Page 1734 – Christianity Today (2024)

This month, the bottled-water company Humankind Water beat out over 4,000 other products to reach the "top ten" in an American Idol-style contest run by Wal-Mart called Get on the Shelf. The contest pitted start-up companies and entrepreneurs against each other, as voters submitted a million votes in total to tell Wal-Mart which product they would like to see, as the title suggests, on the shelf of their local superstore.

Now, the top 10 products are competing against each other again, in a second round of voting that ended yesterday. The top three finalists will be carried on walmart.com, and the overall winner will also "get on the shelf" in select Wal-Mart stores.

Get on the Shelf is the first contest of its kind by a major retailer, according to The Wall Street Journal's Market Watch. It's also an opportunity, says Humankind Water founder T. J. Foltz, to help right one of the major wrongs in our world: the lack of clean drinking water.

We've seen the statistics so many times we've almost become immune, Foltz says. Some 10,000 children die every day from a lack of clean drinking water. Sitting on his couch one morning two years ago, praying, Foltz says he came up with an idea: launch a bottled-water company that gives 100 percent of its net profits toward clean water efforts around the globe.

Foltz's background isn't in business or marketing. "I've spent most of my adult life in youth ministry," Foltz says, although he's also worked for Scripture Union and the philanthropic adviser Geneva Global. And Foltz did not set out to make Humankind Water overtly Christian.

"We very intentionally did not put crosses and hallelujahs all over the bottle, because we wanted anybody with a heart for philanthropy to buy our water," Foltz notes. "At the same time, however, anybody who Googles 'T. J. Foltz' will find a youth speaker."

"There are areas of the world where people are literally dying for a drink," Foltz says. Meanwhile, the bottled water business is a multibillion-dollar industry—if some of those billions of dollars of profit could be moved to support clean water for those who don't have it, "we could virtually eliminate the clean-water crisis."

Clean water efforts ranked number 1 out of the 10 most cost-effective aid strategies, according to Christianity Today's February cover story. And Humankind Water is partnering with water relief organizations whose track record is already proven: Water Missions International, Ethiopian Rainwater Harvesting Association, Ugandan Water Project, Living Water International, and Blood:Water Mission.

The key is sustainability, Foltz says. As a part of that, "we don't dig our own wells," he says. "That's not our area of expertise. And not every area in need of clean water calls for the same solution." So Humankind Water instead gives money to relief organizations who know best how to handle the water crisis in their specific area.

"You don't have to dig a well in Haiti," Foltz says by way of example. Water is plentiful, and it's filthy—often little more than sewage. So the best course of action is to filter that water, not dig new wells. Humankind Water will donate 100 percent of its profits to other clean-water nonprofits, who in turn will do the on-the-ground work appropriate to specific areas in need of clean water.

Humankind Water saw their very first bottle of water in October of last year. Then in late January, a friend of Foltz's e-mailed him about Wal-Mart's Get on the Shelf contest. "Our entire marketing plan got put on hold, and we went all in on plans to try and win this competition," Foltz says. "Literally a half an hour after I got that e-mail, we were strategizing on how we could try and win this thing."

The irony of using Wal-Mart as a means to effect positive change isn't lost on Foltz. "Wal-Mart has a bit of a reputation for being ruthless," he says. "I don't think that selling water in Wal-Mart is a perfect vehicle. But I think it's one that will work." Why? Because 84 percent of Americans shop at Wal-Mart, according to the Pew Research Center. And the recent Wal-Mart bribery scandal notwithstanding, money spent on Humankind Water, no mater where it is spent, will directly impact efforts to provide clean water.

"I have no heartfelt affinity for Wal-Mart one way or the other," Foltz concludes. "But it's the biggest retailer in the world. There is no higher priority than saving children's lives, especially children who are dying needlessly. I'm not going to wait for [Wal-Mart] to be perfect, if we have an opportunity [now] to work toward the greater good."

"I don't feel like I need to be Wal-Mart's defender. What we're trying to do is we're trying to sell this product in the biggest outlet that we can, to make the most money we can, to save the most lives."

Watching the video on the Humankind Water website, Foltz's passion is evident. "If we win this contest," Foltz says, "and we save these tens of thousands of lives, that will multiply itself out. There will be generations, because of what we have done."

Many faces, many images, many fragments of lecture and conversation crowd my mind. The poet Scott Cairns was reading from a book in progress. One poem described a monk in a cave on Mount Athos, lying prostrate on the rock floor. The breeze riffled the pages of his Bible. In a kettle on a bed of coals, greens were simmering, until the kettle boiled dry.

Why should this poem keep rising to the surface? I have never been drawn to monasticism. Yet by some alchemy—not least, by Scott’s voice, unique, as every human voice is unique—I am drawn into the scene again and again, as if I were standing just behind the poet, at the entrance to the cave, looking over his shoulder at the monk. Not in the same form but in some way, with the same intensity of conviction, I should divest myself of whatever needs to be cast away.

Calvin College’s every-other-year Festival of Faith & Writing—the 2012 edition began last Thursday and ended Saturday night—is a carnival of disparate voices, a time out of time from which one returns to everyday routines, re-charged. A conference that features, on its first day, a plenary address by Jonathan Safran Foer and concludes with a plenary address by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a model of the ungraspable multifaceted Real we inhabit. Like all models, it is highly selective, stylized. (Lots of voices, we can be grateful—hectoring, insidious, terminally narcissistic—simply are not represented here.) But even so, this tiny simulacrum mimics the effects of the whole.

On Saturday morning, I presided over a panel of three poets: Aaron Belz, Susanna Childress, and Brett Foster. All three write from the perspective of Christian faith. They aren’t far apart in age. Yet to translate a poem from the Belzian idiom to the dialect of Susanna Childress would be far more difficult than translating one of Aaron’s poems from English to Urdu, or one of Susanna’s into Chinese. Nor would it be any easier to convert a Childress poem into Brett Foster’s tongue, or Foster into Belz.

Are we then—as some savants like to claim—all speaking mutually unintelligible languages, every person an isolato, merely deceiving ourselves when we suppose we are understanding one another beyond the most primitive concord? No. There’s a bedrock we can all refer to: the floor of the cave, the words of Scripture, the law written in our hearts. And then we must listen to one another.

Listening doesn’t entail uncritical acceptance. Sometimes after a little listening, an early exit is the best response. There were sessions I skipped because I didn’t want to exit early or squirm through to the end. But one of the recurring delights of the Festival of Faith & Writing over the years is the discovery of new voices. When I asked my wife, Wendy, what sessions she’d attended were the most memorable, the first one she mentioned was a talk by the novelist Leila Aboulela (whose work I don’t know), entitled “Making Sense of Allah’s Will.”

I’m thankful once again to the writers who spoke, to Calvin College, to the planning committee, to all who helped fund the Festival and all who worked to make it run so smoothly. I’m thankful to Shelly LaMahieu Dunn, the director of the Festival, who will soon start to work on FFW 2014. What a joy it was to see old friends, to meet writers I’d known only via email, to hear so many sentences that are still jostling in my head “like clothes in a dryer,” as Foer said. Thanks to you all.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

Copyright © 2012 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

How should we tell stories about people we're trying to help?

Individuals, churches, missionaries, and nonprofit groups should ask this regularly. The answer is inextricably bound to the very justice we're trying to promote. The question now has a perfect case study.

Joseph Kony recently became an Internet star through Invisible Children's Kony 2012 campaign. Among the millions of people who watched the video, no debate broke out about the evil of Kony, who as a warlord in central Africa maimed many and made children into killers. Worldwide consensus may be near impossible, but the cruelty inflicted by one of the world's most wanted men can do that. The common goodwill the "Kony 2012" video unleashed was encouraging. People want the best outcome for those in that region.

But a cyber-speed debate broke out over almost every other aspect of the campaign—sparking a discussion about the best policy, advocacy's role, white man's burden, interventionism, and the use of military force.

My prayers have been for Invisible Children's co-founder Jason Russell's recovery from a public breakdown and strength to continue working for justice. While I don't focus on African policy issues, what has continued to interest me—what intersects with my profession as director of a nonprofit focused on education in Haiti—is the opportunity to think about this question of how "we" tell stories to help "them."

To dive into this question, consider the dynamic of the Kony video and its aftermath, where two realities collided:

• The audience (that is, us) craves simplicity of message, participation in meaningful positive change, and emotional reward—at low personal cost.
• We (that is, "us" and "them") each want to be treated with nuance and respect.

The Kony 2012 makers indisputably addressed this first reality brilliantly. Invisible Children took a risk, communicated their perspective powerfully, and started an important conversation.

For the second reality—the desire we each have to be treated "with nuance and respect"—it's clear Invisible Children wanted people to treat them this way. They wanted people to consider the video within the context of their work, watch follow-up videos, read a Q&A, look at charts, and take their time assessing the situation. It was a fair request, because everyone deserves as much.

Whether they sufficiently did the same for people in northern Uganda was up for debate. Critiques came quickly about oversimplifying or mischaracterizing the situation, as well as disagreeing with how Ugandans were portrayed as victims to be saved by American college students. Others defended the portrayal as effective advocacy that didn't answer all the questions but kickstarted an important movement that could lead toward more learning and positive influence on policy in the region.

We can all keep striving to better understand how to work toward justice not only with our actions, but also with how we tell people's stories.

* * *

Jesus' so-called Golden Rule should serve as the overarching guide: "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you" (Matt. 7:12).

If you've ever talked about your experience on a short-term missions trip in front of your church, tried to start a new project for disadvantaged people in your neighborhood, or raised money to help others, at some point you might have felt an uncomfortable twinge: Did I make the case strongly enough to motivate people to step up and help? Did I selfishly make myself the hero? Did I paint people as one-dimensional victims instead of as the people I know them to be? Did I overstate how much good we've done? I know I've made these mistakes many times during my 15 years in nonprofit work.

Whether as individuals or multi-million dollar Christian development organizations, we need to be accountable for how we speak about each other—particularly about those who have less power than we do.

Articulating principles of a Golden Rule for communication can help align our speaking well with our doing good, align our speaking justly with doing justice.

Principle 1: People need a clear, compelling next step

Leaving the strategy/policy debate aside, Kony 2012 did this very well. Providing a clear, simple, emotionally compelling next step that builds into a larger strategy is harder than it sounds. Child sponsorship remains popular because of how it shows the next step: Help this one child.

