Letter #195: Salvation the American Way

Welcome to the Party, Pal

Mine Son.

In response to your wonderful essay, let me begin by telling a parable — a true personal story I’ve always found utterly humiliating.

For many years, your mother and I lived on very little. We were never truly poor, because my parents had money and would have helped in an emergency, but we flirted with that emergency almost every month. I worked as a security guard, a secretary, and a movie studio reader among other things as I tried desperately to get my writing career going.

All this changed in a single day with a single phone call from a Hollywood agent I didn’t know I had. He had sold my book to a studio for what seemed to me a Danaean shower of gold. Suddenly, we were rolling in dough — relatively speaking.

I’ve never been much for luxuries, but one thing I’d always wanted was to be a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I visited often. So I went there, feeling like Milburn Pennybags, and began to interrogate one of the museum’s many Katherine Hepburn lookalike volunteers about the privileges of membership. What do I get for my money? I kept asking her. Finally, Miss Hepburn, with gentle pity, replied, “Well, you know, it's really to support the museum.”

Translated into English: “Don’t you see, you sad, clownish parvenu? It’s not about what you get. It’s about what you give.”

My first lesson in having money. It was then and remains today incredibly embarrassing to me.

Here’s why I mention it. You write with searching wisdom that America is “Christendom’s first great post-Reformation country,” a land of many, sometimes contradictory, Christianities. This is simple truth, and hooray for it. I have lost patience with the Patrick Deneen Liberalism-is-Bad Make-the-West-Roman-Again integralists. If they think Enlightenment liberalism is a failure, let them go build their own greatest, freest, richest, most powerful country ever. Good luck to them.

Not all roads lead to Christ. Indeed, strait is the way and narrow is the gate. But the “Mere” in C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity reminds us that there are many accretions and variations on the central truths of our salvation. It is God’s church. He will make its fragments whole when it pleases him. And when he does, it will look like something we never imagined and yet always somehow knew.

We want to know what our orthodoxies will give us, that we will be saved and that those who disagree with us are damned. We want to know that we stand in the spotlight of truth while others stumble in the shadows.

But as my friend Katherine Hepburn explained to me: it’s not about what we get. It’s about what we give — whether we surrender our hearts to the love of Christ, and the image of God within us that is our true self.

I do not need to be saved at the expense of another soul’s damnation. Judge not, and let America’s revival thrive.

Love,

Dad