Rod Dreher's Blog, page 133

For Christians, It Really Is A Catastrophe

Two very good e-mails came in this morning, responding to my “Catastrophism And The Blogger” post.

The first comes from a Catholic priest who agreed to let me post this if I didn’t use his name. He is explaining why the “John Paul II Catholicism” of the 1980s and 1990s did not turn the ship around:

The JP II Catholics you speak of in the blog, it seems to me, did not grasp the situation we were actually facing in the 1990s. They believed, some of them, in the possibility of a “Catholic Moment” while others thought that JP II and Ratzinger represented the face of the then-current life of the Church. In many cases, they were unaware of the seismic effect the events of the late 60s and early 70s had on life, formation, and education in the Church and society. The foundations of Catholic and US life shifted remarkably as we moved into post- (or hyper-) modernity. Their misjudgment of the actual situation seems particularly evident in the quixotic restorationist dreams of many   traditionalists and the naive optimism of converts or reverts drawn by JP II and Ratzinger.

The pastoral and theological brilliance of JP II and Ratzinger was in the dynamic synthesis of their profound personal encounter with God in Christ (always including His body/Bride, the Church), a sense of the concrete reality of human existence, and a coherent presentation of the faith. It was a synthesis born of their own experience of Church’s struggle amidst the unraveling of the old order in the face of atheistic ideologies and persecutions. And they both foresaw that that struggle was likely to enter a new phase with a totalitarianism of tolerance, diversity, and inclusion. I suspect their synthesis, at its core, will survive and bear rich fruit whatever Christianity may face in the era we are entering.

The mistake made by many was in believing that somehow these pastors’ vision and witness was enough to turn the tide, that the world–or even contemporary Christians–would embrace it. Those hopes have foundered, often to be replaced by bewilderment, disappointment, scandal, or worse. Although sincere, such expectations were always misplaced. I am now 60, and except, perhaps, for the first few years of my life, the downward drift has been evident and continual, although not always at the same pace. Every “extreme” position we warned would unfold on the basis of trendy movements which claimed they would “never go that far” have, in fact, gone that far and beyond. I am unaware of any “moment” in my lifetime when a  Christian synthesis had a realistic shot at gaining cultural hold, let alone dominance.

What there was in the Catholic Church was a kind of Cold War from the death of Paul VI in 1978 to the election of Francis in 2013 during which the modernists were denied victory but were not defeated. Many “JP II Catholics” did not realize the scope and power of the modernists during his reign. That phase is now over and the modernists are resurgent. It may be, too, that the revolutionary winds which blew in 1968 have returned in 2020 to tear through civil society–we’ll have to wait and see. Regardless, those of us under 60 do not inhabit the same mental, social, or religious world as those who came before us. And those under 20 take for granted a worldview that we could only begin to see when we were their age. But its outlines were already sketched out.

The challenge, as you know so well, is to provide a personal witness to Jesus that remains authentically human and evangelical/doctrinal in the face of the unreality and inhumanity  of a growing ideology. JP II and Ratzinger offer us models of how that can be done–as do the Christians you interviewed for your new book. That is their value: they are witnesses. They show us as well as tell us how to put Jesus at the center while reaching out to fellow Christians and to the world. We’ll have to handle the details as we go. Their example offers us a two-fold hope: there is always a way to remain faithful to Christ and eventually every ideology collapses under the weight of its falsehoods.

Perhaps you are a bit of a “catastrophist.” You’re  certainly someone who has seen the folly and evil at work in our lives. But catastrophe or no, you’ve come to know this world is passing away and that our only hope is to survive as those who have passed through fire–or better yet, have “passed over” by way of the Cross. In reminding us of that, you can’t go wrong regardless of what the future actually brings.

Here’s an email from a Catholic teacher who warns that the challenges young people face going out into the Great Awokening are far greater and more toxic than most parents think:

I teach in a mainstream Catholic school. The tuition would make most people do a double-take. There is no way that a high school can be THAT expensive!

It is.

But we do a fine job, and we do our best to hold on to and promote a mainstream-friendly orthodoxy. I do not know how much longer we will be able to keep doing what we are doing. We have a solid core of JPII enthused families, but most of our constituency floats within the liquid modernity of Moralistic Therapeutic Deist Catholicism. Whether they know it or not.

But what all our parents have in common is that they are desperately attached to the idea that their children can be as wildly successful as they have been. They are quite eager to set their children on the path of a Goldman Sachs strategy of success. They will have the patina of Catholicism, and they and their children will summer on islands off the coast of New England, ski in Colorado in the winter, and live in versions of Murray’s Belmont. They will go to mass on Sundays and Holy Days, and all will be right with the world.

But in order to be a part of what Rod regularly calls the Imperium (riffing on MacIntyre) you must sacrifice your children to the altars of top-tier colleges and universities. You simply cannot chart your path into the rarified world of Big Money if you are not part of the elite sorting structures. Our smart and successful parents know this. They see it every day.

No matter how excited they may have become in their 40s and 50s about Conservative Catholicism, Theology of the Body, or even traditional-ish forms of piety, they desperately want their children to be firmly ensconced in the corridors of power and influence. They want both for their kids. Don’t you?

You may think you are offering them up to “the world” but you are really offering them up to the vengeful Gods of Grievance. These gods are bloodthirsty and merciless.

Parents and teachers of these children have been ignorant to the machinations of the Woke Industrial Complex. They have no idea that they have been paying for their kids to be indoctrinated into a new religion, or have chosen to turn a blind eye. It has become somewhat commonplace for people to joke about kids going to college, flirting with revolutionary ideologies and then having them come back down to earth when they start working for a living and starting their own families.

THIS IS NO LONGER OPERABLE.

As James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose (and others) have carefully delineated, applied postmodernism and Critical Race Theory have joined forces to create a kind of inverted Calvinism. It is not the “total depravity” of yore, but total racism, total white supremacy, total privilege, total fragility. What Marx does to Hegel is what the Critical Social Justice forces have done to Calvinism: a kind of immanent and unforgiving determinism, without even a hint of salvation for the few.

And this has largely captured an entire generation of upper middle class students. And I do not see them coming back from the abyss. Instead of a new Great Awakening, we have a new Great Awokening.

So when I talk about my students’ parents who are rooted in JP2 Catholicism and how they are unprepared for the current moral battles, I mean this: they have made a kind of fusionist pact between a “robust” mainstream Catholicism and a secular world that no longer exists.

Both no longer exist.

There is no more mainstream Catholicism, and Rod’s continual jeremiads against orthodox Christian complacency have gone unheeded. But what is also gone is a kind of friendly mainstream liberal order. We are in the age of Woke.

We are in the flood plain of the cultural tsunami and I don’t see anything on the horizon that will provide a stopper, or a levee that will hold.

They have parasitized your children, and they want more.

Old school 90s Catholicism isn’t going to save them. The strategy needs an update, as it is simply designed as a kind of winsome redress to the hippie church of the 70s. You know, a correction of the excesses of the council, as many of us thought. That moment has come and gone.

To Rod’s point, our kids are not blank slates. They are surrounded by an ambient culture filtered through Instagram and Snapchat. These virtual spaces dominate our kids’ imaginations and they are dominated by the fully woke.

Do your kids know how to explain to a friend why they have been raised in a faith tradition that is not in sync with (and directly opposed) to their college orientation programs?

I have my doubts.

Before they even have their first day of actual class, they have been re-oriented in a radical way. Just ask them. A vanishingly small number of my former students go off to college and resist the Woke re-wiring.

In these highly emotionally charged moments, as you are meeting your new college cohort, you are desperately looking for connection. You are actively seeking out the rules of the game.

You come to a very quick understanding of position, rank, and status. It’s what we do.

I’m not sure I would have been able to resist. Why do we think our kids can?

Two stories from the real world. If we’re going to live not by lies, we have to start by ceasing to lie to ourselves about the condition we’re all in.

The post For Christians, It Really Is A Catastrophe appeared first on The American Conservative.

Theater’s Woke Circular Firing Squad

A reader sent me a link to a pretty great podcast by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. At some point in it, they bring up a new movement by BIPOC (pronounced “bye-pock”) theater makers, challenging white people in theater. They have written an open letter, called We See You, White American Theater. Here it is:

Go to their website here, if you like.This is not a minor thing. Some very big names in American theater have signed on, including Lin-Manuel Miranda and Suzan-Lori Parks. The petition has 60,000 signatures.

Weinstein and Heying also point to a three-night “Town Hall For Racial Reckoning” that the Atlanta theatrical community is staging (the last one is July 1). Check out the “rules of engagement”. You can only speak if you are BIPOC (black, indigenous, person of color). More:

Golly.

I am not a theater person. I have no idea how legitimate the bill of complaints are against White American Theater, whatever that is. I would not have thought that the theater was a hotbed of race hatred, but maybe it is.