My colleagues and I sometimes get too muddled in program details. Speaking at a university, sometimes I've finished telling moving stories, but then failed to help students know what small step to take next. The next step is, after all, the most important one. (After reading some of the Invisible Children critiques, I wanted to ask: So as an American, is there anything I should do to help, or nothing—and if so, what?)

The standard for truth doesn't get lessened, but clear next steps are important.

Principle 2: The audience is who you're talking to—and who you're talking about

If you don't serve your audience, they won't serve others. What angle interests them? How will they relate? What questions will be in the back of their minds? How can you move their hearts and minds? Not asking these questions fails both the audience and the people you're trying to help.

But I think the audience must also be who you're speaking about, whether they're present or not, whether speaking about a homeless person who lives around the block or someone who speaks another language in an electricity-less village thousands of miles away.

Why? First, work for justice directly engages the issue of power and powerlessness. In our very telling of their stories, we must demonstrate justice. Storytelling is a power; we should acknowledge this. Justice, in part, means being accountable to people to whom we don't have to be accountable. After all, the stories are theirs.

Second, this approach works better long-term. How we tell stories influences how we decide strategy and what kinds of results are prioritized (if the story is about "our" goals and not "theirs," unhealthy pressure builds). With communication technology, there is also an increasing chance people are going to see how we're talking about them. Care in communication builds positively into relationships and work for justice. Overarching narratives influence real-world decisions.

Henri Nouwen wrote about the wisdom of taking one of the developmentally disabled people he worked with on speaking engagements. Because of distance and cost, it might not always be possible. Yet we should always consider the people we're trying to serve as also being in our audience.

Principle 3: Be virally prepared

Communication should always be done as though 100+ million people will watch or read it—and experts will dissect it. This shouldn't paralyze, just sensitize. Your story should not shatter into a million little pieces under scrutiny. A recent example was one of NPR's more popular episodes of This American Life, a critique of Apple Inc.'s labor in China, which had to be retracted after closer attention.

For a fleeting Twitter moment, it seemed Invisible Children was going to be a magical way to turn people's noblest intentions into cynicism (see the bestselling Three Cups of Tea, the book later questioned). That didn't happen though. They quickly and substantively responded to initial criticism, even if disagreements about strategy remained.

YouTube's viral potential makes a theological/ethical point incisively for all of us: let us speak all things in a way pleasing to God, in the light of truth and love.

Principle 4: Take care when casting the hero and agent of change

Because of evangelicalism's emphasis on "going out into the world," the act of going out is celebrated. But this can make us vulnerable to misapplied heroism.

We seem to need emotional bridges for stories about need in other places. Some criticized Jason Russell for including his son. I don't, though perhaps the cost for him became too high as the scrutiny became so intense and critiques so personal. I've wrestled with discovering that the more autobiographically I share about needs in Haiti, the more people feel they have a way to get involved.

But we need to acknowledge how much more profound the day-to-day commitment of the local church in [fill in the blank] is than what it took to go on a one-week trip to help build a Sunday school classroom.

Likewise, we should be clear about who the agents of change are in these stories. Do we present other people as victims only to be helped? Or do we present a situation where people are already making a difference and would benefit from a boost that they request? One story is more easily heart-rending; the other might be truer and more respectful.

A number of strong critiques of Kony 2012 came from African writers and journalists, protesting that "casting of the hero/change agent" was askew. It wouldn't have addressed all the objections, but considering the video is 30 minutes long, I wonder if including 2 minutes like this would have helped:

• Halfway through, with appropriate visuals: "Political realities in central Africa are too complex for a child to understand. The problem is horrible, but great progress has been made. Kony's role has been diminished but he still inflicts his evil on children in other countries. Arresting him won't solve every problem, but will be a real step toward peace for the region. Africans are doing the most important, courageous part of this work. Together, we can help them take this next, crucial step."
• A few 20-second segments highlighting work Ugandans have done to make a difference on the issue.

Principle 5: The pitch is the message

The entire message shifts a little if you benefit from what you're pitching. If the Kony 2012 video had ended with a pitch first for getting behind an advocacy campaign and second that 100 percent of donations would go directly to grassroots Ugandan groups working with former child soldiers, would it have been received differently?

It's fair to ask for money for your organization, but we should remember that our choices about the pitch can exacerbate any other weaknesses. People I work with in Haiti have helped me be sensitive to this because they're used to foreigners coming into their communities, taking pictures to go tell stories about them, receiving a hero's welcome when they return to the U.S., and raising money—but all this often doesn't result in much real change for their communities.

Money (or, the pitch) is of course a charged issue, and so we should use it as an opportunity for spiritual reflection:

How am I going to benefit from the message of justice that I'm sharing? How are my ambitions intertwined with what sounds like a saintly project? What is being promised if people give or get involved? Vision, humility, and transparency all need to shine through in the answers.

Principle 6: Be attentive, not safe

The most innovative, subversive, risk-taking communication should happen in service of Jesus and justice. Jesus and the prophets were pointed and creative in their messages. We ought to push hard and try new approaches. Though we may have some disagreements, I admire Invisible Children's commitment to communicate with excellence and creativity for justice.

If the people weren't praising Jesus, the rocks would have on Palm Sunday. The blood of Abel cried out from the ground to God. The blood of injustice flows daily, so let's cry out with our best strategies and communication to respond. Let's be attentive, but not safe. We should call each other into account and also encourage each other to take thoughtful risks.

Our love fails if we're not sensitive enough to these principles about telling the stories of others. But our love also fails if we don't push ourselves to creatively punch through the noise and the entertainment and the apathy.

* * *

The initial Kony 2012 video bent some of these Golden Rule principles for communicating—but was made out of love and commitment to people who are suffering. In that way, the video is a bit like all of us: good, flawed, a mix of sinner and saint.

Perhaps these principles can lead to conversations with the people you tell stories about. Are they okay with how you're telling their stories? What is the most respectful approach that can build trust? Do they understand where you'll tell the stories and what kind of action is being invited? This open exchange can actually become part of the story of justice we're trying to achieve together.

And that's a story worth living.

Kent Annan is author of After Shock and co-director of Haiti Partners. You can follow him on Twitter here.

"Speaking Out" is Christianity Today's guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the magazine.

Copyright © 2012 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Christianity Todayhas covered the Kony 2012 campaign and profiled Joseph Kony.

On the fourth floor of the Health District Building in downtown Richmond, Donald Stern’s office is beginning to resemble a library with an unusual collection. On his desk, next to new editions of the World Health Report and Control of Communicable Diseases, are Race Matters by philosopher Cornel West, Was Bill Cosby Right? by Michael Eric Dyson, and the Moynihan Report, a controversial 1965 federal document that detailed crumbling relations in the African American family. Nearly 50 years after its publication, Stern says, it has proven “prophetic” in the former seat of the Confederacy.

Stern became Richmond’s public health director after his boss urgently called him there in December 2006. He had spent the previous 25 years in some capacity in Virginia public health, tracking infection rates, administering flu shots, inspecting nursing homes—”I’ve done about every job a physician could do in Virginia public health,” says Stern, an affable, mustached doctor trained in maternal and child health. But all that, he says, “was God’s means of preparing me for my most challenging role,” centered in Richmond.

‘People in stable families with a married mother and father have higher high-school graduation rates and income. It’s not only about the theological basis for the design of a man and a woman. When you look at out-comes, it’s a no-brainer.’—Danny Avula, Richmond deputy public health director

“Here’s some light reading for you,” Stern says as he hands me Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America , historian John McWhorter’s landmark study on the effects of welfare reform since the 1960s. “Forty years of public policy around poverty and the war on drugs have, in McWhorter’s words, sent the black community to hell.”

That hell was clear to Stern when he, like any good doctor with a new patient, examined Richmond’s vital signs. “Every health status indicator was worse than the state average. Then we looked at the indicators that were twice as high as the Virginia average: teen pregnancy, infant mortality, out-of-wedlock births, std infections, and lead poisoning. The first four are all a function of relationships between men and women.”

The numbers led Stern to the same “inescapable conclusion” made by scores of sociologists, pastors, and pundits observing the post-Jim Crow black family: “There is a crisis in gender relations in the African American community. This is a painful reality.”

Should a public health department—perceived as a government monolith unqualified to counsel individual men and women—try to change citizens’ gender relations, encouraging fidelity, responsibility, and stable two-parent families?

When it costs a city $205 million every year in taxpayer dollars, say Stern and a number of Christians in Richmond, the answer is clear.

Nuclear Family by the Numbers

With a bottom-line, preventive approach, Richmond has since 2009 hosted one of the few U.S. public health programs whose mantra is “create a community culture connecting fathers to their families.” Unlike most city governments, which respond to father absence by increasing aid to single women, the Richmond Family and Fatherhood Initiative (RFFI) uses ad campaigns, legislation, and partnerships with Richmond’s sizable Christian community to reach its goal: Decrease the nonmarital birthrate, reconnect fathers to their children, and foster strong two-parent families—all for the future health of Richmond.

All 13 of RFFI’s founders are committed Christians, including Brian Gullins, a black pastor who arrived in Richmond to plant a church in 2008. When Gullins needed a second job, Ron Clark, director of the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, encouraged him to apply to become coordinator for “Man Up Richmond,” a then-new program with the health district. After a series of interviews, Gullins met with Stern for lunch.

“I always thought father absence was a social services issue, but Dr. Stern elevated it to a public health issue,” says Gullins, a former youth pastor and schoolteacher from Norfolk, two hours southeast of Richmond. “I had never heard that before. As I saw the tears well up in his eyes, I knew I had to be a part.”

With Stern, Gullins convened a Core Team of local nonprofit heads, pastors, and doctors who understood the root causes of father absence. Using the research model of Benjamin Scafidi, a Georgia economist and author of the 2008 report “The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing,” the team produced a “costs and solutions document” that translated Richmond’s family fragmentation into raw taxpayer costs. “When we’re talking with politicians, it’s always important to understand the bottom line,” says Gullins. “We needed to know how to talk their language, to get a handle on the cost.”

