By ROSS DOUTHAT

AS a taxpayer and a conservative who hopes to remain on good terms with the Internal Revenue Service for many April 15ths to come, I don’t want to speculate too freely about the motives of the “low level” I.R.S. employees who decided to single out Tea Party groups for an inappropriate level of attention during the heat of the 2012 campaign.

But I’m willing to guess this much: Even though an American Civil Liberties Union official described their excessive interest in right-wing groups as “about as constitutionally troubling as it gets,” the bureaucrats in question probably thought they were just doing their patriotic duty, and giving dangerous extremists the treatment they deserved.

Where might an enterprising, public-spirited I.R.S. agent get the idea that a Tea Party group deserved more scrutiny from the government than the typical band of activists seeking tax-exempt status? Oh, I don’t know: why, maybe from all the prominent voices who spent the first two years of the Obama era worrying that the Tea Party wasn’t just a typically messy expression of citizen activism, but something much darker — an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.

The historical term for this kind of anxiety is “Brown Scare” — an inordinate fear of a vast far-right conspiracy, which resembles the anti-Communist panics of our past. As the historian Philip Jenkins wrote in 2009, Brown Scares no less than Red Scares recur throughout American history. They fasten on real-enough phenomena, from homegrown fascist sympathizers in the 1930s to the militia movements in the 1990s, but then wildly exaggerate both the danger these extremists pose and their ties to the conservative mainstream.

In the ’30s, Jenkins noted, this mentality inspired the persistent media-fed fear that “the U.S. was about to be overwhelmed by ultra-Right fifth columnists, millions strong, intimately allied with the Axis powers.” In the ’60s, it persuaded many liberals that Dallas’s right-wing fever was somehow responsible for John F. Kennedy’s assassination even though the president’s actual assassin was a Communist sympathizer. (This idée fixe persists to the present day.) After the Oklahoma City bombing, it led many people to tar the entire militia movement as terrorist, not just extremist, and then to conflate the militias (this was one of Bill Clinton’s defter moves) with the mainstream small-government right.

Our own era’s Brown Scare followed a similar pattern. Early in President Obama’s first term, a Department of Homeland Security report predicted an increase in right-wing extremism, citing real threats but also employing “a definition of extremist so broad,” Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker noted, that “it seemed to include anyone who opposed abortion or immigration or excessive federal power.”

As the Tea Party movement gathered steam, liberals consistently echoed the D.H.S. report’s themes, warning that the movement’s fringier elements and often-overheated rhetoric (which were real enough, and worth criticizing) were laying the groundwork for a wave of far-right violence.

Invoking J.F.K.’s assassination and Oklahoma City, these critics then leapt to connect the dots every time a kook pulled a gun or set off a bomb somewhere — whether it was a lone neo-Nazi shooting a guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, the apparent murder (ultimately ruled a suicide) of a census worker in rural Kentucky, or even the failed Times Square bombing (which turned out to be the work of a would-be jihadist, but not before Michael Bloomberg had suggested that it might be “someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something”).

The dots-connecting peaked, of course, with the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, which was instantly deemed a case of right-wing incitement leading to political violence, with the blame going to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and conservatism in general.

When none of this turned out to be true, however — the shooter was not really a political actor at all, but just a mentally ill lost soul with no connection to partisan politics — the scare began a slow retreat. The Tea Party had won its midterm victory, and as the movement’s ardor cooled and its influence diminished, the fears of its critics began to diminish as well. With Beck off Fox and the Tea Partyers off the streets — replaced by Occupy Wall Street and union protesters, often shouting none-too-moderate slogans of their own — it became harder to look at American conservatism and see Brownshirts or grand wizards on the march.

But moods and prejudices linger even after panics recede. The I.R.S. and the conservative movement have never been on the best of terms, and perhaps the recent abuses just reflect that longstanding tension. But I suspect it’s more than that, and that this episode will be remembered as one of the last embarrassments produced by our era’s Brown Scare.

Baylor is home to renowned researchers and scholars. Scattered around the university, they produce research and papers, many of which define their fields.

One such scholar is Dr. Jeff Levin, University Professor of epidemiology and population health. His research looks at how religion affects public health and he is considered by some as the “Father of Epidemiology and Religion.”

Levin came to Baylor in 2009 with an appointment at the Institute for the Studies of Religion.

“What’s unique about my position here, I’m trained in biomedical sciences and in health,” Levin said. “I function as a social scientist but my background is in the humanities. What’s unique about here, I do medical research but I work in an institute with sociologists.”

He said being at Baylor has been a great fit for him and his research.

“I appreciate there are few places, maybe Baylor is it, where I can conduct with the research I do with the colleagues I do, focused on religion,” Levin said.

Dr. Jeff Levin and his wife, Dr. Lea Steele, are both
epidemiologists at Baylor. Levin is considered
the “Father of the Epidemiology of Religion.”
(Courtesy Photo)

Research
Levin said his current research has three main foci: analyzing data from global health surveys to identify religious determinants of physical and mental health, studying healing and the work of healers and outlining the public policy implications of faith-based resources for the public health sector.

He said part of his research involves working with larger data sets.

“I’ve been working on these huge data sets,” Levin said. “I haven’t done real data collection. Especially the last couple years. I’ve done a number of analyses of data.”

His research with healers is something he said has always been one of his interests.

“Healers. I’ve known a lot of these folks, interviewed a lot of these folks,” Levin said. “Maybe they are healers, maybe they aren’t but it’s been really fascinating. I’ve written some historical pieces on healing.”

