Oh, Martha – won’t you let me contribute to your conjugal virtue?

It’s every guy’s dilemma: a culture has caught your eye, she has so much to recommend her, and you just know that her bedroom is littered with disordered desires. She’s practically crying out for you to take her into your arms and undergird her social structures with your moral grounding. But how do you approach her? You don’t want to come off like one of those culture-warrior players, who don’t really care about her – those guys who just want to find a culture they can dominate to feed their own egos. You want her to know that you care about her needs, and you’re looking for a meaningful and fulfilling long-term integration of socio-cultural imperatives. She’s sick and tired of all the tired old pick-up lines. So what do you say?

Well, friends, the smooth-talking Eric Teetsel has you covered in today’s TPD:

In a 1972 article in Philosophy & Rhetoric, Wayne Brockriede describes the art of communication in terms of sexual conduct. Like sex, argument occurs between human beings who bring their whole selves to the conversation, including personal histories and philosophical presuppositions (whether they know it or not). And, as in sex, participants in conversation can be considerate of these facts and lovingly negotiate them as part of the act, or manipulate them to personal advantage, or ignore them completely and carry on without regard for the others’ welfare at all. The first is arguing as a lover; the second as a seducer; the third as a rapist.

Too often, conservatives—including me—fall into the third category with our derision and condemnation. Not only is this unbecoming of people aspiring to virtue, it is ineffective in winning others to our cause.

Arguing as a lover is better. It frees us to acknowledge our personal faults and the faults in our arguments while remaining committed to our position and allowing our interlocutor to save face in the majority of instances in which our case is superior. As we woo the person across from us (and—remember—the audience watching from home) we are funny, self-effacing, merciful, and confident.

Now that’s what I’ve been waiting for. Kudos to Eric for this great piece.

In Amy Sherman’s recent book, Kingdom Calling, she quotes Doug Spada of WorkLife, Inc. when he refers to the church as an aircraft carrier. An aircraft carrier, of course, is a warship designed to fuel, arm, and ready aircraft for battle.

According to Spada, too many churches consider themselves like cruise ships. People come onboard, are entertained, refreshed, and pampered before heading back to the real world. Too many churches have made their priority entertainment or even spiritual refreshment without ever suggesting to their constituents that the church is at war. The reality is that people do not simply return to the ‘real world’ but to a war zone. A spiritual battle is raging around us as the Kingdom of God fights to take territory from the Kingdom of Satan. Churches need to stop thinking of themselves as cruise ships and instead as aircraft carriers, where people come to be spiritually refueled, armed, equipped, and taught to do spiritual battle for the Kingdom of God during the week. People do not just come to church to be served, but to be prepared to serve. Spada’s analogy is an appropriate one and one which the church does well to remember.

Unfortunately, the church also often falls into the trap of striving to be a battleship rather than an aircraft carriers. The differences between a battleship and an aircraft carrier are fairly obvious. An aircraft carrier has very few offensive weapons; most of the weapons found on an aircraft are defensive weapons for defending the ship from attack. The ship’s mission is not to attack but to support the aircraft with weapons to do the attacking. A battleship, on the other hand, is comprised entirely of offensive guns. The mission of this type of ship is to do the attacking.

The question of what kind of ship the church is called to be is actually a question of mission. What is the church’s mission? Is the church to be on the offensive, attacking the forces of evil? Absolutely! But is the mission of the church to accomplish this task through its members or to through its own organization? If it is discovered that an unscrupulous, villainous individual is running for the school board, should the church as an institution choose their own candidate to promote and make it their mission to see to it that evil persons are not elected as school superintendents? If it comes to the church’s attention that a stretch of highway is notoriously littered, should the church leadership engage in a campaign to end liter, organize work details, and stamp out the trash problem? Or, should the church encourage its members to become politically involved and care for the environment? The difference between these two perspectives is the difference between a battleship and an aircraft carrier.

When Jesus prepared to head back to heaven in Matthew 28 and Acts 1, He told His disciples to “go make disciples” and to “be witnesses.” For nearly two thousand years the church has understood its primary mission to be proclamation of the Gospel, of the message that the Kingdom of God has come, we all stand condemned as rebels against that Kingdom, but in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ we can find forgiveness for our rebellion and instead become disciples and members of that Kingdom. As we are made disciples of the Kingdom of God, we naturally live out of faith socially, politically, environmentally, morally, athletically, ethically, and so on. We are called as members of the Kingdom of God to advance the Kingdom, but the Church is called primarily to proclamation of the Gospel.

When a church starts acting like a battleship, many problems occur. For one thing, many churches quickly slip into a social gospel, where the preaching and teaching becomes less focused on the gospel and more focused on whatever social issue the church is currently engaging. In addition, a battleship can only go in a limited number of places, whereas an aircraft can go just about anywhere. What good is to make the church’s primary goal the cleaning of a highway when some of the members live in a nursing home? Rather than being told how the Gospel, the message of the Kingdom of God impacts their lives, they sit on the side lines while the church tackles pollution. If, however, the church focused on applying the Gospel to the lives of its members, these members would then spread out around the community into places where the church as an institution could never go. By acting like an aircraft carrier, spiritually refueling and trainings its members with the truth of the Gospel, the church remains faithful to its calling of proclamation through teaching and preaching, making disciples, while those disciples then go to war spreading the Kingdom of God.

