Faith And Minds Alive

What a wonderful time to be a Christian, and an Episcopalian. Above is a fascinating hour-long conversation between Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Then my Nixon buddy Paul Matulic pointed out this Slate exchange between Douthat and William Saletan as well as the fact that the New York Times turned to an Episcopal priest, Randall Balmer, to review Douthat's book:

Although Douthat’s grasp of American religious history is sometimes tenuous — he misdates the Second Great Awakening, mistakes Puritans for Pilgrims and erroneously traces the disaffection of American Catholics to the Second Vatican Council rather than the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” — there is much to commend his argument. Yes, the indexes of religious adherence are down, and the quality of religious discourse in America has diminished since the 1950s, in part because of the preference for therapy over theology. Theological illiteracy is appalling; many theologians, like academics generally, prefer to speak to one another rather than engage the public.

But the glass-is-half-full approach, to borrow from the famous Peace Corps ad of this era, looks rather different. I’m not sure that the enervation of religion as institution since the 1950s is entirely a bad thing; institutions, in my experience, are remarkably poor vessels for piety. An alternative reading of the liberal “accommodationists” Douthat so reviles is that they have enough confidence in the relevance and integrity of the faith to confront, however imperfectly, such fraught issues as women’s ordination and homosexuality rather than allow them to fester as they have for centuries. I suspect, moreover, that Douthat has overestimated the influence of intellectual trends like the Jesus Seminar. The thinkers he quotes are important, but I would also recommend the lesser-known work of writers like Roger Olson, Jean Sulivan, Doug Frank, Miroslav Volf and David James Duncan as evidence of the vitality of Christian thinking; they may occasionally poke provocatively at the edges of orthodoxy, but most do so from well within its frame. Finally, the fact that we are having this conversation at all (much less in the pages of this newspaper) is testament to the enduring relevance of faith in what sociologists long ago predicted would be a secular society.

Pastor Pay

Rabbis: Not too shabby.

Do Nothing.

Balance the budget.

Verging Birthers

Trig birtherism gets some rare mainstream attention from "Slate," though the writer, Rachael Larimore, is finally "inclined to believe" that Sarah Palin is the natural mother of her youngest child. Meanwhile the godfather of the TBs, Andrew Sullivan, who published the fabricated story during the 2008 campaign without checking the facts, says Palin's assertion that she's Trig's mother is "literally incredible," which sounds like another way to say she's lying.

Yorba Fea

Yorba Linda is famous as a president's birthplace. Now it's famous for the anti-Muslim rhetoric during protests against a Feb. 13 charity event at the Yorba Linda Community Center. The YouTube video has over 600,000 hits. The Washington Post's coverage is here. At "Slate," Glenn Greenwald writes:

I think what was most striking about that video is that the presence of small children didn't give these anti-Muslim protesters even momentary pause; they just continued screeching their ugly invective while staring at 4-year-olds walking with their parents. People like that are so overflowing with hatred and resentments that the place where their humanity -- their soul -- is supposed to be has been drowned.

Psy-Optics

I was wondering why I was having trouble getting especially worked up at the idea of the brass in Afghanistan using psy-ops on visiting legislators, as alleged in "Rolling Stone." Here's why, from Juliet Lapidos at "Slate":

The idea that, given a U.S. senator as a target, a psy-ops team could "plant" the urge, Inception-style, to give the Army more resources is fairly nonsensical. Psy-ops teams use persuasion, not mind control. If [Gen. William] Caldwell [shown here with Sen. McCain] really did want [whistle blower Michael] Holmes and others to compile detailed profiles of John McCain and others, including their voting records and opinions on hot-button issues, he might as well have assigned such research work to his public affairs staff. (The difference between psy-ops and public affairs is that the purpose of the former is influence and it's supposed to be directed at foreign audiences exclusively, whereas the latter merely informs audiences both at home and abroad. But the distinction can get hazy. A 1997 Army field manual on public affairs notes that the discipline helps the United States "achieve information dominance" and "contributes to the preservation of public support," which seems to edge into influence.)

If military personnel have really broken the law, they should be held accountable. Senators and congressmen are entitled to receive strictly factual briefings, whether in Kabul or wherever they interact with government personnel. I also could understand how a member might get upset learning that the Pentagon had used taxpayers' money to study whether his having been bullied by his high school football coach might make him more inclined to fork over funds for killing the Taliban.

But people of substance engaged in important work always go into meetings hoping to bring back something for their side, and generals are no different. If you're canny, you'll want to learn a little something about the person you're talking to first. Call it psy-ops, or call it empathy.

What astonishes me is the idea that you could be a member of Congress and be all that susceptible to being emotionally manipulated. Wouldn't the members of most congressional delegations have spent the 16-hour flight reading about Afghanistan and getting ready for the meetings themselves? If not -- if the generals are taking these conversations more seriously than the congresspeople -- where's the real scandal?

Serving People Instead Of Serving Time

Nixon White House aide Chuck Colson on fighting crime:

When I first got out of prison and started talking about this in the late '70s and early '80s, most of my conservative friends thought I'd lost my mind, and most of them were against me. Then I began to develop my arguments and write about them—I wrote two books on moral justice and restorative justice: the notion that, instead of just punishing people, you put them to work and [have them] make restitution and do service—and frankly since then there's been a big change.

I tell my conservative friends who disagree with me, "You guys aren't being conservative. You're taking a big government solution, you're thinking prisons are going to change people and that's just not the case." I think I've converted a lot of my old conservative skeptics.

What's Next?

