Rod Dreher's Blog, page 112

‘Live Not By Lies’ On The Front Porch

Let me apologize to you readers who are sick to death of Live Not By Lies stuff. We are just days away from the book’s release, so naturally I’m going to start posting some of the reviews the book gets. If you’re not interested, please skim past.

Here’s a pretty favorable review by James Clark in Front Porch Republic. He liked the book, but I’m going to quote a couple of his criticisms, or at least observations, to answer the questions he implicitly poses. Clark writes:

(Notably, Dreher does not recommend Christians divest themselves of their invasive technology, although his argument suggests such action would be advisable. This is probably because doing so would at a stroke destroy the careers and daily lives of millions. Also, as he himself remarks, “unless you are a hermit living off the grid, you are . . . thoroughly bounded and penetrated by the surveillance capitalist system” [77]. Even so, it would have made sense to discuss how people can cut down on invasive tech at least to some degree. For example, that products such as smart speakers are utterly superfluous is something everyone should be able to agree on, but it would also pay to remember that even ubiquitous devices like smart phones only became mainstream just over ten years ago. To claim we cannot live without them says more about us than it does about reality.)

Yes, I didn’t specifically direct people to do this because I thought it would be obvious. Here is a key passage in the book:

Kamila Bendova sits in her armchair in the Prague apartment where she and her late husband, Václav, used to hold underground seminars to build up the anti-communist dissident movement. It has been thirty years since the fall of communism, but Bendova is not about to lessen her vigilance about threats to freedom. I mention to her that tens of millions of Americans have installed in their houses so-called “smart speakers” that monitor conversations for the sake of making domestic life more convenient. Kamila visibly recoils. The appalled look on her face telegraphs a clear message: How can Americans be so gullible?

To stay free to speak the truth, she tells me, you have to create for yourself a zone of privacy that is inviolate. She reminded me that the secret police had bugged her apartment, and that she and her family had to live with the constant awareness that the government was listening to every sound they made. The idea that anybody would welcome into their home a commercial device that records conversations and transmits them to a third party is horrifying to her. No consumer convenience is worth that risk.

“Information means power,” Kamila says. “We know from our life under the totalitarian regime that if you know something about someone, you can manipulate him or her. You can use it against them. The secret police have evidence of everything like that. They could use it all against you. Anything!”

Kamila pointed out to me the scars along the living room wall of her Prague apartment where, after the end of communism, she and her husband had ripped out the wires the secret police used to bug their home. It turns out that no one in the Benda family uses smartphones or emails. Too risky, they say, even today.

Some might call this paranoia. But in light of Edward Snowden’s revelations, it looks a lot more like prudence. “People think that they are safe because they haven’t said anything controversial,” says Kamila. “That is very naive.”

Everything in the book’s chapter on surveillance capitalism and its technologies ought to make very clear to any reader: divest yourself of it as much as you can. The Bendas don’t use smartphones. Most of us, I’d wager, won’t go that far — I’m trying to decide if I can afford to do so and still do my job — but all of us can refuse to put Alexas in our houses. All of us can afford to refuse any “smart” devices. Any device called “smart” is gathering data on you, and reporting it back to someone. This is not paranoia; this is the way companies do business today. This is not prophesying a world that is coming into being; it’s already here. They are working on technology that will allow smart TVs to read the faces of those watching, and record the moments during commercials where the viewer has particular emotional reactions. I’m serious. Read Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism to learn more.

If the government were imposing this on us, we would all freak out and scream, “Big Brother!” But because it’s coming to us from Big Business, in the form of making our lives easier and more convenient, we open the door to it. Jake Meador wrote me yesterday to say, “I wonder what the Bendas would say about this device.” Here’s what it is:

Ring latest home security camera is taking flight — literally. The new Always Home Cam is an autonomous drone that can fly around inside your home to give you a perspective of any room you want when you’re not home. Once it’s done flying, the Always Home Cam returns to its dock to charge its battery. It is expected to cost $249.99 when it starts shipping next year.

Jamie Siminoff, Ring’s founder and “chief inventor,” says the idea behind the Always Home Cam is to provide multiple viewpoints throughout the home without requiring the use of multiple cameras. In an interview ahead of the announcement, he said the company has spent the past two years on focused development of the device, and that it is an “obvious product that is very hard to build.” Thanks to advancements in drone technology, the company is able to make a product like this and have it work as desired.

I can see the non-nefarious argument for buying one of those things. But look: the very presence of it in our lives creates a habitus in which we are all conditioned to accept surveillance as normal. I didn’t have the space to go into this in Live Not By Lies, but in Zuboff’s book, she talks about how “smart house” technology, which is becoming normative, does helpful things in our homes (e.g., helps a house “learn” how to save energy), but also transmits all kinds of data about our dwellings to corporations. Maybe they’ll use it innocently. Kamila Bendova doesn’t think so. Information means power. 

More from James Clark’s review:

Many of these practices should sound familiar, given that they are reminiscent of The Benedict Option. But Live Not by Lies is not simply a rehash. Indeed, Dreher’s belief that liberalism is dying—more prominent here than in his previous book—helps to explain some of the ways his thought appears to have shifted since The Benedict Option was published.

For example, Dreher barely even mentions religious liberty in Live Not by Lies, whereas in The Benedict Option he contends that “religious liberty is critically important” (84). While he does not expressly recant this view in Live Not by Lies, its general absence as a topic is conspicuous. It is easy to get the impression that he has come to believe there is no point in harping on such a liberal ideal as religious liberty when more and more of those who are in power are “militantly illiberal” (93) and thus “shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality” (34). As such, “they will not even understand why they should tolerate dissent based in religious belief” (xiii).

Relatedly, Dreher’s declaration that “wherever we hide, they will track us, find us, and punish us” (68) can be understood as an acknowledgment of one of the most frequent criticisms of the Benedict Option, namely that those who are hostile to traditional Christianity have no intention of allowing us to practice our “countercultural way of living” (Benedict Option, 2). If Christians cannot count on their religious liberty being protected, and if they have “virtually nowhere left to hide” (Live Not by Lies, xiii), then they must do as the Eastern European churches (and, for that matter, the early Christians) did and “build the underground church.”

