God Doesn't Believe in Atheists, and I Don't Believe in God

Image by KELLEPICS on Pixabay.

On Nov 14, 2025, I moved this essay to Medium. It's a 5-minute read.

But you can still read the background here...

I listened to the 1-hour audiocassette lecture in 2011. Since it had the same title as the 650-page book, I treated the abridged audio as an alternate version of the book, and I posted my comments about it to Goodreads under this book title. I didn't leave the book a starred rating, so as not to affect its collective starred rating, and I did specify I was responding to the abridged audio and not to the full print version. This generated a few negative comments from people who were mad at me for — in their view — reviewing a book that I admitted to not having read.

I disagree with this characterization of the book and of my activity. Audiobooks are books; abridged books are books; abridged audiobooks are books. If a one-hour recorded lecture is not meant to be considered a valid version of the longer print book, then the author or publisher should not give them the same title, as that causes confusion, the responsibility for which falls on them. Finally, I don't believe there is a One True Answer for how people ought to use the Goodreads website; it's social media, and we make it up as we go along. Goodreads may have hoped people would use their website in a particular way, but people who use the site may come up with creative interpretations and we are not necessarily wrong when we do so.

Nonetheless, I no longer wish to receive sporadic comments questioning the validity of why I posted comments about an abridged audio on the product webpage of the longer book ten years ago. I mean, the planet is burning, can we worry about bigger things please. But also, to the extent that I allow myself to be trolled, I admit to being peeved that I have logged over 1750 full-length books that I've read and yet internet strangers are repeatedly needling me about my intellectual capacities because of the single instance of an abridged audiobook among them. (Never mind that I, not they, am the one who bothered to engage the author's argument.) From their perspective, it makes sense that they comment on this post, since it is the post that they saw; but from my perspective, I wonder why this post is high-engagement and rarely does anyone interact with my other 1750 posts. It is a headscratcher. Thus, I have moved the old essay from Goodreads to this webpage. I have rephrased and reformatted the essay for clarity.

May I also add that it is common for people to complain that an online comment is not the correct length — it needs to be shorter to hold their attention, or it needs to be longer for me to prove my intellectual capacity to them upon their demand. That's in the same bucket with people who claim I should not have posted the essay in an internet field labeled "review" because my essay is, for one reason or another, not a proper "review." Or, if the field is labeled "comment," I shouldn't write a full-fledged review, but rather a shorter "comment," because that would be the proper use of the field. People have assumptions about the "proper" use of fields on the internet. (It's almost as if the proper use of the internet were ordained by God.) When they cannot or will not engage with the substance of what I wrote, they sometimes pick an argument with my choice of website, or my choice of labeled field on that website, or the length of what I wrote. But actually, that's not their concern. The reason they criticize the way I wrote what I wrote (be it essay, review, comment, or what have you) is that they don't agree with my point at all and they would like me to stop making it. Until they provide a counterargument, of course, I'm left with my own argument. Thus, my argument here has not changed since 2011, as no one has yet bothered to rebut it.

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

Ross Douthat's 'WASP nostalgia' NYT columns

"I now know that if you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist."
— Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968. p 182.

---

Immediately after the death of President George H. W. Bush, Ross Douthat's column "Why We Miss the WASPs" (Dec. 5, 2018) was published in the New York Times. There was a swift and negative reaction to the column. A main problem was Douthat's assumption that such nostalgia is universal (when straight white male Protestants are a minority in the United States) and his use of the pronoun "we" to describe, for example, what "we feel" (when many Americans emphatically do not share his sentiments). Another problem was his fuzziness about the term WASP itself, an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant that he uses seemingly interchangeably to describe powerful people and a particular set of values.

What he said

Jumping off from two reflections he'd recently read in The Atlantic — that Bush was the last scandal-free, resentment-free president considered "legitimate" (per Peter Beinart) and that, reflecting on Bush's death, the public feels nostalgic for prep-school educated leaders who came from an "Establishment" (per Franklin Foer) — Douthat opined that what is missing today is "a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today." Douthat agrees, after Foer, that "the old ruling class was bigoted and exclusive and often cruel, [and] it had failures aplenty," and Douthat adds that "as a Catholic I hold no brief for its theology (and don’t get me started on its Masonry)." Yet he feels that the WASPs' "more meritocratic, diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well." Nostalgia for WASPs "probably reflects a belated realization that certain of the old establishment’s vices were inherent to any elite, that meritocracy creates its own forms of exclusion — and that the WASPs had virtues that their successors have failed to inherit or revive."

I see two prongs to his comment, and there are vulnerabilities in what he is saying.

First, in the moral realm: Douthat is saying that the WASPish aristocrats weren't so bad, and that people in power today have basically all of the historic WASPish vices with fewer of their virtues. This is a difficult statement to unpack in part because Douthat doesn't clearly name or identify the vices and virtues he's talking about. He tries, referring explicitly to "discipline" and "a spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety...a spirit that trained the most privileged children for service, not just success," as well as "a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety" since "for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists." This yielded "a distinctive competence and effectiveness in statesmanship." His explanation is inadequate because discipline, noblesse oblige, personal austerity, piety, service, and even "competence and effectiveness in statesmanship" first need to be defined, and there just isn't enough space within a newspaper column. It is also probably not literally true that bigots and non-bigoted, deep, scholarly multiculturalists existed in a 1:1 ratio among white Protestants, and that is anyway not a testable hypothesis. And when he says that WASP virtues were replaced by today's "performative self-righteousness and raw ambition," he is unclear if he believes those particular vices existed among the WASPs, too, or, if they did not, exactly what the WASPs' vices were. And there are plenty of people for whom buzzwords like "personal austerity" and "piety" raise red flags: queer proles ruled by self-declared holy leaders have always been menaced by these words that so often signal damaging, repressive policies. LGBT people, even if they can see how austerity and piety may be considered personal virtues, are not nostalgic for the influence of those particular "virtues" in politics.

Second, in political theory: Douthat is pointing out that it might be "a contradiction in terms" to attempt to form "a more democratic and inclusive ruling class." Well, yes. When it does democracy and inclusion well enough, it will no longer be a ruling class. He quotes Helen Andrews to the same effect: Aristocrats can promote "ethnic balance" or "geographic diversity," but they remain aristocrats who have different "values" and "responsibilities" and are not "representative of the country over which they preside." OK, not everyone will get to be president, regardless of how the pool of applicants is widened. But we can't conclude that, when considering demographic access to power, we should be indifferent or deliberately restrictive; nor does it mean (to be more specific) that the white prep-school Establishment should continue to favor itself; nor does it mean that the existing values need to be propagated; nor does it mean that the individuals in power (who will always be small in number, by definition) need to think of themselves as part an aristocracy or an establishment and ought to interpret their own personal values as coalescing and gaining strength in a hive of meta-values shared by other powerful people. Douthat says "a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is," but this prescription is not obvious; perhaps, to the contrary, in the spirit of term limits or the theology of kenosis, a ruling class achieves more good in the world when it disavows some of its own power and attempts to empty itself.

