Best line ever - "products of automatic writing channeled through uncurious literary zombies who aimlessly roam the Internet to traffic in shallow bigotries."


Francis Beckwith on "Secular Gnosticism" at The Catholic Thing:

Just this past week, Bill Keller of the New York Times opined about the religious beliefs of several Republican presidential candidates, suggesting clusters of questions that he would like to ask each of them. Keller’s column has been justly criticized and ridiculed by many writers, including the folks at Get Religion. Not only because of the factual errors that pepper Keller’s epistle, but the crude and uncharitable ways in which he communicates and seems to understand the beliefs of the candidates.


Lurking behind his clumsy queries is an intellectual posture I call “secular gnosticism.” It assumes a position of cultural privilege on what counts as knowledge and justified belief, though it is rarely doubted and thus rarely defended. For that reason, its believers do not subject their position, its presuppositions, and its sources of authority to the sort of rigorous interrogation they suggest the beliefs, presuppositions, and sources of authority of religious believers should undergo.

The word “gnostic” comes from the Greek word γνῶσις, which is translated “knowledge.” The Gnostics of the Early Christian Era were considered heretics because they eschewed ecclesiastical authority while claiming esoteric or intuitive knowledge of the divine as a means to escape material reality for the salvation of their souls. That is, the external world and the institutions in it such as the Church were seen as obstacles to the soul’s ascendance to God.

For this reason, the Gnostics were, in a sense and ironically, invincibly ignorant. No amount of contrary evidence, philosophical argument, or Biblical exegesis can convince someone who has private, direct, incorrigible, and impenetrable acquaintance with The Truth. As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, “Gnostics were ‘people who knew,’ and their knowledge at once constituted them a superior class of beings, whose present and future status was essentially different from that of those who, for whatever reason, did not know.”

Today’s Gnostics are secular, but just as determined to make sure that their intellectual powers remain neatly sequestered from engaging contrary points of view in a serious fashion. This is why when they opine on matters religious their works seem to many of us as products of automatic writing channeled through uncurious literary zombies who aimlessly roam the Internet to traffic in shallow bigotries.

And:
 

Take, for example, a question Keller poses to Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann in a follow-up blog post: “You have recommended as meaningful in your life works by leading advocates of Dominionism, including Nancy Pearcey, whose book Total Truth warns Christians to be suspicious of ideas that come from non-Christians. Do you agree with that warning?”


First, Pearcey is not a Dominionist, a term that refers to a very tiny group of Reformed Protestant writers (who are more accurately called “Theonomists”) who advocate the institution of Old Testament law in American jurisprudence.

Second, Pearcey’s Total Truth is not a brief for theonomy or “being suspicious of ideas that come from non-Christians,” as Keller clumsily puts it. How do I know this? I have not only read the book, but I published a review of it seven years ago in First Things. Although I think she gets some things wrong, such as her take on St. Thomas Aquinas’ view of nature and grace, my overall opinion of the book is that it is a needed corrective to those who insist that theology has no cognitive content. (I would also part ways with her on Intelligent Design, which I critically assess in an article I published two years ago in the University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy).

What Pearcey suggests to her readers is that the Christian should treat his beliefs seriously, and not as if they were merely matters of taste that we should keep out of public view, as Keller thinks we should (which, ironically, puts him in the position of being suspicious of ideas that come from Christians, just as one would expect from a secular gnostic).

How did a New York Times editor make such simple mistakes? He didn’t do any research. He didn’t read the writer he wrote about. And for that reason, he didn’t try to understand what clearly would have seemed culturally peculiar to him if he had actually taken the time to read Pearcey’s book and show some intellectual curiosity about it.

Instead of elevating his inquiry and pursuing the research agenda of the average college sophomore – Googling – he relied on sources such as The New Yorkerand The Daily Beast – whose reputations had already been dispatched by scores of writers by the time Keller had published his follow-up questions online. (See, for example, here and here).

Shoot,  ever since one of our first bishops sold out Christ for 30 pieces of silver, it's been all uphill from there.

There's another book out on the sins and vices found in the historical record of the papacy that has the anti-catholic faction slavering for a fix. The New York Times gave "Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy” by John Julius Norwich the cover and assigned its top editor to give it a rave review, which was an odd choice according to Mollie Ziegler Hemingway:

We don’t typically spend too much time looking at mainstream movie or book reviews, but I thought the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review was worth looking at. For one, it’s written by Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times. For another, the Review has this curious note from “the editors”:

Through the years, The New York Times’s coverage of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican has received sharp criticism from practicing Catholics — including the past eight years that Bill Keller has been the paper’s executive editor. Yet Keller, who wrote this week’s cover review of “Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy,” by John Julius Norwich, was raised within the fold.

“My parents took their faith very seriously — especially my mother, who had the fervor of a convert (from Episcopalian),” Keller recalled in an e-mail. “My brothers and I had nuns and priests as our teachers through high school, and I look back on that education with real gratitude. I’m now what my friend Dan Barry calls a ‘collapsed Catholic’ — beyond lapsed — but you never really extricate yourself from your upbringing.”

I love that “Yet” in the first paragraph. Why “yet”? I mean, the next paragraph explains that he’s “beyond lapsed” to “collapsed.” If being raised in the faith is supposed to mean something about how the coverage can’t be unfair, what is collapsing from it supposed to mean?

And then we read the first paragraph of the review:

John Julius Norwich makes a point of saying in the introduction to his history of the popes that he is “no scholar” and that he is “an agnostic Protestant.” The first point means that while he will be scrupulous with his copious research, he feels no obligation to unearth new revelations or concoct revisionist theories. The second means that he has “no ax to grind.” In short, his only agenda is to tell us the story.

