Rod Dreher's Blog, page 173

Ciao Bella! Black Women — Right?

People who pay attention to the narrative-setting function of the major media will enjoy this e-mail from a reader:

As I think is true of you, I mostly subscribe to The New York Times for the arts/culture/books/travel/food reporting, which is simply irreplaceable (though their politics and foreign policy reporting tends to be excellent too). The article I’m writing you about is a classic culture/travel piece on black women who travel to Italy to find love. 

At first blush, you’d think the diversity tsars would be happy with this story! Imagine the gnashing of teeth from Richard Spencer and his ilk over miscegenation in the heart of Western civilization! But no, after the first two-thirds of the article, which proceeds as you would expect, we find a section lecturing us on the problematic assumptions behind the idea that black women can do better in Italy than in America (though it is clear that many of them believe that).

What follows is embarrassing evidence of a lack of numeracy and analytical rigor.

“For decades, the misleading idea that black women in America are the least likely people to find love has been the topic of books, movies, television specials and countless news articles. In 2017, the Pew Research Center found that black men are twice as likely as black women to have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity.”

We are told off the bat (in a reported piece) that this is a MISLEADING idea, reported in media. Then she cites a research article suggesting that it is empirically true.

“In fact, although interracial marriage has increased for all Americans, black men and women still marry each other most often; less than 10 percent of black men and 5 percent of black women were married to a spouse of another race in 2010, according to census data.”

We are told that this is the FACT that makes the idea misleading. But what she cites suggests (from another, more authoritative data source) … that black men marry outside their race at twice the rate black women do. In addition, if you know anything about dating markets and sex ratios, this would suggest an extraordinary imbalance that would make dating as a black woman in America quite difficult (which is, indeed, the experience of the women interviewed in the article).

Another number often cited in the conversation about black women finding love — and also criticized as misinterpreted — is a number that was popularized in a 2009 ABC News/Nightline broadcast titled “Single, Black, Female,” which said that 42 percent of black women in America have never been married, twice the percentage of white women who have never married.

By going through census data and conducting their own research, Ivory A. Toldson, a professor at Howard University School of Education and a research analyst for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and Bryant Marks, a psychology professor at Morehouse College and faculty associate at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, found that although the “42 percent” number is accurate [emphasis the reader’s — RD], it has been oversimplified and misinterpreted to fit into a negative narrative about black love.

“The often-cited figure of 42 percent of black women never marrying includes all black women 18 and older,” Mr. Toldson said, “but raising the age in an analysis eliminates age groups we don’t really expect to be married and gives a more accurate estimate of true marriage rates.”

She presents this number as misleading as well…even though the evidence she cites supports it! (And of course though they say things are different if you eliminate age groups we don’t really expect to be married that it improves, but if it was substantial they would have cited it.)

Essentially, these are all inconvenient truths for her case. But she still has to note that the attitude that these black women themselves take towards their love life is “problematic”.

What is going on here? Two things I think.

1) On the inside baseball bit, I think we are seeing the outgrowth of an increasingly blurred line between the opinion and editing functions at the NYT (the collapsed wall between Op-Ed and Editorial is part of this). It is arguably about agility for modern digital media as well as reducing overhead (eliminating the public editor/ombudsman role, cutting copy-editors, etc).

2) SJW ideology is eating itself. Everything is “problematic”, because you can always find another critical angle. The result is paralysis and “cancel culture”. Today you can write about the challenges black women face in the dating market, and tomorrow be accused of denying them agency or, worse off, internalizing norms of cisheteropatriarchy about who black women should be dating or some such. Intersectionality makes this worse (I’m reminded of this thread from Wes Yang.)

In the Victim Olympics, persecuted black Italian refugees are more victimized than (rich-enough-to-move-to-Italy) African-American women. So the end result is ass-covering through including multiple diversity angles in the same piece (black women dating white Italian men! But also this is problematic!), in a way which really damages the reader’s experience.

 

The Wes Yang thread starts like this:

In practical terms, intersectionality means that white women who used the general rubric of “diversity” to obtain hegemony in a few industries like publishing and media, have no grace period of secure dominance — they are instantly besieged by demands from POC, WOC

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) February 13, 2020

various sexual minorities, the disabled, the undocumented, the morbidly obese, etc. and attacked as Karens, Beckys, etc., and have absolutely no grounds from which to fight back.

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) February 13, 2020

This explains the social dynamics around “American Dirt” and what is happening in various organs of the Democratic party. https://t.co/yr9NDwhOqq

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) February 13, 2020

Yep. Remember the remark by the Latina novelist who had endorsed American Dirt, but who rescinded her endorsement in the fact of controversy, saying that if she had known that the resentful Latino writer mob “literary community” would come out against the book for political reasons?

Last night in Nashville, someone in the audience asked me why I didn’t include the experience of the black church in The Benedict Option. I responded that I thought about it, but it would have been a stretch to do so without seeming like tokenism, and besides, if I had done it, I would have been accused of wrongly appropriating the black church’s experience. As it happened, I didn’t include it, and was accused of racism. There’s no way to win.

For the record, I am glad that these black women and their Italian partners have found love.

