Category Archives: Community

A crisis Pope for an age in crisis

Posted on by | 3 Comments

Elias Isquith of Salon recently interviewed the Rev. Dr. Chris Hedges, the Minister of Social Witness and Prison Ministry at Second Presbyterian Church of Elizabeth, NJ (PCUSA), the author of several books, and a former reporter for the New York Times.  Hedges is sounding a clarion call of warning which I’m interested to hear coming from a self-described socialist.  When Isquith asked him, “Do you think we are in a revolutionary era now? Or is it more something on the horizon?” Hedges responded,

It’s with us already, but with this caveat:  it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place.

That’s what that essay I quote by Alexander Berkman, “The Invisible Revolution,” talks about.  He likens it to a pot that’s beginning to boil.  So it’s already taking place, although it’s subterranean.  And the facade of power—both the physical facade of power and the ideological facade of power—appears to remain intact. But it has less and less credibility.

There are all sorts of neutral indicators that show that.  Low voter turnout, the fact that Congress has an approval rating of 7 percent, that polls continually reflect a kind of pessimism about where we are going, that many of the major systems that have been set in place—especially in terms of internal security—have no popularity at all.

All of these are indicators that something is seriously wrong, that the government is no longer responding to the most basic concerns, needs, and rights of the citizenry.  That is [true for the] left and right.  But what’s going to take its place, that has not been articulated.  Yes, we are in a revolutionary moment; but maybe it’s a better way to describe it as a revolutionary process.

Read more→

Supreme Court refuses to protect Christian group

Posted on by | No Comments

I’ve been trying for a couple days now to figure out what to make of this, and I’m still not sure.

In a 5-4 decision this morning, the Supreme Court said that a California law school can require a Christian group to open its leadership positions to all students, including those who disagree with the group’s statement of faith.

The majority opinion, issued by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said that Hastings College of the Law’s “all comers” policy, which required all groups to open all positions to all students, “is a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral condition on access to the student-organization forum.” The Christian Legal Society (CLS) chapter at the University of California school, Ginsburg wrote, “seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings’ policy.”

“Hastings, caught in the crossfire between a group’s desire to exclude and students’ demand for equal access, may reasonably draw a line in the sand permitting all organizations to express what they wish but no group to discriminate in membership.” Ginsburg wrote.

However, Ginsburg gave some hope to CLS, which had argued that Hastings officials had selectively enforced its “all comers” policy, allowing organizations like the Latino group La Raza, but not CLS, to have rules restricting its membership. Noting that lower courts had not addressed is accusation of selective enforcement (and that the Supreme Court “is not the proper forum to air the issue in the first instance”), Ginsburg said the Ninth Circuit Court could consider the argument.

It seems to me that if this is seriously enforced, it would do serious damage to meaningful freedom of association, since the freedom to associate with those of like mind necessarily means the freedom to exclude those who are not of like mind. Obviously, we put limits on that freedom, but still, tossing it out the window entirely does not seem like a rational move. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurring opinion may prove important here:

In it, Kennedy said that CLS would have a substantial case “if it were shown that the policy was either designed or used to infiltrate the group or challenge its leadership in order to stifle its views.”

This isn’t just a theoretical possibility, either.

The spectre of students organizing to take over the leadership of groups they don’t like has already happened at Central Michigan University, said David French, senior counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund and director of the ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom. It’s a strong possiblity at any school with a policy like the one at Hastings, he said in a blog post.

“By emphasizing the value of dissent within groups, the Court ignores the fundamental reality of an all-comers policy: Distinct student organizations exist at the whim of the majority,” French wrote. “If ‘all comers’ can join, then the majority can override the speech of any student group. Thus the true marketplace of ideas exists by the permission (or, more likely, apathy) of the majority. The potential for minority or disfavored groups at schools with an all-comers policy to self-censor to avoid controversy—and potential hostile takeovers—is high.”

This is truly problematic, and an unhappy indicator of where the Court might be moving. But on the bright side, at least, this decision will make it hard for the Congressional Black Caucus to exclude Tim Scott when he wins his House seat this November down in South Carolina . . .

