Rod Dreher's Blog, page 182

Wokeness & Child Sexualization

Here’s a sicko story about French high culture:

The French writer Gabriel Matzneff never hid the fact that he engaged in sex with girls and boys in their early teens or even younger. He wrote countless books detailing his insatiable pursuits and appeared on television boasting about them. “Under 16 Years Old,” was the title of an early book that left no ambiguity.

Still, he never spent a day in jail for his actions or suffered any repercussion. Instead, he won acclaim again and again. Much of France’s literary and journalism elite celebrated him and his work for decades. Now 83, Mr. Matzneff was awarded a major literary prize in 2013 and, just two months ago, one of France’s most prestigious publishing houses published his latest work.

But the publication, on Thursday, of an account by one of his victims, Vanessa Springora, has suddenly fueled an intense debate in France over its historically lax attitude toward sex with people who are underage. It has also shone a particularly harsh light on a period during which some of France’s leading literary figures and newspapers — names as big as Foucault, Sartre, Libération and Le Monde — aggressively promoted the practice as a form of human liberation, or at least defended it.

It surprises no one that the French are not the world’s most morally upright people on the matter of sex. But this is way, way beyond the stereotype. More:

Caught now in the crosscurrents of France’s changing attitudes toward sex, Mr. Matzneff is the product and longtime beneficiary of France’s May 68 movement, the social revolution started in 1968 by students and unions against France’s old order.

With the slogan, “It’s forbidden to forbid,” the movement rebelled against authority and fought against imperialism, capitalism, racism, sexism and homophobia. Some also argued for abolishing age-of-consent laws, saying that doing so would liberate children from the domination of their parents and allow them to be full, sexual beings.

Mr. Matzneff was one of the leading writers to advocate the legalization of sex with children. In “Les Moins de Seize Ans,’’ or “Under 16 Years Old,” he writes, “To sleep with a child, it’s a holy experience, a baptismal event, a sacred adventure.” First published in 1974, it was republished in 2005.

Thinkers on the left, like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, spoke in defense of the practice, or came to the defense of men accused of engaging in sex with people below the age of consent in France — which was and remains 15.

Read it all. It’s pretty horrifying. The leading left-wing daily Libération even ran classified ads from pedophiles seeking partners.

An American writer who lives in France, and is married to a French woman, tweeted about this story:

what my wife tried to explain to me about the crazy era in france producing the idea that children should be “liberated” to have sex with adults, was that the people arguing for this were the *wokest of the woke*. sartre, foucault, et al believed they were being *progressive*.

— Thomas Chatterton Williams

In Praise Of Tabloid Catholic Journalism

Catholic commentator George Weigel doesn’t want fellow Catholics reading aggressive conservative Catholic websites, like (presumably) Lifesite News, One Peter Five, and Church Militant:

Resolve to limit your exposure to the Catholic blogosphere. In 2019, many Catholic websites went bonkers. There is no need to click on sites that specialize in all-hysteria or all-propaganda all-the-time. If you want reliable Catholic news, visit the websites of Catholic News Agency and the National Catholic Register. If you want sane commentary on the turbulent Catholic scene, go to the websites of Catholic World Report, First Things, and The Catholic Thing. That’s more than enough for anyone. Limiting your blogosphere browsing to these sites, while ignoring the hysteria-mongers and propagandists, will lower your blood pressure while keeping you well-informed.

Well. I can’t fault his recommendations for those websites at all. They’re all quite good, and I check in with them regularly. But it’s more than a bit rich in 2020, after events of the last two decades, for Weigel to put down those other websites. He’s right that they at times lead with their passions, and go beyond what the knowable facts state. That’s something that readers should know going in. That said, it pays to remember what the Catholic journalist Ross Douthat has said about conspiracy theories:

[W]hen I was starting my career as a journalist I sometimes brushed up against people peddling a story about a network of predators in the Catholic hierarchy — not just pedophile priests, but a self-protecting cabal above them — that seemed like a classic case of the paranoid style, a wild overstatement of the scandal’s scope. I dismissed them then as conspiracy theorists, and indeed they had many of conspiracism’s vices — above all, a desire to believe that the scandal they were describing could be laid entirely at the door of their theological enemies, liberal or traditional.

But on many important points and important names, they were simply right.

Back when I was a Catholic, I remember that respectable conservative Catholics turned their nose up at the traditionalist Catholic publication The Wanderer, for the same reasons. Too radical. Too rash. Too weird. And yet, prior to 2002 (and for some years after), who do you think was better informed about what was actually going on in the Catholic Church regarding sexual scandal and corruption: readers of The Wanderer, or readers of First Things, the magazine for which Weigel has long written? It brings to mind this famous comment that the left-wing intellectual Susan Sontag made in a controversial 1982 speech denouncing communism:

”Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?”

There are some truths that are so terrible that it takes people who are already relatively radicalized within a culture or institutions to see them. This magazine, The American Conservative, saw the folly of the Iraq War more clearly than did all the mainstream conservative magazines and writers (including me). That crazy old far-right wingnut and “unpatriotic conservative” Pat Buchanan — as so many mainstream conservatives called him at the time — called the most important US foreign policy issue of the 21st century right, and the rest of us got it wrong. Buchanan’s alienation from the mainstream of establishment conservative thinking gave him a vantage point for seeing things that the rest of us could not. People who think that establishment conservatives really knew that Iraq was going to be a disaster, but went along with it anyway, are simply wrong. We were all too invested in our narratives to imagine otherwise.

The same thing happened to a lot of smart and dedicated people — conservative and liberal — in the Catholic Church, regarding the sex abuse scandal. People just didn’t want to believe these things were true, or could be true. They sounded too outlandish, like something out of the hysterically anti-Catholic Jack Chick comic books. But in most cases, the stories turned out to be true. Little of it surprised regular readers of The Wanderer. Whatever bad news is yet to come out of the Vatican and the US Catholic Church, the people who read the vividly reported, semi-tabloidy Catholic news sites are going to be less surprised than those who don’t.

Again, I don’t fault the “respectable” news sources Weigel names. I read them, and learn a lot from them, and know (and respect) some of the journalists and writers who contribute to them. I do give things reported on those sites more credibility, for a variety of reasons, but I also know that they operate under certain (non-sinister) restrictions. No newspaper, website, or media source can be all things to all people. I read the alternative sites too, and learn useful information there. In New York, if you want to have a more complete picture of what’s going on in the city, you need to read the Times as well as the Post and the Daily News. Same deal here.

I like what the widely respected conservative Catholic theologian Janet Smith had to say on her Facebook page about Weigel’s comments:

There is wisdom in this post but also some, I am sorry to say, short-sightedness and even foolishness.

Weigel recommends a limited number of news services that Catholics should consult and warns people against others. While many don’t like the tone of some sources, several of these are responsible for much of what we know about the corruption in the Church and their persistence has been invaluable in achieving the few successes there have been.

Yes, those who are excessively troubled by the relentless revelations should limit themselves to reading only “safe” sources, but don’t blame the messenger in respect to the news sources that investigate and report upon events that the others eventually report, somewhat less sensationally. Remember that the news being reported is in itself sensational and some reporters have a flair for highlighting just how outrageous is “news” that is no longer news.

We have become inured to scandal in the Church and laud bishops for minimally doing their jobs and are afraid, it seems, to rebuke those who continue engage in cover up and tolerance of corruption in their own dioceses let alone in the Church as a whole.

