Charles Krauthammer has a magnificent column today on the vicious anti-Semitism of the American Studies Association. He points to an effective response:

Facing a similar (British) academic boycott of Israelis seven years ago, Alan Dershowitz and Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote an open letter declaring that, for the purposes of any anti-Israel boycott, they are to be considered Israelis.

Krauthammer suggests we can bear witness against “the new anti-Semitism” by doing the same:

Express your solidarity. Sign the open letter or write your own. Don the yellow star and wear it proudly.

Obviously we don’t deserve to call ourselves Christians if we don’t fight ferociously against hatred, including hatred of non-Christian religions. And one of the oldest and most widespread methods of bearing witness against hate is to identify yourself as a member of the hated group.

But moving from “identify as an Israeli for boycott purposes” to “don the yellow star” brings in a new question. Can a Christian “don the yellow star” without compromising another witness – our witness to the exclusivity of Christ as the only way to God? I say, if the Jewish editors of the New York Sun can endorse Santa, I see no reason Christian bloggers can’t endorse the Star of David. Symbols are fluid in this kind of context.

And we are, after all, people of David, grafted in by the work of Christ. And Christ is, lest we forget, not only “Son of Man” but “Son of David,” not only the Messiah but the inheritor of the Israelite monarchy, the final and perfect Davidic king.

I am a Christian, but for purposes of all boycotts against Jews, count me as a Jew.

The New York Sun, which published the original “Yes, Virginia” letter in 1897, has now started running the letter every year. However, this decision was not made lightly – the current editor is Jewish, so he ran the question by a number of rabbis, “sages of a rank and degree of Orthodoxy that would be unquestioned even by the heads of the greatest yeshivas.” They gave the Sun a green light to continue endorsing Santa’s existence, indicating their agreement with the Sun‘s wisdom from a century ago:

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

The Sun also addresses some choice words to the recent pronouncement by a Harvard professor that Santa is racist.

Do you think I’m cheapening the blog by linking to a story about rabbis for Santa? Let me restore our highbrow reputation by posting this link to Mike Tyson’s analysis of Kierkegaard.

As I write this, I am sitting in the waiting room as my daughter has major surgery. She is, of course, in the Lord’s hands, and it is at times like this I am most grateful for the joy of Calvinism. But the Lord uses means to accomplish his ends, so I have much more to be grateful for – and much more tangibly – than just his immediate, unknowable work in my heart or his equally unknowable superintendent providence of all events.

Many of his means for accomplishing his ends, probably most of them, involve the mediation of human culture. Two of these means are particularly standing out to me with new clarity as I sit here awaiting news that will be life-changing, either for better or worse.

The waiting room is teaching me that the reserves of American character are surprisingly deep. I am sitting in a crowded room full of people who all have every reason in the world, right now, to think of no one but themselves. (The woman next to me just heard that her daughter’s heart is stopped.) Moreover, in this place the selection biases of race, class, political party, etc. are mostly removed; if anything, the neighbors with whom I am now confined in close quarters, all of us waiting together for our life-changing news, are disproportionately different from myself and from one another. And I am really surprised – perhaps it doesn’t speak well of me – that everyone here is so manifestly good. It is not simply that people who don’t even know each other and are not superficially like one another and have problems of their own to think about are looking out for one another, it is that they do so with such casual frankness and unselfconsciousness. To be good to one another seems to be the most natural thing in the world. Just now someone sitting across from me said to someone else, “thank you for helping, I couldn’t do this without you.”

That does not happen by accident; it is not the natural state of humanity. To train people to be (humanly speaking) good requires a certain kind of culture, one that is difficult to build and just as difficult to maintain. And it is well known among us professional character-mongers that America’s sources of character are declining. More than most people in this line of work, I have assimilated all the worst diagnoses from the most pessimistic sources. There is no argument for despair that I have not heard – indeed, examined at some length.

But you know what? American culture has a way of defying pessimistic expectations. We social scientists can never quite stop selecting on the dependent variable – we look for signs of hope or decline in the places where signs of decline are more visible than signs of hope. We expect the sources of tomorrow’s strength to be the same as yesterday’s sources. But yesterday’s sources are always in decline – that’s just how it is in the fallen world. Meanwhile, in the places where we’re not looking, entrepreneurs are inventing new sources of cultural strength and vitality. The signs of decline are always right where you expect to find them; the signs of hope spring up in the last places you expect.

The subject of entrepreneurship brings me to the other cultural means of God’s providence that I’m grateful for. Before we sent our daughter into surgery, I signed a piece of paper that effectively gives the doctors permission to do whatever they want to her. Yes, there are laws about malpractice, but if you know anything about hospitals you know that they know how to protect themselves from liability. Sure, there are plenty of big jackpot malpractice verdicts, but how much are the malpractice verdicts really related to the merits of the cases? As important as civil justice is – and you will not find any more ardent advocates of it than myself – only a fool would trust his daughter’s life to it.

What I’m trusting my daughter’s life to is the professional ethic of the medical staff. This morning, in a short space of time, I met pretty much everyone who’s going to be working on my daughter today. I was really amazed – again, it may not speak well of me – at how obviously these people care about getting everything exactly right and taking the best possible care of my daughter. I feel not the slightest doubt in trusting my daughter’s life to these people.