His third main area of focus looks at the more political, policy-oriented side of research. He looks at the public policy implications for faith in public health.

“I’ve written some public policy-oriented pieces trying to promote the idea that religious organizations, religious institutions have something to offer to strength the public health infrastructure of health,” Levin said.

In his time at Baylor, Levin has published several scientific articles as well as two books. He has mentored many honors thesis students through their projects.

“Each of the last several years I’ve had an honors student,” Levin said.

Honors program director Dr. Andrew Wisely said Levin has been a great honors thesis director for many students.

“I think he’s a great director to get for a thesis although both he and his wife need to protect their research time,” Wisely said. “But I know they enjoy working with students, and I think students could sit down with either one of them and come away with a list of books off his head or her head that would get them a great jump into any topic having to do with their epidemiological specialty.”

Levin said he enjoys working with the students.

“In fact, that’s the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been at Baylor, working on honors theses,” Levin said.

Brownsville Master’s candidate Cindy Salazar worked with Levin through her undergraduate Honors Thesis, and he was on her committee throughout the process for her Master’s Thesis.

“He’s been a great mentor,” Salazar said. “He’s led me in what I’m doing.”

Salazar said she first heard about him after reading one of his books in another class. When one of her professors connected her with him, she was excited to work with him.

“When I got connected with him, it was amazing,” Salazar said. “He’s never been unpleasant to work with. He’s hard, he expects a bit. He pushes you to be more.”

Salazar said he always takes time to ask her about where she is through her doctoral applications and where she is in life.

“It was a very fostering experience,” she said. “He lets you do as you can to reach your capacity. I see him as more of a mentor.”

She also said he’s very humble as an academic. He focused on his students learning the process of conducting research and the thesis process.

“After my thesis, we started working on the manuscript,” Salazar said. “He didn’t care whether his name was on it or not. That was an eye-opener. Even my thesis, I tried to cite him because he’s so important in my field but he cares more about the substance.”

Dr. Larry Dossey, internal medicine doctor and New York Times bestselling author, said he has worked with Levin throughout his career.

“We go back about 20 years,” Dossey said. “I have written several books of the role of spirituality and health. One of my books was about healing which wound up in the New York Times bestseller list. That book brought me and Jeff together. It was almost an automatic friendship as far as professional and personal interests are concerned.”

Dossey said he has termendous respect for Levin.

“He is one of those rare individuals who has almost single-handedly created a field of interest in academia,” Dossey said.

He said Levin’s success in academia is well-deserved.

“He’s one of the most courageous people I’ve bumped into in my professional life.” Dossey said. “He began to research the correlations between spiritual practices and health and longevity long before anyone knew those correlations existed.”

Dossey said one of Levin’s key qualities is his huge heart and generous support for other people.

Medical Humanities
Levin is also a professor of medical humanities. Dr. Lauren Barron, clinical professor and associated director of medical humanities, has worked with Levin through the department.

“He writes prolifically on the intersection of faith and health,” Barron said. “The fact that we have this renowned scholar right in the middle of Baylor who’s doing extremely influential work in the field of religion and health; it’s extraordinary to have a scholar of his caliber at Baylor. His books and his writing are just fundamental to this concept of how spirituality affects health.”

She described him as charming and intelligent. She said he is a pioneer in the field of epidemiology and religion.

“I guess something that sums him up is his willingness to come speak to my class and share,” Barron said. “He’s generous with his experiences and expertise. And in a way that’s engaging and exciting. He’s very unique and I think his presence at Baylor is an amazing gift.”

Barron said unlike many other professors at Baylor, she does not hold a Ph.D. but rather an MD and she said sometimes, scholars of his caliber aren’t the best communicators.

“There are times when brilliant scholars may not at ease with those of us who are not,” Barron said. “He strikes me as someone who loves people and looks for ways to help share his experience and expertise.”

Barron said the first time she had lunch with him, she went in intimidated by his accomplishments and academic stature, but that was immediately gone when she met him.

“He was extraordinarily warm, engaging, chatty, relaxed, passionate,” she said. “He was warm and kind and interested in the program and very generous in his willingness to share his work and expertise.”

Personal Life
Along with his accomplishments in academia, he has also found a way to balance family life and work.

“That’s not a challenge,” Levin said. “My wife is also on staff here, Dr. Lea Steele. We’re a two-epidemiologist-family. I think for both of us, our work is very important to us. The fact that we’re both epidemiologists, I don’t have to compartmentalize work and home. It’s not a challenge. I love being a professor.”

Dr. Lea Steele, research professor of biomedical studies, said he has eclectic interests inside and outside of academia.

“He is funny and he’s just so smart,” Steele said. “He’s very unique in the way he thinks about things. He’s definitely outside the box in how he approaches intellectual, personal challenges. He’s got a lot of interests. He’s a film buff. He just knows a lot about a lot of things. He’s knows a lot about country music. I think of him as mostly an intellectual but he has great instincts in a lot of areas.”

She said she hopes Levin’s unique career path will inspire students.

“I think it will help students,” Steele said. “Because students don’t really know there are fields you go into that can reconcile and allow you to pursue how science and faith are connected.”

She said being at Baylor has been a great opportunity for Levin to pursue the kind of work he’s interested in.

“This is unique in the world,” Steele said. “It’s the only place where you get scholars in different disciplines look at their disciplines as it compares to faith. All kinds of great scholars. The Institute for the Studies of Religion is such a great place for his love.”

