There are parts of this section, particularly when Dreher is focussing on diagnosis, that are magnificent. There are other places where his implied solution (or what I think is his implied solution) makes me nervous.

First, the good parts:

One of the central things that conservative Christians must do is detach themselves from the idolatries of nationalism. Liberals hate nationalism because they dislike patriotism. Conservatives excuse nationalism and charge it to patriotism's account. Both jumble things that must not be jumbled.

This relates to another good point made in this chapter. Contemporary conservatives fear liberals more than they love liberty, and are prepared to accept anything that pokes liberals a good one. But that is hardly a political theory.

The neo-con vision for the world sets before us many admirable things -- peace in the Middle East, open markets and borders, gas at 10 bucks a gallon (oops) -- but the Christian must not accept the idolatry of the underlying secularism that is the foundation for this vision. Only Christ can bring liberty, and this means that Christ must be preached, not America, not the flag, not democracy.

But there were some things Dreher said that made me a little jumpy.

As a preacher, I would say this is generally true. And I believe that Americans need to hear a lot more sermons about avarice, greed, covetousness, and mammon than they currently do. But this would only be good if everyone involved knew that the sermons were thundering against a sin, and not against a crime. A preacher can inveigh against lust without thinking that the Department of Morality should establish the Lust Police. The civil government is not competent to handle this kind of thing. Only Christ can give a new heart. The state should therefore limit itself to enforcing the terms of a contract that is legally binding, and should have absolutely no interest in whether one of the parties is making too much on the deal, or whether the windfall will be good for his soul.

Dreher also says:

It is this kind of statement that shows that Dreher's line between sin and crime is not drawn clearly enough. First, it is not usually free markets that do this kind of thing, but rather managed markets. I am afraid that Dreher has accepted a common caricature of our economic system. We still have more capitalist traces and remnants than (say) Europe, but ours is a managed and manipulated economy, not a free economy. This means, in the long run, we have a system where subsidized and regulated business and officious government put their heads together and decide the best way to screw the little guy. In response, the little guy howls and, not having read basic economics, calls for the government to "do something." The government is happy to pretend to do so because this bestows more power on them, and the government will then have more resources to work with the next group of lobbyists for this interest or that one. Free market?

Second, to the extent that our remaining free markets might "destroy" something (my view of the mountain, say), we cannot legislate against it without destroying something far more precious (my freedom). When I was building my house about fifteen years ago, I was talking to a building inspector who came by to ask about my health. We were out in the country, on three acres, and had heard a rumor that a trailer park might be going in across the street. Not something Nancy and I had exactly been praying for, and so I asked about it. He said, yeah, that was in the works, but said that we could legally protest it. He did not know what to do when I said that I didn't have a basis for protesting it in that I did not own that piece of property. If I don't want neighborhood meetings trying to outlaw the color of my house, I better not go to any neighborhood meetings trying to outlaw the color of somebody else's house.

This is absolutely correct -- but again, the solution is the worship of God through Jesus Christ. Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit, and cannot be bought for ready money. This requires a massive reformation in the Church. There is no political solution for this kind of thing. I think it was John Adams who said that our Constituion presupposes a moral and a religious people. It is wholly unfit for any other, he said. And he was absolutely right. Taking it a step further, if Christ is not the Savior, then there is no salvation.

Again, I get a little nervous. The guiding principle of the free market is freedom, not efficiency. And few things are locally more inefficient than freedom. But, oddly, over the long haul, this inefficiency is much more efficient than the pre-planned efficiency that statists everywhere lust after. A gas station on every corner of the intersection? Inefficient. Seventeen pizza joints in a small town? Inefficient. When people are free, they will, over the long term, build humane institutions that serve human nature and human community. Dreher is right to desire this. But that cannot happen without freedom from statist constraints, and we cannot be free of statist constraints until we are freed by Jesus Christ from our bondage to sin. And that cannot be accomplished by any political theory.

Last comment. This was a good book, and I recommend it (with the qualifications noted in these reviews) as a good counterweight to the current Republican Ra Ra. With the exception, of course, of Ron Paul. He's not a Ra Ra.

Chapter Seven is entitled "Religion," and Dreher begins it this way. "Scratch the surface of a crunchy con, and you'll usually find a serious religious believer" (p. 180). My criticism of Dreher's approach here is two-fold.

But I have to set the first criticism up.

Someone who is steeped in the VanTilian understanding of the antithesis can see the incipient problem immediately -- "some form of a sacramental worldview" misplaces the antithesis. There is a sacramental worldview that is faithful to Scripture, and there are sacramental worldviews that are wholly idolatrous.

Initially, this appears to be helpful to Dreher because it enables him to move in an ecumenical direction, past his own Catholicism.

Now I think Dreher is doing the right thing here (hanging out with Calvinists) but I suspect the reason. Shared appreciation of free range chicken is not sufficient to overcome these historic boundaries. But in this chapter, Dreher includes in his crunchy con ecumenism an appreciation of Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Jewish approaches.

