No economic system is perfect but American capitalism is arguably the most admired on earth. With all its flaws it has created more wealth for more people than any other economy in human history, and in the process, has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system as well.

Simply put: American free-market capitalism is the most powerful economic machine in the history of the world.

Stephen Moore and Julian Simon, in “It’s Getting Better All The Time” write: “America’s hospitals schools, universities, technoligies, inventions, churches, courts, businesses, highways, airlines, cities, farms water systems, food chains, money, military, governent structure are the envy of the world.”

Bill Bennett, in “Why We Fight,” writes: “Whatever may be America’s many faults, we have provided more freedom to more people than any nation in the history of mankind, that we have provided a greater degree of equality to more people than any nation in the history of mankind, that we have created more prosperity, and spread it more widely, than any nation in the history of mankind, that we have brought more justice to more people than any nation in the history of mankind, that our open, tolerant, prosperous, peacable society is the marvel and envy of the ages.”

As to helping minorities, in a nation of over 315 million people, with blacks constituting eleven percent of the population, the richest talk-show host (Oprah Winfrey) is a black woman, our highest paid athlete (Tiger Woods) is  black, the highest paid pop-singer (Michael Jackson) is black, and, even though dead, remains the highest-paid, although some say a poor white lad from Memphis beats him in some years. The chief law-enforcement officer who is ultimately responsible for the execution of every single law of the most powerful nation on earth (Eric Holder) is a black man, and our highest elective office which houses the leader of the entire free world (Barack Obama) is black.

It is always to be remembered: the poor of the third world possess almost nothing; the American poor have cars, televisions, and cell phones.

When Europe was totally devastated following WWII, America had thirteen million men under arms, possessed the A-bomb and had the most powerful military on earth, but she did not conquer the world; she disarmed. And then, under the Marshall Plan (which see!) America rescued the entirety of western Europe financially from the wreckage of its economies, and prevented Russia from owning western Europe as she did eastern Europe. And that is not to mention America’s protection of Europe and the world from the two other “isms” which, together with the Bolsheviks, took the lives of over 172 million people(!)—Fascism and Nazism. The financial cost of the Marshall plan alone? Over 13.3 billion American dollars—in mid-1940 dollars! And none of that is to mention the countless billions which America has given in foreign aid, in many cases, to people who despise our wealth, but need it to survive. Think “Israel”—who does not hate us,” “Egypt,” “Greece,” etc., etc.) Consider the fact that neither NATO nor the UN could survive without American dollars in the face of socialisms which simply does not produce enough financially to save their own countries, much less others. All thoughtful Americans expect more pleas for financial bail-outs because of our economic power—even in what we call “difficult” times financially.

Canadian commentator Gordon Sinclair wrote about America coming to the financial aid of hurting people. He said, “I can name you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble?” He said that, when fifty-nine American communities were flattened by tornadoes, nobody helped.” (“’Let’s Hear It!’ for the U.S.”)

Bill O’Reilly stated on “The Bill O’Reilly Factor” that America has liberated over 400 million people. And that at the cost of hundreds of billions of Amrican dollars produced by free-market capitalism. That statement was made before our rescue of Kuwait (3 million people), Iraq (38 million people) and Afghanistan (32 million people. That happened because Americans believe all humans possess certain “unalienable” rights, that is, rights which no man but God gave us and that no man or group of men should be able to take away from us, AND because she had sufficient capitalism-produced dollars to pull it all off financially.

A Fox News contributor, Ziad Abdelnour, writes about American “Exceptionalism:” “’Exceptional’ is a nation that can rise in less than 200 years to become the strongest, most dynamic economy in history, a nation born not of ancient tribes but of the best and hardest-working the rest of the world’s nations has to offer. That is what makes America ‘exceptional.’ There is no other such nation on Earth. There never has been and there will probbly never be again….We must have a second American Revolution. We must retain our economic freedom.” He then says, “You can do it yourself, by creating wealth for yourself.”