For my church in particular, this is not simply an academic issue. Directly across the street from our church is a Planned Parenthood Clinic, one of the few in the city where abortions are actually performed. Do we as a church engage this issue like a battleship? We are contemplating renting the billboard next door to the clinic to advertise a free local Christians women’s clinic, but we believe from scripture that our primary calling as a church is not to eliminate Planned Parenthood but to proclaim the Gospel. Through the Gospel, we as a church encourage people to engage their own community wherever they are located and in whatever positions God has placed them. For some of the businessmen that live in the neighborhood around our church, that does mean engaging Planned Parenthood. For the stay at home mom who lives half an hour away, being a disciple of the Kingdom of God looks completely different. We as the leadership of the church believe we are called to be an aircraft carrier, spiritually equipping disciples of the Kingdom to fight on the front lines.

Check out this interesting short video from TGC. This exchange is a really good, clear, concise statement of the problem of moral consensus and Christian participation in politics in early 21st century America. They don’t have all the answers and neither do I, but it’s heartening to see that there’s increasing clarity about the problem. How do we help people accept moral authority from outside themselves and contribute to the structuring of society’s legal/political plausibility structures without imposing Christianity?

No longer just a joke.

I am not the first to remark that modernity is not the absence or even decline of religion, but a change in the relationship between religion and the social order. One aspect of this change is pluralization, the expectation of religious diversity within society. I am inclined to think this aspect is the one that represents modernity in its fullest development, and with the most far-reaching ramifications. However, another aspect is what we might call reformism, the expectation that social institutions should be continually reformed to bring them into better alignment with our moral convictions. Reformism comes first, and when it achieves its ends in full (which does not always happen) the result is pluralization. It is noteworthy that Rodney Stark and Charles Taylor, who disagree about so much, agree that reformism was the prime mover of modernity.

One piece of evidence I would point to in favor of the description I have just given of the relationship between pluralization and reformism is that you sometimes find reformism without pluralism, but you never find pluralism without reformism. Iran and Saudi Arabia, for example, represent reformism taken to an extreme. Bernard Lewis has pointed out that the entire constitutional structure of Iran consists of recent inventions – there was no such thing as a “mullah” until the 1970s. Because Iran is a theocracy, this represents a far-reaching reform not only of government and society, but of Islam itself (at least as practiced in Iran). And while Saudi Arabia has revived the old names of tribal offices instead of inventing new ones, the reformist impulse is the same. For example, I have seen quite a few knowledgeable people point out that the severe restrictions on female dress in these and other countries are of recent origin.

All of which brings us to what might be the most eyebrow-raising story in some time: Al-Qaeda has instituted a complaint department.

Andrew Johnson at NRO, commenting on a story in the Telegraph:

“Any one who might have a complaint against any element of the Islamic state, whether the Emir or an ordinary solider, can come and submit their complaint in any headquarters building of the Islamic state,” the group’s operations in a northeastern part of Syria said in a notice. “Emir” refers to al-Qaeda’s sub-leaders, according to the Telegraph’s translation.

The Telegraph notes that al-Qaeda has an extensive bureaucratic structure. Last month, for example, the Associated Press discovered a letter from an al-Qaeda council that criticized Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a top leader, for not submitting his expenses, answering his phone, or carrying out attacks according to instructions.

Why is this humorous? Because we in pluralist societies are always surprised when we discover what we consider the less central distinguishing qualities of modern organizations – bureaucracy, offices, rules, complaint departments – without what we consider the most central distinguishing quality, pluralism.

And at the risk of being called ethnocentric, I would argue we are right to be amused, even if the realities of Al-Qaeda make it a dark amusement. The basic question here is: are we right that pluarlism is the central characteristic, and bureaucracy and all the rest of it is peripheral – that reformism ultimately ought to lead to pluralism? If so, as I believe is the case, we would not find it surprising if countries that aren’t very reformist are also not very pluralist. It doesn’t violate our expectations if tribal Hindus in rural India murder Christian converts. (“Nobody bats an eye, because it’s all part of the plan.”) But it’s funny when reformism is carried to a great extreme among those who have pledged by their God to lay down their lives in a murderous war to destroy pluralism. “Don’t they see the contradiction?” we want to ask.

Well, no, they don’t, and they’re not going to. But if we beat them, their next of kin may be prompted to think more clearly.

Great news! Political scientists have discovered that Americans of the left and right don’t disagree nearly as much as they seem to, and are able to come together around the facts even when the stakes are high in partisan disputes.

All you have to do is pay them!

That is to say, people think carefully about the truth and are willing to admit the facts even when the facts make the other side looks good – when accurate reporting of the facts brings them an immediate reward.

As Dylan Matthews reports (hat tip to Jim Geraghty’s newsletter), it has been well established for some time that people who identify with the left and right have different perceptions of the facts. Ask whether the deficit went up under Clinton (it didn’t) and Republicans will say yes; ask whether inflation went up under Reagan (ditto) and Democrats will say yes.

The great fear, of course is that this makes a common civic life impossible, as we all end up living in separate worlds. Defending the despised and hated (but innocent) British troops in the Boston Massacre murder trial, John Adams famously said that we are entitled to our own opinions but not our own facts. What happens if we end up living in a country where we don’t have a common set of facts?

Well, count on good old grubby human nature to come to the rescue. A team of political scientists reports that if you offer people a relatively modest reward (Amazon gift cards, in this experiment) if they get the questions right, suddenly the Democrats remember that hey, Reagan kicked inflation’s tail up and down the national mall, and Republicans remember that Clinton did likewise with the federal deficit.

Now there are two caveats to the good news here. One is that it’s tough to see how we hand out Amazon gift cards to all the voters – especially when the politicians in both parties have goodies of their own to reward bad memories rather than good ones. The other is that even when you can do it, this kind of immediate “carrot and stick” incentive is at best a short term solution.

What we need is a revolution in education – in homes and schools – that teaches people from early childhood that getting the facts right is worthwhile even when it sometimes rewards your political adversaries. We’re rolling a heavy stone up a steep hill here. But it can be done.