The findings were sobering: Of all births in Richmond in 2007, 65 percent of children were born to single mothers. Among black children, that rate was 84 percent. (In 2007, the national nonmarital birth rate was 40 percent.) And the social service programs stepping in for broken family structures—child welfare, food stamps, housing assistance, and school meals, among others—were alone costing the city over $50 million annually. Martin Brown, Virginia Commissioner of Social Services and Core Team member, says the document revealed how much the God-ordained institutions of family and government had gotten entangled. “Each institution has either acquiesced or taken responsibility away from the other, and we’ve grown dysfunctional in solving some of our problems,” says Brown. (Using Scafidi’s model, Brown calculates that father absence costs the state $2 billion annually.)

The report also revealed how incarcerating men without offering rehabilitation has fragmented Richmond’s families, costing $35 million annually in the process. (All interviewees for this story said the country’s gross incarceration rates among black men amount to “the new Jim Crow,” and recommended Michelle Alexander’s new book of the same name.) “Those of us in public health apply preventive more than curative strategies,” says Stern. “The curative strategy puts more money in jails. The preventive strategy asks, ‘Wait a minute, why are these young men dropping out of school? What’s happening to the father of this baby?’ We’re raising questions about the more fundamental elements.”

Stern is clear that RFFI is about aligning Richmond’s health stats with the state average, not about making “a religious, right-ring, Republican statement,” as some have charged. “This is what the research shows.”

“If you look at health, education, and poverty indicators, people in stable families with a married mother and father have higher high-school graduation rates and income,” says Danny Avula, Richmond’s deputy health director and Core Team member. “It’s not only about the theological basis for the design of a man and a woman. When you look at outcomes, it’s a no-brainer.”

The Government Can’t Change a Heart

But it’s also been a no-brainer for Richmond’s faith-based community, which Gullins says has responded overwhelmingly to RFFI.

Six years ago, Owen Cardwell started tackling family disintegration using a TV in the basem*nt of his small church in the East Highland Park neighborhood. Moms and kids and aunts would arrive at New Canaan International and pay $30 to “visit” an incarcerated family member, sitting in front of a camcorder at one of nine state prisons. “Over six years, we’ve seen how impacting it is for children to visit with their fathers,” says Cardwell, a Core Team member.

Starting in 2011—with training from RFFI and a $50,000 grant from Strengthening Families Initiative, a similar statewide program—Cardwell has been working to stop youth from going to jail in the first place. Every week, he and male volunteers from eight churches meet with 36 9th-grade boys at Armstrong High School to talk about healthy relationships, real heroes (as opposed to “media-created idols like Beyonce and Jay-Z”), and “character development,” a sanctioned way to teach biblical values in the public schools.

“This is a dropout prevention strategy,” says Cardwell, a Virginia civil rights hero for desegre-gating his Lynchburg high school at age 14. “If you work backwards, you find that 70 to 80 percent of persons who are incarcerated have a GED or less. At 14, the boys are not quite jaded enough to disregard us,” noting the boys were captivated during a recent trip to the Black Caucus Expo in Washington, D.C.

‘I always thought father absence was a social services issue, but Dr. Stern elevated it to a public health issue. As I saw the tears well up in his eyes, I knew I had to be a part.’—Brian Gullins, pastor

Another faith-based group, First Things First Richmond, meets with incarcerated men to encourage “manning up” and returning to their families after their sentence is over. Every Friday, staff teach inmates about relating to their kids and developing skills to enter the workforce. RFFI reached out to jail staff and provided curriculum from the National Fatherhood Initiative.

Due to the response from Richmond churches and nonprofits, Gullins is now working to replicate the rffi model in five other cities with high nonmarital birthrates, incubating “consortiums” of Virginia churches to work with men in each city. Regent University law students are compiling costs and solutions documents for the consortiums’ use over the next two years. But city council members, school principals, and even business leaders are showing interest as well. “We’ve seen so many people from those institutions coming together,” says Gullins. “Richmond is still a small city [about 200,000 in the city limits], and if you target the right people, you can create a cultural shift.”

Avula attributes RFFI’s success in part to the fact that Richmond “is a very religious, conservative town,” noting that its mayor is an ordained black pastor. But a vocal minority says government should focus on upping support for single mothers, not getting dads back in the mix. “Stern is at a distinct disadvantage because he’s an older white man,” says Avula. “Bill Cosby got crucified a few years ago, and he was an icon in the black community. That’s as clear an example as possible as to how countercultural this message is.”

But the message seems to be resonating, however slowly. Gale Grant, adolescent health coordinator for the city, says her teachers address father absence indirectly, teaching teens in the local high schools about paternity laws and child support enforcement. “We say things like, ‘For those of you who’ve grown up without a father, think how you feel.’ We try to connect the dots on the emotional level,” says Grant, a Core Team member. In 2011, she learned that the year prior, Richmond had the lowest teen pregnancy rate in over 20 years, at 61 births per 1,000 teens. (The abortion rate also decreased.)

In the meantime, RFFI’s success in keeping the black family intact remains to be seen, evident after years of tracking welfare and incarceration rates. Right now, its impact may be known only to the on-the-ground Christian leaders building relationships.

“The government can provide research, resources, and training, but that’s where we stop at the door,” says Gullins. “When it comes to transforming a heart, we try to set the table for the faith community to do transformative work that comes through Jesus Christ. We’re just the kingdom of God behind government lines.”

Katelyn Beaty, CT associate editor, is editorial director for This Is Our City.

Copyright © 2012 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Last week Her.meneutics writer Sharon Hodde Miller critiqued aspects of evangelical author Dan Brennan’s take on friendship between men and women, noting that his approach failed to grapple with the reality of sin. Below is Brennan’s response.—The Editors

A heartfelt thank you for the opportunity to respond to Miller, who I agree with on several excellent points.

My heart goes out to singles and their alienation. I also agree with Miller about the objectification of women. And I affirm her warning that any friendship not come between the spousal friendship of husband and wife, the friendship of utmost importance.

Miller’s post stirred some visceral responses, some in agreement, some not. There was no consensus, however, on her framing of the issue. With all this impassioned discussion, it’s apparent that within the evangelical world the issue of cross-gendered friendships, although controversial, is emerging as an important one, one that I’ve given significant attention to through my book and other writings.

First things first: I wish Miller had addressed the elephant in the living room: Freud. The elephant doesn’t disappear simply because we quote Bible verses and think we have higher marital boundaries than our secular neighbors. What passes for a high view of marriage may actually keep us from facing our fears and loving one another (not just our spouses) as Christ loved us.

It’s hard for us evangelicals to confess we have been impacted by the pioneer of psychoanalysis. Freud’s theories, absorbed by pop culture, have put sex at the center of everything in the West—infiltrating evangelical views of relationships between men and women. Christian writers such as Elaine Storkey, James Olthuis, Jack Balswick, Sue Edwards, Lisa McMinn, Ruth Haley Barton, and Marva Dawn have noted Freud’s impact in their respective work.

Yes, we must grapple with the reality of sin in this world. Lust is one of the cardinal sins. We all know of pastors who have fallen into sexual sin, leading to church division, divorce, and emotional scars that last a lifetime. Getting emotionally entangled into inappropriate relationships where one spouse conceals an emotional-sexual connection can be just as devastating as physical adultery. This is another place where I share Sharon’s deep concern. Adultery destroys the vows of exclusive relationship in marital sexuality. Triangles, even if there is no sexual intercourse, are a violation of marital sexuality.

But we must also grapple with the reality of a pop-Freudian undercurrent within our churches that alters how we view relationships. We need to ask, Are we confusing a robust view of sin with a robust view of Freud? Maybe a robust view of sin confesses that we have blindly followed the one who posited frustrated sexual desire to lie at the heart of every relational encounter between men and women—libido lurking in all meaningful oneness.

What does it mean for us as men and women to flourish in relational oneness in God’s Story? Scot McKnight suggests in his book The Blue Parakeet, “Nothing in the Bible makes sense if one does not begin with the Garden of Eden as a life of oneness—human beings in union with God and in communion with the self, with one another, and with the world around them. Life is about oneness.” He adds that Pentecost is “all about the power to create oneness.”

Paul speaks of a oneness beyond marriage when he states there is neither male nor female but we are all in one Christ (Gal. 3:28). Jesus prays for oneness in John 17. Sharon did not address the numerous Bible passages calling for relational oneness beyond the married couple. Aren’t we called to wrestle with these passages as much as those concerning marital oneness?

Alienation is the term I use to describe the brokenness that prevents oneness between men and women both within and beyond marriage. Alienation between men and women has existed since Genesis 3 and manifests in many ways: sexism, suspicion, and sexual objectification. It may be present within an individual relationship, marriage, or community. Fear and shame always accompany alienation.

Betty DeBerg, in her book Ungodly Women, documents how late-19-century premillennalists considered women leaders a sign of the Last Days. Pastors objected to women’s desire to vote, fearing it was a sign of eschatological doom. In the evangelical tradition, women have had to overcome much opposition and sexism pushed by the underlying fear and shame perpetuated by alienation.

Healthy boundaries help men and women flourish as one flesh in marriage and in community. A covenantal view of marriage means that a man and woman belong to one another, and no one (same gender or cross gender friend) is to come between them. They share a distinctive oneness.

However, here’s the tricky, messy part. Readymade, formulaic boundaries for married men and women don’t get to the heart of what is wrong: the fear and shame that keep us from loving one another as Christ has loved us. Alienation shames us into believing we can’t deeply love our spouses while also deeply and chastely loving friends of the opposite sex.

if we claim to be brothers and sisters in Christ, these loves are a viable path from alienation to reconciliation between the sexes in this present world. Our personal communities may include friendship patterns that resemble close sibling relationships, build trust, and strengthen shared life together.

Freudian boundaries perpetuate sexism, suspicion, and sexual objectification, rather than patiently nurturing oneness between men and women. Friendship is a path out of alienation and its trappings—a robust path towards relational oneness. We must not confuse unhealthy triangles with healthy, close relationships with brothers and sisters in Christ.

The greatest way to guard one’s marriage is to intentionally nurture trust, transparency, commitment, and intimacy as a couple. But through that marital oneness, freedom can be navigated between the spouses to nurture relational oneness with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Some of these relationships may develop into deep friendships, in turn bearing witness of the unseen triune God to a fragmented, alienated, Freudian world (John 17).

Dan Brennan is the author of Sacred Unions Sacred Passions: Exploring the Mystery of Friendship Between Men & Women and is hosting a conference on this topic in Chicago this weekend.