He implies that a sacramental crunchy con approach means that the fundamentals are sound. But at the same time, he acknowledges (perhaps unintentionally) something else.

This is exactly right, but it collides with his ecumenism, especially with an ecumenism based on shared sacramental feelings about the food you eat. If religous truths are transcendent, and they are, then Jesus is the Messiah or He isn't. The Catholic Church is the one true Church, or it isn't. The kind of ecumenical approach that Dreher takes here is one that assumes that religious claims are not transcendent. If the conflicting claims of the Christian and the Jew are subsumed under a shared crunchy con lifestyle, then this is tantamount to denying transcendental truths.

This is related to my second criticism.

But if we are talking about lifestyle, and if lifestyle refers to something more than a personal consumption item, at some point we are going to have to enact laws. Culture is impossible without them. But cultures differ because they serve different gods, and different gods require different things. This means the laws are different. Every society is a theocracy. The only question is, "Who's Theo?"

When any behavior is criminalized, that is always done to fulfill the will of a god, whoever that god may be. As Dylan put it in one of his better moments, "you gotta serve somebody." Dreher here says that he wants a secular democracy to run things, and believers of various stripes can choose their religion, just like we choose our clothes and our food.

The problem here is that it becomes irrelevant that Jesus disapproved of greed (p. 181). If the reigning god disapproves of greed then we can do something about it. But the reigning god most certainly does not disapprove of greed -- his name is Mammon after all -- and so we can do nothing about it. And if Dreher wants to do something about this greed, and he appeals to Jesus, well, then, he's a theocrat now.

His next chapter is on the environment, and I think that it is the chapter that most clearly reveals what I consider to be the weaknesses of the book. But as I disagree with some of his positions here, it is important to note that even here Dreher's balance and good sense show through. I don't think I would call Dreher a conservative on this issue, but I would call him a reasonable environmentalist -- one you could work with without setting off some kind of a partisan war. He believes what he does, but not as a "take-no-prisoners" ideologue. He thinks there are reasonable people on both sides, and he thinks there are whackos on both sides. And that's true enough, but the difficulty is sometimes in sorting out which are which. But Dreher shows his balance when he acknowledges that environmentalist monomania and hubris are one of the reasons why people don't take them seriously (p. 166).

He describes his transition from his earlier conservationism to his current environmentalism.

One of the things that factored into his shift was his encounter with Matthew Scully, author of the book Dominion (p. 156). Dreher begins by discussing factory farming, and the way many animals are frequently treated on their way toward your fast food bun. And here, every true conservative is sympathetic. The righteous man has regard for the life of his beast (Prov. 12:10). But we go back to an earlier point I made in our discussion of this book -- the difference between sins and crimes. In a moment we are going to discuss the kind of "solution" to sin that often results in the crimes getting worse, and Dreher at least sees the possibility of this. Discussing the Clean Air Act 1970, he says:

But at other times, beyond acknowledging the government solution might be as bad as or worse than the disease, he doesn't propose a way of making practical decisions based on this knowledge. And this means the default solution for "the big problems" that Dreher assumes is that of coercion and force. "It is far better to rely on market forces to shepherd society toward beneficial ends than to depend on the government" (p. 177). Amen three times. But the enviro-push is always, consistently, inexorably to statist solutions to all problems, whether real like smog or bogus like global warming. And Dreher shows no practical inclination to resist this move at all. More on this in a moment.

Dreher wants to be in the tradition of Wendell Berry and J.R.R. Tolkien.

And quoting Berry at the head of the chapter, Dreher adds his support.

And this is great, if we are talking about what we prefer in our private lives. Berry works his farm, and Tolkien refused to own a car. But we then come to the crux of the matter, which has to do with how we make our laws. Laws, for those just joining us, are those entities, which violated, result in civil penalties being applied to the offender.

Got that? Strict environmental regulation. This means, at the end of the day, men with guns making other people do things. What kind of things? By what standard? No society can exist without coercion, of course, and so the difference between liberty and tyranny has to do with how much you are forced to do, and the nature of what you are forced to do. Are you forced to refrain from borrowing your neighbor's car in the middle of the night? Or are you forced to shut down your light industry tea-cozy manufacturing plant because a neighbor thinks that three parts per million of zinc in the air or water, take your pick, increases his chances of getting cancer. It actually decreases his chances of getting cancer, but we couldn't really get away with sending him a bill. But I digress.

Now I am perfectly willing to coerce the citizenry on issues like murder, rape, assault, theft, and so on. I am not willing to shut down a man's backyard summer barbeque because a vegan neighbor doesn't like the exquisite smell of barbequed beef. So, all law is coercion, and all law invokes a standard. And if you are going to restrict someone's liberty, the standard needs to be as solid as a slab of marble, five feet thick.

But what do we currently have? What do we have instead?