Looking from the outside, though, that WSYWAT (pron. “wizzy-wat,” because I say so) letter is incredibly provocative, a list of harsh accusations. Are they true? I don’t know how a White-Theater-American would even start to defend himself from them. They are not intended to invite dialogue of any sort. Likewise, it sounds like the racial reckoning townhall is meant for White-Theater-Americans to sit there silently while they are subjected to a Maoist struggle session.

What good can come out of this? Again, I don’t know the theater world, but if people really do have racial grievances, of course they should be voiced, and the community should work them out. That does not seem to be what is intended here, though. At all.

The timing is bizarre, too. The other day, all 41 Broadway theaters announced that they would remain dark for the rest of 2020, because of Covid-19. Everybody else is in the same sinking boat. In May, the Atlantic ran a piece speculating that the theatrical business may not survive this pandemic. It’s about the British theater, but the same lessons apply here. The piece points out that not only will the long shutdown kill some theatrical companies and venues, but those that survive will be so weakened that when they return, they will almost certainly have to stage sure-fire audience-pleasing productions at first (in other words, good luck trying to mount an eat-your-broccoli-bigot play). There will be a lot of unemployed actors and other theater professionals, and it may take years to rebound.

And into this unprecedented crisis — virtually an existential crisis — these BIPOC activists are staging a highly antagonistic racial drama against an industry that is one of the most progressive in the world? A drama that is going to heighten anger, mistrust, and discord, at a time when theatrical community needs to be pulling together? I don’t get it. It seems suicidal to me, but again, I’m not a theater person. If you are, help me understand the rationale here.

 

 

 

 

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Catastrophism And The Blogger

My friend Alan Jacobs, the professor of literature and author of many books, has written a little piece about me and my work on his blog. Several readers have asked me to respond, so I will. First, some quotes from Alan’s piece:

My buddy Rod Dreher has a book coming out soon called Live Not By Lies, and it’s about what American Christians can learn about living under an oppressive regime by studying what believers did under the old Soviet Union. I think this is a story that Christians ought to be interested in, whether they agree with Rod’s politics or not. Every thoughtful Christian I know thinks that the cause of Christ has powerful cultural and political enemies, that we are in various ways discouraged or impeded in our discipleship by forces external to the Church. Where we differ is in our assessment of what the chief opposing forces are.

Rod is primarily worried about the rise of a “soft totalitarianism” of the left, what James Poulos calls a “pink police state.” Other Christians I know are equally worried, but about the dangers to Christian life of white supremacy, or the international neoliberal order. For me the chief concern (I have many) is what I call “metaphysical capitalism.” But we all agree that the Church of Jesus Christ is under a kind of ongoing assault, sometimes direct and sometimes indirect, sometimes blunt and sometimes subtle, and that living faithfully under such circumstances is a constant challenge. Why wouldn’t we want to learn from people who faced even greater challenges than we do and who managed to sustain their faith through that experience? Isn’t that valuable to all of us?

Alan says that for him The Benedict Option was that kind of book. You don’t have to agree with everything in it to profit from being compelled to think hard about the way Christians ought to be living in the here and now, in ways that strengthen our faith, which is under profound stresses. More:

Often when I make this argument people acknowledge the force of it but tell me that Rod is the “wrong messenger.” I understand what they mean. Rod is excitable, and temperamentally a catastrophist, as opposed to a declinist. (That’s Ross Douthat’s distinction.) Like the prophet of Richard Wilbur’s poem, he’s gotten himself “Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,” and I often think that if he writes the phrase “Wake up, people!” one more time I’m gonna drive to Baton Rouge and slap him upside the head.

Hey, I resemble that remark! I told Alan this morning, after I had read his bit, that there’s always been a part of me that is a catastrophist, and that that aspect of my character was solidified and electrified (the word is not too strong) by my writing about the Catholic sex abuse scandal.

Part of it was seeing how people like Father Tom Doyle, and other activists, had begged the Catholic bishops to take it seriously, for years, but were ignored. When you bury yourself in the history of this thing, it really defies comprehension, the self-destructive blindness of the bishops and others in authority in the Church. Even if they had no moral sense at all, they should at least have had the sense to understand that if this thing ever became publish, it would destroy the Catholic Church’s authority. But they didn’t. The catastrophe of the scandal, from which the US Catholic Church might never recover, at least not in my lifetime, is something that could have been avoided had people listened, and acted.

Part of it too was seeing how my own writing about the scandal was dismissed by many as alarmist and shrill. It was alarmist, and at times shrill. But the facts merited alarm! The more defensive my fellow Catholics became at the time (early 2000s), the more alarmed I got. I could see bad men like Ted McCarrick lying about themselves and the situation, and so many ordinary, decent Catholics buying into the lie, because the truth was too painful to accept. As my regular readers know, all this broke me spiritually.

Something most people don’t know is that after I moved back to my Louisiana hometown, I became aware of a serious problem within my own family. It didn’t involve sexual abuse or anything criminal, but it did involve a trusted person lying to take advantage of vulnerable people. I tried to raise the alarm, but was bitterly denounced by others in the family as a cynic. What I was trying to tell them did not fit the narrative they preferred. Well, everything happened exactly like I warned it would, and it caused irreparable damage.

Point is, I come by my catastrophism in part through shattering experiences. Nevertheless, if a prophet is a shrieker, it makes it less likely that some will hear him. I get that. That said, it’s so, so difficult to watch people on the party barge headed for the falls, and not hearing the warnings from the screamers on shore that they had better turn around, or they’ll crash. In the past week, in large part through the Tarkovsky movie Nostalghia, I have had a startling warning in my own spiritual life that I had better sever myself from certain worldly attachments so I can better see what is right in front of me. I think about my poor father, and how his nostalgia for an Arcadia that never existed kept him from living in the real world, and dealing with problems right in front of him (and from accepting the graces offered him too). All of us can be like that. I’m no different from anybody else.

I think of myself as primarily (but not exclusively) speaking to Christians who consider themselves to be theologically conservative. I can see the particular form that blinding nostalgia takes for us. Just today I was talking to a Catholic teacher friend, a conservative, who said that he deals with students’ parents who are rooted in 1990s John Paul II Catholicism, and who believe that the spiritual and moral battles their kids face can be comprehended through a paradigm that has become outdated by the radical shifts within American culture. These are not bad people at all, but their passion for a past era has rendered them blind and deaf to the crises facing them and their families. Anyway, that’s the kind of thing that drives my alarmism on these matters.

Alan says that what alarms me has more to do with threats I perceive coming from the Left than from the Right, and that’s why some left-minded Christians dismiss me. He goes on:

But, you know, Jonah was definitely the wrong messenger for Ninevah — he even thought so himself — and yet the Ninevites would’ve done well to pay attention to him.

And if you think Rod has a potentially useful message but is the wrong conveyer of it, then get off your ass and become the messenger you want to see in the world. Lord knows we need more Christians, not fewer, paying attention to the challenges of deep Christian formation. Wake up, people!

Read it all. 

It’s a fair comment. I have never said that the Benedict Option is the answer. How would I know? It’s not a set of doctrines, or a crisp, clear formula, but rather a state of mind within which I believe people within the churches can work their way toward more grounded, effective modes of living, and of discipleship. It’s the best answer I can come up with right now. I have always said, and will repeat here again, that if you don’t like the Benedict Option, that’s fine — so what do you think we should do?

What we are doing is not working. You’d have to be blinded by ideology not to see that. I’ve received a lot of criticism from partisans of Pope Francis within the Catholic Church — chiefly the Vatican Jesuit Antonio Spadaro — who claim that the Ben Op is in opposition to Francis’s work. This, even though I don’t mention Francis in the book. It’s not an unfair accusation, though, insofar as Francis’s general thrust is a revival of 1970s-style social justice Catholicism. True, I don’t see how any faithful Christian can deny that believers have a responsibility to take the Gospel to the poor, to suffer with them, and to help them. My general objection to the Francis style of ministry is that it devalues orthodoxy, and seems to make a worldview on empathy alone.

You cannot bring to the world what you do not have. All you have to do is look at the studies and see that massive numbers of young people are falling away from the faith, and those who remain often have only the slightest idea what Christianity means, and why they should care. My challenge to progressive-minded Christians (Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant) is: what are you passing on to the young? Is there any evidence that the young believe more strongly, or at all? Two years ago, I wrote a post about the falling-away of youth from Christianity, based on social science findings.

Religious conservatives haven’t figured out how to transmit the faith to our kids either — but progressive Christianity is the last stage before leaving Christianity altogether. It’s a massive crisis that all factions within the churches have to deal with — and are doing their best to avoid. I get letters from young people (= 35 and under) raised in #MAGA Evangelicalism, who are struggling to find a way forward in their faith, because they see the churches in which they were raised having been corrupted by mere conformity to white middle-class political conservative standards. I also get e-mails from young people who are sick and tired of the empty progressivism of their churches, and are seeking something deeper and stronger. Just last week a reader who is parent to small children e-mailed to say that they and their spouse have broken with the megachurch Evangelicalism within which they have been worshipping almost all their lives, and are going to an Orthodox parish in their city.