You are what you refuse to eat. However broad we may claim our tastes to be, all societies have foods that disgust or intimidate them: substances that can theoretically be eaten for nourishment but which, if eaten, would mark the consumer as ignorant, gross, unclean, unfit for human company, and (possibly) racially inferior. Whales, dogs, frogs, locusts, and horses all provide protein to some human communities somewhere, although even discussing those creatures as menu items can make many Western readers queasy—just as unsettled, in fact, as religious Muslims and Jews become in the presence of pork or ham. These fears are richly illustrative for social attitudes. Sometimes the dislike can have religious roots; sometimes it reflects human attitudes toward one particular kind of animal, although not to its near-related kin; and sometimes it claims to be based on a conviction that the food in question is actively harmful or dangerous.

As modern society notionally extols science as its chief source of objective wisdom, it is not surprising that our own food taboos often arise from scientific claims. The problem, of course, is that scientific certainty is a very malleable thing. Anyone who saw Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper will recall how scientists in the far future struggle to comprehend the preferences of a 1970s health food aficionado. But surely, they ask in wonderment, did he not have access to deep fat, to steak, cream pies, and fudge? Was there really a time when such wonderful foods were regarded as dangerous and unhealthy? That is exactly the opposite of what we know in our own enlightened 22nd century.

In his engaging, thoroughly researched, and well-written study Fear of Food, Harvey Levenstein offers a history of the major themes in pseudo-scientific dietary alarmism since the late 19th century. He focuses chiefly on the United States, suggesting in effect that Americans over the past 130 years or so have been subjected to successive waves of alimentary terrorism, which have instilled into them something like a pathological fear of food. (I would question this exceptionalism: Europeans are not less subject to food panics, they just succumb to different ones). While several of these panics have subsided or been discredited, other very similar concerns still haunt us today. And even those earlier concerns that are supposedly dead and exorcised have left relics in the form of popular folklore about Good and Bad Foods.

Although he could have taken any number of examples, Levenstein wisely focuses on several main case-studies, each of which had at its center a leading advocate who boldly publicized claims about a particular menace—in social science terms, these figures were moral entrepreneurs, who in their way tried to reshape society as comprehensively as an industrial entrepreneur like Henry Ford. One such was Elie Metchnikoff, the Russian who proved to his own satisfaction the dangers posed by harmful bacteria multiplying in the colon. This caused the dreadful condition of “autointoxication,” which caused human beings to die in their 70s and 80s instead of enjoying the 140-year lifespan to which they were naturally entitled. (Metchnikoff, I am happy to report, died at age 71.) Although the long-term solution to the problem was self-evidently the surgical removal of the colons of most patients, society might take years to reach the cultural maturity to accept such drastic measures. In the meantime, anyone desiring health and longevity needed dietary change, and above all a recognition of the benefits of that obscure miracle food, “yogurt.”

Among his other claims to fame, Metchnikoff pioneered what would become a familiar habit among food advocates, by identifying a distant people somewhere around the globe whose healthy natural diet prevented them from acquiring Western ailments. Although Metchnikoff pointed to supposedly long-lived Balkan shepherds as his exemplars, later generations would find equal wonders among primitive peoples in the Caucasus or Himalayas—peoples whose healthful reputations endured until any more critical scientist chose to examine them skeptically.

Levenstein then describes other succeeding waves of concern that in many ways reproduced the autointoxication fad, including concerns over tainted beef and milk in the 20th century, and the later fascination with vitamins as the source of all health and well-being. Elmer McCollum played the entrepreneurial role in the vitamin scare, Ancel Keys in the modern panic over saturated fats (“Lipophobia”). Although Levenstein never denies the existence of quite authentic problems, for instance involving contaminated meat or milk, he scrupulously distinguishes between real and imagined dangers; the irrational concerns that he describes fully merit the name of “panic.”

Levenstein’s book is much more than a believe-it-or-not catalogue of human folly, of what Charles Mackay famously termed Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The author offers readers a brief but invaluable primer on how to interpret claims that they might encounter: always, he suggests,

look at those propounding those fears and ask “what’s in it for them?” … “[T]hem” of course includes the usual suspects: food companies trying to promote and profit from food fears. However it also includes thousands of other people with career interests in scaring us … [including] scientists hoping to keep the research grants flowing by discovering connections between diet and health; it also involves well meaning people working for other public and nonprofit agencies who try to prove their usefulness by warning about dangerous eating habits.

Throughout the book, we see interest-group politics at work, often using the cover of disinterested public health campaigns. The campaign against tainted beef owed much to the activism of major meat enterprises hoping to suppress poorer and less regulated rivals. Fears of the Demon Milk ended when the dairy industry organized publicity campaigns to promote the image of milk as a source of health and vigor.

Social problems are the subject of a great deal of work by social scientists. Recognizing that problems are neither universal nor self-evident, scholars try to understand the means by which they are constructed and presented to the public, through a process akin to marketing. Ordinary people have neither the time nor the strength to be equally concerned about all potential dangers all the time, so they have to be persuaded that one particular danger is eminently worthy of concern, while others are not. Imagine a lay person walking past the various market stalls of a bazaar, while the different merchants cry out, “Look at this problem! It’s out to get your children!” “No, look at this one—it’s much more threatening!” And so on. To understand any problem, then—whether food-related or not—we need to understand several different parts of the story: the sellers (the advocates, moral entrepreneurs, and true believers pushing the theory); the buyers or consumers (the general public); and the means and rhetoric by which problems are marketed, usually through the mass media.

Fear of Food suggests many different leads on each of these components, although it does not treat each exhaustively. Levenstein is undoubtedly best on the entrepreneurs and the theories they present, but he is less interested, perhaps, in why they win credibility in any particular era. After all, people come up with ridiculous theories all the time, but only a few achieve the national prestige and acceptance of the examples he offers here, such as the omnipotent vitamin. Why? Were these particular theories uniquely well packaged and convincingly sold to a mainstream public? Or was there something about them that appealed to the tastes and interests of consumers at particular times? Did these fads hit when conditions were uniquely ripe in ways that they would not have been a decade or so earlier or later?

Personally, I would pay more attention to the interests and enthusiasms of the lay public, the consumers of these dietary problems, whose concerns and obsessions shift enormously over time. Some years ago, Ruth Clifford Engs published an intriguing account of Clean Living Movements through American history, those eras of fanatical concern about healthy food, bodily purity, sexual reform, and (usually) avoidance of alcohol and intoxicants, themes that are usually closely linked to religious revivalism.[1] One such wave swept the country from 1830 through 1860, another in the early 20th century, and yet another began in the mid 1970s. Each in turn left its residue in terms of religious movements, and also of food products. The 19th-century movement, for instance, bequeathed such famous names as Kellogg of the cereal and Graham of the crackers.

In other words, America’s ambiguous attitudes toward food (healthful but at the same time potentially lethal) are intimately bound up with its spiritual and moral concerns. Only by appreciating that cultural dimension can we understand what scientific claims will strike ordinary consumers of news as credible and (dare I say) palatable at any given time. It’s much more than just America’s “Puritan streak.”

That one criticism apart, Fear of Food is a delicious book.

1.Ruth Clifford Engs, Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of Health Reform (Praeger, 2000).

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the author most recently of Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses (HarperOne).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands is a powerful history of the Soviet and Nazi political mass murders from 1933 to 1945 in the contiguous area from central Poland to western Russia. By focusing on the deliberate killing of approximately 14 million people in the zone where Soviet and German power overlapped, Snyder makes a convincing case that the mass murders in this region constitute a "distinct phenomenon worthy of separate treatment." In the process, Snyder significantly improves our understanding of what could well be humankind's worst catastrophe.

The "bloodlands" were that part of Europe where the most Jews lived, where the imperial plans of both Stalin and Hitler overlapped, where the huge armies fielded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union fought savagely, and where the Soviet NKDV and German SS concentrated their deadly efforts. During World War II, the bloodlands witnessed multiple continuous occupations, especially in those parts of Poland and the Baltic states that Hitler conceded to Stalin in a secret protocol of the nonaggression pact of 1939. Snyder notes that the sector of the bloodlands east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line was where the Holocaust began and where most of the NKVD persecutions of the 1940s took place. "Molotov-Ribbentrop Europe," a joint production of the Soviets and the Nazis, was also where more than a quarter of the German killings of the Jews occurred, as well a massive amount of ethnic cleansing.

The killing began with the deliberate starvation of 3.3 million Soviets, mostly Ukranians, in 1932-33. It continued in the Great Terror of 1937-38, during which approximately 700,000 more Soviet citizens—most of them peasants or members of national minorities—were shot. The Germans and the Soviets cooperated in the destruction of Poland; between 1939 and 1941, the two regimes killed some 200,000 Poles, including many intellectuals. The German invasion of the Soviet Union led to the starvation of another 4.2 million people, including Soviet prisoners of war as well as inhabitants of Leningrad. In addition, the Germans shot or gassed some 5.4 million Jews. Finally, in the partisan wars for Belarus and Warsaw the Germans killed another 500,000 civilians in reprisals.

Although Snyder does not subscribe to Hannah Arendt's thesis that the Nazis and Soviets were totalitarian twins, he does show how the policies of Germany and the Soviet Union often functionally mirrored each other. Stalin wished to rapidly collectivize the Soviet Union; Hitler sought to colonize the western Soviet Union for Nazi Germany. And when they encountered failure, both dictators revised their utopian visions and shifted the responsibility elsewhere for the catastrophes they unleashed—Stalin the kulaks, Ukrainians, and Poles; Hitler the Jews: "After collectivization starved millions to death, this was adduced by Stalin to be evidence of a victorious class struggle. As the Jews were shot and then gassed, Hitler presented this, in ever clearer terms, as a war aim in and of itself. When the war was lost, Hitler called the mass murder of the Jews his victory." Snyder reveals how adept both Stalin and Hitler were in using romantic justification and, later, rationales of preemptive self-defense to make mass killing appealing or at least seem like the lesser evil. For example, young Ukrainian communist activists who took food from the starving were convinced that they were contributing to the triumph of socialism. And many Wehrmacht officers claimed that letting Soviet prisoners of war and citizens starve to death would enable their own men to eat and live.