I don’t mention religious liberty in Live Not By Lies mostly because the book is not focused on politics and law. Yet I think Clark is probably onto something that wasn’t as clear to me when I wrote the Ben Op: that ultimately, the respect for religious liberty and free speech — both core liberal values — is going to fade. The last three years have made that even more clear.

As you know, my greatest frustration with the Benedict Option project is the way people who have never read the book assume that it counsels heading for the hills to build communes where they will leave us alone. I have tried to understand why so many people feel the urge to believe that, despite the fact that it’s not true. In the very first chapter, I quote theologian Ephraim Radner saying there is no place to hide from modernity! My theory is that it is a way of rationalizing their complacency, and/or their belief that we have no choice but to keep doing what we’re doing.

The truth is that the need for and the function of the Benedict Option can be seen in the film A Hidden Life. Nazism even found its way to Franz Jägerstätter’s tiny village high in the Austrian Alps. Even his fellow Catholic churchgoers fell under its spell.But because Franz and his family had been living a life of serious spiritual discipline, they saw Nazism for what it was, and found the strength to resist it, even though it cost them the respect and friendship of their neighbors, and even though it ultimately cost Franz his life.

In Live Not By Lies, I talk about this. Excerpt:

A Hidden Life makes clear that the source of their resistance was their deep Catholic faith. Yet everyone in the village is also Catholic—yet they conform to the Nazi world. Why did the Jägerstätters see, judge, and act as they did, but not one of their fellow Christians?

The answer comes in a conversation Franz has with an old artist who is painting images of Bible stories on the wall of the village church. The artist laments his own inability to truly represent Christ. His images comfort believers, but they do not lead them to repentance and conversion. Says the painter, “We create admirers. We do not create followers.”

Malick, who wrote the screenplay and who was trained in philosophy, almost certainly draws that distinction from the nineteenth-century Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote Jesus didn’t proclaim a philosophy, but a way of life.

Christ understood that being a “disciple” was in innermost and deepest harmony with what he said about himself. Christ claimed to be the way and the truth and the life (Jn. 14:6). For this reason, he could never be satisfied with adherents who accepted his teaching—especially with those who in their lives ignored it or let things take their usual course. His whole life on earth, from beginning to end, was destined solely to have followers and to make admirers impossible.

Admirers love being associated with Jesus, but when trouble comes, they either turn on him or in some way try to put distance between themselves and the Lord. The admirer wants the comfort and advantage that comes with being a Christian, but when times change and Jesus becomes a scandal or worse, the admirer folds. As Kierkegaard writes:

The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, will not reconstruct his life, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires. Not so for the follower. No, no. The follower aspires with all his strength to be what he admires. And then, remarkably enough, even though he is living amongst a “Christian people,” he incurs the same peril as he did when it was dangerous to openly confess Christ.

The follower recognizes the cost of discipleship and is willing to pay it. This does not mean that he is obligated to put himself at maximum peril at all times, or stand guilty of being an admirer. But it does mean that when the Gestapo or the KGB shows up in his village and demands that he bow to the swastika or the hammer and sickle, the follower will make the sign of the cross and walk with fear and trembling toward Golgotha.

So, The Benedict Option never was meant to be a safe refuge from modernity, as any reader of that book can see. It is rather an argument for and an exhortation to build communities that can prepare Christians to be disciples, not admirers, and therefore to be the kind of people who can both discern evil when it shows its face among us, and resist it, no matter what.

More from the review:

Another possible development that seems to stem from Dreher’s greater emphasis on the death of liberalism concerns his treatment of reason. While he observes in The Benedict Option that “logical reason is doubted and even dismissed” (119) in our time, his skepticism toward the effectiveness of reason is even stronger in Live Not by Lies, where he suggests that attempting to convince our illiberal opponents through “secular liberal discourse, with its respect for discursive reasoning” (62) is a waste of time: “Some conservatives think that SJWs [social justice warriors] should be countered with superior arguments and if conservatives stick with liberal proceduralism they will prevail. This is a fundamental error that blinds conservatives to the radical nature of the threat” (63). The implication is that just as our opponents care nothing for liberal ideals, they have equally little regard for reason.

If we cannot reason with our opponents, it seems to follow there is little we can hope to accomplish in the realm of conventional electoral politics. This might be why in Live Not by Lies Dreher continues his support for what he calls the “parallel polis”—understood as “an alternative set of social structures within which social and intellectual life could be lived outside of official approval” (121)—but without the affirmation of “traditional politics” that was present in The Benedict Option (78, 82–83).

This is a fair and insightful comment. Prof. Daniel Mahoney said in his quite positive review that the only thing he wishes had been in the book was more hope expressed towards the possibility of positive political action. That too is fair. I don’t mean to be read as saying voting doesn’t matter. I mean look, Amy Coney Barrett is being nominated for the Supreme Court because we have a Republican president.

My overall point, though, is that in a democracy, the government will ultimately govern according to the wishes of the majority. We know that younger generations — Millennials and Gen Z, and those to come, no doubt — are far more secular, far more liberal on social issues, and far more illiberal on tolerating dissent. Even more important, the illiberal left controls almost all the high ground among elites, institutions, and elite networks. How anybody could have lived through events of this year, and seen how impossible it is even to reason with these zealots (a bellwether example from 2015: look at Prof. Christakis trying to reason on the quad at Yale with a hysterical mob of social justice warriors) is beyond my ability to comprehend. It would be a mistake to think that there is no good to be done in conventional politics, but it would be a far, far more consequential mistake to think that somehow we can turn this around by voting for more Republicans.

The future of this country and its people, and of the churches, is being determined far more by the technology we accept, and how it shapes us individually and communally, than by those for whom we vote. This is a hard lesson for people to grasp, but it’s true.

