“Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization” is the Shakespeare book we need in this age of abuse and hatred. We find love and wisdom through its marvelous pilgrimage. And we find the true Shakespeare who has been buried by “the scholars” because of their ideological prejudices.

We live in an age of hatred: hatred toward our cultural inheritance, Western civilization, and Christianity most especially. Shakespeare, the “principal poet of Western civilization,” is also guillotined regularly for his ties to all that is passé.
Postmodern critics condemn Shakespeare as guilty of the sins of the West, especially sexism, racism, and imperialism. R.V. Young, however, offers a spirited defense of Shakespeare from his anti-Western and anti-Christian critics in his new book, “Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization.”
Anyone who has traversed the halls of Western academic institutions knows the rot that permeates them. Take, for example, my own alma mater, Yale. One can now obtain a BA in English without ever having studied a single sentence of Shakespeare. Yale says it offers Shakespeare as an elective. But it is a gross offense to pass through four years of English literature without studying the great Bard.
This abuse in our education system is not new. Young reminds us, “During the past half century, however, Western civilization has been challenged as never before from within, by academics and intellectuals of an ideological bent.” And Young is far from some right-wing provocateur; he is a professor emeritus of English literature at North Carolina State University.
Shakespeare’s Modern Critics
There are two dominant strands of Shakespeare abuse that have occurred in the past half-century. The first is hard to detect. Harold Bloom is the shining representative of romantic Shakespeare abuse. Bloom, who is also deeply anti-Christian in his criticism, removes the religious significance of Shakespeare as well as the rich cultural well from which the greatest dramatist of the West drank. Bloom’s Shakespeare is a radical “genius,” a man who broke so thoroughly from the classical and Christian past he invented the modern human individual.
Bloom is challenging to critique because he was a soft defender of the Western canon. In the canonical battles over the future of the Western humanities, Bloom was a lonely voice articulating why Shakespeare should be required reading. However, Bloom’s defense of Shakespeare rested on his personal need to strip Shakespeare of his Christian heart and soul and create a secular romantic individualist. Young doesn’t let Bloom off the hook.
The other dominant strand of Shakespeare abuse is best represented by Stephen Greenblatt and Karen Newman, the celebrated literary critics and Shakespeare scholars who both embody the worst of postmodern ideological enslavement. Postmodernism’s Shakespeare is guilty of all the sins the contemporary woke zeitgeist identifies with every stratum of Western civilization. The postmodern Shakespeare, so seductively and cruelly peddled by Greenblatt and others, transforms from eminent dramatist and poet into a mouthpiece of sexism, racism, and colonial imperialism.
Shakespeare on Love
The postmodern critics claim that Shakespeare promoted sexism and enslavement through his idealization of femininity and chastity. Far from their interpretation or the Shakespeare of Bloom, Young reads Shakespeare as he is: someone who critiqued “self-absorbed [romantic] individualism” and reminded us that love in its fullest and freest sense entailed sociality and bonds of duties to others and not to our mere sentiments.
Shakespeare’s luminous writings on love cover the totality of the human condition: jealousy, anger, lust, gentleness, and wisdom. Love is difficult, but also transformative. The highest expression and triumph of love is in marriage, friendship, and community. In other words, Shakespeare’s sexual freedom—understood in the classical and Christian sense of human flourishing and not mere choice—is found in the exact opposite of modern sexual ethics: duty, perseverance, and chastity. Shakespeare is excoriated for these views, though they are informed by two millennia of philosophy and theology.
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We Shall All Be Changed is an honest book. Pipkin’s personal stories will resonate with anyone who has lost a family member. But it’s also a gospel-infused, hopeful book written with beauty and truth. Having read it, I fear death less but hate it more as an enemy. And I believe down to my bones that what Jesus accomplished at the cross and the empty tomb means everything for our present comfort and our future hope.

My grandmother died last year on her 96th birthday. When I got the call that the end was near, I quickly drove to my parents’ home in Tennessee. In those final hours before she died, we held her hands and sang hymns. We recited Scriptures she loved and talked about heaven. Late in the evening, my grandmother died with family, friends, and a hospice nurse holding vigil by her side. “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints,” I whispered, the room now quiet in the absence of her labored breathing.
A wave of conflicting thoughts swirled in my mind. Death is natural. Death is a part of life. But death is also unnatural. It’s an enemy. This isn’t right. My grandmother was a faithful believer. Though I knew she was with the Lord, I wasn’t sure how to feel about her death. There’s an ache of grief, even if it’s grief with hope. But how do we grieve? What do we do with death—the thing that everyone faces but none of us wants to endure? If death is a natural part of life, why are we so afraid of it?
In We Shall All Be Changed: How Facing Death with Loved Ones Transforms Us, journalist Whitney Pipkin answers common questions about grieving the death of a loved one and facing our mortality. Death is a doorway that leads us to eternity, but it’s also an enemy that will chase humanity until Christ returns to put it in its grave.