The post Ciao Bella! Black Women — Right? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Canada: Sparta Of The SJWs

Lydia Perovic, a journalist who was thrilled to emigrate to Canada to escape Slobodan Milosevic’s authoritarianism, writes that her adopted country is becoming much less free — because of the woke left. Excerpts:

Today, the consequences of unpopular speech are swifter and measurably harsher than they were even a few years ago. What’s also new is the tenor of the left’s embrace of censorship — often of fellow leftists. Cases are piling up fast, but one of the most stunning remains the removal of a Sky Gilbert play from Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, in retaliation for a couple of unrelated posts on Gilbert’s personal blog, in which he expressed some dislike for the writing of a younger member of the LGBTQ cohort and for the general culture of wokeness. Lengthy “Do better!” threads followed on Twitter, with the magic word “harmful” especially prominent. And lo, within days, Gilbert’s previously scheduled, announced, and promoted-in-brochures anniversary reading of Drag Queens in Outer Space was forthcoming no more. (Shakespeare’s Criminal was gone too, but that came later.)

How is this even legal? I’ve lived with both left and right authoritarianism, but I have never witnessed such a swift removal of a play — not even under Miloševic, when theatre was a centre of opposition activity. And what does this say about how online activists understand critics and criticism and what they are for?

More:

This is new. The quality and quantity of punishments for expressed opinions or aesthetic choices are different than just a handful of years ago. This reminds me of a different time and place. What is happening, Canada? What are we hurtling toward? Perhaps a time when the left will see hate speech in every disagreement, while the right will continue to run the world. A time when the autonomy of science and art will be abandoned in favour of a more pressing societal value. A re-enchanted time, when journalists and historians look feeble next to the mythmakers. A time that we immigrants from countries with eventful histories know well and can spot from afar.

Read the whole thing. 

Emphasis mine. This is at the core of the thesis of my next book, which, I can tell you now, will have this title: Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.

My book focuses on Christian experiences under Soviet totalitarianism, and is addressed to Christian readers. But as Lydia Perovic makes clear, this is by no means a strictly Christian challenge.

UPDATE: A reader who is a college professor e-mails:

Last semester, I had to deal with cops three times because my students are reporting each other to the police over threatening behavior in the classroom. “How would you describe the incident?” “There was no incident I am aware of”. Was the violent encounter a glance, a raised eyebrow, a corroboration/correction of somebody else’s statement?  Who knows? The cops are nonplussed by this. They are getting dozens of anonymous reports like this a week.

This is the generation of elites who will welcome a pink police state, you know.

The post Canada: Sparta Of The SJWs appeared first on The American Conservative.

View From Your Table

A reader named Jane came up to me yesterday in Nashville and asked me to start putting more Views From Your Table. Here you go, Jane! Happy Valentine’s Day! Some from my recent Rome trip:

Rome, Italy
Rome, Italy
Rome, Italy

The post View From Your Table appeared first on The American Conservative.

Porn And Society

Hey, I’ve been away from the keys all day because I was traveling to Nashville this morning for a conference, and then gave a Benedict Option speech this afternoon, and then went to a great dinner with some Southern Episcopalians and fellow conservative travelers. The most fun people in the world, aside from Italian Catholics, are Southern Episcopalians and their allies. You have not lived until you have drunk wine and laughed with a Welsh historian who is fond of all things eccentric, and who finds the Megacolon at the Mütter Museum as delightful as I do. She has not yet read A Confederacy Of Dunces. I am going to have to find my way over to a bookstore in town tomorrow to buy a copy to send home with her.

But I have to tell you about something deeply shocking I learned tonight in conversation with one of the conferees. There’s nothing funny about this at all. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to write a book called Benedict Option II: Head For The Hills!

I spoke with a man who works with victims of human sex trafficking. This is not a world I have paid attention to. He was telling me that it is much, much worse than people imagine, because of the Internet. Online pornography, he said, is destroying the hearts and minds of so many young people. He told me about a 13 year old girl in his church who came to the pastor and asked innocently if it was worth it to give a boy a blow job in exchange for a meal at McDonalds. She was holding out for Applebees, and wondered if it she was overshooting.

I asked if this was a poor girl. Not at all — this is a kid from a well-to-do, churchgoing family. This kind of thing was so normal that she felt comfortable asking for her pastor’s advice.

This is the culture that porn has created. He told me that Pornhub’s analytics show that 41 percent of its users are females. The idea that porn is something males do is totally outdated.

He said that in his line of work, he hears from fertility doctors — not one fertility doctor, but several — that they are having to teach married couples how to have normal sex. Normal, as in penis-in-vagina sex — this, if they want to conceive. These young people have been so saturated in pornography, and have had their imaginations so thoroughly formed by it, that the idea of normal reproductive sex acts are bizarre to them.

“This one doctor told me that she has to prescribe only doing penis-in-vagina sex exclusively for six months, so they can learn to feel normal about it,” he said. He wasn’t joking. He said that the first time a fertility doc told him that, he thought it must be a one-off thing, but he’s heard it from fertility docs from around the country.

When the Roman Empire collapsed, the loss of basic knowledge of how to do ordinary things was immense. The Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins told me that it took western Europeans something like 700 years to relearn how to build a roof as solid as the Romans knew how to build. When you read about how the early Benedictine monks had to teach basics like gardening, metalworking, and the like to peasants in postlapsarian Rome, it’s not a joke. This was knowledge that everybody once held, until it was taken from them.

