THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 |A
I
’m not sure pediatricians should
admit that they like some pa-
tients more than others. But let
me get this off my chest: My favor-
ites are 3-month-old babies.
Parents may read this and silently
despair: Do things really start going
downhill at 3 months? No, but at
that age infants have gotten their
bearings. They’re past what pediatri-
cians call the “fourth trimester.”
They’ve put behind them those fussy,
colicky weeks of adjusting to life
outside the womb. (Three months is
also around the time babies forgive
their mothers for pushing them out
of a safe, quiet home into our dan-
gerous, noisy world.)
At this stage, babies and parents
have negotiated regular feeding pat-
terns. They honor daily routines of
bathing and play. Most important, 3-
month-olds are starting to sleep lon-
ger at night and wake up happy in
the morning.
A 3-month-old baby is a substan-LondonM
ike Pompeo and Wil-
liam Barr both came
under attack this
week for speeches on
religion. The secretary
of state’s talk, delivered on Oct. 11
to the Association of Christian
Counselors, was titled “Being a
Christian Leader.” The same day,
the attorney general addressed the
Notre Dame Law School on the
dangers of “militant” secularism.
These displays of piety from
members of the president’s cabinet
startled many cosmopolitan ob-
servers. Historian Tom Holland was
not among them. He argues that
the increasingly secular West re-
mains as locked into Christian as-
sumptions as it has ever been—and
that Christianity is the most revo-
lutionary cultural force in history.
Mr. Holland, 51, is a celebrated
historian of the ancient world, and
his latest book makes these argu-
ments at length. Titled “Dominion:
How the Christian Revolution Re-
made the World,” it will be pub-
lished in the U.S. on Oct. 29. In his
native Britain, it came out last
month with a notably different sub-
title, “The Making of the Western
Mind,” in which any reference to
religion was omitted. British edi-
tors,hesays,“aremoreproneto
worrying that the mention of
Christianity on the cover of a book
will frighten the horses.”
In contrast with some of his cab-
inet members, President Trump is
not a pious man. Mr. Holland calls
him “easily the least Christian
president that the U.S. has ever
had.” Yet some of his most loyal
supporters are evangelical Protes-
tants. In March the Christian
Broadcasting Network asked Mr.
Pompeo if he thought Mr. Trump
had “been raised” like the biblical
Queen Esther “to help save the
Jewish people from the Iranian
menace.” Mr. Pompeo’s answer: “As
a Christian, I certainly believe
that’s possible.”
Mr. Holland has two explana-
tions for this evangelical enthusi-
asm for Mr. Trump. The first is
their sense that the U.S. is becom-
ing a godless nation: “Roiled by is-
sues that seem to them not just un-
biblical but directly antithetical to
God’s purposes—abortion, gay
marriage, transgender rights—
they’re willing to hold their noses
and back a man who, porn stars
notwithstanding, has unblushingly
cast himself as the standard-bearer
for Christian values.”
Second, Christians “have always
seen a tracing of God’s finger in the
events of the world.” Mr. Pompeo’s
language, Mr. Holland says, “is
marinated in a distinctively Protes-
tant take on world affairs that
wouldn’t have been unfamiliar to
Oliver Cromwell.”
This worldview reaches back
much further than the Reforma-
tion. “It was there in the writings
of Eusebius” in the fourth century:
“The first great historian of the
church, he similarly saw the Roman
Emperor Constantine as a man
raised up to fulfill divine will.” Mr.
Holland suggests that Mr. Pompeo’s
beliefs are rooted in a “distinctively
biblical understanding that history
isn’t just one damn thing after an-
other—that God’s purpose is mani-
fest in the rise and fall of empires.”
All this, Mr. Holland says, fuels
the left’s contempt for evangelical
Christians. But in a country “as sat-
urated by Christian assumptions as
the United States,” he says, “Amer-
ica’s culture wars are less a war
against Christianity than a war be-
tween Christian factions.” Progres-
sives, after all, often insistthey’re
on the right side of history.
The premise that America’s cul-
ture wars pit Christians against
those who have “emancipated
themselves” from Christianity is, to
Mr. Holland, “a conceit that both
sides have an interest in promot-
ing. The fact that one is branded as
Christian and the other isn’t
doesn’t mean that both aren’t
deeply Christian....Liberals, too,
when they survey the world, view
it through a prism that has been
fashioned out of Christian glass.”
