Rod Dreher's Blog, page 152

Signs & Wonders On Good Friday

Just passing something on to you for your consideration on this Orthodox Good Friday. An Orthodox friend sent me this photo of a rainbow around the sun. It appeared at 3pm, the hour that according to Scripture and Tradition, Jesus Christ died on the Cross. It was taken by a relative in Atlanta today. Friend said it was also seen by a relative there. I darkened the original photo slightly to give the circular rainbow more definition. This is called a sun halo, and it’s a natural meteorological phenomenon, though rare. Still, 3pm on Good Friday is quite some timing.

Meanwhile, today on Mount Athos, the Greek Orthodox monastic enclave, this miracle happened today:

Blood and tears found miraculously flowing from Christ's body on Mount Athos today pic.twitter.com/BvXWWClK3O

— Orthodox Central (@Orthosphere) April 17, 2020

Strange days indeed.

UPDATE: A reader says that he read a report in Greek media that the bleeding icon is inside a chapel at a nursing home there. If so, then with nursing homes being places of extraordinary death and suffering from Covid-19, then the miracle can be interpreted as a sign that Christ suffers with them.

I certainly believe that some claimed miracles are fake. I have seen this happen personally. One is not wrong to approach with skepticism. But sometimes you really can’t explain these things. In those cases, I find that there are two kind of people in the world: the kind who see something like this, and say, “Why would God have done something like that? If he wanted to show those people that He was with them, why didn’t He choose some other way, or why didn’t He just stop the virus, or why didn’t He do what makes sense to me?”; and the kind who simply fall to their knees and say, “My Lord and my God.”

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Covid Christians As Rich Young Rulers

Today is Orthodox Good Friday. As is my tradition, I am staying away from the blog today. I wrote this on Thursday night, and scheduled it to post on Friday. Please be patient about comments. I will approve comments at some point during the day on Friday, just so they don’t get out of hand by the time business as usual resumes on Saturday, but mostly, I will not be adhering to the regular schedule.

I was as moved by these two Pandemic Diary entries I received yesterday as I have been by anything readers have written me over the years. The first comes from Ohio:

One thing the crisis has done is crystallized a sense of alienation from the religion I grew up in and am still, ostensibly, a member of. I grew up in a conservative Catholic household–six kids, homeschooled, dad is mentioned briefly as one of the victims in Michael Rose’s “Goodbye, Good Men,” the works. I go to church every Sunday, pray every day, my wife is a convert, etc. I’m friends with a lot of conservative Catholics.

The coronavirus has made me realize that, in order to be a “conservative Catholic” is good standing, you really have to deny a lot of things that are actually true. My conservative friends’ Facebook feeds are full of conspiracy theories positing that the general idea is that the whole thing is overblown, this is just the flu, and the shutdowns are just a power grab. Needless to say, this is all based on clearly flawed or nonexistent evidence. The idea seems to be that everyone has the right to their opinion, and that it’s possible to find facts supporting almost any opinion, so it’s up to you to pick which opinion you like best.

I know not all conservative Christians are like this, but a very high percentage are, and those tend to be the most vocal. Realistically, if you’re joining a group of conservative Catholics, you’ll either have to be (or pretend to be) a fervent Trump supporter, deny global warming and most likely evolution as well, and view anything coming from the “mainstream media” (defined as any source that isn’t explicitly conservative) with extreme skepticism.

This isn’t just conservative Christians, and I’ve definitely seen most of our political groups get more extreme over the last decade or so, but I would argue that conservatives might be among the worst. Last night, I literally saw someone (intelligent and educated) arguing that she wouldn’t get a coronavirus vaccine because it’s HER CHOICE. That’s not even the craziest thing I saw yesterday; someone else was saying that coronavirus was easily treatable with essential oils.

It might sound like I’m “ashamed” of my coreligionists, and I sort of am. But the larger problem is that I feel profoundly alienated from them; it’s hard to feel allied with people who deny reality, and more than that, make their invented reality the cornerstone of their lives. I’m also inclined to think that a movement based on conspiracies and pseudoscience isn’t likely to last too long.

The second, from Colorado:

I’m writing to you from Littleton, Colorado. I have been a reader of your blog for years and have rooted you on when it comes to the Benedict Option and your correct diagnosis of the impact of the woke left on Christian Institutions. However the last month or so I have bristled at you and your writings covering the virus. I consider myself rational, my college major was biology, my wife is a physician assistant and my brother a doctor, yet I’ve found myself rebelling at everything that is standing in the way of things returning to normal.

My faith, which should be sustaining me is in tatters. I’ve lived a very comfortable suburban life and have become accustomed to making plans and having a pretty good idea of how things would go. I’ve always thought Christ would be sufficient, and if push came to shove I’d be able to persevere. This interruption and the possibility of economic ruin, has made me realize how weak my faith is. I crave comfort and certainty. I’m being asked to consider the possibility that I may have to sacrifice everything and trust Christ fully. Like the rich young ruler, this virus is making me consider if I could leave everything and only follow Christ. I’m failing and rather than repentance, my heart is hard and my neck is stiff. I’m finding myself unconcerned with the human toll as long as we can return to normal. I’m not doing well.

This, my friends, is what apocalypse does: it reveals. The Ohio reader, like many of us, are seeing things in the church that were hidden from us before, and it leaves us cold. The Colorado reader is seeing things in himself that he didn’t realize existed, and it is breaking him. I have already tonight been praying for both of these men, and they will be on my mind and in my prayers on Good Friday. I agree with the Ohio reader, and though I am not where the Colorado reader is, I know myself well enough to know that deep down, the Rich Young Ruler lives inside me too, and eventually in this crisis, I am likely to meet him under duress.

The fact is, so many of us Americans — I count myself in this number — are terrified of being poor. I’m not talking about being afraid of losing luxuries. I have had times in my life when I had no luxuries, and I have had Champagne and French oysters times in my life. The Champagne and oysters times are better, but really, I have never known hard times. The world my parents grew up in — the rural South, in the Great Depression — may as well have been deepest Uzbekistan. The most frightening thing about poverty to me is not the material asceticism, which really isn’t that scary to me. It’s the feeling of loss of control. If there’s one thing we modern Americans — liberals and conservatives, secular and religious — cannot stand, it’s the thought that we aren’t in control of our lives. It is our collective idol, especially for the middle class. Again, let me make clear to you that I’m talking to myself too.

Being poor is never easy, God knows, but as I reflect on my late father’s stories of Great Depression poverty, I realize that they had something then that we don’t today. They could count on a level of social order and solidarity that is largely absent today. I often think of this observation from Robert D. Kaplan’s much-discussed 1994 Atlantic article titled “The Coming Anarchy.” He contrasts the chaos and violence of the poor of West Africa with the order of the poor of Turkey:

Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future’s victims. Slums—in the sociological sense—do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar between people and family groups is stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone. Turks, history’s perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.

We Americans clearly do not take disruption in stride. Look at us now. For us middle-class Christians, what has been uncovered is our inability to cope with the possibility of sacrifice. It scares us to death. Many of us are prepared to believe anything rather than accept the radical sacrifices that fighting this pandemic calls for — and this is what the Ohio letter-writer is getting at.

No, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t question the authorities’ decision-making. I concede that maintaining a high degree of lockdown, as we are supposedly doing now, is not going to be possible for the length of time we will probably need for scientists to come up with a vaccine. I further concede that if I were one of the 22 million Americans who lost their job this past month, I would probably be a lot more prone to radical thoughts too. Again, I am not as susceptible to Rich Young Ruler Syndrome as the Colorado reader is, but I’d be a self-deceiving fool to say that I’m immune to it.

What has helped me think more clearly here is my experiences in this past year reading about those Christians who suffered under communism, and meeting with a number of them. I won’t go into all that again; if you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know some of these stories, and in any case, you’ll read more when my next book comes out this fall. I want to remind you that these men and women suffered far more under communism than any of us are likely to suffer in this pandemic. They lost their jobs, their status, their liberty — and some even went to prison, and endured torture. We Americans who are freaking out and believing conspiracy theories, and in all kinds of magical thinking, because we’re scared that the virus is going to make us poor — my Lord, we wouldn’t have lasted two days under communism. We would have been just like the majority of people in those countries: conformists, out of fear.

And not just fear of the secret police taking us away in the middle of the night. There is the more normal kind of fear, including loss of status and privileges. It’s also the kind of fear that compelled a lot of Catholics to deny that some priests were sexually abusing children, and that bishops were covering it up. It was a massive threat to their faith to face that horrible reality than to deal with it straightforwardly, and to trust in God through it. Eventually, reality broke through, and the problem could no longer be denied. Anyone who has lived through a situation in their family, place of work, or other community, in which the majority were prepared to believe just about anything as long as they could maintain their belief that the world they thought they were living in was real will understand how this works.

Hear me: I am not saying that anybody who questions the lockdown is a denialist. I genuinely believe that we are going to have to have a serious conversation about how to roll back some of these restrictions in a responsible way. That is going to mean determining how much death we are willing to accept. The MIT model warns us, as other epidemiologists have, that loosening restrictions too soon is going to mean a “catastrophic” increase in mortality. In Singapore, early restrictions flattened the curve, but now, having backed off too soon, they’re in trouble again. In the US, a CDC expert says that our official Covid death rate is probably far too low because our testing is so poor, and a lot of people are probably dying in their homes. We have to also face the possibility that the virus will mutate, greatly complicating vaccine development.