The Church rather desperately needs news outlets that realize that “business as usual” is not an option when the corruption is so pervasive. I am all for reporting good news and having hope and providing just and balanced treatment of all people and issues, but I think it unwise and unfair to try to marginalize those who have been and are in the forefront of exposing corruption. The “mainline” Catholic news services perform a valuable service, to be sure, and perhaps some should limit themselves to reading those services. But when the history is written of this period, some of what are now considered to be extreme and fringe outfits will be lauded as heroes. Muck-rakers are rarely “balanced” but they often expose corruption that other “more respectable” reporters and analysts won’t for fear of seeming sensationalist or alarmist. It is hard to clean up the dirt without getting a bit dirty. Those who are being bombarded day by day with those who call in with stories of more and more abuse can’t fully be blamed for shouting the truth at the rest of us who just might not want to hear it.

Amen, sister.

If you have the time, check out the transcript from a Catholic media conference held in Washington in March 2002 — a couple of months after the Boston scandal blew the Church wide open. I was one of the speakers there. What’s not on the transcript are the self-congratulatory remarks the Legion of Christ priest who at the time was publisher of the National Catholic Register — at the time, owned by the Legion, and full of happy-clappy conservative news. That priest praised his own newspaper for not getting down in the gutter with the secular media in reporting about the Church scandal. Eight years later, after the horrifying revelations about the demonic sexual predator Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion, that priest, Father Owen Kearns, publicly apologized for having overseen coverage defending him, and having defended Maciel himself. (The Register is now owned by EWTN, and is a much better newspaper.)

Check out this exchange between then-First Things contributor Joseph Bottum and me:

Bottum: Now that job of being a professional Catholic, it seems to me, is one into which Rod Dreher has fallen. In recent articles Rod has fallen off the tight rope. He said that pedophilia scandals have to be talked about. He’s absolutely right and we should talk about it. We should talk about it in this room, but that doesn’t mean it has to be talked about on the front cover of National Review.

He says we need to regain our public voice. It strikes me that this is not the way to regain our public voice. This is the way to lose it forever. In fact, there are publications that would willingly use Catholics to be the point men in this attack which they intend to ultimately to be an attack on Catholicism. We’ve seen it before. The lefty journals of New York City have a set of people they use as their professional Catholics, Garry Wills, or Mary Gordon. They’re always trotted out to say: I am a Catholic, but I have to say, the Church’s position on this or what the Church is doing on that is an outrage.

I’ve watched it happen on the right as well. The Wall Street Journal a few years ago published a column by Ralph McInerny that bothered me a great deal. He let himself be used by the Wall Street Journal to write exactly the Garry Wills/Mary Gordon column that says I am a Catholic, but I can’t believe what the Church is saying about capital punishment. This is a perpetual threat, a perpetual danger and it seems to me one that we must all guard ourselves against and that Rod has fallen off the wagon on.

Dreher: So what’s the alternative? If we only leave the public square open to the Richard McBrien’s, the dissenters, among the professional Catholic set, who’s is going to be out there to stand up for what the Church really does teach. Being a faithful Catholic does not mean that you have to fall in line behind the bishops just out of respect for the bishops because of their office.

Bottum: It’s when it becomes obsession that it begins to worry me. I also think you are mad, Rod, if you imagine that by being widely quoted in dissent you are thereby going to gain a standing that you will be able to use in the mainstream media when you want to put out a position of orthodoxy. You are not gaining resources on this topic which will then allow you to print something otherwise orthodox on a later issue in the New York Times. It’s just not true.

Dreher: I just don’t see what the alternative is. I don’t enjoy attacking the Church, but I think it has to be done and it has to be done from a position of fidelity to the magisterium and fidelity to the laity as well because the Church is not just the institution.

I assure you that in the spring of 2002, Jody Bottum’s position was that of respectable conservative Catholicism. I think my stance has aged better, even if the same anger that allowed me to see more clearly what was happening within the Church and be properly outraged about it ultimately burned me out as a Catholic. That is a professional hazard I didn’t grasp with sufficient clarity. And lest I seem to be praising myself, let me point out again that I might have gotten the scandal right as a National Review writer, but at the same time, I was writing blog posts for The Corner praising the march to war in Iraq. We are all fallible people. You should be grateful that unlike journalists and politicians, you have the ability to make your mistakes privately, and they can be quickly forgotten, instead of preserved forever.

All of which is to say that I prefer the malcontent journalism that the alt-Catholic news and opinion sites do to the establishmentarian restraint counseled by a consummate Church insider like George Weigel. But then, I would say that, wouldn’t I, given what happened to me and my Catholic faith?

I’ll say this, though: a big reason for the despair that cost me my Catholic faith in 2005 was the fact that so few orthodox Catholics — Phil Lawler and his team at Catholic World Report are honorable exceptions, but there are others — were standing up to the corruption and lies of the hierarchy. It felt like a pretty lonely and quixotic battle. Well, in 2020, Catholics such as I was back then have a lot more company. Some of them write for National Catholic Register (I see you Edward Pentin), Catholic News Agency, First Things, Catholic World Report, and The Catholic Thing. But some of them write for Lifesite News, Church Militant, and One Peter Five. Fifteen years ago, if there had been as many orthodox Catholic voices crying in the ecclesial wilderness as there are today, the situation would still have been bad, but it wouldn’t have felt so damned hopeless.

The post In Praise Of Tabloid Catholic Journalism appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Iran Cock-Up

Oh for heaven’s sake, really? Is this a country, or a failing business?

Top Pentagon leaders said Monday that the United States has no plans to withdraw troops from Iraq, despite a draft letter from a senior military officer that appeared to suggest plans for withdrawal were underway.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters the U.S. is “moving forces around” Iraq and neighboring Kuwait. He said a draft letter circulated internally by a U.S. Marine commander was a “poorly written” honest mistake that should never have gotten out.

The draft letter appeared to suggest the U.S. was preparing to pull troops out of Iraq in response to a vote by the Iraqi Parliament over the weekend. The draft said troops would be “repositioning over the course of the coming days and weeks to prepare for onward movement.” and warned of an increase in helicopter travel around the Green Zone. It added, “We respect your sovereignty decision to order our departure.”

If the Iraqis vote for us to leave their country, then we had better do it. There’s a word for a country in which foreign troops remain against the wishes of its people: occupied.

What did the Commander-In-Chief expect? He assassinated a senior Iranian leader in Baghdad. The Iraqis are supposed to be fine with that?

Look, I acknowledge that Gen. Soleimani was a nasty SOB with a lot of blood on his hands. The world is a better place for his not being in it. And I understand that the US could not simply sit back and allow Iran to get away with unanswered provocations. But the American president’s decision to assassinate a senior foreign leader is an extraordinary provocation. And what is it likely to get us? On what grounds did we do it? Eric Boehm writes in Reason:

Soleimani “was actively plotting in the region to take actions, the big action as he described it, that would have put dozens if not hundreds of American lives at risk,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday. “We know it was imminent.”

But 48 hours after the drone attack that claimed Soleimani’s life, that narrative is starting to unravel amid reports that Trump took the unprecedented step of killing a foreign leader based on thin evidence of a threat and with an eye towards domestic politics. Indeed, the administration has so far provided little evidence that killing Soleimani has made Americans objectively safer—while the strike has clearly worsened the status quo by raising the likelihood of Iranian reprisals and the prospect for open war.

Yep. We are supposed to believe the Commander In Chief, and the US military, when successive administrations — Republican and Democratic — have lied this country into disastrous wars? Matt Welch, also writing in Reason:

The truth, which literally hurts, is that every administration lies about war, particularly (though not only) about its reasons for initiating deadly force. It was literally only last month that The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” project detailed how America’s longest war has been a nearly two-decade festival of deadly bullshit. How many times are we going to accept on-the-record U.S. military quotes like “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible”?

Too many times, I’m afraid. We enable the machinery of our own bamboozlement with our often partisan-based trust in the protectors of the flag.