Can you imagine that people could forget how to have normal sex for the sake of having babies? It’s happening. This is the same kind of collapse of the very basic practice necessary to continue with civilization. My interlocutor said that so many parents these days have no idea at all what their kids are doing online, and how severely it is messing up their heads.

I like to think that I’m unshockable about the decadence around us. But I am naive.

We talked for a bit about how desperate ordinary Christians are for moral guidance from priests and pastors, and how they just aren’t getting it.

He also talked about how powerful sex traffickers are, and how young girls are being pulled into this world by the Internet. And he mentioned that so many parents are completely checked out on their children, and what their kids are exposing themselves to online, through their smartphones and computers. I tell you, it was like having the veil lifted. This man does this for a living, trying to fight this evil. It’s happening all around us, and people like me, we just don’t know about it.

Another man talked to me about how his little girls go to a public elementary school in his city, and he and his wife have just about had enough of the stuff they’re exposed to from the other kids, who get it from cable television. They’re looking for a way out. Note well, this is not stuff they’re getting in classrooms. This is stuff they’re getting from the culture in the heads of other elementary school students, who are exposed to it on TV.

I’m here to talk about The Benedict Option. But I’m learning a lot about why it is so very, very necessary. If I had it to write again, I would add a chapter about sex and pornography.

Meanwhile, American popular culture continues to drive us into the sewer:

HGTV featured a three-person couple, or “throuple,” for the first time on “House Hunters” Wednesday.

During the episode, titled “Three’s Not a Crowd in Colorado Springs,” partners Brian, Lori and Angellica (“Geli”) were moving to Colorado “in search of a home with a master bath that can accommodate three sinks,” according to a description on the HGTV website.

The house hunt had an extra layer of difficulty with only one week to “satisfy three very different personalities.”

“Lori and I got married in 2002, and we have two kids…” Brian explained in the episode. “I understood from day one, even when we were dating, that Lori was bisexual… and so we evolved to a point where we were comfortable having another woman in our lives.”

Geli said they met at a bar.

“I didn’t plan on being in a relationship with a married couple, but it just happened very naturally, organically” Geli explained.

Those poor children.

 

 

 

The post Porn And Society appeared first on The American Conservative.

Black Student: ‘Segregation Now!’

The other day, the University of Virginia opened its Multicultural Student Center. Its goals, according to the center’s website:

Here’s some holistic empowerment and understanding-building-through-dialogue for you, shot within the Center:

Leftists at the University of Virginia are dictating who is and who isn’t allowed in the new Multicultural Student Center.

“Frankly there is just too many white people in here, and this is a space for people of color.”

This kind of racist intolerance is NOT multicultural. pic.twitter.com/XkefKqfqLA

— YAF (@yaf) February 12, 2020

If you can’t watch the clip, the woman says this is a “public service announcement,” then:

“If y’all didn’t know, this is the MSC, and, frankly, there’s just too many white people in here, and this is a space for people of color, so, just be really cognizant of the space that you’re taking up because it does make some of us POCs uncomfortable when we see too many white people in here.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I think universities routinely send the exact message this black woman had the bad manners to speak aloud.

As we all know, if a white student stood and ordered non-white students to vacate a space because their non-whiteness made it uncomfortable for white people, the entire campus would have had a gran mal seizure (and if it were Yale, the students and allied faculty would have shaken down the university for $50 million, as happened in 2015 over the Halloween costume debacle). But this will pass without notice, because racism is a virtue when it is expressed or deployed against white people. Dr. Martin Luther King’s universalist ethic is sooo twentieth century.

Meanwhile, Baylor University’s administration is busy constructing a rationale to abandon the school’s Evangelical moral teaching on LGBT. It sent out an electronic survey to its faculty today. I’ve received the same screenshots from two readers who teach there. One said, “Literally the only thing they care about is LGBT.” Here are a couple of the questions:

Last year, at the start of the fall semester. Baylor president Linda Livingstone announced that the Texas Baptist university’s Board of Regents had reaffirmed its traditional teaching on sexuality:

 “The University affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality as a gift from God. Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm.”

… but, according to President Livingstone, there would be changes:

With this said, we understand that we must do more to demonstrate love and support for our students who identify as LGBTQ.

A common theme emerging from all of the aforementioned conversations is the need for us to provide more robust and more specific training for students, faculty and staff in loving, caring for and supporting our LGBTQ students.

It also became clear that we need to provide additional opportunities for our University community to listen to each other and discuss such matters in a civil, academic and supportive environment, as they are important to our faith and society.

And, perhaps most importantly, we need to establish trust with our LGBTQ students so that, among other things, they might seek out the resources provided by Baylor – all of which must be done as a faithful expression of our Christian mission.

Nobody can object to wanting to love these students, and to treat them with genuine compassion and fairness. But this is how these things go: the administration leads with “love” and “listening” as part of “Christian mission.” Now it has moved into creating a foundation in data for loving and listening the university away from its problematic insistence on Scriptural authority. I predict that when this survey is complete, the Livingstone administration will profess surprise at the size of the LGBT contingent on faculty, and will say that it is urgent that the university change its policies to increase faculty satisfaction, as part of its Christian mission. The phrase “Baylor family” will be deployed generously. And that is how the college will change, and come to look just like everybody else. We have seen this happen so often within Christian institutions.