What I’m calling out is what Ohio reader is calling out: Christians who are committing themselves to conspiratorial interpretations of what’s happening, and to denying science if the science tells them to do something that they do not want to do. (The Washington Post reports that this is a phenomenon of the populist right, egged on by Fox News and talk radio.) A Catholic reader in the Midwest sent me some material being passed out by a lay religious leader in his parish who does not believe all these lockdowns are necessary, and who is calling for resistance. The feeling there is that if you do believe that the lockdowns are necessary, then you are a fraidy-cat. The Pentecostal pastor in Baton Rouge, Tony Spell, has been saying flat-out that people who are afraid to come to church because they fear getting the disease are cowardly Christians. Yesterday in Baton Rouge it emerged that one of his congregants has died from the virus, according to the coroner, but Tony Spell calls it fake news. One of Spell’s lawyers is in the hospital now with the virus, and told reporters that he feels bad if he passed it on to anyone. That whole church is one big synod of magical thinkers. The CREC — the Presbyterian denomination that includes controversial pastor Douglas Wilson — has announced:

Those individuals and their families, pastors, leaders and physicians, are the ones to make the best decisions about how they should live during the spread of this disease. If this were a great plague, a direct threat to the health and lives of all of our congregants, as many of us initially thought it was, we would be glad to continue to comply with reasonable measures to mitigate the spread. However, it is now clear that it is not the plague and we are not prepared to continue to comply with extreme mitigation efforts. Our desire is to be obedient to the civil magistrate. However, we must also do what we believe God expects of us, what is best for our people and our communities, and what our consciences dictate. For our American members, The U.S. Constitution rightly affords us these rights of speech and assembly because they extend to us from God, Himself. The citizens of the United States and our congregants are already beginning to strongly feel the need to get back to regular living. While we do not currently have a date after which we will no longer comply with the extreme restrictions, we believe the time is now at hand for our leaders to stand down from the extreme isolation efforts, and the date after which we will no longer comply, is soon approaching, in days or weeks, not months.

They “strongly feel” that it’s time to get back to regular living, so they’re preparing to defy scientists and government leaders. Because of “rights.”

Honestly, I cannot grasp this. Do they believe that this virus is a political entity that they can take to court, and petition the court to tell it to go away, because it is violating their God-given and Constitutional rights?

Mother Teresa, speaking about abortion, said, “It is a poverty  to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.” Along those lines, we might say, “It is a poverty to decide that old people, those with weak immune systems, obese people, and others must die so that you may live as you wish.”

Yes, we know that economic pain brings with it more deaths from suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Shouldn’t members of churches be less susceptible to these pathologies? Are these Christians really worried about those far from the life of the church, who don’t have the fellowship and the internal moral and spiritual strength to endure great hardship — or are they worried that they themselves will have to abandon, like the Colorado readers, their “very comfortable suburban lives,” and the sense of control they have over them? Are all the potential deaths from Covid-19 a price worth paying to keep the suburbs humming along?

I think of the woman the Ohio man heard from, who said that she would stand on her “right” not to take the covid vaccine. And the one who said she was going to try to fight it with essential oils. Anything, it seems, not to face the harsh realities this virus brings to us.

Christians of the early church were known for caring for the ill in plague times, and not running away from them. It seems that a lot of conservative Christians today prefer to run away from the plague — or at least to act as if they could run away from the plague — rather than do the hard work of figuring out how to bear together the sacrifices necessary to defeat it. This is not the way Christians are supposed to behave. This is Rich Young Ruler stuff.

The historian of the ancient world Tom Holland writes about how the early Christians distinguished themselves in the Roman Empire by caring for the plague sick. Excerpts:

First, at the end of the second century, and then again in the middle of the third, bowls of wrath were poured out on the Roman empire. Of the second pandemic, a historian would subsequently record that “there was almost no province of Rome, no city, no house, which was not attacked and emptied by this general pestilence”.

Did it mark, then, the breaking of the cities of the world foretold by St John? Many Christians believed so. Fatefully, however, it was not as worshippers of a God of wrath that they would come to be viewed by many of their fellow citizens, but as worshippers of a God of love: for it was observed by many in plague-ravaged cities how, “heedless of the danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ”. Obedient to the commands of their Saviour, who had told them that to care for the least of their brothers and sisters was to care for him, and confident in the promise of eternal life, large numbers of them were able to stand firm against dread of the plague, and tend to those afflicted by it.

The compassion they showed to the sick – and not just to the Christian sick – was widely noted, and would have enduring consequences. Emerging from the terrible years of plague, the Church found itself steeled in its sense of mission. For the first time in history, an institution existed that believed itself called to provide compassion and medical care to every level of society.

The revolutionary implications of this, in a world where it had always been taken for granted that doctors were yet another perk of the rich, could hardly be overstated. The sick, rather than disgusting and repelling Christians, provided them with something they saw as infinitely precious: an opportunity to demonstrate their love of Christ.

Jesus himself, asked by a centurion to heal his servant of a mortal illness, had marvelled that a Roman should place such confidence in him – and duly healed the officer’s servant. By the beginning of the fourth century, not even their bitterest enemies could deny Christians success when it came to tending the sick. In Armenia, the Zoroastrian priests who marked down the Krestayne as purveyors of witchcraft were at the same time paying them a compliment. When the Armenian king became the first ruler to proclaim his realm a Christian land in 301, his conversion followed the success of a Christian holy man in curing him of insanity – and specifically of the conviction that he was a wild boar.

Then, just over a decade later, an even greater ruler was brought to Christ. Constantine embraced Christianity, not out of any concern for the unfortunate, but out of the far more traditional desire for a divine patron who would bring him victory in battle; but this did not mean, once the successful establishment of his regime had served to legitimate Christianity, that Christians among the ranks of the Roman elite turned a blind eye to their responsibility towards the sick.

Quite the opposite: “Do not despise these people in their abjection; do not think they merit no respect.” So urged Gregory, an aristocrat from Cappadocia who in 372, 60 years after Constantine’s conversion, became the bishop of a small town named Nyssa. “Reflect on who they are, and you will understand their dignity; they have taken upon them the person of our Saviour. For he, the compassionate, has given them his own person.”

Read it all — it’s amazing.

What about us Christians? So many of us are running around acting like the coronavirus sick are a threat to our settled lives and our livelihoods, and that we should be willing to allow a number of them to die so we can live as we were. Rush Limbaugh delivered this week a monologue saying that the Democrats want the economy to remain closed so they can hurt Donald Trump and the GOP. As if this virus gave a damn about American politics!

Why is Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk radio hosts treated by so many conservative Christians as a greater authority on how Christians ought to behave in the plague than Christian pastors and bishops? Than scientists?

I would simply ask all of us to interrogate ourselves, like the Colorado reader, and ask whether or not our passions about the virus and fighting it are driven not by rational considerations, but by fear of poverty, and fear of our lives being too disrupted for too long. Are we the Rich Young Ruler — the man who told Jesus he wanted to follow Him, and to whom Jesus said, “Sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and come with me” — and the rich young man went away sad, because he couldn’t do that?

Is that us?

We’re going to be opening up some things in the months to come. What are we prepared to do for all those who get sick and die because of it? Are we prepared for the possibility that among that number will be our mothers, fathers, family members, friends, fellow church members, and such like? It’s one thing to say that you yourself are prepared to die, but that’s not how the virus works. You can be carrying the virus and not feel sick yet, but still infect others. It’s not just about you.

And it’s not just about politics, cultural and otherwise.  You can no more wish the reality of this virus away with bold declarations than a man can declare himself to be a woman with strong words and passions.

UPDATE: My wife texts me this from Facebook. She asked me to take the name of the poster off, because she’s not sure how public his FB account is. He is an Orthodox priest:

My wife is on the phone now, so I can’t ask her what that final line was. But I read the original, and I think it says, “I am struggling and that’s okay.” Or something to that effect.

In other Orthodox Good Friday news, this thing is happening, this thing that doesn’t happen:

Blood and tears found miraculously flowing from Christ's body on Mount Athos today pic.twitter.com/BvXWWClK3O

— Orthodox Central (@Orthosphere) April 17, 2020

The post Covid Christians As Rich Young Rulers appeared first on The American Conservative.

Pandemic Diaries 30

Today was a better day than most for me. I wrote earlier today about my wife and daughter going out to pick up a haul of pre-ordered vegetables curbside at the Baton Rouge Farmers Market. The best thing about the run was that they came home with three brown paper bags full of mushrooms, which, hobbit that I am, I adore. Look, these mushrooms are so powerful that they can even subdue a mad dog!

 

The afternoon was not so hot — another mono spell, with fitful sleep (I lose three or four hours almost every afternoon with this stuff). That, and bad dreams. It’s so weird how the Epstein-Barr Virus affects my dreams, both in the afternoon and at night. It also causes night sweats. Awful stuff. But it could always be worse. It could be coronavirus.

Still, it’s amazing to me how something as small as getting in fresh vegetables, especially mushrooms, and packets of seeds for the garden my wife is about to put in, brought me such a lift. This time of trial really does make one grateful for small things, doesn’t it?

What’s going on with y’all? Let’s see what you’ve had to say since last I checked.

From Ohio:

As you know, Ohio is perhaps the state best managing the coronavirus epidemic. Governor DeWine started social distancing early, so while there are still sicknesses and deaths here, the curve seems to be flattening and the numbers are low. (Plus, we are supposed to start reopening in a couple of weeks!) While the loneliness, uncertainty and fear of the unknown are very real, since I’m lucky enough to work in an “essential” industry at a job I can easily perform remotely means that my life overall isn’t impacted that much. My government stimulus money arrived today, and while I have mixed feeling about it considering I haven’t actually lost much income, I guess it’s nice to have it.

One thing the crisis has done is crystallized a sense of alienation from the religion I grew up in and am still, ostensibly, a member of. I grew up in a conservative Catholic household–six kids, homeschooled, dad is mentioned briefly as one of the victims in Michael Rose’s “Goodbye, Good Men,” the works. I go to church every Sunday, pray every day, my wife is a convert, etc. I’m friends with a lot of conservative Catholics.

The coronavirus has made me realize that, in order to be a “conservative Catholic” is good standing, you really have to deny a lot of things that are actually true. My conservative friends’ Facebook feeds are full of conspiracy theories positing that the general idea is that the whole thing is overblown, this is just the flu, and the shutdowns are just a power grab. Needless to say, this is all based on clearly flawed or nonexistent evidence. The idea seems to be that everyone has the right to their opinion, and that it’s possible to find facts supporting almost any opinion, so it’s up to you to pick which opinion you like best.

I know not all conservative Christians are like this, but a very high percentage are, and those tend to be the most vocal. Realistically, if you’re joining a group of conservative Catholics, you’ll either have to be (or pretend to be) a fervent Trump supporter, deny global warming and most likely evolution as well, and view anything coming from the “mainstream media” (defined as any source that isn’t explicitly conservative) with extreme skepticism.