One more excerpt:

In closing, when The Benedict Option was published, multiple commentators—and some people quoted in the book itself—observed that the vast majority of its practices simply amounted to the church being what it always has (or should have) been (142). That claim is more difficult to make about Live Not by Lies, as some of its recommendations—e.g., Christians moving underground and preparing the laity to take on the bulk of church leadership—are clearly made with extraordinary circumstances in view. Indeed, some will be inclined to reject Dreher’s ideas as overly extreme or apocalyptic.

Tempting as this reaction may be, however, I encourage readers to give Dreher a fair hearing and consider the evidence he offers in support of his arguments. The phenomena he cites are real and disquieting, and he should not be dismissed out-of-hand simply because he forecasts a world far darker than many of us believe could possibly emerge.

He’s right about that: Live Not By Lies is a darker book than The Benedict Option, even if it is ultimately hopeful. The hopefulness of the book, though, lies in a distinction I often like to make: that hope is not the same thing as optimism. Optimism says that everything is going to be just fine. That is simply not true. You would have to be out of your mind to look at the evidence and conclude, as any kind of social or religious conservative, that everything is bound to work out well for us. Hope, on the other hand, is the conviction that even if the worst comes, we can and must trust that God can use the pain and suffering of His people for the redemption of the world, even if we do not live to see it. As I say in Live Not By Lies, almost none of those who fought communism thought they would ever live to see its collapse. They resisted — and they were a minority! — because it was the right thing to do. Because that’s what it meant to be a disciple, not an admirer. I believe that when you read the stories in the book of how Christians like Silvester Krcmery and Alexander Ogorodnikov withstood their torture and imprisonment, you will see very clearly the difference between optimism and hope.

Optimism will leave us all vulnerable to collaboration and moral collapse, because it will drive us to deny reality, and then to compromise ourselves for the sake of maintaining the illusion. Only hope, of the kind that kept believers like those you meet in Live Not By Lies, will sustain us through the dark night ahead.

Read the whole review. Remember, I’ve just taken out a few points that I wanted to address. I thank James Clark and Front Porch Republic for their kind attention to my book, and for the opportunity to talk about it.

There’s still time to pre-order Live Not By Lies before its Tuesday publication date. And remember: if you want a signed copy, pre-order exclusively from Eighth Day Books in Wichita by going to this page. 

The post ‘Live Not By Lies’ On The Front Porch appeared first on The American Conservative.

Jesus Statue Desecrated

A friend here in Baton Rouge sends me these images of a Jesus statue outside of St. Joseph Catholic Cathedral in Baton Rouge, the mother church of the diocese. The desecration was discovered on Thursday morning. I have blotted out the f-word:

 

I do not for one second believe that a black person desecrated this statue of Jesus Christ. Not here in Louisiana, at least. This has not made the local news. My source is a local Catholic friend who confirmed that the photos are real.

That anybody, of any race, would do such a thing is execrable. The times are evil. We can expect a lot more of this kind of thing.

The post Jesus Statue Desecrated appeared first on The American Conservative.

It’s Amy Coney Barrett!

If The New York Times reports it, it must be true:

President Trump has selected Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the favorite candidate of conservatives, to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and will try to force Senate confirmation before Election Day in a move that would significantly alter the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court for years.

Mr. Trump plans to announce on Saturday that she is his choice, according to people close to the process who asked not to be identified disclosing the decision in advance. The president met with Judge Barrett at the White House this week and came away impressed with a jurist that leading conservatives told him would be a female Antonin Scalia, referring to the justice who died in 2016 and for whom Judge Barrett clerked.

As they often do, aides cautioned that Mr. Trump sometimes upends his own plans. But he is not known to have interviewed any other candidates for the post.

Washington Post reports same, as do PBS, WSJ, CNN, and everybody else. The Daily Beast says that the GOP plans to have a Senate vote before Election Day — and that they’ll be able to, because there’s nothing the Democrats can do to stop it. She was thoroughly vetted before her 2017 Senate confirmation hearing for the Seventh Circuit, in which Sen. Dianne Feinstein memorably criticized the nominee’s relationship to her Catholic faith by saying:

The Barrett nomination and expected confirmation, coming after Trump’s having put two other conservatives on the Supreme Court, is about the best possible news for social conservatives, and is mostly why Christians who didn’t like Trump otherwise voted for him. We should remember that judges are human beings, not robots; Gorsuch ruled the wrong way (from a socon point of view) in Bostock. Nevertheless, this nomination is sweet indeed, and, in tandem with the other two Trump SCOTUS picks, evidence that elections really do matter.

Here’s something we’re not going to know until Election Day exit polling: will the ACB nomination (and confirmation) do more to motivate Democratic turnout, or Republican turnout? I think a lot of that depends on how the Democrats handle themselves between now and then. This would not be a promising way to go:

 

Take a look at this letter signed by prominent black Pentecostals, charismatics, and Full Gospel pastors, including the Rev. Eugene Rivers and Bishop Talbert Swan. It says, in part:

As Christians, when we see others being abused and mistreated, we must speak out in defense of

their rights. We must defend the rights of our fellow Christians, of people of other faiths and of

those who hold no faith. Today we stand with, and speak in defense of, Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

As black Christians we will not stand by in silence as our sister in the faith is persecuted for the

“political crime” of her beliefs.

We do not know whether she will be nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court of the United

States, for which she is by all reports under consideration. But we do know that attacks on her

Christian beliefs and her membership in a charismatic Christian community reflect rank religious

bigotry that has no legitimate place in our political debates or public life. We condemn these vile

attacks—which began three years ago during the process of her confirmation for the judicial post

she currently holds. As the descendants of slaves we are particularly sensitive to acts of

discrimination and we demand an end to this reprehensible conduct.