In both of these kinds of cases, the young people are yearning for something more, something they are sure must be there. One of the most important new book out there now is Strange Rites, by Tara Isabella Burton. It’s a book of reporting about how American religion is changing in pretty radical ways, fitting our tumultous time. She writes about how institutional religion is mostly collapsing among young adults, but they are not becoming atheists. Rather, they are “remixed” — collecting this and that and cobbling together a bricolage of spirituality that suits their desires. TIB writes:

This apparent contradiction — what does it mean to be “spiritual but not religious” and yet identify with a given religion at the same time? — points to a much wider and more serious problem, which is how difficult it is to define what a religion actually is. Is it about identity — the box we check on a form, or the way we describe our cultural heritage? Is it about community — the family and friends we gather with at regular festivals? Is it about rituals and practices — attending weekly services at church or synagogue, or fasting during Ramadan? Or is it about belief — what people actually think (and feel) about the metaphysics of the world around them, and the transcendent beyond? One of the biggest difficulties that we’ll return to, again and again, in numbering America’s religiously Remixed is that it’s not so easy to pin down what we’re remixing.

I’ll write about her really interesting book later. The point I want to make here is that if you care about religious orthodoxy — and to not care about religious orthodoxy is not to be serious about what religion is — the nostalgia you have for the world you wish were still here might well make you powerless to contend with the world as it is, and the world into which your children will go. A Catholic friend told me today that the crises this year have been an apocalypse for us, revealing the “thinness” of our lives, our institutions, and especially our Christianity.

This is what I’ve been shouting about for a while. At the risk of drawing down the slap of Alan Jacobs, I say therefore unto ye again: “Wake up!”

One thing about Live Not By Lies, the manuscript of which is in the hands of reviewers, in advance of its September 29 publication. One of those advance readers told me today that the book might suffer because it doesn’t tell people that they can escape what’s coming. It tells them flat out that none of us can escape it, but we can live through it faithfully as Christians, if we take seriously the testimonies and the advice of Christians who lived through worse in the twentieth century. The reader is correct in that I don’t offer a ten-point plan for avoiding soft totalitarianism, though there is information in the book that, if acted on, might blunt its effects. (I mean, if people read the book and recognize things emerging now as totalitarian, they may be moved to fight them). Mostly, though, it’s a book about what to do when all looks lost, but you are not willing to surrender. Christians have been there, within living memory, and they know what to do.

Ah, since I started writing this post, I received from my publisher this comment on my book by one of the advance readers, Prof. Daniel Mahoney, one of the foremost Solzhenitsyn scholars in America:

“As a new cultural revolution aims to institutionalize a tyranny of ideological clichés, Dreher renews Solzhenitsyn’s great call to ‘live not by lies.’ I cannot imagine a more timely and urgent book, or one with a more enduring spiritual, political, and cultural message.”—Daniel J. Mahoney, Augustine Chair of Distinguished Scholarship, Assumption University, co-editor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader

I’m so grateful for these kind words. If anything in my book inspires readers to turn to Solzhenitsyn, and the other literature of anti-communist dissent, as well as testimonies by Christians who carried the cross through the persecution, it will have done its job. I strongly recommend Prof. Mahoney’s recent book of cultural criticism, The Idol Of Our Age.

UPDATE: Several readers have e-mailed privately to ask what I mean by saying this:

Just today I was talking to a Catholic teacher friend, a conservative, who said that he deals with students’ parents who are rooted in 1990s John Paul II Catholicism, and who believe that the spiritual and moral battles their kids face can be comprehended through a paradigm that has become outdated by the radical shifts within American culture.

It’s not a criticism of John Paul. It’s about how much and how fast the culture has changed. Read this fantastic 2015 essay by Michael Hanby, on how Christianity has ceased to have salience in contemporary America. Here, from the beginning of the essay, is the core reason why:

What availed as the common wisdom of mankind until the day before yesterday—for example, that man, woman, mother, and father name natural realities as well as social roles, that children issue naturally from their union, that the marital union of man and woman is the foundation of human society and provides the optimal home for the flourishing of children—all this is now regarded by many as obsolete and even hopelessly bigoted, as court after court, demonstrating that this revolution has profoundly transformed even the meaning of reason itself, has declared that this bygone wisdom now fails even to pass the minimum legal threshold of rational cogency.

America is a decisively post-Christian country, and culture. During JP2’s heyday, this wasn’t so clear. Now it is. When I talk about “John Paul Catholicism” in this particular context I’m talking about the mindset of conservative American Catholics of a certain generation (my generation) who don’t really grasp how radically different things are. At the very meeting at First Things where Hanby presented the paper (I was in the room), there was a fascinating exchange between older Catholic intellectuals (George Weigel and his generation) and younger Catholic professors in the room. The conversation was about politics and Christianity; younger Catholic profs, from Catholic universities, were telling the older ones that their students really are blank slates. They have come out of parishes where they were taught nothing serious about the faith and its traditions, and out of families where this wasn’t done either. How, said these younger professors, are we supposed to get them to reason about the intersection between faith and public life when they cannot even reason as Catholics?

That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. I’m sure that Christians from other traditions are just about as blind about the youth and the world that formed them.

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America’s Monumental Existential Problem

Anyone doubting how quickly “year zero” jacobinism has captured American liberalism should note here that this famous memorial to the republic’s great men is now a site of “white supremacy”….a society intent on (literally) blowing up its founders cannot survive pic.twitter.com/FiKO5zHCVs

— Gray Connolly (@GrayConnolly) June 30, 2020

The Democrats deleted the tweet … but this is how they think. Could you have imagined as recently as 2016 that in four years, the national Democratic Party would denounce Mount Rushmore as a site of white supremacy? This is not some college professor or liberal newspaper columnist. This is the Democratic Party.

It’s mind-boggling. This is not going to go away anytime soon, either. We are going to be fighting this for the rest of our lives. These people really do hate America. Look:

Washington Square Park, NYC. pic.twitter.com/PEidU4Njw8

— BILL HEMMER (@BillHemmer) June 29, 2020

Read this powerful essay by Aris Roussinos, writing for the UK site Unherd, on the meaning of this monumental moment in the life of the West. Excerpts:

It is natural to read a culture’s attitudes to its monuments as expressions of its social health. They are the symbolic repository of any given culture, and deeply imbued with political meaning. When civilisations fall and their literature is lost to time, it is their monuments that serve as testaments to their values, to their greatest heroes and their highest aspirations. Statues, great building projects and monuments are stories we tell about ourselves, expressions in stone and bronze of the Burkean compact between generations past and those to come. As Atta’s thesis states, the architecture of the past is imbued with moral meaning: “if we think about the maintenance of urban heritage,” he wrote, “then this is a maintenance of the good values of the former generations for the benefit of today’s and future generations.”

It is only logical then, for the terminal crisis of liberal modernity to play out in culture wars over monuments, as the fate of a monument stands as a metaphor for the civilisation that erected it. It is for this reason that conquerors of a civilisation so often pull down the monuments of their predecessors and replace them with their own, a powerful act of symbolic domination.

The wave of statue-toppling spreading across the Western world from the United States is not an aesthetic act, but a political one, the disfigured monuments in bronze and stone standing for the repudiation of an entire civilisation. No longer limiting their rage to slave-owners, American mobs are pulling down and disfiguring statues of abolitionists, writers and saints in an act of revolt against the country’s European founding, now reimagined as the nation’s original sin, a moral and symbolic shift with which we Europeans will soon be forced to reckon.

Roussinos quotes from this Viktor Orban interview from a couple of weeks back. From the Radio Kossuth interview:

“I also see that law enforcement and police are on the streets and yet there is a wave of violence. Statues are being toppled, the conditions are deplorable, and there are gang wars on the beautiful streets of small towns in civilized Western European countries,” Orbán said. “I look at the countries of those who are advising us how to conduct our lives properly and on good governance, proper operation of democracy, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

Damn right. Back to Roussinos:

In contrast, in a recent speech to mark the centenary of the hated Treaty of Trianon, Orban specifically cited the historical monuments of the Carpathian region as a testament to the endurance of the Hungarian people throughout history: “the indelible evidence, churches and cathedrals, cities and town squares still stand everywhere today. They proclaim that we Hungarians are a great, culture-building and state-organising nation.”

Read it all.

What can we Americans build anymore? We don’t build — we either tear down, or we build things that aren’t worth preserving. A friend of mine, a commercial architect, told me last year how much he hated much of what he does for a living. It’s all soulless, disposable crap, he said — and that’s what people want. If you build something more permanent, it limits your options. Best to make it functional and easy to tear down, so you can build new piece of crap there. Here’s the thing that stuck with me about that conversation: the architect doesn’t want to do that kind of work, but there is no commercial market for anything other than that. Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us.”