Academic Background
Levin graduated from Duke University and went to University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to study epidemiology in graduate school. He said the origins of his research over religion and public health stemmed from a term paper in a class on social and cultural factors in health.

“I recalled seeing a few studies about religion and public health in medical literature,” Levin said. “I thought this was fascinating, so I took the whole semester and I found about a dozen of these papers. The professor said, ‘This is interesting, you ought to write it up as an article for a journal.’”

Levin said he then went back to the library to search the literature again to ensure he hadn’t forgotten anything.

“I started searching the literature,” he said. “I found more and more studies. Over the next four to five years, I would go to the library. In 1987, I had discovered over 200 of these studies, wrote it all up and ended up sending it to a medical journal. This was the first literature review that suggested religion was related to health. That kind of got me started.”

He said he didn’t set out to find this field, but he is glad to have been able to contribute.

“I think I played a part in stimulating interest,” Levin said. “It’s a part of science now. It’s been rewarding to think I contributed to this. There’s also a helpful and inspiring message. The ideas you have and the research you do can potentially create a field that other people will gravitate to. Decades down the road, there could be a new field of study. In a way, this is how science and biomedicine advance. It’s kind of been rewarding. That’s how it starts, as a graduate student who wrote up a term paper.”

He said initially, his research was met with a level of controversy, however he doesn’t think that’s the case anymore.

“After more than 4,000 studies in this field, I don’t think the controversy is a big deal,” Levin said. “Early on, I guess for me, I just ignored it. The hardest thing was getting our studies reviewed by journals. We live in a time now of medicine and mind-body medicine and advances in the study of medicine. There has now been a generation or two of scientists that have been trained in epidemiology and sociology and psychology.”

Levin said for now, he’s focusing on his third foci of research.

“For me, the whole public policy angle, the third area, I want to continue to evolve my work to look at public policy implications,” Levin said.

He said he would like to be involved in the public policy making process in Washington.

“I want my work to count for something other than a long list of publications,” Levin said. “I want to reach people with decision making authority. It’s kind of exciting. I want to help try to continue to contribute to that process. If my work can interface with that world, then fantastic. I’m also completely content at Baylor. I have the best academic position in the country.”

Levin said if he had a piece of advice to give to students he would say to “follow your heart.”

“Once one is in graduate or medical school, there will be opportunities to decide what kind of specialty; follow your heart and see what you’re drawn to,” Levin said. “This is a decision that will affect you for the rest of your life. It should be something that energizes you so even if you weren’t a doctor, you’d what to read about. The same thing when it comes to research. Pick a topic that hasn’t been researched to death. It’s easy to pick a subject where there’s a huge infrastructure down. Follow your heart. It’s your life.”

Tsarnaev Conspiracy Central

By Philip Jenkins

In the aftermath of the Boston bombings, some members of the Tsarnaev family resolutely refused to accept the charges against the two brothers, and hinted at dark official conspiracies. I know exactly why they are so suspicious.

Please understand, I do not personally accept any allegations of official conspiracy in this affair. In my view, law enforcement agencies acted as bravely and efficiently as they possibly could against two truly dangerous terrorists. But here’s the problem. Over the past twenty years, the independence struggle of the Chechens and neighboring peoples of the North Caucasus has involved ferocious violence, frequently directed against innocent civilians. Throughout, this has been an ugly and confusing clandestine war, marked by repeated acts of deception and provocation. Russian forces assuredly have engaged in false flag actions, seeking to blame atrocities on rebel forces. Chechens naturally assume that American agencies follow the same tactics.

However poorly reported in the West, the scale of terrorism resulting from this Caucasian conflict has been horrendous. If the United States or a European ally suffered such carnage on a regular basis, we would be wondering if the nation in question could escape total collapse.

As the Russians tried to suppress the insurgency, so Caucasian forces — usually Muslim — took the war to the enemy, carrying out mega-terror attacks on Russian soil. Among the worst incidents, we think of the terrorist takeover of a Moscow theater in 2002, which killed 130 hostages, in addition to forty militants. In 2010, two women suicide bombers killed forty commuters on the Moscow subway. The following year, forty civilians perished in the bombing of Moscow’s Domodedovo airport. Suicide bombers have also brought down airliners. Most notoriously, the Islamist seizure of a school in Beslan (North Ossetia) in 2004 killed almost four hundred, including two hundred children. And those ghastly “spectaculars” were just the tip of a very large iceberg of continuing murderous attacks.

In most cases, there is no reason to doubt the attribution of blame, particularly when actions were publicly claimed by terror leaders like the monstrous Shamil Basaev (who was probably assassinated by Russian forces in 2006). Sometimes, though, attributing responsibility is close to impossible.

The most troubling such incident occurred in September 1999, when huge bombs detonated in apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buynaksk. Three hundred innocent civilians died, most of whom were sleeping in their beds. (Other simultaneous attacks were planned, but prevented). Popular fury about the atrocity gave an enormous boost to the new government of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. This patriotic upsurge gave the Russian state the justification it needed for a renewed offensive in the Caucasus. The resulting conflict — the Second Chechen War — lasted a decade and killed perhaps a hundred thousand.

As the apartment bombing story developed, though, it became still more sinister. Government critics noted implausible elements in the official account, and they noted the highly convenient timing of the crime, just as the regime needed an excuse to renew its war effort. These suspicions were further publicized when billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky fell out with the Putin government, and used his wealth to promote a media campaign denouncing the official version. Berezovsky’s propaganda war against Putin ended this year when he died in England, the victim of a highly controversial apparent suicide. Another prominent advocate of official conspiracy in the apartment bombing case was intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, who also died in England, murdered by exposure to a rare radioactive isotope. British law enforcement and media have widely attributed the Litvinenko murder to the Russian government.

