The Untold Story of the Constitutional Convention (video) - Gleaves Whitney

by Gleaves Whitney

Benjamin Franklin - Leader Extraordinaire (video lecture)

By Gleaves Whitney

American Founding -- John Adams (Part 3)

by Gleaves Whitney

Why the Fame? (Part 2 is available here; Part 1 is available here.)


Given John Adams's liabilities -- his prickly personality, several career setbacks, and the inconvenient fact that his presidency was shoehorned between that of eminent Virginians -- it is hardly surprising that his revival came so late -- 200 years after his retirement from public life. I'd argue that it is not justifiable to give all the credit to David McCullough and HBO. It is true that Adams needed people to plead his case before the bar of public opinion, but there was a good case to champion because of the man himself. Adams himself deserves the fame that Americans now accord him because of his decisive response to the challenging times in which he lived, as well as because of his good character, hard work, intelligent writing, ability to judge character, and vision for our nation. Let's examine these half-dozen elements in more detail. 

birthplace of Abigail Smith Adams

1. The grand stage  It's a truism that's lost none of its truth: "the times make the man." A person is more likely to be famous if by accident of birth he lives in heroic times and if by accident of geography he is close to the action. The American founding was a threshold in the human experience, changing the human estate forever. Adams was born in 1735, near Boston. He was nearing forty years of age when hostilities commenced at Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, near Boston. Harnessing his considerable moral and intellectual virtues, Adams seized opportunities to lead during the crisis with Great Britain. The accidents of history and geography put a man leaving his youth and entering his best years in the cockpit of revolutionary tumult then gripping Massachusetts.

I cannot help but add the "accident" of a great marriage to those of time and place. The Adamses were exceedingly fortunate to have found and married one another.

Adams, like Jefferson, read Plutarch's Lives in the original Greek

2. Classical education  Adams's lifelong reading of the classics also prepared him for fame. His teachers were Thucydides, Polybius, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, Cicero, Suetonius, Plutarch, Jesus, and St. Paul. Each ancient teacher grounded him in the understanding that fame is a social state that is not inherited but earned. If earned, it should be based, above all, on the fineness of one's moral character. Honorable living, courage amid danger, prudence in decision-making, temperance in the face of temptation -- all these virtues are the result of a lifetime of moral discipline.  They become more evident when living in challenging times, and when life-and-death decisions have to be made.

Adams knew that fame could be fickle, and he knew not to confuse fame with celebrity. He would be appalled by today's celebrity culture that has confused celebrities with heroes. Adams would have scoffed at the way people seek to break into 24/7 media coverage with 15 seconds of insipid notoriety.

John Trumbull's "Declaration of Independence," in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, captures the moment when the Second Continental Congress begins deliberating on the language of the famous document (thereby telling the world about the July 2 vote for independence). Adams, appropriately, is the delegate in the middle of the picture -- on the left among the five founders who are submitting the Declaration of Independence to the chairman. Jefferson is the tallest of the group, and Franklin is on the right.

3. Ambition  Adams was ambitious to make something of his life. As a young person he thought he might be happy as a farmer. But the more he learned about himself, the more he set his shoulder to the wheel of ambition. His rise from humble beginnings was impressive -- from the Braintree house to scholar at Harvard, to teacher, to law apprentice, to small-town lawyer, to delegate to the Continental Congresses, to diplomat, to constitution maker, to Vice President, to President of the United States, to elder statesman. At each stage in his career he performed his duties with integrity and intensity. In the Continental Congress, for instance, he served on 90 different committees -- more than any other congressman -- and chaired 20 of them. His work on behalf of our country meant long periods of time when he could not be with Abigail and his children, or tending his farm in Braintree. His diligent study and hard work insured that what he said and what he did made genuine contributions to his country. In Paris, his hard work probably saved him from many a temptation [McCullough 236-37]! More, his sense of duty made him stoical in the face of difficulties. He wryly observed that, "No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it."

Happiness

by Gleaves Whitney 

The Founders and Happiness

It was Thomas Jefferson and America's founding generation that set culture on a new course when they declared that all human beings had the inalienable right to the "pursuit of happiness." It has been said that that phrase in the Declaration of Independence has done more to shape the sensibilities of the modern age than any other.