Roussinos brings up the new Orthodox military cathedral that Putin has constructed. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a couple of weeks, after watching this clip of it:

What an overpowering work of architecture. What troubles me about it, a bit, as an Orthodox Christian is that it is dedicated to military might. In the original plans — dropped under criticism — there were to be mosaics depicting Stalin and Putin, as well as celebrating the annexation of Crimea. Unlike many American Christians, I am divided internally about mixing nationalism with religion — but I do recognize that that view is massively ahistorical. I don’t judge the Russians on this; their cathedral is also a memorial to those who died in defense of the Russian homeland. No one who knows even the slightest thing about the way the patriotic Russians fought the Nazis, and how they suffered, can begrudge them something like this. I don’t bring it up in this context to argue about its appropriateness. Rather, I want to say that a nation that can build a monument like this to its God and to its greatness is a nation of immense depth and power.

Could we build anything like this in America? Don’t be absurd. We don’t have the internal strength and imagination to do so. And therein lies a tale. We are a nation that allows scum to throw red paint onto statues of our Founders, and to pull down a statue of Union soldiers who died in a war to end slavery, and few if any of our leaders say a word.

Did you ever see the 1966 Russian film Andrei Rublev? It’s ostensibly a dramatized biography of Russia’s greatest iconographer, a man of the Middle Ages, but in truth we don’t know much about him. It’s a movie about the Russian soul. Despite the incredible violence and harshness of life in medieval Russia, it was still able to produce astonishing churches and icons. The film portrays the Russian genius not for making beauty despite great suffering and misery, but making it because of great suffering and misery. It is true that Russia today is suffering in many ways. Some American trads have a habit of romanticizing Putin’s Russia; that’s a mistake. And yet, for all its problems, Russia is still a nation that can raise a church like that. Watch Andrei Rublev, and you might see that new Moscow cathedral in a different way.

We are not Russians. We don’t have their history. Rachmaninov’s “Vespers” could not have been written by an American. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue” could not have been written by a Russian. Vive la différence, etc. The point is, we Americans have managed to talk ourselves into hating our roots, hating our fathers, hating the traditions that made us who we are. We sense that the nation is slipping away from us, but “Make America Great Again” is kitsch. Trump makes golf hats, but Putin builds cathedrals.

Seriously, if you’re a Russian, you look at that cathedral and you feel pride in your nation, and a sense of its deep roots. We in America have been taught for a generation or two to look with contempt and guilt upon our monuments and historical architecture. Well, it worked.

Roussinos writes:

It is surely no accident that this is a moral panic driven by millennials, an evanescent generation without property or progeny, barred from creating a future, who now reject their own past in its entirety. This is the endpoint of liberalism, trapped in the eternal present, a shallow growth with no roots from which to draw succour, and bringing forth no seeds of future life.

Fair enough, but who made the Millennials? Who deprived them of their heritage? Who raised them to be this way?

One clue: On Sunday, Trump retweeted a video of his elderly supporters in The Villages, a 100,000-member Florida retirement community that is the world’s largest of its kind. They were clashing publicly with some aged Trump haters. He apparently didn’t realize that one of them barked “white power” as he pootled away with his wife on a golf cart. Here’s a 2014 story about the culture of The Villages. Basically, the old folks are having swingers’ parties, and there’s a black market in Viagra. Having lived for three years in Florida, and having heard these stories about retirement communities there myself, I completely believe it. But look, it seems to me that a country whose elderly — considered by most societies to be repositories of wisdom and dignity — aspire to be perpetual rutting teenagers is not a country that has much to look forward to. If you want to have a future, you need a past.

 

 

 

The post America’s Monumental Existential Problem appeared first on The American Conservative.

Republicans Who Deserve To Lose

Watch this entire clip. It demonstrates two things: 1) Why Tucker Carlson is the No. 1 cable talk host in the country, and 2) why the Republican Party is hated by its own natural base.

The interview subject is Mike Braun, a Republican US Senator from Indiana. Tucker had him on to talk about Braun’s support for Black Lives Matter and for a bill to make it easier to sue the police. I don’t know that there has been a more thorough (and thoroughly entertaining) slicing and dicing on prime time television since Iron Chef went off the air.

Does Mike Braun even know what he believes in? Leaving aside the merits, or lack thereof, of his position on the bill and on Black Lives Matter, he couldn’t defend himself, or anything about it. As Tucker put it to Braun, mobs looted and burned cities, and are tearing down monuments all over the country, with zero pushback from authorities — and this Indiana Republican wants to make it easier to sue cops, and stands with Black Lives Matter! If that’s what Republicans are for, then we might as well have Democrats.

Notice too how, at the 5:57 mark, Braun tries to blame Chuck Schumer for his own mushiness. Tucker is not having any of it. Braun makes Snuggles the Fabric Softener Bear look like Sheriff Buford Pusser.

But seriously, this was not just a disastrous interview for Mike Braun. It says something about the GOP in this hour of national crisis. The national Democrats haven’t said much about the woke mob — and why should they? They’re going to ride the protests and the tsunami of progressive bigotry into power. We elect Republicans to stand up to this kind of garbage. Don’t we?

Mike Braun, a first-term senator, won election in 2018, so he’s going to deadhead that seat for four more years. Still, when the history of this terrible political year for Republicans is written, tonight’s interview with Braun will be a symbol of something wrong with the party.

The post Republicans Who Deserve To Lose appeared first on The American Conservative.

Our Propagandistic Press

More exciting news about America’s No. 1 bestselling race grifter, via a 2019 story from The Daily Caller News Foundation:

White liberal academics can earn more in a day lecturing about their own “white privilege” than the median black household makes in three months, public records obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation and U.S. Census data show.

Left-wing academic Robin DiAngelo is renowned in social justice circles for crafting the “white privilege checklist” and for coining the term “white fragility.” Listening to her speak comes at a steep price.

DiAngelo, who is white, charged the University of Kentucky $12,000, not counting travel expenses, housing accommodations and meals, for a two-hour “Racial Justice Keynote and breakout session” in March, according to a copy of the speaking contract obtained by the DCNF through public records requests.

“Dr. DiAngelo’s schedule cannot accommodate phone calls related to services,” the contract states, instructing that all communications be sent via email or through DiAngelo’s assistant. “If phone calls are deemed necessary, they will be charged at a rate of $320 per hour.”

DiAngelo’s fee for the event was more than a quarter of the annual median income for black families which is just over $40,000, according to U.S. Census data.

I bet her fee has gone way up now that her book is so popular. If you missed Matt Taibbi’s evisceration of the book, look here. He writes that DiAngelo’s White Fragility “might be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.”

I found out about DiAngelo’s speaker grift from this tweet by the left-wing journalist Jesse Singal:

Why in the name of God’s holy green earth does this have to fall on the Daily Caller to report?

“DiAngelo… charged the University of Kentucky $12,000” plus expenses for a two-hour training (backed by zero evidence). This doesn’t matter to people? https://t.co/BGnjcabFZJ

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) June 29, 2020

For the cost of these two hours of a training that has zero evidence behind it, and which likely makes race relations *worse* (if you have read DiAngelo’s book you will see why), UK could have just given one of Kentucky’s many poor kids a free year of college tuition. pic.twitter.com/fNeE1Ddux5

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) June 29, 2020

It has to fall to the Daily Caller to do this because mainstream journalistic institutions don’t care. DiAngelo serves the Narrative. Never mind that she’s making $6000 per hour to tell fellow white people that they’re racist. Kentucky state legislators ought to ask why this state-funded university is wasting taxpayer dollars on racist propaganda sessions.

Has anybody seen any journalism in a mainstream source (aside from Tucker Carlson’s show) that casts doubt on DiAngelo and her thesis? I spend my days scanning the major print and broadcast outlets, and every day for a while now, on the subject of race, most of them have been like Pravda and Izvestia covering May Day festivities. The uncritical nature of their coverage of Black Lives Matter and this extraordinary cultural moment has been something to behold. (N.B., I never look at the Wall Street Journal, which is paywalled.) If any of you have seen any major print or broadcast outlet who has devoted any serious coverage to critical takes on BLM, DiAngelo, and their lot, please post a link in the comments.

We have instead seen things like the NYT reporting uncritically on “antiracist” teenagers searching out objectionable social media comments by other teens, then doing their best to ruin those kids’ lives, and activists bullying a distinguished museum curator for indirectly suggesting that BLM activists might be pressing too far against art and statuary, and that art needs protection against the iconoclastic rage of the mob. The problem is not the Times reporting on these stories. The problem is that they do so uncritically. Read those stories and you will see no voices saying, “This is not a good idea.” I guess they believe, to borrow from a famous 1964 Barry Goldwater formulation, that extremism in defense of wokeness is no vice, and moderation in pursuit of social justice is no virtue.”