This isn’t just conservative Christians, and I’ve definitely seen most of our political groups get more extreme over the last decade or so, but I would argue that conservatives might be among the worst. Last night, I literally saw someone (intelligent and educated) arguing that she wouldn’t get a coronavirus vaccine because it’s HER CHOICE. That’s not even the craziest thing I saw yesterday; someone else was saying that coronavirus was easily treatable with essential oils.

It might sound like I’m “ashamed” of my coreligionists, and I sort of am. But the larger problem is that I feel profoundly alienated from them; it’s hard to feel allied with people who deny reality, and more than that, make their invented reality the cornerstone of their lives. I’m also inclined to think that a movement based on conspiracies and pseudoscience isn’t likely to last too long.

That is a painful letter to read. I’m going to make a separate post for it.

From Rochester, New York:

I’m writing to you from Rochester, NY. Although we’re only a few hours away from New York City, we’ve been fortunate to avoid being hit as hard with the disease. I know many people who live there, and it’s been so hard to hear about what they’re going through. I’m often praying for the medical workers there fighting this disease, and the families affected so tragically by it all over the country.

The losses, uncertainties and disorientation in my own life have been hard to pin down, because I’m not struggling like many people are right now, and my challenges have been accompanied by many blessings as well.

On one hand, I’m immensely fortunate with my work and living situation. I have a technician job at the University of Rochester that I’m able to continue from home with full pay, and amazing friends that I live with in an awesome house. We’re watching films together, and we read “The Importance of Being Earnest” together a few weeks back, each person picking a few characters to be. One housemate even managed somehow to procure a full keg setup, so we now have a running beer tap in the house. So, that’s pretty nice.

On my own, I’ve been voraciously reading Les Miserables, still writing and editing for my websites, and I just took up learning an incredible and free 3-D modeling software called Blender; I needed some sort of visual, 3-D form of creativity to balance the written word. I’ve taken to walking and running around the beautiful part of the city I live in a lot more as well. I often pass the Frederick Douglass statue and memorial that’s been moved to look out over South Avenue recently, right next to the farm property he used to live on in his last years in this city. I’ve been listening to David Blight’s recently written and marvelous biography of his life, while walking the very same streets he used to walk and live on. Mount Hope Cemetery, just a mile from my house, is one of the most beautiful places in the city (in my opinion), and I visited his and Susan B. Anthony’s grave there on Easter. There are indeed many blessings that I have; to be surrounded by the legacies of those who shaped history so much is something I don’t take lightly. It makes me wonder about my own mark on history.

There’s also a lot of uncertainty for me during this time as well. A few months ago, I applied to study English Literature as a mature student at the University of Cambridge. It was quite the long shot: I had only visited as a tourist in June of last year, and decided that, with no prior serious English studies under my belt, I’d try and study there. In mid-January I got accepted, and received an offer to start this fall, which was absolutely thrilling. I’ve been preparing for that these past few months, but now I have no idea what will happen with my studies. So far, I’ve heard nothing that would indicate any changes to my offer, but who knows what these few months may bring? To be on the brink of something that monumental, achieved against some pretty large odds, and now to undergo this kind of limbo is quite disorienting. Everything with my work, education and living situation is up in the air right now. Needless to say, I’ve been learning new ways of entrusting my future to God.

Prior to the outbreak, the office of Compline was sung at Christ Church downtown every Sunday evening during the school year. Rochester is home to the Eastman School of Music, one of the best in the country, and brilliant students and professors from Eastman, other local music programs and Christ Church sing and pray the liturgy. The church is a beautiful and old building, and when you enter the sanctuary there is complete silence, anticipating the singers who eventually file out into the room – the only sound is the organ music that starts ten minutes prior to the service. All the lights are off, replaced instead with candles throughout the room. It’s perhaps the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard in my life, every week without fail, and serves as the central point for my week.

It’s made my heart ache not to be able to go and experience this beauty these past few weeks, especially because, if I do leave for Europe when I had previously planned, I won’t have the opportunity of attending again for perhaps a few years. It’s a dear piece of Rochester that I cherish, and will miss greatly. I was hoping to be able to say goodbye to it in a more gradual way.

A few Sunday nights ago, I suddenly recalled that many of the songs for the service have been recorded and uploaded to a Youtube channel. When everyone else had gone to sleep, I turned off most of the lights in the house, put in my headphones, and attended the service once more. I could close my eyes and feel the darkness of the sanctuary envelop me, smell the old church, see the candlelit singers in my mind once more and hear their piercingly beautiful voices. I’ve been attending the service for years, and it moved me how much of it has settled into my heart and my memory, ready for me when I come searching for it in my time of need.

The last song I listened to was a moving arrangement of the Lord’s Prayer. Every week since, and for the coming months, I will continue to pray with them that God would deliver us from all evil.
May He bless you and all those who are suffering in these difficult times.

From northern Utah:

These past two months have surely been a fulfillment of the curse, “may you live in interesting times”!

I live at home with my semi-retired parents and a college-age brother. Our house is paid for and we have enough and to spare, but we’ve always lived frugally, following our church’s suggestion to keep a minimum of three months’ food and cash reserve.

The timing of the stay-at-home order was fortuitous for me; just as it became impossible to do my usual work (I’m a cleaning lady for several elderly people), the weather is nice enough that one of the widows I work for has given me continued employment cleaning up her yard and planting her a vegetable garden. I am so grateful for her kindness, and I thank the Lord for the small miracles that caused me to meet her.

My father is a bishop for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and as such we get a ground-level view of suffering in our neighborhood. We live in a college town, and in the last two weeks alone, we’ve gotten far too many calls from young husbands who have just lost their jobs. He is doing what he can to help them figure out their options.

One of our family jokes is that we pay our tithing, and the Lord opens up the windows of heaven – all of them (see Malachi 3:10). Usually this happens in the form of food – we get so much that we literally cannot use it all . . . so we share with those in need. My dad has long gotten ‘chicken bread’ from one of the local bakeries – day-olds that they can’t sell – and since there are so many people struggling right now, Dad’s been giving the freshest loaves away to neighbors who can’t leave the house, or who have lost jobs. Since we have chickens, we’ve also been giving away our extra eggs. To help out our favorite restaurants, though we used to eat out less than once a month, we have started ordering take-out once a week, though we have enough food stored that we don’t really need to.

We have a quarter-acre garden and a quarter-acre orchard. This year, it may be that we need to give away more of our produce than usual, so I’ve been reclaiming a few extra row feet from the bindweed. I planted too many tomato seeds back in January, and it seems that may have been prescient.

Suddenly, all the skills that I joked I was acquiring for what happens after the zombie apocalypse are about to be in high demand – my mom’s sewing masks as our church has requested us to do at this very moment, and I will be helping her. All of those old-fashioned pioneer skills that my parents taught me are about to become very useful again, and I’m grateful indeed that I acquired them – and got my learning curve in – before the crisis.

The seasons roll on, and the dark winter of this pandemic will eventually give way to a promise of spring, and again to the flourishing swelter of summer. So it has always been. We are promised that in the world we will have tribulation – that is a promise – but also that Christ has overcome the world. His infinite atonement was to take away not only the sting of death, but also to comfort us through our sorrows and afflictions. He is our Great Physician, and he is might to save; his hands are stretched out still.

From Pennsylvania:

I’ve appreciated your writing for a long time, but please accept my particular thanks for the effort you’ve put into addressing this pandemic.

Not long ago, a lonely young man sat at the kitchen table in a rural Pennsylvania cabin, watching the livestream of a church worship service two hundred miles away. The church sanctuary was a lonely place, too – his pastor stood in an empty sanctuary preaching through a camera to a scattered congregation. It was Palm Sunday.

He tried to block out the noise from the next room, where his friends and relations sat by the coal stove playing cards and enjoying Christian fellowship or something. But try as he might, the sounds of lively conversation would intrude. He knew that far away, his parents and siblings were gathered in their own living room watching the same live stream, prevented by the coronavirus outbreak from joining their brothers and sisters in Christ, out of concern for loved ones and at-risk fellow congregants. Dozens of his friends and hundreds more of his acquaintance were doing likewise all over the Philadelphia region, all of them longing to be gathered together again in the presence of God and each other to worship Him as one. But knowing they were watching with him just wasn’t the same as being together.

He wished the merry crowd in the sitting room would join him, or invite him to bring the livestream in so that they could all listen. But they were unchurched believers – or perhaps organically churched, he wasn’t exactly sure – anyway, they disapproved of man-made labels, denominations, and divisions within the church. To them, his membership in, and accountability to, a local church was a kind of oppression. The church, they said, was made up of all believers, and organized Christianity was a human innovation designed to control people. The Christian Sabbath wasn’t a thing, in their opinion; every day was God’s day and wherever two or three are gathered in His name, that’s the church. So, while this young man tried to focus on the hymns, the prayers and the Word proclaimed, they played cards and discussed how badly the organized church was failing in its duties during the ongoing crisis.

After all, they said, hadn’t followers of Jesus in times past been willing to run towards the danger? Hadn’t believers in the early church, and even during the plagues of the medieval period, been on the front lines caring for the sick and needy, no matter how contagious? What a shame it is, they said, to see Christians hunkered down at home, afraid to go out and live life to the fullest, just because of a contagion. Death isn’t supposed to be scary for the Christian anyway, is it? So sad, so sad.

With an effort the young man called his attention back to the screen. The pastor was praying. He prayed for the grace to look upwards from this groaning and suffering creation and the vision to see something of the beauty and goodness of the Redeemer for whom she waits. He prayed for comfort for the sick, the grieving, and the anxious. He prayed especially for the many members of the congregation who were (and still are) on the front lines of the crisis – doctors, nurses, janitors, medics – some of whom were even at that very moment tending to the sick. And he prayed that all of us might find, in our exile from each other, a renewed appreciation for the Lord’s Day and the immense privilege that is ours when we gather as living stones, being built up together into a temple for the Triune God in whose presence we meet.