He goes on, creating more problems.

He says that "in any scenario the WASP elite would have had to diversify and adapt," and that the WASPs themselves began to believe that "the emerging secular meritocracy would be morally and intellectually superior to their own style of elite," so they voluntarily "pre-emptively dissolved," which amounted to "self-abnegation" and "surrender." He is speaking out of both sides of his mouth here: white patriarchs really have to begin promoting diversity and interpreting talent differently, but when they actually begin to listen and make room for other people, they are shooting themselves in the foot and abdicating? In other words, he is saying that diversity is a value, but then he frames power as a zero-sum game. If he really wants to promote diversity, maybe he shouldn't describe it as win-lose for WASPs vs. others.

He says he wishes that these end-stage WASPs had not believed that merit alone could justify a leader but that they instead had followed "a self-consciously elite-crafting strategy" as part of their racial and gender diversification. But what on earth could such an elite-crafting strategy be, if not encouraging talented, motivated, meritorious people to rise in power and influence? Is he implying that he wanted the WASP Establishment to impose its idea of virtue on the up-and-coming meritorious leaders, to mold the new elite in the old WASP image? But that, too, is missing much of the point of diversity. The moral failures of bigotry and cruelty were not necessarily random occurrences that happened to coexist with virtues like noblesse oblige; they were its very shadow. The old guard does not have moral authority to impose WASP virtues on new leaders of diverse demographics (and likely won't succeed in that endeavor, anyway) if it has not yet examined what went wrong with those virtues such that their previous exemplars accommodated or enabled evil. The Establishment really does need to listen to new ideas especially when it has not yet fixed itself.

He wants today's leaders to pursue an "imitation of the old establishment's more pious and aristocratic spirit." Even if individual leaders perceive value in piety and aristocracy (whatever exactly that means), why should they imitate the past, rather than being authentically who they are today and responding to the actual needs of others around them?

And then he said

Three days later, the New York Times gave him more space to clarify. The new column on Dec. 8 was headlined "The Case Against Meritocracy: An aristocracy that can’t admit it." He immediately denied that his argument was racist, and then he simply elaborated on his previous column.

He said that "ideals of diversity and meritocracy are two different ways of shaping an elite, which can advance together but which are just as often separable, or even in tension with each other." Sure. This is understandable. You can admit, hire, or vote for someone based primarily on their identity group, or primarily on their track record, or both. If you seek a full, personalized understanding of someone's values and capabilities, you are probably looking at both their background and their merit. (Douthat certainly did it in the previous column where he used the term "WASP" to refer to a group of largely white male Protestants who fulfilled specific social roles and when he tied the demographic and collective track record together to imply something about WASP beliefs, values, and "competence and effectiveness." In the second column, he adds that WASPs tended to study "academia, finance, foreign policy," to be Republican, and to have "manners.")

He complains that meritocracy amounts to a brain-drain, "plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities," leaving "demoralized peripheries." But the solution — as I see it — cannot possibly be to take away the ladder to advancement, granting some people extreme power simply because they happen to be born in Washington while discouraging equally capable, motivated people from coming to Washington. If indeed geographic brain-drain is a problem, a more appropriate solution would seem to be the decentralization of power. He does not take up this line of thought.

He then says that the highest achievers in any system (even a supposedly meritocratic one) cannot help but pass on their own brand of privilege to their children. Today's meritocrats are especially prone to the "self-deception" that they are self-made due to their own achievements rather than to their aristocratic heritage, and thus they tend toward "ruthless solipsism." To avoid self-deception, he suggests that "an aristocracy that knows itself to be one might be more clearsighted and effective than an aristocracy that doesn't."

On this theory, it seems that the brain-drain affects only the first generation of high achievers (the ones with the most personal merit), who then migrate to large cities where their children grow up to become the second generation of high achievers (due more to their privileged, aristocratic upbringing than to their innate merit).

He says he supports diversity but not meritocracy, explaining that "the older American system was both hierarchical and permeable, with room for actual merit even without a meritocratic organizing theory." He also says that the original WASPs, the ones who were actually white Protestants, imposed their values: they "set a tone for the American upper class that was adopted by other groups when they ascended." However, he also describes non-white, non-Protestants who reached the upper-class as having merely "imitated" WASP culture, a word that is telling. He says that they lived "in the shadow of racial apartheid and residual anti-Catholicism." So the hierarchy wasn't that permeable, after all. Or perhaps the word WASP really does refer to an ethnic and religious demographic, such that one must be born into it; in this case, the verb "ascend" is wholly inappropriate, since it implies that certain ethnicities stand above others in the natural order of things. In any case, the demographically diverse people who reached the upper-class constitute an example, in his mind, that it is possible to "adopt the WASP establishment’s upper-class virtues without the ethnic and religious chauvinism." That remains unproven because he has not here examined the full range of virtues and vices and explained which ones led to chauvinism and which ones undid it.

He names "aristocracy’s vices" as "privilege, insularity, arrogance." (He also adds "duty" and "self-restraint" to the list of virtues given in his previous column.) He reiterates that today's leaders — those who exemplify the meritocracy rather than the aristocracy, as he defines it — exhibit aristocratic vices but not WASPish virtues.

At the end, he claims: "I don’t want to bring back the WASPs; if I had the magic wand to conjure a different elite, it would be a multiracial, multilingual Catholic aristocracy ruling from Quebec to Chile." His undefended preference for Catholicism should present a concern for the 80 percent of Americans who aren't Catholic. Exactly who does he want in power: local Catholics who happen to have been born in Washington and weren't brain-drained from other cities, and who absorbed their American values (but not their theology) from Protestants, and who cultivate those values to make up for whatever merit they might lack? His comment helps non-Christian readers see more plainly that his references to "piety" and "discipline" are indeed coded messages to Christians. People who weren't raised with Protestant or Catholic definitions and appreciations of these terms are, perhaps, not meant to understand exactly what he means by them. But, then, there is a problem: How can "we" feel properly nostalgic for an aristocracy that operates by virtues that aren't ours? Are we meant to perceive neo-WASPs as competent and effective while not understanding the divine Christian mystery (alien to us) by which they achieve it? Are we encouraged to convert to Catholicism so that we can begin to understand what makes them so special?

This, all of it, is a problem. Both columns.

---

I don’t say this to be provocative or trollish: this column, which I have now read multiple times, does not make sense. I am at a loss as to its point. I am open to other readers suggesting what they got out of it. https://t.co/ilW41jrWcP

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 9, 2018

---

Related to this subject, please see also my Goodreads review of Robert P. Jones' book The End of White Christian America and my year-old blog posts, "Will organized religion 'take ownership' of the President?" (Dead Men Blogging) and "Reaction to Mark Lilla's 'The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics' (Disruptive Dissertation)

---

Also, on January 29, 2024, Douthat tweeted with an implication that the romance between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce is “a sweet thing to watch and maybe the last best hope for America, we need them to marry and procreate.” Mike Duncan suggested on Bluesky that this is “basically just the 14 words expressed in 19 words.”

