Two worthwhile books with “heretics” or “heresy” in the title hit the bookstores last month. Both are worth contemplating in connection with yesterday’s New York Times profile of Mitt Romney’s Mormon beliefs.

On April 17, Times columnist Ross Douthat came out with Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. He charts the religious movement of America from the 1950s to the present, and then takes on heresies like “Pray and Grow Rich” and “The God Within.”

One week later, Canadian columnist Michael Coren’s Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity came out. It knocks down claims that Christianity is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, war-mongering, progress-resistant, and generally gnarly.

Heresies to the left of us, heresies to the right of us: They all volley and thunder. Some evangelicals say they won’t vote for Romney because he espouses Mormonism, which could well be viewed as a Christian heresy. They worry that a President Romney would increase the prestige and influence of the Latter-day Saints, especially abroad. That’s a legitimate concern.

On the other hand, Barack Obama appears to syncretize three beliefs that could also be called Christian heresies. His Rev. Jeremiah Wright-influenced liberation theology is an extension of the theological liberalism that J. Gresham Machen eviscerated in his 1924 classic, Christianity and Liberalism. His Harvard Law School politics are based in radical secularism. And, without bowing to the claims that Obama is a Muslim, elements of Islam’s communalism mixed with authoritarianism are also evident.

So, evangelical voters do not have a choice between a heretic and someone whose views most Christians can look at with comfort. Heresies surround us, and no candidate is pure. In such a case, it probably makes sense to put aside heresy-seeking and look more at the trustworthiness of the candidates and the policies each advocates.

One way to determine whether the nation should trust a person is to see whether his spouse can. In this regard, both Obama and Romney have high grades—no episodes of adultery. A lot of evangelicals scathingly say that Obama ran as a person who could bring Americans together yet has been radically divisive once in office—but anyone who listened closely to Obama’s talk in 2008 could see that he’d be the most leftist president in U.S. history.

So it comes down to policies, where Romney provides a clear alternative to Obama on the economy, the federal deficit, social issues, foreign policy, and the makeup of the Supreme Court. One other question concerns the treatment of religious minorities—and Christianity is now a minority religion in the United States. In that respect, here’s the most interesting sentence in yesterday’s New York Times profile:

“While voters tend to see Mr. Romney as immensely fortunate, those close to him say that he never forgets he is a member of an oft-derided religious minority.”

Barack Obama won in 2008 because of the financial meltdown, the war in Iraq, the opportunity to make a statement about racial equality, and his personality.

Four years later, the only thing going for him might be his personality, but reports of Obama ego unbound are hurting him. Some current blowback: One of Obama’s aides, perhaps obeying instructions, inserted mentions of the boss into official White House bios of former presidents. Here are a few of the examples pulled together by Investor’s Business Daily:

• “On Feb. 22, 1924, Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people. … President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls.”
• “President Herbert Hoover signed the bill founding the Department of Veterans Affairs July 21, 1930. President Obama is committed to making sure that the VA, the second-largest cabinet department, serves the needs of all veterans. …”
• On August 14, 1935, President [Franklin D] Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. Today the Obama Administration continues to protect seniors and ensure Social Security will be there for future generations.”
• “President Truman wrote that government has ‘an obligation to see that the civil rights of every citizen are fully and equally protected.’ … Today the Obama Administration continues to strive toward upholding the civil rights of its citizens, repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, allowing people of all sexual orientations to serve openly in our armed forces.”

We also learn that John F. Kennedy began the Peace Corps, but “President Obama celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps with a Presidential Proclamation,” and that “President Reagan designated Martin Luther King Jr. Day a national holiday; today the Obama Administration honors this tradition, with the First and Second Families participating in service projects on this day.”

Etc., etc., regarding 20th century presidents. Meanwhile, President Obama seems intent on showing that he’s brighter than his 19th century predecessors, yet even The Washington Post called him out with a headline, “Obama’s whopper about Rutherford B. Hayes and the telephone.” (Obama asserted that Hayes—backward-looking Republican—thought phones useless, but Hayes tried out one in 1877 and called it “wonderful.”)