Although the apartment bombing case remains the most controversial, it’s not hard to find activists who accuse the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, of covert involvement in virtually all the major terror attacks in recent years.

The notion of false flag provocateur terrorism might seem like gross paranoia, but it has been a well-known intelligence strategy through the years, and one highly familiar to Russia. In its modern form, the method was largely devised by Pyotr Rachkovsky, who served as head of overseas operations for the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police. Later Soviet agencies like the KGB imitated their Tsarist predecessors enthusiastically, and the FSB has inherited much of the old KGB world-view. (Putin himself served as a KGB officer for sixteen years).

False flag actions have various goals. At the simplest level, an intelligence group might set up a front organization to allow the perpetration of a violent act in such a way as to escape responsibility — in other words, to achieve deniability. Alternatively, an agency can carry out an outrage in a way that places the blame on some hostile group or nation, so that this enemy will be stigmatized. In extreme cases, an outrage might even justify a military response or a declaration of war.

The clandestine structure of terrorist groups makes such false attribution easy enough. Hypothetically, imagine a situation in which Russian agents have penetrated the command structure of a hostile terrorist movement, such as a Chechen Muslim group. A low-level operative receives an order to carry out an act and obeys it, knowing nothing of the real purpose he is serving. Truthfully, then, we could say that the actual crime was the work of a Chechen group and a Chechen terrorist — but the orders came from Moscow. As English thriller writer Eric Ambler observed, the important thing is not who fires the shot, what counts is who pays for the bullet.

Matters become still shadier when we think of the clandestine underworld of rogue intelligence agents and would-be spooks, double agents and independent contractors, lone wolves and petty criminals, any of whom would carry out the bloodiest atrocity if sufficiently well paid. In some cases, neither intelligence agencies nor terrorists might be entirely sure who actually orchestrated a given attack.

The more widely conspiracy charges circulate in a society, the harder it becomes to accept any act at its face value. An intelligent or well-informed person will respond suspiciously to virtually any official statement or attribution of responsibility. And that is why some people around the world, however improbably, will always regard the Tsarnaev affair as a manifestation of American manipulation and dirty tricks.

A Baylor University professor noted for his studies on the role of religion in the social behavior of young people likes the way Omaha officials and community organizers are battling juvenile crime.

Byron Johnson began a two-day visit to the city on Sunday when he appeared on a panel at Covenant Presbyterian Church to discuss “Why Faith Matters, and How It Could Matter More.”

Johnson briefly touched on his latest book, “More God, Less Crime,” and said he will go into greater depth on the topic during a daylong conference today starting at 9 a.m. at Salem Baptist Church, 3131 Lake St.

“I’m trying to demonstrate through research what (Omaha) already knows to be true,” Johnson said. “This conference is going to expose how and why faith matters.”

Johnson lauded Omaha 360 and its director, Willie Barney, who also was on Sunday’s panel. Omaha 360 is a coalition of organizations focused on ending gun and gang violence and developing thriving, revitalized neighborhoods.

Johnson said he wished he had known about Omaha 360’s efforts 2½ years ago, “because I would’ve written a chapter in my book about you.”

Omaha 360 is a blueprint for other cities to follow, he said later.

“Omaha 360 is the exact idea for others to follow,” Johnson said. “It’s a holistic approach, an integrated effort that deals with the many problems we have for juvenile crime.”

Johnson borrowed from the 1960s advertising jingle for Brylcreem, a hair-styling product, when describing how religious and secular organizations can work together. “A little dab of God will do you” when cities are searching for ways to reduce crime, he said.

“That’s what Omaha 360 has done by mixing a dab of this and a dab of that. I’m really hopeful that Omaha 360 could become a model, because they’re doing some very good things.”

Johnson said his research in prisons shows that people who want to break out of the cycle of crime and punishment need help in a variety of areas. Offenders often need everyday skills such as the ability to balance a checkbook and parent properly if they want to successfully re-enter society, he said.

Barney said even though he’s not a minister, he felt a calling to reduce juvenile crime eight years ago during a pawnshop robbery in Benson that resulted in the death of a young suspect. Prayer walks, closer cooperation with police and more employment opportunities have reduced violence by 50 percent in some neighborhoods, he said.

“It’s great to have the pastors and faith leaders engaged, and it’s great to have the government and elected officials engaged, but we’ve seen the greatest results when people (take) some personal responsibility,” Barney said. “We believe the greatness of Omaha can be extended to every single ZIP code, and that’s the responsibility that God has given us.”

Barney said Omaha 360 aims to provide employment, housing, support services and education opportunities to make tangible differences in the community.

Johnson nodded as Barney spoke.

“I look forward to getting to know Willie,” he said. “I think you’re kind of creating a laboratory here that we should study.”

Contact the writer: 402-444-1272, kevin.cole@owh.com

Williams exercised his influence through his seven great novels, his criticism, and his overtly theological writings—although theology to some degree informed everything he ever wrote. Some, including myself, care passionately about his poetry (I said “care about,” not “understand”). Amazingly, though, given his enduring reputation, Williams’ plays remain all but unknown and uncited, even by those who cherish his other work. Now, these plays are not “lost” in any Dead Sea Scroll sense: as recently as 2006, Regent College Publishing reissued his Collected Plays. But I have still heard erudite scholars who themselves advocate a Williams revival ask, seriously, “He wrote plays?” Indeed he did, and they amply repay reading, for their spiritual content as much as for their innovative dramatic qualities. Two at least—Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury and The House of the Octopus—demand recognition as modern Christian classics, and others are plausible candidates.