Linda Livingstone can’t very well stand there with the boldness of that black undergraduate woman at UVA, and say that there are just too many conservative Evangelical people at Baylor, and that they’re making LGBTs and their allies uncomfortable, as well as embarrassing the university in front of academia. But that’s what’s coming, veiled by data-based bureaucratic claims, “diversity and inclusion” jibber-jabber, and therapeutic Christian jargon.

 

 

The post Black Student: ‘Segregation Now!’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

SAS = Self-Abasing Scandinavians

Here is a most bizarre, self-hating advertisement. It’s from Scandinavian Airlines. It’s about white liberal self-abasement. The message is, “We Scandinavians have nothing to be proud of. Every good thing associated with us, we culturally appropriated from others.” Seriously, you have to watch this to believe how awful it is:

I actually like Scandinavia. Though the only Scandinavian country I’ve ever been to is Norway, I thought it was beautiful, and the people were kind. I would love to visit Sweden, Denmark, and Finland — especially since I discovered via 23 & Me that I have Finnish and Sami ancestry. So many good things come from those countries, and they all have so much to be proud of. What kind of crazy left-wing corporation thinks it can make Scandinavians eager to purchase its services by instructing them that their culture is without value? Well, Scandinavian Airlines, which tells the Danes, the Swedes, the Norwegians, and the Finns that the only things they have worth cherishing are the things that they went out into the world and took from other people. Therefore, according to the ad’s logic, if you fly with us, you can get out of this miserable, bland, uninteresting land of ours, and go out into the world and find something worth caring about.

This Twitter commenter gets it right in his characterization of the ad’s real message:

You are not a people.

You have no culture.

Your history is a lie.

Your existence is an accident.

You are rootless, atomized cosmopolitans driven only by the desire to consume our product.

Our product gives you the meaning you crave.

Its consumption justifies your existence. https://t.co/vRRjZrAQty

— Radical Catholic (@RadicalCath) February 12, 2020

SAS executives deserve to spend eternity with that miserable child harridan Greta Thunberg yelling at them for ruining the environment with their wicked carbon-emitting aircraft.

UPDATE: I have learned from readers that Finns are Nordic, but not Scandinavian. I had no idea. I withdraw the inclusion of them. I guess I’m cancelled now in Helsinki.

UPDATE.2: I realized another subtext of the ad, or at least a psychological basis upon which the ad’s message is constructed: Please, immigrants and refugees, come into our countries in great multitudes and enrich us culturally impoverished Scandinavians with your many gifts.

The post SAS = Self-Abasing Scandinavians appeared first on The American Conservative.

Lunch With Susans From The Parish Council

A reader writes:

I just wanted to relate to you a conversation that I had today with some coworkers that was highly demoralizing, yet offered some clarity of the options (or lack thereof) for religious conservatives. Or maybe not even just conservatives, maybe just anyone who takes religion seriously, believers and unbelievers alike.

I popped into a break room to eat my lunch this afternoon, sitting a table away from three women who were eating together, people who I knew from around the building. After exchanging pleasantries and light talk, we discovered that we were all four Catholics, which led in turn to conversations about which parishes we attend, etc (normal light talk among Catholics of any stripe). It turned out that none of the three women still attended mass, sometimes they attended services at local non-denoms but even that was rare. Their reasons were the following: mass is boring; I don’t “get” anything out of it while I feel really great after my non-denom services; people should be able to use birth control; I didn’t like that priest; confession is awkward; etc.

All three of these women (all in their 40’s and 50’s) had attended Catholic schools from K-12, and none of them had even the slightest idea of why the Church teaches what it does, or even a hint of self-awareness that none of their complaints remotely touched what God Himself wants, only me, me, me. Nothing touched upon how they thought God wanted to be worshiped, or how God wants us to live. At one point during one woman’s diatribe about how she gets nothing out of Mass I meekly remarked “well maybe that’s not the point of it all,” to which she blurted “Why else would I go?!” These kinds of Christians (pray for them, please) are not rare, of course, but these exchanges reinforced one lesson and taught me another:

1. The BenOp is necessary if only because the modern Church offers institutionalized solutions that are only partially successful, if at all. All of these women went to Catholic schools, and none had even the slightest awareness of what mass is, beyond free entertainment. We’ve seen it a thousand times from the 1970s-90s youth culture, to parish committees led by Susan from the Parish Council types, to endless episcopal investigations and task forces about this issue or that. Institutions, in their current stage at least, are not an answer to most of these problems. I happen to be reading Morris Berman’s “The Twilight of American Culture,” and in it he repeatedly stresses that nothing makes a good idea less effective at what the creator was trying to accomplish than for it to get institutionalized. Institutions take short cuts, do partial jobs, sloganize, worry about press coverage, and generally just create kitschy noise. In this era we will need a different type of institution, and I believe those institutions will need to be decidedly BenOp in nature.

2. I legitimately think if I had pushed those three women, and asked hard questions about whether they thought worship was about God or about their own feelings, they would have defiantly refused to worship Him if their “feelz” weren’t the center of a worship service. That is a very modern, very individualistic, and very American conclusion to come to, and knowing that it is very hard to disagree with the Ahmari side of the Ahmari-French debate. If God is our number one priority, and if liberal individualism has led to this kind of self-worshipping individual being exceedingly common in our society, then it is hard as a Christian for me to come to any other conclusion that Liberalism has failed miserably.

