Evangelical leader converts to Catholicism
It's not every day that the president of the is converts to Catholicism. Francis Beckwith is a leading American conservative Christian academic and commentator. He is a professor at Baylor University, an historically Baptist liberal arts college in Texas, and is a leading figure in the Intelligent Design movement. Ten days ago, he was received into full communion by the Catholic Church and resigned as president of the Evangelical Theologial Society -- much to the surpise of many evangelicals in the United States.
Dr Beckwith was in fact raised within the Catholic tradition and in the final days of Pope John Paul's pontificate he wrote articles (such as ) inviting Evangelicals to recognise the late Pope as a great theologian with much to teach evangelicals. In 2005, he wrote:
Over the past few decades, Catholics and Evangelicals have forged cultural and political alliances and, as a result, have begun to learn from one another, oftentimes discovering that some of our beliefs about the other did not correspond to reality. This is not to say that there are not real theological differences. There are. But we have so much more in common than we realized before. For this reason, we should enthusiastically plumb the many resources in the other’s tradition with which we can nurture our souls and sharpen our minds. There is no better place for Evangelicals to start than in the works of John Paul II, a good and faithful servant who did well.
Comments
I've always wondered how someone who is an excellent salesman for his company's product, trying his hardest to convince his prospects of the superiority of what he sells over the competition's offerings is able to switch companies and make a convincing case for his new employer arguing the exact opposite of what he had said just days earlier, sometimes to the same prospects. What could go on in his mind to convince him that what was best is now just OK and what was average is now oustanding. It must seem to some people around the world that Americans change religions like they get a new pair of shoes, the old ones having worn so thin you can see right through them. So it must be for Francis Beckwith who was raised a Catholic, saw the light and became a Baptist and evangelical, and now has seen the brighter light of his former cult, the one which he previously rejected. And unlike the manufacturer of say automobiles, these religions can't say that they've come out with a new and improved model to win over converts they'd lost once before, the theology doesn't change which is one reason some people are attracted to them, a sort of stability in an ever changing world. So now Beckwith must either accept evolution which as we learned on William Crawley's show some months back from an authoratitive souce is Catholic theology or he must admit that he picks and chooses among those aspects of the dogma he likes and rejects those he disagrees with, the very thing a priest will admonish his flock for doing. So the first question I'd ask him in an interview after why did you swap religions is do you believe in evolution as Catholic dogma has it or in Creation Science or Intelligent Design (the name given it to circumvent the US Constitution's ban on teaching in in public schools) and what made you change your mind about that. To one sitting on the shore with binoculars, watching a drowning man you don't know or care about grasp for whatever floats to keep from going under can be an amusing diversion for a few moments. For all his learning, Beckwith seems utterly confused and at sea. Anyone want to send him a note in a bottle? Anyone got a bottle? If it isn't empty, let me be the first to offer to help you drain it.
Mark:
Perhaps I can remedy your confusion. Mr. Crawley's claim that I am a leading figure in the Intelligent Design Movement is misleading. My work on ID has dealt exclusively with the legal question as to whether non-sectarian cases for non-naturalistic accounts of natural phenomena may be taught in U. S. public schools without violating the separation of church and state. My answer is "yes," which, as I have written, supports the notion that ID could be taught in public schools, but within certain narrow parameters. My own view is that at present it ought not to be taught. But that is a policy question with which I do not deal.
Personally, I made my peace with Darwin sometime ago. So, it doesn't bother me either way. However, with naturalism, that is another story. I think, and have argued, that naturalism as a metaphysical position is deeply flawed.
I hope your confusion has been remedied.
Sincerely,
F. Beckwith
Not so fast Francis. You are listed as a Fellow with the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture founded in 1996 with the assistance of Phillip E. Johnson in order to advance the Wedge strategy. The Discovery Insttute is America's leading Intelligent Design advocacy group.
Francis, you have given very vocal public support ti the Discovery Institute's work. It's a bit rich now to try to distance yourself. I'd say the post is acurate. You were involved as an evangelical in a culture war. You may now want to walk away from al of that, but let's not rewrite the past.