Mr. Holland is a provocative his-
torian, with an array of sometimes
eccentric extracurricular interests.
He fights for the protection of en-
dangered hedgehogs. He has joined
forces with archaeologists and dru-
ids to campaign against a proposed
road tunnel that would run almost
directly under Stonehenge. In his
spare time, he plays cricket and
fusses over dinosaur fossils, often
in the wilds of Wyoming. In his
book, he recounts his boyhood re-
jection of God, occasioned by the
giant lizards’ extinction: “Why, if
he were merciful and good, had he
permitted an asteroid to smash
into the side of the planet, making
the flesh on the bones of dinosaurs
burst into flame, the Mesozoic seas
to boil, and darkness to cover the
face of the earth?”
I meet him in his house in Brix-
ton, a gentrifying part of London
where a Cambridge-educated whiteman would not have lived 25 years
ago. Back then even I—a native of
India—would have drawn suspi-
cious looks from the people on the
street, who would have been Afro-
Caribbean. On this day, I stroll to
see Mr. Holland from a nearby pub
that had not a single black cus-
tomer. When I tell Mr. Holland this,
he is inclined to apologize, as if
guilty about all the change around
him.
The first of Mr. Holland’s six
books, “Rubicon” (2003), was on
the Roman Republic, and he de-
scribes it to me as “holding a mir-
ror up the United States in the age
of 9/11.” In 2012 he published “In
the Shadow of the Sword,” about
the origins of Islam, in which he ar-
gues that much of what Muslims
have traditionally believed about
Muhammad and the Quran were
myths. A British TV movie based
on the book prompted death
threats from Salafists.A
book on Christianity is un-
likely to imperil his life in
quite the same way. But it
may make him unpopular with the
left—particularly his contention
that the #MeToo movement is in-
herently Christian.
“#MeToo would not have any
impact—would have no resonance,”
Mr. Holland says, “if it were not
culturally taken for granted that
men do not have the right to force
themselves on their inferiors. This
is a cultural given in the United
States, that men do not have this
right.”
It is, however, “a very, very cul-
turally distinctive assumption.” In
ancient Rome, for instance, “the es-
sence of being a male citizen was
that you had the right to penetrate
pretty much anyone who was not a
citizen, or the wife of a citizen, or
the chattel of a citizen.” In that
world, the “sexual binary” was notbetween men and women but be-
tween those who had power and
those who lacked it.
Christianity changed sexual mo-
rality altogether, beginning with St.
Paul. He inherited from Jewish
scripture the idea “that God cre-
ates man and woman, and that this,
not power, was the sexual binary.”
Paul refined this further by saying
that the relationship between man
and woman mirrors the relation-
ship of Christ and the church. So if
a man raped a woman, “that was a
sacrilege against the Church and
against Christ,” Mr. Holland says.
“Paul imposes a sense on Chris-
tians that the human body is some-
thing that is sacral, and cannot just
be penetrated and used, as was
generally taken for granted in the
Roman world.”
A further refinement to sexual
morality had “incalculable conse-
quences,” Mr. Holland says. Paul
made sex “the focus of his anxiet-
ies.” The Old Testament condemns
men sleeping with men, but not
women sleeping with women. The
categorical notion that homosexu-
ality is wrong doesn’t appear in
Jewish scripture, or in Greek or Ro-
man literature or law. “It’s some-
thing that Paul comes up with,” Mr.
Holland says, “in a throwaway
comment in his Letter to the Ro-
mans.”
Mr. Holland is now quite ani-
mated, and his narrative fast-for-
wards to the 1960s in America,
where Martin Luther King invokes
the traditions of American Protes-
tantism by “summoning white
American Protestants to a recogni-
tion of their own faults, because
fundamental to Christianity is that
all humans are created equal in the
image of God.”
The civil-rights movement was
deeply and overtly Christian—but
as the movement for rights ex-
panded to include women and gaypeople, Mr. Holland says, it became
“divorced from Christian Protestant
doctrine because of a tension with
traditional Christian teaching.”
Gay-rights activists and feminists
“can’t and won’t do what King had
done, which is to speak to Ameri-
can Protestants in the language of
prophecy,” Mr. Holland says.
Yet “both sides were indebted to
Christian assumptions.” As a Chris-
tian may speak of being awakened,
a progressive describes himself as
“woke”—meaning, in Mr. Holland’s
words, that he is “someone who
knows what is right, who cam-
paigns for justice. He recognizes
that there’s a hierarchy in which
those who are the first will be the
last, and the last shall be first.”