Readers with long memories will surely note that David Frum wrote President George W. Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” State of the Union Address in January 2002, linking Iran, North Korea, and especially Iraq in a rhetorical if not quite actual network of bad-guy regimes threatening to do the U.S. harm. “I was to provide a justification for war,” Frum recalled in his memoir. The justification was…misleading.

Consider the war of choice that deposed Muammar Qaddafi, and led to massive regional instability:

“We knew,” Barack Obama said on March 28, 2011, “that…if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. It was not in our national interest to let that happen. I refused to let that happen….Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

We know now that the congressionally unauthorized, U.S.-led regime-change war in Libya was not, as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly bragged on the presidential campaign trail, “smart power at its best.” It was one of the major causes of Middle Eastern instability and misery over the past decade. But what we’ve forgotten, because our political discourse is cripplingly trivial, is that Obama’s bar-lowering justification was hysterical.

Read it all, and remind yourself that we Americans are led by people whose judgment and whose words we cannot trust. I am not a pacifist, and I don’t think the Iranian government is an innocent victim here. But I am very, very tired of leaving American blood and American treasure in the Middle East because of the hubris and incompetence of American leaders. And no, sorry, this time, it’s not different.

About Trump, some people on the Right backed him because they figured him to be less of a war enthusiast than Hillary Clinton. He’s blown that reputation sky-high, along with Gen. Soleimani. It’s the rashness of the attack, given the enormity of its potential consequences, that shocks. And now the Pentagon can’t even get its story straight about whether we are about to leave a country we invaded, and in which we have made our presence unwelcome by assassinating a top leader of the neighboring country, possibly (if the Iraqi leader is to be believed) because we induced the Iraqis to lure Soleimani to Baghdad in the first place.

UPDATE: Here is the letter that the commanding US general in Iraq sent:

The post The Iran Cock-Up appeared first on The American Conservative.

When A Bishop Does Right

Whenever you read about bishops here, it’s usually to complain about their failings. I’m delighted to be able to write about something good a bishop has done. In this case, it’s the Antiochian Orthodox Bishop Basil Essey, of Wichita, who corrected one of his priests, Father Aaron Warwick. As I wrote here, Father Aaron published an essay in a dissenting Orthodox online journal in which he called for a strong revision in Orthodox pastoral care for LGBT people — including encouraging same-sex couples to pair off and keep their sex lives within the pairing. Father Aaron insisted that he wasn’t challenging Church teaching, only pastoral practice, but this is a Jesuitical distinction without a difference (no, it really is: this is the tactic the Catholic LGBT activist priest James Martin, SJ, uses).

Father Aaron was scheduled to be elevated to archpriest (sort of like “monsignor” in the Catholic Church) this month, but now, that’s not going to happen quite yet. This went out yesterday:

I don’t know what, exactly, Bishop Basil did, but Father Aaron issued a public apology, and a retraction of his essay. The site, Orthodoxy In Dialogue, has since published pieces in support of Father Aaron, including one from a deacon and his wife, and another from an eccentric, pro-LGBT elderly Canadian bishop who has been officially forbidden by the Orthodox Church in America from speaking about gay and transgender matters, but who doesn’t care.

So that’s them. A blogger called Orthodox Farm Wife, a recent convert to Orthodoxy, has a beautiful essay in praise of Bishop Basil for acting as he did. Here’s part of it:

A lot of us converts came from religious backgrounds where our spiritual leaders were either silent or stood for nothing. We’ve all seen priests and pastors subvert church doctrine without consequence and sat through a Sunday message that left us feeling used or abused. We knew about priests and pastors who were reported to bishops and church authorities for serious infractions and nothing came of it. I’m not even talking about sexual or financial abuse, as that’s a whole other ballpark.

I found Christ, whom I had abandoned in my youth, in the Eucharist. I visited a Roman Catholic church, hungry for something real, and saw it in the offering of the bread and wine. After careful thought I determined that if the Eucharist was real, and if I wanted to participate in it, I had to be able to accept all the church teachings. This was a really tall order for me. As a former neopagan, as a fairly liberal feminist, as an LGBT ally, I was facing my Mt. Everest and I wasn’t sure I could do this.

I thought my catechism instructors and sponsor would aid me in accepting church teaching. I thought I wasn’t in this alone, but I was wrong. On many aspects of Roman Catholic teaching I was told the church was wrong. I was instructed by priests and deacons that women should be ordained to the diaconate and priesthood. It was made clear to me that any idea that the church is correct about birth control, sex outside of marriage, or homosexuality was not to be entertained. I was taught transcendental meditation, creative visualization, and one of my instructors read my aura. It was a bizarre and difficult experience to try to climb my own spiritual Everest when those supposed to help me were pulling me back down. After confirmation I discovered that the priest who had welcomed me into the Roman Catholic church didn’t believe in the Eucharist, and I simply broke.

It was a kind, imperfect, and deeply sincere Orthodox Christian that saved my faith. They gently suggested I might find refuge in Orthodoxy, stressed it was not perfect, but that it was a sanctuary from all the grief I had been experiencing in the Roman Catholic church. My foray into Orthodoxy was tentative, suspicious, and untrusting. But slowly, as I saw it really was what it said it was, I began to fall in love with the Orthodox Church.

More:

As someone who used to be an LGBT ally, and still knows many wonderful LGBT people, I understand how the process of opening a dialogue works. It’s a one-way street, not a genuine exchange. It starts with a very cynical attitude towards humanity, with the idea that heterosexuals are incapable of chastity. As a single woman who has been celibate for over four years, even before returning to Christ, I find that incredibly patronizing and demeaning. While it is true that the emotion of lust and experience of desire may be difficult to manage, it’s actually quite easy to not have sex. You can’t do it by accident. It’s an intentional act. Rape is a very different matter, as it is non-consensual, but sex is really a very simple thing for a single person to avoid. There are plenty of celibate single Christians out there.

After the demeaning and infantilizing claim that heterosexuals are incapable of chastity, comes the equally insulting claim that homosexual persons are even less capable of chastity. And the wedge just keeps being hammered in from that point on. I think the Apostles were really wise to be so hard on sexual sin, because it is one of the easiest sins to avoid. But once you soften your views on sexual immorality, relativism and a determinism of victimhood begins to infect all our views of human life. Nothing is our fault, we have no free will, and nothing should be denied us. This is the very cage that Christ freed us from with His Resurrection, and I am not willing to crawl back into that cage.

One more:

For an ex-Catholic to feel like she could go to her bishop with a real problem and he would listen, and if necessary take action, is astonishing.

Of all the gifts Orthodoxy has given me, restoring my faith in the clergy is among the most precious. I don’t feel like I’m going this alone. I don’t feel like those who are supposed to guide me in the faith are leading me astray. And now, I feel quietly confident that those charged with defending the faith are doing just that. And because they are faithful, I have the privilege of not worrying about church news, of focusing on my own salvation in my own parish knowing my priest and my bishop are faithfully doing what they were called to do.

Read the whole thing. It’s so good, and it deeply resonates with me. I’ve been in touch with the Orthodox Farm Wife blogger (she’s not married, yet, but she would like to be a farm wife), and the stories she tells about the decadent liberal Catholic diocese of which she was a part, and how hard she struggled, in vain, to find help leading a faithful Catholic life, help me understand how profound her gratitude to Bishop Basil is. You readers know that based on my experience, I tend toward deep cynicism towards church hierarchy — any church hierarchy — mostly out of self-defense, so I am really happy to be able to publish something in praise of a good bishop who is not afraid to do the right thing.

There is no more difficult stance in contemporary American culture for a cleric, bishop or not, to take than the one Bishop Basil has taken here. When our priests, pastors, and bishops do take those stands, we need to praise them, and praise them publicly. A senior church leader who doesn’t temporize or surrender to the culture — imagine that! God, send us more!

