Faith, charity, and freedom

Free to Serve: Protecting the Religious Freedom of Faith-Based Organizations, by Stephen V. Monsma and Stanley W. Carlson-Thies (Brazos, 2015), gives background and good advice regarding the new drive to straightjacket Christian social service organizations. The most important one, I believe, is “Be Explicit in Your Religious Commitments.” Trying to fly under the radar to avoid possible lawsuits and hold onto benefits that secular groups receive “is the exact wrong approach,” because organizations can have some constitutional protection only if they show their beliefs and practices “are clearly and genuinely embedded in their organization’s religious nature.”

That means mission statements, orientation materials for new employees, words and images on websites, and much besides should be honest. A group dedicated to advancing Christian understanding should not fall into the use of new, bland clichés such as, “We’re committed to human flourishing.” But Monsma and Carlson-Thies use the euphemism that became fashionable 15 years ago: “faith-based.” That expression covers too much of the waterfront, since just about anything we do is based in a faith of some kind, whether religious or secular. It also covers over huge divides between, say, Christianity and Islam. We should be more specific: Bible-based and Quran-based would be better.

Free to Serve successfully undermines some underlying assumptions of Obama administration action: the belief that a religious organization’s acceptance of government funds places it under governmental control and the belief that Christianity still has a dominant, favored position in American society. The most crucial battle concerns the Obama administration’s limiting of religious freedom to “freedom to worship,” as if God wants us to render unto Him one hour per week and give the other 167 to Caesar.

Some of the book’s advice needs further discussion. “Avoid Even the Appearance of Coercing Others to Follow One’s Religiously Based Practices” sounds fine, but why isn’t it proper for Christian homeless shelters to require residents to attend a church service—not to deliver a maybe-false prayer or profession of faith, but to sit and listen? Nothing wrong with some required classes, either: A societal belief in personal autonomy has allowed millions to drink and drug themselves to slow deaths.

Short stops

Greg Linville’s Christmanship: A Theology of Competition and Sport (Oliver House, 2014) thoughtfully approaches key issues and would start many good conversations in college or adult Sunday school classes: What’s the value of athletic events? Should boxing be legal? What about Sunday games? Since Linville’s book would be a great textbook for sports-related courses at Christian colleges, I wrote to him and asked if any were using it, and he named half a dozen: More should.

The subtitle of Winter Is Coming (PublicAffairs, 2015) yells its true message: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. Author and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov had been a leader in democratic opposition to Russia’s new czar. The subtitle of The Confucian Cycle (First Edition Design, 2015) displays the clever old-new twist it gives to conservative concerns: China’s Sage & America’s Decline. Authors William and Ken Taylor examine Washington bureaucracy through the lens of ancient wisdom and suggest we’ve lost “the mandate of heaven.”

Harold Holzer’s Lincoln and the Power of the Press (Simon & Schuster, 2014) gives scholarly detail on Honest Abe’s ways of dealing with some fundamentally dishonest editors. Irwin F. Gellman’s The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961 (Yale, 2015) is a thorough history (warning: 790 pages) without the political correctness that led some historians to depict Dwight Eisenhower as an amiable dunce and Richard Nixon as always a liar.

Rachel Sussman’s The Oldest Living Things in the World (University of Chicago, 2014) is a coffee table book with a great concept: She photographed sequoia, yucca, lichen, coral, baobab, moss, and other organisms thousands of years old. The problem: Age comes before beauty, and many of her finds have long shed their good looks. —M.O.