One result of this hate crime against Hayes is an internet meme showing a photo of Hayes with the words, “Wouldn’t insert himself into Obama’s biography.” Others have come up with “In 1877 telephones were the future and windmills were the past,” or “Balanced four annual budgets. Didn’t borrow a trillion per year.”

Many more are at Quickmeme. One is sharp but oversimplified: “His election was close because Democrats didn’t let blacks vote.” Another is sharp and personally pointed: “Rode a horse in battle swinging a sharp sword and dodging musket balls. Obama: Can’t ride a bike on a quiet Sunday afternoon without mom jeans and a safety helmet.”

And the beating goes on.

I’ve had a bear in my backyard here in Asheville, N.C. WORLD editor Mindy Belz lives half a mile away: Yesterday a bear (probably the same one) was in her front yard, and she was unable to leave her house for a couple of hours. To my knowledge, Asheville has no bear casualties—yet.

The New York Times this morning has an article about coyotes in the parks and expensive backyards of San Francisco. The Times noted that dogs outnumber children in that remarkable city, and pondered this question: “Will the two animal worlds—the domesticated and the wild—be able to coexist?”

In 2007 authorities shot two coyotes that attacked dogs in Golden Gate Park: “Since then, the city has emphasized coexistence.” The Times quoted Camilla Fox, executive director of Project Coyote: “Usually, the knee-jerk response is, ‘Problem: wildlife. Let’s trap and kill.’”

That’s one knee-jerk response. The other goes something like, “Ooh, cute.” The Times ended its story by quoting one bemused resident’s view of coyotes: “They’re doing their own thing. It’s pretty cool. This is a big city, and there are wild animals.”

Hmm. A quick Google search of “coyotes, children” shows some press leads of recent years. Here’s one: “The wary but tolerant relationship between humans and coyotes is changing in a New York City suburb, where two attacks on little girls have police officers shooting at the animals and parents keeping their kids inside on summer evenings at the urging of authorities.”

And another, from a Los Angeles suburb: “The coyote … snapped its jaws on the girl’s buttocks and her nanny had to pry the toddler from the wild animal. Less than a week later, a coyote in a mountain resort town some 35 miles away grabbed a girl by the head and tried to drag her from a front yard. …”

I read about coyote attacks in Indiana, New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Washington, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Colorado (see the photo above of a couple of coyotes outside a church in a Denver suburb in 2008). In 2009 coyotes in a Canadian national park killed 19-year-old singer-songwriter Taylor Mitchell. That was terrible, but wilderness is where the wild things live—do they belong in cities, though?

I happily saw no stories of coyotes killing children in backyards—just dogs, so far. Happily also, God has put in wild animals some fear of man, so coyote attacks on humans are still rare. But, with animal rights advocates on the march, this is an issue we will have to face. Are we bigoted and intolerant practitioners of “species-ism” if we respect wildlife but put first the safety of children?

Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer for The Atlantic, posted two weeks ago his list (with links) of the 101 best journalistic pieces of 2011. One of them is by Charles Krauthammer, who opines wisely on politics but misses a likely solution to the mystery he spotlights in a Washington Post column, “Are we alone in the universe?”

Krauthammer does the math and figures that in a gigantic galaxy with lots of planets where intelligent life could exist, we should by now, after decades of diligent searching, have found some evidence—signals or radio waves—that intelligent life does exist.

He writes, “The search betrays a profound melancholy—a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence. That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense.”

Krauthammer then tries to make sense by proposing, as did Carl Sagan, “the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.” He points to the growing likelihood of biological warfare and nuclear proliferation, and uses those dangers as evidence of the importance of … politics: “We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics—in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations—is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.”