As a dramatist, Williams was a late bloomer. Although he was writing plays from his thirties, most were forgettable ephemera, and his most ambitious work suffered from his desire to reproduce Jacobean styles. In 1936, though, as Williams turned fifty, his play Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury was produced at the Canterbury Festival. This setting might have daunted a lesser artist, as the previous year’s main piece was Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, which raised astronomically high expectations. Thomas Cranmer, though, did not disappoint. Cranmer was after all a fascinating and complex figure, the guiding force in the Tudor Reformation of the English church and a founding father of Anglicanism. Yet when the Catholic Queen Mary came to the throne in 1553, Cranmer repeatedly showed himself willing to compromise with the new order. He signed multiple denials of Protestant doctrine before reasserting his principles, recanting the recantations, on the very day of his martyrdom. Famously, he thrust his hand into the fire moments before he was executed, condemning the instrument by which he had betrayed his beliefs.

Williams’ play is a superb retelling of the history of the English Reformation, but most of the interest focuses on Cranmer himself. Williams studies the journey of a soul en route to salvation despite every effort it can make to resist that outcome—what he calls “the hounding of a man into salvation.” This powerfully reflects the belief in the working of Grace, of the Holy Spirit, that is such a keystone of Williams’ theological framework.

We follow Cranmer along his way through the acerbic commentary of the Skeleton, Figura Rerum, one of the mysterious characters Williams repeatedly used to reveal the inner spiritual aspects of the drama. Although they appear on stage, they normally remain unseen by most or all of the human characters. But the Skeleton is much more than a chorus or commentary: rather, he represents both God’s plan and Cranmer’s destiny, “the delator of all things to their truth.” He is also a Christ-figure, who speaks in mordant and troubling adaptations of Jesus’ words from the Gospel of John: “You believe in God; believe also in me; I am the Judas who betrays men to God.” He is “Christ’s back,” and anything but a Comforter. The Skeleton, moreover, is given some of Williams’ finest poetry, lines that stir a vague recognition until you realize the intimate parallels to Eliot’s yet-unwritten Four Quartets.

Despite Cranmer’s timid and bookish nature, he is led to a courage that will mean both martyrdom and salvation, and will moreover advance God’s purpose in history. Ultimately, having lost everything and all hope, he throws himself on God’s will (in one of Williams’ many echoes of Kierkegaard). “Where is my God?” asks a despairing Cranmer. The Skeleton replies,

Where is your God?
When you have lost him at last you shall come into God.
…
When time and space withdraw, there is nothing left
But yourself and I; lose yourself, there is only I.
But even at this moment of total surrender, the play offers no easy solutions, and no simple hagiography. In the last moments, with death imminent, Cranmer even agrees to the Skeleton’s comment that “If the Pope had bid you live, you should have served him.” If he is to be a martyr, that decision is wholly in God’s hands: “Heaven is gracious / but few can draw safe deductions on its method.”

The success of Thomas Cranmer marked a shift in Williams’ interests to drama. Over the next nine years, up to his death in 1945, he would publish only two novels, as against eight other dramas that, together with Cranmer, would make up his Collected Plays. Like his friend Christopher Fry and other English dramatists of the age, Williams sought to revive older forms, including mystery plays and pageants, and some of these works are among his most accessible. Seed of Adam and The House by the Stable are Nativity plays, but as far removed from any standard church productions as we might expect given the author. In Seed, Adam also becomes Augustus, and the Three Kings represent different temptations to which fallen humanity has succumbed. In the pageant Judgement at Chelmsford, episodes from the span of Christian history provide a context for one very new and thoroughly modern diocese largely composed of suburban and industrial regions, and already (in 1939) facing the prospect of destruction by bombing. Yet Williams unites ancient and modern, placing Chelmsford firmly in the Christian story alongside Jerusalem and Antioch: all times are one before the Cross.

But if all the plays are worth rediscovering, it is his very last—The House of the Octopus (1945), a theologically daring story of an encounter with absolute evil—that best makes the case for his stature as a first-class Christian writer. Remarkably too, this play gains enormously in hindsight because of its exploration of ideas that seemed marginal to Christian thought at the time, but which have become pressing in an age of global church expansion.

The House of the Octopus offers a highly developed statement of Williams’ elaborate theological system, which we can trace especially through the earlier novels. His key beliefs involved what he termed substitution and exchange, in a sense that went well beyond the customary interpretation of Christ’s atonement. For Williams, human lives are so intertwined that one person can and must bear the burdens of others. We must, he thought, share mystically in one another’s lives in a way that reflects the different persons of the Trinity: they participate in what Williams called Co-inherence. Moreover, this mutual sharing and participation extends across Time—to which God is not subject—and after death. In his novel Descent Into Hell (1937), a woman agrees to bear the sufferings and terrors of a 16th-century ancestor as he faced martyrdom in the Protestant cause; he in turn perceives that loving aid as the voice of a divine messenger—and he might well be right in his understanding.

Stricter Protestants found Williams’ vision of the overlapping worlds of living and dead unacceptably Catholic, if not medieval, and accused him of heresy. Wasn’t he teaching a doctrine of Purgatory? Williams was perhaps taking to extremes the Catholic/Anglican doctrine of the communion of saints, but he was guided above all by one scriptural principle, expounded in Romans 8: the denial that anything in time and space can separate us from God’s love.