However, like you, I am forced to admit that while Ahmari may have really good points, a post-liberal society with the building blocks that we currently have (hell, these three women probably represent a third of our country, with another third being religion-hating progressives) would probably turn out vastly more progressive and frankly idiotic than we could dream of, while French does have the legitimate point that in our current liberal epoch there are at least protections for religious believers, crumbling and insufficient they may be. It is like we are starving on a desert isle and Ahmari is offering us a coupon for a free steak dinner at a great restaurant in a mall that was demolished 50 years ago, while French is offering us Mar-mite on stale and moldy Wonder bread. It’s confusing.

Anyway, just wanted to give you some more tidbits about the state of religious life in America, from an average Joe in the Mid South.

Demoralizing? Yes. But not as demoralizing as enforced cheerfulness and frogmarched optimism.

 

 

The post Lunch With Susans From The Parish Council appeared first on The American Conservative.

Ernst Jünger’s ‘Forest Passage’

After I gave my speech last week in Rome, someone came up to me and said, “You have to read The Forest Passage by Ernst Jünger.” I wish I could remember who told me that, but I do remember that they were emphatic. So I ordered it on my Kindle that night from my hotel room, and read it on the flight home.

It’s pretty great. Jünger is one of those writers I’ve heard a lot about, but never read. He died in 1998, at the age of 102. The German fought for the Kaiser in World War I, wrote a celebrated memoir about it, and was wooed by Hitler, though he kept his distance, and even wrote a novel that was widely interpreted as anti-Nazi. Yet he fought for his country in World War II. He was a conservative, but not a Nazi. He wrote a number of books, and became well-loved throughout Europe, especially in France. He came from an unbelieving family, but converted to Catholicism two years before his death.

The Forest Passage, first published in 1951, is a book about resistance to the material age, and authoritarian government. It’s kind of mystical, in a very German Romantic way, which is a bit too much Schlag on the strudel, but this is a minor criticism. This passage by Russell Berman from the introduction to the 2013 Telos Press edition gives you a good idea of where Jünger is coming from:

Religion is important for Jünger because it taps into dimensions of irrationality and myth, the deep wisdom at home in the forest. It is not that Jünger proselytizes or engages in theological speculation, but he recognizes how irrational contents nourish the capacity for independence. No wonder the regimes of power celebrate the cult of reason instead. “How is man to be prepared for paths that lead into darkness and the unknown? The fulfillment of this task belongs chiefly to the churches, and in many known, and many more unknown, cases, it has effectively been accomplished. It has been confirmed that greater force can be preserved in churches and sects than in what are today called worldviews—which usually means natural science raised to the level of philosophical conviction. It is for this reason that we see tyrannical regimes so rabidly persecuting such harmless creatures as the Jehovah’s Witnesses—the same tyrannies that reserve seats of honor for their nuclear physicists.” It is worth noting how the two twin totalitarianisms of the twentieth century each posed as the carrier of a scientific mission: the biological racism of Nazism and the economic “science of Marxism- Leninism” in Communism. From our contemporary point of view, of course, neither is a science, but Jünger’s point is that modes of scientistic thinking are fully compatible with reigns of terror, while the integrity of faith may preserve a space of freedom, a leap of faith into the forest passage.

After hearing me talk about St. Benedict, Father Tomislav Kolakovic, and the need to build a Christian resistance to the coming soft totalitarianism, I see why the person recommended The Forest Passage to me. What Jünger calls the “forest passage” is the symbolic fleeing into the woods to become a guerrilla fighter against the social and political order that crushes humanity. Jünger makes it clear that he’s not talking about mystical renunciation of the world — or, as my Benedict Option critics have framed it, “heading for the hills”:

Although we will not deny that it is imagination which leads the spirit to victory, the issue cannot be reduced to the founding of yoga schools. This is the vision not only of countless sects but also of a form of Christian nihilism that oversimplifies the matter for its own convenience. For we cannot limit ourselves to knowing what is good and true on the top floors while fellow human beings are being flayed alive in the cellar. This would also be unacceptable if our position were not merely spiritually secure but also spiritually superior—because the unheard suffering of the enslaved millions cries out to the heavens. The vapors of the flayers’ huts still hang in the air today; on such things there must be no deceiving ourselves.

He’s talking about Auschwitz. He’s saying that the virtuous forest rebel cannot be content to save himself, but must struggle for the common good. Here’s what he means specifically by “forest passage”:

Let us call this turn the Forest Passage, and the person who accomplishes it the Forest Rebel. Like Worker, this word also encompasses a spectrum of meaning, since it can designate not only very divergent forms and fields but also different levels of a single deportment. Although we will further refine the expression here, it is helpful that it already has a history in old Icelandic vocabulary. A forest passage followed a banishment; through this action a man declared his will to self-affirmation from his own resources. This was considered honorable, and it still is today, despite all the platitudes. In those times, the banishment was usually the consequence of a homicide, whereas today it happens to a man automatically, like the turning of a roulette wheel. None of us can know today if tomorrow morning we will not be counted as part of a group considered outside the law. In that moment the civilized veneer of life changes, as the stage props of well-being disappear and are transformed into omens of destruction. The luxury liner becomes a battleship, or the black jolly roger and the red executioner’s flag are hoisted on it.

