And Rightly So

July 31, 2009

Recently I enjoyed a wonderful experience as your editor; May 14 was the date of the Conservative Book Club's first-ever live teleconference with one of our authors. The writer breaking this new ground with us was Steve Milloy. Milloy's Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them was already quite topical then. And, most unfortunately -- with the wretched cap-and-trade legislation now already having passed the House of Representatives -- it's becoming increasingly more relevant by the day.

It was fascinating to hear Milloy's take on the environmentalists' plans to crimp our lives to fit their Procrustean notions of how human beings ought to live. Milloy talked about exactly how the legislation they (including cap-and-trade champion President Obama) are proposing will hurt us as individuals -- from grossly inflating our electricity bills to forcing us to install government-monitored GPS devices in all our cars. And he also delved into the real motivations behind this power- grab: It's worth noting that the global warming scare picked up steam just around the time the Berlin Wall fell and Communism was thoroughly discredited. (It looks an awful lot like the itch some people have to manage other people's lives simply had to go somewhere.) The teleconference was like a solid hour of radio with an author, but with no advertisements to break up the discussion! I do hope Club members on the call were energized to resist environmentalist proposals that threaten to make us both poorer and less free.

But even more than the opportunity to interview Milloy, it was a real treat for me to be in contact with Club members in a new way. It's great just to talk to good old-fashioned Americans who aren't putting out their hands to ask for a government bailout, or itching to rescue other people and run their lives them for them. Especially in the Age of Obama, with nanny state liberalism on the move again -- at a faster pace than ever.

On August 13 we'll be doing another live teleconference just for Conservative Book Club members -- this time with Michelle Malkin, the author of our current Main Selection Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies. Another topic that's really timely at the moment. Almost every day comes another bit of evidence of the Obama administration's arrogance. And it seems inevitable that folks who think they're wise enough to run ordinary people's lives (set our thermostats, control our medical care) tend to think of themselves as not bound by the rules the rest of us have to obey.

I'm beginning to have just a tiny little hope that Obama may already have overreached -- that the nemesis that inevitably follows on hubris may arrive in time to save America from the worst of his planning schemes. It's becoming more obvious every day that the bloated "stimulus" plan he insisted on passing is not bringing on a recovery. In fact, it's hard to see an economic recovery coming any time soon. Not only are the pieces of Obama's agenda that have already passed into law draining vast resources out of the productive economy and imposing new regulations that make hiring employees unattractive. The still-pending pieces of the Obama agenda -- cap and trade, healthcare "reform," more banking regulations, a whole new federal agency to oversee credit -- are creating the same kind of uncertain business environment that kept the Great Depression going for practically a decade. As the fantastically expensive "stimulus" is a more and more obvious failure, won't the public be less inclined to let their representatives sign onto Obama's other ambitious schemes?

It still seems like a small chance, but a real one. And of course the more people know about our President, his plans, and his people, the less I think they'll trust him. Which makes Michelle Malkin's Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies a very important book. I hope you’ll join me on August 13 to discuss it with her!

If you weren’t on the phone call in May, here's how it works. First, make sure we have your phone number! Email CustomerService@conservativebookclub.com with "Michelle Malkin call" in the subject line and your phone number in the email. Then just answer the phone between 1:55 and 2:05 in the afternoon (that's Eastern time, so adjust for your time zone) and you'll be on the teleforum! Hope to talk to you then.

--Elizabeth Kantor

andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com

And Rightly So

July 3, 2009

On first sight, David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies fits neatly into a category familiar to the conservative book reader. It's a smashing refutation of the Christianity-bashing books of the last few years. You've heard their titles even if you haven't read the books: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris; God Is Not Great (How Religion Poisons Everything) by Christopher Hitchens. Quite a few book-length answers to these attacks have been published in the past couple of years, and some of them have provided valuable counterarguments. They pointed out, for example, that most of the arguments that put the "village atheists" on the bestseller list are not new; they're dumbed-down rehashes of challenges that have been flung at (and answered by) Christians since the Enlightenment. Authors have also made the case that religion hardly "poisons everything": Is the world really worse off with, for example, hospitals and universities (both of which are inventions of Christianity)? And earlier authors have made the telling point that the record of atheist mass murderers in the twentieth century (e.g., Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) dwarfs the historical violence that fans of atheism chalk up to Christianity.

But Atheist Delusions begins where the other books leave off. David Bentley Hart's defense of Christianity is much richer in detail; he makes the points the earlier authors have made, but with new fresh and interesting examples. And he does the big picture better, too -- providing a remarkable account of what he calls "the Christian revolution": the radical transformation of civilization that faith in Jesus Christ wrought, overturning the values of the ancient pagan world and giving us a new respect for the dignity of human beings that we forget, at our peril, is a gift of faith in the God become Man.

On the details, here's just one memorable example. It's often been pointed out -- in fact, C. S. Lewis used this fact in answering the Dawkinses and Hitchenses of his day -- that the heyday of witch burning in Europe was not the Middle Ages but the seventeenth century, the dawn of the Enlightenment. But Hart's more detailed account of the medieval Church's dealings with witchcraft is highly informative. Far from sniffing out and burning witches, it appears that religious authorities in the Middle Ages were bent on proving that witchcraft was a scam: one cleric chased a supposed witch around a locked room to prove that she couldn't (as she claimed) fly through the keyhole.

Atheist Delusions also adds texture and weight to the argument about Christianity's historical responsibility for violence. Like witch burnings, "wars of religion" aren't characteristic of the Middle Ages; they began to heat up in the Renaissance and seventeenth century, just as medieval Christendom was breaking up into modern nation states. Hart shows how the real impetus behind the violence wasn't so much religious belief as it was secular rulers' push for something closer to absolute control (than the medieval Church had allowed them) within their national borders.

Hart handily demolishes the "religion poisons everything" position. But the chief virtue of Atheist Delusions is in the positive case it makes for "the Christian revolution." In the book's most compelling passages, Hart shows how two events reported in the Bible -- Peter's weeping when the cock crows after he's denied Jesus, and Jesus' trial before Pilate -- reveal the radical transformation Christianity brought about in the classical world view. In classical culture before Jesus, the moral failings and bitter disappointment of a poor fisherman would have been a matter for cruel comedy only; given Jesus Christ, the world can see Pilate's cynical, brutal exercise of power for the mockery of true justice that it is.

Atheist Delusions leaves the reader enlightened and inspired about our past -- but disturbed about the future. Our "village atheists" have no understanding of the civilizational achievement they're bent on destroying -- any more than Attila the Hun understood Rome's sophisticated urban infrastructure. Clueless barbarians were quite successful in leaving Rome in ruins; let's hope the pseudo-sophisticates trying their best to bring down Christianity don't leave universal respect for human dignity in the same state.

--Elizabeth Kantor

andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com