If some of Williams’ visionary ideas fitted poorly in the England of his day, they could still resonate in newer churches not grounded in Western traditions. House of the Octopus, for example, used a non-European setting to suggest how familiar dogmas might be reimagined in other cultures. The play is set on a Pacific island during an invasion by the Satanic empire of P’o-l’u. Although the situation strongly recalls the Japanese invasion of Western-ruled territories in World War II, and the resulting mass slaughter of Christian missionaries, Williams never intended to identify P’o-l’u with any earthly state. This is a spiritual drama, and the leading character is Lingua Coeli, “Heaven’s Tongue,” or the Flame, a representation of the Holy Spirit, who remains invisible to most of the characters throughout the play.

When alien forces occupy the island, they immediately demand the submission of the native people, who have recently become Christian converts. Terrified, one young woman, Alayu, denies her Christian faith and agrees to serve instead as “the lowest slave of P’ol’u,” but even that apostasy does not save her life. And this is where the theological issue becomes acute. The Western missionary priest, Anthony, is convinced that Alayu’s last-minute denial has damned her eternally. The local people, however, realize that salvation absolutely has to be communal as well as individual:

We in these isles
Live in our people—no man’s life his own—
From birth and initiation. When our salvation
Came to us, it showed us no new mode—
Sir, dare you say so—of living to ourselves.
The Church is not many but the life of many
In ways of relation.
Wiser than Fr. Anthony, they also know that death itself is a permeable barrier, and so is the seemingly rigid structure of Time itself. As a native deacon asks, could not Alayu’s original baptism have swallowed up her later sin?

If God is outside Time, is it so certain
That we know which moments of time count with him,
And how?
Alayu is saved after her death, through the support of her people and the direct intervention of the Flame. Formerly an apostate, the dead Alayu becomes a saint interceding for the living. As the native believers tell the horrified missionary, “Her blood has mothered us in the Faith, as yours fathered.” When Anthony in turn faces his own torment and martyrdom—and the danger of apostasy—it is Alayu who will give him strength: “He will die your death and you fear his fright.” Fr. Anthony learns that the Spirit’s power is far larger than he has ever dared believe. And he also realizes how deceived he was to think he could have kept his status as paternalistic ruler of his native church indefinitely, among believers who had at least as much direct access to the Spirit as he did himself.

Although Williams was claiming no special knowledge of newer churches and missions, recent developments have given his work a strongly contemporary feel. The ideas he was exploring in 1945 have become influential in those rising churches, especially the emphasis on the power of ancestors and the utterly communal nature of belief. In such settings, the ancient doctrine of the communion of saints, the chain binding living and dead, acquires a whole new relevance, and a new set of challenges for churches that thought these issues settled long since.

Like his other writings, Charles Williams’ plays offer plenty to debate and to argue with—but his ideas are not lightly dismissed. Some of us have been wrestling with them for the better part of a lifetime.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the author most recently of Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses (HarperOne).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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By Philip Jenkins

Although there are plenty of candidates for this title, the most pernicious item that has ever appeared on the Internet may be Inspire, the online English-language magazine circulated by al Qaeda. Part of its goal is to instruct individual would-be jihadis how to cause the maximum carnage without access to modern arms or explosives.

Why not just drive a car into a crowd of infidels? Or build a bomb from a simple pressure cooker? And as the British Daily Telegraph was the first to point out, the bomb design offered by the magazine was precisely that adopted by the Tsarnaev brothers in their deadly attack in Boston. The mere fact of borrowing a technique proves nothing about ideology, but the brothers’ actions so precisely fit those of dozens of other lone wolf terrorists in the West in recent years that it is virtually certain that they were following the al Qaeda playbook.

In itself, the idea of Chechen extremists identifying with al Qaeda is hardly surprising, as the movement has for twenty years made the Caucasus region one of its principal battlefronts worldwide. From a historical perspective, though, that alliance should give us pause. Muslims in these parts have a very long tradition of religious-based insurgency directed against the Russian state, dating back almost two centuries. For most of that time, resistance stemmed from one particular tradition within Islam, namely the Sufi mystical brotherhoods. The Sufis, though, are anathema to the stringent fundamentalist version of Islam preached by al Qaeda. In Pakistan and Iraq especially, al Qaeda followers regularly target Sufi shrines and devotees for terrorist violence.

While Westerners tend to lump all forms of Islamic-inspired violence under a common jihadi label, Chechen-related militancy involves some truly odd and counter-intuitive alliances. Ideally, that internal conflict should give non-Islamic states some leverage in discouraging the spread of al Qaeda militancy.

Scarcely had Tsarist Russia established control in Caucasian regions of Chechnya and Dagestan than local Muslims began their campaigns of resistance. From 1830 through 1859, the Russians faced a deadly guerrilla war led by folk-hero Imam Shamil. Beyond being an Islamic leader, Shamil was also a leader of the Naqshbandi school of Sufi Islam, which still flourishes across Central Asia and much of the former Soviet Union. Then and since, such secretive brotherhoods provided a wonderful institutional framework for clandestine organization.

