NEVER MIND JOHN STOTT,
WHO, DEAR GOD, IS DAVID BROOKS?

Jerry Harkins

The short answer is David Brooks is the anointed successor of the late William Safire as the house conservative of The New York Times. He is the voice of what passes for right wing reason, not as witty as William F. Buckley, nor as experienced as George F. Will, but presentable enough to be invited to dine with the Sulzbergers. Most public conservatives are loud-mouthed hypocrites: the adulterer Newt Gingrich, the drug addict Rush Limbaugh, the gambling addict William Bennett, the idiot Sarah Palin and, of course, the entire cast of sociopaths who contended for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Some, like Mr. Safire, are loud-mouthed libertarians who occasionally cross back over to the normal side of the MMPI. Mr. Brooks, however, is none of these things. He abjures almost all right wing craziness in favor of a thoughtful Hamiltonian understanding of politics and governance. He is, in short, one of those peculiar intellectuals regularly produced by the University of Chicago—intelligent, articulate but sometimes a bit careless or perhaps lazy. He is attracted to the slightly offbeat perspective. For example, he shares the conservative objective of doing away with social security. However, he recommends a gradualist approach. Step One would be for the government to open tax deferred savings accounts for all American children, depositing $1,000 at birth and $500 a year for the next five years. This he says would give everyone a nest egg of over $100,000 at retirement, that is 65 or 70 years later. But here’s the part where a bit more analysis might have been helpful. Even if there were only an annual average of 3% inflation, $100,000 isn’t going to be a hell of a lot in 2075 and the purchasing power in current dollars is likely to be about $3,500. Some nest egg! Some conservatism! The government gets to spend billions in current dollars and the retirees get to collect an almost worthless pourboire at retirement.

Even Congress would be unlikely to fall for such flimflam so to really understand Brooks, you have to follow his line of thought on a more obscure subject. After the 2004 elections, he set out to instruct Democrats on which religious conservatives they should court. Begging the question of why the Democrats should be interested in any such thing, he counseled that there is no need to deal with the “Elmer Gantry-style blowhards” like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, [1] but rather they should make their pitch to the John Stotts of this world. [2] Stott was identified as “…the framer of the Lausanne Covenant, a crucial organizing document for modern evangelicalism.” Brooks says, “[His] is a voice that is friendly, courteous and natural. It is humble and self-critical, but also joyful and optimistic.” In short, Stott’s conservative Christian voice is not unlike Brooks’ own conservative political voice. Indeed there are similarities, but they are not flattering to either party. Stott who died last year was, as the highly liberal Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong once said, “Jerry Falwell with perfume.” By that standard, David Brooks is Rush Limbaugh with a brain.

The Lausanne Covenant of 1974 is one of the most ridiculous documents in the history of Christianity—right up there with its more famous first cousins, Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864), Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam (1302), and Adrian IV’s Laudabiliter (1155). Here is its key pronouncement:

We affirm the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both Old and New Testament Scriptures in their entirety as the only written word of God, without error in all that it affirms, and the only infallible rule of faith and practice. We also affirm the power of God's word to accomplish his purpose of salvation. The message of the Bible is addressed to all men and women. For God's revelation in Christ and in Scripture is unchangeable. Through it the Holy Spirit still speaks today. He illumines the minds of God's people in every culture to perceive its truth freshly through their own eyes and thus discloses to the whole Church ever more of the many-colored wisdom of God. (II Tim. 3:16; II Pet. 1:21; John 10:35; Isa. 55:11; 1 Cor. 1:21; Rom. 1:16, Matt. 5:17,18; Jude 3; Eph. 1:17,18; 3:10,18)

As I read this statement, it makes seven explicit claims about the Bible, all of them demonstrably foolish. It is said to be (1) divinely inspired, (2) truthful, (3) authoritative, (4) infallible and inerrant, (5) addressed to all people, (6) directed to their salvation, and (7) unchangeable but also capable of being “freshly” perceived by different cultures. In support of these claims, it provides ten biblical references, which is to say it quotes the Bible to establish the Bible’s validity. [3] This is rock solid, because-I-say-so Christian fundamentalism and the fact that its principal author is soft-spoken and polite does nothing to mitigate the fact that anyone whose rhetoric is so impaired is also a zealot, a wild-eyed fanatic and a religious bigot. Anyone who purports to believe that the Bible is, “the only infallible rule of faith and practice” must stand foursquare for the death penalty for homosexuals (Leviticus 20:13). Stott must also think it licit to whip his male and female slaves as long as he does not kill them in the process (Exodus 21:20-21). These and a long list of other psychopathologies and moral abominations.

