In the July/August issue of Touchstone, which features a cover story by Acton research director Sam Gregg, “The European Disunion,” a bit of wisdom is passed along to us by senior editor Anthony Esolen in the magazine’s section, Quodlibet:

If you have a virtuous people, you don’t need quite so many laws, and the laws you do pass will have a lot less to do with restraint than with man’s creative participation in God’s governance of the world.

This statement captures well the sentiments I expressed regarding the relation of Christianity to political freedom, which appear in Kevin Schmiesing’s post, “Freedom and Christianity,” at American Creation.

“This is a story, really, about when America was at its best, when we were doing the right things in the world, when people all over the world looked to us as a source of goodness and decency and humanity,” says Andrei Cherny. His words come courtesy of the Voice of America article titled, “Berlin Airlift Remembered After 60 Years.” Cherny is the author of the new book The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour.

In 1948, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin blockaded the section of Berlin under the control of democratic allied countries in post war Germany. The western sector of the war torn city only contained 36 days of food, and a very limited supply of fuel. The Soviet Union also cut the power in the same sector as well. Stubbornly, The United States and other free countries were standing in the way of Soviet expansion into Western Europe.

Not wanting to start World War III, The United States and Great Britain sought out a way to break the Soviet blockade. Thus the airlift known as Operation Vittles flew its first flight on June 26th 1948, one of 32 that day. At its peak, the airlift was flying an amazing 1500 flights a day into Berlin, with just over 4500 tons of daily supplies. The airlift had to supply two million people with food and fuel. It was a mammoth 15 month long undertaking to insure liberty and freedom to America’s recent foe. At first, the planes reminded German citizens of allied bombers and some American pilots weren’t to keen about feeding Germans, however, barriers quickly fell, and friendships flourished.

German children began to greatly admire the American pilots and would stand at the edges of the airport watching the planes as they descended. The best known American pilot who served in the airlift is undoubtedly, Gail S. Halvorsen. Halvorsen was amazed after he gave some gum to a bunch of German kids on a fence line, and they patiently divided it up evenly. Halverson also notes the German kids never begged. He told the kids he would drop some candy attached to little parachutes right before he flew into the airport the next day, and wiggle his wings so they could identify him.

Operation Little Vittles was a powerful publicity campaign against totalitarian propaganda and influence, which developed because of a compassionate pilot with an idea. Soon American children donated their own candy to German kids. The United States showed further resolve by announcing, “The airlift would continue indefinitely.” The Soviets, whose image was battered, lifted the blockade in May of 1949. Stalin’s intent to divide Europeans had the reverse effect. Europeans united against Soviet aggression and inhumanity, and Stalin’s actions quickened American resolve in defending Western Europe.

The Berlin Airlift could have only been pulled off by a people dedicated to a free society. At Acton University, I had a good discussion with notable blogger Hunter Baker about the the moral implications of defending freedom during the Cold War. We both agreed that many younger Americans, those who are about my age, 29 and younger, don’t understand the virtue related to standing against totalitarian aggression. During my time in seminary, some students and professors tried to make moral equivocations between the United States and totalitarian regimes, focusing on “American sins”, and “saber-rattling.” They obviously were not thinking of the Berlin Airlift, a giant humanitarian operation, which rescued millions of people from the slavery of communism, while uniting the resolve of free people. The Spirit of Freedom, which is dedicated to preserving the memory and legacy of the airlift, has a very moving video tribute to the Berlin Airlift.

Picking up on themes we’ve touched on here, here, and here, last week NYT columnist David Brooks weighed in on the culture of debt in the United States.

“The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined,” he writes. “The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened.”

Brooks has his own proposed solutions for this cultural shift. Elsewhere Richard Posner and Gary Becker debate whether there has been a paradigm change and if so what it means.

I submit that a good place to start to look would be religious institutions. Max Weber had a profound insight when he pointed out the specifically theological backgrounds (even if he didn’t get the particular backgrounds quite right) and their impact on morally-informed behavior make all the difference between someone like Richard Baxter and John Wesley on the one hand and Benjamin Franklin on the other (the easy cloak vs. iron cage comparison). A divine mandate inspires and motivates in ways other things simply aren’t able.

Brooks wants us to return to Franklin-esque “bourgeois virtues.” But it may just be that those secular virtues don’t have cultural staying power on their own, and when divorced from religious undergirding become a waystation on the way to rampant consumerism.

But hey, at least this guy has figured out a way to make the economic stimulus package permanent (unlike the Bush tax cuts).

It’s a recurring bit of guidance throughout the Christian tradition, that if Christians will only do what is right, they will make the best citizens and be respected, perhaps even celebrated, by the society and the government. This wisdom is an expansion of Paul’s note in Romans 13 that if you “do what is right” then the civil magistrate “will commend you.”