This is the kind of thinking that just gives me the willies. Something passes into received wisdom, and if you even begin to raise questions about it, then you are the equivalent of a flat earther or tobacco exec. And then a second tenuous proposal is perched on top of the first (although now unquestioned) axiom. And only idiots raise questions. But facts is facts, and if you lined up one hundred, one-pack-a-day Camel smokers, fifteen of them would at some point get lung cancer. Eighty-five wouldn't. There is significant statistical correlation, yes, and a very fine reason to quit smoking, I hasten to add, but it is not the same kind of causation that we see when someone puts the eight ball in the corner pocket. And then people get whipped up over second hand smoke, and so they ban smoking in all restaurants in New York City, and so on. This is why it is curious to find Tolkien invoked. What would Samwise have done had he come back to a pub in New York City instead of to the Shire? What would he have done to the No Smoking signs? You tell me. Like Sam, I would rather breathe free than freely.

Now back to global warming. I confess that I believe the evidence for global warming to be transparently a statist flim-flam operation. I greet dire warnings on the evening news with a horse laugh. The "time's-a-wasting!" public service notices are a world-class hoot. I don't buy any of it. None. But . . .

Now I am all about prudence, and Dreher is right that prudent conservatism is a redundancy. But how on earth is it prudent to hand over to the government the kind of power it would take to combat something like global warming, even assuming it to be a threat? If it turns out to be just another enviro-false alarm, would the government hand all that power back to the citizens? Yeah, right. And how is it prudent for us to assume that we know the ins and outs of the results of global warming? Why are all the results of global warming pitched to us as unmitigated disasters? Why are we not regaled with stories about the coming greening of the Sahara?

So, we don't know that something is happening, and, if it is, we don't know what is causing it. And even if we knew what was causing it, we don't know what the practical results of it will be. And yet, despite our oceans of ignorance, we must sign the papers now. We must act now. We must hand over our freedoms now to responsible folks like Al Gore. Not going to do it. Wouldn't be prudent.

I do not see how it is prudent of me to notice some particular ache or pain, assume the worst, and as a result take three pills at random from every bottle in the medicine chest. Just in case.

The one entity in the Western world that has proven (over and over again) to be genuinely incapable of living within its means would be the government. Private individuals have to live within their means. Companies have to. Corporations have to. If they do not, then they go out of business, routinely. The government lives way beyond its means, like a sailor on shore leave after three months at sea, and it assumes as axiomatic that the only appropriate response to their wastrel ways that we might consider is to triple their means, so that they might live beyond those. If global warming is the divine chastizement upon us for living beyond our means, why would we think that repentance would involve turning unlimited authority and resources to the worst offender on the planet, to wit, the United States Gummint?

This is the kind of rhetoric that makes my brain go straight to the screen saver. I am reminded of the standard enviro-scare that used to tell us how much of the Amazon rain forest was being consumed every day, which, if true, would have resulted in no rain forest whatever about thirty years ago. Look at that first statistic again. Two-thirds of the world's natural resources have already been used up? But in order to make a statement like that with a straight face, the authors of the report would have to know what the world's resources are in the first place, wouldn't they? But they cannot know this, in large part because the resources are so vast. Here is a simple question, with hidden depths. Is salt water a resource?

In conclusion, the basis thing we have to remember -- going back to Tolkien -- is that Sauron and Saruman were not robber barons, or multinational corporations, or grasping capitalists. They were the government.

While Dreher says that he and his wife are not "pure homeschoolers" (p. 128), he does think that homeschooling is the way to go if you can manage it.

At the same time, as a non-purist, he acknowledges that this is not a "one-size-fits-all" kind of deal.

Homeschooling represents a radical committment to the education of one's children. And in many situations (when that committment is a given), however hard it is, it is the easiest godly option available.

There are other factors as well, one of them being how long you are going to live somewhere. Out the options above, one that Dreher left out was the option of founding a school, one that would be responsive to the godly concerns of involved parents. That is the course that my wife and I took when we were involved in starting Logos. All our kids went through Logos, as our grandchildren are also doing. But while our son-in-law is in grad school at Oxford, our grandchildren are being homeschooled there. There simply isn't time to start a school. But if dedicated parents are situated for good, starting a school is at least an option that they should add to Dreher's list above.

Dreher's wife makes a great observation: "Homeschooling forces you to see your home as a place where more than just consumption takes place. It leads you back to the traditional view of the home as a place where something was produced" (p. 137). A home should be more than a pod for sleeping and refueling and television watching. In the older view of the home, it was an active place -- the kind of place that had an impact on the economy. It was not to be thought of as the realm of passivity.