Judge Barrett has a record as a lawyer, law professor, and U.S. Court of Appeals judge. She should

be judged on that record, not on her religious beliefs or membership in a religious community, be

it charismatic or otherwise. Contrary to the claims of some, this is no marginal group. Pentecostal

and Charismatic Christians together represent almost 600 million people, or 8.5 % of the world’s

population and almost twice the population of the United States. If Judge Barrett’s belief in the

baptism of the Holy Spirit and in the moral convictions associated with the historic Christian faith

disqualifies her for an office of public trust, then our American values of individual freedom and

the right to follow one’s conscience are simply hypocrisy. The truth, however, is that the

Constitution of the United States itself prohibits religious tests for public office. Those who say

that Judge Barrett’s charismatic Christian faith—or ours—is a threat to the Constitution are

themselves enemies of the Constitution. They are enemies of the freedom of the individual. Such

behavior cannot be tolerated. We must stand in defense of freedom of conscience in principle and

defend Judge Barrett’s right to practice her faith in particular.

I really, really appreciate that letter. I bet few if any of these men and women are Republicans. None of them endorse ACB’s nomination per se; they just want to say that nobody better run her down for being a charismatic. They’re right.

I know our liberal friends are very down now, and probably feeling like we would if President Obama had named the head of the ACLU to replace Justice Scalia, and had a Democratic Senate in his back pocket. I’m not going to rub it in, but I’m also not feeling very generous towards those who will shriek abuse at her or us. You know my feeling: that the country is going to speed leftward over the rest of my lifetime — we all know how liberal the Millennials and Gen Z are — and the last line of defense for social and religious conservatives, and for the First Amendment, is going to be the federal judiciary. For ACB’s nomination, Deo gratias.

The post It’s Amy Coney Barrett! appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Live Not By Lies’ Study Guide

I wasn’t going to release this until publication day of Live Not By Lies (next Tuesday), but it occurs to me that some of you potential readers might be wondering about whether or not it’s a book you’ll want to study with your church or other faith group. My publisher Sentinel has given me permission to post this link to the Study Guide in advance. It’s free and available to anybody. Here’s the preface:

 

Take a look at the Study Guide, which goes chapter by chapter, asking creative questions that should prompt discussion and action. When you go to church (or synagogue — it’s a book for Christians, but all religious traditionalists should read this) this weekend, talk to your pastor or others about the book, and whether or not it’s something that you all want to read together.

Here’s a link to pre-ordering a copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other major retailers.

If you’d like a signed copy, pre-order from Eighth Day Books; they’re handling signed pre-ordered copies exclusively. They won’t ship till September 29. You’ll probably get it quicker if you order from one of the big guys, but if you get it from Eighth Day, not only will you have a bookplate with my chicken scratch inside, but you’ll be supporting a small independent bookseller that happens to be one of the best places on earth (see what The New York Times wrote about it a few years back). I’m not kidding — people who make it to Wichita to visit the actual bookstore often cannot believe that a bookstore as excellent as this one exists at all, anywhere. It’s like asking the Inklings what their ideal bookstore would be like, except it’s not on the Cherwell, but on the Kansas plain.

Additionally, let me urge you to sign up for one or both of these online Zoom events next week:

 

Here’s the sign-up link for the J.D. Vance event. And this:

 

Sign up for the Speccie event here. 

(Don’t worry, I’m going to re-post the link to the Study Guide next week.)

The post ‘Live Not By Lies’ Study Guide appeared first on The American Conservative.

Notes From A Crisis Nation

There’s so much going on that I want to comment on, and I’ve run out of time today. Let me toss them out there to bring them to your attention. I have way too much to do today to get ready for book promotion, and no time to comment on these below. I just spent two hours approving comments from last night. But I think these items below are important, and that you should know about them.

ITEM: Radley Balko says that the Kentucky authorities are not being forthcoming about the events that led to Breonna Taylor’s death. He writes in the form of debunking questions from defenders of the police. Excerpt:

“This was not a no-knock warrant.”

It absolutely was. It says so right on the warrant. Moreover, the portion of the warrant authorizing a no-knock entry cited only cut-and-pasted information from the four other warrants that were part of the same investigation. This is a violation of a requirement set by the Supreme Court that no-knock warrants should be granted when police can present evidence that a particular suspect is a risk to shoot at police or destroy evidence if they knock and announce. They didn’t do that.

The police claim they were told after the fact to disregard the no-knock portion and instead knock and announce themselves, because, by that point, someone had determined that Taylor was a “soft target” — not a threat, and not a major player in the drug investigation. But there are problems with this account. If Taylor was a “soft target,” why not surround the house, get on a megaphone, and ask her to come out with her hands up? Why still take down her door with a battering ram? Why still serve the warrant in the middle of the night?

“The police knocked and announced themselves, and a witness heard them.”

In what was probably the most frustrating part of Cameron’s press event, he cited a single witness who claimed to have heard the officers identify themselves as police. I spoke with Taylor’s lawyers in June, who at that time had interviewed 11 of her neighbors. Many lived in the same apartment building as Taylor. According to the lawyers, no neighbor heard an announcement. The New York Times interviewed 12 neighbors. They found one — just one — who heard an announcement. And he only heard one announcement. He also told the paper that with all the commotion, it’s entirely possible that Walker and Taylor didn’t hear that announcement. Cameron neglected to mention any of this.

Moreover, in a CNN interview Wednesday night, Walker’s attorney, Steven Romines, said the witness to whom Cameron was referring initially said he did not hear the police announce themselves. And he repeated that assertion in a second interview. It was only after his third interview that he finally said he heard an announcement. That’s critical context that Cameron neglected to mention.

ITEM: This e-mail came in from a Czech reader:

Anytime I read your posts about Kyle Rittenhouse I wonder if you Americans realize how absolutely crazy these stories sound to people from outside of the USA. I understand that there is right and wrong usage of gun and that it is important to search for the truth in each case of fatal shooting. But I find it hard to find any sympathy for any person running around the streets with a semi-automatic weapon no matter what the reasons behind this are.

If you were to show up (just show up, not shooting or aiming at anyone) with such a weapon in my country (Czech Republic) it would warrant immediate response from a special police unit. The same applies to all European countries pretty much. I have watched the video in your latest piece on the subject and it doesn’t do much in convincing me in rooting for Kyle Rittenhouse or any other person involved in these incidents.

