Rod Dreher's Blog, page 108

The Archbishop’s Silence

Here in south Louisiana, everybody is talking about the hurricane coming ashore today. But they’re also talking about this vile story from a small town north of New Orleans: 

The lights inside Saints Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church in Pearl River were on later than usual on Sept. 30, so a passerby stopped to take a closer look.

Peering inside, the onlooker saw the small parish’s pastor half-naked having sex with two women on the altar, according to court documents. The women were dressed in corsets and high-heeled boots. There were sex toys and stage lighting. And a mobile phone was mounted on a tripod, recording it all.

Father Travis Clark (St. Tammany Sheriff’s Dept)

The eyewitness took a video and called the Pearl River police, who arrived at the church and viewed that recording. Officers then arrested the Rev. Travis Clark, pastor of Saints Peter and Paul since 2019, on obscenity charges.

The Archdiocese of New Orleans announced the priest’s arrest Oct. 1 but would not give specifics about why he was arrested. Nor would the police.

New details, however, have emerged in court filings that paint a lurid picture of a priest recording himself engaged in sexual role play while desecrating a sacred place within the church. Public records additionally show that one of the women, Mindy Dixon, 41, is an adult film actor who also works for hire as a dominatrix. On a social media account associated with Dixon, a Sept. 29 post says she was on her way to the New Orleans area to meet another dominatrix “and defile a house of God.”

Read it all. 

Obviously this is demonic. What is also infuriating is that Archbishop Aymond is treating this like a management problem. He’s stayed quiet (notice that the media found out through court filings), came in and exorcised the church, appointed a new priest, and sent an official letter saying that he is standing by the parish in its time of scandal.

“Be assured of my continued personal support and prayers for your parish community.” Those are the words of a bureaucrat, not a pastor. My God, this priest had kinky sex on the holy altar! The archbishop ought to be visibly shaken and infuriated by this desecration, and the pain it must cause the people of the parish. He has reportedly suspended Father Clark. Suspended? He ought to begin the defrocking process immediately, and make it publicly known that he is doing this.

Worse, it turns out that Father Clark had just been named chaplain of Pope John Paul II Catholic high school in nearby Slidell. He had been appointed to replace Father Pat Wattigny, removed from that position on October 1 after he admitted to Archbishop Aymond that in 2013, he molested a minor. From WWL’s report:

Pope John Paul II’s principal on Tuesday sent a letter to school parents rebuking Aymond for waiting until last week to tell him that Wattigny had been under investigation for those texts since February.

Bill Arata, an attorney representing a student who received texts from Wattigny and a father of another Pope John Paul II student, said the students are struggling with the news.

“Today is one full week to hear two incredibly disappointing events and to say that an in-house deacon can provide counseling to these kids when the deacon has children at the school would be the equivalent of sending me to do it,” Arata said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate. I think they need world-class crisis intervention. It’s obvious now they need it.”

But get this: the Archdiocese has known all year that Father Wattigny was under investigation for sending inappropriate texts to a male student in that high school (asking, for example, when he would turn 18) — but it did not tell the high school’s principal. More:

Arata said Wattigny was sending texts to his client in the middle of the night, repeatedly asking when the boy would turn 18 and discussing private, in-person meetings.

The texts that the student’s mother turned over are from February and July and cover 90 printed pages, Arata said. Both batches of texts were provided to the Archdiocese’s general counsel, Susan Zeringue, who met with the boy’s mother in February, the archdiocese confirmed.

Aymond’s letter to Pope John Paul families defended the archdiocese’s handling of Wattigny, explaining how the church arranged for him to undergo “professional assessments” that led the priest to disclose an episode where he did abuse a child.

Gosh, parents, what’s your problem? The archbishop said that the lecherous priest preying on your sons via text message, trying to figure out when it would be legal to get into their pants, had been made to undergo “professional assessments.” What more do you want?

(I’m being sarcastic. What would Walker Percy have been able to do with a deadhead bureaucrat like Archbishop Aymond?!)

These guys, the bishops: they will never, ever get it. Many of them have shown over and over that they will protect the perceived interest of the institution over the interests of the Catholic people. And then when scandal breaks, they treat it like a corporate crisis to be managed, not a moral and spiritual catastrophe.

When, exactly, was Archbishop Aymond planning to tell the people of that parish, and of the archdiocese, that a parish priest and chaplain of a big Catholic high school had been caught having sex with dominatrixes on the altar of a church? Why did the Catholics of the archdiocese have to learn about this from the media perusing court documents? Why did it take eight months for the archbishop to tell the leadership of the Catholic high school that the chaplain appeared to be cruising boys in the school? This, eighteen years after Boston! 

Why should anybody look to the archbishop and the clergy for spiritual and moral leadership?

The decadence of Father Clark and Father Wattigny are part of the problem. But the greater problem is the decadent passivity of men like Archbishop Aymond. According to Hannah Arendt, the collapse of faith in institutions and hierarchies was a precursor of totalitarianism in Russia and Germany. I know less about the situation of the Weimar-era German church, but in Russia’s late imperial period, the Orthodox Church hierarchy discredited itself in the eyes of many by being mindlessly conservative and indifferent to the suffering of the people. Younger priests begged with the hierarchy to open its eyes to what was happening, but they were rebuffed.

We are in a very similar situation here. And the Father Clarks and Wattignys are part of this — but the Archbishop Aymonds are more culpable, because of the folly of their passivity, which causes people to lose trust in them. From Live Not By Lies:

Americans’ loss of faith in institutions and hierarchies began in the 1960s. In Europe, though, it started in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Surveying the political scene in Germany during the 1920s, Arendt noted a “terrifying negative solidarity” among people from diverse classes, united in their belief that all political parties were populated by fools.

Are we today really so different? According to Gallup, Americans’ confidence in their institutions—political, media, religious, legal, medical, corporate—is at historic lows across the board. Only the military, the police, and small businesses retain the strong confidence of over 50 percent. Democratic norms are under strain in many industrialized nations, with the support for mainstream parties of left and right in decline.

In Europe of the 1920s, says Arendt, the first indication of the coming totalitarianism was the failure of established parties to attract younger members, and the willingness of the passive masses to consider radical alternatives to discredited establishment parties.

A loss of faith in democratic politics is a sign of a deeper and broader instability. As radical individualism has become more pervasive in our consumerist-driven culture, people have ceased to look outside themselves for authoritative sources of meaning. This is the fulfillment of modern liberalism’s goal: to free the individual from any unchosen obligations.

But this imposes a terrible psychological burden on the individual, many of whom may seek deliverance in the certainties and solidarity offered by totalitarian movements.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim observed that many people who had been set free from the bonds of religion did not thrive in their liberty. In fact, they lost a shared sense of purpose, of meaning, and of community. A number of these despairing people committed suicide. According to Durkheim, what happened to individuals could also happen to societies.

You can destroy as much by failing to build as by actively wrecking. Philip Rieff said the collapse of a civilizational order begins when its elites cease to be able to transmit faith in its institutions and customs to younger generations.

How many of those students at John Paul II Catholic High School are going to be inspired to draw closer to their Catholic faith after seeing what their previous and current chaplains were up to, and by seeing how their chestless hierarch dealt with these scandals?

I have said it in this space before, and I’ll say it again, to my Catholic readers and to all Christians: for the most part, we are on our own. If we sit around waiting for institutional leadership to get its act together, we will wait in vain, and suffer the consequences — and so will our children and grandchildren.