As I said in the beginning, Dreher says many good things in this chapter. Just a couple comments or cautions. Crunchy-con-ism needs to take care that it does not shrink below village size. Anchorite families are not the need of the hour. Family is important, but it is not all important. If I could add a qualification to Russell Kirk's statement above, it would include the necessity of preserving the Church above all. Families are a part of this, and that is the point. We don't need hermit families. We need to take care that our children grow up in community, and this needs to be broader than the family. It also needs to be centered in Word and sacrament. If the kids are homeschooled, there are ways to arrange for this, but it takes work. I would urge Dreher and those with him to consider forming schools -- not status quo schools, but schools that are responsive to involved parents. Covenant schools are not a recent development of modernity -- they go back at least to the Jewish exile in Babylon. And I think they are at least as consistent with the crunchy-con ethos as disciplined homeschooling is.

When it comes to how we configure the places where we live, and worship, something has gone very, very wrong. And we have no real way to fight back, because we have drifted into an aesthetic relativism.

In pursuit of this crucial point, Dreher cites two important books. First there is Jonathan Hale's 1994 book, The Old Way of Seeing, and James Kunstler's book, The Geography of Nowhere. With the exception of the very last part of his book (where his worldview collapses under the weight of the glories he has spent the book describing), Hale's book is simply glory upon architectural glory. Nancy read it a number of years ago, and then read it again recently. Inspired by my wife's diligence, I read it last year and the book opened up a completely new world. Unfortunately, it is a world that is not currently under construction anywhere near you. About the only contemporary application you can make is that of explaining to yourself why new subdivisions are so mud-fence ugly. I have known that they were ugly for a number of years now -- Hale shows exactly why. Take a typical house under construction today, and try to explain the geometric relations inherent in the placement of windows. Well, there aren't any. New construction ignores, defies, spits upon ancient and embedded codes for building that God placed in the world -- regulatory lines, proportion, the golden scale, or the golden section.

Dreher points out that architectural patterns that strike as beautiful function in a mysterious way (p. 97), but there is no mystery at all about which patterns have this effect.

This does not mean that houses are built with no purpose or point today. The most common principle is personal convenience inside the house -- location of the home theater room, say -- and this convenience does not include any kind of aesthetic comfort. And since no one has been trained to identify this kind of thing, we are all left with a vague sense of accumulating unease.

Dreher points to one of the themes of his book -- suspicion of the newer, bigger, faster -- in a quotation from one of the people he interviewed. "You know how we conservatives have the whole free-market thing piled into us, and we get into that mindset: new is good, expansion is good, growth is good" (p. 116).

This is a place where I have differed with Dreher before, but the difference on this point is not a matter of aesthetic principle. I still favor free market solutions to economic problems, including this kind of problem. But this does not mean that I think the free market will solve this kind of problem in five minutes. It does not mean that any snapshot judgment of the market is good -- but give it time. The free market is currently throwing these kinds of houses across the landscape like they were candy prizes at a kids' party. As the Eagles put it in one of their songs, can't remember which one, "they put up a bunch of ugly boxes, Jesus, people bought 'em." But remember, the middle ages -- back when they knew about regulating lines and all the rest of it -- built lots of atrocious things also. We just don't have to look at them now, because there was no reason to save them. The best survives, and we don't have to look at any of the ramshackle units built in the 1350s. The thing that should encourage us is that, in the long run, stupidity never works. We have no reason to believe that these houses will be anything but disposable living units. It is possible to build a house that will stand for five hundred years, and which ought to stand for five hundred years. We are not currently building very many of them -- but the ones that we do build will the ones our descendants will ooh and aah over.

This was a great chapter, and worth the price of the book.

There are actually two important issues in this chapter. I agree with Dreher completely on the first, and differ on the second -- but the agreement is fundamental, and the disagreement is (in my view) a matter of taste. The first concerns the way we eat. The second involves what we eat. And the matter of taste only becomes important if someone refuses to acknowledge it as a matter of lifestyle choice and personal taste, and tries to see it as part of the battle between light and darkness.

First, let emphasize our agreement -- the way we eat.

When this sacramental understanding is gone, families fly apart. "Families these days don't even eat dinner together" (p. 59). The modern family table has come to be thought of as a QwickServ Fueling Station -- and that is when a table is even involved. But we need to remember the centrality of love and time together, and not fall for a reductionist approach to the ingestion of nutrients.

The etymology of the word companion helps us understand what a true companion is, and how true companionship is nurtured. Panis is the Latin word for bread, and a companion is one who shares bread together with us. When I was a kid in the fifties, we ate a lot of fifties food, but we ate it together, seated around the dinner table every night. And when our kids were growing up, we had a sit-down meal around the dinner table every evening, with hours of discussion, story-telling, readings, and laughter. Now that the grandkids are here, we all break bread together at least weekly, and frequently more often than that. Eating together in love and fellowship is really important, and I think this is one of the most important points that Dreher has made in this book. But for this kind of thing to happen, it is not necessary to get the food for the event at the Food Coop. But it is more necessary to make a point of cultivating the how and why of fellowship around food, than it is to focus on the history and chemical composition of the food itself. A good cook will care about such things, but only as a means to love the people. The altar sanctifies the gold, not the other way around.