Anyway, it chapped my hide to read this op-ed in the Times today by Margaret Renkl, urging readers not to cancel their newspaper subscriptions. She starts by talking about an offensive ad the Nashville Tennessean ran, but then understandably canceled. Now people are talking about cancelling their subscriptions to that paper in protest of the fact that the ad was approved in the first place. She writes:

As the “first rough draft of history,” journalism will always be prone to mistakes, no matter how assiduously reporters and editors try to prevent them. But canceling your newspaper subscription because of one ad, no matter how hideous — or because of one deeply offensive headline, or one flagrantly dangerous op-ed — will not cure journalism of what ails it.

The only thing canceling your subscription to a newspaper will do is hasten the death of journalism itself. It will leave your community with even fewer full-time reporters to tell you what local leaders were up to while you weren’t paying attention. It will leave you with a far poorer understanding of the place where you live.

That “flagrantly dangerous op-ed” was that Tom Cotton one in the Times that cost James Bennet his job. As a matter of fact, I did cancel my Times subscription over Bennet’s forced resignation, and I’m not sorry I did it. The Bennet firing came as part of a progressive takeover of the newsroom, and the Times moving to abandon traditional journalism standards in favor of advocating a progressive narrative in its news pages (as distinct from its op-ed pages). It is not an accident that those two stories I mentioned do not question whether or not these commissar teenagers are right to witch-hunt their peers, or whether the Met curator might have a good point. This is why I canceled the Times: it has gone beyond liberal bias to flat-out advocacy journalism. They’re not even trying to be balanced.

I have no idea whether or not the Nashville paper is a fair and reliable source of news. If it is, then folks in the Nashville area should support it. I have never believed that a newspaper has an obligation never, ever to offend its readers. In fact, a newspaper that never challenges the biases of its readership is not doing its job. Nor is a readership that loses its cool over a single ad, headline, or story, and cancels the paper.

But come on. Judging by the things I’m most interested in — religion, culture, and social issues — if you depended on the national media to help you understand the country where we live, at least outside of coastal elite zones, you would be in bad shape. Why should people pay money to subsidize journalism from a viewpoint that tells them monotonously that they are terrible people who believe bad things, whose history is dung, whose ancestors were trash, and who pretty much deserve to lose?

This is the same mentality of masochistic liberals who think it’s a good investment to pay that grifter Robin DiAngelo $12,000 to come tell captive white people that they are irredeemable pieces of crap. If that’s the deformed beast that journalism has become, then starve the thing until it dies. If journalism is dying, then surely one of the reasons has to do with the fact that it falls to sites like the Daily Caller to report skeptically on the guru Robin DiAngelo. With regard to Black Lives Matter and adjacent figures, it’s like the press thinks its L’Osservatore Romano covering the papal court.

UPDATE: Perfectly said:

Newspapers want you to cancel everyone, except newspapers. https://t.co/vHGYKsBlwb

— Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) June 29, 2020

I think I mentioned this the other day in this space — this tweet (now deleted) by the Global Opinions editor of the Washington Post, a second-generation black woman, the daughter of immigrants:

Could you imagine being a white female Post employee subordinate to such an open bigot against people like you? One of these days, somebody is going to have to bring a hostile workplace lawsuit against companies like the Washington Post. That’s the only way they will ever rein in this kind of racism. Until then, people like Karen Attiah will keep exploiting their privilege within woke workplaces.

UPDATE.2: OK, look. Brent Bozell couldn’t make this up:

UPDATE.3: Reader Coleman Glenn points to Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada’s takedown of White Fragility two weeks ago. It’s quite a good piece, and I’m happy to share it with you all.

The post Our Propagandistic Press appeared first on The American Conservative.

Revolutionary Zealots Of Cancel Culture

Here is a white Young Adult author who has canceled herself in a freakish fashion. She had an upcoming book that featured a heroine from South Carolina’s black Gullah Geechee culture. From Publishers Weekly:

In a statement released yesterday by [Alexandra] Duncan, she refers to exchanges with author colleagues following the cover reveal, which made her aware that in her “misguided attempt to write a book that was inclusive of all cultures of Charleston and the Lowcountry, where the book is set,” she participated in the “ongoing erasure of [the Gullah Geechee] culture.” Explaining that her “own limited worldview as a white person” led her to incorrectly assume she could responsibly depict this culture, Duncan said, “Clearly, the fact that I did not see the signs of the problem with my book’s premise in my research or conversations about the book is evidence that I was not the right person to try to tell this story. I am deeply ashamed to have made a mistake of this magnitude and hope my actions will not negatively affect the cause of bringing greater diversity to children’s literature.”

Duncan also addressed and rejected the misconception that the cancellation is censorship, noting, “It is wholly my decision to withdraw the book in order to mitigate the harm I have done. I have work to do to improve myself and my writing, and I will continue doing it.” She concluded the statement by suggesting that readers support Black authors and providing a list of suggested “published or upcoming YA, all of which contain elements of fantasy and folklore.”

“The harm I have done” — by writing a novel centered on a black character! This is insane. This is a cult.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that a veteran curator at the Metropolitan Museum has run afoul of the woke commissars. Excerpts:

Now, Met Museum employees are sounding their own alarm, prompted by a personal Instagram posting on Friday by the museum’s powerful chairman of European paintings, Keith Christiansen, who has worked at the Met since 1977.

Below a pen-and-ink image of the French archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir, who devoted himself to saving France’s historic monuments from the ravages of the French Revolution, Mr. Christiansen wrote: “Alexandre Lenoir battling the revolutionary zealots bent on destroying the royal tombs in Saint Denis. How many great works of art have been lost to the desire to rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve.

“And how grateful we are to people like Lenoir,” Mr. Christiansen continued, “who realized that their value — both artistic and historical — extended beyond a defining moment of social and political upheaval and change.”While Mr. Christiansen appeared to be arguing for the preservation of monuments, he also struck some as insensitive and tone deaf.

The post was criticized in a tweet by the advocacy group of arts workers, Art + Museum Transparency: “Dear @metmuseum, one of your most powerful curators suggested that it’s a shame we’re trying to ‘rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve’ by removing monuments — and, worse, making a dog whistle of an equation of #BLM activists with ‘revolutionary zealots.’ This is not OK.”

Responses to the tweet were similarly critical. “This is disgusting,” one comment said, “not acceptable.”

Read it all, and marvel. They’re going after this man because he criticized “revolutionary zealots” who try to take down art they hate — thus proving his point! But that doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter that this appeared on Christensen’s personal Instagram account. The Met’s director threw Christiansen under a bus, and then Christiansen threw himself under the same bus — to no avail. The revolutionary zealots are not satisfied with his apology.

No telling what paintings and other forms of art will be taken out of the Met now.

On the opposite coast, a truly shocking thing has happened to a federal judge. From the LA Times:

The chief judge for the Central District of California, the nation’s largest federal court jurisdiction, which includes Los Angeles and its neighboring counties, has stepped down from that post, citing his racially insensitive comments regarding the court’s top administrative official, a Black woman.

U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney, who began a four-year term as chief district judge June 1, announced his decision to step down from the top post but remain a judge in an email Friday to court staff and fellow judges, and offered a public apology to Kiry K. Gray.

A federal court employee for 35 years, Gray in 2015 became the first Black woman appointed to be the Central District’s executive and clerk of court, a job that entails working closely with the chief judge to oversee court operations.

What horrible thing did Judge Carney say about Kiry Gray? More:

The controversy erupted around the time of a June 9 webinar sponsored by the local chapter of the Federal Bar Assn.

During the webinar, Carney gave an overview of his vision for his time as chief judge and discussed the protests and vandalism in several cities across the nation following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

“It’s been sad, quite frankly, seeing our courthouses vandalized with graffiti,” Carney said in the webinar.

When Carney began discussing his adjusting to the role of chief district judge, his comments turned to Gray.

“Fortunately for me, we have just a fabulous clerk of the court in Kiry Gray. She’s so street-smart and really knows her job,” Carney said.

Several who heard the “street-smart” comment or learned of the remarks afterward interpreted the compliment as having a derogatory and racially insensitive layer, and Carney acknowledged that judges, court staff and attorneys were upset.

The judge sought to explain himself: “To me, the term means a person of great common sense, initiative, and ability to work with people and get things done. It saddened me greatly to learn that some people view the term to be demeaning to people of color. I never knew that there was a different definition of the term.”

Read it all. 

That is exactly what “street smart” means! To think that there were racial connotations to it requires maliciously motivated reasoning — of which there is no shortage today. I wish Judge Carney wouldn’t have stepped down. Every time someone in authority yields to these revolutionary zealots, they make it more likely that the zealots will win.

If I were a judge, I would avoid every opportunity to speak in public. You never know how people who hate you will use and abuse your comments. What these wokesters are doing is straight out of the totalitarian playbook for destroying civil society. From my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies (which is available now in digital galley form — if you are a journalist or reviewer, email me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and I’ll forward your request to the publicist to see if you quality for an advance reader copy):

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.”