One of the most amusing things inerrancy demands of its servants is belief in a literal reading of the Book of Revelations. Now here is how John describes the God who appears to him:

His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and out of his mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.

Or consider this lovely passage from Chapter 17:

Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a desert. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. This title was written on her forehead: Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of Prostitutes, and of the Abominations of the Earth. I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus.

Do you think Stott believes the Mother of All Prostitutes was or will be drinking his blood? Nah! No more than he believes Scotland Yard would let him own a single slave, never mind whip one (more the pity). He is, you see, a hypocrite, preaching the inerrancy of the Bible while ignoring anything that is intellectually inconvenient. It is a joy to watch him weaseling his way around whatever it is he means by the “many-colored wisdom of God.” In a masterful display of such equivocation, he once wrote, “However strongly we may disapprove of homosexual practices, we have no liberty to dehumanize those who engage in them.” This may sound pretty high minded until you realize it doesn’t mean anything. Dehumanize? How do you do that? Branding them with a scarlet letter I for inhuman? Of course, he may mean it literally, but even Pat Robertson would stand up and admit that turning gays into frogs is, sadly, beyond his ability. What Stott is doing is throwing a meaningless bone to moderate Protestants—people who don’t have the stomach to stone gays and adulteresses.

In another place, Stott writes, “Thus, homosexually-oriented individuals must choose whether they will submit to the lordship of Christ, with the loving support of the church community, or to the messages of contemporary culture. Furthermore, faith accepts grace; therefore, celibacy is possible!” That’s his exclamation point, not mine, but I endorse it wholeheartedly. Now it is not useful to burden the Christian right with the discipline of logic for the same reason that you can’t fault an elephant because it can’t fly. [4] So we can ignore his earlier admission that the Church is nowhere near being a loving community for gays. (If they do go looking for such a community, what they will find is the cult of what is called “reparative therapy.”) But you can’t let the man get away with an inanity like the idea that celibacy is possible because faith accepts grace. As recent events have once again made clear, celibacy—abstention from sexual expression—is exceedingly rare even among those who have vowed to be celibate. Either faith or grace needs to do a better job.

The Bible is a very complex book. Anyone who purports to believe that it is the inerrant word of God has a very dim view of God’s IQ not to mention his Rorschach profile. Of course, such people are not talking about God God so much as about themselves. It’s their understanding of the Bible that is inerrant, their favorite translation. “I know the mind and meaning of God” is not all that far from “I am God.”

Okay, do you remember David Brooks? I assure you he thinks all this Christian fundamentalism is gaga preached by people who were educated somewhere other than the University of Chicago. It’s a good bet he’s never read the Book of Revelation with all its nonsense about multi-headed, fire-breathing monsters and The Rapture so beloved of evangelicals. [5] He knows that people like Fred Phelps, Jimmy Swaggart and John Stott do not have God’s unlisted phone number. What he seems not to know is that Fred, Jimmy and Johnny are birds of a feather—there’s not a hair of difference between them except that one has a better vocabulary and speaks with an upper class British accent. Not for Stott the word of the Lord as preached recently by the pornography addicted, prostitute using Reverend Bubba:

I get amazed. I can't look at it but about ten seconds, at these politicians dancing around this, dancing around this -- I'm trying to find a correct name for it -- this utter, absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died. Case anybody doesn't know, God calls it an abomination . It's an abomination . It's an abomination! These ridiculous, utterly absurd district attorneys and judges and state congress. 'Well, we don't know.' They oughta -- they oughta -- they oughta have to marry a pig and live with them forever.

John Stott has enough sense not to say this kind of thing out loud in public. But there isn’t a single idea (I use the word loosely) in that diatribe that Mr. Stott would say is not supported in the “written word of God.” Well, maybe the good book would not recommend bestiality as a substitute for sodomy, but you see my point. My father always warned me not to discuss cosmology with anyone who believes the moon is made of green cheese. So why do I want to deal with a mad priest who is utterly convinced that David Brooks is going to hell because he is not born again of water and the spirit? Can I hope to change his mind? David, David! Were you paying attention to W’s rants about John Kerry’s “flip-flopping?” Bush knows everything in his gut and has never felt the need to change his mind about anything. At least, not since he stopped drinking and found Jesus. He doesn’t read newspapers. I have as much hope of changing John Stott’s mind about the absurdities he purports to believe.