And this is where I start to part company with the argument that Dreher is making.

I don't see this distinctive of the Christian faith as an unfortunate oversight on our part, but rather as one of the glories of our faith. A man is not defiled by what goes into his mouth, but rather by what comes out of his heart. Jesus declared all foods clean, and this did not just include bacon, but also Kraft mac-in-a-box.

There are deep religious issues here, and one of them is that apart from Christ man has a deep need to believe himself put right, or made superior, or cleansed by means of what he puts into his mouth. Dreher is a clear-headed Christian, and he does see the phenomenon.

What I would suggest though, is that such Food Pharisaism is no unrelated accident, unconnected to the broader context. We need to urge Christian families to sit down and eat together as way of showing their love for one another. The end result will be joy, gladness, simplicity of heart, and a great deal of laughter. But all forms of righteousness-on-a-plate will end in spiritual wasteland, with a White Witch condemning all the frivolity and self-indulgence.

I have no quarrel with Dreher's initial reasons for getting into an organic food approach. It is a big country, it takes all kinds, and so long as he is putting his food into his mouth, where the taste will be appreciated, I think it is just great. I really do. At first they got into it because "the vegetables tasted so much better" (p. 61), and they also felt good about supporting the little guy farmer and "not big, impersonal agribusiness" (p. 61). This is great, and do so more and more. Our house sits on three acres, and I have had a go at growing corn there because I agree with this point precisely. There is nothing like fresh corn that was on the stalk fifteen minutes ago and is boiling merrily in the pot now. And if you have real butter from your own cow, even better. But there is organic and there is organic. The only corn I have been able to grow is what I affectionately call my "Third World corn." It is as organic as all get out, and no pesticides anywhere. There is also very little corn.

And so it is when Dreher's appreciation of finer things morphs into contempt for those who can't afford to do it the yuppie way that I take issue.

Okay, let's meditate on it a bit. I have a friend here on the Palouse who farms many hundreds of acres. First, however easy it would be to dismiss him as an "impersonal" industrial farmer, he is no more impersonal than any of my other friends. A lot of times, people dismiss others as impersonal simply because they have not met them yet. Secondly, this friend of mine is doing a wonderful job feeding a lot of people on the other side of the world who used to (back in the good old organic days) routinely starve to death.

Whenever we turn up our nose at something, we have to ask ourselves what we are comparing it to. Fresh corn is far superior to corn flown in from Nebraska in a big freezer. Corn flown in from Nebraska is superior to no corn at all. Inferior food is superior to no food.

It is nice to be rich. When I say this, I am not being snide. I really do think it is a blessing from God. But one of the perennial temptations of rich people, one that the Bible commands us to avoid, is the pressure to show contempt for poor people and their limited choices. Poor Marie probably never said, "Let them eat cake," but that statement does summarize the problematic attitude the wealthy frequently have. When you have the wherewithal, it is easy to exhort others to impossibilities.

This is a great example of yuppie belt tightening. Don't go to Starbucks so much, you waster, and I can just imagine a subsistence family on the other side of the world, kept alive by my friend's big farm wheat, just staring at us.

Well, let's just call it compassionate conservatism then. What good is a traditional lifestyle when everybody you know in it dies?

This is not to say that no criticisms of agri-business are sound. But we have to identify the right problem. As Dreher points out, perhaps inadvertantly, the problems here are frequently government problems. Capitalism is quite a different system than mercantilism, and mercantilism (our current system) does cause many unnecessary problems. But mercantilism grows precisely because of our tendency to discover a problem and start yelling for a law. And when the law is passed, it turns out that the big boys in business have the resources to manipulate the system, and the little guy never does. Dreher acknowledges this, but the acknowledgement is in tension with some of the remedies he proposes elsewhere in the book. Dreher quotes one woman "who says she went all the way from the left wing to the right wing without ever once trusting the government" (p. 75). Good for her. And as Dreher points out elsewhere in this chapter, there are good reasons for mistrusting the government, even when they are interfering in the food business to make everything all better.

Exactly. And so how are we going to fix any genuine problems we might have by giving the government more authority over our food? And, in the meantime, let us remember that the enjoyment of different kinds of foods -- even the kind that comes out of a can -- is not a problem that we need to solve.

In the blogospheric chatter that has come up over my review of Dreher's book, one of the funniest comments was the caution that I am "a theonomist." This is funny because my commitment to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in the public sphere requires me to argue that we need to remove a bunch of coercive and restrictive laws. Some people are afraid of tyranny, but many more are afraid of liberty. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, and biblical law is the perfect law of liberty.

That said, there are still reasonable questions. We can see the implicit trust that we have come to place in the state as savior whenever we try to make this distinction between sins and crimes. The civil magistrate is commissioned by God to maintain and keep public order and decency. The job of the state is to keep people from getting mugged or murdered, and not to ensure that their children's teeth are checked regularly.