The post When A Bishop Does Right appeared first on The American Conservative.

Peace With Iran

I woke up early this morning, almost two hours before the alarm, with a heavy feeling on my heart that I needed to pray for peace. I got out of bed and did just that. I found myself thinking about a particular Iranian reader of this blog whom I’ve gotten to know via correspondence these past few years. I wrote to him this morning and asked what things look like from where he sits. I publish his response here, with his permission (I promised that I wouldn’t use his name):

In Iran, a lot of people are very angry, some others joyful, that Suleimani was killed! But most seem and sound just resigned! Resigned to future events, whatever they turn out to be, as they feel they can have absolutely zero control or influence on what will happen. I belong to this third group.

Soleimani became somehow popular in some large sections of Iranian society ONLY after ISIS was defeated and he was credited for their defeat. Just imagine yourself in the shoes of an Iranian, who senses ISIS is getting near, or at least has the fear that a lot of Shiite blood would be shed in Iraq by this group. The defeat of ISIS was a huge relief, and, unlike the people in the USA, nobody in Iran or in Iraq credits the US government for its defeat. On the contrary, many people think that American allies directly, and the US government indirectly at least, helped that group gain power. Even some Kurds now have some soft feelings towards the man, as ISIS was only a few kilometers away from Erbil, and it was with the help of the Quds force that they managed to stop ISIS. I was living in Erbil for business purposes when the first ISIS bomb exploded there, ending 10 years of uninterrupted tranquility in the city.

You know I have zero sympathy for the Iranian regime’s ideology and for the so-called “political Islam” to which Soleimani adhered. And I personally don’t regard him as a hero, not certainly MY hero! But I know a lot of other people, with no sympathy for the regime either, even some irreligious folks, who are now extremely angry at the killing of a person whom they regard as their savior from ISIS. And all this adds to their belief that ISIS was a production of USA government.

And add to this the extremely stupid tweet of Trump about targeting Iranian cultural sites!

Your and others’ prayers for peace are really needed! I hope and pray the two countries don’t get into open conflict.

Me too, brother, me too.

I have a terrible feeling about all this. This Reuters report about Soleimani co-ordinating attacks on US troops in Iraq sounds credible. Nevertheless, one has to wonder if this escalation was prudent. And God help us if Trump strikes Iranian cultural sites. That would be a war crime.

I can’t offer you any kind of analysis. Like my Iranian friend, I feel that this is out of our hands. If you pray, pray for peace.

UPDATE: Reader Kevin in OR’s position is more or less where I am:

As someone who has been deployed to Iraq and has seen the results of Soleimani-sponsored attacks on US and coalition forces, I will not shed a tear for his passing. He was a combatant and it was legal under our laws to strike him; he certainly had it coming. That said, it remains to be seen whether it was a wise choice. I wish I had more confidence in the internal decision-making process of the Trump administration, but I don’t. I fear this was a rash decision that will result in more dead American troops and civilians, or, as our Secretary of State characterizes it, “noise.”

UPDATE.2: This is insane.

Absolutely astonishing.

Embassies, ambassadors plenipotentiary, diplomatic cables, closed-door backroom meetings, unofficial channels, press leaks…irrelevant.

It's all just Twitter now. https://t.co/NxO03XukwX

— Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) January 5, 2020

UPDATE.3: Time for the “widespread opposition” to speak out loud and clear:

Two senior US officials on Sunday described widespread opposition within the administration to targeting cultural sites in Iran should the United States launch retaliatory strikes against Tehran, despite President Donald Trump saying a day before that such sites are among dozens the US has identified as potential targets.

“Nothing rallies people like the deliberate destruction of beloved cultural sites. Whether ISIS’s destruction of religious monuments or the burning of the Leuven Library in WWI, history shows targeting locations giving civilization meaning is not only immoral but self-defeating,” one of the officials told CNN.

“The Persian people hold a deeply influential and beautiful history of poetry, logic, art and science. Iran’s leaders do not live up to that history. But America would be better served by leaders who embrace Persian culture, not threaten to destroy it,” they added.

“Consistent with laws and norms of armed conflict, we would respect Iranian culture,” the second senior US official said.

The post Peace With Iran appeared first on The American Conservative.

Just As He Is

Tomorrow Monday is the Feast of Theophany in the Orthodox Church — the commemoration of Jesus’s baptism in the river Jordan. It has become my favorite feast, for reasons I talked about in this 2014 post (above is the image of our former priest, Father Matthew Harrington, blessing the Mississippi River on the Feast of Theophany, 2014).

We had three baptisms in our little mission parish this afternoon. I’m not going to disclose private information, of course, but one of the three is a young man who has become especially dear to me. He has such a noble spirit, and he doesn’t even know it. He has been badly battered by life, especially of late, and is exhausted. I have seen lots of people come to the Orthodox church through baptism and chrismation, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one who bears such humility in his face, and who has come to the riverside after such a punishing journey. He approached the baptismal font — we practice full immersion baptism — with tears in his eyes. I thought, “Yes, brother, Jesus came for you, for men like you — ‘blessed are the poor in spirit’ — and now He has found you.”

It’s very easy to become cynical, even despairing, about church matters. But on a day like today, in a moment like the one we just witnessed here in our little parish in a rental hall, you realize what the Christian faith is about in its purest form. This young man’s face this afternoon was, to my eyes, the embodiment of that beautiful spiritual, here performed by the incomparable Mahalia Jackson, Just As I Am.

Just as I am, without one plea

But that Thy blood was shed for me

And that Thou bid’st me come to Thee

O Lamb of God, I come! I come

Just as I am, though tossed about

With many a conflict, many a doubt

Fighting and fears within without

O Lamb of God, I come, I come

Just as I am, and waiting not

to rid my soul of one dark blot

to thee whose blood can cleanse each spot

O Lamb of God, I come, I come

Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind

Sight, riches, healing of the mind

Yea, all I need, in Thee to find

O Lamb of God, I come, I come!

It’s hard to imagine two expressions of Christianity more aesthetically different than Orthodoxy and the African-American church tradition, but when it comes right down to it, what Mahalia Jackson sings is what we sing, in our deepest hearts and souls. I wish I could show you the photo I took of my brother on the verge of his baptism, but of course I can’t violate his privacy. I am saving it, though, for the church in the generations to come, after he becomes a saint, so they will have an image from which to write his icon. With a broken heart like he has, and such purity of spirit, God can do mighty things. What a grace it was to witness this new birth! There is so much grief and suffering in this world of liquid modernity, but truth, beauty, and goodness arise from the water too. I need to remember that. You do too, probably.

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The United Methodist Divorce

We all knew it was coming, but it’s still a surprise to see it: the United Methodist Church will go into formal schism over the issue of homosexuality. From the NYT:

Leaders of the United Methodist Church, the second-largest Protestant denomination in the nation, announced on Friday a plan that would formally split the church after years of division over same-sex marriage.

Under the plan, which would sunder a denomination with 13 million members worldwide, a new “traditionalist Methodist” denomination would be created, and would continue to ban same-sex marriage as well as the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy.

A separation in the Methodist church had been anticipated since a contentious general conference in St Louis last February, when 53 percent of church leaders and lay members voted to tighten the ban on same-sex marriage, declaring that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.”

In the months following, a plan was put together by a 16-member committee of bishops and other church representatives, who determined that separation was “the best means to resolve our differences, allowing each part of the Church to remain true to its theological understanding.”

Like some of you, I wondered why it was that the traditionalists won the general conference vote, but are the ones who are being forced out of the UMC. The answer, I think, is that in the United States, trads are in the minority. They only prevailed at the general conference because they had the votes of overseas (especially African) Methodist churches.