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The Russians acknowledged the central role of the brotherhoods by the names they gave their rebel opponents. Tsarist officials called them muridists, from murid, a Sufi disciple. The Soviets later denounced their enemies as zikristi, those who repeatedly chanted the dhikr declaration of faith in order to bring themselves into an ecstatic state. But whether murids or zikrists, there was no doubt about the Sufi foundations of Chechen nationalism, which time and again sprung to life to challenge Russian rule. In 1944, the sheer impossibility of suppressing zikristi persuaded Stalin to deport most of the Chechen people to Central Asia, where they remained until 1957.

Islamic pride and self-awareness revived during the 1980s, as the Soviet Union lurched towards dissolution. We get a hint of this, oddly, from the names of the two Tsarnaev brothers themselves. Tamerlan, born in 1986, was named for the great Islamic conqueror of the fifteenth century, Timur or “Tamerlane.” Dzhokhar, born 1994, received the name of Dzhokhar Dudaev, the first president of the breakaway Chechen republic, and a hero of Islamic nationalism.

Sporadically from 1994 through 2009, the Russians found themselves repeatedly at war with Chechens and neighboring Caucasian peoples. Giving a sense of historical déjà vu, insurgents based themselves explicitly on the old Sufi heroes. Their most ferocious commander — and a persistent sponsor of vicious acts of terror — was Shamil Basayev, who took his name from the nineteenth century imam.

From the mid-1990s though, the region’s endemic violence drew in a new religious and military force, namely the newly formed al Qaeda. Saudi militant Emir Ibn al-Khattab brought thousands of foreign fighters to assist the Chechen war effort, many trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In fact, several of the later 9/11 hijackers originally joined the global jihad specifically to fight Russians in the Caucasus, and only later were they redirected against the US mainland. Osama bin Laden’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, made a personal visit to try and create an al Qaeda base in Chechnya. The horrific recruitment videos circulated online by al Qaeda propagandists often show the murder and beheading of Russian soldiers.

As I have suggested, the religious slant of al Qaeda was radically hostile to Sufi traditions. Their own background was Wahhabi or Salafist, and condemned the Sufi brotherhoods as semi-pagan, both for their mystical practices and their devotion to saints and local shrines. Despite this, their fanatical militancy gave al Qaeda’s foreign fighters enormous prestige in the North Caucasus, where networks of Islamist militia soon developed. In turn, al Qaeda tactics influenced the older local movements. Chechen militants now launched terror attacks aimed at inflicting mass civilian casualties, and increasingly used suicide bombers — including women. Ibn al-Khattab himself formed a close personal relationship with Shamil Basayev.

Yet the Sufi heritage has not vanished, and Chechen Muslims are usually much more broad-minded in their religious practice than the puritanical Wahhabis. While Chechens definitely want an independent Islamic state, few wish to live in a Caucasus emirate under stringent Sharia law. That outlook has translated into politics. While early Chechen leaders were religiously moderate, their successors have had to become more ostentatiously pious and Muslim — but they do so in a way that is strongly Sufi.

Since 2007, the Chechen head of state has been Ramzan Kadyrov, who has vigorously promoted Sufi Islam as a deliberate counter-balance to alien Salafi influences. He is himself a disciple, a murid, of the Qadiriyya order, and regularly holds dhikr ceremonies. In public life, his administration has built and rebuilt mosques, including most sensationally a pilgrimage shrine (a ziyarat) commemorating the nineteenth century sheikh Haji Kunta. At a time of war and devastation in Chechnya, Kunta was a famous mystic who led a Sufi revival, and became so venerated as to gain supernatural status: for his devotees at least, he never died. He thus represents everything the Wahhabis and al Qaeda loathe in the practice of Islam, and militants regularly threaten Kadyrov’s life. Presently, though, the state-sponsored Sufi revival shows no obvious signs of abating.

Not just in Chechnya, Sufi Islam remains an enormous obstacle to al Qaeda and its supporters. Treated with due caution and respect, it could yet become a potent de facto ally for Western interests.

James Madison Program lectures are free and open to the public with no RSVP required.  Thank you for your support and interest in the Madison Program.  For details on all public events, please visit our website calendar here.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics, Divinity School, The University of Chicago, with appointments in Political Science and the Committee on International Relations. She is also a Visiting Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics at Baylor University.  She joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts/Amherst where she taught from 1973 to 1988. She joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University in 1988 as the first woman to hold an endowed professorship in the history of that institution. She was appointed to her current position at the University of Chicago in 1995. She has been a visiting professor at Oberlin College, Yale University, Harvard University, and held the Leavey Chair in the Foundations of American Freedom, Georgetown University.

Her books include Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought; Meditations on Modern Political Thought; Women and War; Democracy on Trial (a New York Times “notable book” for 1995); Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life; Augustine and the Limits of Politics; Who are We? Critical Reflections, Hopeful Possibilities (recipient of the Theologos Award for Best AcademicBook 2000 by the Association of Theological Booksellers); Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (honored by the Society of Midland Authors in 2002); Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (named one of the best non-fiction books of 2003 by Publishers Weekly); and Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (her Gifford Lectures, published 2008).  In addition, Professor Elshtain has edited numerous books. She writes frequently for journals of civic opinion and lectures widely in the United States and abroad on themes of democracy, ethical dilemmas, religion and politics, and international relations.

She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a Guggenheim Fellow; a Fellow at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation; holder of the Maguire Chair in Ethics at the Library of Congress; and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, where she also served on the Board of Trustees. She has been a Phi Beta Kappa Lecturer and in 2002 she received the Goodnow Award, the highest award bestowed by the American Political Science Association for distinguished service to the profession. She has served on the Boards of the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for Democracy, and currently she is a member of the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Scholars Council of the Library of Congress. In 2006, she delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, joining such previous Gifford Lecturers as William James, Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. In 2008, she was appointed to the President’s Council on Bioethics.