What I see when I watch the video is scenes that seem to be only possible in the USA and third world countries. The number of deaths just feels like reaping the fruit of loose gun policy and grown up people playing army on the streets. I actually find some understanding for people attacking or even aiming guns at Rittenhouse. For all they knew he just shot someone and was running around with what looks like a machine gun. Still all of them are playing the same game of running around the town with guns out on the open… feels insane to me.

Obviously it turns out his victims are/were bad people with criminal records and all the violence surrounding it is reprehensible. But to me anyone carrying a weapon to protests is part of a problem and in such an intense atmosphere I find it hard to look for nuances and distinguish good guys from bad guys within the hammock that took place that night. I also find Kyle’s demeanor sort of coldblooded. I imagine that a person who just shot someone is shaken with horror, not running around calmly explaining “I hat to shoot him” and then being ready to shoot some more. Of course I know that in these circumstances people react differently but this sure feels like a person who came there ready to use his gun.

I live in Central Europe and I am closely watching protests in Belarus. They actually have a dictator ruling over them yet the protests there are nothing like what we see in the USA. I understand people might find sympathy for Rittenhouse (I don’t) but I absolutely don’t understand how people are making hero of him. You live by a sword you need to be ready to take consequences…

Anyway thank you for your blog and for covering all kinds of topics including the controversial ones

Let’s Be Real: Dark Age Ahead

Well, this review of Live Not By Lies, in the Catholic magazine Crisis, was really something to wake up to. There’s this line at the end:

Live Not By Lies will cement Rod Dreher’s reputation as the most important Christian thinker of our age.

Thanks, everybody, I’m going back to bed now. Reviewer Michael Warren Davis is talking smack about Your Working Boy.

Seriously, though, I can’t thank Michael Warren Davis, the editor of Crisis, enough for his generous words. It’s a good review too, though I want to show him the respect of engaging with a critical part of it in a bit. But first, some of his praise. Notice how he identifies the totalitarian temptation with a generation’s emotional response to authority:

In his new book, Live Not By Lies, Rod Dreher warns us that the Hitlers and Stalins of our age will not wear funny mustaches and slick uniforms as they did in the 20th century. “The totalitarian temptation presents itself with a twenty-first century face,” he writes. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is that face. It’s the face of grown women screaming in anger and disbelief into the cameras of their iPhones over the death of their fallen hero. It’s the face of grown men who tweet about collapsing on the floor, sobbing, on hearing the news of Ginsburg’s death.

So long as Millennials remain dominant in American politics, this will remain the prevailing mode of discourse. My generation was abandoned by our parents and our teachers. We were never given a moral education for fear of stunting our “individuality. We were never taught to reason. We were never taught to control our emotional or carnal impulses.

That’s why there isn’t one real “individual” in America under forty. We all became slaves to peer pressure, and to our own base appetites. That’s the great danger of this moment in American history. We are being ruled by children—children who can’t tell right from wrong, and who lack all self-control. Like all children, our new ruling class won’t hesitate to punish any deviation from their the latest infatuation with ostracism, abuse, and perhaps even violence.

The new totalitarians are overgrown children, which is why the new totalitarianism will be defined by these three characteristics: emotivism, hedonism, and conformism. It will look less like Nineteen Eighty-Four and more like Lord of the Flies.

I hadn’t though of the phenomenon with quite that clarity, I confess. I talk in the book about how the Millennials and Gen Z are so different in their politics — they’re far more likely to favor socialism, for example, and they are not, by and large, social conservatives — but there’s something about Michael Warren Davis’s words that resonate this morning. It’s probably because since I finished the manuscript, we’ve seen things from that generation that reinforce the trends cited in the book. We’ve watched Millennials and Gen Z’ers driving dissenters out of major media (just this past week, the ultrapopular podcaster Joe Rogan is facing pressure from within Spotify, which just acquired his podcast in a $100 million deal, to punish him for interviewing Abigail Shrier, a journalist who wrote a book about how the trans movement is harming teenage girls). Last weekend I watched “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix, which is about how social media and that technology in general has changed us. It has created a generation, well, like the one Michael Warren Davis describes. They have been formed by the methods of the online mob.

Anyway, I really am grateful that Michael Warren Davis’s review emphasizes that the coming totalitarianism really will be soft, but no less totalitarian for that fact. Christians need to open their eyes to the form it will take, and is taking. Far too many Christians believe that either we aren’t in a war, or that if we are, then we need to build a Maginot Line.

In Live Not By Lies, I quote this passage from the memoir of Dr. Silvester Krcmery, imprisoned by the communist for his faith:

We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible. We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented. This, at first, is quite inconspicuous. However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.

You had better take this seriously. Solzhenitsyn said the same thing. So did Arendt:

There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.

Back to Michael Warren Davis:

Following the publication of The Benedict Option, Mr. Dreher was accused of being a “retreatist,” even a “defeatist.” Why? Because, as he says in In Live Not By Lies, Mr. Dreher believes that “The culture war is largely over—and we lost.” That seems to be the central thesis of Mr. Dreher’s work. He made the assertion early in The Benedict Option but didn’t spend much time defending it. The first half of Live Not By Lies is devoted to proving that thesis; the second half, to surviving the coming anti-Christian, totalitarian regime.

Now, one might argue that Christians are just one election away from reclaiming total control over this country’s political, religious, economic, and cultural institutions. So far, nobody has tried—probably because they can’t. After reading Live Not By Lies, there can be no shadow of a doubt that Mr. Dreher is right. He isn’t a pessimist, but a realist.

At its best, then, Live Not By Lies is a kind of prequel to The Benedict Option. The BenOp is not, as Mr. Dreher’s critics claim, a retreatist manifesto. It doesn’t lay out terms for unconditional surrender. It’s a manual for Christian partisans who have been driven into the jungles. The culture war, traditionally understood, is indeed lost. The Benedict Option is like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War for a new phase of cultural guerrilla warfare.