A footnote: free-market capitalism works everywhere it is turned loose. “In Asia, the turn to the capitalist way has raised up more than a half billion human beings out of an immemorial poverty just in the past twenty years.” (Michael Novak, “An Apology for Democratic Capitalism,” in “First Things,” February, 2009, p. 41.)

The danger to the world’s most powerful economic engine? A proliferation of onerous governmental regulations in an effort to redistribute American wealth which will kill jobs, produce a drag on business expansion, and destroy incentives to take entrepreneurial financial risks. Americans do not fear taking financial risks; they do fear punitive government financial policies which guarantee risk failure.

The Twilight of Atheism, Alister McGrath (on Chapter 8, p. 199f)

McGrath says that certain emphases in classic Protestantism (notably by Luther & Calvin) tended to (he says “did”) lead to atheism on the part of many. In doing so, some of his arguments are palpably false, others are misleading, and he fails to give proper recognition to the bases of the reformers concerns about iconography and liturgy in the Catholic church.

1.  “Martin Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone is an example of this tendency to move away from a corporate understanding of society.” p. 199. (Nonsense; a false dichotomy.)  He later (p. 200), accuses the reformers of “the divorce of the realm of the sacred and secular.” (Ditto.)

2. “Salvation was no longer determined by membership in the church, but by one’s individual relationship to God.” p. 199. (Indeed!)

3. He admits that Weber’s thesis has been widely discounted, but writes as if it hasn’t. (It has been widely discounted; see Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason.)

4. Divorcing the sacred from the secular, he says, meant that “God could not be known directly; God has to be known indirectly.” He repeats this throughout the chapter. “The absence of any expectation of encountering the divine directly through nature or in personal experience inevitably (sic!) encourages belief in a godless world—a world that lives ‘as if God did not exist.’” p. 209. (It is simply impossible to imagine Luther or Calvin thinking or saying such things.)

5. He argues—throughout the chapter—that, for the reformers, one could not expect to encounter and experience the divine in everyday life. (202) (Again, one imagines Luther and Calvin yelling a cosmic “NO!”)

6. He writes incredible things on p. 203: “Christ could only be known as an absence,” “The outcome was inevitable and predictable. God became an absence in the world,” “For Catholics—as opposed to Protestants— the world was ‘charged with the grandeur of God,’” etc.) (I continue to wonder which reformer ever held such positions.)

7.  Yes (see p. 297) Protestants did de-emphasize (“fail,” to use his word) the imaginative aspects of the faith, but an honest man has to admit the possibility that the Catholics “failed,” and continue to do so, to properly appreciate the Biblical text! His entire thesis is, in my view, shipwrecked on his failure to deal with WHY the Protestants were anti-iconic in worship—which was based on their repudiation of popular Catholic heathenism which icon-centered worship produced. His admissions of this huge problem for the Catholics are weak and rare: see pp. 207 and 209-210.

8. He does not, in discussing the Orthodox and Catholic positions, ever deal with the almost total absence of any emphasis on Biblical exegesis, both in their medieval and modern congregational worship, except in some sort of ritualistic form.

9. To say that “God ceased to be a living reality in the popular Protestant imagination” (p. 211) is lunacy.

10. “Once more, it is a small step from declaring that God cannot be pictured (!) to suggesting that he cannot be conceived as a living reality in the rich imaginative life of humanity.” p. 212. (A truly amazing sentence with heavy pejorative insinuations, and a criticism, not simply of Protestantism, but of demonstrable Biblical Hebraic thought. McGrath has a pronounced tendency to superimpose general sociological categories when defining Christian worship.)