But when the state refuses to outlaw certain things -- like greed, or lust, or parental negligence of a child's dental health -- it is false to say that the advocate of keeping such sins legal is someone who approves of those sinful things. In my case, not only do I not approve, but one of the reasons I think they should be legal is that by refusing to apply false remedies, we leave room for the only true remedy -- which is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Whenever the state tries to eradicate sin, the only thing they do is multiply sin. Their efforts at salvation are like taking a mallet to a puddle of mercury. False saviors getting underfoot don't make anything better, and to oppose the interventions of false saviors is not the same thing as applauding the sin.

Theft is a crime; greed is a sin. I want the police to track down thieves. I want the question of greed to be absolutely none of their business. Rape is a crime; lust is not. I don't want any lust police. In these examples, there really is sin to be dealt with. Only the grace of God can deal with it, and so we shouldn't murk the situation up with political slogans than presuppose we can deal with the heart of man by means of legislation.

But this is also crucial because in a political setting it is perilously easy to assign the guilt of sin to others on the basis of something other than the Word of God. This usually happens on the basis of whose ox is being gored. In other words, we can easily advocate restrictions on a global corporation because they "obviously" want cheap labor overseas because they want to fill their Greedy Coffers. But why does this question of greed not arise with regard to the American workers who don't want people overseas, living in grinding poverty, to have a shot at getting out of it? Why do the workers and the corporate execs, who both want that extra $3.25 an hour, have radically different motives assigned to them? They are fighting over the same money. Why don't they have the same problem? The answer is that they may or may not have the same problem, and whether they do or not has nothing whatever to do with what the law ought to be.

Before I tell someone -- whether a man, a woman, a business, a corporation -- that they must submit to a particular act of legislative coercion, I want to make doubly sure that this is something that God requires of us. I know that God requires us to apply coercive measures to murderers and rapists. When it comes to the manufacuture of micro-chips outside the territorial borders of these United States, I don't know anything of the kind. I believe that in the context of a robust Christian worldview, coercion should always be a big deal. We should never advocate it lightly, and we most certainly should never advocate it because the solons of Congress have detected impure motives in my competitor's heart.

All true conservatives, as they should be, are wary of the ism. The problem is not consuming per se. Adam and Eve were told that they could eat from any tree in the garden, which meant that it was lawful for them to walk around and be consumers. The problem is the elevation of consuming into an ideology, or consuming more than you produce, or a means of creating a personal identity . . . in short, consumerism.

Dreher is balanced at this point. "There is nothing objectively wrong with material progress, and a great deal right with it" (p. 29). And he knows that he cannot really extricate himself from that progress. "Besides, there's something funny about a guy tapping out a philippic against materialism on a state-of-the-art laptop computer" (p. 29). And he records the appropriate warning his wife gives him -- "Just don't get on your high horse and diss technology too much, because if we didn't have that freezer and that microwave, I wouldn't have the time or the energy to do nearly as much home cooking as I do" (p. 38). So Dreher is no Luddite, and he clearly has a bias toward balance -- but I still wish some of the lines in this chapter were clearer.

We have to make the distinction between consumption (as a necessary calling for all creatures) and consumption as an idolatrous principle of social organization. A desire to get away from the former is actually to give way to the first temptation ("You shall be as God"). Only God does not consume. And the latter approach is to build a civilization with an ugly statue of Mammon in the public square.

And this sets up my first observation. Idolatry is a matter of the heart, and it can occur anywhere. It occurred in the Garden, when our first parents (surrounded by a perfect environment) decided to disobey God. It occurs in gardens, in deserts, in living rooms, in monasteries, in communes, and on the floor of the stock exchange. But it can also be avoided in all those places. Now, speaking of Eric Brede, Dreher says, "He points out that the philosophical developments that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution were advocated by English liberals, who are the true philosophical forefathers of most who claim the conservative mantle today" (p. 36).

This is quite true, but there are two issues involved here. When these English liberals (like Adam Smith) discovered how an "invisible hand" governs the production of all goods and services, they were actually discovering something about how God made the world. The division of labor really does affect the price of pins. But the second issue (where I believe Dreher and I would agree) occurs when people turn this simple discovery into an ultimate worldview, believing that this market therefore has the capacity or authority to set the price of everything -- including the souls of men and women, or other permanant things like beauty, justice or holiness.

Great problems are caused when people blur these two categories. When this kind of thing happens, people believe that Newtonian physics is somehow an argument for Deism, or Einstein's General Relativity is somehow an argument for moral relativism. The free market, as articulated by Smith, does not require us to believe that we can or should buy and sell the human soul. What Smith discovered has nothing whatever to do with that.