As you know, I dedicated Live Not By Lies to the brave and heroic Catholic priest Father Tomislav Kolakovic, who understood the threat facing the Christians of Slovakia from communist totalitarianism, and was not deterred by the criticism of his bishops, who told him he was being alarmist. From Live Not By Lies:

Father Kolaković knew that the clericalism and passivity of traditional Slovak Catholicism would be no match for communism. For one thing, he correctly foresaw that the communists would try to control the church by subduing the clergy. For another, he understood that the spiritual trials awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.

“Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles,” the priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.1

Giving oneself totally to Christ was not an abstraction or a pious thought. It needed to be concrete, and it needed to be communal. The total destruction of the First World War opened the eyes of younger Catholics to the need for a new evangelization. A Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn, whose father had been killed in a mining accident, started a lay movement to do this among the working class.

These were the Young Christian Workers, called “Jocists” after the initials of their name in French. Inspired by the Jocist example, Father Kolaković adapted it to the needs of the Catholic Church in German-occupied Slovakia. He established cells of faithful young Catholics who came together for prayer, study, and fellowship.

The refugee priest taught the young Slovak believers that every person must be accountable to God for his actions. Freedom is responsibility, he stressed; it is a means to live within the truth. The motto of the Jocists became the motto for what Father Kolaković called his “Family”: “See. Judge. Act.”

See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.

Václav Vaško, a Kolaković follower, recalled late in his life that Father Kolaković’s ministry excited so many young Catholics because it energized the laity and gave them a sense of leadership responsibility.

“It is remarkable how Kolaković almost instantly succeeded in creating a community of trust and mutual friendship from a diverse grouping of people (priests, religious and lay people of different ages, education, or spiritual maturity),” Vaško wrote.

The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolaković lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolaković also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.

The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation. “By the end of the school year 1944,” Vaško said, “it would have been difficult to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our circles did not operate.”

I hope faithful Catholics and other Christians will turn their righteous anger over grotesque moral and spiritual failures by the clergy, especially hierarchs, into building something positive, like Father Kolakovic did. He was not disobedient to the bishops, but he also knew that the bishops were largely useless in preparing the church for what was coming. So it is with us. Pious passivity in a time of emergency is poison. These Aymonds, they are nothing more than managers of decline.

Here is Father Tomislav Kolakovic, a holy priest. Here is a strong, brave, and daring man of God — a man with chest:

UPDATE: A reader sends in the letter that Archbishop Aymond (and another official) sent to the parents of students at JP2 High School (I had to break up the screenshots, which is why they’re uneven):

I still find that appallingly legalistic.

The same reader sent the letter that JP2 High principal Douglas Triche wrote to the parents:

The failure of authority in the Archdiocesan office ends up harming the authority of the high school’s leadership, even though they did nothing wrong, and didn’t even know what was going on. I think it was Joseph Schumpeter who said that all institutional bureaucracies will, over time, come to conflate their own personal interests with the interest of the institution. Pat Wattigny’s welfare appears to have mattered more to the Archdiocese than the welfare of the boys in that school, some of whom he seems, from media reports, to have been hitting on.

UPDATE.2: A Catholic priest sends in this book from Archbishop Aymond’s oeuvre:

He adds:

Prior to New Orleans, when Aymond was bishop of Austin, he was in charge of the USCCB office that dealt with abuse of minors. In fact, he was the featured speaker in a set of videos used for training clergy and laity in best practices to protect youth. Thus, he knows full well the nature of “grooming” and the prohibitions of inappropriate private contact or conversations that fall short of outright sexual contact. These are, in themselves, grounds for investigation and penalties. By the nature of the chaplain’s assignment, any such investigation would have had to include informing and questioning the principle. Even IF there was some reason the investigation was legitimately impeded, the archbishop should have removed the priest from the assignment once inappropriate interaction with a student came to his attention. If he did not do so, parents and others involved should denounce him to the Nuncio and directly to the Holy Father so that no one in the Vatican can say they were not told.

Setting aside the particular case in New Orleans, please avoid the trope that derelict bishops seek to protect the institution or the priesthood.  While in theory those concerns could motivate a person, in fact what one usually finds in these cases is that bishops are out to protect themselves and their status in the eyes of their peers, the Roman Curia, and the Pope. For example, these bishops don’t voluntarily fall on their sword to protect their diocese or the priesthood. Nor do they personally seek to make restitution for the financial damage their administration has wreaked upon the diocese.  Instead, they cling to their office, their retirement, and the trappings of the episcopacy with the last full measure of devotion.  It just so happens that steps they believe will protect themselves may also appear to protect the institution or the priesthood.

Many of the bishops become bishops by scrupulously avoiding making waves–which may serve institutional security, but is always intended to maximize the chance of their own advancement.  Most of them simply want to avoid problems, cover them up, or make them go away. Admitting the problem, actively seeking its roots and branches, and then removing and repairing the damage is never this type of bishop’s first step. Often, these steps are never taken because it is easier and “safer” to face only what has to be faced when it has to be faced. So, it’s usually either no steps or half-steps. That’s known as the “curial shuffle.”

UPDATE.3: The Archdiocese of New Orleans released this video on Friday:

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Systemic Racism At Wells Fargo & Microsoft

Here’s a letter the US Labor Department sent to Wells Fargo recently. (I had to screenshot it in parts, which is why it’s broken up here):

The Labor Department sent a similar letter to Microsoft:

There is no chance at all that a Biden administration Labor Department would investigate major corporations for anti-white discrimination. Keep that in mind. Naturally, there has been negative press coverage. For example:

Samuel Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan who served in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama, called the Labor Department’s letters “a perversion of what they were set up to do.”

“If you look at what Microsoft says it’s doing, they’re making sure that they have a sufficient pipeline of people, so that when it comes time to make promotion decisions, they’re not arbitrarily excluding African Americans and minorities from management positions,” Bagenstos said.

Bagenstos, who served as a law clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she sat on the Supreme Court, said that’s what the law requires.

“I think the best way to think about this is another one of those Trump culture war acts that are being taken right before the election,” he said.

Bull. Here is a link to the letter from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to the company’s employees that drew the Labor Department’s attention. Excerpt:

Bagenstos is flat-out misrepresenting what Microsoft says. Nadella didn’t say that Microsoft will attempt to do that; he said that Microsoft will do that. You can only double the number of blacks at the company through discriminatory hiring and firing. If you are white, Asian, or Hispanic, and work at Microsoft, you will not have the same chance at promotion, or perhaps you will even have to be laid off to make room for black managers. How can non-black Microsoft employees, or those who aspire to work at Microsoft, possibly have confidence that they will be treated fairly?

And look, this is typical of how the Left handles things: if you raise an objection to this phony “diversity” stuff, then if you aren’t a bigot, then you are at least engaged in “culture war” nonsense.

Bloomberg’s biased report on this investigation features condemnation of the Trump administration for the Labor Department inquiry, but nowhere quotes from the actual Microsoft statement that triggered it. If all you knew about the investigation was what Bloomberg reported, you would have no idea that Microsoft actually appears to be intending to discriminate against non-black employees. Woke Capitalism and Woke Media are all committed to defending the Narrative, no matter what.

The Labor Department’s letter to Wells Fargo announcing the investigation says it was triggered by this June statement by the bank’s CEO Charles Scharf. Excerpt:

How is this not evidence of structural racism? How is Wells Fargo going to double black leadership in five years without actively hiring and firing people on the basis of race? Senior leaders are incentivized to hire based on race (“improving diverse representation”), or lose compensation.