I beg to disagree. If God exists—and that’s the most important question we ever face—then everything rests ultimately on Him. The silence makes no sense if we believe in evolution, but it may be an indication that God does exist and that He created life here and nowhere else.

God could have, of course, created life elsewhere—C.S. Lewis wrote a space trilogy based on that idea—but right now it seems that the sounds of silence have given us one more indication that creation is more likely than evolution.

Two distinct events. First, Indiana Republicans will go to the polls tomorrow to decide whether to make Sen. Richard Lugar, who has been a Capitol Hill fixture for 35 years, their candidate for a new six-year term. Second, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam last Thursday vetoed a bill that would cut off some $24 million in state aid to Vanderbilt if the university persists in its plan to force student religious groups to allow anyone, believer or not, into organizational leadership.

The common denominator is that Lugar and Haslam have both received praise for acting in thoughtful ways. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan on Friday offered “The Case for Dick Lugar.” She called Lugar “sober and responsible. … Right now, and more than ever, we need mature folk involved in our governance. … There is value in the ability to take the long view, and do your best with modesty.”

Meanwhile, The Chattanoogan.com’s David Tulis praised Haslam for adhering “to a philosophy of limited government and a reluctance to use even the most well-intentioned power of the state to overwhelm a private institution’s government and to dictate terms.” Haslam said he disagrees with Vanderbilt’s policy and approved of the legislature directing state universities but not private ones. Even though liberals try to control private institutions that receive some taxpayer funds, Haslam contended, conservatives should not do the same.

Some conservatives disagree. Noonan noted the GOP’s “growing sense that for 40 years, members of the party have sent Republicans to Washington and Washington—its spending, its regulating, its demands—keeps getting worse, not better.” Our human tendency is to fight fire with fire: When the left keeps pushing for more and more, we wonder whether Lugar-like politeness in the Senate amounts to unilateral disarmament.

I don’t have a recommendation for Indiana voters, but I do ask a strategic question: Do liberals keep increasing state power because they know that if gentlemanly conservatives are in charge the increased power will not be used against them? Maybe so, but it still seems to me that conservatives should not act against principle and grow government even when we might gain a temporary tactical advantage.

Tulis appropriately quoted John Calvin: “When tyrants reign, let us first remember our faults, which are chastised by such scourges; and, therefore, humility will restrain our impatience.” That makes sense to me, but I’d also welcome readers’ opinions on this, as I think about a possible future column in WORLD.

The Occupy movement brought mischief and mayhem to Oakland and several other cities on May Day. But if Occupiers truly wanted to fight inequality and not just mutter about the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent, they would protest the public school system. And if some Occupy leaders read a Tuesday article coauthored by a person they probably despise, former Secretary of State George Shultz, in a publication they probably despise, The Wall Street Journal, they would see why.

Shultz and Hoover Institution senior fellow Eric Hanushek wrote that a failure to reform K-12 schools will lead to not only slow growth but “inequality problems that will plague us for decades if not generations to come.” They offer their own state of California as an example:

“Once a leader in education, it is now ranked behind 40 other U.S. states in math achievement, placing it at the level of Greece and foreshadowing a bleak future of ballooning debt and growing income disparity.”

Shultz and Hanushek continued:

“The averages mask the truly sad story in the Latino population, soon to become California’s dominant demographic group. Hispanics attending school in California perform no better than the average student in Mexico, a level comparable to the typical student in Kazakhstan. An alarming 43% of Hispanic students in California did not complete high school between 2005 and 2009, and only 10% attained a college degree. Anyone worried about income disparity in America should be deeply disturbed.”

The leading pushers of inequality in American today are the union leaders of the National Education Association, a once-idealistic group that now works to protect only its own interests. The NEA includes many good teachers, but the organization defends bad schools and protects bad teachers. Competition in education and freedom for educational entrepreneurs would lead to better education for everyone, but especially for the poor, and more job opportunities for better-trained high school graduates.