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s 1990 reunification, the German government opened the vast files of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, to its victims. None of the Soviet Bloc states had a surveillance apparatus as thorough as East Germany’s, nor had any communist rivals developed a culture of snitching with roots as deep and wide in the population. Historians later discovered that vast numbers of East German citizens, with no prompting by the government, volunteered negative information about their friends and neighbors. “Across the country, people were on the lookout for divergent viewpoints, which were then branded as dangerous to the state,” reported the magazine Der Spiegel. This practice gave the East German police state an unparalleled perspective on the private lives of its citizens.

Not only will they use what you say in private against you, but as the Duncan, Christiansen and Carney cases demonstrate, things you say in public that you meant for good, or that you understandably assumed were positive, or at least neutral, will be enough to get you cancelled. There is no hiding from this mob. You might as well fight the bastards, and if you go down, unlike these three, you will go down with your dignity intact.

The post Revolutionary Zealots Of Cancel Culture appeared first on The American Conservative.

Abortion Forever

I apologize for being late to post this. TAC was offline for a while this morning. The Supreme Court today, in a 5-4 decision, overturned Louisiana’s restrictive abortion law. Chief Justice John Roberts, the new Anthony Kennedy, provided the swing vote:

The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a restrictive Louisiana law that would have left the state with only one abortion clinic.

It was the first chance for a court reinforced by President Trump’s two conservative appointees to reconsider its abortion rights jurisprudence. But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court’s liberals in striking down the law, saying it was required by the court’s decision overturning a Texas law in 2016.

“The legal doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike,” Roberts wrote in concurring with the decision. “The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.”

The question was whether Louisiana’s 2014 law requiring doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals unduly burdens women’s access to abortion. Practitioners have said it has proven impossible for most of the doctors to acquire the privileges, leaving only one eligible to perform the procedure.

It is almost identical to the Texas law struck down by the Supreme Court in 2016, which said the requirement did not have a medical benefit. Now-retired justice Anthony M. Kennedy joined the court’s four liberals to form a majority in what was its most important endorsement of abortion rights in 25 years.

Ryan Anderson puts his finger on the moral insanity of this moment:

Unreal. Justice Roberts just voted with the four liberals on an abortion case because of stare decisis… The precedent he’s upholding is from a case just four years ago, that he dissented on. If he thought the Court got it wrong four years ago, today was his chance to correct it

— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanTAnd) June 29, 2020

Two years ago, Roberts signed the dissent in the 2016 Texas case — a dissent that said the majority decision “exemplifies the court’s troubling tendency ‘to bend the rules when any effort to limit abortion, or even to speak in opposition to abortion, is at issue.’” Today, only four years later, Justice Roberts has Grown In Office, and has voted to uphold the abortion status quo. Good Catholic Justice Roberts.

Can anyone understand SCOTUS abortion jurisprudence? Can it ever be applied logically? I think it can, if you understand this principle: Pro-lifers must lose.

I first heard about the decision when a pro-life Catholic lawyer e-mailed it to me, saying, “We vote for Republicans to avoid decisions like this.”

Another Catholic friend messaged: “Welp, looks like I’m done with the GOP.”

More:

The Sad, Sad Song of the SoCon:

1980: No more Harry Blackmuns!

1990: No more John Paul Stevenses!

2000: No more David Souters!

2010: No more Anthony Kennedys!

2020: No more John Robertses!

2030: No more … https://t.co/Gh8FewC8IF

— Darel E. Paul (@darelmass) June 29, 2020

Another reaction:

Yeah, Roberts is full of crap, and is voting with the liberals because he knows how the Senate races are going and wants to forestall court packing. Let’s just admit it. https://t.co/tWiaSiAADL

— Peter Spiliakos (@petespiliakos) June 29, 2020

Still another:

The time is now past to relate to the American regime as citizens.

Christians must now relate to it as subjects, as we were in Nero’s Rome. https://t.co/YMGf4Qb2jyhttps://t.co/5yvIKoB160 https://t.co/yfAXvsmah3 pic.twitter.com/4ZKBSBpg2z

— Irenist

Yankee Doodle Yugoslavia

It actually happened that the President of the United States tweeted approvingly a clip in which an angry supporter of his said, “White power!” He later deleted it. Axios reports:

President Trump tweeted, “Thank you to the great people of The Villages” on Sunday morning in response to a video of protesters verbally clashing with Trump supporters — including one man who yelled “white power” while passing in a golf cart.

The latest: Trump appeared to have deleted the tweet around 11am ET Sunday, about three hours after posting it. White House spokesperson Judd Deere said in a statement: “President Trump is a big fan of The Villages. He did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters.”

Why it matters: Trump has already been accused of inflaming racial tensions in the U.S. at a time of nationwide backlash over the killing of George Floyd. The White House did not respond when asked whether Trump condemned the supporter’s comment.

Details: The first clip in the montage shows protesters chanting “racist” at a white couple driving by in a golf cart bearing “Trump 2020” and “America First” signs. The man driving the cart gives a thumbs up and yells back, “White power!”

You know, I actually believe that Trump is so lazy and inattentive that he didn’t watch the whole video. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the President of the United States tweeted to his 82 million global followers a video clip in which a Trump supporter said, “White power!” This was a clash between older white people at a Florida retirement village. Here is the tweet of the original video, from a different account. The “white power” think happens in the first moments. Warning: if you stick around, an anti-Trump elderly person screams, “F–k Trump!” — so, not safe for work:

Seniors from The Villages in Florida protesting against each other: pic.twitter.com/Q3GRJCTjEW

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) June 27, 2020

How can we be surprised by any of this, though? The American left, abetted by the media, is racializing everything, in extremely toxic ways. I don’t say this as whatabouttery. You longtime readers know I have been saying for years in this space that the race-conscious left, by explicitly repudiating the liberal, MLK-era model of race relations, is calling up demons that they won’t be able to control. Well, those demons are now showing themselves. America is in for a terrible, terrible time.

Look at , where a ranting mob screamed for a statue of St. Louis, King of France, to be taken down. From the newspaper story:

“He’s gonna come down,” Umar Lee, one of the protest organizers, said of the statue Saturday. “This guy right here represents hate and we’re trying to create a city of love. We’re trying to create a city where Black lives matter. We’re trying to create a city where there is no antisemitism or Islamophobia … this is not a symbol of our city in 2020.”

Another protest organizer, Moji Sidiqi of the Regional Muslim Action Network said that in addition to removing the statue, she thinks the city of St. Louis should be renamed to celebrate the city’s racial, ethnic and religious diversity.

“It’s a revolution,” she said. “It’s time for change … right now, our number one mission is to take this thing down and sit down with people who want to see positive change take place and continue to heal our country.”

Louis IX lived in the 13th century, yet he is being judged by the standards of 21st-century left-wing Americans, who have decided that he must be despised and removed from the sight of the public. A group of Catholics, later protected by police, stood praying between the thuggish, foul-mouthed mob and the statue.

(This weekend, the Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco went to the site where the mob tore down the statue of St. Junipero Serra, and there, with a small group of the faithful, led prayers, including exorcism prayers. Archbishop Cordileone knows that we have now been plunged into open spiritual warfare.)

I was one of those people who was divided over whether or not to take down most Confederate statues, but was mostly okay with it, because I thought it would stop with the Confederates. I was wrong, and was, in fact, a fool. This has nothing to do with history. This is about hatred and power, nothing more. I see that now.

The late Stanford cultural critic Rene Girard wrote in his book I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning:

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 said in 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.

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 s complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious.

Girard said in an interview with David Cayley:

The Apocalypse is not some invention. If we are without sacrifices, either we’re going to love each other or we’re going to die. We have no more protection against our own violence. Therefore, we are confronted with a choice: either we’re going to follow the rules of the Kingdom of God or the situation is going to get infinitely worse.

But we don’t do this. The cult of victimization and the valorization of racial hatred by the left is dragging us to some kind of explosion of violence.

The New York Times has been one of the leading instigators of the new race hatred. Here’s a story about how high school kids are policing other kids for racism online, and trying to destroy their lives. Excerpts:

Many students believe the only consequence their peers will take seriously is having their college admissions letter rescinded. “I’m not trying to target freshmen or middle schoolers, but people who are about to go to college need to be held accountable for what they say,” said Anamika Arya, the 16-year-old administrator of @Smithtown_Racist_Callouts, which is focused on Smithtown, N.Y.

“People who go to college end up becoming racist lawyers and doctors. I don’t want people like that to keep getting jobs,” Mx. Arya added.

“People think when you call out a racist student, it’s ruining their life,” said Mariwa Gambo, 15, a junior at a New York City public school. “But when you prevent them from advancing, you’re helping to stop the spread of racist lawyers or doctors or people who make it harder for the black community.”

More:

Anonymous Google Docs have also become a tool for accountability. “They made a Google spreadsheet w/the info of racist students who post racist comments on social media. won’t you look at that,” one young woman tweeted on June 4. “Someone rly started a Google doc of racists and their info for us to ruin their lives. i love Twitter,” another said.

