by Os Guinness
The Sport of Fools
A word of advice. The bulging files that cover years of operations against the recurring phenomenon of conservatism are all eloquent about one thing: suppress the temptation to indulge in conservative-baiting.
Conservative-baiting, or “fundy-bashing,” as it’s known in certain circles, is the sport of fools. There is enormous value in the skilled teasing that arouses conservatives to a passion of nostalgia for some lost era. Equally, there are times when a short, sharp prod in the midriff catches conservatism off guard and produces a reaction of maddened and uptight impotence.
Fundy-bashing, however, is different. It says more about the baiter than the baited. It is entirely appropriate when used by the Christian liberal or, better still, by the ex-conservative. Nothing widens the polarization so sharply. But your field agents should not resort to it out of laziness. Far better for them to learn the skills to make the most of the pitfalls.
Consider the record of extreme Christian conservatives over the last 200 years in light of these pitfalls. On the one hand, you can hear the ringing rhetoric, the stirring summons to vigilance and loyalty, the proclamations of authority and manifestoes of concern, the recounting of heroic deeds, the verbal gauntlets thrown at the feet of sundry foes, the muffled tread of millions marching to their meetings.
On the other hand, consider how much these pitfalls account for the reality: the easily eliminated smallness, the calcifying defensiveness, the tame subservience, the carelessly unguarded flank, the pendulum-like swings, the creeping compromises and the flagrant hypocrisies.
Christian conservatives stumble unwarily into all the traps laid for them. There is only one thought with which they can comfort themselves. They have fared no worse than their brothers and sisters at the liberal end of the spectrum.
P.S. Your response to my two recent memos has just come up on the screen. Frankly, I am mystified by several of your questions and by the general tone of your reply. This time your jousting has rather gone over the top.
It has been my experience that such attitudes in an agent usually indicate either a state of carelessness, a result of the deceiver’s contempt for the deceived, or soft-headedness that comes from involuntary identification with the target people. Both are signs of a sort of mental fatigue in field agents. But that can hardly be true of you. Nor, to put it mildly, is it worthy of a member of the Council. So I am not sure precisely how to read you.
Please explain yourself in much greater detail. Surely you have not become addicted after all these years to the chronic seminar style (all questions, no conclusions; all discussion, no decision). Nor, I trust, has it anything to do with the Old Fool. There were some raised eyebrows here when you took the initiative to arrange a second and then a third meeting. (Surely you haven’t let his cranky jokes get under your skin. I am told that he telegraphs them with a mischievous look in his eye and rolls them around his mouth before delivering them, as if savoring a delicacy.)
What the Director will make of your remarks, I do not know. I should warn you, he is not known for kid gloves when it comes to dealing with hesitations among the higher echelons. He is a grand master of the plausible denial in public, but with our own people his art of the utterly deniable compliment has become most refined. And he is merciless on his own protégés. Only the most ruthlessly tested and proven are trusted. All others are mere agents, strictly there to be handled and run, not known. I look forward to your explanation without delay.
MEMORANDUM 10
Trendies and Traitors
FROM: DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTRAL SECURITY COUNCIL
TO: DIRECTOR DESIGNATE, LOS ANGELES BUREAU
CLASSIFICATION: ULTRA SECRET
I was gratified by your prompt response, and I, for my part, am willing to accept your explanation. As you say, the best covers are never a complete fabrication, merely a plausible extension of the truth. You have played the role of a philosophy don with considerable distinction for many years, so the sort of tenacious questioning that characterized your last memo is perhaps second nature to you by now. Perhaps. It is also true that it is the rare agent who never has a single flicker of doubt. But do not make a creed of such questions. If you wish to pursue your philosophical reflections or to carry on your offensive against the Christian faith in obscure, “free thinking” journals, I have greatly misjudged you. Cover or not, our task is too urgent for such indulgence.
The Director, however, would like to question you himself and has ordered a change in plans. Instead of flying direct to Los Angeles at the end of the month, you are to fly to Washington, D.C., within 24 hours of receiving my final memorandum. You will be met at Dulles Airport and taken to a rendezvous with the Director before continuing to L.A. In the meantime the Director wishes it to be clear that under no circumstances are you to meet with or contact the Old Fool again. You have already exceeded your brief. This is straight from the top, so there is no question of altering it. And now let me resume what I was describing before this unfortunate hiccup in our communication.
Assessment of “Agent Potential”
Just prior to leaving France in the early 1950s, I heard an interview with a former leader of the French resistance. At the insistence of the interviewer he had recounted several of his own daring exploits, and he was asked finally how he explained the heroism and farsightedness of his men.
“Heroism?” he replied. “No. We weren’t heroes. Nor were we particularly far-sighted. We were simply maladjusted enough to be able to see that something was wrong.”
