Well, 2017 is almost over, and what a year
it has been. A retrospective could leave you happy or depressed,
depending on your focus.
Donald J. Trump is president. The left has decided that its
fundamentalist enemies were right about Bill Clinton's impeachment. I held
a conference
attacking the LGBT agenda from every imaginable angle two weeks ago, without
being thrown in a gulag. Hope springs eternal. None of this would
have been conceivable only eighteen months ago.
But 2017 is also ending on a note of embarrassment.
Fortunately, I do not feel embarrassed and should not. Nor do most
pro-Trump people allied to me. But the firestorm surrounding Roy Moore's
candidacy for the Alabama Senate seat played out like a scene from an Aeschylus
play. Imagine a chorus, like the matrons in Seven against
Thebes or Egyptian refugees in Suppliant Women, waiting
for the next herald to bring more bad news.
"Yea, verily, I come to bring news of another traitor, who
hath laid a hex upon Judge Moore, unleashing with the dark force of the winged
harpies from the far-off wind caves, another warrior with well-crafted arrows,
crying out the name of a fair maiden who tells of Moore the Tamer of Courthouses
and his dark lusty deeds in the days of his unbearded youth. Hark!
Here cometh another National Review column."
Life is short, so I suggest
you follow this link to see my explanation for why the claims against Roy Moore
are absolutely, 100%
garbage. Let us just consider the baseline.
A few weeks before an election, a newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos
publishes a rambling set of memories about dates that Roy Moore went on roughly
forty years ago. Three stories involve Moore dating teenage girls of
legal age when he was in his early thirties but courting them with nothing more
than a kiss and respecting their families and honor. A fourth involves a
far-fetched tale about Moore luring a fourteen-year-old out of a courthouse,
stripping down to his underwear, and trying to molest her.
A din rises from the lairs of angry LGBT advocates who have hated
Roy Moore for years. They just happen to have come under fire with unprecedented
attention to pederastic grooming in gay Hollywood. Joining these longstanding
antagonists of Moore are the familiar voices from the Southern Poverty Law
Center and the predictable squad of NeverTrumps – Ross Douthat, David French,
Ben Shapiro, etc. – rushing to drop more of the headlines we have come to
expect from them.
The straw men multiply and start marching into the bonfire on cue.
The scrupulous solons tell us that Christians should not defend evil just
because they are Republican. They remind us that we should be as willing
to hold our allies accountable as our friends. Their many missives all overlook the fact that we are
giving Roy Moore a pass not because he is Republican, but because he is innocent,
and the charges are obviously phony.
They are convinced that the Washington Post accusations are
"credible" based on what the Washington Post reported about the
process of gathering the women's testimonies. After all, in 2017, if
there is one thing you can trust, it is a newspaper. "Credible"
becomes like "edgy" and "full of heart" and other
catchphrases used by people peddling screenplays in the San Fernando Valley.
Given the propensity of the Moore-haters to quote Bible verses, it
is ironic that nothing in the Bible encourages us to rush into condemnation of
people based on recent and suspicious claims. Much in the Bible supports my view that
we should rebuke foolish claims using our God-given sense of reason.
Proverbs 9:13 states, "The woman Folly is rowdy; she is
gullible and knows nothing."
Proverbs 26:11 states, "Like a dog returning to his vomit,
so a fool repeats his foolishness."
Proverbs 26:24 states, "A hateful person disguises himself
with his speech and harbors deceit within."
Proverbs 30:12 states, "Do not slander a servant to his
master," just in case Christians think the Bible thinks it's great to send
social media mobs to get people fired and blacklisted over allegations they
read about online.
And of course, there is Psalm 9:9: "For there is nothing
reliable in what they say, destruction is within them, their throat is an open
grave."
Nothing in the Bible implies that women never lie, even about
something serious like rape. The Mosaic code has quite deliberate rules
about how to deal with rape accusations and what due process must be followed.
This is not surprising, given the tales of Potiphar's wife (Genesis
39:7), Jezebel's charge of treason against Naboth (1 Kings 21:10), and the
whore who lied to Solomon to steal another woman's baby (1 Kings 3:26).
Nowhere in the Bible does God glorify people who believe
unsubstantiated gossip. Evil forces use lies and manipulation in the way
Satan tries to contrive a case against Job. These themes complement the
important lines from Jesus Christ, so often misquoted: "For with the
judgment you use, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be
measured to you" (Matthew 7:2).
Many Christians have had to explain to gay people that this does
not mean we cannot describe homosexuality truthfully as a sin. But
perhaps in the wake of the Roy Moore scandal, some Christians need
clarification on what these lines mean. Would any of you want to be
called a "child-molester" because random people scored an interview
with the Washington Post and said you raped little girls 40 years ago? If
that is how all of us must be judged, then we should dig mass graves, because
we will all soon be executed and laid to rest.