Mark Tooley, a well-informed conservative Methodist, comments on the Juicy Ecumenism blog:

If the quadrennial General Conference approves this plan in May, when it meets in Minneapolis, the two separate denominations would start there immediately, with separate General Conferences. The liberal church of course would delete United Methodism’s current affirmation of sex only within male/female marriage.

This denominational schism would be historic and largely the first of its kind since the 1840s when Methodists and Baptists divided regionally over slavery.

It’s likely the General Conference, even if it approves this plan, will amend it.

My prediction: General Conference will approve a version of this plan. During several subsequent years of sorting, United Methodism’s current 6.7 million members in the USA will drop to about 6 million. About 2.5 million will join the conservative church, and about 3.5 million will be in the liberal church. Nearly all the 5.5 million overseas members, mostly in Africa, will join conservative church, so the conservative denomination will have about 8 million members globally.

This process will be messy and often tragic. Many local congregations will divide and die. But United Methodism is already dying in America. This division will allow evangelistic-minded Methodism to plant new congregations and grow. American Christianity and society desperately need a theologically cohesive rejuvenated Methodism.

I wonder how the Methodist church in my hometown is going to vote on this. You would think, maybe, that being in a small Southern town, it would be conservative. That’s not necessarily so. I would guess the vote will be close, and generationally lopsided. A big factor for a church like that is whether or not the plan would allow congregations to keep their church buildings and property. It’s hard to overstate how much the simple 19th-century wooden church means to longtime congregants of the St Francisville United Methodist Church. I can easily imagine conservative people voting to stay within the liberal UMC just so they can hold on to the building, if losing it would be the cost of departure. No matter which way the local vote goes, I would imagine that a significant number of Methodists in that congregation would grit their teeth and accept it, because they wouldn’t want to leave that church building, in which generations of their family members have been baptized, married, and prayed over in death.

Hard conversations ahead for Methodists. I would like to hear from Methodist readers about what your thoughts are on the topic. I would also like to hear from conservative former Episcopalians who had to surrender their church buildings and property when their congregations left TEC. What was that like? How did you make the decision that you did?

I believe, with Mark Tooley, that the liberal UMC will wither away and die. The traditionalist Methodists will be smaller, but stronger and more vibrant. They will not have an easy time of it in this post-Christian culture, but they will have what it takes to endure.

 

 

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Orthodoxy, LGBT, & Spiritual Sedition

You might not have seen this late update to the post from the other day about the Orthodox priest in Wichita, Father Aaron Warwick, who published an article on a pro-gay Orthodox website, Orthodoxy In Dialogue, in which he, among other things, called on the Orthodox Church to encourage gay people to commit themselves to partners, and keep their sexual activity within those partnerships.

Here is the text of a public letter Father Warwick has now released — at the direction, I understand, of his bishop:

As of this writing, the original post is still there. Maybe the Orthodoxy In Dialogue editors refuse to remove it. I don’t know. But listen, whether or not the apology is sincere is not that important. What is important is the signal this sends from the Antiochian Orthodox hierarchy that the kind of thing Father Warwick did will not be tolerated, at all. It shouldn’t have taken almost two weeks for the bishop to act, but he did act, and that is a relief.

The Orthodox Church is small in America — maybe only one million adherents — so non-Orthodox may not be aware that Orthodoxy has become a refuge for a number of converts who saw their own churches fall to pieces over the inability to adhere to Christian orthodoxy on sexual matters, particularly on homosexuality.

Some background: Orthodox Christianity doesn’t have a central world headquarters, as Catholicism does, but it is rather more like a confederation of national churches, each with its own hierarchy, but united in belief. In the US, each Orthodox immigrant group brought its own churches, leading to a highly irregular situation here. All the Orthodox churches in the US have grown significantly by the influx of converts, both into the clergy and the laity (see here for more information on that); under their previous leader, the late Metropolitan Philip, the declining Antiochians threw the doors wide open to converts. Now, something like 90 percent of Antiochian clergy in the US are converts, and the church is thriving.

Now, as I was saying, the presence of so many converts, especially in the clergy, who came from churches going to pieces because of sexual issues (particularly homosexuality), means that there are more than a few people — clergy and laity both — who view with real alarm any signs of Orthodoxy going wobbly. A friend of mine and reader of this blog was received not long ago into Orthodoxy, along with his wife. They left the Episcopal Church, where he, at least, had spent his entire life. Their story is a familiar one: lies on top of lies from parish leadership about the church’s intention to hold the orthodox Christian line on sexuality — and then, after all the “dialogue” and appeals to “tolerance,” when the pro-gay liberals got the upper hand, they showed faithful traditionalists the door.

If you spend any time asking Orthodox converts who are 40 and over to tell their stories, you’ll hear lots of accounts like that. When I posted the piece the other day about Father Warwick’s essay, the friend I mentioned in the previous paragraph hit the roof. He was ready to knock heads over it — and he was right to be! He has already lost one church home to sexual progressivism; he is not willing to lose another.

His story is not exactly mine, but they run on parallel tracks. As regular readers know, I went to Orthodoxy after losing my ability to believe in the truth claims of the Catholic Church, after years of reporting on the abuse scandal. I have no interest in arguing theology or ecclesiology here, so don’t bother starting an argument about that in the comments; I’ll just delete your remarks. For me, a return to Protestantism wasn’t possible, for reasons of theology and ecclesiological conviction. That left Orthodoxy as my only possibility. Complicated story, not worth telling here.

It turns out to have been my real home all along, and I’m grateful for the gifts God has given me in Orthodoxy. One of the best ones, for a Christian like me who had been heavily engaged in front-line fighting within the Catholic Church over moral and theological issues, was the sweet relief of knowing that these fights weren’t happening within the Orthodox Church. Of course there was and is progressive dissent, but it doesn’t have nearly the platform or the standing that it does in Catholicism. Nor do progressives have the mechanism to change the teaching and practice of the Church as it does in Catholicism. It was such a blessing to be able to go to liturgy on Sunday morning and not feel that you were entering some sort of battlefield.

I never, ever believed that any church was a safe place from scandal or from theological conflict. This is true of the Orthodox Church, like any other church. But to be candid, there is a lot to be said about the lack of gay clergy, compared to Catholicism. I’m not sure why it is; perhaps the married priesthood has something to do with it. But it’s real. And maybe because the Orthodox priesthood is not so gay-friendly, that may explain in part why the institutional church itself hasn’t cracked under pressure to engage in “dialogue,” to practice “inclusiveness” and “welcome,” and all the other strategies that are always and everywhere the first step to overturning orthodox theology and practice. It is certainly the case that the strong presence of converts who fled churches whose moral theology had been corrupted by contemporary sexual ideology stiffens the institutional spine.

There are a number of Orthodox jurisdictions in the US — Greek, Russian, OCA, Antiochian, etc. — and some of them struggle with this stuff more than others do. But if you come to Orthodoxy from a Mainline Protestant, progressive Evangelical, or Roman Catholic background, you will be amazed and gratified by how different the atmosphere here is on that front. I’ve heard over the past day or two that a lot of Orthodox clergy, across jurisdictions, had seen the Warwick essay, and felt strongly that this kind of thing has to be nipped in the bud at once. Too many such priests have the hard, punishing experience of seeing where it leads.

In his apology letter, Father Warwick claims that he never advocated changing church teaching. This is a distinction without a difference. He was following the successful misdirection that Father James Martin, the pro-LGBT Jesuit, uses to normalize sexual heterodoxy: claiming to only be about changing pastoral practice, not altering official teaching. This allows these change agents to pretend to be orthodox, while changing facts on the ground. That effort has come to a crashing stop in the Antiochian church now, and for that let us rejoice. But let us continue to be vigilant. I came out of a church whose moral authority is badly compromised because it does not know how to deal with homosexuality among the bishops, the lower clergy, or anywhere else. If Orthodoxy opens its doors to this, God help it.