Planting trees in the blight

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Over a decade ago now, as a seminary student, I made a foray into inner-city ministry at a street mission in Vancouver, BC’s Downtown Eastside. At that time, that neighborhood had the highest rates of drug addiction, HIV infection, and deaths from both of any neighborhood in the developed world. It was a grim place to be. My time there didn’t end all that well, for a variety of reasons—one of them being that I discovered I’m not well gifted for that area of ministry—but when I left, I left carrying many people in my heart. I still think about them, and pray for them, and wonder how many of them are still alive. (Given the odds, I doubt even half of them are, but I really don’t know.)

Now, apparently, there’s a massive development project going on right within the Downtown Eastside, putting in both high-end condos and good-quality affordable housing, combined with other efforts to turn the area around (such as cleaning up Oppenheimer Park, which boggles my mind); the National Post has one of its reporters living in one of the condos for a month, writing about the development and its effects on the neighborhood. It’s a fascinating series; I’ve linked to the oldest page of posts, and if you have a little time, I really encourage you to check it out and follow it up to his most recent pieces. It will be interesting to see how this story plays out over time; if this sort of project can bring meaningful renewal to a neighborhood like that—well, I wouldn’t have believed it possible.

The importance of friendship in ministry

Posted on by | No Comments

The Worship Symposium began today at Calvin; this year, I started off by taking a seminar on “Developing Pastoral Excellence,” which turned out to be interesting in an unexpected way.  The presenter, the Rev. David Wood, is the director of Transition into Ministry, a program funded by the Lilly Foundation which seeks to aid and support pastors in the transition from the education process into the early years of their first call.  As such, he’s been thinking a lot about what it means to be a good pastor and what is necessary for pastors to minister well; in so doing, in looking at all the list that various authors have generated of what makes an excellent pastor, he noticed “the sound of something missing”:  he argued that an essential and unconsidered component of pastoral excellence is friendship.In brief, his argument runs like this.  To be a good pastor, one must be a person of character and integrity and moral habit; as Aristotle (whom he quoted repeatedly) says, “We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”  To live in this way requires sustained moral effort; and to sustain moral effort, the Rev. Wood contends (following Aristotle), we need friends of character—deep, strong friendships with godly people whom we can trust implicitly.This is true for a number of reasons.  For one, central to our work as pastors is our ability to maintain a proper balance of intimacy and distance with the people in our congregations, something we can’t do if we’re starved for intimacy ourselves.  For another, this requires a degre of self-knowledge which we can’t manage on our own—we need people who know us well to reflect us back to ourselves, so that we can see them through their eyes.  For a third, we need support, reinforcement, encouragement, and sometimes a good swift kick or two from others if we’re to live lives of excellence of character—none of us have the resources in ourselves to do that alone.And fourth, we need friends to protect us from boredom.  The Rev. Wood argues that when you see a pastor in moral collapse, you’re probably seeing someone who was bored with their life.  It’s easy to grow bored with the things that matter most to us if we have no one with whom to share them; it’s easy to forget why they matter.  We need others to help us remember, and to help us stay excited about and invested in them.  As long as we stay interested in what we’re called to be doing, we stay energized about doing it, and invested in it.  When we get bored, we go looking for trouble—and usually find it.

TV is for losers?

Posted on by | No Comments

No, not exactly; but a new study reported in the New York Times has found something interesting:

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers—but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.That’s what unhappy people do.Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.

Very interesting. This is not, I’m sure, to say that watching TV makes you unhappy (though the news these days could have that effect); but the other activities referenced (in the article, anyway) are either communal, or require effort, or both. TV is neither—it’s a passive activity which can be isolating (though it need not be); it’s an easy pleasure, and easy pleasures get us nowhere that matters.HT: Ray Ortlund