Snyder asserts that "Europe's epoch of mass killing is overtheorized and misunderstood." He argues that our understanding of the Holocaust is skewed by the hold that Auschwitz has on our collective imagination, which has in turn generated theorizing on the deep dysfunctionality in modern society. Before we draw such theoretical conclusions, he contends, we need a better factual foundation of "what actually happened." Without in any way reducing the horror of the concentration camp experience, Snyder notes that the "tremendous majority" of Germany's victims were killed outright in gas chambers, killing fields, and starvation zones. A sentence to the concentration camp at Belsen, for instance, was one thing, whereas transport to the Belzec death factory was something else: "The first meant hunger and labor, but also the likelihood of survival; the second meant immediate and certain death by asphyxiation." In fact, almost none of the 14 million people killed in the bloodlands by both regimes saw a concentration camp. The timing and geography of liberation by American and British forces "placed German concentration camps at the center of the most important cinematic images, whereas in fact American and British forces never entered the bloodlands and never saw the sites where the Germans (or for that matter the Soviets) carried out their worst crimes."[1]

Why do these distinctions matter? Snyder observes that, to this day, nationalists throughout the bloodlands have "indulged in the quantitative exaggeration of victimhood." Russian leaders, for example, conflate Soviet and Russian losses and arrive at a highly exaggerated Russian death count. Given this "politics of inflated victimhood," a sober history of mass killing is needed to "unite the numbers and the memories" in an impartial reckoning. "By repeating exaggerated numbers," Snyder maintains, "Europeans release into their culture millions of ghosts of people who never lived. Unfortunately, such specters have power. What begins as competitive martyrology can end with martyrological imperialism [—the wars for Yugoslavia in the 1990s, for example]." He concludes that "[w]hen history is removed, numbers go upward and memories go inward, to all of our peril."

But more is needed than just getting the numbers right. We must resist the understandable temptation to let the numbing enormity of these deaths lead us to abstraction. Rather than harboring a generic mental image of some Jew dying, multiplied by the millions, we need to recall, whenever possible, individuals like Dobica Kagan, a girl in killed in a Ukrainian synagogue. This leads Snyder back to the numbers. He notes perceptively that the "cultures of memory are organized by round numbers." But if we use the specific number of 780,863 as the tally of individuals killed at Treblinka, for example, the three people at the end of that number "might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed, and Ruth Dorfmann, who was able to cry with the man who cut her hair before she entered the gas chamber."

Bloodlands is a depressingly important book. It is a scholarly and moral act of the highest order to get this history "right"—as far as that is humanly possible. Similarly, it is an act of moral and intellectual cowardice to ignore such horrific aspects of human sinfulness—a theological category the author does not employ—because of their manifest unpleasantness. To his credit, Snyder prompts us to attempt to understand the logic of the perpetrators along with the suffering of the victims. In fact, he argues that it is "morally more urgent to understand the actions of the perpetrators." There is never the "moral danger" that one might become a victim, but it is indeed possible that someday under some circ*mstances "one might be a perpetrator or a bystander."

A similarly discomfiting sense of urgency informs Michael Burleigh's Moral Combat. This is not a standard operational history of World War II; rather, it is an examination of the "prevailing moral sentiment of entire societies and their leaderships" as well as of the moral reasoning of ordinary individuals who had to make choices under the most difficult of circ*mstances. Burleigh is well-suited for the task. He is one of Britain's leading historians and an eloquent wordsmith. After his award-winning The Third Reich (2000), he left the academy to concentrate on his writing. American readers may know him best for his two-volume study of political religion, Earthly Powers (2006) and Sacred Causes (2007).

Moral Combat is not an exercise in abstract moral theory; nor does Burleigh adopt a preachy voice. He masterfully shapes his historical narrative in such a way that the reader cannot miss how the war strained conventional morality, frequently ripping it to shreds. For Burleigh, while no war has ever been good, World War II was necessary. And without whitewashing its many moral compromises or dismissing the monstrous conduct of the Soviets, he defends the overall Allied war effort.

The North African campaign was probably the "cleanest" active theater of the war. But elsewhere there was much savagery, especially in the Nazi-Soviet "bloodlands" (to borrow Snyder's fitting term) and the war in the Pacific. Burleigh devotes the most attention to the primal contest of wills, machines, and ideologies between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945. The rape of Poland in 1939 previewed the bestial*ty and gratuitous violence that became routine in the gigantic war of attrition and retaliatory violence in Russia. Burleigh notes that it is impossible to maintain the fiction that German generals were unaware of the murderous intentions of the Nazi regime. They knew what the SS was doing in occupied Poland and Russia, and attempted to abdicate moral responsibility almost as rapidly as possible. What is striking is that the German occupiers often felt sorry for themselves for having to do such brutal things in the name of duty, discipline, racial purity, or the German mission in the east, and they constructed twisted moral codes that emphasized order and efficiency to help rationalize their murderous behavior.

Dismissing Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" as little more than a cliché, Burleigh remarks that those involved in the Final Solution had many attributes, "but banality was not one of them. The fertility of their cruelty and malice rippled out to any number of actors in Germany and beyond." And he cautions against seeking too much consolation from the "tiny gleams of light provided by the stirring human-interest dramas" of people like Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg: "Rescue was statistically insignificant in a story of catastrophic bleakness, from which there is no redemptive message [;] … human goodness really did not triumph in the end."

Burleigh is particularly effective analyzing life in occupied France. He rightfully draws attention away from the collaborator celebrities—people like Maurice Chevalier or Coco Channel—to the "grubby complicities" of the common man or woman. He notes that collaboration was partly a function of "geographical or occupational fate. The Germans were unlikely to trouble the isolated farmer, but bar staff, chambermaids, cooks, typists, and waitresses in garrison towns would have frequent dealings with them." He also confronts the reader with the moral dilemmas of violent resistance. The Germans routinely shot French hostages (at ratios ranging from 10:1 to many times that) and rounded up large numbers of workers for deportation to Germany in reprisal for assassinations and sabotage committed against the German occupiers.

Winston Churchill comes off well in Moral Combat. Burleigh notes early on that what perhaps separated Churchill from his colleagues was "the capacity to imagine the diabolic," something which probably "required having a little of the devil in himself." He also offers a nuanced and basically sympathetic treatment of the much maligned Arthur Harris, head of the RAF's Bomber Command and, indeed, of the entire Allied bombing campaign against both Germany and Japan, including the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Burleigh has no patience for those who would argue for the moral equivalency of the Allied bombing campaign and the ruthless bloodletting of the Nazis. "No serious person," he argues, "can compare the hard-fought bombing campaign with slaughtering innocent civilians in circ*mstances where the only risk the perpetrators ran was to be splashed with blood and brains in some ditch in the Ukraine."

Like Snyder, Burleigh has a keen sense of the importance of specificity and evocative details. Students of World War II are well aware that Germany faced huge logistical obstacles in Russia. But Burleigh makes this point graphically when he notes that German planners anticipated that Army Group Center would need 24 trainloads of supplies per day to operate successfully in the Ukraine and Russia. Even before they ran into unanticipated stiff resistance from Soviet forces in December 1941, only half that number of trains fed the German assault. Again, the superior performance of German troops is a commonplace, but Burleigh drives this home with the stunning assertion that throughout the war—"in attack or retreat, with or without local numerical, artillery and air superiority"—the Germans inflicted 50 percent more casualties on their opponents than they suffered themselves. He also peppers his narrative with memorable anecdotal nuggets. For example, there is the story of Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Russified Pole, who in 1940 went from a NKVD torture chamber (where, among other refinements, he suffered three mock executions, had his fingernails pulled out, and lost nine teeth) to command a Soviet army. This same officer became Poland's defense minister after the war, and in 1956 ordered tanks to put down the Poznan uprising. Then there is the account of the head of the General Government for occupied Poland, Hans Frank, presenting a gold watch at the Cracow railway station in 1943 to the millionth Pole deported to Germany as a forced laborer.

One of the many virtues of Burleigh's book is that it demonstrates the value of intentionally approaching history from a moral perspective. While of course not every sober-minded historian will agree with all of his moral assessments, Burleigh's Moral Combat succeeds even better than Michael Bess' fine earlier work, Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (2006), in confronting the moral complexities of that war without resorting to triumphalist nonsense or facile arguments of moral equivalency. Indeed, Moral Combat may well rank, along with Gerhard Weinberg's magisterial A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (1994), as one of the finest volumes ever written about the war that killed 55 million people. Long after finishing Moral Combat, the reader is haunted by how this necessary war was so far from being good.

1. Interview with Timothy Snyder, Historically Speaking, November 2011.

Donald A. Yerxa is professor of history emeritus at Eastern Nazarene College. He is senior editor of Historically Speaking and editor of Fides et Historia.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Preachers who read widely get the same benefits out of it as the rest of us, but their needs may be more acute. Imagine standing up weekly in front of a mixed audience and speaking to it engagingly about things of final significance. God, sin, grace, the beauty of creation, life, death, justice, the kingdom of God, faith, hope, love, the death of Jesus, compassion, peace, comfort, the miracle of Easter, pilgrimage, aging, wonder, union with Christ, terror, alienation, hell, the joy of heaven, longing, betrayal, redemption—the list of topics on the preacher’s agenda intimidates all but the foolish. And I’ve written only a partial list because the Bible is such a big book.

Now add that congregations send preachers to the Bible not just to dig up its treasures and lay them out on Sunday morning, but also to do so in such a way that, with the Holy Spirit blowing in the room, the minister’s words may bring God’s word to us.

This intolerable calling requires courage and humility. It requires a life full of God. It also requires that the preacher become as wise as possible. Even an expository preacher has to become a kind of sage, a person who is conversant on the range of biblical topics and who can speak on them to healthy spiritual effect. In this calling, the Bible itself is the preacher’s first teacher. His experience of life helps a lot. So does the preacher’s wide reading of fine writers—storytellers, biographers, poets, journalists. Reading them tends to make the preacher wiser, which is perhaps, beyond sheer delight, the principal reason for doing so.

