Joseph Hartman (vice president for public policy and general counsel at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention) lectured at Providence Magazine’s Christianity & National Security Conference on Nov. 2, 2018.

[Applause]

Well, thanks, Mark. I won’t just talk about Niebuhr, but that’s going to be sort of the bulk of what I’d like to do. So, Mark had asked me to talk about Niebuhr for today. I’ll try to do that. The way I’d like to proceed is to spend just a brief amount of time, I know most people here probably know something about Niebuhr, giving you a little bit of his background.

I’m going to focus substantively on two areas: Niebuhr’s understanding of what he called human nature. I almost want to do this when I say human nature; some people understand why. I’ll explain that, and then I want to turn to his account of history. Partly because those were the two primary themes in his largest work, “The Nature and Destiny of Man,” and also because I think, and I’ll get to this, they speak to issues we’re dealing with today. So, I’ll try to kind of connect those up.

I’m not doing a Christian realism lecture, and I’m also not an expert in foreign policy. So if you came to talk or argue about Niebuhr and foreign policy, you can try, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to respond or not. We’ll see. Just a little bit of background: Niebuhr is well known, probably one of the more famous American public intellectuals in the last century. His career really stretched from World War I all the way to Vietnam.

He was prolific in terms of what he wrote: books, sermons, articles, op-eds, or whole books of his op-eds. Again, the work I’m going to focus on would be more scholarly. He wasn’t, I don’t think I’d call him a scholar in the sense of maybe many of us, but nonetheless, his most scholarly work, I think, is “The Nature and Destiny of Man,” which were his Gifford lectures delivered in Scotland in 1939. He’s also pretty well known for the Serenity Prayer, which was originally included in a prayer book given to American GIs in World War II, probably more famous as the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer.

He was actually first-generation as his parents were German immigrants, and German was his first language. I think that’s a little bit relevant to some of his philosophical work. He graduated from Elmhurst College in Illinois and then studied at Eden Theological Seminary in Missouri. He went to Yale Divinity, so that was sort of a jump to the big leagues, I suppose. He earned his MA but never got his doctorate. I’m pretty sure he did more than the rest of us, so those of us running around with PhDs can take that for what it’s worth.

He started out as a pastor of a church in Detroit, and I think it’s safe to say he was a social gospeler, for lack of a better way of putting it. I’m going to talk about how he ended up in a very different position. He spent most of his career teaching at Union Theological Seminary. Interestingly, he graced the cover of Time magazine. You know, good luck finding a theologian on the cover of Time magazine today. He was eulogized upon his death in 1971 as the greatest Protestant theologian in America since Jonathan Edwards.

Interestingly, “The Nature and Destiny of Man” was ranked by Modern Library as the 18th most important non-fiction work of the 20th century. I’m curious whether they would still say that today because it was ahead of Rawls, who we just heard about, Rawls’ “Theory of Justice,” Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk,” and Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” So, highly regarded in that sense. He probably came to folks’ attention more recently when Barack Obama, in a famous interview with David Brooks, revealed that Niebuhr was one of his favorite philosophers. Now, whether that’s because Niebuhr was one of Barack Obama’s favorite philosophers or whether it was because David Brooks really likes Niebuhr and got some nice ink for Barack Obama, I leave to you.

There’s also actually, this came out, I think, about a year ago, a quite good documentary on Niebuhr entitled “An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story.” It came up on PBS, I want to say last spring. Worth watching. Okay, so that’s some of the background, but again, I was asked to talk about what we Niebuhr today, and part of the reason it’s, to me, an interesting question is that liberals and conservatives, and I’m going to press on those definitions a bit, both claim him in different ways.

So, you know, you’ve got Michael Novak and John McCain claiming the mantle of being Niebuhr-ians, and Cornel West and E.J. Dionne. So he gets categorized as a political revolutionary, a neoconservative, a hawk, and a non-interventionist. I think it was Paul Elie who wrote an essay some years ago in The Atlantic, “Reinhold Niebuhr: A Man for All Seasons,” and the point was sort of people use him in all kinds of ways.

