Book review: Out of the Ashes by Anthony Esolen

The seventeenth book I read in 2017 is Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding America Culture by Anthony Esolen.  It is one of a recent spate of jeremiads, along with Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option and Charles J. Chaput's Strangers in a Strange Land, which call the Christian faithful to intentional countercultural living in the age of Obama and Obergefell.

Esolen, a literature professor and translator of Dante, bemoans the state of public schooling, higher education, church architecture, sexual behavior, craftsmanship, childhood recreation, and more in contemporary America, and it is hard to disagree with him on many of these points.  There seems to be wide, if vague, agreement that things aren't as good as they used to be; witness Donald Trump's surprisingly successful campaign to Make America Great Again.

There are caveats, however.  Firstly, one cannot ignore the unseemliness of a white male looking back to a time when whiteness and maleness were even more privileged than they are now and calling it Good.  This is perhaps an unfair observation -- I don't believe that Esolen is motivated by prejudice -- but it is one that raises immediate distrust in the minds of those who would have been at an extreme disadvantage in those Golden Days of the 1950s.

Secondly, both the subtitle of the book and Esolen's ongoing comparison of Now to Then imply that the American culture which the author desires to rebuild matters: that is, that the rescue of what he sees as American civilization is the most important issue of the day.  This is an unexamined view that denigrates the experience of the church outside America.  While I would agree that the American experiment has been good for Christianity, especially in the realm of advancing religious liberty, to imply that it is necessary, or even desirable, is, in my opinion, to make an idol of one's nation or politics.  Christianity flourished after the fall of Christendom and has shown most admirable in places and situations where it is out of favor or even outlawed.  Whether or not "American culture" is rebuilt to Esolen's specifications, the Church Universal will persevere.

Esolen's answer to the problems of societal decay he diagnoses is the taking up of the batons dropped by American society by Christian communities.  This is a top-down remedy favorable to Esolen's own faith community of Roman Catholicism.  The remaining members of the prophetic triumvirate, Dreher and Chaput, are Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic, respectively, which I don't think is a coincidence.  Both are hierarchical organizations ready and willing to step in place of secular government.  As an Evangelical Protestant, however, I am more leery of authority, even when it appears to be bearing gifts.