According to theorists of “antiracism” like Ibram X. Kendi, any time you see fewer blacks within an institution (unless we are talking about professional sports, I suppose), that is conclusive evidence of racism. Racial discrimination is the only explanation. It could not possibly be that, for example, fewer blacks chose to study finance (Wells Fargo), tech (Microsoft) or in related fields that would have brought them into the workplace at those particular companies. Only racism explains it. As Kendi writes in his megaselling book How To Be Antiracist:

Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. Here’s an example of racial inequity: 71 percent of White families lived in owner-occupied homes in 2014, compared to 45 percent of Latinx families and 41 percent of Black families. Racial equity is when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing. An example of racial equity would be if there were relatively equitable percentages of all three racial groups living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.

More:

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

This is what Microsoft apparently believes. This is what Wells Fargo apparently believes. This is what they are committed to doing: discriminating against non-black employees to fit this ideological idea of antiracism.

The Trump Administration is calling them out for it, and forcing them through this investigation to explain how their intention to discriminate against non-blacks in hiring and promotion is legal.

This is one reason why elections matter. The corporate elites under Woke Capitalism are committed to  implementing systemic anti-white, anti-Asian, anti-Latino racism in the workplace. They are bigots — but they’re bigots for the Left, so it’s okay.

Interestingly, the Wells Fargo CEO got in trouble recently:

Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf apologized Wednesday for comments he made suggesting it is difficult to find qualified Black executives in the financial industry.

Scharf said in a memo to employees “there is a very limited pool of Black talent to recruit from” in corporate America. The memo was written in June, but became public only this week.

The comments and similar statements made in a Zoom meeting, reported by Reuters, led to an intense backlash in Washington and on social media.

“Perhaps it is the CEO of Wells Fargo who lacks the talent to recruit Black workers,” said Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York, on Twitter.

Scharf on Wednesday said in a prepared statement that his comments reflected “my own unconscious bias.”

What if Scharf was right? What if there really is a lack of qualified black executives in the financial industry? What if Scharf was telling an ideologically inconvenient truth? How can we know? A decade or so ago, when I was working in newspaper journalism, media managers were constantly trying to hire black and Latino journalists, but there were so few qualified ones. There could be any number of reasons for that, but it was the truth (maybe things have changed over the last decade since I worked in the MSM). I saw personally how hard media managers worked to find qualified minority journalists. The friends and colleagues I had within the industry took this very seriously, and genuinely agonized over it. But you cannot force people to go to journalism school, any more than you can force them to study finance. The world is not a machine.

The entire corporate field of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and most especially the word “antiracist,” depend on the falsification of language. If the ideologues are going to get people to accept their schemes against their own interests, and against the interests of fairness and justice, they often have to lie about what they’re doing through the manipulation of language. Here’s a passage from Live Not By Lies in which a Polish historian, Pawel Skibinski, tells me that the postcommunist generation is particularly vulnerable to this:

Skibiński focuses on language as a preserver of cultural memory. We know that communists forbade people to talk about history in unapproved ways. This is a tactic today’s progressives use as well, especially within universities.

What is harder for contemporary people to appreciate is how we are repeating the Marxist habit of falsifying language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning. Propaganda not only changes the way we think about politics and contemporary life but it also conditions what a culture judges worth remembering.

I mention the way liberals today deploy neutral-sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives. And they imbue other words and phrases—hierarchy, for example, or traditional family—with negative connotations.

Recalling life under communism, the professor continues, “The people who lived only within such a linguistic sphere, who didn’t know any other way to speak, they could really start believing in this way of using words. If a word carries with it negative baggage, it becomes impossible to have a discussion about the phenomenon.”

Teaching current generations of college students who grew up in the postcommunist era is challenging

because they do not have a natural immunity to the ideological abuse of language. “For me, it’s obvious. I remember this false use of language. But for our students, it’s impossible to understand.”

Every manager or employee at Wells Fargo and Microsoft who does not believe in the new ideology — who thinks it is unjust, or harmful to the company’s business — will have to live by lies if they want to keep their job. The only force powerful enough to hold these powerful Woke Capitalists accountable for unjust and discriminatory employment practices is the federal government.

For as long as it is willing to do so, anyway.

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How Totalitarianism Can Happen Here

Above, a slight change to the cover design of Live Not By Lies, based on recent reporting by The New York Times. 

Man, it’s been a busy time since the book’s publication last week. I’ve been doing lots of interviews with radio, podcasters (like Mortification of Spin), and even some TV. Today I taped a segment for CBN which will air next week. Publicists are trying to work out the details of a couple of cable news talk show appearances soon. A lot more to come.

The book has become popular because so many people understand that we do not live in normal times, that something big and sinister is happening to American life and culture — and not just in politics. I just finished doing media for the afternoon and see that some Michigan militia people have been arrested on charges that they were planning to kidnap the state’s Democratic governor. That’s horrifying, domestic terrorist stuff — and a reminder that though most of the political violence this year has come from the Left, there are bad actors also on the Right. So much of what we have seen this year really is straight out of late Weimar.

I’ve been meaning to write about Baylor professor Perry Glanzer’s thoughtful review published at The Gospel Coalition site, but there’s so much coming at me that I can barely keep up. That’s a shame, because the praise Prof. Glanzer has for the book means so much because he has done scholarly work on the post-Soviet period. He writes in his review:

Dreher makes his case in the first part of his book by pointing out that Hannah Arendt’s description of a pre-totalitarian society accurately describes America today. We share: (1) loneliness and social atomization; (2) a lost faith in hierarchies and institutions; (3) the growing desire to transgress and destroy; (4) an increase in propaganda and the willingness to believe useful lies; (5) a mania for ideology; and (the one I often see in American higher education); (6) a society that values loyalty more than expertise. Dreher draws upon observations of post-communist immigrants who saw them under communism and now see these characteristics emerging in America. Despite this evidence, in making this comparison between Soviet totalitarianism and the United States, Trevin Wax’s TGC review suggests that Dreher “overplays his hand.” Actually, I think he underplays it.

Dreher does not mention one of the most important ingredients that would allow American elites to turn soft totalitarianism into hard totalitarianism—the increasing concentration of political power in American life. Consider that before World War I, we had no federal income tax; Supreme Court decisions did not generally apply to the states; the federal government had no role in education; the vast majority of college students attended private colleges and universities; entities such as the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security did not exist; federal regulatory agencies were almost nonexistent; and our military was miniscule. These things made us very different from the monarchies across the Atlantic Ocean, including Russia. All those things have now changed, to make us more like the former USSR. Today, one letter from one federal bureaucrat, or one decision with a one-person Supreme Court majority, can radically alter the price of faithfulness for Christians in education, business, or health care. As Ross Douthat recently noted after the death of Justice Ginsburg, “A system in which the great questions of our country are settled by the deaths of octogenarians is too close to late-Soviet Politburo politics for comfort.” Structurally, we are more like authoritarian and totalitarian governments than ever before.

Americans tend to be naïve about this concentration of federal power, since most do not recognize this historical change. The elites who do recognize it believe they have largely been a force for good. After all, the expansion of federal government power has helped us address great ills such as poverty (e.g., Social Security and Great Society programs), racial injustice (e.g., civil-rights laws and court decisions), health problems (e.g., Obamacare), the rights of minorities (with the Bill of Rights applied to the states), educational inequities (e.g., federal loans), educational advances (e.g., the mass growth of higher education) and more.

Of course, concentrated power does help get certain good things accomplished, but we cannot be blind to the possible future costs. This is where Trevin Wax is wrong. The potential increasingly exists for secret police (for the first time, we have what Czarist Russia had for centuries—a national internal police that watch citizens), strict censorship (ask most professors how they feel about their free speech these days), deprivation from jobs (ask people fired for posting and saying the “unwoke” thing), and more. An increasingly nationalized and centralized education system also makes it easier for governments to “reeducate” millions. Just ask the Chinese Uyghurs.

