Two Book Reviews: Archbishop Charles Chaput and Mary Eberstadt

A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America
Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Philadelphia 
Image Books
(Available by download at amazon.com and barnsandnoble.com) 

If Cardinal Dolan of New York represents the face of the New Evangelization, Philadelphia's Archbishop Charles Chaput could be called the face of the New Apologetics.  For over a decade Archbishop Chaput has been a leading voice defending the place of religion in the public life of the United States.  We are living in an age where faith is treated by the media and intellectual class as a private matter that should not impact a citizen's civic life or an elected officials public duties.  We have been told that this position is as American as apple pie and grandma, since the Founders were deistic, non religious children of the Enlightenment who wanted a high, impenetrable wall built separating church and state.  But were they really?

Archbishop Chaput argues that the Founders were, for the most part, people of faith who indeed wanted to maintain a secular, "Enlightened" state, while recognizing that the values that informed the Republic they were putting together came from their Protestant Christian tradition.  He points out that George Washington, in his Farewell Address, stated clearly that religion and morality are "indispensable supports" for political prosperity.  He continues that "reason and experience" show that national morality can not prevail without a foundation in religious principles (what Archbishop Chaput does not point out is that many history textbooks exclude these lines, if they even bother to contain the address at all).

At the heart of Archbishop Chaput's essay is the assertion that we as Catholics have done a very good job at becoming American, but not such a good job at maintaining our Catholic identity.  Rather than using our Constitutionally protected freedom of religion to foster a robust, distinctive Catholic community that acts as a leaven, influencing the broader culture, we have become infected with he "yeast of the Pharisees" (my term), blending into the wider society to the point of being indistinguishable from other citizens.  We have forfeited our intellectual tradition and so lack a clear, distinctive voice to counter both the encroachments of a government increasingly hostile to faith and a culture that is growing at the very least indifferent, and at the worst scornful, of religious values.  We should not worry though that the culture will change, because it already has.  According to Archbishop Chaput Post Christian America has arrived, and it is for us to recapture our heritage and our voice or risk permanent irrelevance. 

Archbishop Chaput is a man who is unflinchingly Catholic, but also all American.  His words come from a deep well of faith, but also from a love and understanding of what the American Experiment meant to the Founders and the conviction that it is still a vital, valid project for us and the world today.  But what if salt loses it's flavor?  What if we lose touch with both our religious identity and core national values? What that brings is the "Next America" of the subtitle; while the Archbishop tries to keep his Christian optimism, it is obvious that this is not a place we will recognize as home. 

This is a rather slim tome, billed as an ebook, but is comparable in length to a long journal article.  It is coupled with an excerpt from the Archbishop's 2008 book Render Unto Caesar.  There are also extensive footnotes.

 Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution
Mary Eberstadt,
Ignatius Press
Available in book or electronic formats from amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com
Just in time for the current HHS controversy is a new book by Mary Eberstadt, Adam and Eve After the Pill.  The book is really about the effects of the Sexual Revolution in toto, but sees the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 as its de facto starting point and long term enabler.  There were those who extolled the "virtues" of free love before 1960, but it was only after the development of a reliable and relatively inexpensive chemical contraceptive that large numbers of people could actually live the dream.  In arguing that the dream has indeed become a nightmare, Eberstadt avoids moral reasoning but utilizes cold hard research from the world of sociology and psychology.  Though she only examines Paul VI's landmark 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae in the last chapter, the four basic pillars that the late pontiff based his decision to maintain the traditional Christian teaching on birth control looms large over the book.

What amazes Eberstadt more than the mountain of research that has been compiled over the last forty plus years on the negative effects of the sexual revolution is the fact that so many either ignore the data or try to explain it away.  She compares the present situation to intellectuals in the West who tried to deny the evils of Soviet communism during the Cold War.  She calls this phenomenon the "will to disbelieve," borrowing the term from the late UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and writes that this same reality holds true today in the sphere of the social sciences.  In spite of the fact that Pope Paul's predictions that the Pill would lead to a "general lowering of morality in society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments" has come to pass, the Western intellectual class either ignores these trends or claims that they are morally neutral or even laudatory.  But far from creating a Utopia filled with happy marriages and an emotionally satisfied population, we see record divorce rates (with the ill effects it has on children), the mainstreaming of pornography, and the use of contraceptives by governments like China to control population growth.

Eberstadt is essentially a political and cultural critic, but a full 15% of her book is handed over to footnotes detailing the social science research she uses to make her case.  This is not a definitive work, and her chapter describing how our attitudes toward food and sex have become inverted over the decades was covered already by the likes of George Will several years ago.  But it's still a solid  read and lays the ground work for the topic well.