So, I think part of that has to do with just the prolific nature of his writing. I think part of it has to do with the fact of a long sweep of a career where there are a number of different issues he was dealing with. He himself, at different times, would sort of use language that might suggest one or the other. He once commented that our problem, both in foreign policy and in other affairs, is how to generate the wisdom of true conservatism without losing the humane virtues which the liberal movement developed. So, I guess you can claim him for both if you like.

My own view, and what I focused on, is that trying to kind of take Niebuhr and deploy him in one or another sort of political issue, current political issue, is a mistake. I think where he has real wisdom for us is in the way he steeped himself in the philosophical and theological traditions of the West. One of his most well-known students, Langdon Gilkey, commented on this, and this is what I want to get at. He said Niebuhr was convinced that at the heart of any philosophy, however explicitly it might be based on scientific inquiry or rational speculation, lies its views on human issues, on the questions of the meaning of life.

For him, each philosophy’s understanding of fate and the tragic, of human evil and human renewal, shaped all of its other speculations about reality and knowing. In short, Niebuhr insisted that all of these philosophical systems, these beliefs, ideologies we hold, ultimately rest on faiths, on something that you can’t necessarily prove, a kind of non-rational, or if you will, a-rational belief, both in the meaning of life, the meaning of human being, and I think, and this I want to get to, the meaning of history. So, I want to suggest that we’re having an argument about that right now.

Okay, so let me say a little bit about his, what I’ll use the term, his theological or his philosophical anthropology. He famously began volume one of “The Nature and Destiny of Man” with the line, “Man has always been his most vexing problem.” Not politics, not culture, us. And by the way, he used the term man throughout. I know that’s probably not in vogue now. I will refer to it from time to time simply because it’s the term he used. He was talking in a broader context than that, of course.

So, in any event, he had this insistence that we placed too much faith in human reason, our sort of minds, and we actually placed too much faith in our own goodness, our own virtue. One of his big criticisms about modernity, and I’ll get to that account in a little bit, was that we really think we can solve problems if we just think hard enough, if we get the right data, or if we have the right intent, if we can figure out which part of the society needs fixing, that we’re going to solve the problem. He once said that the hope of every recalcitrant element in human behavior may be brought under the subjection of the inclusive purposes of mind is the culminating error in man’s misunderstanding of himself.

The spiritual confusions arising from this misunderstanding constitute the cultural crisis of our age, beyond and above the political crisis in which our civilization is involved. He basically thought we don’t understand ourselves. The central piece of his thought that we don’t understand ourselves was his insistence that we needed to recover the notion of sin.

And so, he tried to do this… I’ll fast forward a little bit. I’ve kind of thought a lot about this. How do you talk about sin? Because sin to most people today means chocolates that are bad for you or, you know, eating too much, or, you know, it’s sort of this delicacy that you play with, or it’s this kind of thing where, you know, people who are really crabbed, religious people, want to Hector someone else about something they did.

Niebuhr wanted to insist that that’s, you’re kind of missing the point, that there’s this deep, you can call it brokenness. I know there are various terms that people try to use that are slightly less offensive than sin, but what he was trying to get at is the problem isn’t, you know, we just don’t know enough, our science isn’t good enough, our social structures need resolving. The problem is us. It’s that old, you know, G.K. Chesterton, you know, I think this is maybe apocryphal, but the idea that somebody published a challenge, you know, what’s the problem with the world, you know, send in an essay, and he sends in, “Dear Sirs, I am.” It’s that kind of idea.

So, Niebuhr really wanted to recover this idea that we need to understand ourselves and we don’t, that’s a quick primer on the nature piece. I want to spend a little bit more time on history. So, I mean, Niebuhr’s Augustinian. He’s trying to recover, I think we can argue about this, but if somebody else were to press me, I think he’s trying to recover Augustinian thought read through the lens of the modern world and all the modern thought that surrounds it.

The first thing I would say is he insists that our notion of history as having a direction, whether we acknowledge it or not, is indebted to Christianity. There’s a great book by Mircea Eliade called “The Myth of the Eternal Return” that kind of makes this argument. It says, look, if you look at antiquity, there’s kind of a cyclical understanding of history, but what you get really through the Hebrew Bible and messianic literature is this notion of a trajectory. You know, sort of things are bad now but they’re going to get better. Why? Because, you know, the divine is going to enter into the world and redeem the world.