A week later, my wife and I gathered our children again around the computer screen to celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord, the foundational basis of all our hope as Christians. Later, we joined around twenty of our neighbors for a small service in the field across the street, led by a neighbor who is a medical doctor and an officer in a small IFB Baptist church. As we stood in scattered family groups and sang hymns together, my mind went back to that young man and his lonely time of worship. The irony of it all was inescapable. Here we were, committed Presbyterians, worshipping the God who is there, affirming the truth of our Lord’s bodily resurrection, and looking forward to His return with Baptists and Roman Catholics. We could do this without leaving false impressions in part because we knew where each other stood. We didn’t need to agree about all the important doctrines before we could praise God together. We could – and we do – see grave error in each other’s theology, while still coming together in thankfulness for the One who has redeemed us. Yet the same people who reject doctrinal distinctions as divisive and unnecessary could not see the value in joining with that young man on the Lord’s Day to worship and hear the Word, choosing instead to sit aloof and congratulate themselves on having chosen the better part.

As Dr. Carl Trueman likes to say, all churches have liturgies, and all Christians have creeds and confessions. The only question is whether they will take the trouble to write them down so others can look at them and talk about them. In that moment it seemed clear to me that the core value of the so-called organic church movement is the avoidance of accountability. Never mind church discipline; by claiming to just believe the Bible and rejecting creeds, confessions and statements of faith, they eschew even intellectual accountability.

And where was this lonely young man while his church celebrated the resurrection via livestream and our neighbors gathered in the meadow? The loneliness had won. He was joining in the games with his unchurched friends. Maybe later he would catch the sermon on YouTube.

I doubt if those good people have any idea of what they miss by rejecting the visible church. But dear God! I wish that they could anticipate the harm their example may do. How can one love Christ but hold His bride in contempt? How can one be joined to Christ but not His body? This all feels especially raw because so many of us desperately want to gather right now but can’t. It’s frankly gut wrenching to think of our brothers and sisters throughout history, from the early church to the Covenanters of Scotland and right on down to many today in other parts of the world, risking their liberty and even their lives to meet together on the first day of the week, while coddled American Christians pontificate about legalism or debate the pros and cons of organized worship. If corporate worship on the Lord’s Day really is adiaphora (a matter of indifference), shouldn’t these enlightened moderns be taking that message to underground churches in China where it is desperately needed?

Like many others, I grieve over the multiplied schisms in the visible church. Among many joys we may look forward to when Christ returns, the removal of these divisions and the reconciliation of God’s people is surely one of the greatest. But in the meantime – to borrow a beautiful metaphor from C.S. Lewis – let us not live in the hall, but in the rooms, because it is there that we find fires, and chairs, and meals. We live the Christian life alone at immense peril.

From Littleton, Colorado:

I’m writing to you from Littleton, Colorado. I have been a reader of your blog for years and have rooted you on when it comes to the Benedict Option and your correct diagnosis of the impact of the woke left on Christian Institutions. However the last month or so I have bristled at you and your writings covering the virus. I consider myself rational, my college major was biology, my wife is a physician assistant and my brother a doctor, yet I’ve found myself rebelling at everything that is standing in the way of things returning to normal.

My faith, which should be sustaining me is in tatters. I’ve lived a very comfortable suburban life and have become accustomed to making plans and having a pretty good idea of how things would go. I’ve always thought Christ would be sufficient, and if push came to shove I’d be able to persevere. This interruption and the possibility of economic ruin, has made me realize how weak my faith is. I crave comfort and certainty. I’m being asked to consider the possibility that I may have to sacrifice everything and trust Christ fully. Like the rich young ruler, this virus is making me consider if I could leave everything and only follow Christ. I’m failing and rather than repentance, my heart is hard and my neck is stiff. I’m finding myself unconcerned with the human toll as long as we can return to normal. I’m not doing well.

I grieve to read that, but as I told that reader, he is being more honest with himself, spiritually, than a lot of us are.

I’m going to write one more post before I go to bed tonight, and I’ll set it to publish automatically on Friday. It’s Orthodox Good Friday, so I’m going to stay offline. I am so thankful for all of you who have written these diaries, and who have read them. Please, if you pray, pray for each other. There is not a soul in this country, or in this world, who is not fighting a great battle of some sort, because of this plague.

I am eager to keep hearing from you all. Please write to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line. Don’t forget to say where you’re from. Please keep in mind that I will not be checking e-mail on Friday, because of the day of mourning. Next Pandemic Diaries will be on Saturday.

The post Pandemic Diaries 30 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Why We Are Polarized

From political scientist Eric Kaufmann has a good review essay of Ezra Klein’s new book about political polarization:

Aside from a throwaway line or two, Klein misses the crucial synergy between minority movements and leftist ideology. He shies away from taking too close a look at his tribe: the largely white 8 percent of Americans the Hidden Tribes report labels Progressive Activists. Commenting on Matt Yglesias’ Great Awokening among white liberals—who are now more likely to see America as racist than black liberals—Klein hints that greater sensitivity to minority concerns is an inevitable adjustment to demographic realities. This ignores the fact that the Awokening is an ideological innovation, a fundamentalist upsurge of John McWhorter’s religion of antiracism, in which white liberals worship at the feet of high priests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, eagerly lapping up his anti-white sermons. As allies, they achieve moral purity, this-worldly absolution, and a superior status to their un-woke brethren.

The wave of woke innovations—from trans activism to microaggressions to white fragility—is treated as an overdue ‘democratization of discomfort’ caused by demographic shifts. But Klein seems to elide the distinction between feeling uncomfortable as a minority in a largely white male environment and being trained by an ideology to be hypersensitive to non-slights like someone wearing a Chinese prom dress, saying “you guys,” or writing a novel about minority characters. The rising number of Catholics and Jews in American universities at midcentury did not produce a trope of “Protestant fragility” or “Protestant privilege,” yet the rising share of nonwhites is supposed to explain the progressive obsession with “white privilege.”

Klein hasn’t imbibed the wisdom of Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s The Rise of Victimhood Culture: that feeling disrespected or offended is largely a cultural construct. Being outraged by a speaker you haven’t heard of addressing an audience somewhere on campus is not an untutored reaction, but a cultivated ideological performance. Reporting this to the campus authorities while drumming up a flash mob on twitter is an irrational “speech is violence” response that bears a resemblance, say the authors, to Aaron Burr challenging Alexander Hamilton to a duel over an insult.

Kaufmann says that there is no question but that the GOP and right-wing media have done their part to fuel polarization. But, he says, Klein “fails to see that contemporary progressivism contains a fundamentalist impulse that warps judgment on its holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality. On these questions, many media outlets are unable to see that they are guided by faith rather than reason.” Kaufmann goes on:

As I argue in my book Whiteshift, these are questions we should be able to calmly discuss and compromise over. Lamenting ethnic change, as Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson have (perhaps clumsily), is not the sin Klein suggests it is unless their statements reflect hostility toward an outgroup rather than attachment to an in-group or to the traditional ethnic composition of America. And decades of psychological research confirms that these sentiments are not correlated. To render the least charitable interpretation of Ingraham and Carlson’s remarks in an attempt to land the “racist” jab drives an important conversation underground, where it festers, fanning polarization.

Kaufmann praises the Klein book overall, but he says that progressives declaring certain values as “sacred” — that is, not up for discussion and compromise — and by using institutional dominance to advance those values in policies, make it harder to reach accommodation with conservatives. Read the whole thing.

This commentary reminds me of a conversation I had with a Southern friend today about how complex race relations are in the South, and how the human reality defies ideology. There was this case of a progressive white pastor who came into an all-white congregation, and began urging them to integrate the church. He was not wrong to want the church to be open to all. What he didn’t understand, though, was that racism was not the only reason (and maybe by that time, not the reason at all) why black people weren’t part of that congregation. The progressive pastor seemed to have the view that black people would want to come to that mainline Protestant church if they felt welcome — and that the only reason they wouldn’t feel welcome is the racism (real or perceived) of the congregation.

What he didn’t understand, according to people in that congregation, was that black people in that town were devoted to their own churches, which had a very distinct worship style — one quite different from that particular white Protestant congregation. Why should black people give up their churches — the churches that their ancestors had been worshiping in for generations — to come to the white church, especially when the style of worship was not what they had come to love? And why should those white congregants have wanted to change their worship traditions to draw others?

The pastor — who was young and relatively inexperienced — was right to oppose racism, but he didn’t recognize that there was a lot more going on with church culture in that town than his liberal ideology could account for. His beliefs were actually pretty patronizing towards local black Christians, with their unspoken assumption that black folks would naturally prefer to worship with whites, in the white Protestant style, if not for the whites’ presumptive racism.

That pastor greatly polarized his congregation, and was eventually transferred after a significant number of them left.

To be fair, I have heard similar stories about young conservative Catholic priests who have come into a more or less liberal congregation and changed things so quickly that they seriously alienated the congregation. To be sure, there’s an important difference: in the Catholic cases, this had a lot to do with the conservative priests bringing the parish back to liturgical and doctrinal norms that previous liberal pastors had let slide. The Protestant case I brought up had nothing to do with theology, and only tangentially with liturgical norms. Still, I have heard over the years from older conservative Catholic priests who have criticized younger ones who come out of seminary with the right ideas and sentiments, but who construe the world in such a way as to make enemies of people unnecessarily.

It’s like this with politics, isn’t it? I cannot stand the way Donald Trump seems to go out of his way to antagonize others. He places more value on owning the libs than in getting things done. On the left, though, it’s hard to hear them gripe about how bigoted, intolerant, and closed-minded conservatives are when in truth, their definition of bigotry, intolerance, and closedmindedness is “doesn’t agree with progressives on every single thing.”

One more thought about modernity and partisanship — a Charles Taylor point. It seems to me that one reason why people of all kinds are so quick to fault those not like themselves is because we are all aware that we could choose otherwise. Kaufmann points to research showing that a couple of generations ago, few people cared if their kids married someone of the opposite political party. Now, they really care. People seem to think these days that because you can know about all kinds of political ideologies and opinions, you should be held morally responsible for your choices. That’s normal. The weird thing is that people of all kinds seem to care more about politics than religion — or, to be more precise, they care about politics as if it were a religion. That this happened at the same time that people in America became both more secular, and came to care less about religious difference, is really interesting.