But my daughter’s life is not just in the hands of the American work ethic as she goes into surgery. As we drove here this morning, her life was in the hands of the work ethic of assembly line workers in car factories – not just the people who made our car but the people who made every car on the road. When we slept in the hotel last night, her life was in the hands of the work ethic of the housekeeping staff, whose diligent labor alone stands between us and whatever germs were brought into that room by all its previous occupants. My daughter’s life is in the hands of the American work ethic every day, and so is mine and so is yours.

Once again, this is not the normal, natural state of humanity. It is difficult to build and sustain a culture in which people feel a sense of moral responsibility when they put bolts into car parts or change bedsheets. It requires an institutional environment in which people are allowed to be stewards of their own lives, so that they are able to understand themselves as responsible moral agents; more fundamentally, it requires an entire cultural environment that makes the concept of stewardship and its responsibilities plausible. Without all this, you can’t build civilization above subsistence level – which is why scraping by at subsistence level is the normal, natural state of civilization.

And once again, all the obvious signs – the signs we social scientists are likely to read – are of a decline in the work ethic, yet sources of hope are springing up all around us in places we don’t know to look.

Charles Murray ended his recent book with four reasons to expect the American experiment in responsible freedom to end in the coming generation, and four reasons to think it might not. One of his reasons for hope was simply that time and again in its history, America has inexplicably bounced back from existential catastrophe. “Inexplicably,” that is, to social science. To those who understand the entrepreneurial spirit, America’s persistent refusal to accept our invitations for it to expire is less inexplicable.

It is even less inexplicable for those who understand the work of the Holy Spirit, who has been the deepest source of the culture of responsible stewardship and entrepreneurial creativity.

The Lord does not owe us success, and perhaps what I’m seeing in the waiting room today is the last delicate fruit of a tree whose roots have already died. But “hope does not put us to shame,” and hope is not just for the eschaton. Hope means God is at work now, today, and thus we can be (rationally, realistically) hopeful about our temporal fortunes. Despair is a sin – it denies that God is in control. And as Scott McCloud once said, if there’s a 99% chance of total disaster the only rational response is to focus all our attention on the remaining 1%.

Update: She’s out of surgery and everything went perfectly. Praise God!

I have an article today at TGC on Christianity and the relationship between rich and poor:

Healing the relational estrangement between rich and poor is one of the most central elements of Christian living. James points to “partiality” among economic classes as a quality that demonstrates unbelief and leads to perdition (James 2). Paul identifies “contentment” with your economic position as a way of life that distinguishes true believers from false teachers (1 Timothy 6:3-10).

Check out the comment thread, where I’m accused of something (it’s not quite clear what) involving atheism and mind control.

Fascinating article on TGC this morning by Mike Cosper on The Hunger Games. I haven’t read the books but gave THG a try when it came out on Netflix, not expecting much. I was very pleasantly surprised by it. Cosper’s article is the first I’ve read (not that I spend lots of time reading articles about THG) that starts to unpack why there’s more to this story than meets the eye.

Many people are made uncomfortable by THG because, superficially, we are being invited to sit in the audience and be entertained by the sight of children killing each other for the entertainment of the audience. Cosper acknowledges that a person with a properly formed conscience should not participate in the Games, but he argues (correctly, I think) that the movie itself is aware of this. In the totalitarian environment where Katniss has been raised, “a properly formed conscience” becomes supremely difficult to develop. THG is following in the footsteps of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley – with less intellectual ambition of course, but still showing us how the institutions of culture can be used to manipulate our perceptions of reality and make good seem evil, evil seem good.

I think a close reading of the movie would bear this out. The filmmakers clearly put a lot of thought into designing the propaganda videos, the media interviews, etc. by which murder for entertainment is framed as an act of virtue, patriotism, and even love of life and peace. As the story unfolds, a super-slick talk show host/sports announcer character played by Stanley Tucci effortlessly spins everything we see and hear into conformity with the regime’s ideology. Those who are worried about the moral impact of THG are missing the point – the filmmakers (and no doubt the novels as well) are subtly deconstructing the very glamorization of evil they’re worried about.

The contrast with the remake of Robocop is instructive. Paul Verhoeven was doing much the same thing in 1987 that THG is doing now – deconstructing the system’s manipulation of reality, showing how we are all being invited to live as domesticated animals (“I’d buy that for a dollar!”) rather than men and women. Like Katniss, Officer Murphy is fighting for justice as best he knows how, but he’s a pawn in a game that’s under the control of bigger people. The bad guys who destroyed his life are brought down, but the bigger bad guys – the whole rotten system itself – remains standing. In the climactic finale, Murphy saves the life of the heartless tycoon who has been using him like a tool. It’s the right thing to do, and Murphy reclaims his humanity by doing it (“Nice shooting, son – what’s your name?”) but the rotten system that dehumanized him grinds on. The Robocop remake is pretty obviously not interested in such things; no doubt they’ll feel obligated to have some social satire in there as a nod to the original, but it won’t work because the people making the movie obviously have nothing to say.

Yes, a fully ethical person would not participate in the Games; perhaps a fully ethical Officer Murphy would have resigned from the police force. But these are stories of people struggling to become fully ethical people in the midst of cultures where such formation can only come slowly, as the result of great struggle, and with enormous sacrifice.