AMUSINGLY, THEY HAVE THE FACTS WRONG TOO:

Poured Concrete for the Soul: a review of Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning By Nancy Pearcey (Dan Peterson, February 2011, American Spectator)

Adapted from Francis Schaeffer, under whom Pearcey studied in Switzerland, the fact/value analysis holds that modern secularism has artificially separated truth into two domains. Analogizing truth to a two-story house, the first floor is the realm of "facts," generally defined in an empiricist or materialist way. The truths of science are the paradigmatic facts that can gain admission to the first floor. Only in this realm, the secularists assert, do we find real truths about the world that are objective and verifiable, and can thus form the basis for education, government policy, and public discussion.

The second floor is the realm of "values," such as statements about aesthetics, morality, and God. These are considered by secularists to be expressions of personal preference only, which are subjective and unverifiable, and cannot form the basis for public discourse or actions. So the second floor is where religion goes. Like an eccentric uncle shut up in the attic, Christianity can be ignored so long as it doesn't try to come downstairs and annoy polite company.

Thus, materialist secularism becomes by definition the default worldview and the only legitimate worldview. As Pearcey notes, the fact/value split is the "main strategy used to marginalize and disempower Christians in the public arena." Indeed, "why bother to argue that Christianity is false when it's so much easier to take it out of the realm of true and false altogether?"

THE CONSEQUENCES OF FRACTURING TRUTH, delegitimizing Christianity, and substituting a secular worldview have been staggering. In Saving Leonardo, Pearcey first examines those effects on hot-button issues such as sexual morality, abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic research. As she shows, divisions on these issues are deeply influenced by whether one adheres to the secular view that human beings are merely biological machines, blindly evolved for no purpose, and guided by nothing but their own interests and preferences, or whether one embraces the Christian view that each of us is a divine creation, with a God-given purpose in life, and subject to immutable moral laws.

The central part of the book then traces the development of the two main streams of thought that have produced most of the modern and postmodern worldviews, in which secularism has now come to predominate. Enlightenment rationalism was the spring of the first stream, while the second was fed by the romantic reaction against rationalism.

Pearcey often turns to philosophers and thinkers for the explicit intellectual articulation of those two currents. But her major task is to track the continuing courses of rationalism and romanticism as they shaped artistic expression in the 19th and 20th centuries. In doing so, she lays bare the secular pre- suppositions that have increasingly come to underlie literature, the dramatic arts, the plastic arts, and music, with generally baneful effects.

That is an ambitious, synoptic undertaking, but Pearcey traces cause and effect deftly and clearly, without any sacrifice of nuance or accuracy. The breadth of learning that she brings to bear is formidable. How does materialism deeply inform the novels of Jack London and Theodore Dreiser? What is the philosophic foundation for the (unlistenable) musical serialism of Boulez and Babbitt? How do three paintings depicting executions by firing squad, one by Gamborino, one by Goya, and one by Manet, reveal different underlying worldviews? Pearcey marshals hundreds of examples to elucidate how worldviews play out in works of art. (I'll also note here that the book has more than 100 color images interspersed with the text, so her intellectual points are vividly and graphically reinforced as the reader progresses.)

The effects of the precepts of secularism, which destroy the unity of truth, and deny any objective meaning and purpose in life, have necessarily been dismal in the arts. The romantic strain, focusing on the individual's quest for liberation and meaning, ultimately degenerates into paintings in which paint is flung on canvases, and plays in which noth- ing occurs but banal, meaningless dialogue. The rationalist strain, which has tended to devolve into materialism and determinism, produces barren geometrical abstraction in painting and hideous Corbusian "machines for living" in architecture. An author who actually bases a novel or a play on materialist principles, as the turn of the century "naturalists" tried to do, runs the risk that his work will be utterly boring. Who cares what characters might do, if they are mere "puppets of fate," and lacking free will? As Pearcey shows, human freedom and the responsibility to make moral choices, which are central to the Christian worldview, are also essential for artistic meaning.