I found this passage about the courage of martyrs to be stirring:

To overcome the fear of death is at once to overcome every other terror, for they all have meaning only in relation to this fundamental problem. The forest passage is, therefore, above all a passage through death. The path leads to the brink of death itself—indeed, if necessary, it passes through it. When the line is successfully crossed, the forest as a place of life is revealed in all its preternatural fullness. The superabundance of the world lies before us. Every authentic spiritual guidance is related to this truth—it knows how to bring man to the point where he recognizes the reality. This is most evident where the teaching and the example are united: when the conqueror of fear enters the kingdom of death, as we see Christ, the highest benefactor, doing. With its death, the grain of wheat brought forth not a thousand fruits, but fruits without number. The superabundance of the world was touched, which every generative act is related to as a symbol of time, and of time’s defeat. In its train followed not only the martyrs, who were stronger than the stoics, stronger than the caesars, stronger than the hundred thousand spectators surrounding them in the arena—there also followed the innumerable others who died with their faith intact.

To this day this is a far more compelling force than it at first seems. Even when the cathedrals crumble, a patrimony of knowledge remains that undermines the palaces of the oppressors like catacombs. Already on these grounds we may be sure that the pure use of force, exercised in the old manner, cannot prevail in the long term. With this blood, substance was infused into history, and it is with good reason that we still number our years from this epochal turning point. The full fertility of theogony reigns here, the mythical generative power. The sacrifice is replayed on countless altars.

Jünger says the “forest” is everywhere — it’s a spiritual and mental state of being. It’s what we carry in our heads and in our hearts. If we are forest rebels, then we are moving undetected in the world, laying sabotage for the enemy, provoking its unrest. I like these lines about not relying on the institutional church:

When all institutions have become equivocal or even disreputable, and when open prayers are heard even in churches not for the persecuted but for the persecutors, at this point moral responsibility passes into the hands of individuals, or, more accurately, into the hands of any still unbroken individuals.

I thought of Father Kolakovic preparing the Slovak laity for the resistance to come. It wasn’t because he was anti-clerical — he was a priest! — but because he knew that when they seized power, the communists were going to target the Catholic clergy, on the plausible theory that if they controlled the clergy, they could suppress religious resistance. In our time, it is unfortunately the case that many churches and religious institutions are “equivocal or even disreputable,” and that it falls, and will fall, to the laity to resist.

These are beautiful lines too, about the need to cultivate detachment from material possessions to stay faithful to the truth:

Preserving one’s true nature is arduous—and the more so when one is weighed down with goods. There is the danger that threatened Cortez’s Spaniards—they were dragged to the ground in that “mournful night” by the burden of gold that they were loath to part with.

Jünger was not a Christian when he wrote this book, and it is not a Christian book — though it can be read through Christian eyes, and adapted easily to a Christian framework. This is not a long book, and it can be frustratingly opaque. Jünger doesn’t offer any kind of political program, or endorse a particular political order. He is generally opposed to mass society, though thinking of him as an American-style libertarian is a superficial and inaccurate reading. Jünger is very much an individualist — he says this himself — but he by no means comes across as an egoist. Rather, he seems to be a spiritual aristocrat in the very best sense of the word. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure from one reading of the book what Jünger was for, but his poetic description of resistance to modernity, to leveling, to materialism — and the necessary religious roots of that resistance — helped me in thinking about where we Christians go from here. I rewrote the final chapter of my upcoming book to include some of Jünger’s thinking from The Forest Passage.

Have any of you read Ernst Jünger? What do you think?

The post Ernst Jünger’s ‘Forest Passage’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Hating Whitey At The Movies

Another day, another opportunity for intersectional whining on the op-ed page of The New York Times. In this case, an Asian film critic can’t bring himself to celebrate the incredible Oscar Best Picture win for the South Korean film Parasite — truly an excellent movie (I saw it on the plane last week) — even though it was the first-ever Best Picture victory for a foreign-made film:

But I’m hesitant to give too much credit to the academy for its sudden interest in “inclusion.”

Caught in the middle are Asian-Americans. For many of us, our great hope for representation at the Oscars wasn’t “Parasite,” it was Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell,” about a young Asian-American woman who at a time of personal crisis is confronted with the widening cultural gulf between herself and her parents and grandmother. Alas, “The Farewell,” despite finding popular success and recognition at the Golden Globes and the Film Independent Spirit Awards,garnered no Oscar nominations. I find its exclusion a better indicator of how not just Asian-Americans but also female directors are still seen in Hollywood.

OK, so the wrong Asian film won Best Picture. Got it.

A reader wrote the morning after the Oscars:

Was reading the NYT Oscars coverage. Was a bit taken a back at how much “diversity and inclusion” was considered newsworthy and neutral for its own sake. The reporting is fine I suppose, but there are lots of percentages of the number of white, male, etc. participants and what the Oscars are doing to expand their diversity and inclusion. This not in an article about this issue specifically but in the home page, main reporting piece on the Oscars. Sign of the times.

He’s right. It’s so strange. We can’t simply be allowed to revel in the fact that a wonderful South Korean film won Best Picture, in a triumph for terrific storytelling. We have to racialize it, and frame the victory as something that comes at the cost of white people — though remember, this is a progressive narrative, so it’s good to think that this is happening at the expense of white people, not bad, like your Uncle Bubba thinks. Times story:

In honoring the film, which also won best director, original screenplay and international feature, voters managed to simultaneously embrace the future — Hollywood’s overreliance on white stories told by white filmmakers may finally be ebbing — and remain reverential to decades-old tradition: Unlike some other best-picture nominees, “Parasite” was given a conventional release in theaters. It has taken in $35.5 million at the North American box office since its release in October. Global ticket sales stand at $165 million.