I’ll leave you with a couple of passages from an article that the Orthodox Biblical scholar Bradley Nassif wrote about homosexuality. It appeared in the pro-LGBT Orthodox journal The Wheel, which has no links for non-subscribers. Dr. Nassif sent me a copy of his essay, which, contrary to the general editorial line of the magazine, defends Orthodox teaching on homosexuality. These two passages can’t possibly do justice to why Orthodoxy believes the things it does about homosexuality, but it will give you a sense. In the first one, it’s a matter of the plain teaching of Scripture, which has authority over us:

In recent years, considerable effort has been exerted to re-interpret the plain meaning of these texts through an alternate “gay reading” of Scripture. Much of it, however, has been rejected as eisegesis [reading meaning into text — RD] by biblical scholars, even by those who promote a gay agenda such as the well-known Roman Catholic scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, who frankly admits:

I have little patience with efforts to make Scripture say something other than what it says through appeals to linguistic or cultural subtleties. The exegetical situation is straightforward: we know what the text says. . . . [However] we must state our grounds for standing in tension with the clear commands of Scripture. . . and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us.

Johnson’s rejection of biblical authority in exchange for the authority of his own personal “experience” and those of others is a bold and honest admission. While Orthodoxy values the testimony of human experience as one of several signs of God’s will, it can never agree with Johnson that it should be the main source for determining Christian doctrine. Otherwise there would be as many truths as there are experiences. Johnson is correct in concluding that the Bible is clear in its teaching about homosexual practice, even though he disagrees with it. The Church’s consensual tradition on this topic is likewise unambiguous: all homosexual acts are sinful because they have no procreative value (Gen. 1:28), they are a repression of the visible evidence in nature regarding male-female anatomical and procreative complementarity (Rom. 1:26–27), they violate the “image of God” in those who commit them and in others (Gen. 1:27), and they are a parody of the “one flesh” union (Gen. 2:24, Matt. 19:5, Eph. 5:21). This is not to say that homosexual “orientation” is an act of sin even though it is a symptom of human corruption no worse than other passions of the flesh that afflict all humans (Gal. 5:19–21).

In this passage, Dr. Nassif explains that it also has to do with Christian anthropology. What is man? What is the relationship between soul and body?

The starting point for a Christian understanding of sexuality and the nature of the human person is the same starting point as many other questions in Orthodox theology, namely, the incarnation of the Word

(John 1:14). The incarnation is the fundamental dogma of all theology. A theology of sex begins with the apostolic encounter with the human Jesus and the revelation of his saving identity for humanity as a

whole. The revelation of the glorified, paschal humanity of the Lord, and not the “old Adam” of Gen. 1–2, makes the person of Christ, the “new Adam,” the primary focus of the Church’s affirmations about human nature because Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s creational purposes.

The old Adam of Gen. 1–2 was “a type [typos] of him [Christ] who was to come” (Rom. 5:14). Adam was a lesser shadow of the greater antitype fulfilled in the human Son of God. The incarnation, therefore, provides the basic components for understanding what it means to be human. Those components include the following affirmations: (a) created humanity (physicality) is good; (b) human nature is fundamentally a commingling of material and immaterial, both being sacred; (c) gender identity continues in the resurrection; the physical, male characteristics of the paschal humanity of Christ remained recognizable to his disciples. Sexual identity is an essential part of Jesus’ personality, and personality is retained in the resurrection; (d) human beings are theocentric creatures. We cannot be fully human

apart from union with God. Perfect union with God is revealed and healed through the harmonious activity of the divine and human natures, wills, and saving work of the incarnate Logos (contra Eutychian, Nestorian, Monothelite, and aphthartodocetic constructions). Hence, christological anthropology is teleological. The incarnation is the ultimate expression of what it means to be human, now and in the age to come.

More:

The human being, therefore, is at once an ensouled body, and a bodily soul. One’s personal identity and wholeness is bound up with this interconnection. The body is the visible, objective expression of the life of the soul. What happens to the body happens also to the soul, and what happens to the soul happens also to the body. The totality of human experience—including not only sexual experience but also eating, drinking, joy, sadness, sickness, health, and death—is not merely a matter of physicality. Rather, these experiences are those of a human subject and therefore the human soul of a person. The implications for human sexuality direct us during this present life to strive for wholeness and health for ourselves and others. If one is to take responsibility for one’s sexual life as a human being, it will be exercised in such a way that it upholds the full humanity of the other.

A same-sex marriage cannot be a holy thing in Orthodox teaching; nor can marriage be understood as anything less than an icon of the relationship between Christ and the Church:

A holy sexual bond requires two, and only two, different sexual halves (“a man” and “his wife”), brought together into one sexual whole (“one flesh”).11 This complementarity is a reflection of God himself, since male and female together are made in God’s image.

Gender differentiation and sexuality are essential components of human nature. Masculinity and femininity

are adjectival, an aspect of our humanity. Thus, there are only two ways to be fully human: either as male or as female. Any other form is a symptom of the corruption of human nature that has come as a result of the fall. These forms include adultery (Exod. 20:14; Matt. 19:18), fornication (1 Cor. 6:15–18), homosexuality (Lev. 18:22; Rom. 1:26–27), incest (Lev. 20:11–21), bestiality (Lev. 18:23; 20:15–16), and lust (Matt. 5:28).12 Positively speaking, in briefest terms, the sacrament of Christian marriage is to be heterosexual, monogamous, non-incestuous, socially visible, socially affirmed, physical, permanent,

sanctifying, and eschatological.

Accordingly, Orthodox Christianity views the “one flesh” union as a profound mystery that images the love between Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:31–32). Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians uses the marital analogy as a public picture of the intimate union between Christ and the Church. Saint John Chrysostom observes how this union takes on an ecclesial character that makes the Christian home “a little church.” Heterosexual, monogamous marriage functions as a redemptive analogy of the exclusive relationship between Christ and his bride, the Church. The female imagery of the Church’s bridal relation to Christ, the male bridegroom, is used in Ephesians 5 to manifest the mystery of salvation when Paul quotes the Genesis text, “‘the two shall become one flesh.’” “This mystery is a profound one,” says Paul, “and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:29–32). There is thus a soteriological, iconic dimension to marriage and human sexuality that are to be understood in light of God’s self-revelation in Christ (the male bridegroom) and the Church (his female bride).

Along these lines, the Orthodox wedding icon (see above), which depicts the Wedding in Cana, is not an arbitrary image, but gives us a theophany, a divine revelation, of the relationship of Christ to His Church through a wedding. Orthodox priest Michael Gillis explains the meaning of the icon, in which Jesus Christ is present, but not at the center.

Granted, Father Warwick was not proposing that the Orthodox Church begin to offer marriage to same-sex couples, though he was in fact suggesting that the church bless them living in pseudo-marriage. I bring up the Wedding in Cana only to point out how entwined Orthodoxy’s teaching on marriage is with its teaching on sexuality. You cannot disentangle them. The Orthodox belief is not arbitrary, or shallow. You may consider it to be wrong, but you cannot say that it is trivial, or based on prejudice. For the Orthodox, to lose sight of these profound, God-given truths about human nature, marriage, and God would constitute a dramatic falling-away from God. I say “for the Orthodox,” but it’s true for all Christians. Many churches have lost this vision of the Good. Others, like the Catholic Church, are engaged in an all-out internal struggle over it. There can be no question that the Orthodox Church needs to do a much better job explaining its teaching to its people, and helping gay and lesbian brothers and sisters walk that particularly hard road they have been given on our shared pilgrimage. (This is not an abstract issue for me; I have a gay Orthodox friend who is chaste, and with whom I talk about his struggles.)