The Protestant-Catholic divide in Baton Rouge, the Louisiana capital, is not nearly as socially significant as it was in prior to 1970. The city is slightly more Protestant by population, but in the late 1980s, a Catholic priest who did a lot of work on ecumenism in the 1960s until his retirement in the 1980s told me that this was a very different city when he arrived here from Belgium. Protestants and Catholics lived side by side, but in two different worlds. That’s just not the case anymore, overall. I have a sense, though, that people feel much more divided now about politics than about religion. Let me put it like this: I feel comfortable talking religion with anybody in town, but I would not discuss politics with either liberals or conservatives, unless I knew that they already agreed with me, because people would get way too emotional, way too fast.

So, question to the room: why have so many Americans shifted their partisan passions from religion to politics? Look at this new finding out from Pew Research:

Read the whole story here. I think it is truly appalling that any American would ever find it “not acceptable” to criticize the President of the United States — Republican or Democrat — under any circumstances, except perhaps some strictly limited conditions of war. These are numbers (from the GOP side) that you would expect to see Catholics express about the pope, not a free people about a president. That’s not liberals being knotheads; that’s conservatives.

(And, I want to know who is in the 14 percent of Democrats who believe elected officials shouldn’t criticize Trump on Covid response.)

Sorry for the long, rambling post. I am going to take a break from this blog on Orthodox Good Friday, so I didn’t have time to hone this thing down. I’m going to post Pandemic Diaries 30, then sign off till Saturday. Please be patient with the comments. I’ll log in at some point on Good Friday and approve them, so I won’t have a huge backlog, but I won’t be back to regular approving until Saturday.

The post Why We Are Polarized appeared first on The American Conservative.

Karma Comes For Team Tony Spell

Remember the Rev. Tony Spell, the bumptious Baton Rouge pastor who has made a name for himself defying the governor’s ban on big gatherings? Turns out one of his church’s lawyers has been hospitalized with coronavirus:

The lawyer, Jeff Wittenbrink, attended two events at Life Tabernacle Church — an April 2 news conference and an April 5 church service, and has been at Baton Rouge General since Tuesday after progressively worsening conditions, including a high fever and persistent cough, he said.

Reached in his hospital room Thursday while taking oxygen through his nose, Wittenbrink said he did not feel ill during the church events and has “no idea” how he may have contracted the virus.

“I went to Albertson’s twice a day. I went to Sam’s. I went to Walmart. I went to Lowe’s. I used the gas pumps. I mean I just wasn’t careful. God knows where I got it. The bad thing is I might have spread to somebody. I feel bad about that, ” he said.

This. Is. Why. The. Governor. Has. Banned. Large. Gatherings.

Worse, a congregant at Spell’s Life Tabernacle has died of coronavirus,though Spell, predictably, calls that fake news:

The Rev. Tony Spell, the church’s pastor, did not return messages left Thursday about Orillion after the coroner released his death information following a public records request from The Advocate. Spell later in the day confirmed to television stations WAFB and WVLA that Orillion was a parishioner in good standing.

Spell also disputed that Orillion’s death was due to the virus, despite the coroner’s determination. “That is a lie,” Spell told WAFB.

Because a pastor knows better than the coroner. Right.

You might recall that last week, Spell told TMZ that death would be a “welcome friend” to Christians if it came in defense of their faith, including dying because you caught the virus by coming to church. I guess it’s more pleasant to say the coroner is a liar than to face having to face your own potential moral responsibility for this old man’s coronavirus death.

I hope the lawyer recovers, and I pray that the old man’s family will be comforted in their loss. This is why churches are closing now, though!

I want to throw this tweet from a prominent conservative talk radio host out there too:

I am friends with a lady who is a nurse. She hated my guts in 2016 for not supporting Trump. She deleted her Facebook acct today. She got tired of seeing all her friends saying the virus is no big deal when she has never seen anything like it in over 20 years as a nurse.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 17, 2020

The post Karma Comes For Team Tony Spell appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Joy Of Mycophilia

It gives me great pleasure to tell you that people in Baton Rouge are standing by the Red Stick Farmers’ Market during this crisis. My wife put in a big Easter order this week, for the Thursday morning pick-up. Since the crisis, the farmers market has gone to online orders, with curbside delivery at a single site in the city. This was the first time we had done the farmers market order since the crisis started, and it occurred to us that we ought to be doing more to help the local folks. Julie and Nora went to get our stuff, and joined a line of over 100 cars! That’s so encouraging!

The thing I was most looking forward to in the bounty was mushrooms from Mushroom Maggie’s, a little mushroom farm in Starhill, not too far from where my mom lives. Maggie Long and her husband Cyrus Lester run the farm. As they explain in this news story, they didn’t know much at all about mushroom growing, until they decided a few years back to teach themselves. Now they have a successful business.

In the news story to which I link, Maggie tells the reporter that she didn’t really care for eating mushrooms before she got into the business, because all she knew were bland supermarket mushrooms. But once you taste homegrown mushrooms, in all the different varieties, it opens you up to a new world. I really love mushrooms, but don’t cook them often because I’m the only one in my house who does. The other day, as we were planning our Pascha menu, I realized that when I break the Lenten fast on Sunday, I want a T-bone steak grilled medium rare, boiled new potatoes swimming in butter and sea salt, and Maggie’s mushrooms sauteed in a special bit of Normandy butter that I’ve reserved. I also want to make a chicken and mushroom stew next week, or maybe a chicken and mushroom pie. I e-mailed Maggie for advice.

Today she sent home some shiitakes and some pioppinos, and a type I can’t identify. Look at the beautiful gills:

My favorite way to eat mushrooms is simply sautéed in good butter, with a sprinkling of sea salt on top. I think I really must be a hobbit. I love the earthy aroma and taste of mushrooms. I think I should devote myself to learning how to make more delicious things with mushrooms, now that I have a source of homemade mushrooms nearby.

Are you a mushroom lover — that is, a mycophile? If so, what do you love about them? How do you like to cook them? Do you grow them yourself?

Julie and Nora brought back potatoes, chard, spinach, strawberries, golden beets and beet greens, fresh milk from a local dairy, and beef from a local cattle farmer, in their haul. To be especially careful, they washed the vegetables outside and dried them carefully on beach towels before bringing them into the house. It made me unexpectedly cheerful to see all that produce laying in the sun on this surprisingly cool south Louisiana spring day. And while they were doing that, the postman brought in some packets of seeds from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange:

 

Herbs and flowers and radishes to look forward to! This would have made me happy any old time, but coming right now, they almost brought tears to my eyes. This is one thing that my wife is better at than I am. Me, I’m satisfied to sit around contemplating the doom unfolding around us; she, though, is more motivated to get out there and plant something. She knows that she cannot stop what’s going to happen from happening, but she does not have to be paralyzed in the face of it. Sunflowers and zinnias and herbs and radishes aren’t going to kill the virus or save the economy, but they can gladden the heart, delight the tongue (just you wait till I make pesto, and hibiscus tea), busy the hands, and are, in a way, a vote of confidence in the future. Which is just the thing we need right now.

I encourage you to plant something, anything, in your backyard, if you have one. If you live in Baton Rouge or the surrounding area, and you have the money to buy from local farmers, please, please make weekly pick-up orders from the Farmers Market (see here for more information). Like many farmers, Mushroom Maggie’s makes most of its money from selling to restaurants … many of which are closed for the time being. We need to do what we can to support them. This is no doubt true where many of you readers live.

Don’t forget to put in the comments section your favorite mushroom stories and recipes!

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A College That Can Endure The Storm

After yesterday’s post about college during the pandemic, I received an e-mail from my friend David Whidden, a theologian at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University, or FranU. It’s the small Catholic college whose primary mission is to train nurses and medical personnel to work in the large nearby Our Lady of the Lake Hospital. David pointed out ways that FranU is in some ways poised to do well in the present and coming crisis of higher education. His e-mail was so good that I asked him to do an interview with me about it. It starts below the photo of Prof. Whidden in the classroom:

RD: I wrote recently that higher education is about to undergo a terrible reckoning in the economic fallout from the pandemic, and that small colleges will be the most vulnerable to shutdown. I expect this will be especially true of small religious colleges without endowments. But you say that your school, Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University, is uniquely adapted to thrive during this long crisis. What do you mean?

DW: For the last several years higher education leaders have been talking about the demographic cliff that was set to arrive in 2025 – we knew there was going to be a lot of institutions that would struggle to stay open when that hit, but I think this pandemic has sped up the timeline.  Even big universities are financially struggling due to returning room and boarding fees, losing international tuition (international students tend to pay full tuition, so are cash cows for universities), losing athletic revenue while keeping coaches and support staff on the payroll, etc.  Marquette, for instance, has lost $15 million in revenue and the University of Wisconsin is going to lose $100 million (which is a small part of their budget, but still!).  If students stay at home next fall, small tuition driven institutions that were already dangerously on the brink of insolvency may not make it.

So, as a small, Catholic, 100% commuter school, in a small state, with a very small endowment you would think that we’d be one of the first colleges to fall off the cliff, but I am much more hopeful about our future than I am of other colleges.  All the things that used to be disadvantages for us are suddenly advantages.  We have no dorms, no Greek life, no sports, and not even a cafeteria, so we haven’t had to return any money to students.  And let me add that while the lack of those things might have seemed like a disadvantage before the pandemic, I never considered them to be a disadvantage, because when I walked into a classroom I knew my students had only one reason to be there, which was for an education (for instance, the day after the national championship game I had my first class of the semester at 7:45 am and only had two out of 29 students absent).  Most of our budget is spent on what is supposed to be the main mission of higher education, which is to teach and support students, not on things that are secondary to the university.  And it keeps our prices low compared to private Catholic colleges at around $10,000 a year for undergraduates, before TOPS (or to put it another way, a lot of our students who went to private high schools in the area pay less for college than they did for high school).

So we don’t really offer the typical ‘college experience’, but what we do offer is an affordable, no frills education that truly leaves our graduates better off in the long run.

Our other secret weapon is that we have a niche in healthcare degrees, so most of our students are enrolled in undergraduate programs like nursing, respiratory therapy, radiologic technology, physical therapy assisting, biology (pre-med or pre-physicians assistant), and the like.  As the pandemic has made clear, there is an ongoing need for students with those degrees.  But their education all takes place in a Catholic and Franciscan context that forms them to be not just technically proficient, but also deeply human in their approach to their vocations.  Next year we are launching a program that will allow us to make sure that all our students are also properly formed with regard to healthcare ethics, which is something that we have also seen a need for in the pandemic.  I like to say that we have majors that matter, and that has never been more clear than in the last month.