We also have newly woke revolutionaries to support the elites. I recently had a student defend communism on the basis that Lenin and Stalin did advance literacy and extend the life span of the Russian people. In response I seriously joked, “I guess those life span stats did not include the life spans of the tens of millions of deaths directly attributable to Lenin and Stalin in the Gulags or the Holodomor.”

There are so many good things in this review, things that made me think. For example:

Dreher advises that we need to engage in the work of resistance to evil with a small, praying community (a la Eph. 6:18-20). You pray together for the courage to resist, and as one Christian recounts, “When you were with your friends in these communities, you had freedom.” Not surprisingly, our recent Baylor Character and Spirituality Study of students found that the key to their spiritual and moral flourishing in college was involvement in Christian small groups. Although a staple of evangelical circles, Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox could learn from this insight. As my Russian friends would often tell me: if I want to pray, I go to the Orthodox Church, but if I want to understand something, talk to other believers, and experience fellowship, I go to Protestant small groups.

But Protestants have something to learn from us Orthodox too, says Prof. Glanzer:

Finally, as any good Eastern Orthodox Christian will do, Dreher reminds us in the end that to live for Christ involves suffering under either soft or hard totalitarianism. It is a timely lesson he illustrates with powerful examples. In the Baylor Character and Spirituality Study I mentioned, when we asked Baylor students what the good life looks like to them 10 years from now, what they describe is the opposite of suffering. They do not want riches; they merely want one of the most dangerous idols of them all, “to be comfortable.” As Father Kirill Kaleda says in Dreher’s book, “this current ideology of comfort is anti-Christian in its very essence.”

Read it all.  Prof. Glanzer says that I am not pessimistic enough about the capacity for American soft totalitarianism to remain hard, but not optimistic enough about the religious creativity of Americans to create means of resistance. Every writer hopes for readers as thoughtful and as engaged as Perry Glanzer.

Once again, if you have bought the book or intend to buy it, here is a link to the free downloadable Study Guide I wrote to accompany the text. From that document:

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Wokeness Comes To Pfizer

Two different readers e-mailed with their concern about this upcoming event at the pharmaceutical giant:

 

One of the readers said:

Rod, please don’t use my name.  Isn’t it a shame to have to say that?

This is very distressing.  When I was a practicing doctor, the last thing I’d want to do was prescribe a medication made by a company that espoused a political agenda–any political agenda.  Nor should a patient have to think about such things.  When I joined the pharma industry, my understanding was that its purpose was to make medications that could help people.  Until recently, it was.

This is the same kind of thing as I wrote about happening at Halliburton: employees who dissent from this highly politicized stuff, but who are afraid to be known as dissenters because they might lose their jobs. Consider the internal demoralization of employees who have to walk on eggshells because of the workplace environment established by corporate leaders. Under Kendi’s extremist ideology, almost anything can be described as racist. It would unnerve me if his radical philosophy were embraced by my company.


“Albert” is Dr. Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer. He says that he has been “encouraged by the ongoing dialogue about race taking place at different Pfizer sites around the world,” and that he looks forward to “engaging and productive discussions from which we can all learn and grow.”

This is complete corporate bullshit. No one at Pfizer who has a brain in their heads would ever participate in a “dialogue” in which they contested anything that Dr. Kendi and the diversity commissars proclaim. Seriously, you’d have to be a fool to do so. You would immediately be tagged as a troublemaker, and at some point face a “hostile workplace environment” claim. The two employees who e-mailed me independent of each other are frightened that their names not be associated with complaining.

This is totalitarian in spirit. What kind of miserable corporate culture is it when you have to assent to a political philosophy that has nothing at all to do with the work that happens in the office, or fear being driven out of your job as a pariah who is the enemy of Diversity, Compassion, and Inclusion?

From Live Not By Lies:

The embrace of aggressive social progressivism by big business is one of the most underappreciated stories of the last two decades. Critics call it “woke capitalism,” a snarky theft of the left-wing slang term indicating progressive enlightenment. Woke capitalism is now the most transformative agent within the religion of social justice, because it unites progressive ideology with the most potent force in American life: consumerism and making money.

In his 2018 letter to investors, Larry Fink, CEO of the global investment company BlackRock, said that corporate social responsibility is now part of the cost of doing business.

“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose,” Fink wrote. “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”

Poll results about consumer expectations back Fink up. Millennials and Generation Z customers are

especially prone to seeing their consumer expenditures as part of creating a socially conscious personal brand identity. For many companies, then, signaling progressive virtues to consumers is a smart business move in the same way that signaling all-American patriotism would have been to corporations in the 1950s.

But what counts as a “positive contribution to society”? Corporations like to brand themselves as being in favor of a predictable constellation of causes, all of them guiding stars of the progressive cosmos. Woke capitalist branding harnesses the unmatched propaganda resources of the advertising industry to send the message, both explicitly and implicitly: the beliefs of social conservatives and religious traditionalists are obstacles to the social good.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough to my conservative readers: Big Business is not our friend. If you believe that totalitarianism can only come through the State, and not through institutions like corporations, you are going to miss what’s really happening. It is a therapeutic totalitarianism, but no less totalitarian for it. The liberal Washington Monthly criticized Kendi’s thought, saying that “antiracism” is not what you think it is. The black linguist John McWhorter has denounced “antiracism” as a pseudo-religion. This is really bad stuff, all of it embraced and propagated by well-meaning people who (rightly) oppose racism.

No one inside Pfizer, or in any corporation, university, or institution, can object to any of this without putting his or her job at risk. (Well, a person of color probably could.) This is not something the government is imposing on corporations. They’re doing it themselves.

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The Antichrist Of Compassion

This morning I received an e-mail from a professor at a Catholic university. I won’t name it, or her, here, because I don’t have permission. But she told me a first-hand story about how the university tried to deny the pro-life student group a permit to set up a booth at a recent non-political campus event open to the public. The faculty advisor fought for the pro-life students, and won, but after it was over, one of the university’s diversity coordinator raised hell with senior administrators about how the presence of pro-lifers caused neighborhood children to weep. The professor said nobody, of course, saw or heard these triggered tots, but the diversity commissar insisted that they exist.

Another reader — this one teaches at a Catholic high school — told me yesterday that his school has approved a Gay-Straight Alliance club. He said that he told his faculty colleagues that they are deluded if they think there is not an intrinsic conflict between this club and the Catholic mission of the school. Of course it didn’t matter — the school capitulated.

I don’t see how any Christian school is going to survive this cultural revolution with its values intact unless it has deep confidence in its Christian identity and mission, and massive reserves of courage upon which to draw. A Christian academic friend told me that, and he’s right. And even then the soft totalitarian regime — the state, accreditation authorities, corporations, and so on — will try to crush them.

It’s here. It’s happening now. The collapse is happening all around us. I want to point you to a piece I wrote last year, “The Age Of Antichrist.”  It was inspired in part by a Catholic cardinal’s frank admission that we might well be in the Last Days. And I would like you to see this post I wrote last year quoting the late, great Catholic thinker Rene Girard; I quote some of this in Live Not By Lies:

Now, here is where Girard becomes especially interesting, and relevant to our moment. He says that today, “we hear repeated in every way that we no longer have an absolute,” but in fact the concern for victims “is our absolute.” That is, it is the basis for our morality: “it is the concern for victims that determines what is most important.” This is the case because all other sources of absolute value have been lost. More:

The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition. … We are living through a caricatural “ultra-Christianity” that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by “radicalizing” the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner. … The intellectuals and other cultural elites have promoted Christianity to the role of number one scapegoat.