I knew this wry, self-deprecating realism all too well. It had been almost impossible to corrupt. While in the Left Bank Bureau, I had made it my own personal interest to discover and understand the parallels between the so-called treason of the European intellectuals in relation to the Soviet Union before the war and the same tendency in the Church in relation to the modern world. I had a hunch it would open up a new line of thinking for us.
Cynicism and opportunism among European intellectuals had been easy to trade on, but there was always a risk with such easy virtue. They could be exploited by either side and were as likely to create double agents as true partisans. I saw that by far the best conditions for fostering treachery were those that combined idealism (for some cause) and impatience (with one’s country or contemporaries). This was what was behind much of the seemingly unexpected infatuation with Moscow of many European intellectuals during the 1930s, whether in Cambridge or in Paris.
I realized that the combination of idealism and impatience was fateful because of the world conditions of that time. Throughout the greater part of the 1930s, none of the Western democracies showed any sign of readiness to confront the rising power of Hitler and Mussolini—not in Central Europe, not in Abyssinia, not in Spain. Impatient with the complacency of their contemporaries, many intellectuals saw Stalin as the sole leader pledged to resist fascism. They were not aware that their idealism was foolishly naive.
“Treason,” charge their critics today. “No,” say their friends. “It was not a question of treachery and dishonor, but only of gross misjudgment.”
Listen to that discussion for a while, take out the specific names and issues, and you might be listening to a heated argument between the two sides of our grand polarization. In many ways the conditions found on the Christian liberal side (the idealism-cum-impatience) and the charges flung from the Christian conservative side (treachery to the faith) bear an uncanny resemblance to the pre-war political alignments. But what I could not see in Paris in the ’50s was how much the following decade was going to complete the likeness. For if the ’30s is the key to understanding the infatuation with Stalin, the decade essential for understanding current Christian infatuation with the modern world is the ’60s.
Seducing the Liberal
Traitors are made, not born. Find the Achilles’ heel, spot the chink in his armor, feel the old scar, and before long the experienced secret agent will have a candidate for turning. At some point ev
en the professional spy has to come in from the cold; even the illusionless have a last illusion. The ordinary citizen is an easier target still. Dissatisfaction with job prospects, over-indulgence in alcohol, excessive ambition, constantly critical attitude toward the political system, fondness for the opposite sex—the factors that make people conducive to recruitment are endless. Nations, classes, flags and loyalties may vary, but there is an extraordinary similarity in the dynamics by which traitors are made.
The particular challenge we faced in exploiting the liberal tendency was this: Where were the liberals open to seduction at a point that would lead them to unfaithfulness? How could we draw them from a passing flirtation with relevance into a compromising situation with the spirit of modernity? The tactic was not new. “Apostasy as adultery” was how their own prophet Hosea inveighed against an earlier version of it.
I outlined the dilemma of extreme conservatism in terms of its core problems and their practical consequences. Similarly, let me deal with extreme liberalism by pointing out the steps by which it moves toward a compromising situation and then showing the practical problems this creates for liberal Christianity.
You will remember that “liberal,” as we are using the term, is not a matter of theology only. It is an index of cultural involvement and therefore of the degree of worldliness, so it refers to practice as well as theory and includes institutions as well as ideas. The professing conservative (defined theologically) may therefore be a practicing liberal (defined culturally).
Let me re-emphasize the difference between the ideal and the extremes. Obviously we gain advantage only from the extremes. At the point of their respective ideals (“resistance” for the conservative, “relevance” for the liberal), each side supports a principle that is essential to the proper functioning of faith as a whole. The faithfulness principle (of the conservative) and the flexibility principle (of the liberal) are two sides of the same coin. They are both necessary if Christians are to follow their instructions and remain simultaneously “in” the world but not “of” it.
We gain only when we isolate and then exaggerate the insight of each extreme until it becomes self-defeating. In other words, when conservatism stresses faithfulness without flexibility, it ends by stifling the truth; when liberalism stresses flexibility without faithfulness, it ends by squandering the truth. “Divide and rule” has never been improved upon.
We are playing here on a deep tension as old as the Christian faith itself. But there are two facts in the current situation that tilt the balance (or to be more accurate, the imbalance) decisively in our favor. The first is that modern Christians are extraordinarily ignorant about the art of engaging in culture, whether in words or deeds.
You know the crisis in conventions that surrounds sexuality today. With no accepted moral standards and etiquette, the distance between shaking hands and sexual relations is shorter than ever before. Indeed, for many people progress from one to the other is as swift and unexpected as the movement in a high-speed elevator with no red lights to indicate the passing floors. They have hardly pressed the button before they arrive.
Our approach in seducing liberals is the spiritual equivalent of this sexual state of affairs. Modern Christians rarely notice the fateful shift from changing tactics (a matter of adapting to the style and language of the other side) to changing truth (a matter of adopting the substance of the other side’s beliefs). Before they know it, we have them in bed, and apostasy is adultery all over again.