Francis Beckwith, as a followup to my first posting and since you have been kind enough to give us your time and reply here, I have a question I would appreciate an answer to. Could you describe for us your epiphanal experiences both in your original conversion away from Catholicism and your later reconversion to it? I am most interested in what went through your mind and how you reconciled what you had previously believed with what you later believed in each case. While this does not rise to Orwell's concept of doublethink because that requires a belief in two mutually exclusive contradictory ideas with equal conviction at the same time, this strikes me as a step in that direction. After all, the two theologies you believed in at one time or another had quite different views. During Pope Benedict's visit to Brazil this week, he made it clear that Catholicism in Latin America is being challenged by Evangelicals, a challenge he wants to meet and prevail over. As luck would have it, these are the very two theologies you have believed in yourself at one time or another in your life. Do you have any advice about strategies for the Pope now that you have more than stuck your nose in the other tent so to speak?
What happened to my other posting? Too confrontational?
On the assumption that my reply to #2 was either unacceptable or was lost in cyberspace in Ö÷²¥´óÐã's impossibly unreliable file server, I'll rephrase what I said and this time I'll keep a copy just in case I have to repost.
Francis Beckwith, I am not a confused person. I have never changed my theological beliefs becaue I have never had any. I have been an atheist all my life. I've never been blinded by the light of someone else's truth. I know only what I see and can deduce from it. I take even that on a tentative basis. If I tentatively believe what others claim to have seen and deduced, I take that tentatively with the assumption that they can show me exactly what they saw so that I can see it for myself. I also have to understand and agree with their logical assumptions. And again, it is always subject to being overthrown by new observations which nullify the logic. Others seem to change their view of existance periodically taking other people at face value without question and are just as certain each time they've made a change in their beliefs as they had been the previous time. I love that question lawyers always ask of people who have changed their story when they take the stand to testify in court; "were you telling us the truth with your original story or are you telling us the truth now? Since you've changed your story, how can we know that you aren't mistaken this time as well?"
Insofar as your role in the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, I may have been misinformed by William Crawley but I was not confused. However I will tentatively take you at your word for argument's sake that your role was not as an advocate for intelligent design but for the right for it to be taught in American public schools, presumably because it is science, not religion. I don't see it that way and neither did the court in Dover Pennsylvania. They called it Creationism under another name and the clumsiness with which it was disguised must have been astonishing even to the court, a text editor used simply to change a single word or phrase systematically leaving the entire remainder of the text unaltered. How obvious a fraud, couldn't its proponents have done a little better, made it a little more challenging?
Science and religion are incompatible. Except for the method which insists on conclusions drawn from observations and consistant with them, scientific theory is infinitely flexible, always subject to change when new observations fly in the face of old theories. In fact the theories are overthown even when a new better theory isn't available to explain new observations. That no theory of natural science currently exists to explain observations and therefore a supernatural theory must be the correct explanation by default is NOT acceptable science.
By contrast, religion is infinitely rigid, unwilling to yield in the face of even incontrovertable evidence of its flaws. You say you find flaws in natural science but what could be more flawed than theories which cannot be altered or abandoned when facts prove them wrong? In the past, when theocrats had absolute power as they do in some places in the world today like Iran, heresy, the presentation of contradictions to theological doctrine were met with the rack or burning at the stake as a way to surpress the facts and frighten anyone who would follow a similar path. Today, there are punishments for people who do that if they get caught at it. Andy McIntosh would probaby have been far happier in Galileo's world where he would have no fear of being contradicted about his obviously incorrect pronouncements about the second law of thermodynamics because it violates his theology of Intelligent Design.
Those who think as you do and who try to impose flawed pseudo science and non science on children in America's public schools are not only risking their mental well being and giving them misinformation which will damage them for their entire lives, it risks compromising America's national security by handicapping students in comparison to those in other countries not burdened with such nonsense. The outcome could have ominous consequences for future generations of Americans who will live in a world where the US is no longer number one in science and technology. That's what Dr. Miller and his colleagues said and I agree with them.
"Not so fast Francis. You are listed as a Fellow with the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture founded in 1996 with the assistance of Phillip E. Johnson in order to advance the Wedge strategy. The Discovery Insttute is America's leading Intelligent Design advocacy group."
That is true. DI was kind enough to provide me with a modest fellowship seven years ago to help fund my work on ID and public education, work I produced as a dissertation for my graduate degree in law at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. (The sum was $9,000, a pittance of the total cost of my law school tuition, board, and expenses. Since Fall 2000 I have received no remuneration from DI)
Having said that, I am not required as a fellow to support or agree with every policy, program, or view uttered by DI or any of its other fellows. DI has been magnanimous in supporting my work without requiring that I undergo a litmus test.