“White stories told by white filmmakers”? For one thing, what makes a story a “white” story? The story in Parasite is a universal one, told in a Korean setting. It’s about a wily working-class family exploiting the anxieties of a wealthy family to take advantage of them. What’s Korean about the story is its language and its setting, but this well-told story is universally human, which is why it’s so accessible.

For another thing, do you think we will ever see the day when the Times opines, in a news story, about Hollywood’s “overreliance on black stories told by black filmmakers,” or “overreliance on Jewish stories told by Jewish filmmakers,” and so forth?

For a third thing: what is the Times‘s reckoning on the right degree of reliance on “white stories told by white filmmakers”? How will the Times know when Hollywood is underrelying on white stories told by white filmmakers? If it can’t say, maybe it’s not a good idea to write like a lazy progressive.

This story reminded me of that time in the 1970s, when I was over at a friend’s house playing, and overheard his father watching Sanford & Son in the next room, and complaining that “all the funniest shows on TV are n—er shows.” The man went on to complain that black people were overrepresented on TV, even as it offended him that the programs that made him laugh the most were about black people. Somehow, I don’t think the Times would find the race-consciousness of that Southern-fried Archie Bunker affirmative. But then, as the woke come to discover, some people who evaluate arts and entertainment primarily in racial terms are Good Racists.

This news story goes on — and remember, this is the main news account of Oscar night, not a sidebar:

The celebration of “Parasite” follows a year in which Oscar voters seemed to retrench toward their conservative past. In a choice that prompted immediate blowback — from, among others, the director Spike Lee, who threw up his hands in frustration and started to walk out of the theater — the academy gave the 2019 best-picture Oscar to “Green Book,” a segregation-era buddy film. While admired by some as a feel-good depiction of people uniting against the odds, the movie was criticized by others as woefully retrograde and borderline bigoted.

Without the victory for “Parasite,” it was a rather poor year for inclusion at the Oscars. The academy barely avoided another #OscarsSoWhite debacle by nominating Cynthia Erivo (“Harriet”) for best actress. (She lost to Renée Zellweger for “Judy.”) Once again, all of the nominees for best director were men, despite it having been a banner year for female filmmakers.

Et cetera. The Times is obsessed with identity politics, of course. You might be thinking, it’s The New York Times, what do you expect? You would be right, in one sense, but in another, you would be quite wrong to be so dismissive. The Times is both bellwether and leader of elite cultural opinion. That the Times is aggressively racializing its coverage like this, and framing the presence of whites in filmmaking as some sort of moral failing, is an indicator of where we are headed as a culture. As I have been saying for years about race-conscious progressives: you are summoning up demons you will not be able to control.

Anyway, I hate this. I didn’t see all the Oscar Best Picture nominees, but I did see Parasite, and I was thrilled that it won because it’s such a clever and incisive film. It is, of course, significant that a foreign-language film won Best Picture, but I hate the way the Times coverage diminishes the artistic meaning of the movie’s victory by making it seem like a form of tokenism. That is not the intention, of course, but when you impose an identity-politics lens on every damn thing, it’s unavoidable.

The post Hating Whitey At The Movies appeared first on The American Conservative.

Evangelicals Still Agonizing Over Trump

David French wrote a strongly-worded piece cracking on Trumpy Christians after the president’s embarrassing display at the National Prayer Breakfast. Excerpt:

American Evangelicals represent one of the most powerful religious movements in the world. They exercise veto power over the political success of any presidential candidate from one of America’s two great parties. Yet they don’t wield that power to veto the selection of a man who completely rejects—and even scorns—many of their core moral values.

I fully recognize what I’m saying. I fully recognize that refusing to hire a hater and refusing to hire a liar carries costs. If we see politics through worldly eyes, it makes no sense at all. Why would you adopt moral standards that put you at a disadvantage in an existential political struggle? If we don’t stand by Trump we will lose, and losing is unacceptable.

The pastor of my old church used to refer to the kingdom of God as “upside down.” The last are first? To gain your life, you have to lose it? It simply defies earthly common sense. As Paul said, “[T]he wisdom of the world is foolishness to God.” I’m reminded of the old Christian hymn, “Trust and Obey.” While it ruins the rhyme, I like the concept with the words reversed—obey and trust. Obey the creator of the universe when he tells me to love my enemies and then trust that justice will still be done and that God’s will still prevails.

On the other hand, Andrew T. Walker — also a conservative Evangelical — explains at length why some Christians dislike Trump but plan to vote for him anyway. Excerpts:

But an event on October 10, 2019 explains the odd-couple relationship of religious conservatives and Donald Trump. That evening, during a CNN townhall on LGBTQ issues, the now-former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke proclaimed that churches failing to toe the line on gay and transgender rights would lose their tax-exempt status in his administration. O’Rourke’s comments represented a high-water mark of a culture that has jettisoned anything resembling a Christian moral ecology. Never mind that O’Rourke’s candidacy is over. It was an Overton Window–shifting moment.