These lists often contain students’ full names, school information, social media profiles, contact information, the college they plan to attend if available and sometimes screen shots or an overview of their racist behavior. “Some people say, ‘You’re ruining their lives,’” Karina Carbajal, 22 and the creator of one of the Google Docs, told Forbes. “I think it’s the only way to prove to them that actions do have consequences.”

A tool of accountability — this horrible totalitarian practice! Can you imagine these righteous little monsters turned loose to destroy the lives of others? All of you who never said anything cruel or bigoted as a teenager, please stop reading now. You are still reading, because every one of us has done this as a kid. If we are virtuous, we come to realize that we were wrong, we were immoral — and we change. These high school Red Guards are doing their best to make sure that everyone who crosses them will be crippled by their sins for the rest of their lives. The Times story features no voices talking about the dangers and problems of doing this. It’s just “accountability.”

The Washington Post is also agitating for race hatred. Here is a tweet tonight by one of its prominent black writers:

The lies & tears of White women hath wrought:

-The 1921 Tulsa Massacre

-Murder of Emmet Till

-Exclusion of Black women from feminist movements

-53% of white women voting for Trump.

White women are lucky that we are just calling them “Karen’s”.

And not calling for revenge.

— Karen Attiah (@KarenAttiah) June 28, 2020

Karen Attiah holds one of the most privileged jobs in American journalism, and she’s using her platform to justify hatred and to come right up to the point of stoking vengeance on an entire class of people, only because of their sex and the color of their skin.

She’s not alone. Time magazine last week published a story that denounced “white women and their tears” as a source of racist violence. It is perfectly fine to explore the role that white women have historically played in the construction of racist myths, e.g., in the South, the fear that black men wanted to rape white women. But there is nothing in this story that balances it, that discusses how dangerous it is to vilify an entire demographic class of women.

Where does Time and the Washington Post think this kind of racist journalism is taking us? We all know that they would never, ever publish anything, or allow their reporters and editors to tweet anything, about any other racial demographic. In Germany, long before the Nazis took power, the press worked to shape the public’s perception of Jews as a menace to Germans. It did not start in Nazi party rags. It did not even start with the Nazi party.

The political scientist Yascha Mounk wrote an Atlantic piece the other day saying that this race madness is getting innocent people fired. He writes about the case of Emmanuel Cafferty, a working-class Latino fired after being goaded into making an “OK” sign while driving — and later being accused of flashing a white power sign. Excerpt:

Cafferty is a big, calm, muscular man in his 40s who was born and raised in a diverse working-class community on the south side of San Diego. On his father’s side, he has both Irish and Mexican ancestors. His mother is Latina. “If I was a white supremacist,” he told me, “I would literally have to hate 75 percent of myself.”

After finishing high school, Cafferty bounced from one physically demanding and poorly paid job to another. For most of his life, he had trouble making ends meet. But his new job was set to change all that. “I was very proud of my position,” Cafferty told me. “It was the first time in my life where I wasn’t living check to check.”

When Cafferty was wrongly accused of being a white supremacist, he fought hard to keep his job. He said he explained to the people carrying out the investigation—all of them were white—that he had no earthly idea some racists had tried to appropriate the “okay” sign for their sinister purposes. He told them he simply wasn’t interested in politics; as far as he remembered, he had not voted in a single election. Eventually, he told me, “I got so desperate, I was showing them the color of my skin. I was saying, ‘Look at me. Look at the color of my skin.’”

It was all to no avail. SDG&E, Cafferty told me, never presented him with any evidence that he held racist beliefs or knew about the meaning of his gesture. Yet he was terminated.

The loss of his job has left Cafferty shaken. A few days ago, he spoke with a mental-health counselor for the first time in his life. “A man can learn from making a mistake,” he told me. “But what am I supposed to learn from this? It’s like I was struck by lightning.”

I hope he sues his former employer for wrongful termination, and takes them to the cleaners. Mounk tells a couple more stories, including one of an Arab immigrant business owner who saw his life’s work ruined when the social media mob set on him because of racist tweets his daughter sent out eight years ago. Mounk is concerned that these excesses will turn people against the move for social justice.

Alan Jacobs, though, says that Mounk is wrong: the punishment of the innocent is not an aberration, but the point. Excerpt:

What must be created is an environment in which people discipline themselves. But they will only do this when they fear exposure (and subsequent punishment) so much that they will go to extreme lengths to perform their obedience. And people will only exert the energy to enact this ongoing self-policing if they believe that anything they do or say can be seen. They need to believe that they are living in a Panopticon.

This is where social media come in. If everyone has a smartphone and access to social media accounts, then anything you do or say might be recorded and published. Anything those to whom you are related do or say may be recorded and published, to shame you before the entire world. From the perspective of those who lust for social control, this is an ideal situation, because if they make you sufficiently fearful of exposure then you will not only police yourself, you will police your friends and family. And if you can be exposed and punished not only for what you intentionally do and say, but for what you inadvertently do and say, and for what people you know do and say, then you will become obsessively vigilant in your policing.

That is why, for those who want to effect social change by exposure and shaming, punishing the innocent is a feature of their system, not a bug. It increases fear, which increases discipline, not only of oneself but of others. And every employer who fires an employee because they’re afraid of a social-media mob draws us closer to a fully Panoptic society, a social tyranny with an efficiency beyond the dreams of totalitarian societies of the past.

I repeat: the American media — people in my business — are aiders and abetters of this soft totalitarianism. As disgusting as it was to see Donald Trump retweet a “white power” clip, however briefly, every single day brings a deluge of opinion and news coverage advancing what you might call “anti-white power.” Where do these people think this is going to end up?

The lefty journalist Matt Taibbi is unnerved by what he sees. Here is a link to an important essay by Taibbi on the fraudulent white racial grifter Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, the bestselling book in the country. Excerpts:

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests.

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

More:

At a time of catastrophe and national despair, when conservative nationalism is on the rise and violent confrontation on the streets is becoming commonplace, it’s extremely suspicious that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences. Meanwhile books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, which are both beautiful and actually anti-racist, have been banned, for containing the “N-word.” (White Fragility contains it too, by the way). It’s almost like someone thinks there’s a benefit to keeping people divided.

Read the entire Taibbi piece. 

You know where this is all going, don’t you? If we don’t stop it, I mean?

Earlier this month, the controversial French writer Jean Raspail died at age 94. In 1973, Raspail wrote a dystopian futuristic novel that has become a favorite of the far right: The Camp of the Saints. It’s about the collapse of Western civilization under pressure from Third World immigrants. I read the book back in 2015 to understand why it was so important to the far right. I wrote a long blog about it, titled “Good Lessons From A Bad Book,” in which I acknowledged and criticized the repulsive racism of the novel (which got my blog post denounced by an alt-right writer as “politically correct”), but I also said that there is something important in its pages. From that blog:

Even a bad book may have something valuable to say to us. This is true of The Camp of the Saints. One aspect of the novel that I can’t shake off, though, is Raspail’s portrait of the migrants as not giving a damn about European civilization. It’s nothing personal; rather, they don’t believe they are coming to Europe as beggars who ought to be grateful for charity, but move as a mass that believes it is entitled to what the Europeans have. Europeans, by contrast, are, in the book, the ones who agonize over their civilization, whether it is worth defending, and what it means to be truly Western. The leaders in Camp of the Saints are not consciously surrendering, but rather they mask their cultural surrender with humanitarianism. They think that by flinging their doors open to the Third World masses, they are being good Westerners.

This is why the real villains in Raspail’s novel aren’t the migrants, but the European elites. He believes, it appears, that the Europeans ought to do whatever it takes to defend their civilization from the barbarian invasion. Raspail denounces contemporary France, though, as an exhausted civilization that is eager to be relieved of its burdens. To borrow a line from Cavafy, “those people, the barbarians, were a kind of solution.”

Here’s what is so unnerving about reading the damn novel: so much of it could be lifted from today’s headlines. Reading it brought to mind more than once what people used to say back in the Nineties about gangsta rap: that as vulgar and as repulsive as it may have been, it told us something important about conditions in the inner cities. You don’t have to endorse Raspail’s radical racialist vision to recognize that there is diagnostic value in his novel.

And:

To conclude, what are the good lessons from this bad book, The Camp of the Saints? I’m not sure there are “lessons” to be learned as much as the extremely dark novel gives one a more skeptical eye towards humanitarian pronouncements about migrants from European leaders, including church leaders. In the book, the militant pro-migrant humanitarianism of the elites and the masses that follow them do not reflect moral strength, but actually exemplify moral exhaustion. Camp is a dystopian fantasy, certainly, but the core questions it poses regarding what European civilization is, what Christian civilization is, and the lengths to which Europeans ought to be prepared to go to defend what they have, are important ones, even if Raspail answers them in a way that provokes disgust, and that Christians, at least, will find unacceptable.