For instance, because of the strain on the healthcare system here in Louisiana, we were asked to see what we could do to graduate our nursing and respiratory therapy students a month early so they could begin to help immediately.  I have a senior nursing student in one of my classes that I’m working to get finished by April 23 because we need him working as soon as possible – and he is going to be a great nurse!  Almost all our graduates leave with a job lined up, so their investment in higher education ends up being a wise one. I think a college like ours is going to be deeply attractive to parents and students, especially next year when people might want to stay closer to home.
 Also, our classes are small, usually capped for undergraduates at around 32, so we know our students by name.  And we are a Catholic college that actually treats the Catholic intellectual tradition with respect, not as a burden to be avoided, but as a gift to be shared.  It isn’t perfect, but our students get a faithful Catholic education while they are with us, and even if they don’t come here for that, they often leave appreciating what they were given (and this goes for our non-Catholics too).

Do all the students at Fran U plan to go into the healthcare field, or are there other potential career paths for them?

Well, there are other career paths, since we have degrees in business, theology, psychology, and the liberal arts, but what unites them all is a commitment to service.  I do an orientation session for new and transfer students and I always tell them that at FranU their education isn’t about them, but is about the people they are called to go out and serve.  So even our non-healthcare degrees are oriented to serving and helping people in important ways.  And students respond to this, because deep in their hearts they want someone to tell them that there is more to life than just their own needs and wants, that they will become the best version of themselves by learning to serve others.

A lot of college students show up at their university with no real idea of why they are there (I was once one of those), and so they drift.  But put them in a college where they are challenged to think about other people and you can see them mature and rise to the challenges that education presents.  Again, for the right kind of student, a university experience like that should be deeply attractive.

Why have you all added a Great Books component to the Fran U experience? If you’re only training people to work in healthcare, why do they need this kind of background?

We are launching a Great Books program in Fall of 2021, and while it is primarily aimed at liberal arts majors, we are excited about its possibilities for all students.  Our liberal arts program had very few majors, so we decided to reconfigure it as a Great Books program, though our program is quite different than many others, for several reasons.

First, and this is the primary benefit to healthcare majors, it is organized thematically rather than chronologically, which allows for any student to take just one of the courses as an elective and not necessarily feel like she has missed too much.  Plus, a thematic approach allows us to offer a Great Books program that fits our mission, so we will have a class on great books on healthcare, healing, etc.

Second, it does not reside in an honors college because we think that all students should have an opportunity to read great books, no matter how challenging it may be.

Our third difference is that every student is required to have a minor in a more ‘practical’ field, such as business, communications, psychology, biology, and so on.  We want them to have some marketable skills when they get done.

And fourth, every student will be required to do two internships, again to get some real-world experience and have some marketable skills – the research shows that liberal arts majors with internships have the best long-term outcomes.

Really, though, we just think students deserve a chance to be challenged by texts that ask them difficult questions and rarely provide easy answers, because that is the world they live in. It creates more supple and empathetic thinkers, who are not easily led by whatever the current intellectual fad of the day happens to be.

Additionally, we know from conversations with people like the headmaster of Sequitur, Brian Daigle, who has been very helpful and supportive of our plan, that the students who finish high school in a classical education model rarely can find a college that also values those classical approaches.  Why spend twelve years educating your child in a classical model only to have much of that work dismantled at a four year college that does not share your interest?

Broadly speaking, how do you anticipate this crisis changing higher education in the long term?

There are a lot of people who have argued that it will make online courses more acceptable or desired, but I actually think the opposite will happen.  I have already had students tell me that one thing they’ve learned is that they do better in the face-to-face classroom.  Online can work well for people who are working full-time, and that is good for increasing accessibility, but I think more students will want face-to-face classes after this.

I think that universities that recruit nationally are going to suffer from this because it just does not make a lot of sense to spend $50,000 a year to go to a college 500 miles or more from home, especially if it means you might not be able to see your parents in a quarantine.  I think the universities that will prosper will be the low-cost regional colleges that students can drive to and from on a daily basis, rather than stay in dorms.  The ‘college experience’ can be fun, but I don’t think parents are going to keep going for it anymore.

Finally, the financial strain of the pandemic and the coming demographic changes are going to result in a fair number of colleges closing.  It is going to be Darwinian.  I’m not sure who the winners and losers are going to be, but I’m glad that I am at a place that is affordable, mission-focused, and no-frills, because I think that gives us an advantage over a lot of our competitors, though even with those advantages we will have to be careful.

To learn more about FranU, click here. To learn more about David Whidden, click here.

I’d like to know more about small colleges that, like Fran U, are set up to weather this storm. Please feel free to tell your institution’s story in the comments.

The post A College That Can Endure The Storm appeared first on The American Conservative.

Pandemic Diaries 29

What ho! No news from here. There is news from you, though. Let’s get to it.

From Dallas (see his roaster above):

I’ve been roasting coffee off and on for 10 years but dropped off the habit  the last few years. This was a hobby brought to me by the older men and friends at my first Orthodox Parish in Costa Mesa California.  Not only are those men there responsible for my spiritual life as it is today but also for my current sanity with such fresh coffee available.  Both are required to give me the strength to deal with two elementary aged kids and a baby plus an extroverted wife who is going crazy at home as well.  Your mention of thanking God for those small things brought the origins of my coffee habit to mind.  I am thankful for those men sharing their passion for God and passion for transforming green beans into roasty delicious coffee beans
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For us the legume of choice for most of lent was the lowly pinto bean.  For some reason my 1.5 year old LOVES them.  So we’ve made a lot of them.  I’m ready for some red meat seared at high heat and some low and slow pork shoulder in the smoker.  I’ve got a pork shoulder defrosting in the fridge right now.  I think I’ll overnight smoke it Saturday night so I can eat it for breakfast.

All is well in our house during this time of crisis.  My wife and I are both able to do most of our work from home.  The kids while going a bit stir crazy in our small house.  However, both did learn to ride with no training wheels so now getting outside with them is great.  We’re stocked well on food.  After the last Costco trip (what an experience that was.  You get directed to a parking “zone”, wait in your car until your “zone” is called, and then go in.  This was to control the number of people in there) we haven’t had to shop for a couple weeks.  I’ve tried to write some pandemic diary type stuff a few times but when I read others experience I feel like we are so totally normal or doing so well its really kind of embarrassing.  I feel bad for my extroverted friends.  I know they are struggling.  I’m an introvert and a “hobby collector” so I don’t ever really run out of things to do on my own.  I’d rather not ever go back into the office other than mandatory meetings because its much easier to get my work done without “drive-by’s” distracting me.

The only crisis we had was my newly minted bike riding 8yo son took a nasty spill and got a deep cut/tear.  It looked like it might need stitches.  Their pediatrician doesn’t do stitches, the urgent cares around us are either closed or only doing e-visit triage, but to do e-visit you have to be a current patient.  So far 30 minutes of phone calls everyone basically said our only option was to take him to the ER.  So my wife did.  It wasn’t terrible she said.  Mostly Empty.  Everyone had to stay far apart.  Everyone had to have a mask.  Nobody could sit near anybody.  There were screeners at the door.  They had to glue his wound together.  Something we couldn’t have done without the lidocaine they gave him.  Unfortunate we will have to pay the ER rates on this for something an Urgent Care should have been able to do.  But we are doing really well.  So it’s a hurdle we will be able to overcome.

From Melbourne, Australia:

I am a young Catholic writing to you from Melbourne, Australia about how coronavirus has impacted our lives here in the Land Down Under.

I have been reading your articles for a while now and have enjoyed your commentary on world affairs and the challenges faced by Christians in the west. I thought the Benedict Option was excellent, and am constantly recommending it to others. However, I initially felt you were excessive in your assessment of the danger posed by the coronavirus earlier this year, when the virus was largely contained to China. At the time when you were posting letters talking of Chinese people dying in the streets, Australia only had sporadic cases from people returning from overseas and it seemed like a distant problem that wouldn’t affect us. Certainly like many westerners, we assumed such an outbreak could never happen in a western country, considering how ‘good’ our health system and quarantine regimes are. How proud and arrogant we were!

Eventually, in early March, I started buying the occasional extra foodstuff when I went shopping, just in case ‘fearmongers’ like you were right. I think I started taking coronavirus seriously about a week before the rest of Australia, managing to stockpile enough spare food to last for two weeks. Soon enough, the realisation hit that Australia was losing control of the virus, as more cases popped up connected to people fleeing COVID-19 hot spots, followed by the first ‘community outbreak’ in Sydney. People began to panic buy toilet paper and other things, leading to empty shelves and anxiety about supply.

In mid-March, myself and my wife developed mild flu-like symptoms, and I was tested for coronavirus. We were told to self-isolate until my results came back. We feared for our health and quickly the realisation dawned on us of how fragile human life can be. Blessedly, the symptoms peaked at a mild level and disappeared fairly quickly. 

At that time results took 5-6 days to come back, as Australia scrambled to get on top of the flood of tests which began to come in around that time. We waited over a week to be told that my test sample was lost, which I was assured was ‘rare’. We self-isolated for a total of 2 weeks (lucky we had that stockpile of food!), and the world had changed dramatically when we came out. People were wearing masks at the shops, offices had switched to working from home, sports were played in front of empty stadiums (before being cancelled all together) and popular parks and beaches are shut. Australia was effectively in total lock down. Indeed, our government has mandated that you must be isolated for two weeks directly after entering the country and most states have similar rules for interstate travellers. Western Australia has even restricted travel between different regions of the state!


Luckily for Australia, our government placed restrictions on Chinese travellers very early (January), despite calls of racism from the Left (we also went through a phase where much of the coronavirus coverage focused on racism). They also implemented lock down measures with decent cooperation between state and federal governments just before things could have got really bad. Case numbers are dropping off and it seems like Australia has avoided that dangerous first wave that Europe and the US are experiencing. For this we are extremely grateful, especially as I am immuno-compromised (hence why I was quite worried about my sniffles and got tested for COVID!). The national conversation has now shifted to what happens from here, how the country can open up again without a second wave happening.
 