Theology of Death

It’s tempting to cloak our feelings about death with cheery Bible verses and “buck-up” clichés. However, if death is truly the enemy Jesus came to destroy, then it’s right to grieve its reach in this life. It’s right to lament because death is lamentable, even if it’s anticipated. Pipkin writes, “There is no tidy theology that will keep those tears from falling. But our suffering in death need not be deepened by surprise” (33).
We all must face our mortality. Walking with our loved ones through death is a rehearsal for our own step into eternity. Unless Christ returns in our lifetime, we will die. Developing a theology of death teaches us to sit with grief and understand the hope of Christ’s return.
Death is a result of sin.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Tuesday, June 21, 2022
The recommendations in the report essentially represent a progressive takeover of the SBC, utilizing the same pattern of of Title IX style administrative control used by progressives in higher education (and elsewhere). As in secular society, accusations of wrongdoing are being leveraged for the purposes of seizing control of an institution.

In newsletter #49 I discussed the importance of defending institutional integrity. The first plank of this was “trusthworthiness,” that is, operating with baseline morals and ethics. As I put it, “You would think this would be a simple baseline element of institutional leadership, but alas apparently not. The number of churches and other Christian institutions with a variety of moral, ethical, operational, and even criminal problems is absurdly high.”
Unfortunately, one of the areas with severe failings has been in responding to abuse. The Catholic abuse scandals get the most press, but there’s a ton of Protestant ones too. At the same time, I pointed out that in the Protestant world, outrage over abuse is curiously selective and often associated with political attempts by activists to insert themselves as the leaders of the institution being accused. I said with regards to this:
This is why, although even accusations by enemies that are true need to be strongly addressed, you should never give any sort of position of authority or oversight of your organization to people making accusations against it. You’ll note that they frequently agitate for this such as by demanding that some allied organization be retained for an investigation, calling for the board members to be replaced (naturally by people of which they approve), etc. But just because I point out that an organization has some conflict of interest, for example, that doesn’t mean I or my buddies should be assigned any role in running or overseeing its finances.
I want to examine the recent Southern Baptist Convention abuse report through this lens. I didn’t go into any detail on the investigation itself and the findings. Sadly, I have no doubt that there are many cases of abuse, and many cases in which incidents of abuse were poorly handled.
The SBC is a huge denomination with nearly 14 million members. Clearly, any group this large will have lot of bad things happen within it. Demographer Lyman Stone suggested that the report shows the SBC has lower levels of abuse than we would expect. Even if that’s true, it certainly doesn’t excuse the evildoers or those who failed to correctly act in positions of authority. Judgment begins with the household of God. The Protestant house has not been in order on abuse.
Rather than the allegations themselves, I want to look at the report’s recommendations for action. There are about 30 pages worth of them, including 17 executive committee recommendations (along with two alternatives) and 16 credentials commmittee recommendations. So even in the recommendations, I cannot do a detailed analysis here. But I will give a big picture look.
Creating a Title IX Style Adjudication System in the SBC
Before getting into the recommendations, it’s important to note that in baptist church polity, each congregation is completely autonomous. Unlike other denominations like the Episcopal Church or the Presbyterian Church, where the denomination provides a lot of oversight and control over congregations, baptist denominations do not have authority over their churches. Basically, the only membership requirements are very low baselines, such as giving assent to the broadly evangelical Baptist Faith and Message statement. The SBC is more of a cooperative association than a denomination per se.
The abuse report recommendations start to change that in two key ways:

It proposes creating an “administrative entity” that will be similar to a Title IX style tribunal in investigating allegations of abuse.
It proposes turning the credentialing committee (which basically determines whether or not a church is affiliated with the SBC) into a more expansive accrediting committee that can kick out any churches that don’t comply with the Title IX style entity, or who are otherwise not perceived as following the party line from the report recommendations on abuse.

Given that this report is about some of the some heinous felonies on the books —sexual assault and sexual abuse —it’s remarkable how few references to the criminal or civil legal system there are in the recommendations. Apart from references to mandated reporting —cases where churches are legally obligated to report suspected abuse to the police —I only saw one reference to criminal justice in the recommendations, a note that the Title IX style entity might hire people from law enforcement backgrounds.
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