The extravagant emotionalism and self-abasement that the novel’s French elites (academic, governmental, media, ecclesial, etc) show towards the migrants who hate everything they stand for is awfully familiar now, in their reaction to the George Floyd killing. It’s both a mania, and a form of moral exhaustion. Here’s why I bring it up in this space: in Raspail’s pitch-black vision, France cannot be saved, but whites who do not accept surrender go out with a burst of savage, murderous violence. My fear, growing every day, is that this nightmare racist novel is a prologue for what’s coming to America.

As I see it, the only way for people in a multiracial, pluralistic, modern democratic society to live together is through the old-fashioned liberal principles whose most prominent advocate was Martin Luther King, Jr. The left, led by academic and media institutions, is pulling those principles down with the ideological fervor of fanatical iconoclasts. Nobody is thinking about where this cannot help but lead. What do you think the Emmanuel Caffertys are going to do when their livelihoods are taken from them, and their children, and their children’s children, are set up to suffer for their supposed sins, all in the name of justice? Jean Raspail, in his extremely dark way, thought about it. So did Slobodan Milosevic.

UPDATE: I should emphasize that as a Christian, I believe in those old liberal values, the King vision. Why are no senior leaders in this country defending it? The Democrats are too afraid of their own mob to do so (or maybe they are happy to ride the wave of zealotry into power), and the Republicans are weighed down by an incompetent White House troll who doesn’t have the sense not to tweet out elderly creeps chanting “white power.” What a curse is upon this country, in its ruling class!

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The Great Christian Sorting

The other night an Evangelical friend e-mailed me a link to Jen Hatmaker’s podcast episode in which she and her gay daughter talk about being lesbian. Hatmaker, as you may know, is a progressive Evangelical laywoman who has a vast fan base. She’s quite influential among certain Evangelical women. I read the transcript of the episode, not expecting to agree with Hatmaker and her daughter, and in that I was not surprised. What took me aback, though, was how the entire thing — and it was long — was about nothing but emotion and affirmation, and takes for granted that churches that are not affirmative of homosexuality and transgenderism are mean, hurtful, and wrong. It was uncanny. There was no theology there, only feelz. It was as vivid an instantiation of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as I’ve ever seen.

As I was reading the transcript on my phone, there was a pop-up ad for Hatmaker’s latest book. I found it on Amazon.com, and screengrabbed the cover:

Here’s the book’s description on its Amazon page:

No more hiding or people-pleasing up in here, sisters. No more being sidelined in your own life. It is time for us to be brave, to claim our gifts and quirks and emotions. You are set free and set up and set on fire.

NOW you can get busy doing what you were placed on this planet to do. NOW you can be honest, honest, honest about all of it, even the hard stuff, even the humiliating stuff, even the secret stuff. NOW you can walk in your convictions of faith and ask new questions unafraid. NOW you can be so free, because you are not searching for value from any source other than your own beautiful soul made piece by piece by God who adores you and is ready to get on with the business of unleashing you into this world.

In this book, I break it down into five self-reflective categories—who I am, what I need, what I want, what I believe, and how I connect—and by working your way through them, you will learn to own your space, ground, and gifts (they are YOURS, sister);

be strong in your relationships and lay down passive aggression, resentment, drama, and compliance;

say GUILT-FREE what you want and what you need; and

welcome spiritual curiosity and all the fantastic change that doing so creates.

You with me, beloveds? If we do this work on our own selves now, not only will we discover a life truly worth living, but we will free our daughters to rise up behind us, with spines straight, heads up, and coated in our strength.

Good grief, such celebratory egotism. American pop Christianity at its most spiritually poisonous. All of this is the total opposite of Orthodox Christian spirituality.

On Saturday morning I woke up early because my priest was having a special liturgy for the handful of members of our congregation who are either elderly or immunocompromised. It was the first time we had been to church since March. Our parish re-opened under strict guidelines (everybody wears a mask and stands six feet apart), but some of us didn’t feel that we could take the risk of being there even under those circumstances. So our priest celebrated a liturgy for us today. Before I left for church, I received a long email from a reader who told me about struggles in their and their spouse’s Evangelical megachurch. (I’m writing cagily because the reader does not want me to publish their e-mail or give details.) I’ll just say that the reader and the reader’s spouse have been shocked by how wokeness has invaded their church, and how destructive it has been.

It has rattled them, and made them reflect even more on how dissatisfying their church life has become. The reader indicates that that particular church is very big on emotions, but does little in the way of discipleship. The reader indicated that the ethos at the church is consumerist: that one comes to have an experience, but not to be changed in any but a superficial way. And now, with the Great Awokening washing over the culture, including church culture, they are looking for something deeper. The reader said that they are about to become inquirers at a local Orthodox Church, and asked for my prayers.

Well, you can imagine that praying for them was the first thing on my mind when I went to the liturgy at my little parish. It was so great to be back in church, hearing that gorgeous old liturgy, the chanted psalms, the Scripture readings. It is hard to overstate how important liturgical worship is to Orthodox Christians. As I was praying for them, I was trying to imagine how unusual Orthodoxy will no doubt seem to that young couple when they go to their first Divine Liturgy on Sunday morning. One thing that people tried to tell me when I first became Orthodox fourteen years ago, but that I really had to learn on my own to understand it, is that Orthodoxy is less a body of doctrine than a way of living. Don’t get me wrong, there is doctrine in Orthodoxy (the name itself means “right belief”). The point is that Orthodoxy is primarily designed to get you out of your head, and to embody the doctrine in the way you live.

To be fair, all Christianity is like this to some degree, but it’s noticeably different in Orthodoxy. Believe it or not, watching a couple of Andrei Tarkovsky films this week helped me understand that better. Tarkovsky (d. 1986) was a Soviet film director, but also a believing Orthodox Christian. My first Tarkovsky film was Andrei Rublev, his 1966 masterpiece about the medieval Russian iconographer. I later saw Solaris, his sci-fi drama, which I didn’t much care for. This past Monday night, I saw his Nostalghia, which knocked me out spiritually. On Friday night, I watched The Sacrifice, his final film, which I didn’t like in terms of drama, but I cannot stop thinking about the images.

The only one of those films that is explicitly about religion is Andrei Rublev, but a profoundly religious sensibility suffuses Tarkovsky’s movies. He once said:

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

This is the way Orthodoxy approaches the Christian faith. One thing that impressed me so deeply about Nostalghia is how its protagonist, a melancholic Russian poet, is stuck with a divided and confused self. A holy fool helps him to see that his inner division has to do with his being weighed down by the things of this world, and that an act of faith could gather his scattered inner self and bind it. What is the difference between faith and madness, though? That is a question the incredible denouement of Nostalghia poses — and that arises again in The Sacrifice. Kierkegaard famously said, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” But what is the thing one must will? Orthodox Christianity, of course, teaches that the will of God must be our own wills. All small-o orthodox Christianity teaches this, of course, but Orthodoxy trains its devotees to regard the entirety of creation as iconographic, as a sign, or collection of signs, pointing us to God. For the Orthodox, theosis — ultimate unity with God — is the goal of the Christian journey in this life. This is not something you can think your way to. It’s something you pray your way to, you worship your way to, you repent your way to, and you live your way to. There is no other way. Anything else is a trap.

It’s a lesson that I have to keep learning, myself. This is normal too. The Christian life is about falling down and falling away, coming back to yourself and to God, and resuming the journey. The thing about Orthodoxy, I find, is how timeless it is — that is, how out of time, how Orthodox worship really does make you feel that you are connected to something deep and eternal. Or rather, Someone.

I don’t want to go on too long here, because I do not want to proselytize. And in any case, do not go to Orthodoxy thinking it’s an escape from the problems of this world. Back at church for the first time in months, though, and thinking about the e-mail from the reader, I found myself so grateful that God showed me this way. The Divine Liturgy seems like the still point around with everything in this chaotic and dying world turns.

In his homily today, our priest said that faith is what saves us, but it cannot be faith that is merely an intellectual affirmation of propositions, or an emotional high, but it has to be something that is integrated into every aspect of our life. We are always living towards dying, if we’re doing it right. After the services, Father told our small group that since the Covid crisis, he has had more people contact him to inquire about Orthodoxy than ever. He said that there must be a rising awareness that things are getting worse in this country, and that Christians are going to go through a long and agonizing trial. People are looking for depth and seriousness, he said. We cannot waste this time God has given us to prepare for what’s coming, he advised.

He’s right about that. You Christian readers, whatever your church, take that to heart. I’m not going to tell you to become Orthodox, but I am going to tell you most emphatically to find a safe harbor on a solid rock, both in your own spiritual life and in your church life. Never, ever think that thinking the right thoughts, and feeling spiritually exalting emotions, are enough. Trust me on this — I’ve lived to learn what a dead end that is, and I keep having to learn that lesson, one way or the other. There is no way to the top of this mountain except around the arduous spiral path. We are all going through a great sorting now, a sorting that is going to intensify rapidly. A church and a spirituality that is in tune with the times will be swept downstream, like a house built on sand.

 

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