See where he ended up in January 2025:

I hope that the meteor really destroys everything. I don’t want future archaeologists to know we were saying stuff like this

[image or embed]

— New York Times Pitchbot (@nytpitchbot.bsky.social) January 11, 2025 at 9:34 AM

In June 2025, this feels related:

God of the Gaps by Robert P. Baird. Ross Douthat’s usual contrarian approach, in his recent book Believe, leads to a curiously impotent, watered-down account of religious experience. January 15, 2026 issue.

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, you can become a member of Medium, where I publish many of my essays.

Will organized religion 'take ownership' of the President?

Thoughts on this book:

The main learning I took away from Stephen Mansfield's Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him (Baker Books, 2017) was the personal influence of Norman Vincent Peale over Donald Trump as a young man. Apart from this biographical detail, I struggled with complex reactions to this book. It didn't hit the nail on the head but neither did it have fatal flaws.

Mansfield appears to tread a fine line between heavily criticizing President Trump for transparently ridiculous behavior that cannot but be criticized and yet grasping for biographical details — if only, perhaps, in the interest of fairness or charity — that make Trump seem like a heavyweight who can coherently assume, if not deserve, the mantle of the President of the United States. Most readers will probably feel that the author goes too far in one direction or the other in its opposition or support for the President. Mansfield acknowledges says the book he's written is "dangerous" (at least for its publisher) because it "critiques a sitting president" yet also "takes [the president] seriously" when he is deeply unpopular. This nebulous idea of taking the president seriously makes the book a little maddening or bewildering. What exactly does it mean to take Trump seriously? He is a wealthy celebrity who has made high-stakes business transactions throughout his life and got elected president. He has a biography similar to others who grew up in a wealthy family. He has psychology and motivations that, like any other human's, can be examined, analyzed, and interpreted. In that regard, the book takes him seriously. But I am not certain that the book — which doesn't mention global climate change or the North Korean nuclear tensions — fully and directly engages the extent of the influence the president has on others and the lasting damage he can do to the nation and the world.

On a related point, the author does not directly reveal his own religious and political beliefs. (At his most explicitly theological, he writes of "the good that courageous voices of faith can do. If they will set themselves to tell the truth, if they will remember that they are emissaries from another land, they can remind leaders — who are too often mired in the temporal — of higher purposes and surer boundaries. They have the power to fix vision upon the eternal.") What peeks through occasionally is a form of political moderateness that rings either a bit insincere or underinformed. For example, on “the all-important issue of race,” he says that the president has delivered “at least racially inappropriate if not outright racist statements on many an occasion.” If one really believes the issue is all-important, the president's well-documented outright racism should be easy to call out. "Inappropriate" is far too mild a word, unless one believes that racial justice and race relations are mostly about being well-mannered (and thus not genuinely all-important). For another example, the author describes the record of Barack Obama on LGBT rights and the position of Hillary Clinton on abortion rights as “extreme.” It is hard to tell if that is his personal view or if he is reflecting how he thinks many religious people perceive them. But, again, if you really believe in LGBT rights and abortion rights, defending them is not "extreme." Trying to toe some kind of moderate line in these contexts doesn't work very well, especially if you don't attempt to explain what your view is and exactly why you believe it to be fair and good despite its avoidance of the "extremes" of nondiscrimination and liberation movements. Mushing around the topic results in a kind of diplomacy that, while trying to be polite and reassuring, achieves the opposite. This undefined moderate stance, perhaps attempting to represent neutrality, does not help the reader understand the author's view and therefore it muddies his moral portrait of the president because it is hard to understand exactly where his points of disagreement are.

The analysis ends at events that happened shortly after the January 2017 inauguration, but the book was not released until Oct. 3. The details of Trump's tumultuous first year in office could not have been anticipated, so Mansfield does not address how bad the presidency really is, and therefore the book will strike many readers as a little tone-deaf. For example, the problem of the president's persistent falsehoods is ever more serious and means something different as he approaches a year in office. The Washington Post counted "1,628 false or misleading claims" through mid-November. We are no longer mainly interested in evaluating his character to know whether to vote for him or to predict how he will govern; we are (or should be) interested in how the government is now being run and how foreign relations are being conducted. We have passed the point where his character flaws are impacting people's lives and causing lasting damage.

True, the purpose of the book is only incidentally, and not primarily, to do the three things discussed in the previous paragraphs — respectfully and seriously assess the president as a full human being who has lived over 70 years on Earth, project one's own moral beliefs to judge how he handles his current role, or concretely assess from a historian's viewpoint what he has accomplished since his inauguration — but rather to explain, as its subtitle announces, "why Christian conservatives supported him" in the election. This it does in a general sense. The answer provided is: Because they were angry and Trump's personality appealed to them. The book is far more about Trump than it is about the Christians who supported him. For a sociological study of those Christians, I recommend The End of White Christian America by Robert P. Jones, released four months before the 2016 election, a book that Mansfield unfortunately doesn't reference.

Trump's Character

First, this is a man who "has lived the life of a celebrated hedonist."

He developed a "juvenile" obsession with the size of the crowds who came to see him. "When he spoke at Liberty University in 2016, his first words had to do with breaking an attendance record. He was in a church service at the time."

He avoids taking expert advice. As a result, his wife Melania's inaugural speech was plagiarized from Michelle Obama's eight years earlier. Melania's interesting life story was "worthy of a great speech" and there was no reason for her to "borrow from the one person on the planet from whom she most needed to distinguish herself". Mansfield believes this was an accident due to incompetence, and he attributes it to Donald Trump's reliance on advice and assistance from a disordered family team where "[n]o one was put in charge." A professional speechwriter would never have made such a sophomoric error.

He also likes to fight. At school, he threw things and needed constant attention. He has asserted that his own "temperament" hasn't changed much since first grade. In second grade, he disagreed with a lesson and gave his teacher a black eye. In business, he said that "most people aren’t worthy of respect” and in Think Big he wrote, "You need to screw them back fifteen times harder...go for the jugular, attack them in spades!" At his campaign rallies, he incited violence.

Americans note his "almost complete lack of the character that is usually the fruit of sincere religion." Americans expect that a president's character is fixed by the time he or she is elected, unlike the Pope whose ordination transforms him, and, when considering Trump, a "deeply imperfect man" with apparent "deformities" and "oddities," the thought of him remaining the same "can be a disturbing experience."

Influence of Norman Vincent Peale

The famous religious leader Norman Vincent Peale was Trump's greatest personal mentor during formative years, and in return Peale called Trump his "greatest student of all time," Stephen Mansfield wrote. Even though this faith "largely failed him [Trump] as both a public and a private man," he returned to these roots in the 2016 campaign, revealing "a softening in religious matters". The nature of this softening is not clearly identified.