Last year, I published a long, heartfelt letter from an Orthodox Christian living in an Orthodox country, talking about how vicious the public rhetoric, especially from churchmen, is towards gays. The cruelty he describes is not Christian! The Church has to figure out how to hold the line for the Truth while also treating gays and lesbians with dignity and compassion, not with anger and contempt. That said, the idea that to fight this cruelty we must surrender the truth of God’s revelation to us about who He is, who we are, and how we are to live out our holiness with Him in our bodies — that must be firmly rejected. It is a false choice to say that we must choose between viciousness towards gays, or our moral theology.

We can see from the experiences of the Mainline Protestant and Catholic churches how hard it is to defend when you give the heterodox standing — especially given that the heterodox have behind them an entire culture and its propaganda machine. Just today, the United Methodist Church announced plans for a formal schism between those faithful to Biblical teaching, and heterodox progressives. We in the Orthodox Church have to hold the line, no matter what the world throws at us. Whether he knows it or not, Father Warwick’s seditious, Jim Martin-style sentimentality will lead to the dissolution of the Orthodox faith’s teaching on sexuality and marriage. It is certainly true that this teaching is wildly unpopular these days. That is not a judgment upon the Orthodox Church, but upon the world that will not have a God that tells it thou shalt not. For those who wish to be faithful and obedient, the bishops, priests, and theologians of the Orthodox Church must stand firm in the truth. There are countless numbers of us — I am one — for whom the Orthodox Church is the last, best hope in this post-Christian desert, and who have received its teachings, even its hard ones, as liberation. Glory to God for it!

So look, bishops and priests: do not lead us back to that Egypt from which we came!

 

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The Shame Of The Conformists

I’m not on Facebook, but Facebook, for some reason, will not let me delete my page there. If you have tried to write me on FB, I have not seen my page for over a year. It really is the Hotel California: you can check in, but you can never leave. Anyway, I say that because a reader sent me this piece from Prof. Robby George’s Facebook page today:

In his deeply thoughtful commentary on the piece Ryan Anderson and I have out in USA Today, Rod Dreher says the following about the redefinition of marriage, the decline of sexual morality, and the erosion of people’s basic understanding of sexuality:

“George and Anderson, and all of us who consider ourselves their allies, failed to stop this thing. But this failure ought to be judged as a loss in a war that was unwinnable. George and Anderson fought harder than almost anybody, and with real moral and intellectual excellence. But they, and their allies (I include myself in this number, though my contributions have been very modest compared to theirs), were the equivalent of the mythical Polish cavalry charging into the face of the Wehrmacht. (This didn’t actually happen, but it’s a powerful symbol nonetheless.) We trads were having to fight nothing less than modernity, with its valorization of the sovereign individual, its technocracy, its abandonment of God and transcendence, and an economic force (capitalism) that is both powered by these factors, and also magnifies them. It obliterates everything in its path.”

Okay, that was Rod. Now back to me (Robby):

I don’t agree that the war was unwinnable. (In fact, I don’t believe it is permanently lost, though obviously those of us who believe in marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife and who uphold basic understandings of sexuality and norms of sexual morality have been knocked back on our heels–hard.) What has been missing on the “conservative” or “traditional” side is not something that was unavailable to us. Rather, it was something too many conservatives or traditionalists (or whatever you want to call us) failed to muster. People could have mustered it, but too many didn’t. What am I referring to? Courage. What has been in short supply is courage.

Our opponents sensed that many of our people lacked it and they did what savvy–and ruthless–people would do in that circumstance: they ran a campaign of intimidation, smearing anyone who opposed their agenda as a bigot and a hater. This was comparatively easy to do because they had managed early on to gain something approaching a monopoly on what David Brooks (who himself supported and supports the redefinition of marriage) rightly calls “cultural power.” They controlled the commanding heights of culture: the universities, the news and (very importantly) entertainment media, the arts and their institutions, the major professional associations, mainline religion, even (they discovered) most of the corporate board rooms.

So when push came to shove, many, many supporters of marriage and traditional understandings of sexuality and sexual morality yielded to the bullying or at least abandoned the field. While left-wing (and even one or two otherwise right-wing) millionaires and billionaires poured money into referenda and legislative battles to redefine marriage, many, many well-to-do Christians (fearful of adverse consequences for themselves and their businesses of contributing money to the pro-marriage cause) declined to give. Some gave anonymously, but when one or two of these were “outed” and vilified by the left, others became too frightened even to do that. This was cowardice. For a longtime, the pro-marriage forces won most of these battles despite being massively outspent. But eventually the huge disparities in funding paid off for the marriage redefiners and for people who wanted to reorient education in ways that would advance the sexual liberationist agenda. Since politics is NOT downstream from culture (or, rather, since that slogan is at best a half truth) and political and legal developments partially shape culture–by influencing people’s understandings and beliefs–and don’t just reflect it, political victories paid huge dividends. They even paid off on the legal side of things. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy would never have pulled the trigger, providing the fifth vote for the absurd idea that the Constitution requires legal recognition of same-sex sexual partnerships as marriages, had the ground not been prepared by political victories (and the movement in their wake of a significant segment of public opinion).

The victories that were won leading to the current situation (in which polyamory is being mainstreamed and physically healthy thirteen-year old girls are being subjected to hormone treatments and mastectomies because they believe they are actually boys trapped in girls’ bodies) were NOT inevitable. They were won because too many people on the other side failed to muster the courage to fight. They cowered in fear. They stood on the sidelines. They wanted “other people” to do the work, contribute the money, stand boldly for what is true and good and right and justice. But there weren’t enough “other people.”

Someone might say, “this is no time for recriminations.” Well, I don’t agree. This is precisely the time for recriminations. Indeed, there was never a better time. Standing boldly for what is true and good and right and just is everybody’s job. It’s not just “other people’s” job. Especially to my fellow Christians I say, it is OUR job. It comes with the Gospel territory. You say “it’s hard”? Of course, it’s hard. But who ever told you that Christian discipleship was not going to be hard? Or risky? Or costly? Not Jesus, that’s for sure. He told us–in the most explicit terms–that it was going to be hard–very hard–and risky, and costly. What did he say exactly? “Whoever would be my disciple let him take up his cross and follow me.”

Every time you or I or anyone else fails to muster the courage to do what’s right, what God is calling us to do, there is behind that failure a still deeper failure: a failure of love. Moral norms and requirements are not abstract rules or arbitrary commandments. Their content is shaped by the human goods that these norms and requirements protect, preserve, uphold, and advance–the goods of flesh and blood human beings–ourselves and our precious brothers and sisters in the human family–whom we are called on to love and serve. We seek to preserve marriage–the real thing–for example because of the profound respects in which a flourishing marriage culture serves and benefits all members of the community–beginning with children. We need courage, we need to muster the courage, to love as we should–self-sacrificially.

That was a good piece, and I’m grateful to Prof. George for having written it. I may argue with him about whether or not the fight was winnable — I don’t concede ground here — but I have absolutely no argument with him that we religious and social conservatives were burdened in our resistance by a massive failure of moral courage, especially among the leadership class. And we still are.

Are there any Republicans in Congress will take up with gusto the fight for religious liberty, or against the mutilation of children by gender ideology, or any other manifestation of cultural radicalism? Where are the priests and pastors who will? Where are the courageous laity, especially those in a position of authority, whose words and deeds might mean something?

I’ve told this story here before, I’ll tell it again. Several years ago, when the California legislature was considering legislation that would have had the effect of compelling Christian colleges to compromise their principles on homosexuality, or be forced to shut down because state scholarship money would be disallowed there, a coalition of religious educators came together to fight for those schools’ right to exist. An Evangelical academic who was at the heart of that fight told me that they appealed to pastors and lay leaders in the vast Evangelical landscape of Orange County. Come help us. We are trying to save our schools. Few, if any, did; they were all terrified that some liberal might call them bigots.