O’Rourke’s comments reminded religious conservatives why so many of them voted for Trump in 2016, even if doing so felt hypocritical and seemed like a betrayal of their principles — and why they will likely do so again in 2020, despite their realism about his character. O’Rourke’s promise to remove tax exemptions only reinforced the embattled mentality of most religious conservatives, which mobilizes them as voters. The problem was not only with O’Rourke’s tax policy, however. It’s also that the rhetoric of progressives around sexual orientation and gender identity logically leads to the conclusion that O’Rourke simply dared to state honestly: It is illogical to say that Christianity is “harmful” to gay and transgender persons and then not to want it somehow punished. For years, religious conservatives predicted that the sexual revolution would eventually affect government policy and directly threaten churches. They can now point to O’Rourke and other examples as evidence of a massive cultural shift that has realized their predictions. Even the most convinced progressive should sympathize with religious conservatives who are concerned about federal law possibly turning against them.

While Christians must cast off both unwarranted fear and moral panic, rejecting both does not remove the real concerns that persist among religious conservatives. Most criticisms of how religious conservatives understand the world miss the mark. They fail to capture fully the moral landscape and moral contrasts that are formed by believing in a world richly enchanted with divine order. Christians who refract cultural disputes through sexuality and gender do so not because they are obsessed with either, but because the two reflect larger debates about morality, human nature, authority, the role of government, and the nature of justice. Our moral debates are not ephemeral; they are, rather, metaphysical and cosmological. Thus, when religious conservatives of the Reluctant Trump variety vote, they are not thinking merely about one man, even if he has reconfigured the relationship between character and electability and defined both the presidency and elections as character tests downward. They are thinking about the larger moral worldview to which the party is committed.

Walker brings up a real-life example to illustrate the complexity of the Evangelical response to Trump:

To understand this complexity, take my real-life friend. Let’s call him Steve. Steve is a white evangelical in his forties, a middle-school teacher, the father of two daughters, and a deacon at his Southern Baptist church. These are identities that media narratives depict as culprits for Trump’s ascension: White, male, Christian, middle-class, husband, father. He’s the token “white evangelical” that the media depicts as red-state reprobates.

But there is more to Steve. Steve serves the homeless, sees diversity as a pillar of God’s creation, and helped an Iraqi refugee family resettle in his own hometown. I daresay he cares more about justice in real life than those who preen about it on Twitter.

Steve voted for Trump, and will again. Why? For one, he thinks abortion is America’s Holocaust, and will not support any party that supports abortion on demand. Whatever Trump’s eccentricities are, Steve won’t vote for a progressive, even if the media tells him that to do so would save America and its institutions. For Steve, saving abstractions like “America” and its “institutions” can make America a lot less worthy of survival if abortion on demand continues apace. To the average religious conservative, in fact, saving America means saving it from the scourge of abortion.

Those are the stakes that many religious conservatives live with. My advice to progressives is that, if they want religious conservatives to let go of their devotion to the Republican Party’s platform, progressives should weaken their commitment to unfettered abortion access. The same goes for their support for gender fluidity, and opposition to any person or institution that does not affirm such things as gay marriage. Until that happens, complaining about “white evangelicalism” and ascribing to it every imaginable authoritarian impulse will be like shouting into a void; no one will listen.

Also, in Steve’s thinking, the mainstream media is so blinded by its anti-Trump rage that it has seriously impaired its credibility. This is not #FakeNews conspiracy-peddling, but a real belief that the media’s trustworthiness has collapsed under its derangement. Trump criticism becomes ignorable once every action of Trump is subject to criticism.

Steve does not think President Trump is a Christian. He’s embarrassed by Trump’s moral failings and thinks he’s a terrible model for his daughters. But is this the stereotypical “white evangelical” responsible for America’s downfall, who wants to revive racism and drive immigrants out of this country? No.

It’s a really good piece. Walker says he doesn’t write to justify voting for Trump, but only to explain that the factors going into a Trump vote from Evangelicals are a lot more complicated than the simplistic portrait of the media. And note well, he criticizes fellow Evangelicals who talk and think about Trump as if he were a good and admirable person, even a believer in Christ.

As regular readers know, I come down more on the side of Walker than French, though I wouldn’t post French’s column if I didn’t think he had important things to say.

I was talking politics the other day with a close friend, a pro-life Christian who is a Bernie Sanders supporter. He doesn’t like Sanders’s views on abortion, but he is planning to vote for Sanders in the Louisiana Democratic primary (though he’s an Independent) for other reasons. I disagree with his prudential reasoning, but I recognize it as exactly that: as a thoughtful voter trying to figure out the best way to use his vote when all of the available candidates have what are to him serious lacunae in their positions. In other words, I think he’s simply wrong, not a bad person, or an accomplice to baby-killing, or anything like that. Similarly, I hope he realizes that if I vote for Trump this fall, I’m doing so as the least bad of available options, based on weighing prudentially the things I care about politically.

It’s not sexy to say it, but I don’t hate people who vote for Trump, I don’t hate people who vote against Trump, I don’t hate people who vote for Sanders, or anybody. I don’t believe we are facing a Twilight Of The Gods showdown between Good and Evil. I believe we are facing a particularly vivid, emotionally charged version of the usual choice between deeply flawed candidates. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t get worked up into spiting the Other, because if I put myself in their shoes, I can see why they would vote as they do, even if I think they’re wrong. Is this lukewarmness?

OK, it’s lukewarmness. But politics are not my god, so I don’t care.

The post Evangelicals Still Agonizing Over Trump appeared first on The American Conservative.