Meditation on community and sense of place

Posted on by | No Comments

I live in Indiana, and have for over nine months now. It’s my second tour of duty in the Midwest, as I went to college in Holland, MI, a couple hours north and west of here. I love the people of this congregation and of this community, and I can honestly say I’m glad to be here. But I’m not a Midwesterner; and however long I stay here, I may never be.I remember talking about that in a sermon one time while I was still in Grand Lake; Trinity Church in the Pines may have been in the Colorado Rockies, but there really weren’t all that many of the congregation who were true Coloradans. More of them were Midwesterners who had retired there or who spent the summers there. I remember telling them that I knew I’d never really qualified as a Midwesterner because I still didn’t get Garrison Keillor—and I ended up with one of our part-time members (born and raised Columbus, Ohio) taking half an hour and more after the service patiently and earnestly trying to correct the problem. Tell truth, it’s a couple years on, and I’m back in the Midwest, and you know what? I still don’t get Garrison Keillor.It probably doesn’t help that even nine months on, I continue to get the occasional amazed comment that we actually moved from Colorado to Indiana, usually accompanied by comments about how beautiful Colorado is. I tell them that with all the trees dying from the mountain pine beetle, it was a lot less beautiful than it had been when we moved there, and that it’s really a relief to my soul to be back someplace where the trees are all alive—which is true, and it makes sense to people; when I follow that up by pointing out that at least here, we have the lakes, and then note that it’s nice to have a big grocery store, a Lowe’s and a Walmart in town, that’s usually enough to satisfy them, and we can move on to talking about other things. But none of that is the real reason why we were happy to make the move.The real reason has much more to do with something Larry Bacon said during my last year there: “I liked Grand Lake a lot better before I moved here.” I had to agree with him. It was a beautiful place with a lot of people I enjoyed; what it wasn’t was a community in any functional sense. It was, rather, a lot of little cliques who didn’t get along, producing constant infighting between and among the mayor, the town council, the Chamber of Commerce, various business owners, the recreation district, and pretty much anybody else with any sort of stake in the area. John Pritchard once said wryly that the problem with the town was that the original settlers hadn’t built in the valley, they’d built on the hills on either side so they could shoot across at each other, and it had been that way ever since. Unfortunately, rather than being an agent of God’s reconciliation in the community, the church tended rather to reflect its divisions, at least in its decision-making. (To its credit, in the ordinary life of the congregation, it was a remarkably cohesive group given that half its people were only there 3-5 months out of the year.) It may not be as scenic here, but it’s a strong functional community for all its challenges, and that’s a wonderful change.Sara tells people that the big thing we learned from our five years in Colorado is that scenery isn’t everything, and that’s a true thing; but for me, it isn’t the big thing. For me, I think the big thing I learned has more to do with my sense of place. I’ve been thinking about this ever since I posted on “sense of place and the ’08 election” a month ago. I think of myself, broadly speaking, as a Westerner; I don’t have deep roots in any one town in the Western US, but that’s where I’ve spent most of my life (well, that and just across the Canadian border), and the cultures of the rural and small-town West are where I feel most comfortable. It’s not a matter of conservative vs. liberal, either; as it happens, I’m probably no less conservative than most folks here in northern Indiana, but it’s different. I don’t know that I could define all the differences in mindset and expectations, but they’re there and I can sense them. I grew up in the West, in the land of mountains and great distances, and it shaped me, and it shaped my sense of where I belong.At the same time, though, as I noted in that previous post, I also grew up with the sense that the particular place where I belonged was not a location but a community—or rather, two communities: the Navy and the church. I didn’t keep the immediate connection to the Navy, since God didn’t call me into the chaplaincy (I still feel that connection, but more distantly, as a part of my heritage), but the church has continued to be my home; and then, of course, in getting married and having children, home has become wherever Sara and the girls are. Home, in other words, is not primarily about where but about who; my sense of place is less about the location in which I live than it is about the community of which I am a part. I think I might have known that before we went to Colorado, but at the time, Sara still didn’t think I could be content living someplace without mountains, and at the time, she may well have been right—I hadn’t really learned that lesson. Now, I have; and while I still have the mountains in my soul, I can be content living without them. Indeed, I’ve learned that as beautiful as they are, they aren’t a healthy place for me to live, because they work against true community, and I need the beauty of community (for which they are a hostile environment) more than I need their beauty.So in a way, maybe I did move for scenery after all: I traded physical beauty for spiritual and emotional beauty, and I do not regret the trade. Even if I never feel like Indiana is truly my home, if I always feel that this church is my home, I will be well content.