I do agree with DI that materialism as a worldview is seriously flawed, which is a widely-held view among theistic philosophers including those that reject ID arguments. I'm not sure what's so controversial about that.
You write:
"Francis, you have given very vocal public support to the Discovery Institute's work."
Really, where?
Certainly, I support any endeavor that advances important conversations concerning the relationship between science, religion, and knowledge. Hence, I support the work of the Templeton Foundation, which has been generally opposed to ID.
You write:
"It's a bit rich now to try to distance yourself. I'd say the post is accurate. You were involved as an evangelical in a culture war. You may now want to walk away from all of that, but let's not rewrite the past."
What I am trying to distance myself from are bigoted and misleading caricatures of my work, depictions, such as yours, that play to the prejudices of your audience rather than to the higher aspects of their intellects.
Because of comments such as yours, I remain a fellow of DI as a matter of principle. After all, there is no financial or professional incentive in doing so. What I do not want to do is to acquiesce to the bigoted bullies. That would set a bad example to younger scholars.
You apparently have not been to my website for awhile. If you peruse it, you will see that I do not shy away from the issues that deeply divide American culture, e.g., abortion, the nature of marriage, and whether religious claims may count as knowledge. In fact, later this year Cambridge University Press will be publishing a monograph of mine on the topic of abortion, Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice. See the link to it on my website:
I do what any descent citizen should do who wants to persuade his fellows of the correctness of his point of view: I offer arguments in a respectful fashion. I am open to criticism and am honored when other scholars take my work seriously.
With best regards,
Frank
Francis Beckwith, here's a question about abortion you probably don't get every day. If you had your way and Roe v Wade was overturned, there would be half a million additional new mouths to feed in the United States every single year. Most of those mouths are not going to be born in white healthy adoptable babies, most will be born black, brown, Latino, drug addicted, medically dependent for a lifetime, or to indigent parents such as single teenage mothers who can barely feed themselves let alone absorb the cost of raising a child. In short they will be unadoptable or will remain with impovrished parents. So here is my question; who is going too pay to feed, clothe, house, provide medical services, and educate these children? When they grow up and find that they cannot have the $80 Jordache Jeans, the $100 Addidas shoes, the $300 Play Stations middle class children have unless they steal to get them, or turn to prostitution, or sell drugs, who will protect us from them then? When they become young adults, they will form a criminal underclass. In a generation there will be as many of them as there are illegal aliens in the US today only they won't be deportable or intimidated. When they commit murder killing the children and grandchildren of your most ardent supporters, aren't they going to be the ones to scream the loudest for the death penalty to be imposed on them? How do I know this will happen? Because the one thing they will be able to get their hands on easily are guns. As we just saw in Virginia, even the most deranged individual has no trouble acquiring them. Your most ardent supporters have seen to that too.
Francis Beckwith, now you do have me confused. As a Master of Juridical Studies, your work on behalf of DI is clearly a professional service whose cost you have apparantly mostly absorbed yourself. I'd like to know why. You have intimated that you are disabused of the philosophy of DI yet it would seem that this voluntary donation of your professional services to them on their behalf could belie that claim. Does it? Don't they have the financial resources to pay for their own legal services? It would come as a great surprise to me if they didn't. You said you have made your peace with Darwin, however I get the feeling you are still to a degree in sympathy with DI's cause yourself and feel it is your responsibility to see to it that it gets its fair day in court. I have yet to meet a lawyer who donated his services for free (except pro bono to the indigent) for a cause he didn't wholeheartedly believe in. So do you or do you not personally believe in ID? Are you of one mind or two? If it's two, haven't you arrived at doublethink?
Many of you in the UK will remember Malcolm Muggeridge, the English iconoclast journalist who went from atheism to agnosticism to Protestantism to Catholicism.
On November 27, 1982, Malcolm Muggeridge at age 79 and his wife Kitty were received into the Catholic Church.
Here is a short description of his conversion story.
Regards,
Michael
Mark:
As for your question on Roe, you are indeed correct that I do not get it every day, though there have been days when I've gotten it. And in fact, I address a similar question in my forthcoming book. There are two flaws in your question. First, overturning Roe would not make abortion illegal. I don't know how familiar you are with American law, but Roe merely federalized abortion as a fundamental right. So, if Roe were overturned, the issue would return to the individual states, many of which would keep abortion legal in one form or another. Second, the wrongness of abortion, if it is indeed wrong, depends on the premise that the unborn is a person with intrinsic dignity. If that is in fact the case, then society does not uphold the dignity of its least prosperous members by allowing them to kill their progeny. What we would be doing is allowing the minority poor to assimilate the very ideas about them and their children that racists who hate them hold. I don't see anyone would want to do that. Of course, if the unborn is not person, then it doesn't matter. But then you wouldn't need any other arguments. So, that should be your focus rather than other contingent, and thus irrelevant matters.