Andrew Ferguson is probably the funniest journalist in America now, but sometimes he waxes serious, as he did in a Weekly Standard article last month, “The Book That Drove Them Crazy.”

In it Ferguson describes the reception of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, published 25 years ago. Ferguson praises Bloom’s “sly wit and the torrential energy of his prose,” but also notes that “Bloom wrote a moment before the population of modernity’s Holy Trinity—Marx, Freud, and Darwin—decreased by two-thirds. Marx lost his allure, at least nominally, after the collapse of the murderous regimes that had been built from his ideas. Freud was demoted from scientist to cultural observer, and an unreliable one besides. Only Darwin survives, undiminished and if anything enlarged, as the font of a new materialism.”

Bloom did not really take on Darwin—and his thinking is at the core of today’s regnant materialism. Materialists needed Darwin. Before, they had no way of explaining how the world around us and humans ourselves came into being without God’s action. Afterward, it became common to explain everything that happened as the result of physical causes.

Darwin ate up Freud: Psychiatrists generally stopped putting patients on couches and started giving them pharmaceutical cocktails designed to change their brain waves. Darwin even ate up Marx: The hope that changing class relationships would quickly change human nature could not stand up before sociobiology’s emphasis on nature over nurture.

If Darwinism is right, the result is what Bloom called “the civilized reanimalization of man.” Ferguson points out, “Nowadays, if we seek insight into the mysteries of the human heart (not high on the academic agenda in any case) we are far more likely to consult a neurobiologist or a social psychologist than Tolstoy or Aristotle. This is not progress.” He’s right, but Tolstoy—although his “What Men Live By” is my favorite short story—and Aristotle cannot by themselves stand up against Darwin’s surge.

That’s why the brave souls who fight for intelligent design in the face of furious opposition deserve support. That’s why reading the Bible, and embracing biblical objectivity rather than materialism, is so important. That’s why the cross is crucial, because it shows us that the battle is not nature vs. nurture: Grace trumps all.

The New York Times this morning has a surprisingly positive profile of GOP leader Paul Ryan. Meanwhile, NYT columnist Paul Krugman and New York magazine are scathing in their criticism.

Among Christians a lot of confusion remains, in part because Ryan (as I reported in WORLD last summer) has combined admirable budget analysis with troubling esteem for Christ-hating Ayn Rand. Happily, he has now clarified (or changed) his stance concerning Rand.

First, let’s review the past. Ryan told The Weekly Standard in 2003, “I give out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it.” In 2005 he told an Atlas Society gathering, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” In 2009 he posted a pro-Rand video on his Facebook page and wrote, “It’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build the moral case for capitalism.”

Now, the problem: Rand actually offered the amoral case for capitalism. As Chuck Colson noted in an article last year critiquing Rand, and Ryan’s advocacy of her work: “What makes this newly renewed regard especially troubling is that Rand’s worldview is explicitly anti-Christian. She once said she wanted to be known as ‘the greatest enemy of religion.’ And when Rand said ‘religion’ she meant Christianity, which she once called the ‘kindergarten of communism.’” Colson was right. It’s striking that Atlas Shrugged ends with hero John Galt making the sign of the dollar instead of the sign of the cross.

Finally, the present: Earlier this month Ryan told National Review, “I reject her philosophy. … It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview.” He said, “I, like millions of young people in America, read Rand’s novels when I was young. I enjoyed them. … They spurred an interest in economics, in the Chicago School and Milton Friedman. … If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. … Don’t give me Ayn Rand.”

I’ve requested an interview with Ryan, but no go so far. In his defense, Rand did create bold characters (although with as much depth as Superman or Lex Luthor). She showed the dangers of both government control and corporate acquiescence. So if Ryan liked those aspects, I can’t fault him, and I’m glad he’s distanced himself from her theology.

What if telling the truth, at least the truth as you see it, means dishonoring your father and mother? It has been sad to see the fine writer Frank Schaeffer—I called him once and told him how much I liked his 2005 book, Faith of Our Sons: A Father’s Wartime Diary—bashing in print his famous dad, Francis. But maybe Frank thought his iconoclastic message was important, and he was the only one in position to give it, because of his firsthand view.

