Family Matters

I talk about my children at work. And I talk about my work at church. The context in which I work and worship is quite the opposite of Susan Wise Bauer's grim experience [May/June].

The difficulties Bauer encounters hark back to industrialization in the midnineteenth century and the emergence of a doctrine of separate spheres, in which men were narrowly defined as breadwinners and women narrowly defined as homemakers. Society has expected men to work unimpeded by family matters. And, more recently, to the extent that women have gained professional employment, the expectations have been similar.

But not all workplaces and church settings demand that women lead bifurcated lives. Workplaces like mine, where family concerns are positively regarded, represent no mere accommodation to women's responsibilities as mothers. Rather, they are affirming places because male colleagues are both academics and fathers who are actively involved in their children's lives. Recognizing that provider and child-rearing roles are not gender-specific creates a context in which both women and men can acknowledge the whole of their lives, both at work and at church.

Barbara Wells

Hope College

Holland, Mich.

"Fundamentalism" As Code Word

I am an enthusiastic B&C reader. It is simply a delight to read. I've usually found the commentary and critique incisive and enlightening, and imbibing it has become a major part of my intellectual regimen.

In light of this enthusiasm, I was disappointed by your editorial decision to allow Andrew Chignell [May/June] to make the simplistic and pejorative connection between "inerrantists" and "fundamentalists." The term "fundamentalist" is today no more than a code word that has little descriptive content. It does have, however, a very clear and widely understood illocutionary force: In good Hofstadterian fashion, it gives the writer a convenient way to assure the reader that he is really quite unlike those embarrassingly anti-intellectual country cousins. I hope that B&C will not permit the collective inferiority complex of evangelical academics to dictate this kind of rhetorical strategy.

I see your publication as having great potential to help undo much of the harm done during the "battles for the Bible" of the 1970s and '80s, and I hope that in your efforts to achieve a sophisticated and intellectually respected product you do not stoop to denigrate a significant part of the evangelical academic world (not to mention a potentially large constituency). For the growth of the cultural enterprise that your publication has already done a lot to inspire, we need as unified a body of scholars as possible. Please continue to strive to become that point of unity.

Eric J. Miller

Ph.D. candidate

University of Delaware

Newark, Del.

Evangelical Narcissism

In the March/April issue of Books & Culture, Prof. Roy Anker reviews the lavishly trophied film The English Patient. I found his review indicative of what I see evidence for everywhere: the "romantification" of the evangelical subculture. "Filmmaking like this happens but rarely," Anker writes. "Indeed, from the first frames on, the film does not so much tell a story as cast a spell."

One can certainly appreciate the cinematic skill of such a movie, but one looks for a decent story to no avail. Like much postmodern fiction it intentionally obliterates a clear narrative line, weaving instead a tapestry of glamour. The origins of this word are in the medieval grammar, which was associated with the practice of occult spells and incantations. And what this film glamorizes is the betrayal of personal and civic loyalties. Indeed, the central motif of the movie is the violation of all boundaries: boundaries of marriage, nationality, and ultimately the boundary betweeen good and evil. But where boundaries are erased (as in the opening sequence wherein an airplane flies over the enigmatic borderless Sahara), commitments wither, and in their place are enshrined adultery, treason, and narcissism.

Narcissism: the sin that contains its own apparent justification. How can something that feels so right be so wrong? And this is the cardinal question of our century. When Hitler was rallying Germany to the battle cry of the master race, I am certain it felt good to be German. For those of us who grew up in the decade of protest and "free" love, if it felt good it was good. Now, as we gyre toward the end of this benighted century of war and tenuous "peace," evangelicals (who once winced at the seductions of the cinema) proclaim the virtues of the "spell," as over against the story.

I found myself thinking of James Davison Hunter's Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation, a sociological study of the lapsing of the subculture (which once was a counterculture). Hunter examines the concrete ways in which evangelical piety and holiness traditions have become desiccated and are finally being left behind for popular Americanisms like expensive cars, home entertainment centers, and a host of behaviors associated with the culture at large. What started as an attempt to offset the separatist tendencies in fundamentalism is ending in an accommodationism that looks more like worldliness than the "subtle as serpent/guileless as a dove" mandate. We are not only in the world, we are conspicuously becoming "of" it.

Bruce Herman

Gordon College

Wenham, Mass.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 5

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