As I discussed in Wackos Thugs & Perverts, 40%
of American adults now get a bachelor's degree. The vast majority of
these people are forced to take distribution requirements that ostensibly
foster "critical thinking" and "critical reading" skills.
But the Moore controversy is final proof that higher education is an expensive
cancer on society. The people defending Moore as they should are largely
unknown commentators standing up to the Big Lie through Facebook and Twitter
posts. Like much of Trump's base, they did not go through college under
the regime of "Composition & Rhetoric" feminists showing Jon
Stewart monologues in class to explain rhetorical strategy. In fact, the single best predictor
of someone's ability to see through a ridiculous political fraud is the absence
of a liberal arts degree on his résumé.
Never has a more stunning indictment of the humanities presented
itself. Think of the following narratives, in no particular order: Music
Man, Chicago, Elmer Gantry, 1984, Brave
New World, Little Orphan Annie, Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, Scarlet Letter, House of the Seven
Gables, "The Tell-Tale Heart,"Coquette, Sport
of the Gods, "Narrative of the Life of William Wells Brown,"Invisible
Man, Wag the Dog, True Colors, "The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow,"Blithedale Romance, To Kill a
Mockingbird, and the list goes on. American arts and letters are
full – absolutely overflowing! – with stories about the classic tradition of
the political fraud. If our forsaken English departments would stop
teaching seminars on Harry Potter and The Vagina Monologues,
maybe they could prepare people for citizenship.
But how will critical thinking ever return to the American mind?
Only people with Ph.D.s
are allowed to teach these great texts. The people with fancy degrees are
mostly believing the preposterous story that Moore stripped down to his
underwear and tried to molest a little girl in 1979, whom he picked up at his
job in a district attorney's office of a small Alabama town without having been
caught or called out on it for 38 years. These are not people who would
have noticed that the photos of Elmer Gantry with Lulu Baines were an obvious
forgery.
I must put in a plug for the great books program at Southwestern
Baptist Theological Seminary, where I teach. Proudly I force my
undergraduates to get through the great literature of civilization in eight
semesters. This semester, by luck, I was teaching the Medieval Literature
seminar. We were studying William Ockham as the sex hysteria broke out!
As Ockham scholar Stephen F. Brown explains Ockham's most famous contention about truth: "We are not allowed to affirm a statement to be true or to maintain that a certain thing exists, unless we are forced to do so either by its self-evidence or by revelation or by experience or by a logical deduction from either a revealed truth or a proposition verified by observation" (xx).
As Ockham scholar Stephen F. Brown explains Ockham's most famous contention about truth: "We are not allowed to affirm a statement to be true or to maintain that a certain thing exists, unless we are forced to do so either by its self-evidence or by revelation or by experience or by a logical deduction from either a revealed truth or a proposition verified by observation" (xx).
I can state this in simpler terms: most things we hear are
not true. We should give the title of
"true" to things only if (1) they are immediately obvious; (2) they
are divinely revealed to us, as in Scripture; (3) we saw them with our own
eyes; or (4) we can test the reasonableness of them by seeing them as upheld by
divine revelation, or we observe something that proves them.
If you can't prove it,
don't believe it. This is the beauty of the medieval science of
epistemology, the quest to determine how we can know that something is true. Thinkers like Ockham drew liberally
from Aristotle, whose Categories andNicomachean
Ethics established clear terms to help us sort through confusing
details. Aristotle gave us the terms "kind" and
"degree" so we would not be duped by people trying to group together
a serious charge like child rape with a harmless claim like "he went out
on dates with eighteen-year-olds when he was thirty and even tried to kiss one
or two, forty years ago, when he was single."
In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle laboriously
schematizes various levels of "responsibility" and "cause"
to help philosophers examine the ethics of individuals. He talks about
intention, volition, wish, opinion, desire, and deliberation – all nuances that
matter and demand thorough consideration before we publish an essay casually
referring to Roy Moore as a man "credibly accused of molesting
teenagers."
Even among people who are experts in these very texts, a dam seems
to store up analytical knowledge and keep wisdom from leaking out into the
world in which we live. We are truly living in a scary age. I
blame the thinkers whose job it was to prepare Americans for a civic realm that
was bound to include the eternal dangers of demagogues, liars, tricksters,
creeps, and con artists. The thinkers may have been doing some thinking,
but something went wrong. Like the residents of River City incensed about
a pool table, they lost their ability to reason and became the very thing they
never wanted to be: a loud, stupid mob.
WORK CITED
Stephen F. Brown. Introduction. Ockham: Philosophical
Writings. Trans. Philotheus Boehner, O.F.M. Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 1990.