I wonder if you don’t give the game away with unnecessary talk of burned out utopians and despair that striving towards any kind of demanding standard has been rendered utterly impossible by the combination of disorder and affluence?

The evangelicals are currently experiencing a deep crisis that flows directly from their naïve “wanting to go back into the common culture and be an influence for good” armed with little more than good intentions and “discernment.” Evangelical literature at places like Christianity Today is replete with “self-help” styled advice for living in the swamp that concede too much to a crass kind of determinism: “You don’t really have to change your life in a material way — and you couldn't even if you wanted to, because the alternative is too hard, and really we’d lose lots of readers if we introduced anything strenuous into the conversation. Besides, the common culture is strong and won’t fail us, we just need to recognize the need to take time out to ‘be holy’ and learn to ‘be discerning.’” This is an extremely weak appology for faith and holiness and has led to all kinds of problems in the evangelical church.

Holiness requires concrete and particular regimines, routines, and comitments — not just the vagaries of good intentions and discernment. There are some rings that cannot be worn — to be Tolkeinian about it — even by those who wish to steward the permanent things. The life that is called for and needed now is a life of struggle.

We published a long rumination on these questions, specifically on the interpretations of MacIntyre on offer in the Christian press, which may be helpful for this discussion. I’ve excerpted it liberally below:

[Consider] Books & Culture editor John Wilson as he gushes over Robert Putnam, Lewis Feldstein, and Don Cohen’s book, Better Together. Writing in Christianity Today, Wilson claims that Better Together’s study of Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch indicates “[t]he unmistakable conclusion … that evangelicals can be trusted at the civic table.” They’re generating social capital, and what’s more, they’re still maintaining evangelistic agendas. This is supposed to silence the cautionary critics, “notably disciples of theologian Stanley Hauerwas,” who hold that Evangelicals “have been co-opted by the imperial state.” In a complete non-sequitur which does violence to the real arguments offered by Hauerwas and others, Wilson closes his article by posing Jesus—“a man who dined with tax collectors and all kinds of riffraff”—as a “precedent” over against those who don’t “believe that [Christians] should strive to have a place at the civic table.” I suspect that the civic tables Wilson, Warren, Neuhaus and other Christian culture elites sit at are not populated by riffraff. More appropriate would have been a response to [Alan] Wolfe’s sense that Evangelicals are selling out their patrimony.

I am under no illusions concerning Wolfe’s place in this debate. He is clearly of the mind that the civic table is a good and necessary thing; a “civilizing” influence on the fervent passions that are prone to grip sectarians such as Hauerwas. Thus, like Neuhaus and Wilson, Wolfe dislikes Hauerwas’s adversarial rancor. Wolfe much prefers what he calls the phenomena of Evangelical “Salvation Inflation.” In an interview with Michael Cromartie for the March/April 2004 issue of Books & Culture, Wolfe says that in the Rick Warren mode of post-traditional Protestantism, “more Americans than ever proclaim themselves born again in Christ, but the lord to whom they turn rarely gets angry and frequently strengthens self-esteem.” “People confess fewer and fewer sins, and are rewarded with more and more.” This, to Wolfe, represents a positive development within Christianity, making its adherents better civil citizens of a pluralistic democracy. Wolfe’s manner is strikingly reminiscent of a colonial governor writing home with condescending delight to describe the natives’ halting embrace of the modern world.

Accompanying the Books & Culture interview, Wolfe received an appreciative but anxious review of The Transformation of American Religion from R. Stephen Warner. Warner prompts readers to avoid Neuhaus’s histrionics and give Wolfe a charitable reading in the I’m OK-You’re OK Evangelical way where every critic is ultimately an okely-dokely heckuva nice guy. (Translation: we ignore whatever he says that rubs us the wrong way or try to put a positive spin on it.) For in Warner’s review, truth and accuracy in analysis take a back seat to pop psychology’s language of diplomacy: Wolfe is “well-intentioned,” he has “new evangelical friends,” and he does a fair job of understanding them. Wolfe is “sensitive to [Evangelicals’] vulnerability to his scorn.” Hence, when Wolfe uses negative terms to describe Evangelicals, it is because he “respects” them “too much not to share with them his disdain for the way many of their number flirt with the worst of American pop culture.” On the other hand, Warner wishes that Wolfe had talked about other, more progressive Evangelicals, such as those who took in Central American refugees in the 80s and helped “delegitimate Reagan-era counterinsurgency policies.”

Warner’s review works the way he thinks Wolfe’s book works—not primarily as a real analysis but rather as a negotiation between secularists and Christians. Warner’s main anxiety about Wolfe’s book is not that its analysis of Western Christianity is badly mistaken but that it is inconvenient for the cultural-political agendas of Christian “movement” literature like Books & Culture: “Wolfe’s well-intentioned purpose to allay mutual fears and disarm recriminations on the part of his two audiences would have been better served if the theme of capitulation had not been such a relentless drumbeat. As it is, he lends support to those who see an eschatological slippery slope instead of a perennial tightrope in every instance calling for their cultural discernment.”