The Empire is now too decayed to salvage. The Dark Age is coming, whether we like it or not. …

The review could have stopped right there and I would have been forever grateful to Michael Warren Davis for getting The Benedict Option correct, when so many others did not. I’ve tried to explain it over the years to people like this: consider that in the culture war, traditional Christians today are like the British army at Dunkirk. We can make a kamikaze charge at the enemy, but we would be destroyed. We can sit quietly and hope that the enemy will pass us by, but that would be hopelessly stupid. Or we can get on the flotilla waiting offshore and escape to England, where, in relative safety, we can keep our armies from being destroyed while we re-arm and train for the battles to come on some far-off D-Day.

The Benedict Option is about a strategic retreat to “England” — strategic, because it is not intended to be permanent, but only the most reasonable thing we can do under the dire circumstances, and is part of a long-term offensive strategy. Or, if you prefer MWD’s view, it’s about building base camps for guerrilla culture war. I think the reason so many Christians rejected the book is that they cannot bring themselves to accept the reality of post-Christianity. They don’t recognize that Sauron is gaining strength, and the Sarumans of our civilization are switching alliances. I spoke yesterday to a prominent lay Catholic who told me he has come to believe that the survival of the Catholic faith in the West is going to depend much more heavily on well-formed, believing Catholic laity than many of us realized. This aligned with what a middle-aged German Catholic told me in Rome two years ago: that he and his friends recognize that the Catholic Church institution in Germany is going to fall apart, and they are going to have to keep the faith alive in part by building strong networks between true-believing families, and strongly encouraging their children to marry within the network.

Does this sound weird to you? It sounds necessary to me. If you aren’t at least considering this kind of thing seriously, then I’m sorry, but you are not facing reality. And none of us have time to dither.

Michael Warren Davis’s review takes an interesting swerve when he talks about how the ultimate goal of The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies must be the restoration of Catholicism in the West:

I understand the desire to link arms with our fellow Christians against our common foe. Still, when we talk of restoring a Christian society, we must ask: “What do you mean by ‘Christian’?” If Mr. Dreher is fighting to restore the Christian society championed by Catholics like Augustine of Hippo, Thomas More, Robert Bellarmine, and Christopher Columbus, then I’m with him. But if he’s content with Calvin’s Geneva or Luther’s Saxony, then I am not.

Well, as an Orthodox Christian, I would not be “content” with either the Catholic or the Reformed version, but I would be more content living in either than in what is emerging from the ruins of Christendom. My view in The Benedict Option, and even more strongly expressed in Live Not By Lies, is that we Christians do not have to agree on the ultimate goal we seek in order to build defensive alliances for the resistance. When the secret police (I’m speaking metaphorically) come for us, they are not going to come because we are Evangelical, or Catholic, or Orthodox; they are going to come because we are faithful Christians who will not bend the knee.

From Live Not By Lies:

Along with other prisoners, Krčméry would sing hymns, and would pray litanies for everyday needs, including for a spirit of humility and willingness to endure all for the sake of Christ. This brotherhood was an integral part of the spirituality of Christian resistance. Father Kolaković had taught the Family the virtue of reaching across church lines to establish brotherhood with other Christians. Captivity and torture turned this into a practical reality.

“In prison, nobody recognized any confessional differences,” writes Krčméry.

This same principle echoes in the testimony of the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand and other former captives of the communists. It is not a false ecumenism that claims all religions are essentially the same. It is rather a mutual recognition that within the context of persecution, embracing Jan Patočka’s “solidarity of the shattered,” becomes vital to spiritual survival.

That’s the kind of ecumenism of the trenches that I favor in this cultural moment. I am an Orthodox Christian, I know why I am an Orthodox Christian, and I intend to remain an Orthodox Christian, come what may. But my Christianity, and my understanding of the nature of the struggle into which we have all been thrown, makes me aware that if they come for the Baptists or the Catholics, they’ll be coming for me too. We either stick together, or hang separately.

More Davis:

We may survive in our BenOp communities, of course. But no confederation of “intentional communities” can restore Christendom to its glory. We aren’t strong enough to build a new, purer society on our own. We must have the grace of the Sacraments, the guidance of the Magisterium, and the strength of Tradition behind us. Otherwise, we’re building castles in the sand.

All of that notwithstanding, Live Not By Lies is indispensable for any Christian hoping not only to survive the fall of the Empire but to see a new Christendom emerge from its ruins. Those who are optimistic about the future of liberal-democratic capitalism will be thoroughly disillusioned—and they’ll thank Mr. Dreher for it.

Having realized that things are, in fact, much worse than they seem, they must then read The Benedict Option with fresh eyes. They must prepare for total war against modernity. Modern Man, in all his infantile fury, is surely gearing up for total war against us Christians. Those who don’t heed Mr. Dreher’s warnings and study his writings will not survive the coming Dark Age.

Read the whole thing. It’s a great review, and I thank Michael Warren Davis for it. I’m really grateful too for his reading linking both of my recent books as a single project of cultural analysis. Note well, though, that neither The Benedict Option nor Live Not By Lies is prescriptive in terms of what we Christians are ultimately seeking in terms of social order. That is beyond my ability to discern, and not immediately necessary, in my judgment. To use another World War II analogy, if you’re the French Resistance, the kind of government that will rule France after the Germans are expelled and defeated is an important question, and monarchists, Christian Democrats, socialists, communists, and others will have a different answer to that question. But the overwhelming tasks in front of them are to survive, and to defeat the enemy. That’s where small-o orthodox Christians are now, and we shouldn’t allow our ultimate concerns keep us from standing together (when we can without compromising our particular faith commitments) in the fight that is now upon us.

Live Not By Lies will be published on Tuesday September 29. If you would like to have a signed copy delivered to you after that date, order it exclusively here, through the independent bookseller Eighth Day Books. 

I am going to publish the Study Guide for the book on this blog in the next few days. It will be free and downloadable for everybody. Live Not By Lies is the kind of book that will ideally be read and discussed in small groups. One of the most important points the book makes — this, advised by the Soviet bloc dissidents — is that Christians need to build strong small fellowships. Reading and discussing Live Not By Lies together will be the beginning of that for many of us. This is not a book that is only for contemplation, but also for action.