That’s the essence of Christ’s
teaching, but because progressives
have “come to see Christianity it-
self as hegemonic, Christianity it-
self is condemned.”
In the 1960s, that meant a con-
demnation of Christian morality as
repressive. “People consciously
looked back,” Mr. Holland says, “to
the pre-Christian age of Ancient
Greece and Rome.” Along with
gains for women came “the mes-
sage for men that you don’t have to
put up with repressive Christian
morality—you can just have sex
with whoever you like. It’s cool and
free, and you’re not a prude.”
Christian morality is demanding,
“and in the 1960s the stays were
loosened. Men suddenly got a
glimpse of what life would be like
without this sexual morality.” They
became, in a sense, Roman again.
St. Paul seemed passé.‘W
hat’s happening with
#MeToo,” Mr. Holland
says, “is essentially an
attempt to reimpose that Christian
sexual morality.” He notes that
women who go on #MeToo mar-
ches often dress as fertility slaves
from “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Mar-
garet Atwood’s dystopian satire of
Christian moralism. Although this
costume is designed to convey a re-
jection of patriarchy, Mr. Holland
regards it as a “call to return to a
Puritan America. They’re demand-
ing that men in America today be-
have as Puritan men had done, that
they respect the bodily integrity of
women.”
That sums up what Mr. Holland
calls “the paradox that lies at the
heart of the culture wars in the
West, and particularly in America.
It’s that although it seems to be a
war between Christians and post-
Christians, it is actually part of an
ongoing civil war that has always
been present in Christianity.”Mr. Varadarajan is executive ed-
itor at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution.The Christian Roots of #MeToo
KEN FALLINThe historian argues both
sides of the culture wars
share similar theological
assumptions—including
the dignity of women,
which he traces to St. Paul.
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Tom Holland| By Tunku Varadarajan
OPINION
Detroit Is Making a Comeback. Can Its Schools?
There wasn’t much
to celebrate in Mich-
igan’s statewide
reading and math
assessments this
year. No grade level
in the state reached
50% proficiency in
any subject on the
Michigan Student
Test of Educational
Preparedness, or M-
STEP, according to results released in
August. But Nikolai Vitti, who heads
the state’s largest public school sys-
tem, hasn’t lost hope.
When he became Detroit’s super-
intendent in 2017, Mr. Vitti inherited
a crisis. By 2010 the city’s population
had shrunk nearly to the size it had
been a century earlier and the auto
manufacturers on which its economy
depended had collapsed. A 2011 re-
view of Detroit’s finances estimated
it owed creditors $12 billion. The
school district alone owed $305 mil-
lion in 2009, when the state put an
emergency manager in control of its
finances.
The district continued bleeding
students and funds. The number of
students attending Detroit Public
Schools fell to 48,900 in 2015 from
95,000 in 2009. In 2016 the district
nearly declared bankruptcy and was
put under the oversight of an emer-
gency commission to deal with its
overwhelming debt.
In a lawsuit filed against state of-
ficials that year by Los Angeles-
based Public Counsel, a pro bono law
firm, seven Detroit students at five of
the district’s lowest-performing
schools alleged that classrooms
lacked “textbooks and basic materi-
als” as well as qualified teachers. The
plaintiffs said they could see their
breath in the winter and sat in 90-de-
gree heat in the warmer months. In
2017 the district ranked last among
major cities on the National Assess-
ment of Educational Progress—for
the fifth time in a row.
By the time Mr. Vitti arrived, he
says, the district had started “to lose
sight of what children can do.” It had
become acceptable to focus only “on
caring and loving and supporting chil-
dren from a social-emotional point of
view, because of the challenges that
many of our students bring to school.”
The district was “using curriculum
that were sometimes one, two, three
grade levels below what the children
should have been exposed to.”
Mr. Vitti and his team immediately
focused on raising student achieve-
ment, instituting a new curriculum for
the 2017-18 school year. The effect was
immediate. In 2018, only 11.5% of De-
troit students in grades three through
seven—those tested on the M-STEP—
were proficient in reading and about
6.7% in math. After the implementation
of the new curriculum, those rates rose
to 12.7% and 10.1% respectively.