Girard says we are at the advent of what he calls “the other totalitarianism,” saying that it is

the most cunning and malicious of the two, the one with the greatest future, by all evidence. At present it does not oppose Judeo-Christian aspirations but claims them as its own and questions the concern for victims on the part of Christians (not without a certain semblance of reason at the level of concrete action, given the deficiencies of historical Christianity). The other totalitarianism does not openly oppose Christianity but outflanks it on its left wing.

This is the force of what in the Christian tradition is called Antichrist. You don’t have to believe in a literal Antichrist figure to grasp what Girard is saying here. Girard points out that in the symbolic language of the New Testament, Antichrist opposes Christ by imitating him and seeking to be better than him. More:

The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc.

Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious. Since the Christian denominations have become only tardily aware of their failings in charity, their connivance with established political orders in the past and present world that are always “sacrificial,” they are particularly vulnerable to the ongoing blackmail of contemporary neo-paganism.

Notice that at the unnamed Catholic university, the diversity commissar was attempting to suppress the pro-life group in the name of compassion to children. At the unnamed Catholic high school, the administration approved the Gay-Straight Alliance because compassion and tolerance demanded violating Catholic teaching. These woke Catholics are going to be more compassionate than Jesus, you see.

This is the kind of thing I wrote Live Not By Lies to warn Christians about, and to urge them to fight, and to prepare to endure faithfully. We will not be able to count on our institutions and our leaders. This alien and malign spirit is conquering the institutions. We need to be ready to see, judge, and act. Let those with ears to hear, hear.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

My Catholic high school had a GSA when I was a student there (2008-2012). Every teacher was obliged to wear an “Ally” badge on Pride Day.

That didn’t bother me at all. In fact, I joined the GSA, because I very sincerely thought that Christians ought to be more compassionate towards gay people. I was raised in the liberal Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, but was politically very conservative; I wasn’t there to support the gay agenda, but I didn’t really care what two men did in the privacy of their own bedrooms, either. I just thought “Building a Bridge” was a good idea long before I’d heard of Father Martin. It never occurred to me that one had to imbibe the whole LGBT agenda in order to be an “Ally.” Silly me!

I was president of our Young Republicans club and an officer in the GSA at the same time. Then, the 2012 election rolled around. At a GSA meeting, I mentioned nonchalantly that I was supporting Romney, in part, because he upheld traditional marriage. The other members were appalled. Our faculty advisor flew off the handle. I sputtered, “But the Catholic Church opposes gay marriage!” He—a former seminarian, teaching at a Catholic school—went into a long tirade against the Church’s teaching being bigoted, homophobic, etc. I was furious and immediately resigned from the GSA.

Now, I can remember three teachers openly disagreeing with Church teaching, two of whom were openly in relationships with other men, and they would bring their partners to school events. It didn’t surprise me that the faculty advisor disagreed with me. What truly shocked me was that they would get angry and think less of me as a person.

I spoke to some friends in the Young Republicans, who had always thought I was a tool for joining the GSA but had been too afraid to say anything. One of the lads came from a legacy family. He told me that the previous headmaster—a member of the religious order that theoretically) runs the school—had been ousted by the board of alumni for not letting a transgendered student bring his boyfriend to prom. They still let him teach science—”like you’d throw a dog a bone,” as Johnny Cash would say.

It still blows my mind. There I was, a doe-eyed Republican youff thinking that progressives wouldn’t hate my guts just because I disagreed with their definition of marriage. I will never make that mistake again. I will never, ever fall for the “building bridges” spiel again.

I look back at how blind I was, and it still bothers me. How many students just lapped it up, assuming (naturally) that a Catholic school would teach Catholic truths? How many parents had any idea it was going on—and why would they think to ask?

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A Jimmy Carter Birthday Party

Fortunately for me, I didn’t see much of the debate tonight. Why? Because my daughter Nora wanted to have a picnic to celebrate her 14th birthday (which is next week, but they’re out of school for the rest of the week) outside of Torchy’s Tacos on LSU’s campus. My kids are wonderfully eccentric. Nora is going through a phase where she’s ironically preoccupied with all things Jimmy Carter. It’s a Seventies thing, I think. She chose the slogan for her birthday cake, above. Her brother Matt tried to convince her to ask the Baskin-Robbins people for the slogan “SHARIA LAW NOW!”, but Mom said no, the last thing we need now is a visit from the FBI.

Matt got some kind of machine for his recent birthday that allowed him to design and create this t-shirt for her, which she’s holding up here (as a rule, I don’t put my kids’ faces on the Internet):

A little amusing content for this blog won’t hurt you, right?

I should have pulled a Billy Carter and gone and peed on the side of Torchy’s. (For you young’uns, President Carter’s brother once urinated on an airport runway in full view of the media.) I think Nora would 100 percent agree that I am the Billy Carter of our family. No kidding, I love Billy Carter, unironically.

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A Great Apostasy

We’re getting preliminary sales numbers in from launch week of Live Not By Lies, and they’re amazing — by far the best launch I’ve ever had. One reviewer said that this is “the right book at the right time,” and I think the numbers bear that out. People sense that this time is different, that there’s some revolutionary in the air — that for once, Dreher’s alarmism is justified.

It has been gratifying to see that the wild success of Live Not By Lies has also goosed sales of The Benedict Option. According to the same preliminary sales numbers, there was a 400 percent increase in Ben Op sales on the opening week of Live Not; we haven’t sold as many copies of Ben Op in a single week for over two years (and it has continued to sell decently well every week since it was first published in March 2017).

I’ve been asked by several interviewers over the past week what the connection is between The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies.

What the two books have in common is that they attempt to address believing traditional (small-o orthodox) Christians in a post-Christian, indeed increasingly anti-Christian, world. I analyze the condition that we are in, and offer prescriptions for how Christians who want to hold on to their faith should act in the face of these challenges. Both books assume that we are well into what Aaron Renn, in his well-regarded 2017 essay “The Lost World Of American Evangelicalism,” called “Negative World.” Excerpt:

1. Positive World (Pre-1994). To be seen as a religious person and one who exemplifies traditional Christian norms is a social positive. Christianity is a status enhancer. In some cases failure to embrace those norms hurt you.

2. Neutral World (1994-2014). Christianity is seen as a socially neutral attribute. It no longer had dominant status in society, but to be seen as a religious person is not a knock either. It’s more like a personal affectation or hobby. Traditional norms of behavior retain residual force.

3. Negative World (2014-). In this world, being a Christian is a social negative, especially in high status positions. Christianity in many ways as seen as undermining the social good. Traditional norms are expressly repudiated.

I take for granted that most of us who are under the age of 80 who don’t live in a rural town understand that Positive World disappeared a long time ago. I believe that the great majority of American Christians still think that we are in Neutral World. For these people, The Benedict Option was too negative and despairing. These Pollyannas — many of whom lead churches and influential ministries — are not going to like Live Not By Lies, because it starts from the premise that Negative World is accelerating away from Neutral World at increasing velocity. It assumes that Christians who believe in a negotiated peace with Negative World are deluding themselves about what the future holds. In Live Not By Lies, I make the case that the world we are moving into is going to be a soft totalitarianism, and that Christians who lived through Soviet-style totalitarianism have good advice for us on how to prepare ourselves spiritually, morally, and communally for living out the faith in a time of persecution.