Alienation, reconciled

Posted on by | No Comments

And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless
and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed
in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.—Colossians 1:21-23 (ESV)Paul describes the effects of human sin and the work of Christ in a number of ways across his letters, to enable us to see it from different angles; unfortunately, the church has historically tended to pick and choose, to grab one description and lose sight of the rest. Thus, for instance, there are a lot of people who are quite fluent in the legal language which Paul uses elsewhere (which gives us the term “justification”) but miss the relational language which he uses here, talking about alienation and reconciliation. That’s too bad, because this is language which resonates with many people in our culture, and which helps us to understand ourselves and what Christ has done for us in ways that we might not otherwise catch.The truth is, the alienating effects of sin run in several directions. First, it alienates us from God; our sin separated us from him, breaking that relationship beyond our ability to repair—and indeed, beyond our ability even to desire to do so. Look at the old pagan religions, and you’ll see that they’re founded on fear; we take for granted this idea of a loving, caring God whom we can come to know on friendly terms, whom we can trust and on whom we can rely, but that’s not an idea people ever came up with. It took God even to give us the idea, because our sin had estranged us from him to that great an extent. Second, to be alienated from God is to be alienated from ourselves. It’s God who made us and who alone knows us as we really are; it’s God who holds us in his hand, and in his mind—we continue to exist only because he remembers us to ourselves. It’s God who is the source of all good things, including all the good gifts we possess. As a consequence, we cannot know ourselves truly, at least at the deepest level, if we don’t know him; we can figure out a great many things about ourselves, but we’ll always figure some of them wrong, whether just by mistake or out of our desire to believe ourselves better (or different) than we really are. What’s more, there will always be things about ourselves that we won’t be able to make sense of, and currents in our souls that run too deep for us even to see, though we may sense their effects. This is why we invented psychologists and psychiatrists and social workers, and why we conjured up Sigmund Freud so he could invent psychoanalysts, so they could tell us some of the nonsensical truths about ourselves that we would never have wit enough to see on our own; and even so, even at our best, we remain strangers in our own minds. Only God in Christ has the ability to reverse that alienation and restore us to ourselves; only in him can true healing be found.Third, since we were estranged from God, who is the source of all that is good in us, and since we were estranged from ourselves as a consequence, we were estranged from each other as well. We could build relationships across the divides between us as best we were able, friendships and marriages and families and business partnerships, and often, we did pretty well; but in our own strength, even the strongest relationships we can create are fairly fragile. The vagaries of life can break them, our own sinfulness can cause them to collapse, and even if everything else goes well, death brings them to an inevitable end. And even those who have the most and closest friends know far more people to whom they’re not close, some of whom may be rivals and competitors, and some of whom might even be true enemies. And beyond that, we divide ourselves up in myriad ways, companies and teams, political parties and ethnic groups, states and nations, and we fight with each other. War, of course, is one form of that—but economic competition is another, and sports yet a third, and politics a fourth.We as fallen human beings need reconciliation; we need peace with God, with ourselves, and with each other, and we can’t do it in our own strength. This world is never going to find a peace treaty to end all wars, and there will never be any such thing as a post-partisan political candidate, any more than there will ever be an economy where no company ever goes under or a sports league where every team ties for the championship. It’s just not in us. As Paul says, our wicked works prove that. It’s not just about life after death; Jesus didn’t just come so that after we die, everything would be good, though that’s certainly part of the gift he’s given us. More than that, though, he came to bring the reconciliation we need in this life. He came to remove the barrier of sin that isolates and alienates us, and to heal the breaches it created. He came to restore our relationship with God so that we could once again call him Father; he came to free us from the distorting burden of slavery to sin that warps and mars our souls; he came to bring reconciliation between us, that we might learn to love our enemies and do good to those who harm us. Indeed, he came to bring reconciliation to the whole created order, which has been broken and sent spinning off course and out of tune by our sin, to heal the damage we have done, to restore its harmony and set it right.He’s done this, Paul says, “in the body of his flesh by his death.” The one who is the image of the invisible God, the one who was God become human, the Lord of the universe and head of the church, in whom and through whom and for whom are all things, the one who holds all things together, hung bleeding on a cross in shock and agony until his heart stopped. This is the central fact of our faith, I think, taken together with the resurrection, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself by taking the overflowing cup of human sin with all its agony and draining that cup to the very dregs.This is what Paul wants the Colossians to understand, that there is simply no room for their delusions that they can contribute anything to their own salvation; the sacrifice of Jesus is so immense, in the awe-striking glory of who he is and the truly awe-full reality of the price he paid, that there is nothing we can add to it. The price he paid and the work he accomplished on the cross was sufficient for everything; it was truly an infinite sacrifice, the work of infinite love, the gift of infinite grace, and that sacrifice, that work, that gift, is sufficient. It is enough. Whatever may come, whatever may happen, whatever we may do, it is always enough; and it only is enough. It is Christ, by his work on the cross, who makes us holy and blameless in the eyes of God, able to stand in his presence with no reason for guilt or reproach; no matter how good we might be, we can’t live up to that standard, nor will we ever be able to on our own. We can’t earn our way there—and we don’t have to. In Christ, we have been given that status that we can’t achieve for ourselves; he took all our sin on himself on the cross and paid the price for it there, and gave us his righteousness in exchange.Now, you might have noticed that in verse 22, Paul says that Jesus has done this—“you who once were alienated . . . he has now reconciled in his body of flesh”—but then in verse 23, he says, “if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast.” What’s going on here? Does this mean that you can lose your salvation? There are those who argue that, of course, but no, that’s not what this means. The work of Christ on the cross is finished, it is completed, once and for all. At that moment, salvation was accomplished for all those who belong to him; it cannot be undone, and God isn’t going back on it. Paul isn’t turning around and casting any doubts on that, as if he were somehow lessening the work of Christ. Rather, what he’s doing is making a point that Jesus also made in Matthew 7 when he said, talking of false prophets, “You will know them by their fruits.” If we’ve been saved, if we’ve been reconciled through the work of Christ on the cross, if his Spirit is at work in us, that’s going to have certain clear effects in our lives; thus Jesus could go on to say, “Every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.” One of the good fruit that we bear if we’re spiritually healthy—which is to say, if we’ve received the new life of God in Christ by the power of his Holy Spirit—is perseverance: if our salvation is real, we don’t walk away from it. We may drift at times, but in the end Jesus always pulls us back by his Spirit. He is faithful, and he will not let us go.