This cluelessness and the absence of conventions give us a lot of room in which to operate. For instead of “being all things to all people” in order to “win them to Christ,” as they are instructed, modern Christians tend to become all things to all people—and then stay there and move in with them. They “spoil the Egyptians,” as the Israelites were instructed to do, and then—like the Israelites—create from the spoils a forbidden golden calf.
There is a second point in our favor. The modern world is overwhelmingly forceful and seductive, so the struggle is unequal. Christians put their toes into the world gingerly and in an instant are out of their depth. They gamble with it cautiously, but lose their shirts as well as their chips. They argue with it passionately, but they might as well be talking to an avalanche. Casual flirting with modernity is an automatic invitation to “becoming involved.” Here are the steps by which they become compromised.
Step 1: Assumption
The first step in the seduction is the crucial one. At the outset, nothing is further from the Christian’s mind than compromise, but like the Chinese journey of a thousand miles, the liberal road to compromise must begin somewhere. This step is taken when some aspect of modern life or thought is entertained as not only significant, and therefore worth acknowledging, but superior to what Christians now know or do, and therefore worth assuming as true.1
You can see this step most readily in the area of thought. I am sure you heard of theologian Rudolf Bultmann’s famous remark that modern people cannot use electric light and radio, or call upon medicine in the case of illness, and at the same time believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles? That is a clear example of the sort of assumption made in the first step.
Without stopping to think what they are doing, Christians pass from a description that is proper (“The scientific world view has tended to increase secularism”) to a judgment that does not follow at all (“The scientific world view makes the New Testament world of spirits and miracles incredible”).
Notice the confusion between description and judgment. Judgments like Bultmann’s dress themselves up in a borrowed authority that really belongs to descriptions. Everyone can see the accuracy of the description, so how can anyone disagree with the authority of the judgment? All we need do to reinforce the confusion is to circulate the judgment with a growing chorus of conviction (“Today it is no longer possible to believe x, y or z …”), and it will soon seem self-evident and unquestionable.
What Christians also overlook is that this leap from description to judgment, or from analysis to assumption, is theologically decisive too. It imports a new source of authority into Christian thinking. Whatever is assumed is then used as the Christian’s new yardstick. It is no longer weighed and measured; it weighs and measures all else. It becomes the Christian’s criterion rather than the object of his critique. Once the golden calf is in place, it displaces the old altar as the center of the dance.
Only rarely does this happen consciously and deliberately. Most people do it without realizing it. This lack of consciousness is how we can take theological conservatives and turn them into cultural liberals, and how we can move theological liberals toward revisionism and heresy.
The megachurch movement and the Christian Right are good examples of the former. What stroke of luck, you might ask, could make them distort so many of their own Christian principles? Not luck at all, but logic, is the answer—once you see what they take for granted uncritically. Assumptions about television, for instance, or marketing or relevance or innovation or the place of celebrities in modern society—assumptions from the surrounding culture are all swallowed whole.
Talk about swallowing a camel. Ostensible conservatives can be encouraged to make bitter attacks upon liberals of the theological variety and then buy up the world’s value system without a second thought. They labor away at forming their own golden calves while thundering against the golden calves of others. They may idolize conservative politics rather than secular thought, unfettered capitalism rather than Marxism. But the effect is the same. Some aspect of modern experience is assumed uncritically, so that it is made authoritative in practice. In the process, the authority of modernity replaces the authority of the Adversary. A defiant “Thus says the Lord” is as passé as a bishop’s gaiters.
Step 2: Abandonment
The next step in the seduction follows logically from the first. Everything that does not fit in with the new assumption (made in step one) is either cut out deliberately o
r slowly abandoned to a limbo of neglect.2 One infatuated glance at a “new woman” and the “old wife” is seen in a new and unflattering light.
What is involved in this step is not merely a matter of altering tactics, but of altering truth itself. They might excuse their little flirtations by saying they are becoming “all things to all people.” But consider the old renegade they cite in support of their position. It is true that as Saul-turned-Paul debated on Mars Hill or spoke to the gullible crowd in Lystra, he did not work from his Jewish Scriptures as he did in the synagogues. But this was a tactical device. He reduced the differences between himself and his audience almost to a vanishing point, but only so as to stress his distinctiveness more clearly once they had seen his point.3
With the modern Christian, however, the removal or modification of offending assumptions is permanent. They may begin as a matter of tactics, but they quickly escalate to what is a question of truth. They assume that something modern is true and proper. Therefore anything in the tradition that no longer fits must go. Is it unfashionable, politically incorrect, or just superfluous? Whatever the case, whether summarily dismissed or politely discarded to collect dust in some creedal attic, it has to go.
In effect, what we achieve in this step is “anti-revelation,” revelation recycled in line with the size and shape of modern assumptions. And the dividend for counter-apologetics is reductionism, the voluntary abdication of Christian truth by a thousand qualifications.