Live Not By Lies focuses on active hostility to faithful traditional Christian disciples (as opposed to admirers of Christ who have completely conformed to the post/anti-Christian modern ideology). There’s some of that in The Benedict Option, but mostly the Ben Op is about holding on to the faith as the modern world becomes not so much hostile to Christianity, but indifferent to it. Let me put it like this: for a true Christian, apostasy is a worse fate than martyrdom. In fact, though you would never know it from the teachings of the bourgeois self-help Christianity that dominates America, martyrdom is traditionally seen by the Church as the highest of honors. To die for having given witness to Christ is glory.

Here, from Live Not By Lies, is a story that testifies to that reality. It’s going to sound like madness to non-Christians. If you are a Christian and you don’t find this tale riveting and inspiring, then you need to re-think your faith. The storyteller is Alexander Ogorodnikov, a prominent Russian Christian who was imprisoned and tortured in the late Soviet period. Here he tells me about the time the state relocated him to a rural jailhouse:

In that small prison, Ogorodnikov was the only captive, and he was looked after by a single guard. He was clearly a pensioner who was allowed to work the night shift because he was lonely.

One night, he entered Ogorodnikov’s cell with a wild look on his face. “They come at night,” said the old man to the prisoner. Ogorodnikov understood that the old man was being driven to the brink of insanity by something and that he needed to confess. Ogorodnikov urged him to speak. This is what the haunted prison guard said:

“When I was a young guard in a different prison, they would gather twenty or thirty priests who had been behind bars, and took them outside. They rigged them up to a sled, so that they were pulling the sled. They had them pull the sled out into the forest. They made them run all day, until they brought them to a swamp. And then they put them into two rows, one behind the other. I was one of the guards who stood in the perimeter around the prisoners.

“One of the KGB guys walked up to the first priest. He asked him very calmly and quietly, ’Is there a God?’ The priest said yes. They shot him in the forehead in such a way that his brains covered the priest standing behind him. He calmly loaded his pistol, went to next priest, and asked, ‘Does God exist?’

“‘Yes, he exists.’ The KGB man shot this priest in the same way. We didn’t blindfold them. They saw everything that was about to happen to them.”

Ogorodnikov fights back tears as he comes to the end of his story. In a voice cracking with emotion, the old prisoner says, “Not one of those priests denied Christ.”

This is why the old man volunteered to keep Ogorodnikov company after sundown: memories of the priests’ faces in the moments before their execution haunted him at night.

Were those priests heroes, or fools? The way you answer that question, Christian, probably forecasts your future. You might be the sort of Christian who says, “They should have lied, and denied Christ outwardly, knowing that a confession made under duress is not real. Then they could have gone back into the world and done some good ministering to people.” If that’s who you are, then you are nothing but a rationalizer. Or, as the Russian Baptist pastor Yuri Sipko told me in Live Not By Lies:

“Without being willing to suffer, even die for Christ, it’s just hypocrisy. It’s just a search for comfort,” says Yuri Sipko, the Russian Baptist pastor. “When I meet with brothers in faith, especially young people, I ask them: name three values as Christians that you are ready to die for. This is where you see the border between those who are serious about their faith and those who aren’t.”

When he thinks of the communist past, about Christians who were sent to prison camps and never returned, of those who were ridiculed in the world, who lost their jobs, who even in some cases had their children taken from them because of their faith, Sipko knows what gave them the strength to endure. Their ability to suffer all of this for the sake of Christ is what testified to the reality of their unseen God.

“You need to confess him and worship him in such a way that people can see that this world is a lie,” says the old pastor. “This is hard, but this is what reveals man as an image of God.”

We may all face a similar situation one day, where the choice between death and apostasy is stark. But I doubt it. This is why I call what’s coming soft totalitarianism. The regime — and by “regime” I mean the state, big business, schools, universities, the media, and other key social institutions — won’t need to have its agents take us out to the woods and threaten to blow our brains out if we don’t apostatize. It has much more sophisticated ways of getting to us. I’ll talk about that when I do my piece on my first somewhat negative review — I’ll share it with you later, in a separate post — in which the neoreactionary reviewer makes the case that Dreher is not being alarmist enough.

For right now, this morning, in this post, I want to focus on the passive persecution that is the very water in which we swim. I say “passive” because it doesn’t require active agents of the state or institutions identifying and acting negatively against Christians. This is rather the kind of thing that I focus more on in The Benedict Option: the passing of Christianity out of our world in a way analogous to how classical paganism passed out of the Roman world in the fourth century, giving way to a successor religion, Christianity. It becomes easier to actively persecute Christians (in the way I anticipate in Live Not By Lies) once Christianity has become a marginal force in the culture (which is the condition that The Benedict Option addresses).

The choice faced by those Russian Orthodox priests in the forest clearing that night was a choice akin to what Winston Smith faced in his clash with the torturer O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In our time, the apostasy is more like what the Savage faces in his showdown with Mustapha Mond in Brave New World. As I recall in Live Not By Lies:

Hard totalitarianism depends on terrorizing us into surrendering our free consciences; soft totalitarianism uses fear as well, but mostly it bewitches us with therapeutic promises of entertainment, pleasure, and comfort—including, in the phrase of Mustapha Mond, Huxley’s great dictator, “Christianity without tears.”

But truth cannot be separated from tears. To live in truth requires accepting suffering. In Brave New World, Mond appeals to John the Savage to leave his wild life in the woods and return to the comforts of civilization. The prophetic savage refuses the temptation.

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

Mond doesn’t torture the Savage. He let’s him go, saying something like, “You’re welcome to it.” Mond knows that the Savage is no threat to the totalitarianism of comfort that the World Controllers have established. Few people are going to choose anything over comfort. Fighting this threat to Christianity from within the hearts and minds of Christians raised in late modern culture is what both The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies have in common — and why they really should be read together (though not necessarily in chronological order).

Here’s something that should be a stark wake-up call to all religious believers, not just Christians. It’s a new piece from Foreign Affairs, by Ronald Inglehart. It’s not behind a paywall, but you have to register to see it. It’s about the collapse of religion globally in economically advanced countries. Here’s the gist:

A dozen years ago, my colleague Pippa Norris and I analyzed data on religious trends in 49 countries, including a few subnational territories such as Northern Ireland, from which survey evidence was available from 1981 to 2007 (these countries contained 60 percent of the world’s population). We did not find a universal resurgence of religion, despite claims to that effect—most high-income countries became less religious—but we did find that in 33 of the 49 countries we studied, people became more religious during those years. This was true in most former communist countries, in most developing countries, and even in a number of high-income countries. Our findings made it clear that industrialization and the spread of scientific knowledge were not causing religion to disappear, as some scholars had once assumed.

But since 2007, things have changed with surprising speed. From about 2007 to 2019, the overwhelming majority of the countries we studied—43 out of 49—became less religious. The decline in belief was not confined to high-income countries and appeared across most of the world.

Growing numbers of people no longer find religion a necessary source of support and meaning in their lives. Even the United States—long cited as proof that an economically advanced society can be strongly religious—has now joined other wealthy countries in moving away from religion. Several forces are driving this trend, but the most powerful one is the waning hold of a set of beliefs closely linked to the imperative of maintaining high birthrates. Modern societies have become less religious in part because they no longer need to uphold the kinds of gender and sexual norms that the major world religions have instilled for centuries.

Although some religious conservatives warn that the retreat from faith will lead to a collapse of social cohesion and public morality, the evidence doesn’t support this claim. As unexpected as it may seem, countries that are less religious actually tend to be less corrupt and have lower murder rates than more religious ones. Needless to say, religion itself doesn’t encourage corruption and crime. This phenomenon reflects the fact that as societies develop, survival becomes more secure: starvation, once pervasive, becomes uncommon; life expectancy increases; murder and other forms of violence diminish. And as this level of security rises, people tend to become less religious.

