You can keep up with Hitchens and Wilson in the media at the Collision website.  For more information about the movie, the Collision website has a well done summary  (perhaps too well done).  You can also find the link to buy tickets for Thursday’s premiere in Los Angeles (29th); or, you can go directly to the ticket booth here.  I will be at the Landmark Theatre  (or nearby, such as the Barnes & Noble) around 6:00 or so for the 7:00 viewing.  So let me know if you wanted to hook up for a cup of coffee.

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The Collision website sent me to a Kirkers’ website to listen to the Laura Ingraham Show’s coverage, and I was not able to access it.  So here is an alternative link: you can listen to the show, with commercials deleted here, at Life Without Faith.

Over the last 15 years, I have not been fond of the thought of stumbling upon an old high school buddy at the airport who knows just enough about my Pioneering days – now, thankfully, finally placing me in San Diego, California – to say, “So why did you move from Orlando, Florida to north Idaho?”  My answer would likely vary according to the fanaticism of my mood. 

I can thankfully now just say, ‘glad you asked, Christopher Hitchens just wrote an article about just this point in Slate, titled Faith No More .  I’ll email you a link.’  Now Hitchens has to explain himself – and so I find my answer vicariously. Miller’s recent silliness in Newsweek is perhaps in part due to her puzzlement of Hitchens’ new attraction to yokels and one of their old Prophets in hills of north Idaho. In reply to Miller, Hitchens writes:

Wilson isn’t one of those evasive Christians who mumble apologetically about how some of the Bible stories are really just “metaphors.” He is willing to maintain very staunchly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and that his sacrifice redeems our state of sin, which in turn is the outcome of our rebellion against God. He doesn’t waffle when asked why God allows so much evil and suffering—of course he “allows” it since it is the inescapable state of rebellious sinners. I much prefer this sincerity to the vague and Python-esque witterings of the interfaith and ecumenical groups who barely respect their own traditions and who look upon faith as just another word for community organizing. (Incidentally, just when is President Barack Obama going to decide which church he attends?)

This approach to religion in America, I think, will be an important part of the advance of the New Enlightenment.  We need to look genuine religion – the real thing – directly in the eye and distinguish it from all the other superficial spin offs, whether it be the mush, the kitsch, the hand-waiving, the arid modernism, the irrational Bacchanalian rites of the holy rollers. It is all these past times of Americans that protect the real thing. Consequently, the real thing remains just enough alive to keep generating the spin offs. To stop the cycle, a disciplined focus on right up the [fill-in-the-blank] real Christian religion in America is in order.

Wilson enjoyed the writings of H.L. Mencken before concocting his social engineering project, which he later coined ‘The Kirk’.  In fact, Menken provided what was one of the first lessons at New Saint Andrews – at least when I was a student there. Wilson lectured on Menken’s appreciation for Dr. Machen and thought such appreciation was a mark of real success. Machen was a zealous opponent of all the sloppy mind-muck that allowed ‘Christianity’ to flourish as it did in the 20th century, and consequently, the founding father of the new conservative Calvinism in America – from Princeton to the fundamentalist Westminster Theological Seminary, where Hitchens and Wilson debated.  In 1931, H.L. Menken wrote the following about Dr. Machen for American Mercury:

 . . . this Dr. Machen believes completely in the inspired integrity of Holy Writ, and when it was questioned at Princeton he withdrew indignantly from those hallowed shades . . . I confess frankly, as a life-long fan of theology, that I can find no defect in his defense of his position.  Is Christianity actually a revealed religion?  If not, then it is nothing; if so, then we must accept the Bible as an inspired statement of its principles.  But how can we think of the Bible as inspired and at the same time as fallible?  How can we imagine it as part divine and awful truth and part mere literary confectionery?  And how, if we manage so to imagine it, are we to distinguish between the truth and the confectionery?  Dr. Machen answers these questions very simply and very convincingly. If Christianity is really true, as he believes, then the Bible is true, and if the Bible is true, then it is true from cover to cover.  So answering, he takes his stand upon it, and defies the hosts of Beelzebub to shake him. . . . Does he encounter witches in Exodus, and more of them in Deuteronomy, and yet more in Chronicles, then he is unperturbed.  Is he confronted, in Revelation, with angels, dragons, serpents and beasts with seven heads and ten horns, then he contemplates them as calmly as an atheist looks at a chimpanzee in a zoo. . . His moral advantage over his Modernist adversaries, like his logical advantage, is immense and obvious.