McGrath would be far better served, in my view, to say that all humans —without any reference to denominational categories or the absence thereof—are prone to divorce churchianity—liturgies or non-liturgies of every sort—from the recognition of the true and living God. To put it in a different way, morphological fundamentalisms of every sort—high church, low church, broad church, no church—are apt to set in when Christians gather. Are some worship styles more conducive to an authentic-and-Biblically-centered-existential-Christianity than others? Maybe so and maybe no. It would be, and is, an interesting debate. But if I were forced (it would take force!) to take one side as against the other, I’d take the motley and slipshod evangelical scene (I’m thinking of evangelicals as a sub-species of “Protestantism” here) against the Roman and Orthodox Catholics every time. (He himself does that in affirming Pentecostalism.) Did some Protestants fail to fully assimilate the best of Protestant theology? Yes, of course, they did and do, as many Catholics did and do with the best of Catholic theology. In my view, he utterly fails in his essential argument, i.e., basic Protestant theology provably, and justifiably, produced atheism.

For those who wonder about papal power, let them contemplate this: by a single sentence the current pope, Francis I has taken center-stage in the world’s media and will produce hundreds of thousands of sermons by sermon-makers of every sort.  The genial and gentle man said that if a person was “gay,” but sought God and was a person of good will, “who am I to judge him?” His handlers are scurrying into print and speech to draw boundaries around his statement, but there it stands, in his own words and nobody else’s words about his words, and in context. And—one recalls—in direct contradiction to the position of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, whose take on the subject was that homosexuality is “an intrinsic moral evil” and an “objective disorder.” Catholics, predictably, are dividing left and right on implications on the pope’s statement.

One asks, to begin with: was the pope a bit squeamish in not using precise words (homosexuality, sodomy, etc.) but the colloquial (and English) “gay,” which carries far less opprobium than the more accurate words?  (The fear of words is an intriguing study!)  Perhaps he was speaking only for himself, but, of course, no pope ever speaks for himself alone (thus, the world-wide dust-up). And, indeed, as he asks, who is he to judge?

All humans, we all agree, should be treated with dignity and respect. That does not mean, cannot mean, that we may not make moral distinctions about human activities. All of us do that many times every day.  Human existence is unthinkable without it. About this specific matter, Christ’s apostle put it plainly: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites…will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.” On this, and all moral issues, why not quote (the many) explicit and pertinent biblical references?  (Emphasis added. I note in passing: putting the Bible aside for the moment, one never hears the act defended as “natural.”)

The plight of current western civilization is, in simple terms, as follows: we all have four essential sources for moral instruction: the family, the school, the culture, and the church or synagogue.  Alas, if the “Vicar of Christ on earth,” the one human who alone, we are told, has the power to speak “infallibly” on moral issues, does not agree with the explicit teaching of scripture, where does that leave the faithful?  In his statement, he has chosen to align the church with the  other three bases of our societal moral compass, all of which are in demonstrable moral decline.

In truth, no serious student of the Bible will be surprised by these things. We are plainly taught there that, in the last days of human history, A “great falling away” (the word is apostasy, i.e., a defection from the truth) is going to occur amid Christ’s flock. I kindly suggest that it is at least possible that Francis’ remarks match the prophecy.

Malcolm Muggeridge’s word is appropriate here: watching the demise of the church in England, along with the frank and open forfeiture of biblical convictions on the part of many among the clergy, he observed that empty church buildings are not tragic, but that it would be tragic to change the biblical message in an attempt to fill them.

Finally, I suggest we hope that Francis’ remarks were taken out of context, a possibility that is—at this point—not at all obvious.

“For the first time in American history,” the article begins, an American professional “from a major sport” has outed himself as a homosexual. The media is totally abuzz about it all, calling him “brave,” “avante-garde,” a  “hero,” a “front-running leader” in the “battle” for the rights of minorities. He is featured, next morning, on the national morning news programs, in multi-segments. Many are assigning him the number “42,” comparing him to another professional athlete who wore that number on his jersey when he broke the color barrier in major league baseball.  A past president applauds him. The current president telephones him and says he is“extremely proud” of our new hero, and is sure that the athlete’s admitting his homosexual sex  preferences bodes well for the country in many ways. The president’s wife tweets her effusive congratulations. One sports writer says the NBA commissioner should “demand” that the athlete be given another contract (he is a free-agent) to be fair. The young man, then, would have two “firsts,” the second one being given an undeserved job as a professional athlete solely to affirm current- but-ever-changing political correctness.