This should surprise no one who reads the Bible. The Bible talks about how the wealthy are in the most danger of losing their faith. In fact, in Revelation 3, an angel has this message to the church of Laodicea:

I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot; I would that you be either cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and are neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of My mouth.

For you say, ‘I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing’; and you do not understand that you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from Me gold purified by fire so that you may be rich; and white garments so that you may be clothed, and the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and to anoint your eyes with eye salve, so that you may see.

The churches in America are the Church in Laodicea. Sometimes I hear from non-religious readers who think that the fact that America has not become a sinkhole of poverty and crime as it has cast aside religion means that prophesies of calamity if the nation forgets God are empty. This is wrong for two reasons. First, nobody should become a Christian because they believe that it will bring prosperity. This is the false idol promoted by the prosperity gospel. It may be the case that committing to live by the teachings of Christ brings a certain stability to one’s life, such that one is better able to grow prosperous. For example, we know that the most important factor in predicting whether an adult will be poor, or at least will struggle economically, is whether or not one grew up in a home with two parents. Christianity’s sexual and family ethic, therefore, makes practical sense.

But one should by no means think that prosperity is the proof of the Gospel! St. Peter and St. Paul died as martyrs, as did many early Christians. Were they living their best life then? Yes, absolutely — martyrdom was a crown of glory. But by Joel Osteen’s measure, they were failures. Similarly with us: what good does it to a man to win the whole world, but to lose his soul?

And, Solzhenitsyn said, in his 1983 Templeton Prize address:

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

As he goes on to explain, a world that has divested itself of consciousness of the Divine opens itself up to terrible evils — even if it is wealthy and powerful. The falcon cannot hear the Falconer. We lose contact with the knowledge and the force that enables us to recognize evil for what it is, and to overcome it. We are living through this catastrophe now, and have been for over a century now. The atheist Nietzsche knew us better than we know ourselves. A very important book about evolutionary psychology that has just appeared, The Weirdest People In The World , explains how this happened. I intend to write about the book later.



Back to Inglehart’s piece:

The most dramatic shift away from religion has taken place among the American public. From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the world’s more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little. Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data. Near the end of the initial period studied, Americans’ mean rating of the importance of God in their lives was 8.2 on a ten-point scale. In the most recent U.S. survey, from 2017, the figure had dropped to 4.6, an astonishingly sharp decline. For years, the United States had been the key case demonstrating that economic modernization need not produce secularization. By this measure, the United States now ranks as the 11th least religious country for which we have data.

This is at the core of it:

During the twentieth century, a growing number of countries attained drastically reduced infant mortality rates and higher life expectancies, making these traditional cultural norms no longer necessary. This process didn’t happen overnight. The major world religions had presented pro-fertility norms as absolute moral rules and stoutly resisted change. People only slowly gave up the familiar beliefs and societal roles they had known since childhood concerning gender and sexual behavior. But when a society reached a sufficiently high level of economic and physical security, younger generations grew up taking that security for granted, and the norms around fertility receded. Ideas, practices, and laws concerning gender equality, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality are now changing rapidly.

This shift is quantifiable. Data collected in the World Values Survey over the years offer a glimpse of a deep transformation. The survey uses a ten-point scale based on each country’s acceptance of divorce, abortion, and homosexuality.

In The Benedict Option, I wrote about how the Sexual Revolution was the tipping point for us in the West:

When people decide that historically normative Christianity is wrong about sex, they typically don’t find a church that endorses their liberal views. They quit going to church altogether.

This raises a critically important question: Is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?

Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been under way since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the Sexual Revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s demise. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture and redirecting the erotic instinct was intrinsic to Christian culture. Without Christianity, the West was reverting to its former state.

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among the People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” Chastity—the rightly ordered use of the gift of sexuality—was the greatest distinction setting Christians of the early church apart from the pagan world.

The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what a person does with their sexuality cannot be separated from what a person is. In a sense, moderns believe the same thing, but from a perspective entirely different from the early church’s.

In speaking of how men and women of the early Christian era saw their bodies, historian Peter Brown says the body

was embedded in a cosmic matrix in ways that made its perception of itself profoundly unlike our own. Ultimately, sex was not the expression of inner needs, lodged in the isolated body. Instead, it was seen as the pulsing, through the body, of the same energies as kept the stars alive. Whether this pulse of energy came from benevolent gods or from malevolent demons (as many radical Christians believed) sex could never be seen as a thing for the isolated human body alone.

Early Christianity’s sexual teaching does not only come from the words of Christ and the Apostle Paul; more broadly, it emerges from the Bible’s anthropology. The human being bears the image of God, however tarnished by sin, and is the pinnacle of an order created and imbued with meaning by God.

In that order, man has a purpose. He is meant for something, to achieve certain ends. When Paul warned the Christians of Corinth that having sex with a prostitute meant that they were joining Jesus Christ to that prostitute, he was not speaking metaphorically. Because we belong to Christ as a unity of body, mind, and soul, how we use the body and the mind sexually is a very big deal.

Anything we do that falls short of perfect harmony with the will of God is sin. Sin is not merely rule breaking but failing to live in accord with the structure of reality itself.

You can have the modern view of sex, sexual identity, and family — or you can have Christ. You cannot have both. You may be able to reconcile these in your mind, but your children (all 1.7 of them) will not. Look at the numbers. The collapse of Christianity in the US is happening primarily in the Millennial generation, and Generation Z.

Inglehart says:

The evidence suggests that modern societies will not descend into nihilistic chaos without religious faith to bind them… .

He’s right about that — for now. But what happens if the money goes away? Or what happens if there is a slow-motion dying-out of a civilization, as is happening in Europe? Ever read the novels of Michel Houellebecq? He is no Christian, but he knows what’s happening. When I was in Russia last year, a man told me about his immigrant friend living in Finland. The immigrant said that Finland is a very strange place: everybody is well cared for materially by the advanced welfare state, and it is a peaceful, prosperous, post-Christian society. But there is a bizarre loss of spirit there (he said), something he can’t understand. This brought to mind a painful conversation I had back in the early 1990s with an older Dutch man, who lived in a small town in beautiful, pastoral eastern Holland (which is one of the world’s least religious societies). The man could not grasp why there were so many suicides in his tranquil village. None of it made sense to him. Men, having forgotten God, were losing their will to carry on, despite the peace and widely shared prosperity.

Read it all. 

And don’t forget that for a truly believing Christian, there is a worse fate than poverty and suffering: the poverty of alienation from God. It is better to die for Christ than to live — even to live in great comfort — without Him. Our eternal destinies are at stake! This makes no sense to the world, but it had better make sense to Christians, or they will soon be ex-Christians when it suddenly costs something to keep the faith.

This is where Live Not By Lies comes in. The soft totalitarianism of which I write is one designed to choke the Christianity out of us with velvet gloves. We really are living through a great apostasy, and an apocalypse. I don’t know if it is the Great Apostasy prophesied in Christian Scripture — that is, the mass abandonment of the faith before the Second Coming — and I don’t know if it is the Apocalypse either. No man knows the hour or the day. But I do know that the Christian world is living through a catastrophe the likes of which it has never seen. As a Slovak Catholic priest put it (I’m paraphrasing), “It was easier, in a way, under communism. The light of the Gospel shone clearly through the darkness to light the way. But now when it shines, it only strikes fog.”