Since when does being “an agnostic Protestant” mean that ipso facto one wouldn’t have an ax to grind against the Roman Catholic Church or the papacy? But also, how does this relate to the editors note? Are we to presume that Keller does have an ax to grind since he’s a “collapsed” Catholic? I know he’s acted contrary to the faith in which he was raised (he and his wife aborted a son, for instance). Is that playing a role in The Times’ coverage of the Catholic Church? And then, there’s this famous Keller column — “Is the Pope Catholic?”

Here's a paragraph from the "famous Keller column":

Probably no institution run by a fraternity of aging celibates was going to reconcile easily with a movement that embraced the equality of women, abortion on demand and gay rights. It is possible, though, to imagine a leadership that would have given it a try. In fact, Pope Paul VI indicated some interest in adopting a more lenient view of birth control, and he handpicked a committee of prominent Catholics who endorsed the idea almost by acclamation. The pope agonized, and then astonished Catholics by reaffirming the old ban.

Ah, Keller is one of those "collapsed Catholics" - a person who puts his allegiance to the totems of his tribe, upper-class liberalism, above that of his faith.

And - lo and behold - Mollie finds that the nonscholarly book by a nonscholar "Protestant agnostic" that retails myths and slanders as scholarship is congenial to the prejudices of said "collapsed Catholic":

Here’s the thing: This review is not up to snuff. Many folks across the Catholic spectrum are talking about problems with the review and its uncritical look at the book in question. For instance, the book author gives quite a bit of time to a fictional incident of a female pope — a full chapter. Keller gives another couple hundred words in his short review over to discussion of this fictional character.


The review is stunningly uncritical. I actually laughed out loud at Keller’s kicker — simply a quote from the book:

“It is now well over half a century since progressive Catholics have longed to see their church bring itself into the modern age,” he writes. “With the accession of every succeeding pontiff they have raised their hopes that some progress might be made on the leading issues of the day — on homosexuality, on contraception, on the ordination of women priests. And each time they have been disappointed.”

Wow. It’s almost like the author has the same lack of an ax to grind as The Times, doesn’t it? Brilliant reviewer choice there, editors.

But it's in God's plan to turn every bit of evil to good, or an opportunity for snarky humor, which in this case is supplied by Diary of a Wimpy Catholic, who points out that when Catholics sin they sin on an epic scale:

What a prince Bill Keller is. In reviewing John Julius Norwich’s Absolute Monarchs, he warns that this “rollicking narrative” featuring “265 popes (plus various usurpers and anti­popes), feral hordes of Vandals, Huns and Visigoths, expansionist emperors, Byzantine intriguers, Borgias and Medicis, heretic zealots, conspiring clerics, bestial inquisitors and more” might not appeal to “devout Catholics.”



It’s a nice little warning label: The following history contains scenes that might shock or upset readers. Not recommended for expectant mothers or members of the Mystical Body of Christ.

I have one question for Keller: son, just who the hell do you think you’re talking to?

Tony Montana told the INS goons that they could do nothing to him that Castro hadn’t done already. Well, John Julius Norwich can’t tell us anything that Garry Wills hasn’t told us already — in Papal Sin, Return of Papal Sin and Bride of Papal Sin. (I myself have been on tenterhooks, waiting for Papal Sin: The Gay Blade.) And then there’s James Carroll. I used to mix him up with Jim Carroll, the Basketball Diaries guy. It’s not an unreasonable mistake: the Jim Carroll Band’s greatest hit was “People Who Died”; James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword might as well be subtitled: Six Million People Who Died, And All Because of Us. Have you ever seen the thing? It’s 750 pages of pure j’accuse. I’d as lief be spitted on an actual Roman gladius as suffer a copy to fall on my foot.

And:

There’s real pride to be taken in knowing that even our screw-ups are epic and spectacular.


What’s the worst thing a fundie pastor’s ever done? Kiss another guy? Smoke some glass? Rip off the faithful? Junior varsity. Nickel and dime. Amateur hour. When one of our popes feels like living in infamy, he sells an entire hemisphere into slavery. That goes for their kids, too. You say Franklin Graham was a real hell-raiser? Cesare Borgia could have stolen his Harley and his girl, gotten his blue-tick hound in the family way, and carved “AUT CAESAR AUT NULLUS” in his forehead with a stiletto before Lucrezia finished pouring arsenic in his grits

And:

Even recently have Catholics been going bad in style. Having decided that Charles de Gaulle was a traitor and a tyrant, French military officers — all being well-bred graduates of St.-Cyr and l’École Polytechnique — didn’t lower themselves by floating any rumors about his birth certificate. (Since de Gaulle was born in Lille, an excellent case could have been made that his nose was a Belgian citizen.) No, asking themselves, “What would Thomas Aquinas do?”, they came up with the answer: take him out. An air force colonel named Bastien-Thiry engaged five gunmen to ambush the presidential car on the Rue des Petits-Clamarts. De Gaulle survived; most of the conspirators escaped to Argentina, where they found jobs teaching naval midshipmen to deliver electric shocks to dissidents’ testicles in a properly Thomistic fashion.


Bastien-Thiry himself was arrested, tried by court-martial, and sentenced to death. He went to the firing squad clutching his rosary.

He had been a Boy Scout. His specialty was designing air-to-surface missiles. His given name was “Jean-Marie.”

Even our sissypants wonk patsies are hardcore.

Oo-rah!