But if we blur this, we can blur it in both directions. One man can look at what Smith demonstrated, and then falsely "discover" something else. He slaps his forehead. "Man does live by bread alone, after all!" But knowing why bread costs a buck twenty five per loaf does not serve as an adequate premise for the conclusion, "There is no triune God." But another man errs in the opposite direction. He can know, on the authority of Jesus, that man does not live by bread alone, but then believe that because he knows this great spiritual truth, that somehow price fixing by the goverment ceases to be an incoherent act.

What Smith discovered (apart from the worship of Mammon that some have advanced downstream from Smith) is that in the realm of economics water does not run uphill. Other men have discovered (in the physical realm) that water doesn't run uphill there either, and it does not follow from this physical datum that God does not exist.

Now what water does and does not do, it does and does not do in all manner of settings. When men use water to cool the presses that they are using to print their pornography, that water does not run uphill. When I use water to baptize a child, as I did yesterday, it also does not run uphill. In the same way, the price of cocaine and the price of prayer books are both determined by the market, and the market does not tell us which we should prefer. The price of adoption and the price of abortion are both determined by the market. The market does not tell us which is the godly choice. Now if you have no god besides the market, then you have given yourself over to the worship of Mammon, and though you may be gained the world, what does it profit? You have lost your soul. But a man can refuse to worship Mammon and yet feel no obligation to argue with Adam Smith over how the price of cabbages came to be what it is.

Now I believe that Dreher does an outstanding job in reminding us that a man is more than the sum of his possessions. The warnings in this chapter against Mammonism are timely, and most needed. But I do believe that Dreher tends to blur the distinction between market forces in their "just the way it is" capacity and market forces in their "idolatrous reason for living" capacity. He rejects the second, as do I, but this seems to lead him to think that the former is more flexible than it is. But it isn't -- water simply won't run uphill, however much it would be to the benefit of a hard-working conservative family living at the top of the hill.

Dreher tells a story of a family of his acquaintance that had enrolled their children in the state's Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). When the Republican legislature there in Texas mandated cutbacks in the CHIP program, this particular family was forced to make some unpleasant choices, including putting the kids into government schools, and so on. In response, Dreher wrote, as he put it, a "scathing column" in which he ripped "the GOP legislature for the CHIP cuts" (p. 47).

Now let me offer here the disagreement that Dreher was expecting, and keep it all within the bounds of civility. No unshirted anything -- although I may point out that even on Dreher's accounting, he started this particular imbroglio, what with his scathing and ripping column. But, whoever started it, there is something substantive here to discuss and debate. Dreher says that he learned that "for quite a few of my fellow Republicans, almost nothing matters more than keeping taxes low" (p. 47).

Okay, fair enough. But here is the problem. "Keeping taxes low" is a phrase that can be placed in different stories or contexts, and with radically different effects. Dreher objected to these cutbacks because of how the reduced government program would negatively affect a family that he knew. But the assumption in this is that the program existed for those who were struggling, and the people who were paying the taxes for it weren't among those who were struggling, and that therefore the only possible reason they could have for wanting their taxes low was greed simpliciter. But I have been a pastor for many years, and this includes helping people with financial struggles. And for every lower or middle class family I have worked with that had financial struggles, for every "program cut" difficulty I have seen, I bet I could produce fifty "tax burden" difficulties. Dreher points to a family who put their children in the government school because of a program cut. But suppose I could point to numerous families who could afford tuition in a Christian school if their taxes weren't so high. Now what? A program cut or a tax hike is a simple dollar amount. We have to put that dollar amount into a story, and when we do, we do so in accordance with a particular narrative standard.

This last part is great. God doesn't mind his people having money, He minds money having His people. God doesn't mind His people having an economy, but He does mind if that economy, and all the cares of this world, choke out their spiritual life -- and Jesus warned us repeatedly about this problem. But the first part of this comment didn't make sense to me. What does it mean for a writer, writing on economic issues, to say, when challenged, "I'm a writer, not an economist"? I am a writer too, but I don't just write nouns and verbs with no content. When I write, I am talking about something. And when I propose something, or I say something that has certain ramifications, I need to be able to defend the view that I am advancing by means of my writing.

In the illustration that Dreher used, his wife offered to help the other family out financially, "but Joan kindly said no, that they were going to find ways to handle it themselves" (p. 46). But this is the reverse of what actually happened. They weren't handling it themselves, which is fine -- they needed outside help. But the family in need here turned down help that was offered to them voluntarily, and turned to the government for help -- but the help offered by the government was funded, as it always is, by people who would be fined or put in jail if they didn't "contribute." As one writer has noted, we need to stop saying "public and private" sector, and start saying "coercive and voluntary" sector.

We really have to look past the slogans that are put forward in the name of government compassion -- "for the kids," "helping working families," and so on. Around the time of the Second World War, eighty percent of all black families had both a mom and a dad, a wonderful blessing for the kids. Twenty percent did not. Today that figure is reversed -- the eighty and the twenty go the other way. Now, who is responsible for this? Why haven't they been held responsible? And more to the point of this discussion, what slogans were used to cover up the devastation that our ignorant, but no less evil, compassion has wrought?