Peale was one of the earliest promoters of "the power of positive thinking" as demonstrated in his book of the same title. Mansfield sees limitation in this approach. As he explains it, adding what seems to be his own theological commentary: "Trump took from this that it is God’s will to carry him further in the direction he was already going. He did not understand from his time under Peale’s ministry that God empowers a man only after he remakes him."

Ignorance of religion

Speaking to pollster Frank Luntz, Trump was unable to name anyone in the Bible he admired, and, when asked for his personal beliefs about God, "he spoke at length about buying a golf course." Asked by a radio host to name a favorite Bible verse or story, he babbled and the only thing he could come up with was "an eye for an eye." He said he'd never asked God for forgiveness and was unable to say whether he preferred the Old or New Testament. To Fox News, he identified himself as "Presbyterian" but "also busy." In church, where he said he went mainly for Christmas and Easter, he seemed not to recognize a communion plate. Addressing Liberty University, he showed off his baptism photo and certificate but had no personal conversion story. Moreover, Mansfield believes, the students saw that Trump's vengeful attitude in business and past marital difficulties did not align with their idea of Christianity and they had hoped to see "'fruit,' evidence of a life changed by conversion and modeled on the message of Jesus Christ." "It was, in short, the worst presentation of religion by a presidential candidate in recent memory," Mansfield opined.

Yet Jerry Falwell, Jr., president of Liberty University, in 2012 called Trump “the greatest visionary of our time.” This seems key to understand. Why was he elevating Trump, if Trump was so ignorant of religion? What did he hope to get? Mansfield addresses this.

Why religious conservatives wanted Trump

First, they

"were traumatized by the Obama years and fearful a second Clinton presidency would mean more of the same. They would back anyone who could win. They would take a nonbeliever. They would accept a candidate of doubtful morality. They were even willing to risk racial and gender offense on the part of their candidate. They could not endure more years of bombardment from a religious left intent upon remaking the nation."

Exactly how they thought liberals in power would "remake the nation," and why that was more exhausting or existentially more threatening to them than ordinary policy disagreements, is not made clear in this book.

They were angry — that much is made clear. They had a sense of being

"sidelined by history and feared their country as they knew it was slipping away. They wanted change, at nearly any cost, and they looked beyond more experienced candidates to set their hopes upon the sharp-tongued, hard-hitting, angry-as-they-were billionaire from New York. He won them by promising to give their country back to them and to win a future for their children. They believed him, largely because he spoke of faith like a crusader, like one who understood religion as a perpetual call to arms."

In 2016, voters wanted the angry candidate. They asked themselves: "Who best gave voice to our political rage? Who best channeled the anger that kept us up at night? Who was the standard-bearer of our wrath?" When they saw Trump, they felt "they would take him, flaws and all, if he would help them take their nation back."

Donald Trump publicly announced early on in the campaign that he felt he could do better with religious people than Hillary Clinton could. Mansfield wonders why Clinton did not pay closer attention to this and act on it. After all, she "possessed a deeper religious history and wider religious knowledge, and was more articulate in expressing her faith than her opponent" yet she managed to "neglect" those voters. Her choice to give her first speech after receiving the Democratic nomination at a Planned Parenthood event may have been principled, but it wasn't savvy.

Religious people were attracted to how Trump "speaks publicly in the same way that millions of Americans do around kitchen tables, at bars, and among their closest friends. Crass, insulting, bullying, sometimes ill-informed, always opinionated, usually prejudiced, Donald Trump is very much the private voice of millions of Americans." Mansfield continued: "When Trump declared at the 2016 GOP convention, 'I am your voice,' he meant it mainly in an economic sense. Yet he may have inadvertently stated a broader truth. He is a supercharged version of what America has become." This is well put, but it's not obvious what it has to do with religion. Plenty of people are ill-informed and have reason to be angry. Religion, in its most noble self-declared intentions, is supposed to do battle with the ego and replace it with humility and patience. Are white Christians angrier than everyone else? Why? And why do they think, more than anyone else, that Trump is the answer?

(One possible answer I found: Adam Garfinkle, editor of The American Interest, wrote in May 2017 that today's American Protestant evangelical "religious fervor...is not born of traditional, innocent faith" but is rather "intellectualized" and "highly politicized". They are suffering from "an alienating hyper-commercial culture" that breeds "emotional insecurity." Evangelical support for Trump is transactional; what they seek is "community and identity".)

Moreover, Mansfield omits the early sexual harassment accusations against Trump and other politicians. The most he says is that Trump's "treatment of women was sometimes obscene" including occasional "disparaging" or "raunchy terms" for them. It seems he is mincing words out of a sense of propriety. The president has said worse things about women than Mansfield is willing to print. This is a book about voters, so everyone is over 18, and we need to address our adult issues head-on. If we can't call out big issues like this, then it is hard to figure out why people voted the way they did in the past; if we can't say what should be done differently in the future, then it is hard to know why we care why anyone voted the way they did in the past. Sexual morality used to be a matter of concern for religious voters. Now something has changed. Sexual harassment and the changing response to it has become part of the zeitgeist, such that the many women who reported harassment were named Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" for 2017. We need to understand the religious conservative response — or, more accurately, the lack thereof — to abusive behavior by men in the Republican Party. Why is it tolerated? Why don't such accusations hurt candidates at all today? (Marie Griffith recently called it an "extreme politicization of Christianity" and said that evangelicalism "has become so focused on power.")

Trump does like being gently challenged by people he trusts, and so the "reticence to urge him toward a broader faith and deeper character was unfortunate...The religious leaders who surrounded him in the 2016 campaign might have been just such teammates, had they been willing to take the risk of calling him to a more vibrant Christian faith."

Ed Simon wrote on Dec. 31, 2017 of the large majority of white evangelicals who voted for Trump and Moore that it is human nature to resist or abandon the demanding ”countercultural” commitment of Christianity and to betray the faith "for thirty pieces of silver." The irony he sees is that, since the evangelicalism of Reagan’s time, "many apocalyptic minded conservative Christians made a sort of prophetic parlor game out of conjecturing who the potential anti-Christ could be. Figures from Hal Lindsey, to Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, and Jerry Falwell often fingered world leaders or liberal politicians as being in league with Satan. An irony since if the anti-Christ is supposed to be a manipulative, powerful, smooth-talking demagogue with the ability to sever people from their most deeply held beliefs who would be a better candidate than the seemingly indestructible Trump?" Simon does not wish to identify a "literal ant-Christ" but worries that so many Christians "seem to lack the self-awareness to identify something so anti-Christian in Trump himself. Or worse yet, they certainly recognize it, but don’t care."

Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic July/August 2020:

The three most important members of Trump’s Cabinet—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr—are all profoundly shaped by Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self-serving, greedy, and unpatriotic. Nevertheless, a former member of the administration (one of the few who did decide to resign) told me that both Pence and Pompeo “have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment.” All of the things they care about—outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and (though this is never said out loud) maintaining a white majority in America—are under threat. Time is growing short. They believe that “we are approaching the Rapture, and this is a moment of deep religious significance.” Barr, in a speech at Notre Dame, has also described his belief that “militant secularists” are destroying America, that “irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.” Whatever evil Trump does, whatever he damages or destroys, at least he enables Barr, Pence, and Pompeo to save America from a far worse fate. If you are convinced we are living in the End Times, then anything the president does can be forgiven.

How much of our differences are due to religion and how much to race?

Words like “white,” “black,” “African-American,” “Hispanic,” and “race/racial” — used in their racial sense and not in other senses like “race for the White House” — occur, in total, about 75 times throughout the book. That is to say that the subject of race is addressed substantially but isn’t the main focus. The term "white supremacy" doesn't appear at all. Many people have come up with the answer that white people voted for Trump because they are white but this is not quite the same answer Mansfield finds. He recognizes that Trump supporters are mostly white, but he wants to focus on religion. It's fine if he has a different conclusion or passionate interest. The question for me is how well he makes his case. For an entire book focusing on how Christians vote, the words “Protestant” (6), “Catholic” (7), and “evangelical” (20), alongside “Jew” (8) and “Muslim” (8), seem relatively underused. And I am including the bibliography. (These demographics are critical to understand because, as Pew Research found, three-fifths of white Catholics and four-fifths of white evangelicals voted Trump over Clinton, but for Hispanic Catholics it was the other way around, and black Protestants preferred Clinton almost nine-to-one. The vote looks more predictable along color lines than along theological lines.) When I find myself searching an ebook I’ve just finished for keywords so I can retroactively piece together the themes, it underscores for me that something was a little off from my experience as a reader.

Johnson Amendment

As someone who likes to fight, Trump could not understand why clergy did not pick political fights from the pulpit even when they felt themselves "under attack in nearly every arena of American culture." Some clergymembers explained to Trump that they could not make political statements or endorse candidates due to an IRS restriction called the Johnson Amendment. Trump "saw an opportunity both to right what he considered a moral wrong and to unchain a vast army of influential supporters. The Johnson Amendment had to go." He announced this on stage in Dallas on Feb. 26, 2016. The crowd was elated to see an atypically secular candidate nevertheless recognizing their needs and rising to meet them. In so doing, "Trump could win support from some of the nation’s most powerful religious leaders." After his election, he told his evangelical advisory council: "The only way I’m going to get to heaven is by repealing the Johnson Amendment." (One of the members corrected him on that theological point.)

Joy-Ann Reid didn't mention the Johnson Amendment in Fracture in which she traces the current manifestation of racial/political polarization to Johnson's election to the presidency, ten years after the Johnson Amendment was passed. Johnson's rival, Barry Goldwater, was a racially polarizing figure. By the time of the election, religious leaders had been ten years' silenced about political campaigns, thanks to the previous work of Johnson, who was a Democrat, and the last Democratic presidential candidate ever to win a majority of white voters. He got 59 percent of the white vote, but his popularity declined while he was in office, and, in the next election, the Democrat got only 38 percent of the white vote. The man behind the Johnson Amendment may explain why, to this day, it is white evangelical leaders who object most vocally to this rule.

Neither did Robert P. Jones mention the Johnson Amendment in The End of White Christian America. He spoke instead about the broader issue of so-called "religious liberty," emblematized by the example of Christian bakers who are asked to provide wedding cakes for same-sex couples. This would allow the freedom to refrain from speaking or acting in the way ordinarily required by antidiscrimination law, whereas the repeal of the Johnson Amendment would allow the freedom to actively speak or act. These are different problems. The complete absence of the Johnson Amendment from Jones' book, plus the self-undermining assertion by Mansfield that most Americans, including the religious, "not only do not understand what the Johnson Amendment is but may not wish it abolished once they do understand it," makes me curious to confirm the importance of the Johnson Amendment in the minds of evangelicals today. If they don't know what it is, they can't be angry about it, much less be willing to negotiate its repeal in exchange for willfully discarding their fervently held beliefs about, say, sexual harassment and assault and public morality and piety for politicians. My sense is that Mansfield meant that it is mainly the religious leaders who are aware of and concerned about the restriction.

Christianity Today reported in December 2017:

"...overall, most evangelical leaders — and most people in the pews — did not want to see pastors endorsing politicians. Among the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), 90 percent of its board of directors, including the leaders of major denominations and ministries, said they opposed pulpit endorsements in a survey conducted earlier this year.

A LifeWay Research survey conducted during the 2016 campaign found that 73 percent of Americans with evangelical beliefs said pastors should abstain from endorsing candidates, and about 65 percent said churches overall should abstain."

Repealing the Johnson Amendment is not the only way religious people can feel powerful. Mansfield praises, by contrast, "the art of prophetic distance" through which a religious leader delivers a message and models right action to political candidates without endorsing any candidate over another.

Furthermore, Mansfield observes that, if the Johnson Amendment is repealed, then liberal as well as conservative clergy can become politically active. Indeed, most of them, Mansfield believes, "are more left-leaning and will become champions for the other side. Trump may be dealing both himself — if and when he runs for a second term — and other conservatives a difficult hand to play."

What does it mean to take ownership?

Mansfield believes that "the religious voices Trump allows a hearing" may be able to hold sway "between the better angels of human nature and the lesser spirits that lurk in the dark". He warns that for clergy "[t]o support Donald Trump without caveat, to extol him as chosen by God without identifying what is morally objectionable in his politics and behavior, is much the same as extolling American culture without expressing any moral reservation." If religious leaders are not "courageous" and "true," then "they may pay a great price and draw the ire of later generations for being cowardly and unprincipled — all while owning Donald Trump."

But what does it mean to "own" him? The word suggests to me that they already have a particular level of influence over him as well as the future ability to take credit and blame for his deeds. It also suggests to me that Trump has somehow insinuated himself into the religion so that the ownership is mutual. Mansfield does not pinpoint the level or scope of influence nor does he anticipate exactly who might need to apologize for what in the future or, more pressingly, who might be able to fix it. If there is a catastrophe and the best we can hope for is a public apology, then "owning Donald Trump" isn't a very high stakes wager for the faithful to take. This is what we really need to know: not only why white Christians voted for Trump, but what everyone is going to do right now as 2018 rolls in about the terrible mess we are in and how we are going to avoid a similar outcome in the 2020 election.

Updates

For more on the Johnson Amendment, please see the June 2018 blog post on Disruptive Dissertation.