My wife and I now spend all day together, both working from home, longing for the time that we can see family and friends again. While we are still enjoying the relative novelty of marriage, tensions can flare from the stress of being around the same person 24/7 and no one else. Our morning and evening walks through our suburb provide us with a chance to wind down and stretch our legs. At times it feels these brief periods of exercise is all that is keeping us sane. 
 
Our social and religious calendars have had to adapt. We have already watched one friend’s wedding online and missed another. Our regular Sunday Mass attendance has switched to watching online after public Masses were cancelled (with the support of our Bishops – indeed Australia has not had any major religious leaders resist government orders to stop public religious services). Surprisingly, I have found online Mass to be quite spiritually fulfilling, almost as if I was there. Something about praying those familiar prayers and the rhythm of the liturgy is very grounding in this difficult time. Certainly, our smiles were beaming as the Gloria blasted from our TV on Easter Vigil and it was still a joyous moment for us. Christ is risen, Alleluia, Alleluia!
 
Considering the effects on the Australian Catholic Church, I am quite optimistic. Sometimes it appears that our pews are full of heterodox ‘cultural’ Catholics, typically older as their children have abandoned the Church all together. Perhaps this time of upheaval will break the habits many of them have of attending Mass or parish activities and they will not return after this is over. While the loss of souls is sad, I think it may give more room within the Church for the faith to be preached in its fullness without the same resistance from within. Additionally, I am seeing people search for meaning in their life now that they are faced with a global catastrophe, so perhaps that flame will be re-lit for some of the lukewarm or the heterodox. Certainly, even for those more invested in their faith, the forced retreat they are on may lead to some kind of spiritual renewal. Finally, I am seeing so many parishes put a lot more effort into online resources, which of course cannot replace physical services but can be useful in supplementing it (for example, it may be impossible for me to attend daily Mass, but now I can listen to it online while I am at work).

Looking overseas, it is interesting to contrast how Australians have generally been willing to fall in line behind quite draconian measures in comparison to the stories we hear in the USA. Yes, there has been a bit of grumbling in Australia, certainly around arbitrary laws such as the criminalisation of ‘driving without direction’ (going for a drive just to get out of the house with no intention of getting out of the car is a breach of the lockdown laws), or the apparent inconsistencies of ‘boot camps’ and hairdressers being allowed to remain open whilst national parks are closed. However, both sides of politics have been fairly unified in their messaging and most people are taking the restrictions seriously even if some are reluctant. It’s fascinating to see the protests in Michigan (‘Operation Gridlock’) in reaction to a Stay Home order, the reluctance to close state borders or the partisan divide over how strict lockdown laws should be. Perhaps I do not understand the subtleties of the American situation, but I’d be interested to know if you think the American emphasis on personal independence and ‘freedom’ has exacerbated the crisis in the US in a way that perhaps has not happened elsewhere?

Please know that our prayers are with you all in America as well as other nations facing this catastrophe.

The post Pandemic Diaries 29 appeared first on The American Conservative.

We Live In Dangerous Times

If you allow yourself to start thinking about the long game in this pandemic — I mean, past the summer months — you will go down into a dark hole. There really doesn’t seem to be any way out of a world of economic hurt. Long-lasting economic hurt, at that. The Washington Post reports today about the risks of opening up the economy again too soon, or too widely:

A draft national strategy to reopen the country in phases, developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, emphasizes that even a cautious and phased approach “will entail a significant risk of resurgence of the virus.”

The internal document, obtained by The Washington Post, warns of a “large rebound curve” of novel coronavirus cases if mitigation efforts are relaxed too quickly before vaccines are developed and distributed or broad community immunity is achieved.

I don’t think anybody thinks that we can maintain this widespread lockdown for 18 months, if that’s how long it takes to come up with a vaccine. But people who think that opening up will be without serious downsides are deluding themselves. There are no good options here, only less bad ones. The fact is, most of us are going to be significantly poorer, and economically unstable.

Though it’s hard to predict what is likely to happen, it’s a safe bet to say that this going to have grave political consequences. The genetics scientist Razib Khan writes:

Had I been asked in late 2019 what would eventually break American global dominance, I’d have said the rise of China. Projections indicated that by 2030 or so, China would overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy. When was the last time the U.S. had not been the largest economy? According to the late economic historian Angus Maddison, it was about 1880. And what nation was the largest economy in that year? China.

My thinking, pre-pandemic, was that the psychic shock of America’s eventual demotion might trigger cultural and political turmoil, as the nation would find itself forced into a reckoning. Then came 2020. The true shock to our civilization has come not from our own self-image but from nature itself. Western elites were clearly not prepared for this turn, a shattering of our conceit that reality is ours to create. In the U.S., bickering about an appropriate official name for Covid-19, along with a sequence of bureaucratic blunders that led to dire shortages of diagnostic testing and medical gear, highlight the core competencies of today’s media and governmental elites: administrative turf wars and verbal jousting to burnish status in positional games. Even in this high-stakes moment, they cannot abandon unproductive old reflexes. In a strange turn of events, twenty-first-century American elites turn out to resemble the Chinese mandarins of yore, absorbed in intricate intrigues at court to advance their careers while European gunboats prowl the waterways.

More:

Meantime, esoteric forms of intellectual exercise that prioritize human subjectivity and the power of social construction have marched through academic institutions and metastasized into public spaces. Thinkers like Judith Butler of UC Berkeley, who argues that gender is a performance intelligible only in a social matrix, come to shape elite discourse more with every passing year. They would have us believe that the shape of the world is purely a function of our wills, and that reality can be bent to our ideology without limitation.

Now Covid-19 has thrust the untamed physical world back into our line of vision. It has brought post-materialist, twenty-first-century humanity face to face with one of the species’ deepest and most atavistic fears: pestilence and plague. The disease will not be defined away. It is not a social construction or interpretation. It is immune to critique or public shaming on social media. Covid-19 will not be “cancelled.”

Of course he’s correct about the left-wing critical theorists who believe that reality is nothing but narrative. But you can find the same kind of thing on the right. This is what happens when you are a society that is rich and technologically advanced. You come to think that the world is more controllable than it really is.

The other night I watched the first episode in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s ten-part Decalogue series from 1988. It’s about a scientist who lives alone with his young son in Warsaw. The boy’s aunt (sister of the father) is a believing Catholic, but the scientist father puts his faith in science alone. Reality is what can be measured, and only that. The boy, Pawel, admires his father, and is learning how to love science by doing experiments with him. One cold day, Pawel and his dad work out on the computer whether or not the local weather has been cold enough for long enough to have made the surface of the lake safe enough for ice skating. The numbers check out. But little Pawel still falls through the ice and dies. We don’t discover what precisely went wrong, but his father is shattered by the limits of rationalism. He had made an idol of it.

Kieslowski, who was an agnostic, doesn’t make the scientist into a straw man. Science really can tell us a lot about the world, and anyway, the scientist father goes out to the frozen lake himself to confirm through direct personal observation the information his computer provided. Yet for whatever reason, nature did not behave as predicted, and a boy fell through the ice and drowned.

In our world, capitalism, globalism, science, and technology have made a lot of people richer and healthier than our ancestors could have imagined. And these things have made daily life more materially pleasurable. They have also made it harder for us to keep death before our eyes, and therefore to maintain a properly tragic view of human existence. One of the best movies to explore this theme is Atom Egoyan’s 1997 film version of Russell Banks’s novel The Sweet Hereafter. In the plot, a school bus full of a town’s children slides out onto a frozen lake, breaks the ice, and sinks. All the children die. A lawyer comes to town to stir up the grieving parents to file a lawsuit against somebody — this, even though it appears to have been a true accident. The driver wasn’t to blame, nor was the equipment faulty. The movie is a meditation on our inability to cope with the fact that terrible things happen without anyone in particular being to blame. We can’t accept that, because it implies that life is not under our control as much as we wish it were.

(This, by the way, is why conspiracy theories are so popular. It is more unsettling to believe that a lone gunman in a school book depository in Dallas, acting only on his own motives, has the power to strike and kill the most powerful man in the world, than it is to believe that a hidden conspiracy made it happen. Conspiracy theories are strategies of reassurance, because they allow us to believe that the world is more orderly than it really is.)

But as usual, I digress. What I’m thinking about this afternoon is a Washington Examiner piece by Angela Nagle from a month ago: a column about Peter Turchin’s theory of chaos.The words “pandemic” or “coronavirus” don’t appear in it at all. Rather, Nagle discusses Turchin’s theories about which factors in a society cause civil unrest. According to Turchin’s analysis, the United States is due for a period of turmoil. Nagle writes:

In a 2017 review of Brian Burroughs’s Days of Rage, a book about the political violence of the Weather Underground Organization and other radical groups in the 1970s, Turchin wrote that the violence of the ’70s “provides us with a kind of a road map as to what to expect in the next few years.” The first thing to expect is an escalation of language that draws battle lines, fuses together the in-groups that will later spearhead violence, and demonizes and dehumanizes the dissidents’ opponents. The next phase, the “trigger,” has yet to happen. It is typically a “highly symbolic event,” often involving a “sacrificial victim.” For the Weather Underground and other similar groups in the 1970s, the trigger was the killing of the Black Panther Fred Hampton during a police raid in December 1969. After the trigger comes the spiral of violence and counterviolence. If something of that scale isn’t worrying enough, Turchin says our political elites are more polarized now than they were shortly before the American Civil War.

Back in 2016, it looked as though new possibilities were opening up with Trump’s apparent break from Reaganism and Sanders’s break from progressive neoliberalism. Today, however, it seems certain that absent some deus ex machina, no political figure will be capable of cutting across the ideological divide in order to address all the pressures described by Turchin.

Liberals may instinctively consider Turchin’s cyclical model of history fatalistic, but ironically, Turchin long believed that if he presented his theory to elites, they could avoid repeating the crises of the past. He seems to have changed his mind. In 2018, Turchin wrote that until recently, “I thought that we collectively have a decent chance of avoiding the crisis, but I now have abandoned this hope. A major reason for my pessimism is the resolute refusal by our ruling class (including its both Liberal and Conservative wings) to see the real causes of the crisis.” If past generations were doomed by ignorance to repeat the mistakes of history, our elites have the ability to recognize these mistakes — and to keep repeating them anyway.

