John Saltmarsh, a chaplain in the parliamentary army during the English Civil War (1642-6), wrote that “the interest of the people in Christ’s kingdom is not only an interest of … submission, but of consultation, of debating, counselling, prophesying, voting.” We don’t often think of these words together. However, consultation should precede voting, and prophesying can be a political act, as in the Civil Rights movement.

One of Salmarsh’s colleagues, another chaplain named William Dell, asserted that anyone might preach in his own way, since “unity is Christian, uniformity antichristian.” He welcomed diverse voices and opinions because “the variety of forms in the world is the beauty of the world.” John Robinson, the Pilgrims’ pastor while they were in Leiden (1609-20), said that everyone should be encouraged to speak publicly after a sermon. At the Bell Alley Baptist Church in London in the mid-1600s, public debates were held as part of religious observances. Around the same time, George Fox, the first Quaker, used to travel from church to church provoking public arguments. Once, he recalled,

I began to speak to [the minister after a sermon] and he began to oppose me. I told him his glass [half-hour] was gone, his time was out; the place was as free for me as for him; and he accused me that I had broken the law in speaking to him in his time in the morning, and I told him he had broken the law in speaking in my time.

Modern American evangelical Christianity can be traced back to men like Saltmarsh and Dell and to the general atmosphere in the 1640s and 1650s. Radical protestants disagreed about many matters of theology (as do modern evangelicals), but they fought for the right to dispute in public. That is a valuable heritage for Americans who favor civil liberties and public deliberation. It is also, perhaps, an argument against mega-churches and TV ministries, which are very much one-way performances.

There was another face of 17th-century protestant politics. It was Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Parliament that, in 1656, criminalized “disturbances” in churches, reinstating a law that had been passed under the Catholic Queen Mary in the 16th century, but now to suppress Quakers instead of Calvinists. Today, the pious are still influenced by Puritanism, but it is worth remembering that some protestant fundamentalists have found in free debate the essence of their faith.

[Quotations from Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside-Down, 1972]

(On a flight to Milwaukee): At a meeting earlier this week, experts and advocates debated data on the civic participation of particular disadvantaged groups. The groups we were talking about don’t vote or volunteer, according to surveys conducted by the Census Bureau and other authorities. A crucial question arose: Do we believe that voting and volunteering rates measure worthwhile forms of behavior? Why don’t we measure, for example, business deals that build the strength of an ethnic community? Or the kind of deliberate foot-dragging and noncompliance that is often the resort of poor people when faced with oppressive power?

It occurred to me that we don’t have theories that tell us how an individual should act to cause social change. There are plenty of theories that try to explain when and why social change occurs, e.g., because of revolutions in the means of production, technological innovations, shifts in demographics and geographical distribution, crises of rising expectations, failures of the prevailing ideology to match reality …. But there are not many theories about what you or I should do if we have political goals. The standard theories sometimes even suggest that you and I can do nothing, because social change is not influenced by deliberate human action–but that view is surely overstated. I may be missing useful theories, but all I can think of are nostrums about the power of small-scale collective action, by the likes of Margaret Mead, Einstein, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. I find their advice more inspirational than analytical.

If there were a true academic discipline of citizenship, one of its main questions would be: What are the best strategies for obtaining social change if you are an individual situated in various ways? That would be quite different from a more standard question in political science, which is: Why do institutions and policies change? If we could answer the first question, then we could say much more about the kinds of civic engagement that are most valuable for people in various situations. That would be much better than the standard approach right now, which is simply to use the available data to measure “participation,” as if it were self-evident that voting and volunteering are effective.

(New York City) The director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, recently disclosed that 100,000 people work for the US intelligence agencies. Not long before that disclosure, his deputy, Mary Margaret Graham, let slip that the intelligence budget of the United States is $44 billion.

I’m in favor of getting good intelligence, but those numbers look huge when put in context. The total cost of research in American degree-granting universities was $18 billion in 2000-2001. That figure excluded overhead (the cost of libraries, cafeterias, heating bills, etc). Furthermore, academic research is more expensive in 2006 than it was five years ago. Nevertheless, it appears that the intelligence agencies of the US spend more than the cost of research in all 4,236 American institutions of higher education put together.

I realize that intelligence is more expensive than some other forms of research, because some of the data must be collected against foreign countries’ will–which requires spy satellites, bugs, and bribes. But colleges and universities study a huge range of subjects (from global warming to ancient Sumerian) for a total that is smaller than what the US government spends to investigate foreign states and organizations.

A tiny proportion of academic research goes, for example, to studying modern Iraq. But is there any doubt that the academic experts on Iraq better predicted the results of an invasion than the $44-billion intelligence agencies? The same agencies utterly misunderstood the course of events in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Middle East in 1973, Iran in 1979, the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Pakistan since 2000, and the Palestinian territories in the recent elections.

As libertarians and free-market conservatives should be the first to suspect, a monopolistic, bureaucratic, closed system of intelligence gathering is unlikely to be anything other than inefficient and incompetent. It may amass piles of secret data (to justify enormous budgets and to give it access to information that no one else has), but it will fail to interpret, synthesize, or predict. The late Senator Moynihan once wrote that during the Cold War, “error became a distinctive feature of the [national security] system. This is easy enough to explain. As everything became secret, it became ever more difficult to correct mistakes. Why? Because most of the people who might spot the mistakes were kept from knowing about them because the mistakes were classified.” [Moynihan, “The Peace Dividend,” New York Review of Books, (June 28, 1990), p. 3.]

With this warning in mind, we read that a CIA employee or alumnus was recently “refused permission to publish an op-ed article that drew on material from the agency’s Web site”; and the Agency’s inspector general has been given, or has chosen to take, a lie-detector test–but he cannot publicly say why.

Some people are angry about the display of Mexican flags at rallies for immigrant rights. “This isn’t Mexico,” said Joseph Turner, founder of Save Our State. “This is America …. What [annoys me] most is the arrogance that they are going to fly a foreign flag on my soil.” But nothing could be more American. Within five minutes of searching Google images, I found the green, white, and orange tricolor flag of the Irish Republic at the head of St. Patrick’s Day parades in Cape Cod and Staten Island, New York; the tricolore italiano waving at a New York City Columbus Day Parade; a profusion of Greek flags on Fifth Avenue during the National Greek Parade; and rival Israeli and Palestinian flags at an Israeli Independence Day rally at Stanford. Usually, the Stars and Stripes is carried next to foreign flags at ethnic pride parades; that was also the case at the recent immigration rallies.

Sometimes, when I think about the state of civic engagement in America, I just want to make a face …