Again, perhaps the point is capitulation, and perhaps it is an accurate point. …

In 1981, Roger Fisher’s international best-selling negotiation handbook Getting to Yes was published. The book was, and continues to be, such a success because it concisely distills the conflict resolution techniques and procedures which must be used by good citizens of a liberal order. The primary methodology taught by Fisher requires a shift in focus from the positions of disputing parties to the interests of the parties, and from there to work towards creative solutions that approximately satisfy all represented interests.

This method for binding disparate individuals or elements of society together in a common scheme of interest preservation is not original with Fisher. It is in fact the quintessential rule of modern liberal society with its required autonomy of individual interest and resistance to the notion of sacrifice for the commonwealth. Karl Marx recognized this structure and aptly named its central point of reference the “cash nexus”: the point at which all disparate interests congregate to achieve satisfaction and the point which must therefore be defended at any and all cost. Marx was famously skeptical about the ability of a society built within the gravitational field of the cash nexus to hang together.

In any thoughtful consideration of the questions raised above, it would be difficult to underestimate the extent to which conservative Christians have absorbed the Getting to Yes philosophy as it relates to the Church and its relationship to the world. An analysis of the pertinent movement literature reveals the overriding goal of most Christian cultural engagement is to find the cultural nirvana where Christians and secularists can finally get to “Yes!”—the culture nexus. Thus, prime importance is attributed to “the conversation”—to the long slow dance towards “yes!” wherein Christian interests are elucidated and differentiated in increasingly abstract and sophisticated ways.

Those committed to this process cannot help but suffer a corrupted view of the Church. The individual Christian is defined primarily by his interests rather than by older notions of membership, and consequently the Church becomes a community of shared interests rather than a community of practice. It is not surprising that in this context “discernment” rather than obedience becomes the most important virtue. And the peddlers of cultural discernment … naturally have an ongoing interest in maintaining the illusion that the process of getting to “yes!” with the world is a “perennial tightrope” walk which requires careful balance. Loud shouts at those on the tightrope are not merely an annoyance, but a disloyal attempt to upset the balance along the path to the culture nexus.

… Given this unfortunate reality, one could conclude that designated Christian intellectuals … may theorize all they want—it is a community of practice that counts in the end. … Many people—Evangelicals in particular—seem to have difficulty grasping that this is the point of MacIntyre’s oft-quoted passage from After Virtue in which he concludes that a new St. Benedict is needed to build a community of traditional moral discourse grounded in practice, discipline, and ritual. So strong is the Christian intellectuals’ taste for brilliant abstract formulations, helpfully prescriptive manifestoes (have you seen ours?), and a perpetual outpouring of books from InterVarsity Press, Baker, and Eerdmans (all summarily reviewed in First Things, Touchstone, and Books & Culture) that they fail to note what is the single most significant difference between, say, real oddities like Thomas More College (in Merrimack, NH) and the relatively mainstream Baylor and Wheaton. At Thomas More, like at a Benedictine monastery, students and faculty live, work, prepare meals, and eat together. Thomas More students are also responsible for housekeeping. This strikes me as a radical idea, a truly countercultural strategy that unfortunately stands little chance for enthusiastic approval in CCCU institutions. It is badly needed. At a certain Calvinist college proud of its commitment to Christian identity and cultural engagement, I have been told that the student dorms once became too filthy by the end of the term for staff to handle. The problem was resolved in the typically modern way: hire the Merry Maids! Is cleanliness next to godliness if you outsource for it?

… Unfortunately, there are numerous examples in the movement literature of a stubborn adherence to the Fisher/Stout method of cultural engagement. John Owen … takes up MacIntyre in the April issue of First Things. … Owen is … daunted by the image of ascesis that the “St. Benedict Option” conjures up. Fortunately for Owen and for the dual loyalty he imagines, his solution does not require us to follow the saint “all the way into the cloisters.”

… Given the spiritual weakness of a church within this trajectory, [Roger] Wilken argues that it is now “less urgent to convince the … culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic.” In other words, the Church must relearn how to be a community of practice rather than an interest group marketing its wares along the road to “Yes!” Wilken concludes: “If Christ is culture, let the sidewalks be lit with fire on Easter Eve, let traffic stop for a column of Christians waving palm branches on a spring morning, let streets be blocked off as the faithful gather for a Corpus Christi procession. Then will others know that there is another city in their midst, another commonwealth, one that has its face, like the faces of angels, turned toward the face of God.”

I know nothing about either Wilken or Owen, but my guess is that Wilken is a Catholic who thinks orthopraxically and through the Mass whereas Owen is an Evangelical whose primary source of order and reflection—his tradition—is the mass of literature he cites. Owen’s primary commitment to the “conversation” leads him into all kinds of errors, including a strong tendency towards reductive (and erroneous) pigeonholing: Wendell Berry and Stanley Hauerwas become “left-wing” and are thus safely defined and dealt with exclusively in terms of “their place” in the conversation.

Wilken, by contrast, embraces a carnivalesque humanism. Putting it pointedly: Christian renewal means virtue and the cakes and ale. This truth about the Church is central to its transforming power and the one without which, no matter how many concessions are obtained at the negotiation table by self appointed Christian representatives, it will surely fail.