 At some point, however, now that Hitchens has helped redeem Wilson, he will need to go on and face some additional facts about the “sincerity” of this particular Dear Leader. Unlike Machen, a celibate professor of koine greek and “member of both Phi Beta Kappa and the American Philological Association”, Wilson built his career in the ways of a slightly evolved, plotting Orangutan. Living sparingly on honey and locust heads, Wilson generated tithes and offerings for himself and progeny through imprecatory chants against local professors, ravings against science, the censoring of the media, the lying to his lambs, and the spawning of many Roman-like ‘persecutions’ against himself by any stick big enough for the job, which included a plagiarized booklet on the wonderful harmony between slave and free in the old South. Many enemies were generated from within the tribe as well, making the imprecations of David all the more apropos.

 Wilson isn’t laboring for an academic tradition, or the glory of God, or love, or out of empathy for his fellow man. Wilson, rather, studied H.L. Menken early in life so that he could get this write-up published in Slate magazine much later. Wilson has a plan, he lusts incessantly for attention and control, and, I have come to fully believe after years of painful experiment and research, he has the full capacity to rape and maim any sentient organism that might get in his way. This is true, at least, so long as the world would allow him keep his pulpit and halo. In other words, he plans to do nothing he cannot get away with.  And, thankfully, the backlash to Wilson has been vehement and loud and sustained enough, particularly from his close neighbors in his small town who actually know enough about him, to all but neuter this old bull. 

But becoming evangelicalism’s new apologist does not change the kinds of biological vestiges our priestly and bloody ancestors have bequeathed to this valiant defender of God’s rule and crown.  Wilson could care less whether or not he added anything to the apologetic arsenal for Christians that out live him; he – or at least an important part of his unconscious mind – would burn the entire thing to the ground for some more camera clicks, some more glory, and some higher seats for the males that have sprung from his loins or married within the clan. Wilson is some form of sociopath, for sure, but he does at least feel strongly and intensely over the moral virtues of loyalty (to him) and the power and wealth he is able to hand to his covenantal, biological, direct decedents. 

 The psychological complexities and the unusual brilliance of the unconscious mind the Lord has bestowed upon pastor Wilson is certainly a confounding factor in building the proper theory of this particular portal to heaven, but this just makes it all the more rewarding.  And so my thanks to Hitchens for presenting him to the world, not bound and lashed, but just as he is.

Douglas Wilson’s and Christopher Hitchens’ involvement in the recent Christian booksellers’ Expo and Wilson’s involvement in this years’ conference with John Piper is a significant insertion of Wilson, and by association his Kirk of north Idaho, into the consciousness of broader evangelicalism. You can see Piper’s and Wilson’s public discussion of Wilson’s involvement with Hitchens here .  Many Christians who have an understanding of Wilson’s pedigree and history over the last two decades think this is actually a serious insertion of an aberrant and dangerous controversialist into the mainstream.  Molly Worthen tackles this issue tactfully, if not coyly, in her write up on Wilson in Christianity Today this last summer, before Wilson was invited to John Piper’s conference. You can see Worthen’s article here.  (I replied with commentary on Worthen’s article here.)

Now, media coverage of the movie Collision – a presentation of the three day tour of Hitchens and Wilson – is spiking in order to introduce the release of the movie this week, which is, arguably, at least in proper context, an important cultural event for America. You can see, for example, NPR’s interview with Hitchens and Wilson here, (conducted by Guy Raz).

For anyone interested in the immediate context of Collision, I recommend at least two sources: First, I recommend Canon Press’ short book  (Canon Press is the Kirk’s inhouse press) containing the original debate between Hitchens and Wilson, titled ‘Is Christianity Good for the World?’ (2008).  I provided a summary of this debate, which you can find here. This summary was intended to be rigorous and exhaustive enough for the reader that did not have access to book, but this debate was already published online by Christianity Today, which can be found with a few keystrokes in Google (you will need to wade through many pages picture-framed by evangelical advertising).

Second, I highly recommend listening to the tour debate at Westminster Theological Seminary in full, without the movie-craft of Collision (Collision is produced by a Kirker and an evangelical movie-maker). You can find this debate, hosted by the Seminary’s website, here.  I think proper immediate context can be well served by listening to this debate raw.