Or maybe not. Maybe an even more basic reason for the preacher to read fine writers (or listen to fine speakers) is that they will tune the preacher’s ear for language, which is his first tool. From the masters of language the preacher can learn conciseness, rhythm, euphony, and rhetorical devices such as consonance. He can learn to change up his sentence length and sentence functions. He can learn Ring Lardner’s sentence, “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”

From fine writers the preacher can learn one skill that lies beneath all the others. I mean diction. Diction includes pronunciation, and to learn it well, preachers need to listen to good pronouncers. We’d like our preacher to say “terrorist” instead of “ter-rist,” and we’d like her to say “nuclear” instead of “nucular.” In other words we’d like her to listen to some U.S. presidents more than to others.

But the other half of good diction is word choice, and from the masters of it blessings flow. Precision and coherence and transparency depend on it, of course, but so does everything else in a sermon. Saying good preaching depends on good diction is a little like saying good cooking depends on choosing good ingredients.

Here I’ll focus on just two advantages of good diction: that it lets the preacher choose his rhetorical register, whether highbrow or lowbrow; and that it gives our preacher a whole world of power and beauty opened up by the evocativeness of the words he chooses.

To think about the preacher’s rhetorical register, let’s consider a few sentences from the title sermon in Barbara Brown Taylor’s volume Home by Another Way:

[The three wise men] were all glad for a reason to get out of town—because that was clearly where the star was calling them, out—away from everything they knew how to manage and survive, out from under the reputations they had built for themselves, the high expectations, the disappointing returns. And so they set out, one by one, each believing that he was the only one with a star in his eye until they all ran into one another on the road to Jerusalem.[1]

The wise men, says Taylor, were “glad for a reason to get out of town.” The phrase sits right in the middle of the formality/informality scale, so that in many contexts it will sound neither stuffy on the high side nor slangy on the low. Imagine possible alternatives. What if Taylor’s wise men were “gratified at the opportunity to venture forth from their hamlet,” or what if they “just got so hyper to be so outta there”? No, says Taylor, they are “glad for a reason to get out of town.”

The register here is neither tuxedo formal nor tank-top casual. We might call it “upscale colloquial” or “business casual,” and add that it will engage a great many listeners, which is why Taylor wanted to use it. Her good choice makes the sermon formal enough to be serious, and casual enough to be comfortable to wear.

To gain command of their pitch on the formality/informality scale, preachers can learn a lot from reading Robert Jacks’ classic technique book titled Just Say the Word: Writing for the Ear (Eerdmans, 1996). Jacks tells us how to write for the ear, not the eye. He wants us preachers to prepare sermons that speak naturally, using dialogue and sentence fragments just as a person would in good conversation. Recommending something like upscale colloquial, Jacks cautions preachers against both high school hall-speak and an essay-like formality, expressed not only by means of the usual adverb suspects (“whence,” “thence,” “wherefore”) but also by the use of so innocent a coordinating conjunction as “for.” According to Jacks, we might not notice the awkward formality of this conjunction in a preached sentence till we stop to think about it. Our preacher says “Let us trust Jesus for we know he dies for us.” We don’t stop to think that in ordinary speech none of us talks like that. None of us says “Let’s go to Grancino’s tonight, dear, for we know their rigatoni is terrific.”

I’m not suggesting that if the preacher masters upscale colloquial, that’s the only register he needs. Everything depends on context. A campfire talk to middle school kids might be more casual. A speech at the hundredth anniversary of the congregation might be more formal. In any case, the preacher’s reading can give him some rhetorical options. He’ll want to read storytellers for dialogue, maybe including Jonathan Franzen for contemporary college-educated patterns, and also some of the action and detection types like Elmore Leonard and Lee Child for a little more spit and vinegar.

Published storytellers are good at their job in part because they know how people talk, and the preacher who wants an ear for colloquial dialogue can learn a lot from them. Contractions, sentence fragments, slang, dialect—or grace and elegance—it’s all there. If our preacher has a sharp enough ear for dialogue without reading storytellers, God bless her and her natural gifts. But many of us can use some outside help.

Speaking of which, Elmore Leonard once published ten rules for effective writing, including rule 4: “Never use an adverb to modify the verb ‘said.'”[2] Never use an adverb to modify the verb ‘said’ Elmore Leonard said gravely. The preacher will take heed. Else on Sunday morning we get, “You hypocrites,” Jesus said sternly. “You brood of vipers,” he said accusingly. Adverbs give us what’s already obvious, or, on the other side of the street, what isn’t obvious at all and ought to stay that way. Do we really want our preacher’s adverbs to tell us how Pilate asked his famous question? “What is truth?” Pilate said amiably. “What is truth?” Pilate said enthusiastically. Or ironically. Or sarcastically. Or who knows, except that he said it interrogatively, and now we’re back to what’s obvious.

“Never use an adverb to modify the verb ‘said.'” That’s the fourth commandment. Elmore’s tenth commandment for writers, including our preacher, is this: Leave out the part that people will skip.

Preachers can tune their ear for colloquial language by listening to people talk, and by reading dialogue in good writers. That’s colloquial language. On the other end of the formality scale, the preacher wants enough exposure to classical rhetorical forms to have them in his repertoire and ready to go when called for. Take this example from the eulogy by Ted Kennedy for his slain brother Robert: “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”[3]

This form is called symploce, and it’s very old and delightful. In symploce you hold the beginnings and ends of the units constant and change the middle in each repetition:

[He] saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Saw-saw-saw, it-it-it. The rhetorical pitch is heightened here by the grammatical structure, not the vocabulary. Most of the words are one syllable, and none is fancy. Yet, as my colleague James Vanden Bosch has pointed out to me, the rhetorical structure all by it itself signals the command of the speaker and the weight of the occasion. The preacher who wants similar command can read great speeches, of course, but also great essayists like Orwell or even editorialists who may reach for a classical form when the occasion is weighty enough.

Good diction lets the preacher control her register, and adapt it to her preaching context. And then, of course, good diction gives a preacher the power to evoke, to suggest, and therefore to move our hearts.

The wise men, says Barbara Brown Taylor, were “glad for a reason to get out of town.” Each thought he was “the only one with a star in his eye.” All were called “out from under the reputations they had built for themselves.” And “they all ran into one another on the road to Jerusalem.”

This is evocative writing. It makes you ponder, makes you wonder, makes you yearn a little. The good writers are masters of turning a phrase, turning a clause, turning a sentence—all because again and again they choose one word instead of another.

“He was so careful of the truth that he used it sparingly.”
(Ross Macdonald)
“I grew up in the shadow of a big bookcase.” (Baudelaire)
“He was tubby and coarse-featured, with bulbous eyes and bristly hair mown short by a barber with a heavy hand.”
(Michael Thomas)

And here’s Steinbeck in East of Eden: “I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gray mountains full of sun and loneliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother.”

For the evocative power of fine diction, consider also the essayist Edward Hoagland, a naturalist often compared to Thoreau. He’s the sort of keen observer who appears never to have forgotten anything striking he’s seen outdoors, which is a lot to remember when you’ve been outdoors all your life. Hoagland spots outdoor wonders and so helps us preachers refresh our love of God’s good creation and our inclination to celebrate it.

But Hoagland also possesses a sovereign command of the English language, and the preacher can therefore learn some diction from him. Early in his autobiographical essay titled “Small Silences,”[4] he tells of moving to a Connecticut farm at age eight. The farm had “a little brook running” through it, which made wonderful sounds, “thocking and ticking, bubbling and trickling.” The brook rippled, but it also mirrored, and it would tug on a boy’s fingers or feet when he dipped them in.

For their egg supply, Hoagland’s parents kept a dozen brown hens, and then bought a New Hampshire Red rooster “to trumpet their accomplishments.” The red rooster didn’t go off in the morning mechanically, like an alarm clock. No, the rooster knew that in the night eight hens had laid eight eggs and that at dawn it was time to celebrate at least eight times. So the rooster would raise his beak and “trumpet the accomplishments” of the hens.

Let’s say our preacher notes the trumpeting, and some months later is preaching from one of the visions of shalom in Isaiah. Might there be a place in his sermon to extend the prophet’s dream of perfect peace, harmony, and delight in creation by suggesting that in this blessed state the red roosters graciously crow over the accomplishments of the hens?

Of course, but the trumpeting rooster is valuable to the preacher even if never mentioned explicitly in a sermon. The reason is that good diction in writers inspires preachers to imagine possibilities of their own. The preacher’s ear is tuned by absorbing excellent language, even if unconsciously. He’s like an articulate child from a family of articulate speakers, except that the preacher’s professional family includes Marilynne Robinson and Edward Hoagland and Katherine Paterson and John Steinbeck and so many others.

I need to add that the powers of language the preacher picks up from listening and reading are means, not ends, and that the preacher is called not just to linguistic craft but to faithful proclamation of reconciling grace in Jesus Christ. The power and glory may happen, but not so much because the preacher wanted them to. They happen because of the mighty and mysterious work of the Holy Spirit.

And so it was on August 28, 1963, a day forever to be remembered in American history because the power of a preacher’s evocative diction and the movement of the Holy Spirit combined within the greatest sermon ever delivered to the nation. In this sermon, Martin Luther King, Jr., preached righteousness from the prophets, and he did it without apology and without disguise. He was a preacher to the nation that day, who sounded his sermon refrain and then sounded it again. “I have a dream,” he said. “I have a dream today.”

Longing was in that word, and frank recognition of sad reality. Hope was in that word, and imagination. A different word chosen for the refrain and we wouldn’t now be remembering the speech. “I have a dream. I have a dream today.”

Jean Bethke Elshtain has speculated that American civil rights history might have gone quite differently if King had stood before the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, and cried out, “I have a personal preference.” “I have a personal preference today.”[5]

Good diction, combined with good thinking, can give the preacher clarity and all its children. Good diction can give us preachers an apt rhetorical register and lively narrative movement and conciseness and a whole wide world opened by the deliberate choice of this word instead of that one.

“I have a dream today.”

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., is president emeritus of Calvin Theological Seminary and, starting August 1, 2012, senior research fellow, the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. His book Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists, scheduled for publication by Eerdmans in 2013, served as the basis for his Warfield Lectures, delivered at Princeton Theological Seminary in March of this year.

1. Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by Another Way (Cowley, 1997), pp. 28-9.

2. “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” The New York Times, July 16, 2001.