About one year ago, I was asked to teach a class on the American founding. During the months I prepared, I reexamined the founders – George Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Mercy Otis Warren -- and I was struck by two things. One was how differently they defined happiness compared to definitions that are current today. The other was the extent to which they sought to integrate private and public happiness. Nowadays we tend to think of happiness as a  private good. We have lost the sense of "public happiness," but it was much on the minds of the founders in their debates over what qualities of citizenship Americans should possess, and what kind of republic America should be. Allow me to elaborate.

American Founding -- John Adams (Part 2)

by Gleaves Whitney

The Thorn of Fame (Part 1 is available here.)

John Adams has finally gotten the fame he craved, but it was a long time coming over a rough road. Already as a young man he tortured himself thinking about a future without fame. Historians don't need to speculate on this point because he and his wife Abigail seemed to write down everything. Because of the thousands of letters they left us, we know John Adams's inner life better than the inner life of any other founding father. We know, apropos of this talk, that he thought he should be famous, once declaring that the "Times alone have destined me to Fame" [Ferling 170].

Yet the quest for fame was a thorn in his side. As David McCullough put it, as a young man "John Adams was not a man of the world. He enjoyed no social standing. He was an awkward dancer and poor at cards. He never learned to flatter.... There was no money in his background" [19]. Everything he earned -- from respect in the courtroom, to readership in the newspapers, to leadership in Philadelphia -- he had to work hard at. He knew that fame can be fickle and fleeting. For that reason, he feared posterity would not pay him sufficient homage.

Moreover, he was eaten up with envy when he thought of the more illustrious founders of his own day. Given his Puritan New England heritage, Adams knew envy was one of the seven deadlies, but he seemed helpless before the green-eyed monster. Even when Adams was the runner-up to George Washington in our first national election, he still felt green with envy. One year after that election, in a letter to Benjamin Rush, Adams railed: "The history of our revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod -- and henceforward these two conducted all the policy, negotiations, legislatures, and war."


Adams gold coin

Adams's hunger for fame stands in stark contrast to the easy-going attitude of a later president, Ronald Reagan, who quipped: "There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit." Lacking Reagan's insouciance, Adams yearned for the credit. But here's the good news. If Adams didn't get enough of it in his own time, he perhaps is finally satisfied with the credit he receives today. Looking down on us (for he believed in eternal life), this stubborn man would likely be happy to concede how wrong he was about posterity. Americans have been lionizing him since the Second World War.

*     *     *

His Rotundity -- His Own Worst Enemy

Like any public figure who lives into his nineties, Adams experienced his share of setbacks -- more than a few of his own making. Isn't one of the most difficult things any of us learns is how to deal with our own personality and its liabilities? Adams fessed up that he had a difficult personality. He could be his own worst enemy -- ironic given that he once wrote Abigail a letter cataloging all her faults!

American Founding -- John Adams (Part 1)

by Gleaves Whitney

America's greatest philosopher president

Once Forgotten Founding Father and Philosopher President Makes a Comeback.... Why?

Ten years ago, David McCullough told audiences something that still has the capacity to surprise us. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author said that he initially intended to write a joint biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. At first his concern was that Adams could not hold his own next to Jefferson. But the more research he did, the more his concern shifted. At some point he realized that Jefferson could not hold his own next to Adams, so he decided to devote the biography to our second rather than to our third president. As the distinguished historian Pauline Maier notes, "McCullough's biography of Adams inevitably has a lot to say about Jefferson, but on virtually all points of comparison between the two men, Jefferson comes in second."

High recommendation, that, and arguably so. John Adams's public life makes for a compelling story. Consider the number of firsts that he is associated with during the early days of the republic. He was:

• the lead author of the oldest constitution in the world still in use (that of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, dating from 1780);
• the first vice president of the United States;
• the first president who lived in the White House;
• the first president who was challenged for re-election, indeed, the only president in U.S. history who was challenged by the sitting vice president (Thomas Jefferson);
• the first one-term president (because he lost to Jefferson);
• the first commander in chief who had to direct major military operations off U.S. territory (the Quasi War that was fought against the superpower of the day, France, in the Caribbean Sea);
• adapting Plato's term, "philosopher king," let us also call Adams our first "philosopher president" -- the best we have ever had.