The Chuck Colson obituary that Schaeffer posted on his blog Sunday, though, is truly extraordinary, and I don’t see what purpose his fulmination-from-afar serves. The obit memorably begins, “Evangelical Christianity lost one of its most beloved and bigoted homophobic and misogynistic voices with the death of Charles W. ‘Chuck’ Colson, a Watergate felon who converted to ‘evangelicalism’ but never lost his taste for dirty political tricks against opponents.”

Schaeffer’s evidence for that charge: “Colson teamed up with far right Roman Catholic activist Professor Robert George of Princeton to launch the dirty tricks campaign to brand President Obama as ‘anti-religious’ with Colson’s and George’s ‘Manhattan Declaration.’”

How is stating a position a dirty trick? Schaeffer attacks Colson for “helping to craft the mirror image of the racist policy Nixon used to turn Southern Democrats into Republican voters, only this time the tactic was to use ‘family values’ to get white members of the underclass to vote for corporate America.” Why see political disagreement as conspiracy?

After numerous paragraphs of Colson-bashing, Schaeffer turns his ire on another departed leader, “the reactionary’s reactionary, Richard John Neuhaus.” He argues that Colson and Neuhaus fronted for “oppressive ideas rooted in an anti-constitutional theocratic far right wish list for changes that were supposed to roll back the parts of the democratic processes—say Roe v. Wade, women’s rights and gay rights—that far right Catholics and Protestants didn’t approve of.”

I’m not sure how opposition to Roe v. Wade (by which the Supreme Court removed abortion from democratic consideration) and gay rights (note that voters in state after state have voted against referenda establishing same-sex marriage) equals opposition to democratic processes, but even if that charge made sense I’d still be puzzled: What drives Frank Schaeffer to strike out not only against his dad but against every father figure in the Christian conservative movement?

The New York Times has a “public editor,” Arthur S. Brisbane, with the task of listening to readers’ concerns and bringing them to the attention of editors and reporters when he thinks those concerns are warranted. Brisbane is the great grandson of utopian socialist Albert Brisbane and the grandson of Arthur Brisbane (1864-1936), a Hearst editor described by biographer W.A. Swanberg (Citizen Hearst, 1961) as “a one-time socialist who had drifted pleasantly into the profit system.”

Brisbane noted in his column this past Sunday, “Many critics view The Times as constitutionally unable to address the [2012] election in an unbiased fashion.” He reported the results of a study conducted by media scholars Stephen J. Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter that showed that Times coverage of President Obama’s first year in office “was significantly more favorable than its first-year coverage of three predecessors who also brought a new party to power in the White House: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan.”

Brisbane quoted the authors’ question: “Did The Times, perhaps in response to the aggressive efforts by [Rupert] Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to seize market share, decide to tilt more to the left than it had in the past?” His response: “I strongly doubt that. Based on conversations with Times reporters and editors who cover the campaign and Washington, I think they see themselves as aggressive journalists who don’t play favorites.”

Good thing Brisbane cleared that up. But he did quote other criticism of his newspaper, and suggested that Times reporters should now “shift to a campaign coverage paradigm that compares promises with execution, sheds light on campaign operations, and assesses the president’s promises for a second term.” The value in Brisbane’s article is that he quotes a promise from Times political editor Richard Stevenson to target the Obama campaign’s use of his powers of incumbency, along with Obama’s “political style, character, and learning curve.”

I’ll believe that when I see it. Brisbane ends his column by writing, “I applaud The Times’ stated commitment to doing these kinds of stories. Readers deserve to know: Who is the real Barack Obama? And The Times needs to show that it can address the question in a hard-nosed, unbiased way.”

If The Times does not—when The Times does not, judging from its recent decades—will Brisbane blow the whistle?