We’re all familiar with that. There’s an eschatology involved. For Niebuhr, this eschatological understanding comes through Christianity, and I don’t love “Judeo-Christian.” It comes through the Hebrew Bible and then the Christian meditations on that. So, that’s the ground of his notion of history. Then he looks at modernity and says, you know, modern thought is confused for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it’s this kind of mashup of classical thought and Christian thought. Unlike many who sort of synthesized them, Niebuhr saw them as deeply antithetical. Christian thought, I think he would say, was somewhat more pessimistic about human nature. There are some complexities to the classical piece of this, but the idea is you have some real inconsistencies, and our confusion in part comes from mashing these up and accepting pieces of some and pieces of the other, but not really being able to develop something consistent.

So, what do you get when, over the last 500 years, Christianity starts to be sort of stripped away bit by bit from public life? We keep this framework that’s basically a theological framework, this eschatological trajectory. But instead of thinking about it in terms of, well, things are bad and we persist in life and God redeems at the end of time, we have to figure out how to do it. We still have this dream of a sort of eschatological perfection, but it’s completely secular.

A couple of examples of this: early modern thought, if you look at Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau, they’re all talking about states of nature. They’re giving you this sort of narrative. Hobbes maybe not quite as well, but yeah, I think all of them are giving a kind of historical narrative even if it’s a thought experiment. They’re imagining some past that has certain features. You can go forward, look at someone like Hegel, who keeps this sort of odd spiritual dimension, or someone like Marx, who secularizes the whole thing. Marx, it’s an eschatology. So you have these narratives of some kind of movement.

For someone like Kant, the movement is upward and forward. It’s progress, right? What is enlightenment? Man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. We’re moving forward; we’re gaining knowledge. What does that look like now? Faith in technocratic solutions, faith in education, faith in human possibility. Read Steven Pinker if you’ve read his recent book. Not to say there’s nothing to that, but it’s this notion that there’s not really a moral problem; there’s actually just a knowledge problem. It’s an intellectual problem. There’s faith in education and innovation.

On the other hand, you have someone like Rousseau, who imagines this sort of pristine past with this decline essentially as human activity and endeavor gets involved. We sort of muck things up, and we end up with this really bad society. What do we need to do? Well, we have to figure out to either return or understand how bad our institutions are and how to fix them or change them. So, reform becomes a big movement.

So, you have education on the one hand, you have reform on the other hand. You have these two stories. It turns out they’re totally the opposite. They’re both historical narratives, but one is a narrative of decline, one is a narrative of improvement. They’re sort of both present with us. That’s a really fast sprint through Niebuhr, at least on those two issues.

I want to talk a little bit about how I think those apply today, and then we can take questions. The first, and the reason I brought up human nature, it seems very clear to me we’re having this fight right now. It’s why I said you almost have to put it in quotes. We’re having this argument about what, if anything, is natural about human beings. What’s convention?

I was driving in, listening to Pacifica, which I like to do, and they were having a discussion about transgender issues. That conversation, wherever you fall on it, is predicated on what nature means, what convention means. This whole thing the Trump administration is talking about, defining gender in a particular way. For someone like me thinking about this, there’s so much fun back here. But that’s the question. That is one example of how we’re arguing about this question.

It seems to me there are very incoherent arguments about it. We haven’t really figured out what’s natural and what’s not. If it’s natural, should it matter? This goes back again. If you’re talking about convention, is reform sufficient? Is there something else? Is there something primal that’s a problem? Where do we get evil from?

Somebody sort of taking notes in the back and kind of listening to the other, a couple of earlier speakers talking about identity politics. I think about identity politics. What is it doing? It’s locating evil somewhere, but it turns out it’s locating it somewhere other than my identity. That’s not to completely disparage identity politics. I think there’s something to be said for parts of thinking about one’s identity. Nonetheless, there’s this notion that we’re locating the problem somewhere else, and if we could just solve that problem, we can solve our problems.

What does Niebuhr have to say about that? I think the Niebuhrian response goes back to this notion of sin. You can try to come up with another term if you want. Francis Spufford published a book a few years back. I won’t quote it directly, but he said, you know, we can’t use sin because people think of chocolate, so we’re gonna call it the human propensity to foul things up. Try that if you want. Then it got abbreviated to, you know, whatever that abbreviation is, HPT. Anyway, point being, we have to recover this notion of there being a common fault. It’s kind of a democratic thing if you think about it.