All of these points make Adams worthy of admiration, but the last point makes him worthy of the fame he coveted and that we posthumously confer on him. And yet, from my experience in the classroom, I am not certain that most Americans are aware of his intellectual achievements.

One of the greatest first ladies, Abigail Adams

I will come back to the intellectual achievements of our philosopher president later in these remarks, but first let's remind ourselves that, in the pre-David-McCullough world, John Adams was our "forgotten founding father." If you go to Washington, DC -- the city of great monuments to presidents -- there is not a single statue of John Adams. His absence in Statuary Hall is especially conspicuous in light of the statue of his cousin, Samuel Adams, and the marker where his son, John Quincy Adams, died at his desk. There is not a single statue of him in Philadelphia, even though he was the most ardent defender of independence at the Second Continental Congress. There is not a single statue of him at the U.S. Naval Academy, even though the first vessels of our permanent U.S. Navy were launched during his administration. The most prominent statue of him you'll find is in his hometown of Quincy (Braintree), Massachusetts; yet even this memorial was erected just a few years ago, after McCullough's biography.




"Dearest Friend" -- John to Abigail, September 14, 1774

Adams himself predicted that he would be the forgotten founding father. To Benjamin Rush, he wrote with mock humility, “Mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be erected to me. I wish them not. Panegyrical romances will never be written, nor flattering orations spoken, to transmit me to posterity in brilliant colors. No, nor in true colors. All but the last I loathe” [John Adams to Benjamin Rush, March 23, 1809].

America’s Fin de Siècle: End of a Century or a Civilization?

by Gleaves Whitney

(This review was originally published in the Summer 1990 issue of the University Bookman and appears here with their permission.)

The Culture We Deserve
by Jacques Barzun. Edited by Arthur Krystal.
Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1989, 187 pp., $18.

Politically America may have won the Cold War, but culturally she has entered the fin de siècle. Despair is chic among youth. Recently a television news hour reported that pop singers feel rather downbeat about America, their lyrics adding up to an endless tale of woe. High culture, too, is in a lamentable state. So-called artists are making headlines with an American flag laid out on a museum floor and a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine. Most scholars in the social sciences and humanities, meanwhile, are learning more and more about less and less in endless rounds of trivial pursuit; apparently they’ve abandoned all pretense of speaking to an audience outside the ramparts of the academy. Given such conditions, is it rash to ask whether America’s cultural decline is merely a temporary ebb that will spawn new creative energies in the arts and higher learning, or whether the present decay signals something more foreboding—the disintegration of American culture and civilization?

This question underlies Jacques Barzun’s latest collection of essays, The Culture We Deserve. Few historian-critics are so well qualified to diagnose American culture as Barzun, who spent over five decades as a student and professor at Columbia University, and in the process earned a place alongside the most esteemed men of letters in the West. Since mid-century, generations of undergraduates have become acquainted with him through such well-known works as Darwin, Marx, Wagner and The Modern Researcher.

Roots of American Order: Jerusalem

By Gleaves Whitney

To understand America, do not start with 1787. Or 1776. Or 1492. To understand America -- or more precisely the most ancient roots of American order -- go back to the second millennium B.C., to the Hebrews. Ancient Israel has had more influence on American culture than you think. So argues Russell Kirk in his magisterial work, The Roots of American Order.

Why the Hebrews? After all, they were Bronze-age nomads who wandered on the edge of civilization more than 3,000 years ago, in the wastelands of Egypt and Sinai. When they finally did settle in Palestine, they never developed into a great power as did ancient Egypt, Assyria, Persia, China, India, or Rome. They left us no form of government to imitate. No economic system to marvel at. No enduring art or painting or sculpture to admire. The Western (Wailing) Wall from the foundation of the Second Temple is the best remnant of their architecture – hardly as grand as the pyramids of Egypt or temples of Greece.

Yet what these desert nomads gave us is arguably more powerful than any political system, more dynamic than any economic system, more vivid than any painting, and more enduring than any stone monument. What they gave us through their sacred writings were timeless laws of behavior, moral insights that people from every continent and every age have accepted as fundamental to right living. They helped men and women order their souls.

Let's explore ancient Israel's remarkable contributions to Western civilization in more detail.