As for my work on ID, I am not a lawyer. My grad degree in law was an academic one, not a professional one. So, like a PhD dissertation, my MJS thesis was a piece of scholarship and not advocacy. It was very expensive, but well worth it intellectually and professionally.
All the best,
Frank
Francis you are re-writing your past! You are still listed as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute. When did you resig? When did you renounce intelligent design theory?
You also engaged in public debate during last year's Intelligent Design court case in Dover, Pennsylvania, and you supported ID in schools.
I repeat (and I'm glad he hasn't changed his original post here) Will is completely accurate in naming you as a player in the American Intelligent Design movenment.
Trying to rewrite your involvement now is ridiculous.
Francis Beckwith;
Thank you for responding but I don't feel you answered any of my questions. I am well aware that should Roe v Wade be overturned, it would open the door to a crazy quilt patchwork of different laws regarding abortion in each state. Overturning it is just one step in the religious right's program to get back to earlier times when abortion was illegal everywhere in America. I assume you know that in those days, rich people sent their wives, daughters, mistresses to Switzerland to get what was politely termed a "theraputic abortion" while most other women either tried to self abort, went to back alley butchers, or carried unwanted pregnancies to term. Assuming that the religious right ultimately got its way, we would still arrive at the end result I postulated. So you have not answered my question, who will pay for all of the unwanted children who will be born in America. The question of course is rhetorical, the taxpayers will unless they are prepared to see them starve in the street. You and I will be old men by then and it won't matter to us. I've moved about 7 years ago from a gated community in an affluent suburb to a rural community where crime is even lower. The children and grandchildren of those alive today who are condemned to live in the cities and poorer suburbs won't have that luxury, they will have to contend with a new criminal underclass you and those who are of like mind will inadvertently bring into the world. Think about it. I of course have no concerns about the right of the unborn. We could argue about whether god exists or whether there is such a thing as a soul or an afterlife till hell freezes over and not agree. I of course do not believe that a fetus has any rights, you do. We'll see what America's women do when they see the first real sign of their right to a legal abortion in America taken away from them. I have a hunch they will be in open revolt and will work to overturn the entire Republican party but that's another story for another day.
I'm still curious about your epiphanies. Some people have one, you have had two. What was it like overturning all of your most cherished beliefs not once but twice? How can you be sure it won't happen again some day? I'm also not clear where you stand with Darwinian theory. You said you made your peace with Darwin. From what I understood from an interviewee who spoke on theological matters for the Catholic Church on William Crawley's program some months ago, Darwin's theory is Catholic theological dogma period, case closed. So by assisting those who would overturn it, aren't you working to overturn a theology you now believe in? Help me out here, you have me very confused and puzzled about your attitude about this. If DI wins, you will have facillitated American public schools to preach in science classes a dogma which directly contradicts what you believe in and supplant it with one contradictory to it. If it doesn't get that right and loses, you will have failed in your efforts and you will never be sure you haven't given it your best shot unless you truely believe in their cause. So which side are you on. I know in the law, people are supposed to be able to argue either side of a case with equal skill but there must come a point where you stop being a legal expert and start being a man. Where does the man Francis Beckwith stand on this issue today?
Disappointingly we've had no further comment from (deleted) Francis ... Beckwith. (comment deleted)
Note: Commenters should refrain from making personal attacks on others. Civility in discussion is important. Dr Beckwith is at liberty to participate as often or as seldom as he wishes in this post.
This post should be deleted. I do not believe that Mr. Bechwith has every claimed to be Saint Francis. Seems as though this is a forum just to trash Catholics. What a shame. I do hope that you post this comment. I have not seen my orevious one posted.
Gary, I agree entirely and have had the section of the post you refer to removed. You are right to bring this to our attention. It is vital that commenters show respect to one another in their exchanges. I favour as much freedom as possible for commenters to express their own views, but there is a limit to that freedom when commenters engage in sectarian language. It should be possible for everyone to state their views on any subject here without descending into uncivil language. Thanks for making the point.