The idea is that the problem isn’t just that group over there, those people over there. It’s all of us. There’s a communal, democratic, egalitarian aspect to this. Niebuhr would also insist, look, just look at the evidence. The evidence is this is a consistent problem internally. I think it was Niebuhr, he may have been quoting someone else, who said the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically provable doctrine in the Christian faith. I think Niebuhr would kind of think about this.

The other thing I would just say, it seems pretty clear to me, and again, people can press me on this, that Christianity as a cultural influence is receding. I would also argue a big reason for that right now is significant objection on the part of many to its sexual ethics, or at least its traditional sexual ethics. It’s been so oppressive that we have to dispense with it.

The thing I might suggest, and I think I’m channeling Niebuhr a little bit here, is when you lose Christianity, you don’t just lose that. We don’t liberate ourselves to a sort of Steven Pinker enlightenment now, a perfect world. We lose grace. We lose charity. We lose forgiveness. We lose humility. Even a little bit farther, and I’ll talk about this when I talk about history, we lose hope.

I’m not a political pollster. I’m not a partisan necessarily, but if you look at our public culture right now, think about that. Those are not there. Find me hope. Find me humility, forgiveness, grace. They’re not there. I would suggest that we need to think carefully about what we’re doing when we abandon the sort of vestiges of Christianity that retain those virtues.

When we lose this kind of Christian sense of hope, we end up with this kind of wild oscillation between optimism and pessimism. We have the election next week. Depending on where you fall out, there are certain people who are going to be just thrilled. It’s going to be really great. We’re going to fix things now. Or this is terrible, things are going backward. Then there’s another election in two years and it goes the other way. There’s this kind of wild back and forth because it’s on us. Boy, that’s an awful tall order.

So, thinking through human nature and history, this is where I was really glad to read, I think it was Paul Miller had an essay in the most recent Providence on liberalism. I’m no expert in liberalism, but I’ll say a couple of things. I think we’re having a fight over history. I bracket liberal for a second. I think the right ways to think about this are kind of conservatives and progressives seem to me to be fighting over history.

You have the “arc of history bends towards justice.” It sounds really nice, and at times it certainly does. Then you have someone like Rod Dreher, if people have read his work, who seems pretty clearly in the kind of decline. He’s born from

Alastair McIntyre, who’s definitely in the decline world, but there’s this kind of—you have one group of people saying, “We’re moving forward, we’re bringing in…” I mean, it’s sort of eschatological, right? We’re bringing in this wonderful future. You have others who are lamenting the decline and sort of asking, “How do we solve this?” I won’t be one who mischaracterizes Rod. I don’t think he’s saying head for the hills, but he is saying there’s sort of trouble coming, and we have to figure out how to deal with it.

But in any event, I think there’s a fight over history. Are we pushing forward and eliminating all of these vestiges of our terrible past, or are we losing all the things that made us who we are? So, I would argue there’s kind of this conservative-progressive tension, and maybe you can read Paul Miller a little bit more on this. I think maybe liberalism might have something to say about that. In that sense, I think Niebuhr is a kind of liberal, maybe you could call it classical liberalism.

Liberalism has become this sort of catch-all. One of my professors, Patrick Deneen, wrote a whole book on essentially how bad it is. Another conversation, I suppose. I think for Niebuhr, he would say we have to understand history as a lot more ambiguous. Here I’m channeling Augustine again on the notion of sort of secular time where you don’t know. You have this theological model where there’s a beginning and an end, and we have faith in the end, in the eschaton. If you don’t know what’s going on, it doesn’t mean there aren’t movements within, but it’s really hard to tell.

So this kind of confidence that things were great then and now they’re not, or this confidence that things are getting better, ends up being kind of misplaced. I think Niebuhr counsels a little bit more humility from partisans on both sides on that. The last thing I’ll say, and then hopefully we have time for a couple of questions, is that I do think there’s a choice. At the highest thirty-thousand-foot level here, I think, and I’m arguing for a kind of reconsideration of the possibility of Christianity playing a role in how we think about our public life for the reasons I’ve talked about.