3. Full text at americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ekennedytributetorfk.html.

4. In Sex and the River Styx (Chelsea Green, 2011).

5. “Everything for Sale,” Books & Culture, May/June 1998, p. 9.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In theory, I am committed to preaching the Old Testament. I generally feel exercised about how little the Old Testament is proclaimed in churches, how rarely it is preached, how many Christians act as though the Bible started with Matthew. Yet when I look back over the sermons I have preached in the last few years, the vast majority of them take up passages from the Gospels—and although my congregation reads a psalm every single Sunday, I have preached on a psalm exactly once. I am not proud of thus defaulting to the Gospel reading. In doing so, I am, I think, infecting the pulpit with Marcionite tendencies that are already too widespread.

I am not alone in this. As Dennis Olson noted in a 1990 article in the Journal for Preachers, many clergy steer away from Old Testament preaching, for a number of reasons—ministers doubt their own command of the historical context of Old Testament books; ministers suspect that their congregants find the detailed genealogies and laws of Old Testament books off-putting; and so forth.

As a new volume of sermons makes clear, Fleming Rutledge—an Episcopal priest who has for many years devoted herself to a ministry of peripatetic preaching—is an exception (one of many) to the general rule. And God Spoke to Abraham brings together 55 of her Old Testament sermons; the oldest dates to 1975, the most recent to 2010. Here are sermons on Abraham and his three visitors, and on the Exodus. Here is an Ash Wednesday sermon on Psalm 51 and a Trinity Sunday sermon on the burning bush. Here is a sermon, originally preached at a small conjoined Episcopal-Lutheran church in western Massachusetts, in which Rutledge reads the fortunes of the shrinking mainline through the prophet Isaiah: Yes, “the church in New England is in exile in the very land of its birth,” but into “this decline? … the One who has demonstrated his power to raise the dead and pour out his Spirit upon the church even in the wilderness speaks to you and to me this very day as if for the very first time …. I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.”

Rutledge has a rare command of the English language. Her prose is piquant; her paragraphs stand up like starched pieces of clothing. But she is doing far more in these sermons than crafting admirable sentences. She is instructing the church about who our God, the God of Israel, is.

I think of Fleming Rutledge first and foremost as a preacher of Paul. In her Pauline sermons (some of which may be found in an earlier collection, Not Ashamed of the Gospel), she preaches the good news of liberation from the powers of destruction. She preaches the gospel of a gracious God who forgives our sins, and sets us free from sin (sin understood both as corporate powers and individual compulsions). This, it turns out, is not just Rutledge’s word when she is preaching Paul. In her Old Testament sermons, she sounds the same theme: thus, in a sermon on Jeremiah 31, she takes up the Lord’s having “redeemed [Jacob] from hands too strong for him,” a redemption that makes it possible for “maidens [to] rejoice in the dance.” The message, Rutledge says—the “unified message … from the Old and New Testaments”—is that “There can be no rejoicing in the dance unless the Lord redeems us from hands too strong for us.” God—the God who is revealed most fully and finally in Jesus Christ—is the God who redeems us from those too strong hands.

There is, to be sure, long-standing debate about how Christians should preach the Old Testament. Must preachers always pair an Old Testament reading with a New Testament reading? (For a passionate statement of this view, see Elizabeth Achtemeier, who argued for such pairing because “apart from the New Testament, the Old Testament does not belong to the Christian church and is not its book,” and “we [Christians] must hear the Old Testament in Christ.”) Must we make an explicit Christological move in every Old Testament sermon we preach? Must a “Christian sermon” on Genesis or Lamentations name the name of Jesus?

Rutledge does not shy away from these questions. In the introduction to And God Spoke to Abraham, she argues that Christians must “read the Old Testament in light of the New”—it is “impossible for a confessing Christian to do otherwise.” In saying this, she is decidedly not calling for a kind of Christian reading that is deaf to Israel’s own voice; she is not countenancing reading that refuses to credit the faithfulness of Israel or the past activity of God among the Jewish people. To the contrary, Rutledge states clearly that “it is imperative that we remember that the Torah constituted the Jewish community. We cannot simply appropriate the Old Testament for the church and interpret it Christologically without giving thought and care to what we are doing.” One might add only that Torah constitutes the Jewish community still.

In parsing the politics and diction of Christian preaching, Rutledge passes on an insight from Calvin: Calvin understood every reference to “God” to be a reference to the Trinity—if we take the Trinity seriously, every time we mention “God” we are talking about Jesus Christ. Because of this, Rutledge does not feel compelled to “refer explicitly to God the Son in every sermon.”

That said, she does frequently make the terms of Christian theology explicit. Most of these sermons not incidentally but crucially quote the New Testament, invoke the Cross, or name the Trinity or Jesus. So a sermon on “The God of Hurricanes” moves from the Psalter and Job to Mark 4; the call of Samuel leads ultimately to the claim that “the story of Samuel is the story of Israel, and the story of Israel is your story and mine, and ours—the story of salvation through The Child Who Was to Come, of whom St. Luke says, he ‘increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man.'” There is nothing wrong with this statement—indeed, there is a great deal right about helping Christian auditors connect their story with the story of Samuel and the story of Israel. Yet on my reading, only eight of the sermons could, arguably, be described as remaining squarely in the landscape of the Old Testament, and I would have appreciated the inclusion of more sermons that allowed us to linger in the Old Testament text without an explicit Christological move. Such inclusion would, I think, have more fully opened up the multiplicity of ways that Christians can receive the Old Testament as Christian Scripture.

For Christians, says Rutledge, there can be no speaking of “the God of the Old Testament” as though that God is somehow different from “the God of the New Testament.” In a sermon on Isaiah 28, she reminds us that “There is just as much good news in the Old Testament as in the New Testament, and a lot of it has the additional advantage of being written in poetry.” In another sermon on the same text, (Rutledge admits to “being fascinated” by the prophet’s words about evil and suffering), she insists that “a wrathful Old Testament God has not been replaced by a loving New Testament God.” Jesus, after all, was known to strike the occasional note of judgment—and God is seen doing much loving in the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament, Rutledge makes plain, is not the God of caricatures of the Old Testament. Rather, it is precisely “the Old Testament God” who has “come down from his throne on high into the world of sinful human flesh and of his own free will and decision has come under his own judgment in order to deliver us from everlasting condemnation and bring us into eternal life.” Since the God of Abraham is the Father of Jesus Christ, “the witness of the entire Scripture is a seamless garment. No change within God occurred in the intertestamental period; there is no break in the revelation of God’s self, as though there had been an alteration in God.”

At the same time, “there are intrinsic, inalienable features of God in the Old Testament which we would not be able to extract from the New Testament taken by itself.” Without Old Testament preaching, how will we know about the election of Israel, “the righteousness of God as both noun and verb,” God’s jealousy, and God’s “aseity (being-from himself)”?

If you, like me, have a nagging feeling that you are not paying enough attention to the Old Testament—if you, like me, feel inadequately acquainted with the biblical testimony to God’s jealousy; God’s righteousness; God’s freedom, testified to in election; or indeed God’s love—consider taking up Rutledge’s sermons. (They are not an endpoint; as Rutledge surely hopes they will do, these sermons will likely inspire you to further reading—including, I dare suggest, reading more of the Old Testament itself.)

For nourishing the church’s biblical imagination for over 30 years, and for offering us now this challenging and inspiring collection, we owe Rutledge deep thanks.

Lauren F. Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School. She is the author most recently of Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis (HarperOne).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Not so long ago, crime, especially urban crime, seemed truly uncontainable. Ronald Reagan said the streets of America’s cities were “jungles.” The sociologist John DiIulio, now known as the first head of the White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, posited that a new class of “superpredators” was emerging on America’s streets.

In one sense, this is a story we’ve seen before in America. A century ago, the turmoil in America’s cities was equally alarming. That earlier crime wave, like the more recent one, followed a massive migration. The late 19th and early 20th century brought more than 30 million Europeans to America, particularly to the cities of the Midwest and Northeast. The more recent migration was internal: over the course of the 20th century, seven million blacks moved from the South to the same cities that had earlier been transformed by European immigration.

The more recent crime wave differed from its predecessor in two important respects. First, it was far more severe. (Although crime ticked up in the early 20th century, the increase was remarkably mild given the combustible mix of predominantly Catholic immigrants, many fleeing countries that were themselves at war, settling in a Protestant country in the midst of an industrial revolution.) Second, the crime rate continued to rise even after the rate of incarceration increased, and rates of incarceration remained remarkably high even after the crime wave abated.

In The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, Bill Stuntz explains America’s journey from there to here as a severe malfunction of both politics and law. The politics of 19th- and early 20th-century criminal justice were, in Stuntz’s telling, local. They took different shapes in different regions—with large police forces and comparatively low incarceration in the North and Midwest, and fewer police, more volatile rates of imprisonment, and more vigilante justice in the South. But there was a common theme: the police, the prosecutors, and the jurors all came from the same neighborhood. Justice looks different when the defendant is a neighbor, somebody’s brother or son. This pattern of local politics broke down during the course of the 20th century as blacks moved into the cities and whites moved out. Law hasn’t helped. The scope of criminal regulation has steadily expanded, and its effects have been visited disproportionately on blacks. Although the Supreme Court has tried to curb abuses, its interventions have often been counterproductive.

This is the story Stuntz tells in The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, the capstone achievement of the most remarkable criminal justice scholar of the past generation. Although the book is a long parting lament, Stuntz thought that it still may be possible to undo much of the damage of the past century.

Stuntz began his career as a criminal procedure scholar in 1986, when he returned to the University of Virginia School of Law after graduating from Virginia two years earlier and clerking first with Judge Louis Pollak, a former law school dean at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, and then with Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. Stuntz was only a year or two older than most of his students, and looked younger, so he grew a scraggly beard.

Criminal procedure had its heyday in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court, under the leadership of former California governor Earl Warren, radically expanded the constitutional protections for criminal defendants. (Criminal procedure comprises the laws governing police and prosecutor behavior; it and “substantive” criminal law are the two major subfields of criminal justice.) In Mapp v. Ohio (1961), the Court ruled that the protection in the Fourth Amendment against unlawful searches and seizures applied in state cases, not just federal ones; in Gideon v. Wainright (1963), it interpreted the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of representation to require free counsel for indigent defendants in all serious criminal cases; and in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), it defined the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to require the familiar warnings that suspects have the right to remain silent and that anything they say may be used against them at trial. Two decades later, the Warren Court Revolution continued to cast its spell over criminal procedure scholarship.