UPDATE: Oh good grief. I wouldn’t have thought that I had to say that I don’t literally prefer to live in Calvin’s Geneva, or under a Catholic regime in which they tortured and killed heretics. I would bet my paycheck that Michael Warren Davis doesn’t either. But this is the Internet, and there are always people who are maximal literalists. What I took Davis to be saying is that he won’t be satisfied until we live in a civilizational order at which Catholicism is the center. Maybe he is a bona fide integralist; I don’t know. My view is that I would prefer to live in a civilizational order that had Reformed Protestantism or magisterial Catholicism as its basis than the post-Christian materialist order that we are fast approaching. For me, Christian liberal democracy is the best we can hope for in a modern pluralistic society, but if I had to choose between living in, say, Franco’s Spain versus what America is fast becoming, and will become in my lifetime, I would prefer Franco’s Spain as the lesser evil.

UPDATE.2: Reader Lord Karth, who works in New York state as a lawyer, comments:

Allow me to speak to this, if you please.

My work as a lawyer has been, for the last 34 years (32 in practice and 2 as a law clerk for a Family Court Judge) dealing with children and families. I have seen, literally, thousands of cases where families are in difficulty of one sort or another. I realize that I am speaking anecdotally, but I do not think that what I have observed is that far out of line with what others have experienced/observed. To wit:

My first case in Family Court (in 1988) involved a preteen boy accused of using a knife in a fight. He was sent to a juvenile detention center for several weeks before trial. That center has not increased in capacity, and the population of the county it is located in has not increased since then. Today, it does not accept kids accused of such things—it is full to capacity with very violent offenders (guns and gangs are frequently involved) and, increasingly, accused juvenile sexual offenders. It takes the commission of what for an adult would constitute a high-level felony to get sent to this facility—and it has been operating at capacity for at least the past 10 years. PRIOR to “bail reform” and the other nonsense that has been coming out of NeoProgressive Albany.

Requests for “orders of protection” are at an all-time high in the counties I work in. I see more cases involving threats of weapon use and threats of harm to pets than was the case even 10 years ago.

The volume of custody cases is also at historic highs. There are more cases involving domestic violence, substance abuse and serious neglect than there were in 2005–and, I believe, the volume has seriously increased since 2008.

The level of just plain immaturity has also risen. This past year, the NYS Legislature (a/k/a “The Wonderful Gang of ‘Happy Monkeys’ “) made pre-court mediation a virtual requisite for proceeding in Family Court. There were a great many people (including myself) who thought that this would wipe out caseloads back in January. Today, there is not ONE Family Court Judge or practitioner who is not overworked to the point of working 6 full days a week. (I regularly inquire about this caseload to the court clerks in the 5 counties I practice in.). Simply put, mediation is not working; many mediations dissolve in the first 10 minutes, sometimes violently.

I ascribe this to three developments: the utter collapse of family authority since the 1970s (particularly the near-total absence of fathers in lower-class and particularly black lower-class homes). I can literally count on the fingers of both my hands the number of delinquency cases I have been involved in in the last 10 years where the kids have come from intact families.

Secondly, the phenomenon known as “helicopter parenting/“safetyism” (documented in an Atlantic article a few years back). Parents of 2020 are far more likely to vehemently defend their children against accusations, even when the evidence is utterly overwhelming, and in the case of black parents, to make accusations of racism against the courts and even their kids’ own assigned defense lawyers. (We’re “in on it”, conspiring with the prosecutors and the courts, don’t you know.)

Third, the widespread availability of smartphones. The immediate-gratification feedback loop of the devices is much faster than even the loop for television was. There are many homes I have to examine where kids have very serious discipline problems—up to and including the actual use of violence if access to their phones is threatened in any way.

So it may not just be an older generation’s lament about “kids these days”. I’d bet some very serious money on this surge in immaturity being a verifiable fact.

The post Let’s Be Real: Dark Age Ahead appeared first on The American Conservative.

Charismatic Christians Are Normies

The Week‘s Bonnie Kristian has a good piece about how badly progressives are going to screw themselves over if they attack Amy Coney Barrett’s charismatic Christianity. Excerpts:

Going after Barrett’s charismatic faith will do nothing to block her progress through the Senate. It will not add to anti-Trump enthusiasm among the Democratic base, which has long since reached max capacity. But it could well alienate key voting blocs who don’t find charismatic Christianity as weird and scary as many white progressives evidently do. I’m particularly thinking of Hispanic voters who are recent immigrants, children of immigrants, or otherwise maintain close ties to extended family in the Global South, because there is a strong chance those family members or these voters themselves are charismatic Christians, too.

“We are currently living in one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide,” explains religion scholar Philip Jenkins in The Next Christendom. “Over the last century,” his landmark work demonstrates with exhaustive qualitative analysis, “the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably [to the Global South] … If we want to visualize a ‘typical’ contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria, or in a Brazilian favela.”

Read it all. 

Kristian says she is not a charismatic, but charismatic Christianity, in both Protestant and Catholic forms, is completely mainstream in much of the world (and in the US). Pope Francis knows this well, and has long expressed fraternity and sympathy with charismatics. 

Charismatic Christianity is not my jam either, but I remember when I lived in Dallas, seeing storefront Hispanic Pentecostal churches everywhere, and thinking how out of date my own view of Hispanic Christianity was before I moved to Texas. I assumed that most Hispanic immigrants to the US were Catholics. Not at all! According to 2014 Pew research, 22 percent of US Hispanics are Protestant (versus 55 percent who are Catholic), and of that 22 percent, about one in three are Pentecostal. About 27 percent of the world’s population of Christians are either Pentecostal or charismatic. (Scholars of religion typically define Pentecostals differently from charismatics; all Pentecostals are charismatic, but not all charismatics are Pentecostal.) Besides, citing 2007 data from Pew, Molly Worthen writes that half the Latino Catholics in the US identify as part of the charismatic renewal.