Roots (and Shoots) of American Order

By Gleaves Whitney

Roots of American Order

Russell Kirk best tells the story of the West in The Roots of American Order. Now in its fourth edition, Roots is "simply one of the finest surveys of the classical, religious, and European influences on American political thought ever composed" (Lee Cheek). In his masterpiece, Kirk traces key cultural elements of four great civilizations and the cities that defined them -- biblical Jerusalem, ancient Athens, ancient Rome, and medieval and early-modern London. Leaders in each of the four civilizations carried forward the cultural DNA they inherited, often in creative ways that challenged the status quo. So Israel had its Moses, David, and Solomon; Athens its Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; Rome its Cicero, Cato, and Augustus; Britain its Chaucer, St. Thomas More, and Shakespeare.

In the sixteenth century, the world was thrust into a new era when Europeans encountered the Western hemisphere and began planting their ambitions in its rich soil. On American ground, between the 1490s and the 1790s, the cultural DNA of the West eventually combined to make a remarkable new nation. The creation of the United States was organically related to previous civilizations, to be sure, but not a clone of any of them.

Culturally our early republic represented a unique grafting of key elements -- from the monotheistic promise of Jerusalem, to the unfinished philosophical quests of ancient Athens, to the civic republican inheritance of ancient Rome, to the evolving political institutions and common law of London.

Politically the Anglo-American errand in the wilderness was producing a new species of polity that began to blossom in Philadelphia in the mid 1770s. On the one hand, the early republic represented "a revolution not made but prevented," as Burkeans would characterize it. (See Edmund Burke's Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in which he discusses the principles of 1688.) On the other hand, as Alexander Hamilton reminds us, the new polity was the result of self-conscious reflection on American resistance to British tyranny. (See the opening of Federalist Paper Number 1.)

So the establishment of the United States was a unique mix of old and new, fulfillment and promise. It did not exactly represent a novus ordo seclorum -- a new order of the ages -- as some American boosters claimed. (The phrase is still on our paper currency.) In reality, each of the four cities provided the cultural roots from which America's founders, framers, farmers, and forward-trekking pioneers would draw sustenance. These early Americans went about their daily lives with their Bible, Aesop, Plutarch, and Blackstone in hand.

Kirk carries this story of American order forward to the mid 19th century, culminating in the work of Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorn, and Orestes Brownson.



Shoots of American Order

As the title of his book implies, Kirk emphasizes continuity over change -- old roots over new shoots. And yet, new shoots there were. The hundred years from the 1760s to the 1860s was the first Time of Trial in American history. As a result of the American Revolution, War for Independence, birth agony of the new republic, and Civil War to resolve its paradoxes, American politics and culture began to diverge in significant ways from European politics and culture. What had changed?
- Politically: in the 1780s, a large republic was created in a world of settled monarchies.
- Ecclesiastically: there would be no national church.
- Socially: aristocratic titles and privileges were outlawed.
- Culturally: Noah Webster and other chauvinists endeavored to create a distinctively American culture.
- Geographically: the presence of the frontier renewed the possibility, again and again, of equality of opportunity and upward mobility (for white males).
- Economically: the world's largest, continuous, free-trade zone was coming into existence.
- Civil society: in the 1830s, Tocqueville observed that America's network of voluntary associations was the world's most developed, by far.
- Morally: in the 1860s, slavery was abolished on American soil by the Thirteenth Amendment; the greatest uncompensated but legal transfer of property in human history was effected; and four million men and women of African descent were freed from the shackles of the peculiar institution.
Innovations all, from the perspective of Old Europe's anciens regimes.

Violence of Transmitting Cultural DNA

The transmission of cultural DNA from generation to generation and civilization to civilization is rarely seamless. Because the four cultures varied from one another, there were frequent and ferocious clashes, and these clashes are an important part of the story. We well know the story of how Philadelphia clashed with London from the beginning of the American Revolution in 1761 (from John Adams's viewpoint, the true starting point) to the end of the War of 1812, when the War for Independence was finally resolved. We less frequently ask how Jerusalem's ideals clashed with those of Athens, how Athens's ideals clashed with those of Rome, and how Rome's ideals clashed with those of London. Yet these civilizational clashes are critical to understanding our roots as Americans.

David vs. Goliath: Jew vs. Greek?