---

Here's Jeff Sharlet in 2023, writing about Peale's influence on Trump:

"Trump was impious, but he didn't reject faith. Instead, he returned it to the roots of Christian business conservatism, which is where he had been all along: Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking. Since Trump announced his candidacy, he had been talking about Peale, 'my minister for years' (Peale died in 1993), but long before that--before he began declaring on the campaign trail that 'nothing beats the Bible, not even The Art of the Deal--the book that beat them all for Trump was Peale's. In Iowa, Trump held up the Bible his mother gave him, but it was Positive Thinking that Trump inherited from his developer father, Fred. In the books he claimed to have written, Trump invoked a personal trinity: his father, Fred, 'a rock,' who taught him 'toughness'; his mentor, Roy Cohn, the Red Scare mafia lawyer who taught him how to get away with anything 'without admitting any guilt'; and his childhood pastor, Peale. As a child, Trump has said, he watched Billy Graham on television 'for hours and hours,' but what he took from it was merely method, the hard sell presenting as a soft one. It was from Peale that Trump learned 'a very positive feeling about God,' he 'wrote' in his stream-of-consciousness campaign book, Crippled America, 'that made me feel positive about myself.' The point wasn't God; it was him, Donald J. Trump, alpha and omega. Peale, Trump boasted, 'thought I was his greatest student of all time.'

The irony of Trump's religion, mostly mocked as a campaign put-on, was that it was one of the few consistencies in his life. Of course, consistency doesn't equal depth, but then, to 'God's Salesman,' as Peale marketed himself, depth was a distraction. Positive Thinking--still in print and popular--'makes no pretense to literary excellence,' Peale wrote, 'nor does it seek to illustrate any unusual scholarship on my part.' 'Positive Thinking' isn't about serving God; it's about using God, through what Peale called 'applied Christianity,' to achieve 'a perfected and amazing method of successful living.' The method is like a closed loop, a winners' circle of the soul. 'The man who assumes success tends already to have success,' Peale wrote, a tautological spirituality as instantly recognizable in Trumpism as the drumbeat of his words: success, perfect, amazing. For Peale, and Trump, these were magic words..."

— Jeff Sharlet. The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War. W. W. Norton & Co., 2023. pp. 47-48.

In August 2025, he told Fox News: "I want to try and get to heaven if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I hear I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole." Later in the week, he said: "If you’re not a believer, and you believe you go nowhere, what’s the reason to be good, really? There has to be some kind of a report card up there someplace, y’know, like ‘let’s go to heaven, let’s get into heaven.’"

In October, he again said "there's no reason to be good" apart from getting into heaven, and that this was indeed the extent of his own motivation to be good.

later that month,

"Fox News’ Peter Doocy on Sunday [Oct 12, 2025] asked the president on board Air Force One, as he headed to Israel, if he thought his plan for peace between Israel and Hamas “would help” him access the great beyond.

“I’m being a little cute. I don’t think there’s anything going to get me in heaven, OK? I really don’t,” Trump replied."

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Read my essays on Medium by paying for a membership on the platform.

You may also be interested: Christmas Trees Are Not Pagan: a Brief History of the Christmas Trees, White Supremacist Propaganda, & Popular Related Lies, by Jewitches, Substack, Dec 11, 2025

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Alexander Chee (@cheemobile)

Maybe somebody at CNN can explain the difference here because I don’t qwhite understand it 🤔

[image or embed]

— Eric Haywood (@erichaywood.bsky.social) February 20, 2026 at 1:18 PM

A free tip for the dunces manning the Washington Post opinion page these days, when the third paragraph of your draft “There Aren’t Enough Evangelical Leaders” essay is “Some might say, who cares?”, that’s a good sign you should scrap it and blog something else www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

[image or embed]

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) March 6, 2026 at 10:02 AM

As far as concessions go, “the people for whom I am advocating are objectively unable to do the jobs I want them to have, and also have a nasty history of disqualifying themselves with their own rank bigotry” is an incredible thing to have to write

[image or embed]

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) March 6, 2026 at 10:07 AM

Yes, “low cultural impact” is the type of phrase that any halfway competent editor will be like, hang on, what do you mean by that

[image or embed]

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) March 6, 2026 at 10:11 AM

Characterizing Hobby Lobby, who went to SCOTUS to preserve their right to not provide healthcare they don't like to their employees among other overtly political activities, as a business with "low cultural impact," is certainly a choice.

— Devon Unger (He/Him) (@devonunger.bsky.social) March 6, 2026 at 10:06 AM

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write on Medium.

Roy Moore's movement to promote the Ten Commandments in American civic life

For years, there has been a movement to place large monuments representing the Ten Commandments outside U.S. courthouses. An activist in this movement is Roy Moore, who is currently running to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate in tomorrow's election (Dec. 12, 2017).

Roy Moore's monument

In August 2003, Alabama's Judicial Inquiry Commission suspended Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore because he refused to obey a federal court order to remove a 2.6-ton granite Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama state judicial building. Moore claimed that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of U.S. law. "Moore installed the privately funded monument in the early hours of August 1, 2001, without consulting any of the other justices on the Alabama Supreme Court," according to CNN. He personally supervised the installation. Three Alabama attorneys claimed offense and sued in October 2001. In 2002, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled in favor of the attorneys and, upon Moore's appeal, in July 2003 the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled in favor of the attorneys. Moore was given a deadline of August 20, 2003 to remove the monument. A week in advance of that deadline, he argued: "It is not a question of whether I will disobey or obey a court order. The real question is whether or not I will deny the God that created us." Responding to a last-minute appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to involve itself in the case.

Moore did not comply with the order to remove the monument and he was suspended with pay. The monument was moved out of public view on Aug. 27 and, the next day, about a thousand supporters of Moore rallied at the building. Rev. James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, addressed the crowd: "The separation of church and state is not in the Constitution." Dobson also complained about rulings against prayer in public schools, abortion rights, and the repeal of anti-sodomy laws. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, attributed these rulings to "activist judge[s]" and said: "The symbolism as well as the substance of this moment cannot escape us. One federal judge has placed the Ten Commandments in a closet. That came after the United States Supreme Court recently welcomed everything else out of the closet." Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove offered to display the monument at the Mississippi capitol building for a week "to show support for our common Judeo-Christian heritage."

It was not Moore's first time doing this:

"Moore was a circuit judge in Etowah County, northeast of Birmingham, in the late 1990s when he fought a lawsuit seeking to remove a wooden plaque depicting the commandments from his courtroom.

The legal battle propelled him to statewide office in 2000, when the Republican jurist was elected chief justice after campaigning as the 'Ten Commandments Judge.'" [CNN, 8/28/2003]

Choosing a version of the Ten Commandments to display, Bob Minor wrote in 2003, “is to take sides in centuries-old battles between Protestants and Catholics as well as in the history of anti-Semitism” and, furthermore, to accept the final commandment in its entirety is to accept a definition of property that includes a man’s “slaves, his animals, his land, and also his wife.“

As a result of Moore's 2003 protest, the Alabama Court of the Judiciary removed him from office in November 2003.