It seems this isn’t quite true these days, at least as it relates to the Christian virtue of chastity. Take the case of Lydia Playfoot, “a 16-year-old who has taken her school to court over its decision to ban her from wearing her silver ring symbolizing her chastity pledge.”

Lydia is participating in the UK version of the purity ministry named the Silver Ring Thing. Youth take a pledge of sexual purity and abstinence and signify this pledge by wearing a small silver ring. School officials deemed that this decoration violated the school’s dress code policy.

According to reports, “The school, which allows Muslim and Sikh students to wear headscarves and religious bracelets, argued that the ring was not an integral part of the Christian faith and broke its uniform policy.”

I guess government educrats have taken it upon themselves to determine what is and is not adiaphora. Far from commending the voluntary commitment to chastity, the British school system disrespected Playfoot’s virtuous expression of faith.

This case seems to be part of a larger social campaign against chastity. For instance, see the NYT review of More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven Landsburg (HT: NewsBusters), a book which claims:

It’s true: AIDS is nature’s awful retribution for our tolerance of immoderate and socially irresponsible sexual behavior. The epidemic is the price of our permissive attitudes toward monogamy, chastity, and other forms of extreme sexual conservatism. You’ve read elsewhere about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about the sin of self-restraint.

Is the government living up to its responsibilities when it actively discourages chastity?

Update (and bumped): ’Schoolgirl loses “purity ring” battle’ (HT: Religion Clause)

Says Playfoot: “I believe that the judge’s decision will mean that slowly, over time, people such as school governors, employers, political organisations and others will be allowed to stop Christians from publicly expressing and practising their faith.”

Anthony Esolen, from the March issue of Touchstone:

The most bountiful alms that the rich can give the poor, apart from the personal donation of their time and means, are lives of virtue to emulate. It is their duty. But when they use their means to buy off the effects of vice, or, worse, to celebrate it, that is an offense against those whom Jesus called ‘little ones,’ and no amount of almsgiving can lighten the millstone.

Read the whole thing (HT: the evangelical outpost).

ON SECOND THOUGHT, the reality of the situation is probably a bit more complex than the editorial above indicates. That is, there is a cyclical and reciprocal dynamic in the popularization of any trend, as it moves from sub-culture to the mainstream. Very often the rich are dependent on the poor for determining what is “cool”. The rich and famous are typically derivative and dependent in this sense. Just as often the newest trend is wearing a trucker hat or grunge as it is Dolce & Gabbana.

Take the case of rap music. An underground, urban, and grassroots phenomenon has become mainstream. And in any such transition, there are disputes as to who is loyal to the movement itself and who has simply latched on to cash in on the mainstream popularity. Thus, for instance, the dispute between Eazy-E and Dr. Dre in the mid-90’s about who is a real “G.”

This dynamic does underscore the truth of Esolen’s observation about the “disconcerting sameness” between rich and poor. Wealth and power certainly do not by themselves confer any special moral standing or integrity, and as our namesake quote from Lord Acton indicates, they can often be the occasion for greater and more comprehensive corruption.

Having a small child in the home gives the opportunity for exposure to things you might otherwise never have reason to see. Such is the case with the VeggieTales in my house. We have “King George and the Ducky” on VHS, which gets occasional play on the set. The story itself adapts the tale of David and Bathsheba, but before the story gets underway, there’s a brief prelude.

Larry the Cucumber and Bob the Tomato are the stars of the VeggieTales, but two of their friends who don’t usually take center stage give telling a story about selfishness a try. What they come up with doesn’t meet the VeggieTales standards, but it does help tell us something about the way the market works in the real world. Jimmy and Jerry Gourd tell the tales of “The Englishman who went up a hill (and came down with all the bananas),” and “The Swede who went up a hill (and came down with all the strawberries).”


The Englishman has taken all the bananas, “leaving of course the inhabitants of the hill with no bananas and therefore bestowing the term ‘selfish’ upon myself” (QuickTime video here).

When asked if he’s going to eat any of the bananas, the Englishman responds that of course he can’t eat any, because you can’t have bananas without strawberries. “You’re soooo selfish,” cries a voice from off-camera.

The Swede who went up a hill does the same thing as the Englishman, but with strawberries instead of bananas. And the Swede will not eat any strawberries, because you can’t enjoy strawberries without bananas.


When the Englishman and the Swede see that the other one has what he needs to enjoy his own fruit, they ask in turn, “Might you spare a banana/strawberry?” But each character is so selfish that he is unwilling to part with any of his own fruit, and so both the Swede and the Englishman are left unable to enjoy their fruit but unwilling to simply give away his own fruit to make the other better off.

This brief story ends with Jimmy and Jerry Gourd moralizing, “Don’t be selfish.”

