A couple of editorials got my attention over the past week, one by David Brooks and one by John Fea. I’ll praise one and fisk the other, so let’s start by playing nice.

In an article titled Public Hedonism, Private Restraint in our local paper, and published under other headings elsewhere, David Brooks puts forth a refreshingly optimistic take on the issue of teen promiscuity:

The fact is, sex is more explicit everywhere — on ‘‘Desperate Housewives,'' on booty-quaking music videos, on the Internet — except in real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious.

… The percentage of 15-year-olds who have had sex has dropped significantly. Among 13-year-olds, the percentage has dropped even more.

… Half of all high school boys now say they are virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990.

… People can seem raunchy on the surface but are wholesome within. There are Ivy League sex columnists who don't want anybody to think they are loose. There are foul-mouthed Maxim readers terrified they will someday divorce, like their parents. Eminem hardly seems like a paragon of traditional morality, but what he's really angry about is that he comes from a broken home, and what he longs for is enough suburban bliss to raise his daughter.

…(Young people) seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right. You may not like the growing influence of religion in public life, but the lives of young people have improved. You may not like the growing acceptance of homosexuality, but as it has happened heterosexual families have grown healthier.

I enjoy Brooks’s optimism, even if others don’t. Writing for the New York Press, Russ Smith says:

I have no interest in Brooks' own high school romances—maybe he was a stud, maybe not—but just as kids in the 1960s and 70s had more sex than their parents as teenagers, it follows that today's youth is even more active in that area. As for the surveys on the high school boys claiming they're virgins, surely Brooks knows that people respond to such questions depending on what the inquisitor wants to hear.

Smith, of course, is selectively critical. I don’t have any idea exactly how accurate the numbers Brooks sites are, of course. Smith is within reason to question them. But Smith argues that “it follows” that today’s youth is more sexually active than the previous generation. That, of course, is a hypothetical that can’t be proved or disproved. Smith is refuting the uncertain possibility Brooks advances with nothing more than another uncertain possibility. All Smith is really arguing for is his preference for pessimism. Thanks, Russ, but I get plenty of that. Let me enjoy Brooks and his optimism for a few minutes.

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The other item that got my attention, by John Fea, was a response to the general good will of Protestants on the passing of Pope John Paul II. You’re sure to have noticed that everyone, Catholic or otherwise, seems to be sympathetic and mournful about the loss of such a popular and productive religious leader. Protestant religious figures have issued praiseful statements about the late pontiff. You might even get the idea that Protestants and Catholics have come together, closer than ever, during this time of loss.

Well, John Fea isn’t having it. He doesn’t want Catholics and Protestants coming together, and he’s doing his part to reinsert the wedge and drive it as deep as he can. Fea’s column is literally a laundry list of crimes perpetrated by Protestants against Catholics for the past five hundred years:

Martin Luther and John Calvin, the two most influential leaders of the Protestant Reformation and heroic figures to most contemporary evangelicals, believed that popes of their time were the "Antichrist…"

Roger Williams, a Puritan and one of early America's champions of religious liberty, described the pope as the "son of perdition…"

Lyman Beecher, a popular evangelical reformer of the (pre-Civil War) era, said that he feared that Catholic priests would settle in the American West and use their "sinister influence" to undermine the creation of Protestant and republican institutions…

In 1945, (Carl) McIntire announced that the Catholic Church was the "greatest enemy of freedom and liberty that the world has to face today."

Uh… not that you’re keeping score, right Mr. Fea? I mean, for pity’s sake, a list of grudges like that might give readers the idea that you don’t want Catholics and Protestants to share any unity. Could that be the case? Let’s read on:

As cultural and social issues such as abortion and gay rights began to play a prominent role in American politics, evangelicals found an unlikely ally in the Roman Catholic Church and its charismatic leader, John Paul II. Today, evangelical cultural warriors such as James Dobson and Pat Robertson applaud the late pope's unbending moral convictions. Evangelical and conservative Catholic leaders have united to produce "Evangelicals and Catholics Together," a statement affirming what these two branches of Christendom hold in common.

Ah, I see. Could it be that unity between Catholics and Protestants is a threat to Fea’s left-wing causes? I think so. Unity between Catholics and Protestants could bring about a serious conservative drive with regard to the legality of abortion and gay marriage. That clearly bothers Fea. Why didn’t he just cut to the chase in the first place? Why did he need to go back 500 years to rub salt into wounds that Catholics and Protestants might be trying to heal? I guess that’s just the way liberals do things.

Let’s continue reading. Maybe Fea might have something good to say about the unity of Catholics and Protestants:

This new ecumenical spirit between Catholics and evangelicals should be celebrated as an important step toward healing old wounds dating from the Reformation of the 16th century.

Wait for it… wait for it…

Yet…

There it is!

Yet evangelicals' embrace of the pope's social views has been limited at best. The differences between the social teaching of today's conservative evangelicals and the social teaching of John Paul II are profound…

Well, yeah… there are big differences. I suppose that might explain why the Protestants are… well, Protestant, rather than Catholic. Ya think?

Conservative evangelicals may no longer view the pope as the Antichrist…

(But they used to! They used to! John has a whole list of complaints! Don’t you forget, Protestants used to call the Pope the Antichrist! Oh, yes they did! John Fea has proof! He wrote it down!)

…but don't expect them to embrace John Paul II's legacy fully anytime in the near future. To do so would force them to rethink their politics, and that they're unlikely to do.

Well, to embrace John Paul II’s legacy fully would also require Protestants to become Catholic, too, wouldn’t it? Look, Wendy and I are converting to Catholicism, so let’s settle for two Protestants at a time for now, OK? Maybe it would be acceptable to simply rejoice in the newfound unity between Catholics and Protestants, and the shared brotherhood of all Christian faiths. Maybe? Nah, couldn’t be. That might end up giving a lot of liberals reason to worry about their own political causes, wouldn’t it, Mr. Fea?