He returned to the bench when he was elected Alabama's Chief Justice in 2012. The previous year, he had expressed interest in running for President, but his early campaign in 2011 did not succeed.

Influence throughout the nation

In 2003, the city of Casper, Wyoming voted to move a Ten Commandments monument out of a public park where it had been since 1965 and into a separate plaza to be dedicated to showcasing history. The city had been threatened with two lawsuits: one from the Freedom From Religion Foundation and one from the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. The latter wanted to install their own monument in the park to announce that a gay victim of a hate crime was burning in hell.

In 2006, the Christian ministry Faith and Action built a large granite monument outside its headquarters in Washington, D.C. The headquarters are located behind the U.S. Supreme Court, and "the group's president said the tablets were angled so that justices arriving at the high court would see them." (As per Fox News, Sept. 23, 2013. I have removed the link so as not to link to Fox News on principle.) It was vandalized in 2013.

In 2011, in Ohio, Judge James DeWeese, upon being challenged by the ACLU, removed a poster of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and replaced it with a poster called “Philosophies of Law in Conflict” [see it here] that contrasted the Ten Commandments with the “humanist precept” of "moral relativism." The poster asserted that there are “only two views: either God is the final authority, and we acknowledge His unchanging standards of behavior. Or man is the final authority, and standards of behavior change at the whim of individuals or societies.” The 6th Circuit ruled against DeWeese, who was represented by Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal. (The ACLU had previously sued DeWeese in 2000 and 2008 for similar displays.)

In 2012, two state representatives in Tennessee, Mike Bell and Matthew Hill, "introduced a bill authorizing counties and cities to set up displays of 'historical documents and monuments and writings' that have been 'recognized to commemorate freedom and the rich history of Tennessee and the United States.'" Bell said that "the Ten Commandments would be one of them." [read the bill] Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said that the other documents mentioned in the bill were already legal to display, so the bill was only aimed at permitting the display of the Ten Commandments. Lynn pointed out that Protestants, Catholics and Jews recognize separate versions of the Commandments; half of the commandments are not reflected in current laws; and it is "absolutely false" that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of the nation's law.

In 2012, Oklahoma City placed a 6-foot-tall granite Ten Commandments monument at the Capitol in late 2012. (Two years later, a man who claimed to be mentally ill and off his meds and on a mission from Satan pissed on it and drove his car into it, and then walked into the federal building and threatened President Obama and the federal government.)

In 2013, American Atheists designed a 1,500-pound granite monument for the Bradford County Courthouse in Starke, Fla. in response to a Ten Commandments monument that had been placed there the previous year by an organization called Community Men's Fellowship. Bradford County agreed to allow the atheist monument following court-ordered mediation. (The county's attorney said: "What the atheists agreed to is something they could have originally been approved for without a year of money and litigation.") The atheist monument was funded by Stiefel Freethought Foundation and was to have "quotes related to secularism from Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and American Atheists founder Madalyn Murray O'Hair" and the Treaty of Tripoli. American Atheists director of regional operations Ken Loukinen said: "We'd rather there be no monuments at all, but if they are allowed to have the Ten Commandments, we will have our own." Community Men’s Fellowship posted a statement on Facebook acknowledging that “this issue was won on the basis of this being a free speech issue, so don't be alarmed when the American Atheists want to erect their own sign or monument. It's their right.” In 2014, Florida's Levy County, which already had a Ten Commandments monument outside its courthouse, denied a request by the local group Williston Atheists to build a monument similar to the one in Bradford County. The Levy County Commissioners said that the proposed atheist monument did not meet county guidelines because the quotations in the intended design were incomplete.

In 2017, a new Ten Commandments monument outside the Arkansas state capitol was intentionally destroyed by a man who drove his car into it. It was the same man who had driven his car into the Oklahoma monument several years earlier.

In mid-2023, Donald Trump was found liable for raping a woman; the media doesn't figure this topic as prominently into stories about Trump as they did when it was sexual misconduct allegations against Roy Moore.

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write on Medium.

Read: The Republican Effort To Remake Schools In God’s Image: A movement to dismantle the existing school system and remake it in a Christian nationalist image is well on its way across America. Nathalie Baptiste, HuffPost, Sep 28, 2025

Wondered what is happening with the Supreme Court? 👇 They are part of the administration of chaos, corruption, cruelty. #taxTheRich #immunityRuling www.nber.org/papers/w34643 #Voices4victory #USDemocracy

[image or embed]

— Do Not Obey. We are Democracy. (@zangerliberia.bsky.social) January 5, 2026 at 10:46 AM

Fatal flaws in 'Mere Christianity' by C. S. Lewis

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis is a book beloved by millions of people. When I first read it out of curiosity, at age 18 and having just started college, I found it to be a string of fallacies. I didn't expect ever to change my mind about this. Twenty years later, I reread the book and wrote up my assessment. Indeed, my basic assessment did not change. My long essay is on Medium.

The long and misguided history of swearing in on Bibles

Image by: Adrian Pingstone, 2005. The photograph is of a Latin Bible made in Belgium in 1407. © Public domain. The Bible is on display in Malmesbury Abbey in England. Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks for stopping by! This article has had nearly 2,000 views in its nearly 8 years on Dead Men Blogging. In October 2024, I rewrote it for Medium.

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books.

A compressed 500-word summary of 'Evangelium Vitae' by Pope John Paul II (1995)

     Impermissible "crimes against life" include abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, capital punishment, genocide, and suicide. Artificial reproduction, prenatal medical testing, and organ donation are acceptable in some circumstances.
     The full meaning of life is found in eternal Christian life, but life on earth is also sacred. Christ is in everyone, so to attack life is to attack God. Even a murderer has dignity. God, although he punishes, has mercy.
     Killing should not be justified in the name of "individual freedom." Abortion degrades the medical profession and doctors should conscientiously object.
     Young people must be taught the meaning of sexuality, love, procreation, marriage, and chastity to form a pro-life conscience. It is disturbing when the conscience against abortion is missing.
     The materialistic worldview separates the "unitive" and "procreative" meanings of sexual intercourse. A couple should not wish to unite without procreating, nor to procreate without uniting. The married couple are "co-workers with God" as God's image appears in their child.
     New reproductive technology is troublesome because embryos conceived in a laboratory have a high fatality risk, and extra embryos are treated as material and discarded. Prenatal diagnostic tests are acceptable if aimed at the treatment of the baby, but unacceptable if aimed to selectively abort the fetus. Organ donation is "praiseworthy" but should not hasten the death of the donor.
     Although the culture considers suffering itself to be evil, suffering is really a mystery with meaning and value. The blood of Christ represents life and hope. The meaning of life can be learned through dying for one's brothers and sisters.
     Humans were given "dominion" over the world, but this should not be misconstrued as the right to use and misuse natural resources. We have moral responsibilities to the natural world. Man's "lordship" over himself and the world should reflect God's lordship.
     Popular consensus or "relativism" doesn't make a crime acceptable. The Biblical prophets "condemn offences against life" and "awaken hope for a new principle of life."
     Violence should not be used to protect public safety "if bloodless means are sufficient." A pro-life politician may support legislation aimed at limiting the harm of abortion.
     Deliberately killing an innocent person, from embryo to old age, can never be permitted, even as means to an end. No one can ask or consent to be killed or to kill someone in their care. A threat to a mother's health does not justify abortion. Choosing to die in childbirth is "heroic."
     Euthanasia is based on the idea of the elder as a burden. While there is no obligation to share Jesus's passion by refusing painkillers at the end of life, patients should not be drugged unconscious without good reason, so they may fulfill their "moral and family duties." True compassion means sharing someone's pain.
     "Suicide is always as morally objectionable as murder." (3.66)
     Democracy becomes empty if its moral foundation of respect for life is even questioned. Rejection of human life is rejection of Christ.
     Women who've had an abortion may repent and take the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Pope John Paul II. Evangelium Vitae [The Gospel of Life]. Papal Encyclical, Rome, March 25, 1995. Official Vatican English translation.