More to the point though, why does David Brooks think Democrats ought to reason together with John Stott? Perhaps he thinks he’s doing them a favor, increasing their chances of ousting the dangerous radicals now controlling the federal government. Maybe he’s embarrassed that it’s his side that’s sucking up to the Yahoos. Or maybe he sincerely feels that Democrats will be morally if not electorally superior people if they somehow come to terms with the moral majority by adopting their crazy social agenda. For my money, though, his motive is a lot simpler. He had a deadline approaching and nothing to write about. So he retrieved an essay he had written as a sophomore at old UC and made a few changes without giving it much thought. Which may be unfair of me but has the virtue of being consistent with longstanding tradition at The New York Times.

Notes

1. This is what I mean by “careless.” I suspect Mr. Brooks saw the movie and was too busy falling in love with Jean Simmons (surely not Shirley Jones) to pay much attention to what, if anything, Sinclair Lewis was getting at. Elmer Gantry was many unattractive things but he was never a blowhard. Like the Revs. Robertson and Falwell, he was a charlatan but unlike them he was not a simple-minded hypocrite. He would never have taken notice of the homosexual conspiracies of Squarebob Spongepants and Tinky Winky Teletubby. Elmer, a fictional character, is pretty much the most reasonable of Evangelicals.

2. “Who is John Stott?” The New York Times, 11/30/04. Brooks doesn’t tell you this but Father Stott is an Anglican priest who identifies himself with the reactionaries of the African church. He is a best selling but mediocre popularizer of orthodoxy who, through his voluminous writings, is almost single-handedly responsible for the low estate of Evangelical homiletics. For more than forty years, he was the Queen’s confessor which was probably not as interesting as it sounds. In fairness, it should be said that he has many admirers and even acolytes among the clergy. And, of course, he is very popular at The Times. Ninety days after Brooks’ encomium, the Metro section did an adulatory puff piece occasioned by Stott’s visit to New York. When he died in 2011, The Times ran an adulatory obit complete with sidebars. Sadly, the praise of Brooks and his colleagues is offset by Brooks’ correct observation that practically nobody else ever heard of him.

3. The biblical references are only marginally related to any of Stott’s claims and appear to be there mainly as window dressing. However, I will let you judge for yourself. In several cases, I have included surrounding verses to give you a sense of the context. In two cases, I have put a period at the end where the sentence went on in the following verse. The citation from Jude is taken from the New Oxford Bible. All others are from the New International Version.

2 Tim 3:16: All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
2 Peter 1:21 For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

John 10:34-36: Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your Law, 'I have said you are gods.’ If he called them 'gods,' to whom the word of God came--and the Scripture cannot be broken, what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son?”

Isaiah 55:10-11: As the rain and the snow / come down from heaven, / and do not return to it / without watering the earth / and making it bud and flourish, / so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, / so is my word that goes out from my mouth: / It will not return to me empty, / but will accomplish what I desire / and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

1 Corinthians 1:21-25: Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.

Romans 1:16-17: I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith."

Matt 5:17-18: Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

Jude 3: I have no idea where Stott came across this reference. There is no Jude 3. Jude has only a single chapter of 25 verses, the third (i.e., 1:3) of which is, “My friends, I was fully engaged in writing to you about our salvation—which is yours no less than ours—when it became urgently necessary to write at once and appeal to you to join the struggle in defense of the faith, the faith which God entrusted to his people once and for all.” Sounds more like a right wing fund raising letter to me.

Ephesians 1: 17-18: I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.

Ephesians 3:10-18: His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence. I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory. For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.

4. Logic has never been a strong point of the right wing, especially when the subject turns to sex. When, for example, Mr. Brooks writes, “Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide,” you have to accept that he has no rational basis for thinking so. Not even the Bible condemns polygamy. Do you think he believes that masturbation will make your palms turn hairy?

5. Here is how John describes Jesus in Revelation 5:6: “Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders. He had seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. He came and took the scroll from the right hand of him who sat on the throne. And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song: ‘You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God …’” I love it. Not that I know what a dead lamb with seven eyes would smell like, but you’ve got to be impressed by living creatures and elders holding bowls of incense while playing the harp. Unless, of course, they had three hands. Of even greater interest is what the writer of such fantasy was smoking.