Sense of place and the ’08 election

Posted on by | No Comments

My honors English teacher in my junior year of high school used to say that there are three themes in American literature: individualism, sense of place, and the American dream. He said this to a class with a large contingent of Navy brats, including me, including many (though not me) whose only sense of the place in which they lived was that they wouldn’t be there much longer and didn’t particularly want to be. (The town in which, through my parents’ determination, I did the majority of my growing up is a nice town in a beautiful part of the country; but at the time, anyway, it wasn’t the kind of place many of my teenage comrades found all that exciting.) I have long thought of John McCain primarily as a counterpart to my father: a Navy pilot, an officer and a gentleman. For whatever reason, I haven’t thought of him as a counterpart of my own, though from a different generation: a Navy brat. And yet, he was and is that, too; he too knows what it means to grow up in a world where home is not a place, but an institution and a people.Peggy Noonan picked up on this, and on the fact that Barack Obama similarly grew up in a variety of places, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “The End of Placeness”. She’s right that sense of place, which my old English teacher considered such an important American theme, is disappearing; the Rev. Dr. Craig Barnes, of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and Shadyside Presbyterian Church, has had some wise and thoughtful things to say on this. As the Rev. Dr. Barnes puts it, before the GI Bill and the rise of American prosperity following WW II, most Americans were Settlers, people who put down roots in a particular place and stayed there (and settled for whatever way of life they had there); those who didn’t were mistrusted. With the GI Bill and the beginnings of modern suburbia, a new generation of Exiles began (exiles being people who know where home is but don’t live there; he cites as an example his own family, which always went “home for Christmas” from their suburban life to the tobacco farm in North Carolina). Now, as he says, Exiles are giving way increasingly to Nomads: people (primarily Gen X and younger) who are equally at home everywhere because they aren’t really at home anywhere. It’s a significant issue for those of us who are pastors, though not everyone has realized it yet.Having this emerging reality mirrored in our presidential candidates is a strange thing, and I can understand Noonan’s reaction to it. That said, as Beldar points out, they mirror this very differently; though this fact is tangential to Noonan’s point, it’s nevertheless significant.I suspect part of Sen. Obama’s appeal to young voters during the primaries (which seems to be fading somewhat) is that his rootlessness, though an extreme form, is a familar type among those of my generation and younger; while few of us had mothers who married Africans and Indonesians and moved us to another continent, the story’s outline is familiar:

Obama, by contrast, can only remember meeting his father once, briefly, when he was 10, and he never met his paternal grandfather at all. They had no presence in Barack Obama’s life while he was growing up; they were only dreams and stories and faded photos, with an occasional letter. . . .While Obama at least had a long-term relationship with his paternal grandparents, even that came at the expense of being effectively abandoned to their care by his own mother—hardly an ideal situation. Indeed, the adults around young Obama seemed in his book to be tied to nowhere and nothing—and outside of their immediate family (and sometimes not even that), to nobody. Obama was both a literal and figurative “step-child.”

Of him it may truly be said, as Noonan does, that he is “not from a place, but from an experience”—and from an all too common experience among younger folks these days: the experience of divorce and remarriage, step-parents and moving from place to place as one’s mother or father or both chase their own self-fulfillment. The place he’s from is the broken family, and it’s a familiar one to many.Sen. McCain, by contrast, grew up with one of the oldest forms of placelessness in the human experience: he grew up in the military. That has some of the same effects, leaving you with the desire to belong someplace; but it doesn’t leave you truly rootless, because you find your roots in the military community and culture. (And it is a culture of its own, connected to but apart from mainstream American culture, make no mistake about that; our local college has even started exempting military brats along with international students from its standard cross-cultural class and including them in the “adapting to American culture” class instead.) Those of us who grow up in Christian homes learn to find our roots in the church as well, which is a very good thing in many ways. (This is why, when Beldar writes that “McCain got a rock-solid and abiding ‘faith’ from his grandfather and father—faith in them, in himself, in the U.S. Navy and the other U.S. military forces, and most importantly, in all of America—while at best, Obama got only ‘dreams’ from his,” I have to say he’s missed the most important faith Sen. McCain learned from his father and grandfather: faith in God.) The effects of this are very clear in this presidential campaign. Sen. Obama can stand before a German audience and call himself a “citizen of the world” because his psychological citizenship is pretty tenuous—his most formative experiences tie him more to Africa and Asia than to America. Sen. McCain could never do that. He doesn’t belong to Phoenix any more than Sen. Obama belongs to Chicago, but he is unquestionably rooted in America, down to the core of his being, through his generations-deep roots in the United States Navy. In the end, I guess that’s why my respect and admiration for the man trumps my deep reservations about him, and why I trust his instincts even if I don’t always trust his ideas.

Is it possible that anyone could be more unlike Obama’s mother, with her dizzying moves from husband to husband and country to country, than McCain’s mother, who was always the quintessential “Navy wife,” wholly integrated into an American military-family culture that is proud and vast and long-standing? However often Roberta McCain and young John moved, they were never alone, never strangers, never “lost”—and they never had to flail about trying to “find themselves.” Rather, from birth to adulthood, McCain was surrounded by people whose lives were dedicated to a clear set of ideals and a clear purpose. All those people continuously reinforced and reminded him of the faith—the dedication to duty, honor, and country—that he inherited as a legacy from his grandfather and father.

And for Sen. McCain, that’s the bottom line; that, ultimately, is his sense of place.

“The great challenge in this decade . . . is social revival.”

Posted on by | 2 Comments

So says David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party, who has brought about a considerable transformation in the party of Thatcher, a transformation he describes this way: “We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood—in a word, for society.” It seems to be working, since the Conservatives (or Tories) mopped the floor with the ruling Labour Party in local elections held across Britain two weeks ago—Labour even lost in London.David Brooks certainly thinks there’s cause and effect here, and sees a lesson the Republicans need to take to heart. Brooks wrote in last Friday’s column,

The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.” . . .These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They’re trying to use government to foster dense social bonds. . . .They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control.

As Brooks notes, this isn’t an isolated phenomenon, as center-right parties have risen to power recently in Germany, France, and Canada, among other places; the question is, as he puts it, “whether Republicans will learn those lessons sooner, or whether they will learn them later, after a decade or so in the wilderness.” I don’t know if his analysis is right or not; but it needs to be considered. Carefully. Given that the direction he suggests is one that would suit John McCain well, I hope the McCain campaign is listening, and will give his analysis that consideration.