It's not something most of us learned in Sunday school, but the story of David and Goliath may well have foreshadowed future conflicts between Jerusalem and Athens. In the 11th century B.C., both Mycenaean Greeks and Jews wanted to control Palestine. What were Mycenaean Greeks -- called "Philistines" in the Hebrew Scriptures -- doing in Palestine in the 11th century B.C.? It's a good question. One theory is that Mycenaean civilization collapsed suddenly around the time the Greeks were returning from the Trojan War. The collapse forced the Greeks to flee their homeland and seek refuge in other parts of the Mediterranean. The Mycenaean Sea Peoples who made the successful voyage to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean would have included Goliath's ancestors in search of a new homeland. But they ran afoul of King Saul, who was establishing a monarchy for the Jewish people in the region.

Given his size and reputation as a warrior, it is not improbable that Goliath was a descendent of one of the Mycenaean Greeks who had besieged Troy. It's uncanny that another great book of the ancient world -- the Iliad -- features a similar fight in which young Nestor slays the giant Ereuthalion (in Book 7). But in the David and Goliath story, the tables are turned, and it is the Mycenaean warrior who comes out on the losing end. Indeed, when the Bible describes David holding the decapitated head of Goliath up as a trophy (in 1 Samuel 17v51), it is as though the Jews are proclaiming their supremacy over the Mycenaean Greeks, whose exit from history ended the Age of Heroes and bequeathed a dark age to the ancient Mediterranean world.

Hebrew Jews vs. Greek Jews

Another critically important clash occurred in the 2nd century B.C., when Jerusalem -- the City of David -- was the scene of a fierce struggle between champions of Greek culture and freedom fighters for Jewish culture. It is not by accident that I compose this essay on December 1, 2010, at the start of Hanukkah. These Jewish holy days commemorate one of the most famous civilizational clashes in our cultural DNA.

Jerusalem was not a strictly Jewish city in ancient times. The armies of Alexander the Great conquered the Jewish people and imposed Hellenistic culture on them during the Second Temple period. Indeed, one of the kings in the wake of Alexander's conquest, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, reinvented Jerusalem as a Greek polis and renamed the city Antiochia. More, this Seleucid king issued a decree that forbade the Jews from observing the rites and laws of their religion. Instead, Jews had to follow Greek customs. Failure to do so could and frequently did warrant the death penalty. So utterly totalitarian was Antiochus IV that he rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem to the Greek god Zeus. Sacred prostitution was practiced within its precincts.

This is the background to the heroic struggle that the Maccabees waged against those trying to impose a Greek cultural agenda. They sought to reestablish Mosaic law. But the Maccabees did not speak for all Jews, many of whom were eager to embrace Hellenism. The Hellenized Jews were attempting a cultural synthesis that more conservative Jews found threatening. Thus the civil war got nasty -- as civil wars inevitably do -- with the Maccabees seeking out and destroying any fellow Jew who abandoned the law of Moses.

After three years, Antiochus' edict was rescinded, and Jews were once again free to observe Mosaic law. They rededicated the Temple to YHWH in 164 B.C., which is what the modern Jewish holy days of Hanukkah commemorate.

And yet -- and yet -- what did the descendents of the conservative Jewish Maccabees eventually do with their new-found freedom? They accepted Greek names. They adopted Greek customs. They produced Greek literature. They read Old Testament books that had been translated into the Greek left behind by Alexander the Great. Two centuries later, Jewish-raised authors of the New Testament would write in Greek. The apostle Paul would vigorously argue for the inclusion of Hellenized Jews in the Church. The irony is rich.

Moral of the Story

The point of retelling this story is to remind ourselves that the roots of American order did not always grow harmoniously with one another. The story of the Maccabees shows how a civil war could arise when Jewish and Greek values clashed within the same culture. In America today, we are faced with some of the same kinds of tensions that erupted in civil war in the 2nd-century B.C.

Traveling to Denmark, 1991

As I was preparing this afternoon for classes tomorrow (Monday), I came across a photocopy of a 1991 article by our very own Gleaves Whitney entitled "Decadence and Its Critics."  A wave of nostalgia overcame me.  I first read the article (and have since re-read it many times) on a trans-Atlantic flight to Frankfort, en route to southern Jutland in Denmark.  I had only graduated from college a year earlier, was about to begin writing my M.A. thesis, and was making a three-week trip over Christmas break to visit a close friend and her lovely family. 