One ponders this question: if the athlete (let us suppose, for analysis sake) was to change his opinion later about homosexuality and go “straight,” one ponders whether the press and the illuminati would immediately jump on his new bandwagon in lock-step. The president has no word of encouragement to say to a well-known professional football player—a man of sterling character who has routinely visited, on his own dollar, various foreign countries to help the helpless—when he was pilloried by the press for certain public displays of his Christian faith. What we need not ponder is what the president would say, or when he would say it, if the NFL player outed himself as a practicing homosexual.

I have no personal animus toward the athlete. His sexuality is his (I almost said “private”) business. I wish him all the best in his sports career, and in his life. I wish, as well, that he had not felt the necessity of inviting the nation into another bedroom.

I ponder something else. Why is it that the sexually odd, the outré, are touted while traditional morality is consistently trivialized? And this: does all this buzz—not of the activity of a single individual but the national response to it— say anything about moral decline in America? St. Paul’s analysis of another culture comes to mind. He said of them, “…whose god is their belly and whose glory is in their shame.” He added, “Whose end is destruction.” (Philippians 3:19)

I am reading, again, Jacques Barzun’s excellent “From Dawn to Decadence,” a celebrated analysis of  the last five hundred years of western civilization. He is at great pains to say that “decadence” has nothing to do with morals, but with art, music, architecture, the “aging” of attitudes about institutions, the prevalence of a general cultural malaise, etc. It is as if, at the base of things, nobody can really say what is right or wrong, what is ethical or unethical. That would be entering into subjective sentiment. Or maybe he is saying such judgments are unimportant, even if we could distinguish the moral from the immoral. Here is the question of modern liberal “enlightened” western civilization (we being the inheritors of every single value of the eighteenth century “enlightenment” !): is it even possible to decay morally as a culture? And, if so, could such a thing be quantified? And would it matter anyway? American modernity, in every measurable way, says “no” three straight times.

Ten years after her death an extensive correspondence between Mother Teresa and her half-dozen spiritual advisers has come to light which indicates that she struggled, for the better part of half a century, with a sense of God’s absence.  Only twice, apparently, in the correspondence does she openly state that she doubted God’s existence, but the sense of His absence was persistent.

What are the possible explanations?

1.  Many, most, Christians have, at times, sensed something of God’s absence; it is endemic to the human experience.  And the Catholic mystics were notoriously so afflicted, i.e., “Brother Saul,” “St. John of the Cross,” et al.

2.  It is possible that she was suffering under a teaching that we are saved, or made acceptable to God, by means of our good deeds; if that was so, or to the extent that it was so, one cannot be surprised that she had difficulty sensing that she had pleased God.

3.  Several psychotherapists, of various stripe, have suggested that she was so passionate to live a perfect life, in total communion with God, that she set her sights too high, and thus, found them unattainable.

4.  She, confessedly, was worried about her pride; it may be that she was desperate to fight it and that her reaction was overdone.

5.  It is possible that her commitment to poverty produced an unhealthy state, physically, which produced psychological or spiritual ramifications of a negative sort.

6.  It must be remembered that Christians are called upon to suffer with Christ, not in order to help the true Messiah in His own role, or to play–in any sense–a messianic role, but in identity with Him in His life and sufferings.  Perhaps an extreme devotion to Christ–either proper or improper–on her part explains her experience.  (Some expressions of Catholicism come dangerously near to the position that we can, indeed, suffer salvifically–for the salvation of–others.)