While criminal procedure scholars pined for the Warren Court, their criminal law brethren debated the philosophy of punishment or the details of particular criminal laws. As with two tribes whose language and customs have diverged, there was little commerce between them. Stuntz tore down the barriers and almost single-handedly reoriented the two subfields. Drawing on a perspective known as public choice—which assumes that voters and politicians act in accordance with their own self-interest—he considered the implications of criminal procedure and substantive criminal law for each of the major players in the criminal justice system. Stuntz took an almost perverse pleasure in unsettling conventional wisdom. Most famously, he argued that the Warren Court revolution has encouraged indigent defendants to rely on procedural defenses such as their Miranda rights or the exclusionary rule rather than substantive ones, and may have left the very criminal suspects it was designed to protect worse off than before.

Stuntz took people by surprise in another way as well. Almost alone among legal scholars in the leading law schools in his day (Michael McConnell, then at the University of Chicago, was another major exception), he was an evangelical Christian.

Starting in the late 1990s, Stuntz wrote frequently on hot button public issues. He contrasted prosecutors’ need to concoct an apparent lie to prevent a bloody glove from being excluded from the O.J. Simpson trial, with Ken Starr’s ease in securing evidence of doubtful importance to his actual investigation. The lesson, Stuntz concluded, was that the exclusionary rule should be applied differently in different contexts. After the September 11 attacks, Stuntz confounded legal scholars by defending the use of profiling to combat terrorism under some circ*mstances. Even more eyebrows were raised when Stuntz wrote a Weekly Standard cover story insisting—rightly, we now know—that the Iraq surge would likely succeed.

Throughout this period, Stuntz continued to write about the criminal justice system. The articles increasingly emphasized racial disparities and the decline of local democracy that would become one of the main themes of the new book. In 2008, after eight years of debilitating back problems, Stuntz was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. He had recently begun working in earnest on The Collapse of American Criminal Justice; he knew it would be both his first full-fledged book, and his last.

The heart of the book is a seven-chapter march through American criminal justice from the post Civil War Reconstruction Period to the present. In the late 19th century, American criminal justice worked surprisingly well, in no small part because the police, prosecutors, juries, and criminal defendants usually came from the same neighborhoods, especially in America’s cities. Criminal defendants were neighbors, and jurors balanced their sympathy for the defendants’ plight with their concern that their neighborhoods be safe. In Chicago, Stuntz reports, a man who killed someone in the heat of a poker dispute or drunken brawl would generally go free if he said it was self-defense. This was the kind of “jury nullification” we could use a little more of today.

Stuntz has considerably less praise for the Supreme Court’s handiwork during this period. The Court doused the sweeping promise of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection of the laws,” by ruling both that the government did not violate the amendment if it failed to protect against discrimination, and that a victim could not invoke the Equal Protection Clause unless he could show discriminatory intent, not just a pattern of discrimination. Criminal defendants were forced to fall back on other protections, such as the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which assure that the government will not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The Court also left its mark on the culture wars unleashed by the surge of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century. Protestant moral reformers’ campaigns against licentiousness brought laws criminalizing lotteries, prostitution and drugs—many of which were constitutionally precarious. The Court gave Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce unprecedentedly broad scope, upholding the prosecution under the Mann Act, which was designed to ban prostitution, of a man who took a train trip with his mistress with sex but not money or commerce in mind.

After the rise and fall of Prohibition, to which we will return, and a new symbolic politics of crime that rose from its ashes—as pioneered by New York Governor Thomas Dewey and FBI head J. Edgar Hoover—came the Warren Court Revolution. In Stuntz’s telling, the Warren Court’s big mistake was not just the Court’s proceduralization of criminal justice but also the imposition of these costs on police and prosecutors just as crime rates began to skyrocket. This created an opening for politicians like George Wallace and then Ronald Reagan to appeal to voters’ racism without explicitly invoking race. They could attack the white, middle-aged justices of the Supreme Court instead.

In the wake of this backlash and the bidding war that developed as politicians of both parties sought to position themselves as tough on crime, America’s prison population has soared, at the same time becoming disproportionately black. Too many black Americans are behind bars, yet it wouldn’t make sense to simply empty the prisons. What can be done?

Stuntz offers two general kinds of prescriptions in his closing chapter. The first is to restore the local democracy that once characterized American criminal justice, and to sharply increase the ratio of police officers to prisoners. More cops on the streets, he argues, would mean less crime and less need for prisons. To nudge lawmakers in this direction, he proposes shifting more of the cost of incarceration from the state to the local level, and the cost of police salaries in the opposite direction, to make it costlier for prosecutors to throw criminal defendants in prison. Stuntz’s other major proposal is to rejuvenate the Equal Protection Clause, so that courts can police against racial differences in sentencing and the strategic use by prosecutors of laws that are not systematically enforced.

Stuntz’s portrayal of the Warren Court as responsible for a massive wrong turn in criminal justice is especially damning because he does not question the justices’ motives. The Warren Court, he contends, did the wrong thing for the right reasons. Arguments like these marked Stuntz as a conservative throughout his scholarly career. But conservatives come in for equally pointed criticism in The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Not only did Reagan’s appeal to race-based fear factors help fuel the steep rise in incarceration, but so too did, of all people, conservative law professors. According to Stuntz, textualism—a conservative theory of interpretation that is often associated with Justice Antonin Scalia, and which holds that judges should rely solely on the literal language of the relevant law—discourages judges from departing from the strict contours of the law, even when circ*mstances cry out for mercy.

Stuntz’s scrambling of categories and penchant for the counterintuitive extended even to his own views. In earlier work, Stuntz had criticized Prohibition as “self-defeating.” If a temporary majority uses its power to criminalize immoral behavior, but the ban cannot realistically be enforced, he argued, it invites discriminatory enforcement. This discrimination can breed disrespect for the law, prompting a backlash that undermines the very norm it was designed to promote. I have often drawn on this insight in my own work, some of it co-authored with Stuntz. Imagine my surprise when I read in The Collapse of American Criminal Justice that Prohibition actually was a great success—America’s “good culture war.” Stuntz doesn’t question the evidence of inconsistent enforcement: “As for growing disrespect for the law, that phenomenon was real,” he writes, “but there is another side to the story …. For all the justified claims of enforcement bias, it bears emphasizing that the criminal law of alcohol was enforced, and seriously—especially by the federal government.” Moreover, and of particular moment for Stuntz’s prevailing theme, Prohibition was a successful experiment in democracy. Unlike abortion (which “has been resolved, for now at least, by judicial fiat”) and unlike the disastrous, unstable war on drugs, Prohibition was determined “by public persuasion: Americans saw the consequences of the dry experiment and changed their minds about its merits.”

In The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, as in the many writings that preceded it, Stuntz tested his own and others’ ideas, and sought to determine whether they are true. He regularly punctured the conventional wisdom, even when the conventional wisdom was his own.

Future scholars no doubt will pull at some of the threads of his history, which is sweeping as well as brilliantly organized. I doubt they will question his numbers, however, or the basic patterns. When someone recently asked me who Stuntz’s intellectual influences were, I was tempted to point to the Department of Justice’s Sourcebook on Criminal Justice and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, which he pored over obsessively, and which were the source of many of the stunning statistics revealed in the book.

In a new collection of essays on his work, Stuntz’s colleague Carol Steiker marvels that her approach to issues of mercy and justice “is more explicitly religious in inspiration than Bill’s own, despite the fact that he was a devout Christian and I am an (at most) agnostic Jew.”[1] Writing in the same volume, Michael Seidman, another dear friend, puzzles that “at least to my knowledge, his work focusing on criminal justice nowhere explicitly invokes his Christian commitments.” The Collapse of American Criminal Justice fits this pattern. The only direct reference to Stuntz’s faith comes in the acknowledgements, which were written by his family.

Stuntz’s Christian commitments were well known, in part because he wrote several articles and a variety of commentary about Christianity and law, but much more because it was impossible to know Stuntz without knowing his faith. How else to explain his humility and his love for both of the principal communities in his life: his Christian community and his law school colleagues? In a commentary that David Brooks singled out in The New York Times as one of the finest essays written in 2004, Stuntz contended that these communities have more in common than they imagine, and pleaded with them to learn from one another.[2] Bill epitomized the quality that we often refer to, sometimes a little too glibly, as lifestyle evangelism.

Such hope as Stuntz offers in The Collapse of Criminal Justice is grounded in the same qualities. If we were to restore local democracy in criminal justice, he argues; if we put more cops on the streets and fewer young black men in prison; if courts worried less about privacy and more about how police officers treat criminal suspects, the quality of justice might be a little less strained.

Shortly before he died, a friend and colleague of Bill’s sent me an urgent email message. He had just visited Bill, who was confined to a hospital bed on the first floor of his house and seemed to be rapidly failing. If I wanted to contact him one last time, the friend said, I should email right away. I was deeply grateful for the forewarning, as I had not yet really said goodbye. I tapped out a message telling Bill how much I loved him, and how much I had learned about Jesus from his, as well as his wife Ruth’s, Christlikeness throughout his ordeal. I typed “Goodbye” on the subject line, sent the message, and left for my office.

The moment I opened the door, the phone rang. It was Bill, who had not yet seen my email. He hadn’t called to discuss any of the obvious issues; he was worried about something that seemed vastly smaller: the dedication to his book. He knew we are supposed to dedicate our books to Jesus, he said, but several colleagues, none of whom would identify her- or himself as Christian, had made the book possible. On two different occasions, Steiker had offered to step in (and did step in) and teach large classes of Bill’s, once on top of her own heavy teaching load and once during a sabbatical, because Bill’s health problems made it impossible to continue after he had started the semester. She, along with two others, would be shepherding The Collapse of American Criminal Justice through the final stages of publication. Did I think it would be okay if he dedicated the book to these three friends?

Of course it was okay. And of course Bill was dedicating the book to Jesus when he wrote: “For Mike Klarman, Danny Richman, and Carol Steiker—the most generous colleagues anyone could hope for.”

David Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The New Financial Deal: Understanding the Dodd-Frank Act and Its (Unintended) Consequences (Wiley).

1. The Political Heart of Criminal Procedure: Essays on Themes of William J. Stuntz (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012).

2. William Stuntz, “Faculty Clubs and Church Pews,” TCS Daily (November 2004).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.