I think Niebuhr was really trying to do this. Niebuhr is looking and saying, “You know, there’s a kind of Augustinian Christianity that is true.” I mean, I think he would say that it tells us who we are, and it gives us an understanding of history, and it helps us diagnose things. We have to have a humility about it, but when we do that, we can retain some of these virtues. Some of these political—what’s the word—the way of smoothing things a little bit: grace, forgiveness, charity, things that can kind of manage our disagreement.

I think the other choice, and I’m just going to channel Nietzsche here, the other choice is basically tribalism, kind of a combat. I’ll leave you with a quote from “The Genealogy of Morals.” Nietzsche is sort of imagining overthrowing all this, and he recognized what Christianity was. He is sort of imagining destroying it. My argument is we either rethink and try to do some kind of renewal of Christian philosophical, ethical, and theological commitments—not even sure what that looks like, but we need to think about it—or, as Nietzsche said, “Must the ancient fire not someday flare up much more terribly after much longer preparation? Must one not desire it with all one’s might, even will it, even promote it?” I look around, and I see some of that. I think for Niebuhr, it would be kind of, “This is your choice.” And I’ll stop there. I don’t know how much time we have for questions.

Daniel, you very much appreciated that really quick survey of basically all of philosophy. It was brilliant. We can probably… Somebody’s going to… Yeah, so my question as a student of political theory, international political theory itself too, would be for philosophers such as Niebuhr, other classical realists, you know, in international relations theory. So, it’s like a Morgenthau’s Hans Morgenthau. It almost becomes a catch-all to say, “Well, the problem is original sin.”

It very much just kind of stops at, “Well, there’s a very defeatist, almost nihilistic mentality of there’s nothing we can really do about the evil in the world,” you know, whatever have you. And of course, you also have to remember that Niebuhr and Morgenthau and Carr were also reacting to the Wilsonian utopianism and the precursor to. So how do you stop from saying the world is doomed? I don’t know if I can speak to Morgenthau. I can’t… Who else did you mention, sorry? Carr. Okay, I’ll stick with Niebuhr.

I don’t think it’s defeatist. It’s interesting because there’s an essay Niebuhr wrote on Augustine called “Augustine’s Political Realism,” where he basically makes the argument you just made about Augustine: Augustine’s too pessimistic. A couple of things I’d say about Niebuhr on that. The first is he views that concept that I articulated, hopefully reasonably well, as a means of action. So, it frees you to act. The way he talks about it is, “Look, if the burden is entirely on us, the evidence is terrible that we’re just screwing stuff up. If it’s on us, you know, what does Hegel talk about? History’s slaughter-bench.”

Niebuhr’s point is, “Look, you basically have a providential understanding of God’s control, and it frees you up to act. Do take the actions that you see in front of you that you think are appropriate, whether it’s being a Cold Warrior, you know, whatever that frame is. For him, that was it for a long time. But it actually frees you to act, not to be passive, because the results aren’t always dependent on you.” What that also frees you of—and there is a theological hope to this, there’s no question there’s a theological hope to this—but what that frees you from is this kind of optimism-pessimism thing that strikes me that we have. You know, things are really great, things are really terrible, things are really great, things are really terrible. Maybe you can stretch it out over more years than two.

So, I think that’s… I would say that’s a big part of Niebuhr’s response to defeatism. The other thing I would say—and it gets a little more abstract, I suppose, I’m not even sure it’s… I think it’s convincing, but it’s a little abstract—he talks about the fact that there’s this kind of interactive relationship between whatever norms you have and how just they are in your assessments and perfection. So, for him, he calls it the law of love, which is essentially Christ. It’s not just the example of Christ in terms of death on the cross, but the person of Christ as the ideal. He uses this in a way to push back against some natural law.

So, there’s also what’s here and real. We look at that standard and we look at where we are, and there’s a gap. This informs that gap to allow us to try to attain something we know we can’t attain. But it’s like this constant relationship of both. Okay, so we’re informed by it, we try to improve. I mean, the civil rights movement is a perfect example of this. You know, there’s a standard we have, and we’re failing. And they’re called to account, so we move towards it. Well, now we have moved, but we’re still looking to see what’s not being done that could be done. So, there’s sort of a constant spur to action there, I think. So, that may be just some… I think that’s the spur to action, and I think the first piece is how you don’t lose hope and become essentially quietist.