This summary was written in 2005, along with a series of other 500-word summaries of philosophy books, as an exercise in brevity.

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

one thing non-Catholics need to understand about the subset of 'traditionalist' Catholics who never accepted (or are suspicious of) the changes brought about the Second Vatican Council is that one of the things they were most upset about is that the church told them they had to give up hating Jews

[image or embed]

— Christopher Federico (@cmfederico.bsky.social) May 18, 2024 at 9:36 AM

A compressed 500-word summary of 'The Case for Christianity' by C. S. Lewis (1942)

Part 1: "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe"

     Everyone is aware of basic moral standards, knowing security and happiness depend on fair play, yet we fail to comply perfectly. An objective observer would never guess a Moral Law existed.
     The Moral Law encourages individuals to choose between impulses, but is neither impulse nor instinct. Though we teach it to children, we can't alter its content. Its universality is indicated by our quarrels over questions of fairness.
     Virtues are universal despite different cultural expression. When a moral standard appears to change significantly over time (e.g. executing witches), it is usually because factual knowledge has changed (e.g. witches donÍt exist).
     The "religious" view holds that humans were created by an intelligent being that prefers our good behavior, while the contrasting "materialist" view holds that the world was created through a series of impossibly slim chances.
     Christianity speaks only to people who already recognize the Moral Law and think they need forgiveness for failing to live up to it.

Part 2: "What Christians Believe"

     If the mind was produced by evolution, it is untrustworthy. "Unless I believe in God," Lewis wrote, "I can't believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God."
     Injustice does not disprove God's existence because the concept of injustice derives either from God's Moral Law or from personal preference.
     Abrahamic religions believe God made the universe and takes moral positions. Christians may think other religions are partly correct, whereas atheists must believe they're all wrong.
     Jesus talked as if he were God: forgiving sins, judging the world, always existing. He couldn't have spoken pantheistically (believing God animates the world and is beyond good and evil) because he was Jewish. He either told the truth about his divinity, or was crazy or evil; calling him merely a great teacher is not an option.
     The belief in a dualistic battle between good and evil is incoherent because no one is evil for evil's sake and because a third party would have to judge which side is "good." Christianity instead maintains there is "a civil war, a rebellion." The Devil gave Adam and Eve the desire to usurp God.
     It is more important to accept what Christ did--dying to cleanse us and conquer death--than to understand theories about it. Punishing the innocent Christ would have been unfair; rather, he paid our debt of repentance. He was the only one who could repent perfectly because was both God and man.
     We are given a choice to join God willingly before he invades the world. "Christians are Christ's body"; to have "Christ-life" means to be animated by Christ and to be helped by him to do good works. Accepting God is the only path to true happiness.

C. S. Lewis. The Case for Christianity. 1942) New York: MacMillan Co., 1960.

This summary was written in 2005, along with a series of other 500-word summaries of philosophy books, as an exercise in brevity.

---

You may wish to read something much longer I wrote about my opinion on C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

A compressed 500-word summary of 'The Reasonableness of Christianity' by John Locke (1695)

     Because of Adam's disobedience and the punishment of mortality, humanity needs redemption. Jesus, the "Second Adam," restores men to eternal life.
     Was it fair to punish all humans for Adam's sin? It is not exactly a punishment, because immortality was never an entitlement to begin with. The Law of Works (also called the Law of Reason or Nature) is the only rational way to live. It applies to Gentiles as well as Jews because it can be discovered by reason and natural conscience. If people could obey it perfectly, they would be immortal, but they cannot. God cannot soften the law, because it would be against his nature and a slippery slope towards immorality.
     Faith makes up for shortcomings of works. Under the Law of Faith, a Christian is only required to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. (The Epistles include additional doctrines but they are not central to the faith.)
     The Messiah is the Deliverer and a metaphorical King. Jesus himself did not claim publicly to be the Messiah to avoid attracting negative attention from Jews who might have killed him. Until the Last Supper, Jesus did not make the claim to his own Apostles. Instead, Jesus performed miracles so people would realize he was the Messiah.
     Jesus chose Apostles who would trust him rather than question him and who would preach the uncomplicated doctrine that he was the Messiah. He chose, as Locke put it, "a company of Poor, Ignorant, Illiterate Men--but meer Children."
     Acknowledging a popular claim that the identification of Jesus as the Messiah is merely a "historical faith," not a "saving faith," Locke insists the Bible says it is sufficient and says he is not aware of any other doctrine that would be a "saving faith."
     God wants people to come heaven so they can praise him. He accepts people as long as they profess allegiance to Jesus the Messiah-King and make a sincere effort to follow to the Law of Works (otherwise, the Law of Faith would be an excuse for anarchy). Jesus required good works in the Sermon on the Mount and demanded repentance for sins. God would not demand more than is possible for people who lived before Jesus existed.
     People have always wanted to know their moral duty. Philosophers laid codes, but none had authority, and if people cherrypicked their moral beliefs from different philosophers, they would be accountable to no one. No one before Jesus managed to present the Natural Law in its entirety. "He was sent by God: His Miracles shew it; And the Authority of God in his Precepts cannot be questioned," Locke wrote. Another reason no other culture managed to develop virtue was that none had laid a firm belief in eternal life. It's not enough to say virtue is its own reward; the only way to encourage people to be virtuous is to impress upon them a belief in Heaven and Hell.

John Locke. The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures. (1695) Ed. John C. Higgins-Biddle. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.

This summary was written in 2005, along with a series of other 500-word summaries of philosophy books, as an exercise in brevity.

---

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

See my thoughts on Joel Edward Goza's America's Unholy Ghosts, a book that discusses John Locke. My article is a 5-minute read, and the link I provided is unpaywalled. If you buy a paid membership, you don't have to worry about the paywall.