7.  It must be remembered that Mother Teresa was living in one of the most spiritually depraved cultures on the planet–a culture given over to demon-worshipping idolatry.  That, alone, would impose immense pressures on the spirit of a genuinely committed Christian.  (If it be asked why her assistant nuns did not have her experience, it may be (a) they did but did not report it, (b) they experienced it but to a lesser extent, (c) they did not possess the depth of her passion for Christ and His work, or (d) different psychological and/or spiritual dynamics were operating in them.)

The following is a commentary on the book, ATLAS SHRUGGED, by Ayn Rand. 

Ayn Rand, born in Russia in 1905, immigrated to America and wrote “Atlas” in 1957.  It is considered one of America’s premier novels.

“Atlas” is a fictional work which serves as a commentary on Rand’s philosophy of “Objectivism,” which she says she originated.

The novel is both a powerful defense of “free-market capitalism” (with which I agree) and a (perhaps unintended) graphic expression of its excesses.

Her leading figure, John Galt, is a messianic figure and is accompanied by several of his apostles (Francisco d’Anconia, Hank Rearden, and Dagny Taggart). Galt lives out Rand’s philosophy and—toward the end of the book—delineates and espouses it to the entire world in a three-hour globally-aired speech. They alone, with a handful of others, are of sufficient mental acuity to understand Rand’s economic philosophy.  She has a manifest facility in put-downs, both subtly and patently, of those who disagree with her, or are simply too dim-witted to get her “objectivist” philosophy embodied in her heroes.

The essential story-line is that a country (America?) sells out to an economic process by means of which all the wealth of the country is re-distributed, not only to the needy of the country, but to every needy person on earth.  If a child in Patagonia does not have shoes, a resident of the mythical wealthy country may not purchase a second pair for his own child. In the end, the economy utterly fails and Galt and his free-market capitalists—financially dispossessed by a rampant socialism—live reclusive lives in a secret valley where they can live in freedom from the “moochers,” i.e., the socialists.  The book ends with the small group planning to revive the utterly destroyed economy of the country by re-introducing free-market capitalism.

My observations:

• Rand’s essential philosophy is that of a calculating selfishness; neither you nor I owe anything to each other innately.  If we mutually choose (key word) to make a deal which is equally beneficial to each other, then a deal is made.  Neither your need, however, nor mine, can make any claim on each other.  Rand endlessly pillories the idea of sacrifice for another unless there is a free choice in such an act, and an equal compensatory result for both parties.
• Every man should seek his own happiness and contentment first and foremost. (Interestingly, no child is mentioned in the novel, running to almost eleven hundred pages; one wonders how such a philosophy could possible function in a family setting. But then, no family is depicted in the book either.)
• Rand is an atheist and has a dread of people “of faith.”  Only one such person, a priest, makes a quiet appearance and a quick exit in the book.  Rand later wrote that she did not know how to make such a person a believable character, and so didn’t create one.  (That is mystifying since her obvious genius is character development.) She calls such people “mystics,” and blathers often about their shallowness and refusal, or incapacity, to think.  She is feverishly afraid of the doctrine of original sin or even the theory that man is innately inclined to sin.  That would take away man’s most precious gift—true freedom of action.  She gives us no information as to how it is that, universally, all men—I almost said “egregiously and continually”— sin.  To explain a universal accident, occurring to billions of people, across thousands of years, is difficult.  She doesn’t try.  (Defacto, a universal “accident”constitutes a universal law.)  Sentiment has no justifiable place in Rand’s landscape. It is only cool hard calculating rationality that counts.  (Reading C. S. Lewis’ small jewel of a book, “The Abolition of Man” is a sovereign cure for such a theory as he delineates the important, indeed, necessary, place of sentiment in the lives of all humans.)
• Her theory is that life’s great virtue is to use one’s mind, to develop one’s capacity for “real” thought.  She doesn’t say the words, but one is led to believe that, in her view, only those who espouse her own philosophy are true thinkers.
• Interestingly, one of her common mantras is a perfect redundancy: “Existence exists!”  She repeats it often.  And, again, apparently only she and her followers could possibly really know that fact.  (On such a view, a rustic who says—assuming he is standing behind his harnessed mule and has been asked about its existence—“My mule EXISTS!” would qualify for membership in her exclusive club.  One finds it difficult to see the profundity of her scream unless she thinks everybody else is a pure philosophic immaterialist, i.e., a person who believes nothing exists outside the mind.)  And the answer is “no;” she nowhere explains what we are to understand by the obvious fact that existence does exist beyond the obvious and self-evident fact that it does.
• She has a lot to say about morals, but, at bottom her philosophy is amoral, unless “moral” means you and I may justifiably profit in any deal if we get what each of us wants from each other.  Her “morals” (she uses “sanity” almost as a synonym for morality) are of sufficient elasticity for her heroine, Dagny Taggart, to sleep with Rearden and d’Anconia, and apparently, with Galt.  (I suppose one could argue that at least she is discriminating, engaging in sex only with apostles.)  “Morals” for her are simply cultural mores without any transcendant origin or implications.  Remember: no family, happy or sad, is seen in the entire novel!
• She holds that free market capitalism has no basis in a Judeo-Chrisian ethic since it is based solely on self-interest.  Obviously, she has nothing to say about the founding fathers and/or their views on the issue.  America (if she is speaking of America) is exceptional only and solely in an economic sense.
• John Galt’s lengthy speech is so long, so rambling, so convoluted, and so beset with philosophical material (he quotes Aristotle) that perhaps five percent of the general population might have some clue as to what “objectivism” really is.  Remember: the speech was made to all humans on the planet.  One imagines people, upon hearing the speech, in all the great cities in the world, and throughout the countryside, running amok with banners and brass bands in wild joy and unbounded ecstasy shouting that now, they finally understand, from soup to nuts, acceptable economic philosophy.  One more easily envisions the same people pulling the radio plug seven minutes into the speech, plugging in the popcorn machine and calling for beer.
• Rand says (p. 7 of the introduction to the book) that she is the very first human being who has ever created a “new, original abstraction—objectivism—and translated it through new, original means (i.e., fiction).  This as far as I know (she writes) is only me—my kind of fiction.  (Emphasis hers) May God forgive me (Metaphor!) if this is mistaken conceit.”  (Emphasis added!)  Her friend, Leonard Peikoff, who writes the introduction to the book, says (p. 8) that her assessment might be right.  “Atlas,” he says, “might, indeed, be a mistaken conceit.”  His two final words are:  “You decide.”  I have.  It is.

“In America, we have a lot of celebrities, but very few heroes.”

The celebrity pastor tends to …

• Have a pervasive sense of entitlement
• Pursue the symbols of success instead of the status of success
• Believe he is entitled to financial success, so is keenly interested in obtaining it
• Be enamored with celebrities and run with them
• Be inaccessible to his parishioners
• Manifest a corporate CEO mentality, be a manager of people
• Be intensely pragmatic; if it “works,” it must be the thing to do
• Quickly copy what “works” for others
• Be an avid student, and user, of the media
• Be passionately devoted to his image since, to him, image trumps everything
• Interpret his success in numerical terms (and, ergo, demand that his staffers produce numbers)
• See no connection between his own spiritual life and the leadership of his congregation
• Be famous for…..being famous
• BELIEVE AND SAY OPENLY THAT HE IS RESPONSIBLE ONLY TO GOD

Several final observations:

• the “celebrity” pastor will not be guilty of all that, but much of it will mark his life.  
• In the nature of the case, the “celebrity” pastor will vehemently deny such a description fits him, even if it is obvious to those—including family members—about him.  
• It must be obvious to even the most casual observer that such activity, with the necessary changes, describes political, athletic, and entertainment celebrities.