I can understand the frustration of the president's friends and colleagues:

The White House says Mr. Obama prays daily, sometimes in person or over the telephone with a small circle of Christian pastors. One of them, the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, who was also a spiritual adviser to former President George W. Bush, telephoned a reporter on Wednesday, at the White House’s behest. He said he was surprised that the number of Americans who say Mr. Obama is Muslim is growing.

“I must say,” Mr. Caldwell said, “never in the history of modern-day presidential politics has a president confessed his faith in the Lord, and folks basically call him a liar.”

Reflecting on Obamanxiety about a year ago, I speculated that it was the result of people's economic worries, concern about the administration's overreaching, and Obama still seeming a bit remote and unfamiliar. Since then, the first two factors haven't changed much. Oddly, neither has the third.

In the interim I read David Renmick's Obama bio The Bridge, which portrays the president as serious and principled, ambitious and opportunistic, introverted and a bit austere -- and incredibly restless in his peripatetic life since high school. Critics and even some friends put his quick moves down to his uncanny luck and sharp eye for the next rung of the ladder. But maybe there's another reason as well. During the 2008 campaign, a journalist at "Slate" compared his and Hillary Clinton's Myers Briggs personality types. Obama's an ENFP, aka "the Champion" -- idealistic, rousing, able to live with differences and compromise in pursuit of a common purpose. Good stuff for a president, you'd think. but one expert, Otto Kroeger, added this warning:

As a task or responsibility drags on and its mantle becomes increasingly routine, the ENFP can become more pensive, moody, and even rigid.

Somebody give Dr. Otto a cigar, because that sounds a lot like the president I've been watching the last few months.

So Obama's aides can blame the Birther fringe and his angry left flank as much as they want for his problems. They can blame the press for not covering his events properly. All that goes with the territory. Part of being a good president is figuring out how not to be held hostage by the ideological and cultural dynamics of the times.

Another part? Loving the work. If there's evidence that Obama's growing into or especially relishing the job or making it his own, I haven't seen it. If he's forming the intimate bond with the American people that great presidents do in crisis time, I'm not feeling it. If there's anything worse than people thinking he's a Muslim, it's their deciding he doesn't really care for the job.

Tolerant Tirana

A fascinating article by Nathan Thrall about Albania, the Muslim world's most open-minded, pro-U.S. nation. It's even flirting with same-sex unions. Bad news: Nearly three-quarters of Albania's violent deaths are vendetta or revenge killings. As for Albanians' piety:

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Muslim world's most tolerant nation is also its most secular. A recent Gallup poll (free registration required) found that of every Balkan and Muslim-majority nation, Albania had the smallest proportion of people who said religion was an important part of their daily lives.

Talk Is Dead

Farhad Manjoo applauds the apparent death of voice mail:

Every new way we develop of talking to one another—e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging, Twitter, etc.—is faster and more useful than leaving an audio message on someone's phone.

Improving on voice mail is just the beginning. All those means of "talking [sic] to one another" are all also much faster than actually talking to one another. If you have to converse on the phone or in person, you waste time saying hello, asking how the other person is, and then listening to the answer. Then once you say what you have to say, the other person might inconvenience you even further by having something to say in response. They might disagree with you, or offer an insight you hadn't thought of that will immediately alter your own thinking. The exchange might go in an entirely different direction as the result of the unanticipated dynamics of your exchange. These are all incredibly inefficient wastes of your valuable time. Don't stand for it any longer!

Obama Obscura

John Dickerson at "Slate" wonders why the President asked for a torture investigation earlier in the week when he now says he doesn't want one.

Brill Scheme

Jack Shafer at "Slate" is pessimistic about a plan to charge readers for journalism.

Boston Massacre

The Boston Globe, $1.1 billion in debt, could close without major concessions from its unions. Over at "Slate," media writer Jack Shafer errs in arguing that newspapers aren't really essential to the future of democracy. What he misses is that every other major news source -- TV, radio, and the hackosphere -- gets the bulk of its information from newspapers. So it's not newspapers per se that are essential. It's reporting, and newspaper journalists do about 90% of it.

Green Snake Moan

The straight skinny on St. Patrick.

Slate: "Deep Throat Was Not A Good Man"

When Timothy Noah of "Slate" asked Mark Felt in 1999 if he had been Bob Woodward's secret Watergate source, Felt lied and said no. Noah pressed on: Would it be so terrible to be the heroic Presidency- destroyer?

"It would be terrible," Felt replied. "This would completely undermine the reputation that you might have as a loyal, logical employee of the FBI. It just wouldn't fit at all."

But a lot of people thought Deep Throat was a hero for getting the truth out about Richard Nixon's crimes in the White House.

"That's not my view at all," he said. "It would be contrary to my responsibility as a loyal employee of the FBI to leak information."

And so it was. Law enforcement officials aren't supposed to prosecute Americans via leaks to the press; if you doubt how destructive this can be, ask Wen Ho Lee. It's also against the law. Even if you were to recast Felt as a whistle-blower, at the time the FBI was exempt from the protections the law extended to whistle-blowers.

Noah goes on to detail Felt's other abuses of power, which resulted in a felony conviction while enabling Weather Underground bomber William Ayers to evade prosecution. He describes Woodward's poor treatment of Felt and the ex-FBI official's family's profiteering. Noah overlooks Felt's most likely motive for giving Woodward government secrets to get Nixon: He'd been passed over for J. Edgar Hoover's job.

All in all, it's a sordid story. It's obvious why Woodward had hoped to keep the secret until Felt's death, if not beyond. "Deep Throat was not a good man," reads the subhead on Noah's article. But it really doesn't matter, does it? Because when you're going after Richard Nixon, all's fair.