Ten days ago on his blog, Turchin posted something about coronavirus and our “Age of Discord.” 

The takeaway is that the pandemic exacerbates trends that were already in place. Perhaps this is the “triggering” event. In a blog post from last November, Turchin posts slides that lay out his theory of why we should expect political violence in the 2020s. Excerpts:

 

As Turchin says on his blog, prediction is not the same thing as prophecy. Still, given how monumentally destructive this pandemic is and will be to our economy, and given the weaknesses that were already present before the first people started sneezing in Wuhan, it will be a miracle if we emerge from this crisis with things more or less as they are today.

I want to leave you with this — something I’ve already written about here before, but will mention again in this context. If you have a copy of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, go back and re-read the part toward the end in which she talks about the pre-totalitarian conditions of German and Russian societies. I will talk about this at greater length in my forthcoming book, Live Not By Lies, but let me say here that to read Arendt in the current American context is to set yourself up for a jolt. So many of the basic social facts of pre-totalitarian Germany and Russia are very much with us here and now.

For example, loneliness. Totalitarian movements, said Arendt, are “mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.” She continues:

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.

The political theorist wrote those words in the 1950s, a period we look back on as a golden age of community cohesion. Today, loneliness is widely recognized by scientists as a critical social and even medical problem. In the year 2000, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, an acclaimed study documenting the steep decline of civil society since mid-century, and the resulting atomization of America.

Since Putnam’s book, we have experienced the rise of social media networks offering a facsimile of “connection.” Yet we grow ever lonelier and more isolated. A 2018 Ipsos study for the health insurer Cigna found that 47 percent of Americans qualify as lonely on a standard academic scale for measuring social connection. One in four (27 percent) report that they rarely or never encounter another person who understands them. The phenomenon, which has been linked to serious public health concerns, is widespread across modern industrialized nations.

A second, related problem: social atomization. The masses supporting totalitarian movements, says Arendt, grew “out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class.”

Civic trust is another bond that holds society together. Arendt writes that the Soviet government, in an effort to monopolize control, caused the Soviet people to turn on each other. In Russia today, and in the post-communist countries of Central Europe, the obliteration of social trust remains a crippling legacy of communist rule.

In the United States, we have seen nothing like the state aggressively dismantling civil society – but it’s happening all the same. In Bowling Alone, Putnam documented the unraveling of civic bonds since the 1950s. Americans attend fewer club meetings, have fewer dinner parties, eat dinner as a family less, are much less connected to their neighbors. They are disconnected from political parties, and more skeptical of institutions. The result is that ordinary people feel more anxious, isolated, and vulnerable.

Putnam concluded that this social atomization has been caused by a number of factors. As he and other scholars have shown, the central theme of American life since mid-century has been about liberating the individual from social and economic bonds. Voters on both the left and the right are nostalgic for the sense of national cohesion and purpose America had in decades past, but of course no one wants to live under conditions of restricted economic mobility and personal liberty.

Putnam found no factor in atomization more significant, though, than technology — first television, then the Internet. This was because this technology gave people a way to spend leisure time alone. A polity filled with alienated individuals with no sense of community and purpose are prime targets for totalitarian ideologies and leaders who promise solidarity and meaning.

Another factor: loss of faith in hierarchies and institutions. Along those lines, people gave in to a desire to transgress and destroy — even elites were happy to watch the institutions of their society destroyed for the sake of allowing outsiders to take over. Furthermore, people in those pre-totalitarian societies came to value loyalty more than expertise. They stopped caring about truth, and began caring more about ideological narratives that suited their desires. And almost every aspect of life became politicized.

Mind you, these were social factors in place before the Bolsheviks and the Nazis took over, but that made those societies ready for the “solutions” they offered. The trigger for the Bolshevik Revolution was Russia’s disastrous defeat in World War I. For the Nazis, it was primarily the economic pain and suffering from Germany’s defeat in that same war, and the Great Depression, which brought the Nazis to power in an election.

We live in dangerous times.

The post We Live In Dangerous Times appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Gay Totalitarian Anti-Defilement League

Can you imagine hating religious people so much that you would rather see people suffer and possibly even die rather than allow religious doctors to treat them? That’s how it is with these New York City progressives. From NBC:

On Tuesday, a group of LGBTQ activists stood several yards away from the Samaritan’s Purse field hospital on the East Meadow lawn and blasted city and state officials and Mount Sinai Hospital for partnering with the evangelical humanitarian relief organization treating overflow patients suffering from the coronavirus.

Activists with the Reclaim Pride Coalition holding signs saying “help not hate” called out New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the leadership of Mount Sinai just across the park, for allowing the organization headed by evangelist Franklin Graham to treat New Yorkers while adhering to an anti-gay statement of faith.

“How was this group ever considered to bring their hatred and their vitriol into our city at a time of crisis when our people are fighting a pandemic?” asked Jay W. Walker, an activist with the Reclaim Pride Coalition.

Um, because the city’s hospitals were jammed, and it was feared that they would be completely overwhelmed? Because when you’re drowning, you don’t have the liberty of griping about the beliefs of the person throwing you the life preserver?

.@Franklin_Graham, no. When my city is fighting a global pandemic at its epicenter, NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR YOU AND #SatanicPurses TO INJECT YOUR HATRED AND BIGOTRY INTO OUR MIDST. Leave. We have far better and TRULY moral options. w/@queermarch #ReclaimPride #HealthNotHate https://t.co/vGyTiZg3WW pic.twitter.com/GkHqL2sNb0

— Jay W. Walker (@jaywwalker1) April 14, 2020

I honestly don’t understand this at all. Samaritan’s Purse says that it will not turn away anyone for treatment — and it certainly should not. If I was suffering from coronavirus and needed to be hospitalized, I wouldn’t care if my doctor were a Gay Communist Atheist who spent his spare time doing readings at Drag Queen Story Hour, and who had accepted Alabama Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban as his personal savior. I would be grateful for his service, especially if, as in the case with Samaritan’s Purse staff, he was doing it as a volunteer. And I would expect that he wouldn’t care about my religious and political views either. We would be two human beings brought together by tragedy, and cooperating to save life (my own). If New York City doesn’t want these Evangelical doctors and medical personnel there, then they should leave. But what a despicable attitude these activists have.

It is a fundamentally religious attitude, you know: fear of defilement. The idea that medical services delivered by a doctor or nurses who hold contaminated opinions are themselves somehow transmitters of contamination. If Jay W. Walker were flat on his back, gasping for breath, I bet you he would not turn away an Evangelical doctor. In fact, I bet any one of the volunteers at that Samaritan’s Purse facility has done more in one day to help the sick than the useless loudmouth professional activist Jay W. Walker has in all his life. During a pandemic, activists are as useless as teats on a boar.

You might say: “If Samaritan’s Purse really cared about the sick, they wouldn’t require volunteers to sign a Statement of Faith.” A “Statement of Faith” is standard for many religious schools and organizations, as a way to protect their mission. That’s probably what’s going on here. If I were running a Christian medical charity in a crisis, I would probably simply require that volunteers sign a statement saying they will not openly oppose the religious beliefs of the charity. But really, so what? If an Islamic medical organization wanted to volunteer to care for patients in a public health emergency, and it promised not to discriminate in giving that care, what kind of petty person would I be to complain that all its volunteers had to be affirmatively Muslim?

Besides, there’s a gay guy in that NBC story who filed a complaint with the NYC Human Rights Commission because he applied to volunteer with SP, but was turned away because he wouldn’t sign the Statement of Faith. Yeah, right — that guy really wanted to volunteer there. Please, spare me. Had there not been a Statement of Faith, and he had applied and been accepted, that guy would probably have tried to argue about politics and religion instead of working to help the sick. There is no good faith there, not with those people. I have not seen the Statement of Faith of Samaritan’s Purse, but it is possible that as an Orthodox Christian, I could not sign it. So what! I respect SP’s right to set its own guidelines for its staffers. Rather than bitch about what they are not doing perfectly right, according to my point of view, I would be better off trying to organize my people to serve in ways that are compatible with our beliefs.

These activists are expressing a totalitarian mindset. What makes totalitarianism different from authoritarianism is that totalitarians don’t simply care about what you do; they also care about what you think. They aren’t protesting the quality of care that Samaritan’s Purse is providing, nor are they protesting that SP is turning people away from treatment because of their sexuality, or anything else. They are protesting the religious beliefs that the SP personnel carry in their hearts and minds. That is what these gay-activist totalitarians, like totalitarians of all sorts, cannot abide.

If you think this is just a one-off, think again. This mindset is spreading among activists within medical schools and institutions. Last year, I interviewed a senior specialist at a major medical facility who told me that the facility’s policy on transgenderism was to affirm the desires and fulfill the wishes of those wanting to transition, even if, in the attending physician’s professional judgment, medical transition was not the best course of treatment for that particular patient, at that time. Furthermore, said the physician, he was very careful not to post anything on his social media accounts indicating his religious beliefs or opinions, in any way; he said he knows for a fact that the Human Resources department monitors the social media accounts of staff, looking for any sign of wrongthink.

The reason I found myself interviewing this man is because he grew up in a communist country, and I found him in researching my next book. This information about the policy at his hospital emerged in our interview. He said this kind of thing is common now in medicine. Traditional Christians, Orthodox Jews, practicing Muslims, and other religious believers are going to have to go into the closet professionally, even if their beliefs do not substantively affect their medical practice. Transgenderism is the vanguard of this revolution.

What’s happening in Central Park, then, is not simply a case of a bunch of progressive hotheads making a petty-minded stink about doctors spreading Evangelical cooties. It’s symbolic of a culture war raging inside American medicine. If you read The Benedict Option, you’ll remember the prominent Christian physician who told me that he would not want his children to go into the medical profession, because he expects that licensing requirements in the future will compel them to accept abortion, transgenderism, and other things incompatible with their faith.

UPDATE: A reader sends in this video of a prominent secular New Yorker, investor Whitney Tilson, thanking Samaritan’s Purse for the work they’ve done in the city on coronavirus. Thank you, Whitney Tilson!

The post The Gay Totalitarian Anti-Defilement League appeared first on The American Conservative.