This is why knowledge of economics is not optional. I don't worship Mammon because I believe my Bible. But after we have all agreed to not worship Mammon, how do we get real help to the people who really need it? I don't put my hand on a hot stove because I know what happens after that. I don't support government compassion for the same reason. This is not because I am opposed to charity and compassion -- just the reverse. Judas, who kept the money bag, wanted to know why Jesus allowed expensive ointment to be poured on His feet, instead of requiring that amount to be given to the poor. Those who wanted to help the poor had their yard signs all ready. "For the kids! Judas for treasurer!"

But here is the problem. When capitalists are idolaters, the problem is not in the capitalism. When a man murders another man with a knife, the problem is not found in the law of physics. Western economics drives how the supply chain works -- efficiently. The law of physics ensures that a sharp knife enters a soft body efficiently. But murder is in the heart, and steel is the instrument. Idolatry is in the heart, and the market is the instrument. Dealing with idolatry by making sure regulations get underfoot in the market is like trying to prevent murder by mandating dull knives.

This anticipates something that I hope to develop in a future installment, but when it comes to lawful goods and services like widgets (no child porn), we should just turn the market loose. Let 'er rip. On the price of eggs, books, and window shades, I am a libertarian. And what happens when people use their liberty to make, produce, advertise, sell, and consume truckloads of inane, stupid, and idolatrous stuff? For, Dreher would point out, they will do so. And I would agree. They will do so. But this demon of consumerism cannot be cast out with law. Law can and should restrain crime. Law is absolutely helpless when it tries to deal with sin. We need to find men of God with backbone who understand the gospel of grace, men who will preach the only salvation from sin, who will fill the pulpits of our churches and . . . let 'er rip.

In saying that it was quite good, I do not mean to say that I agreed at all points, but I do mean to say that Dreher has opened a discussion that is well worth having. He is self-consciously trying to call the conservative movement back to its Burkean past, listening to and heeding men like Russell Kirk, Wendell Berry, G.K. Chesterton, and others. This would be in contrast the money, money, money approach of many who call themselves conservatives.

Some of his chapters were magnificent. Some articulated a principle we need to recover, but in my view misapplied them. Some raised questions that need answers, but Dreher did not fully develop the answers one way or the other. And in some places, I think that Dreher simply misses the fact that the "alternative counterculture lifestyle" is just another aisle in that big box store that we affectionately call America. I would like to work my way through this book chapter by chapter in what I would describe as a respectful critique. Taking one thing with another, I would much rather try to work with what Dreher proposes than what is currently being served up by the mandarins of the contemporary conservative movement.

In the preface to the paperback edition, Dreher says this:

This is dead center on, and it represents why this book is so important. But, as they say, the devil is in the details. When you bring things down to the local level, you will eventually find yourself in conflicts with friends and neighbors, and will discover that all politics is personal. In this age of high tech and nation-wide political machinery, we have sought to hide this fact from ourselves . . . but direct mail politics is the equivalent of bombing the enemy from thirty thousand feet.

Dreher's journey into crunchyism began, not surprisingly, with food, during which pilgrimage he discovered that cauliflower was more than a "delivery platform for ranch dip and cheese sauce." In fact, the book might be described as a broad cultural apologia from a Republican writer and thinker who began shopping at the Food Coop, and who then discovered some other stuff. And this beginning also displays one of Dreher's strengths -- he knows exactly how goofy some of this stuff looks to the outsider, and he is adept in disarming all such objections.

He is also great at diagnosis. Here's what ails ya.

Dreher is really strong in describing some of the soul-wasting assumptions that are frequently found on America's right wing. But the solution, whatever it is, will still not be imposed from the top down, even if there are local and personal reasons for thinking that "there ought to be a law." And in addition, there are a multitude of statist restrictions and regulations (by definition applied from the top) that will impede the restoration of sanity in our local communities. In short, the solution is going to be found in worship of the triune God -- no baals can deliver us. Not the home-grown organic local baals, and not the nationalist Baal of war, commerce and empire. I believe that Dreher would agree with this, but in the course of this review I want to push it a good deal further than I believe he does.

This is all very good, but it brings the central question I have about this book to the forefront. As we are investing ourselves in Burke's little platoons, what are we willing to make other people do, and why? This is the question underneath all matters of law and justice, and answering it will tell us how to take and apply this book. Eating free range chicken for dinner and supporting legislation that will restrict carbon emissions (to prevent 2017's laughing-stock, global warming) may seem like different aspects of the same worldview. But they are not at all. The first is a personal choice in a free country, and the second is bad coercive law based on bad science, in what is decreasingly a free country. The former feeds the mouths of your family and the latter feeds the maw of the state.

All this said, I enjoyed this book greatly, and hope that the questions it raises will be as profitable in this series of reviews as they were for me in the book itself.