Yuri Sipko again, from Live Not By Lies:

“When I meet with brothers in faith, especially young people, I ask them: name three values as Christians that you are ready to die for. This is where you see the border between those who are serious about their faith and those who aren’t.”

You’d better believe it. I’m serious. The purpose of anti-Christian is ultimately to cause believers to give up their faith. The Enemy does not care if he accomplishes this task through pain, terror, and execution; if he can get what he wants by giving us wealth, comfort, and status, he will. And he is. What are you, Christian, going to do about it?

UPDATE: I forgot to say: a democratic nation that is irreligious is not likely to be a nation that respects religious liberty, because its people will not understand why religious liberty matters.

UPDATE.2: Hey everybody, just got the news that Live Not By Lies made the New York Times bestseller list this week:

I was surprised that it was so far down the list, for one reason alone: we have sold about twice as many copies of LNBL than we did of The Benedict Option on its first week, and TBO debuted at No. 7 on the Times list. But you have to remember that it’s all relative. The list was super-competitive last week. I’m just grateful to be on the list at all. This means that I have written my third NYT Bestseller (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming was my other one). Glory to God!

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The People Behind ‘Live Not By Lies’

Now that Live Not By Lies has become a bestseller, I’d like to highlight some of the people who helped me make this book possible. These people were my translators in various countries, and, to some degree, my local “producers” — in that they made and managed the connections I needed to interview former dissidents. My book would not have been possible without them. Any success the book had is their success too, in a real way.

Above you can see Father Stepan Smolen, a Czech Catholic priest. He is one of the most remarkable people I have ever met, anywhere. His English is impeccable, and his faith is vibrantly orthodox. He is an intellectual whose brilliance can be hard to see when you first meet him, because he is so quiet, humble and gentle. But inside, he is fierce! This young man and those who admire him are the future of Catholic Christianity in the Czech Republic. He is, in fact, a writer and even a bestselling novelist in his country and neighboring Slovakia — if any American Catholic book publishers would like to be in touch with him, reach out to me.

Below is me at the monument in Bratislava to Father Tomislav Kolakovic, the founder of the underground Catholic Church in Slovakia. On my left is Timo Krizka, a Catholic photographer whose story is featured in the concluding chapter of Live Not By Lies. On my right is Juraj Sust, a Catholic who heads up Hanus Days, an ideas festival held every year in Bratislava. I knew very little about Slovakia before going to speak at Hanus Days in 2019, and being introduced by these men to survivors of the underground church there. If not for them, I would have had no idea who Father Kolakovic was. The Christian witness of that little country, Slovakia, and its Christian people has been totally overlooked here in the West. I hope my book changes that — and if it does, you can see in this picture the two Slovak men you have to thank for that:

Another key Slovak in the writing of Live Not By Lies was my translator Viliam Ostatnik, shown here on the left with the historian Jan Simulcik (who is in the book), inside the hidden Bratislava chamber where the underground church published samizdat prayer books and other church literature for a decade, undetected by the secret police:

In Poland, my translator and interview coordinator was Lukasz Kozuchowski, with whom I am here drinking beer in Warsaw:

In Hungary, I could not have done a thing without the magnificent Anna Salyi, whose own family suffered greatly under communism, and whose parents, Tamas Salyi and Judit Pastor, are in the book. Here is Anna with Maria Wittner, a national hero of the 1956 uprising against Soviet occupation:

In Russia, my translator and coordinator was Matthew Casserly, an American expat working in Moscow. I didn’t have my smartphone with me in Russia, for security reasons, so Matthew sent me this photo of himself outside Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana:

I could not have done this reporting in Russia without the organizational assistance of the religion scholar Dmitry Uzlaner, to whom I owe a debt I cannot hope to repay:

There were so many more who gave of their time to tell their stories, and the stories of persecuted Christianity under the communist yoke in Russia and Europe. Again: any success of Live Not By Lies is their success too. One of my greatest hopes for the book is that it will inspire other writers to go to Russia, go to the former communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe, and talk to the incredible men and women of that world. I could spend the rest of my life writing about them. Thank you, friends. Thank you.

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Wokeness Comes To Halliburton

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of The 1619 Project, fancies herself as a brave prophet who takes risks to speak truth to power:

 

Uh-huh. There is nothing safer to say among American power elites today than the racialist narrative hawked by Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, and the others. Shell Oil sponsored an NHJ talk in Houston, as part of a series of lectures on the black experience. I don’t blame her one bit for taking Shell’s money for the lecture. But please, spare us the self-serving and ridiculous, “I am making the powerful uncomfortable.” She is doing exactly the opposite: she is assuaging their liberal guilt.

Today I got an e-mail from a reader who confirmed that wokeness well and truly has conquered corporate America. The reader works for Halliburton, the largest US provider of oilfield services. This is the corporate giant that Dick Cheney used to run, and which has been vilified by liberals since the Iraq War began. Their customers are all oil companies; they sell nothing directly to the general public, according to this employee. I tell you this so you’ll know that there is no possible public relations benefit to what Halliburton’s senior management has just done. Said the reader, “At this point, the only thing that really makes sense is that this is essentially an extortion payment.”

He forwarded to me an image of a company-wide message from CEO Jeff Miller, raving about a recent company “CEO Town Hall on Diversity, Respect and Equality.” The speaker was Michelle Silverthorn, “equality advocate and founder of Inclusion Nation.” Miller, who sits in the same chair that Dick Cheney once did, asked everyone in the company to review the “Ten Rules for Allyship and Justice” that Silverthorn shared.

Look:

Remember, that was the handout that a successor to Dick Cheney at Halliburton passed along to every employee, with the request that they read over it. How about that: radical left ideas of social justice are embraced and encouraged at the most senior management levels at Halliburton, the company that Dick Cheney used to run! Woke Capitalism is triumphant. This Halliburton employee wrote:

I am honestly not sure at this point what would happen to me if I speak up. I plan to, but I need to be very careful. For now, I would be perfectly fine with you sharing this on your blog, but would prefer you not to use my name. Maybe that will change later – I need to pray about it some first.

Sure, Nikole Hannah-Jones is the brave oppressed voice in all this. Right. Meanwhile, this poor white guy at Halliburton is terrified to object to any of this radicalism because he’s afraid of losing his job.

We know exactly who has the power in woke corporate America, and who doesn’t.

 

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Trump Doesn’t Let Self Be Dominated By Winning

OK, think about it: you are 16 points behind your opponent in national polling less than a month before the election. There’s a good chance that your party is going to lose the Senate. The virus that has killed over 200,000 people since the early part of the year, and that sent you to the hospital last week, is nowhere near being under control. There have been massive job losses, and people are facing losing their homes, or eviction. You decide it’s time to make a dramatic play to shake up the race.

What do you do?

Nobody had this on their bingo card:

JUST IN: President Trump said he is ending negotiations on a new coronavirus economic relief bill and won’t support a new economic stimulus package until after the election.

— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) October 6, 2020

Consider:

Trump crashed the market with his tweet announcing no Covid stimulus till after the election:

 

What the hell is he thinking? Is this the dexamethasone talking?

None of this makes the slightest political sense. 

OK, can we just get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed as soon as possible? That’s all I ask for at this point. That, and for God to please help the Republican Senators and House members up for re-election, because the White House ain’t doing it.

UPDATE:

Is Trump trying to be Jimmy Carter? His COVID-19 mask position is opposed by 70% of population, & now he's walking away from stimulus talks as millions are facing new layoffs. Biden could get 350+ Electoral Votes.

— Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) October 6, 2020

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