A Presbyterian Constitution
Revitalizing Hillsdale, egalitarians reject gender complementarity, and more in this week's roundup.
A head’s up that next week I’m going to try to start sending out podcasts on Monday. I already post the transcripts here for paid subscribers, but I’m going to try - if Substack allows - to send out the video version to everyone. If you don’t want to receive these, go to your account settings and turn off notifications for podcasts.
This week’s podcast was a discussion with Luke Robson about his interesting project to revitalize the downtown of Hillsdale, Michigan. He’s already bought about 20% of the buildings downtown, with plans to renovate them and bring in businesses, residents and programming.
Paid subscribers can read the transcript.
You can subscribe to my podcast on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
Egalitarians Reject Gender Complementarity
Back in newsletter #30 in 2019, I argued that the evangelical complementarian gender theology faced future troubles. But I wrote of the egalitarians (evangelical feminists):
Egalitarianism, as an accommodationist theology in tune with the spirit of the age, appears to have a bright future. Because it is accommodationist, however, it will need to continue to change going forward. For example, the principal egalitarian book is called Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy (the “red book”). We can see the problem immediately: “complementarity without hierarchy” implies a gender binary. But society is moving beyond that idea towards a fluid conception of gender. Presuming secular culture continues that direction, egalitarians will ultimately need to change as well or find themselves in the same position that the complementarians are in today.
A recent article noted that the 2021 third edition of this book has a new subtitle that omits complementarity. It’s now called Discovering Biblical Equality: Biblical, Theological, Cultural, and Practical Perspectives.
This was completely unsurprising and very predictable. Similarly, the structural challenges inside of complementarianism are also real.
Irving Kristol on the Constitution
The American Constitution has many intellectual fathers, but only one spiritual mother. That mother is the Protestant religion—perhaps one should say the Protestant impulse—in its various American forms. The idea—and more important, the sentiment—of the American people as a "covenanting community" comes from Calvinism. The idea of this community being governed by elected representatives comes not from memories of a feudal parliament (as in Europe), but from Puritanism and Presbyterianism.
- Irving Kristol, “The Spirit of ‘87” (1987)
Best of the Web
Joshua Gibbs: Against Servant Leadership - I’m glad I’m not the only person to be criticizing this.
This X thread talks about the methodology of top level CEO executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. One of his principles is “brutal 360-degree feedback.” It’s validation of what I wrote about regarding the value of mentorship.
NYT: Lessons From a 20-Person Polycule - The polyamory push continues
WSJ: American’s Birth Rate Hits a Record Low
Mere Orthodoxy: Learning from the Exvangelicals - Somebody needs to compare and contrast “deconstruction” narratives with the “red pill” narrative.
James Wood: Winsomeness in the Negative World
Haroon Moghul: Surviving is Thriving - A Muslim perspective on adapting to the conditions of modern America
NS Lyons: The Right’s Future Must be Parallel, and Counter-Revolutionary - A very interesting perspective
New Content and Media Mentions
I, and Life in the Negative World, were mentioned by the Standing for Freedom Center, Religion Unplugged, and Mark Marshall. I was also on a Pilgrim Radio show.
This week I also posted an essay on evangelicals’ thin anthropology of gender. It got a surprisingly great response.
I did see that someone mentioned that the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, the main organization that promotes complementarian gender theology, started a journal in 2019 called Eikon: A Journal for Biblical Anthropology. Well, that was embarrassing not to have mentioned that! I certainly would have included it had I been aware of it, though it would not have changed my argument in response. There are pockets of anthropological thinking out there. Pastor Michael Foster talks about it, for example. But these are niche areas. It is not present in the mainstream teachings of evangelicalism. I will be planning to look at what articles are in Eikon, and you might want to do so as well.
"“There is no good crying about the matter,” Horace Walpole told the House of Commons when news of the American Revolution arrived in England. “Cousin America has run off with the Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.”" https://stream.org/this-independence-day-its-more-crucial-than-ever-that-we-remember-our-history/
"According to Bancroft, "The Revolution of 1776, so far as it was affected by religion, was a Presbyterian measure." One ardent colonial supporter wrote to King George III the following words: "I fix all of the blame for these extraordinary proceedings upon the Presbyterians. They have been the chief and principal instruments in all these flaming measures."
https://www.christianpost.com/news/the-man-who-founded-america.html
Aaron, nice quote from Irving K. Ever seen the 1990s PBS documentary, Arguing the World? Given the usual production constraints of time and budget, it’s just phenomenally well done, following a decades-long discussion of four influential men, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol, as they separately and/or together process 20th century events. All began on the Left, most as Trostyists, but adjust their thinking (or don’t) as time goes on. Superb. I think some obscure platform will stream it for you, but you can get the DVD and companion book cheaply enough.
https://www.pbs.org/arguing/
The Director, Joseph Dorman, put this Statement on the disc:
"Arguing the World is about a continuing dispute among four brilliant men that took place across sixty tumultuous years of American history. The film grew, in part, out of my admiration for each of them, but perhaps the real inspiration for the film came out of my encounter with American conservatism in the 1980s.
"I had grown up in a liberal household and always considered myself a Democrat. I prided myself on a certain political awareness and yet I had never read a book by a conservative until I decided to pick up Irving Kristol's Reflections of a Neoconservative. The effect of Kristol's thoughtful essays, which contained views so different from my own, was both exhilarating and disorienting and it forced me to think through and clarify my own liberal beliefs.It was with that experience in mind that I made this film.
In an era when so much of what goes by the name of political argument on television is really nothing more than crude sloganeering which precludes any kind of serious thought, when most political documentaries are one-sided arguments for a single point of view, I wanted to make a film that championed the importance of intellectual dispute itself.
By following the strands of an ongoing argument among four engaging thinkers, men who talk as well as write brilliantly, it's my hope that viewers will be goaded--at least once or twice--into reexamining their own beliefs, something that I found myself doing again and again as I made this film."