A graduate of Colorado State University (A.B., 1963), Professor Elshtain went on to earn a Master’s degree in history as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow before turning to the study of politics. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in Politics in 1973.

April 22, 2013

WACO, Texas (April 22, 2013) — Francis J. Beckwith, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy at Baylor University and Resident Scholar in Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, will travel to Rome in mid-June to speak at The Celebration of Evangelium Vitae: Faithful to Life conference, sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization.

Beckwith is one of three speakers invited to speak at the event, to be held June 15-16.

Keynote speaker will be Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston and chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee for Pro-Life Activities. Pope Francis has appointed him one of eight cardinals to advise him on reforming the Church’s central administration.

A panel discussion will be led by Beckwith and Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C.

“It is an incredible honor to be invited to speak at this event,” Beckwith said.

Beckwith also teaches courses in political science as well as in the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor. He is the author of Journeys of Faith: Evangelicalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Anglicanism ( Zondervan, 2012); Politics for Christians: Statecraft as Soulcraft (InterVarsity Press, 2010); Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic (Brazos Press, 2009); and Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Organizers said the conference will explore the timeless truths of the late Pope John Paul II’s 1995 Encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, and the central role that the Gospel of Life continues to have in the Church’s mission of the New Evangelization.

ABOUT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY

Baylor University is a private Christian university and a nationally ranked research institution, characterized as having “high research activity” by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The university provides a vibrant campus community for approximately 15,000 students by blending interdisciplinary research with an international reputation for educational excellence and a faculty commitment to teaching and scholarship. Chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas through the efforts of Baptist pioneers, Baylor is the oldest continually operating university in Texas. Located in Waco, Baylor welcomes students from all 50 states and more than 80 countries to study a broad range of degrees among its 11 nationally recognized academic divisions. Baylor sponsors 19 varsity athletic teams and is a founding member of the Big 12 Conference.

ABOUT THE INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDIES OF RELIGION

Launched in August 2004, the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR) exists to initiate, support and conduct research on religion, involving scholars and projects spanning the intellectual spectrum: history, psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, political science, epidemiology, theology and religious studies. The institute’s mandate extends to all religions, everywhere, and throughout history, and embraces the study of religious effects on prosocial behavior, family life, population health, economic development and social conflict. While always striving for appropriate scientific objectivity, ISR scholars treat religion with the respect that sacred matters require and deserve.

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A BOX LUNCH IS INCLUDED WITH REGISTRATION

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April 18, 2013

Truett Seminary, Powell Chapel

April 19, 2013, will be the 20^th anniversary of the fire that took the lives of some 80 members of a small religious group whose history begins in the 1920s.  The Davidian Seventh-day Adventists had been founded by Victor Houteff and had been part of the larger Waco community since 1935. A disruption among the Davidians at the end of the 1950s would lead to the movement splintering and the development of several new branches, one of which remained in Waco taking the name Branch Davidian. In March of 1993, its headquarters, built on land that they called Mt. Carmel, in rural McLennan County, near Waco, was raided by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and in an exchange of gunfire, four federal agents and six members of the Mt. Carmel community were killed. A lengthy standoff between the group and government (FBI) agents ensued that ended on April 19, when the buildings at Mt. Carmel were burned to the ground following an attempt by the FBI to end the standoff. The event would lead to congressional investigations and a reorganization of the FBI, and remains a matter of intense controversy within American historical and religious studies.

“Reflecting on an American Tragedy” will bring a group of knowledgeable scholars together to discuss the continuing issues raised by the Branch Davidian event and provide some insight into its long-term meaning for American religious life and culture.

Program

9:00 AM Welcome

Kenneth W. Starr, President, Baylor University

William H Bellinger, Jr., Chair, Baylor Religion Department

Rodney Stark, Co-Director, Baylor Institute of Studies of Religion

9:30 AM Introducing the Branch Davidians

Presiding: Bill Pitts, Department of Religion, Baylor University

“The Branch Davidians and Texas Religious History” — J. Gordon Melton, Distinguished Professor of American Religious History, Baylor University

“A Pictorial Introduction to the Mt. Carmel Property”  — Matthew Wittmer, Documentarian

“The Branch Davidians Dilemma: “To Obey God or Man?”  — Phillip Arnold, Executive Director of Reunion Institute (Houston) and founder of the Religion Crisis Task Force

10: 45 Coffee break

11:00 Putting a Human Face on the Branch Davidians

Presiding: Marie Dallam, Professor, University of Oklahoma Honors College

“Listening to Branch Davidians: Learning from the Survivors” — Catherine Wessinger, Professor, Religious Studies, Loyola University New Orleans

12: 00 Lunch

1: 15 The Fruits of Conflict

Presiding – Timothy Miller—Professor of Religious Studies, University of Kansas

“The Challenges of Negotiating at Waco” – Gary Noesner, Chief, FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit (retired)

2:15 Presiding – Byron R. Johnson, Director, Baylor Institute of Studies of Religion

“The Role of State Militarization in the 1993 Branch Davidian Conflict” — Stuart A. Wright, Professor of Sociology, Lamar University

3:30 Waco, the Branch Davidians and the Wider World

Presiding: Susan Palmer, Dawson College, Montreal

“Remember Waco! The Disaster in Politics and Popular Culture”  — Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History, Baylor University