The point is, you aren’t likely (yet!) to find Pentecostals or charismatics in positions of elite secular-world leadership — Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison is a big exception — but there are tens of millions of them in the US, and hundreds of millions worldwide — especially in the Global South. It would be an extremely parochial move by the media and liberal elites to attack Amy Coney Barrett for belonging to a weird, fringey religious sect.

I would like to hear from readers of this blog who are charismatics or Pentecostals. How do you think you are regarded by other Christians, and by non-Christians? Does it please you that one of your own may be nominated for SCOTUS? If she gets the nod, do you think it will bring good attention to the charismatic renewal, or unwelcome scrutiny? What do you think the rest of us need to know about charismatic and/or Pentecostal spirituality?

The post Charismatic Christians Are Normies appeared first on The American Conservative.

Talk To Me About Soft Totalitarianism

Join me and my friend JD Vance for a Zoom conversation about my new book, Live Not By Lies. We’ll be talking about what it means to be a Christian dissident in an age of soft totalitarianism. Register here: https://bit.ly/33U9F23

Can’t make Wednesday’s event, or would prefer to see me tormented by an English inquisitor? Then sign up for Friday’s to-do with Freddy Gray of The Spectator. Sign up in advance here.

UPDATE: Don’t forget that if you want a signed copy, pre-order exclusively from Eighth Day Books.

The post Talk To Me About Soft Totalitarianism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Kyle Rittenhouse Did No Wrong

Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal team has produced an 11-minute video reconstructing events of the night of August 25, in which Rittenhouse shot three attackers in Kenosha, killing two and injuring a third. Watch the video here, for as long as YouTube allows it to stand. 

Bearing in mind that the video is certainly partisan, the close parsing of the video record of that night makes it clear, in my judgment, that Rittenhouse did no wrong.

I had no doubts about his innocence in the shooting death of the skateboarder who attacked him while he was on the ground, or in the wounding of the protester who pulled a gun on him. What I was unsure about was the first shots he fired: the ones that apparently killed Joseph Rosenbaum.

The video breaks down the scene in which Rittenhouse apparently shot Rosenbaum, starting at the 3:57 mark. What I had not seen before was Rosenbaum rushing at Rittenhouse, and trying to grab his gun.

I did not realize that someone else standing nearby fired a pistol at that moment (you can see the flash from the barrel on the video).

And I did not realize that Rosenbaum might have mistaken Rittenhouse for the person who moments before had doused a fire that Rosenbaum had helped start in a dumpster. The video shows that the man who enraged Rosenbaum by putting out the fire was wearing a t-shirt the same color as Rittenhouse’s. It doesn’t matter, I guess, in whether or not Rittenhouse was justified in shooting Rosenbaum, but it does provide a possible motive for Rosenbaum attacking Rittenhouse.

Anyway, watch the thing, though again, keep in mind that this is a short clip created by his defense team. I look forward to the facts coming out at trial, but on the basis of this clip, it seems to me that Kyle Rittenhouse ought never to have been charged. True, a 17-year-old should not have been out in a riot, even though he meant well, but that does not mean that he should have been charged in these shootings. Kyle Rittenhouse is not the enemy of civilization; the people he shot were, and are. No law-abiding citizen has anything to worry from the Kyle Rittenhouses of the world. The men he shot were part of a mob that was vandalizing, burning, and looting.

The post Kyle Rittenhouse Did No Wrong appeared first on The American Conservative.

Challies Likes ‘Live Not By Lies’

My thanks to the influential Reformed writer Tim Challies for his favorable review of Live Not By Lies. He begins with an excellent summary of the book’s central argument. Then:

The question is, then, could this actually happen in America (and, by extension, other Western nations)? Is Dreher just being a pessimist, an alarmist, a scaremonger? That will be for the readers to decide as they evaluate his claims. But as for me, I think he makes a compelling case. And while he is clear that totalitarianism is not yet inevitable, he does warn that “like the imperial Russians, we Americans may well be living in a fog of self-deception about our own country’s stability” and “it is very hard for Americans who have never lived through this kind of ideological fog to recognize what is happening.” Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

More:

Live Not By Lies serves two purposes and, in my assessment, succeeds at both of them. It sounds the alarm, warning people to wake up, to see that the enemy is already closing in on the gates. And, in the eventuality or even the likelihood that it is already too late to hold the hoards at bay, it conveys hard-won wisdom from those who have faced a very similar totalitarian foe and overcome. They may have suffered along the way, but they at least maintained their integrity. And in a similar way, we may not be able to overthrow the totalitarianism “out there,” but by heeding their counsel, and searching the scriptures for more like it, we can at least overthrow it “in here,” within ourselves. We can live with dignity, without regret. In a society increasingly drowning in fabrications and falsehoods, we, of all men, must and can live not by lies.

Read it all. It feels great to have the endorsement of a writer like Challies. He did have one bone to pick, though:

And here, in this matter of those who have gone before, I need to point out that Dreher is far more ecumenical than I am. His “saints” span Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and Protestant traditions, all of which have very different and even contradictory understandings of the central message of the Christian faith, the gospel of Jesus Christ. He sees more unity between traditions than I can. Yet for the most part these important distinctions in doctrine have little impact on his calls to action, though, to be fair, his Orthodox theology does at times show itself.

Just to clarify, my “ecumenism” here is not of the sort that claims all Christian traditions are equally true. Challies is right that the great traditions all have different understandings. The primary unity I see between traditions, for the purposes of this book, is that when the secret police come for you, it’s not going to be because you are a Protestant, a Catholic, or an Orthodox; it’s going to be because you are a Christian who would not conform to the Big Lie. In the book, I quote former prisoners of conscience saying that suffering for Christ behind bars brought them closer together than one would have imagined.

Say, why don’t you sign up for this online discussion I’ll be having with the estimable Freddy Gray? Here’s the link to register.

The post Challies Likes ‘Live Not By Lies’ appeared first on The American Conservative.