As Detroit improves, the rest of
Michigan slides. Other than third-
grade reading, every grade in Detroit
saw improvement above the state av-
erage in every subject area on this
year’s M-STEP. Statewide, no grade
rose by more than a single point in
math. The fourth grade dropped 0.
point. But Detroit posted math gains
ranging from 1.2 points in sixth grade
to 5.3 in third grade. The district also
largely outperformed the state aver-
age in reading. The only exception
was third grade. The state eked out a
0.7 point gain while Detroit posted a
0.6-point improvement. In every
other grade, Detroit did better than
Michigan. Seventh grade was the
lowest-scoring grade statewide,
shedding 0.7 point. Detroit’s seventh-
graders gained 1.4 points.
Mr. Vitti pushes staff as well asstudents to meet higher standards.
He and his team meet with principals
every three months to go over data
such as attendance records, disciplin-
ary reports, and student literacy and
math proficiency. Mr. Vitti’s emphasis
on competent leadership stood out to
Katharine Strunk, a Michigan State
professor who co-directs the center
in charge of assessing the state’s two-
year old Partnership Model, through
which Michigan has crafted individu-
alized agreements with failing
schools to meet goals for reform.
Michigan has struggled to hold
schools accountable in the past. Still,
Ms. Strunk was “really optimistic
about the overall results across the
state, but Detroit specifically.” De-
troit has a disproportionate number
of partnership schools, all of whichsaw the same or higher gains in their
M-STEP scores as other district
schools, according to Mr. Vitti.
Detroit’s growing culture of ac-
countability extends to teacher pay. A
2010 law requires Michigan districts to
tie some pay to performance, but Capi-
tol Confidential reports many districts
simply don’t. Detroit is an exception. It
had offered a form of merit pay in the
past but, Mr. Vitti tells me, it “was not
directly linked to student achieve-
ment” and ended just before he took
over as superintendent.
Against the union’s public opposi-
tion, Mr. Vitti won an agreement this
year to link bonus pay to student
growth as shown by improved literacy
and math scores on state testing. He
says he hopes to do more with perfor-
mance pay in future union talks. De-troit teachers have been dramatically
underpaid for over a decade, the su-
perintendent says, adding that he has
raised teacher salaries generally. But
he sees it as vital to reward good
teachers: “There are those that are
creating a track record that is stronger
than others and that is a way to recog-
nize that work and also to retain that
talent.”
In a state where so many schools
are struggling, Detroit stands out as an
example of what reforms can achieve.
Mr. Vitti acknowledges the system still
has a long way to go, “but we can defi-
nitely say that we’re moving in the
right direction and for us, we haven’t
been able to say that in a long time.”Ms. Keller is an assistant editorial
features editor at the Journal.Thecity’stestscoresare
moving ever so slightly in
the right direction even as
the rest of the state slides.
CROSS
COUNTRY
By Megan
Keller
The Perfect Age Is 3 Months
tial package. Typically weighing 13 to
14 pounds and extending more than
23 inches, babies this age fit nicely
into one’s arms. They’ve also traded
their newborn frailty for growing so-
lidity and firmness.Around 12 weeks after birth, babies
are becoming sociable. Delightful be-
yond words, they follow people
around the room with their eyes, coo
with abandon, and flash winsome
smiles to everyone who engages
them, even strangers.
Three months postdelivery also
marks several milestones for par-
ents. First, it’s the anniversary of the
baby’s conception. The family has
been living with the child for a full
year. I like to point this out to par-
ents and ask them if their lives havechanged. Most smile and marvel at
the differences.
Second, new mothers are well on
their way to full recovery from preg-
nancy and childbirth. They’re finally
getting some sleep, and they can ex-
ercise again. This return to healthy
rhythms restores energy to weary
couples and gives them hope that
they will succeed at this parenting
business.
These developments make the
three-month checkup an affair of joy
and wonder. But what clinches 3
months as my favorite age is the
look these babies have in their eyes.
It’s a guileless glance that conveys
hope and destiny, plus a furtive glim-
mer of self-knowledge. Babies this
age seem to have a sense of the hu-
man potential they’re soon to claim.
If you spend time with 3-month-old
babies, you’ll see that glimmer too.Dr. Hamilton practices pediatrics
in Santa Monica, Calif., and is au-
thor of “7 Secrets of the Newborn”
(St. Martin’s, 2018).By Robert C. HamiltonThesebabiescoo,flash
winsome smiles, sleep
longer and wake up happy.