In today’s NYT (Friday 02/03/2012), David Brooks mocks the lack of conviction of a young man who proclaimed his love for Jesus and hate of religion (or religious institutions) and hypocrisy—including the Republican variety— in a recent video that is widely circulated. According to Brooks’ article, the youth ended up caving in quickly to those who defended religious institutions on a scriptural basis. Why did he cave in so quickly? Brooks thinks it is because present-day protest movements and rebellions are full of vague, superficial sentiments or passion and lack grounding in some solid tradition. If Brooks were thinking of the conditions for a dialectical, critical struggle from which new institutions eventuate, I would be interested.

But Brooks is really after “the protest cries we hear these days,” presumably Occupy Wall Street and student movements. From the young man’s example above, Brooks draws the lesson or rather advice to the young that they should forget about thinking for themselves, short of being Nietzsches or Jesuses. Let them latch on some belief system. He gives a list, including —towards the end— Dorothy Day, Thoreau, Maritain (the Maritain of the friendship with Saul Alinsky, the damned soul of Obama?). Not a peep about the gospel itself. Yes, I would agree that “Without a tradition, everything is impermanence and flux,” but as when he talks of capitalism, Brooks conveniently forgets the cost of institutions. Considering two broad traditions like Judaism and Christianity, it is clear that the Torah was not a thing dropped from the sky but came out of great human suffering. And Christianity, without its sublimating suffixes (-ian and -ity), is all about the cost of grace.

I find it ironic and strange to see institutional Brooks, in an article directed to other institutional people (the readers of the NYT, including me), counseling would-be rebels. It is less strange of course, natural even, that he tells them to replace “one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions.” He spoke and comforted himself, me, other readers, in our past, wise, timid, rewarded “choices”.

Or did he? He reminds me that one cannot extract oneself easily from the old messianic question that the internal engines of Judaism and Christianity have been keeping alive for almost two millenia now. There are those who believe and proclaim that the messiah came and the meaning of history has been revealed for good or at least in its main lines (Christianity), and there are those who believe it has not—how could it be, look around at the state of the world—and is still to come in one form or another (Judaism). Both tendencies may live in sync with a number of behaviors, from fervid apocalypticism to courageous, clear-eyed “world fixing” (tikkun ’olam). Both beliefs, especially when nameless in thousands of souls, are necessary to each other.

Brooks is skirting around the question of the meaning of our history and the nature of our institutions. His advice to would-be messiahs is to accept authorities and institutions and let them tutor “the passions of the heart.” Like the poem by the young man targeted by Brooks, the story of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoievsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is clearer on what this implies: the institution (the paradigmatic Church) no longer needs Jesus. What Jesus does, his calling an institution back to its original values, now again and more than ever interferes with it. The Grand Inquisitor doesn’t believe the vast majority of humans want freedom from institutions that know what is best for them. Neither does Brooks in this article.