(For extra-credit homework, please also watch the exchange between Hitchens and the four Christian apologists at the Christian Book Expo, which you can find here.  And if you have a bit more time on your hands, you do not want to miss Hitchens’ article in Newsweek back in March:  ‘The Texas-sized Debate Over Teaching Evolution’.  Hitchens begins by mentioning  the Book Expo. Please note the link to the right of this site, titled Christopher Hitchens’ Papers.)

But these two sources – the Canon Press debate and the Westminster debate – are just for necessary, immediate context. As for broader context, well, where to begin? 

The function of a religious leader in the act of apologetics has little to do with the argumentative content of discussion (as I will argue as I continue to develop my philosophy and social psychology of religion and informal anthropology with respect to the Kirk). In the case of Wilson’s performance of late, this factor is multiplied exponentially. I say this for a number of reasons but will name only two here: First, Wilson is not interacting with Hitchens’ arguments nor supporting his select assertions through the same rigorous and rational habits of modern apologists that have preceded him – from C.S. Lewis to Greg Bahnsen.  This is actually not intended as a criticism, given what I take to be the social role of Christian apologetics. Second, this association with Hitchens is a very interesting stage for Wilson, and precisely what is not being discussed explicitly about Wilson in these exchanges is more important than the what is.  What Wilson does not say, given the historical and social context, as well as what Hitchens implies about Christianity and her apologists only generally, is more important that the content of rational dialog and what Wilson and Hitchens are saying explicitly about one another. Just what is so immensely interesting about Wilson and his Kirk, and why Wilson is one of the most ‘important’ religious leaders in America today, has very little to do with Wilson’s rehashing half-baked ideas about objective standards for morality, rationality, and beauty.

It is worth emphasing here that I had been working on a book for a couple years, The Kirk: Mother of War. My primary work so far was conducted before Wilson and Hitchens made contact and before, in fact, I knew who Hitchens was.  I remain convinced as I follow this media coverage on the intersection of “two lives colliding”, as well as the largely uninterrupted footage of Collision, that this broader context is necessary for a full and proper understanding of the linguistic sound bytes we have seen so far and might continue to be exposed to. Those appreciative of Hitchens’ past journalism will no doubt understand the importance of an expanded, historical, narrative, and anthropological investigation.

As I would not be able to say about his brother , Evan Wilson is a man of peace. I found refuge and hospitality years ago in a sub-cultural of Moscow, Idaho, ruled by Evan and known as the Big Haus.  Click here  for a recent introduction.  I guess that sometimes you do reap what you sow and you will be found out – one way or the other – later in life.

(Update: Check out the comment section on this one – turned out fairly interesting.)

Finally. I present to you another post that is not about the man Douglas Wilson. This time, I write only about the men.  There are, of course, tens of thousands of Douglas Wilsons currently in the world.

 And Pooh cried from a dark corner of the Wood, “Christopher Ritchens! Help!”

Sure enough, a mixed story leans momentarily to the good.  He came. My Inbox has been full of good advice from my new friend. I will copy and paste my favorite selections.  (Imagine having to re-type them all out, what an enormous task that would be.)  Here is Christopher Hitchens’  advice to a middle-aged contrarian:

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You rather flatter and embarrass me, when you inquire my advice as to how a radical or “contrarian” life may be lived. 

. . . It may be that you, Michael, recognise something of yourself in these instances; a disposition to resistance, however slight, against arbitrary authority or witless mass opinion, or a thrill of recognition when you encounter some well-wrought phrase from a free intelligence.  If so, let us continue to correspond so that I may draw from your experience even as you flatter me by asking to draw upon mine.  For the moment, do bear in mind that the cynics have a point, of a sort, when they speak of the “professional nay-sayer.” To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.  And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it.  It is something you are, and not something you do.

. . . Henry Kissinger, challenged on television to meet my accusation that he was responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, responded with a maniacal and desperate attempt to change the subject, and denounced me as a denier of the Nazi Holocaust. . . . I tell you about it not just in order to boast, though there is that.  It went to make up for many, many other months, when the celebrity culture and the spin-scum and the crooked lawyers and pseudo-statesmen and clerics seemed to have everything their own way.  They will be back, of course. They are always “back.” They never leave.  But the victory is not pre-determined.  And there are vindications to be had as well, far sweeter than anything contained in the meretricious illusion of good notices or “a good press.”