Before the advent of the post 9/11 security state and its particular evils, I loved to fly, especially trans-Atlantic.  This time away from time always served as sacred reading space, and I had brought much to read on that flight that would be over only too quickly.  One thing I threw into my backpack at the last minute--a hideously covered (as a man, I shouldn't know the exact color, but I think it's some form of pinkish periwinkle; see ugly thing at the top of this post) issue of the Intercollegiate Review. 

"The Swords of Imagination: Russell Kirk’s Battle With Modernity"

By Gleaves Whitney (from Modern Age 43:4, Fall 2001) - 01/01/09

“Imagination rules the world,” Russell Kirk used to say. He meant that imagination is a force that molds the clay of our sentiments and understanding. It is not chiefly through calculations, formulas, and syllogisms, but by means of images, myths, and stories that we comprehend our relation to God, to nature, to others, and to the self. That is why William Wordsworth referred to the imagination as “The mightiest lever known to the moral world.” And that is why Dr. Johnson, in an earthier definition, quipped that imagination is “The thing which prevents [a man] from being as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as in the arms of a duchess.”

In his memoirs—titled, significantly, The Sword of Imagination—Kirk recurs to martial imagery to characterize his life. Early on, Kirk (writing in the third person) says that he drew “the sword of imagination” to assail the “sensual errors of his time.” “In the heat of combat, he learned how to love what ought to be loved and how to hate what ought to be hated.” He described his battle against modernity as a “Fifty Years’ War” that was “hard fought.” To the end, he depicted himself as a “battered knight-errant who meant to die in the saddle.”

Readers of these lines may be tempted to think of Kirk as a type of Don Quixote—not an illogical association. There was something undeniably quixotic about Kirk’s life-work. He was, after all, a conservative writing in a liberal nation; a premodern tilting at the modern. There was also a self-deprecating quality about his manner. He wrote that, as his talents were largely limited to writing, speaking, and editing, “The only weapon with which he was skilled was the sword of imagination.” With it, “he might demolish some molehills, if not move mountains.”

It is thus fitting to identify Kirk with Quixote, arguably the most imaginative character ever created. Cervantes’s knight-errant imagined his role into existence, strapped on a sword, and embarked on a journey that was at once anachronistic and timeless—anachronistic in that the age of feudalism had passed; timeless in that the code of chivalry embodied the “Permanent Things,” and thus had lost none of its relevance with the passage of time.

Read the complete essay by Gleaves Whitney on First Principles site

The Founding Fathers – Our First Neocons?

By Gleaves Whitney

The imaginative conservative champions certain first principles in response to the fragmenting forces of modernity.  Burke articulated a humane order to counter the “armed doctrines” of French revolutionaries in the eighteenth century; in turn, Kirk opposed the galloping statism and rapacious totalitarianism of the twentieth.  These avatars set down principles that are drawn from the tested wisdom of the species.  They provide a compass, anchor, and rudder for Homo viator – man the pilgrim – in his long voyage on rough seas. 

One paradox of this conservatism is often overlooked by its champions, and in the present essay I would like to begin to explore the implications of this “disconnect.”  The paradox is that most of conservatism’s first principles are derived from history’s greatest revolutionaries.   Consider briefly:

(1) The belief in a transcendent moral order came not from the conservatives but the revolutionaries of their day.  The Hebrews – led first by Abraham, and then by Moses and Aaron – launched the radical idea of transcendent monotheism amid numerous nature deities.  Such innovative ideas as linear time, a people’s covenant with God, the separation of the Creator from creation, the ethical critique of rulers, the moral evaluation of history, and the end of human sacrifice are all notions we take for granted today, yet they were dramatic departures from the norm between 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

(2) Sitting in our comfortable pews on Sunday, we also tend to forget that Christianity was once the most radical spiritual force on earth.  (It likely still is.)  Jesus and St. Paul alienated their conservative Jewish teachers even more than their imperial Roman masters.  The blood of the martyrs testified to the gospel’s departure from the status quo.  Centuries later, Gibbon would lay the blame for the fall of the Western Empire at the feet of Christians who preached the counter-cultural beatitudes and proclaimed a new creation under Christ’s dominion.