Needless to say, Larry and Bob are not satisfied with this tale, and go on to tell the story of King George and the Ducky. Part of the reason Jimmy and Jerry’s tale doesn’t work is that it is too simplistic and unrealistic.

That is, it doesn’t take into account the way in which market mechanisms can redirect selfish behavior into something that does benefit both parties in an exchange. The situation Jimmy and Jerry sets up simply has each possessor of the fruit ask for the corresponding fruit, implying a reliance upon the charity of the other party.

But what is much more likely to happen in a situation like this is that the Swede and the Englishman would engage in a trade, so that each would give their own fruit to get the other fruit, and in the end both would be able to enjoy strawberries and bananas. There’s no need to depend on or appeal to the charity of the other party in this situation. And an unwillingness to trade would make the lot of both the Swede and the Englishman worse off, as they would each be left with unusable and rotten fruit.

The incentive for their own material benefit would be to trade. In this way the market mechanism can function to take selfish action and make it serve a mutually beneficial purpose. In doing so there is an element of public, civic, or social good that is performed, irrespective of the selfish motivations of the parties involved.

None of these observations do anything to mitigate concerns about the ways in which the Swede and the Englishman went about obtaining their monopoly on the respective fruits. Nor does the material benefit created in the exchange obviate the need for charity and love in human social relations. And furthermore we certainly can’t say that because selfish behavior resulted in some material good that somehow selfishness is to be understood as a virtue in the truest sense. At best brazen selfishness can manifest itself as external righteousness, civic virtue, or a public good and is to be distinguished from true righteousness, virtue, and good. Selfishness is still sin.

But what such an exchange does show is that even in a world marked by sin and depravity, some good can come out of evil. As the Puritan theologian Richard Baxter has written,

If nature be not supported, men are not capable of other good. We pray for our daily bread before pardon and spiritual blessings; not as if it were better, but that nature is supposed before grace, and we cannot be Christians if we be not men.

In this sense, the market mechanism functions as a sort of preserving grace by which material wealth is created and enjoyed, allowing human beings to continue to live and even flourish. But rather than being the end of human activity, such material prosperity is a foundational reality necessary for the actualization of greater goods, a necessary but not sufficient condition for human happiness.

This year’s Super Bowl was widely hailed as an advance for black Americans because, for the first time, two black coaches faced off in the game. But, as Anthony Bradley observes, coaches Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith pointed to an even greater achievement: They did it “the Lord’s way.”

Read the commentary here.

Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in California, has a new blog, Mouw’s Musings, and has taken notice of Sam Gregg’s recent Acton Commentary, “Self Interest, Rightly Understood.”

Giving Gregg credit for making “an important point” with which he largely agrees, Mouw goes on to say: “At the same time this also seems to me to be true. People who are not motivated by an intentional desire to promote the common good often do not in fact promote the common good. And people who do aim to promote the common good often do succeed in doing so.”

Thus, because of this second reality, Mouw concludes that there is “a need for discernment on the part of Christians in evaluating various hard-line economic philosophies.” With that point, I heartily agree.

It seems to me, however, that in some ways the point that Mouw engages, that “as individuals pursue profit” there are all sorts of unintended positive consequences, is a rather small claim that does not itself deny Mouw’s second observation. Gregg himself, in fact, writes in the immediately following line, “None of this means that commercial society does not afford opportunities for people to act altruistically.”

It is a valid point for both Mouw and Gregg to make that there is a higher good than pursuit of mere self-interest and one that is consonant with the Christian tradition. That being said, Gregg is concerned making both a more limited and more pointed claim: the good resulting from the secondary virtue of self-interest is still good, and it is even good that is essential for common flourishing.

There shouldn’t be anything controversial about such a claim, especially since it has been held by so many Christian theologians, not least of which is Jonathan Edwards, who distinguished between primary and secondary virtue.

In his treatise on True Virtue, Edwards writes that self-love “is far from being useless in the world” and “exceeding necessary to society, besides its directly and greatly seeking the good of one.” He even says that self-love can be manifest as a sort of “’negative’ moral goodness,” or “the negation or absence of true moral evil.”

Being that Edwards is concerned to explore the nature of true virtue, rather than this “negative moral goodness,” he doesn’t spend a lot of time examining the implications and social effects of self-love, and that is entirely understandable.

On that score, Edwards’ concern is more like Mouw’s in that he is seeking to describe the highest good. By comparison with Christian benevolence, the virtuous character of secondary or civil good doesn’t match up. Thus, concludes Edwards, “no affection limited to any private system, not dependent on, nor subordinate to Being in general can be of the nature of true virtue.”

But Gregg’s task is different and more limited than either Mouw’s or Edwards’ concern. Gregg is looking primarily at the civic good that self-interest promotes. And its important to realize that neither claim is necessarily inconsistent with the other.

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