 . . . The essence of an independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks  The term “intellectual” was originally coined by those in France who believed in the guilt of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.  They thought that they were defending an organic, harmonious and ordered society against nihilism, and they deployed this contemptuous word against those they regarded as the diseased, the introspective, the disloyal and the unsound. . . . the figure of Emile Zola offers encouragement, and his singular campaign for justice is one of the imperishable examples of what may be accomplished by an individual.

Zola did not in fact require much intellectual capacity to mount his defense of one wronged man.  He applied, first, the forensic and journalistic skills that he was used to employing for the social background of his novels.  These put him in the possession of the unarguable facts.  But the mere facts were not sufficient, because the anti-Dreyfusards did not base their real case on the actual guilt or innocence of the defendant.  They openly maintained that, for reasons of state, it was better not to reopen the case.  Such a reopening would only serve to dissipate public confidence in order and in institutions. . . . (more…)

The kind lady at the local Christian bookstore has been poised with my cell phone number in hand for a few days now, knowing my determination to somehow find an April issue of Christianity Today somewhere in San Diego. “Is there someone you know in this issue?” she asked. “Yes, there is.” Molly Worthen now has a seven page article on my old teacher, titled “The Controversialist.”

I received the call Friday afternoon. A pleasant sense of accomplishment came over me once the magazine was physically in my hands.  A trip to Borders Books and Barnes and Noble had already turned out dry; neither of the local stores still carry Christianity Today. Although, I did accidentally see the name ‘Christopher Hitchens’ while browsing the magazine stands. Hitchens has decided to write a letter to the president of the United States – no more arrogant than arguing with God I suppose. The same was true for the local libraries: no Christianity Today and plenty of Hitchens. The small local library here in Cardiff By The Sea has likely never carried Christianity Today. Yet, the last time I stopped in, someone had thrown the most recent issue of Vanity Fair on top of the displayed weekend newspaper.

I went down to the Seaside Market to get a 6 pack of Heineken after writing the rough draft of this entry and once again had the experience. I found the latest issue of Vanity Fair staring at me at the checkout stand. Heineken is more difficult to locate at a grocery store than Christopher Hitchens. And this was only out of four magazines: three magazines of hot women and one with half naked men wearing barrels. It was the barrels that grabbed my attention. Perhaps Hitchens is becoming, unknowingly, the Big Brother he despises – he is everywhere, and he lets us all know what he thinks we ought to think.  

After this journey in search for April’s issue, there is little question in my mind why Worthen opens her piece with a paragraph extolling the accomplishments and status of, not Douglas Wilson, but my Big Brother Hitchens.  In reality, I do not recall knowing of the man before the Kirk came up with her latest marketing idea. Once again, I owe a good deal to my teacher Douglas Wilson. Another four books by Hitchens are on their way.

Before getting to the obvious task at hand, I wish to first seek some patience from the reader.  I keep saying that Pooh’s Think, Part 2, is not “about Douglas Wilson,” only to then continue writing about Douglas Wilson.  And it will not end here.  Not only is my analysis of Wilson’s debate (Canon Press) with Hitchens incomplete, I also have the two hour discussion between Hitchens and the four-and-a-half apologists at the Christian Book Expo to address – and boy was that something.  And now here is Molly Worthen once again writing about my beloved Kirk: “Wilson is becoming someone who even those minding their own business in the noncontroversial ‘mainstream’ cannot afford to ignore.” If other scholars would stop writing articles about Wilson or giving Wilson the stage lights of ‘debate,’ I could get further along with my book and write posts on something else.  As it is, I ask you to bear with me just a little bit longer. 

But I am starting to wonder if my promise to say off topic was a bit premature.  After all, if I was the only expert on the European Green Crab, would anyone object to my authoring a site dedicated to that species? I would think that my task would produce additional justification; the species of my expertise has been almost extinct the last 400 years.

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Molly Worthen is once again to be commended for her judicious reporting on the Kirk.  Her first task, in 2006, was a piece for the New York Times Magazine, “Onward Christian Soldiers.”    She touched briefly on Douglas Wilson, of all appearances a “lumber jack,” but that was not the focus of her thesis. The Christian soldiers were the students, fellows, and doctors of New St. Andrews College.  In this latest, the topic just is Douglas Wilson, the controversialist. I recommend reading the article, and not just my response below. I will post a link to the article here as soon as one is available. (more…)