Whether you find that compelling is another question, but yeah. Niebuhr’s life and career correspond almost exactly to the high-water mark of mainline Protestantism. Protestant political influence. So, what does he have to say to a fundamentally post-Christian America? That’s a great question. I’ll say, expand it out from that. What do we have to say? There are other people in this room—I know this is one of the things people in Providence are thinking about. If I’m right in channeling Niebuhr, this kind of deep Christian—and I’m not so much talking about necessarily dogmatic Christianity, although I think that’s a piece of it—but this kind of foundational understanding of certain basic features of human beings, of history, the things again I’m arguing are in question right now, I think the work is on us in some ways to be able to, I guess, make some convincing case about this, that there are alternatives here.

Unfortunately, I teach college students, I teach constitutional law, I teach some political theory, but I certainly don’t teach theology. I’m probably mucking about for some of the theologians in the room. But my sense is that there’s a lot of work to be done to make that case. I think you’re right that some common presuppositions that would have been read, the people reading Time magazine with Niebuhr on the cover, are going to have a whole set of presuppositions that are not shared. I think Niebuhr’s approach, the reason he had people like “Atheists for Niebuhr,” I think is he was basically saying, “Okay, look at your own. Let me challenge yours. How’s that going for you?” I had a professor once, and this is a little flip, but he said, “You know, one Christian way of thinking about this is, go ahead and worship Baal. How’s that going?”

I think Niebuhr does that. He’s not as good, by the way, and I think this goes to the other gentleness question on prescriptive. You know, do this, I don’t think he even wants to, other than, you know, the top Ed’s about something. But I mean in the philosophical sense. But I think it’s more okay, what else is out there, what’s on offer, how’s that going?

And I think we do have something to say there now. Anyway, I’m going up, I think. Yeah, thank you.

You said you lose grace, charity, forgiveness, humility, and hope when you lose Christianity, which I’m definitely going to tweet. I wanted to ask particularly about forgiveness because I see such a total misunderstanding in the world today of what forgiveness is, and a fake perspective on forgiveness. Do you think that that’s tied in because there’s a fake perspective on Christianity as well? Could you help me and just say a little bit more about what you mean by that fake forgiveness?

Yeah, people mistake the concept of forgiveness as denial. You know, if something evil has happened, even in the church sometimes this happens, that rather than looking at it squarely and saying to this person or saying about this situation, “This is evil, this should not have happened,” but there is forgiveness. They just either downplay it or pretend that it didn’t happen.

Yeah, I was thinking you might be going into a cheap grace direction, which maybe you are. Maybe a little bit. I mean, I think, yeah, I think that’s probably right.

Because you know, it strikes me that the Christian understanding of goodness, and I think of Christ as an example here, you know, it’s the person who forgives that suffers. It’s not the person who’s forgiven. The person who’s forgiven is kind of getting a freebie. So in the sense of thinking about justice, there’s a whole other conversation again. But if you think about justice, forgiveness in a sense doesn’t work justice in a philosophical sense because you’re essentially somebody’s entitled to X and they’re not getting it, or somebody should be punished in X way and isn’t getting it.

But at the same time, and I don’t have a quote in front of me, Niebuhr sort of talked about forgiveness as kind of, I think it was like the oil that makes the machine of society run. And it just strikes me in our public life, I’m totally off social media, I know nothing about it. But my sense is, you know, people talk about mobs or see these sort of Twitter fights. It’s never like somebody just screwed up and, you know, “I’m really sorry,” and people say, “You know, you shouldn’t have done that, but it happens.” Like, that’s gone. You screw up, it’s just a sort of ballooning thing of you’re destroyed.

And I do think that goes back to the misunderstanding of forgiveness. And I think it goes back to this idea that we no longer locate evil within. It’s sort of those people who did that, and it’s irredeemable. And by the way, one more thing. There are some historical sins and evils that there’s no way to fully compensate for.

And that’s where I’m kind of going. There’s either forgiveness in which someone gives up something, or it’s just you’re never gonna get an end because it’s the nature of humanity. There are things that are too great to be—you, I mean, you guys can think of them for yourselves—but there’s, you can’t do anything but forgiveness. There’s no other accounting.