They barely won, the Christians. This academic, who is white, told me that if not for the involvement of the Catholic Archbishop Gomez, and black Pentecostal pastors from Los Angeles, they probably would have lost. All those comfortable middle-class suburban Christians refused to stand or in any way to raise their voices.

The Social Justice Warriors have our number. They know that most of us won’t put anything on the line for our beliefs. They know that we are conformists.

In Prague last year, I interviewed a man who was a college student when communism collapsed. He told me that he knew fellow students whose parents had compromised at length with the communist government to open doors for them (the students) — and they hated their parents for it! Even though these young adults had been the beneficiaries of their parents’ cooperation with immorality in power, they resented their parents for having compromised to make their own lives easier.

I was reading Dante’s Inferno this week with my 15 year old, for his class. Outside the gates of Hell, a vast mob runs back and forth, chasing a blank flag, stung by wasps and consumed by worms. These are the people who never took a side, either with God or with Satan. In their lukewarmness, neither Heaven nor Hell wants them. Many, many conservative Christians today would fit right in there.

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Tomorrow’s Social Conservatism Today

Thomas Fazi is a socialist journalist based in Europe, and the author of an interesting Twitter thread (starting here) on the changing definition of what it means to be a social conservative. Here’s a threaded, easy-to-read version. Excerpts:

The fall of Labour’s “red wall” and the crushing Tory victory in the recent UK elections has ignited a heated debate about the causes of Labour’s defeat. Apart from the most obvious causes (Brexit, media bias etc.), there is one alleged cause that is causing much controversy: 

Labour’s inability to connect to a growing number of working class voters that are left-leaning on economic issues but – unlike the Labour establishment – “conservative” on social/cultural issues. Hence the latter’s drift towards the Tories. 

The most vocal proponents of this idea are those associated with @blue_labour, which have been arguing for a long time for “a socialism which is economically radical and culturally conservative”.

Fazi cites a Guardian op-ed by Kenan Malik arguing that it’s nonsense to call the British working class socially conservative. After all, they’re rather liberal on race and homosexuality, and other issues that are traditionally associated with social conservatives. This, says Fazi, is weak sauce. The meaning of “social conservatism” has changed — something Malik concedes, in fact, but can’t bring himself to approve of the working class’s nationalism. Fazi writes:

In classic example of left-Pavlovian response, Malik seems unwilling to confront these uncomfortable truths, preferring to take comfort in the fact that a minority of the working class is pro-immigration – enough to dismiss notions of working class conservatism as “nonsense”. 

Malik’s argument gets even more contradictory from here on: to the extent, he says, that immigration is perceived as a problem – a fact he denied until a moment earlier – it is only because immigration has become “symbolic” of the working class’ loss of identity, community etc. 





In other words, Malik says, immigration is not the cause but rather the symptom of working class anxieties over not only its growing material precariousness but also over its loss of collective identity and social atomisation. 





It’s not clear what caused this “erosion of the more intangible aspects of [workers’] lives” for Malik – probably a vague notion of “neoliberalism”. But his solution is clear: the left must not base its attempts to rebuild community on “notions of national or ethnic identity”. 

Rather, they should be based on “struggles to transform society, from battles for decent working conditions to campaigns for equal rights”, which “created organisations […] which drew individuals into new modes of collective life”.

This is ridiculous, says Fazi (who, recall, is a socialist). If a person wants to fight atomization and bring society closer together for collective action for the common good, then building on national identity is the best way to do so:

This, however, represents a clear denial of reality [Malik’s dismissal of nationalism — RD]. As important as narrower (local, political, religious, etc.) forms of identity may be, many studies show that national identity is not only very real, but it remains the strongest form of collective identity around the world. 

Even among the young (less than 25 years old), those with a university education and professionals, national identity trumps local and – even more massively – regional (such as European) or global attachments, except among the globe-trotting cosmopolitan elites. 





A country’s national identity (like nations themselves) may be, to a large extent, an “imaginary” construct. It may also be hard to pin down, encompassing customs, culture, history language, institutions, religion, social mores, etc. But it exists and has very “real” effects… 

… creating common bonds among members of – and giving rise to – a territorially defined community (demos). To deny the existence of the latter is, in effect, to deny the existence of society itself. All that’s left is a bunch of individuals that happen to share a piece of land.

More:

The woke left likes to vilify the nation-state, but all the major social, economic and political advancements of the past centuries were achieved through the institutions of the democratic nation-state, not through international, multilateral or supranational institutions. 

Furthermore, modern concepts of nat. identity are incredibly “progressive”, based as they are on transcending individual particularities – sex, race, biology, religion, etc. – to create cultural-political identities based on participation, equality, citizenship, representation. 

For woke leftists to raise the spectre of “whiteness” whenever the topic of national identity is mentioned is simply a testament to their ignorance. Modern national identities have nothing to do with biology and are indeed extraordinarily inclusive and “open”.

And:

Thus, when we speak of working class or societal values, we are not talking of a specific set of predefined values. We are simply talking of whatever values, norms etc. happen to characterise a specific national community at any point in time.

This is not an argument against the evolution of national identity. It is an argument for respecting a national community’s right to have a say in the pace and form that such evolution takes. To ignore the latter is, quite simply, political suicide.





We are now in a position to offer a different explanation of “social conservatism”: this is simply society’s self-defence against those factors – internal or external – that are perceived as threatening its members’ need for community, belonging, rootedness and identity.

Labour’s continued survival as a working class party, I would argue, depends on its ability to engage with this need.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing. It’s not long, and it will give you more context to understand the passages I’ve quoted here. Fazi sounds like an interesting person to follow on Twitter, which you can do here: @battleforeurope.

You are, of course, wondering about how this changing definition of social conservatism applies to American politics. Unlike Britain, Christianity is still a political force in the US, though a diminishing one. The main political issues separating social conservatism from social liberalism have been abortion and homosexuality. The research organization PRRI used those two issues as its measure in 2018 of the relative social (cultural) conservatism of each state:

In 2003, Thomas B. Edsall, one of the best political journalists we have, wrote a really interesting piece for The Atlantic on how the “morality gap” has become the “key variable” in American politics. Excerpt:

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton’s advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter’s life.

Respondents who took the “liberal” stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a “conservative” stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn’t look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors—and better indicators of partisan inclination—than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic).

It is an axiom of American politics that people vote their pocketbooks, and for seventy years the key political divisions in the United States were indeed economic. The Democratic and Republican Parties were aligned, as a general rule, with different economic interests. Electoral fortunes rose and fell with economic cycles. But over the past several elections a new political configuration has begun to emerge—one that has transformed the composition of the parties and is beginning to alter their relative chances for ballot-box success. What is the force behind this transformation? In a word, sex.

Whereas elections once pitted the party of the working class against the party of Wall Street, they now pit voters who believe in a fixed and universal morality against those who see moral issues, especially sexual ones, as elastic and subject to personal choice.

That was nearly a quarter-century ago. Times have changed. Boy, have they! In that period, Americans have become far more liberal about sexual matters. Fundamental support for abortion rights has not changed much since 1973. With the coming of the Internet and the advent of smartphones in 2007, pornography is ubiquitous, and considered now to be a normal part of life. And gay marriage is widely popular. Look at this Gallup trendline below. In 1996, the country was split down the middle not over gay marriage (27 percent supported it then; today, 63 percent do), but over whether gay sex should be legal! 

Plus, the bottom is falling out of Christianity, especially among the younger generations. Pew has details on that, but this Gallup graphic tells the same story:

Some Christians will want to argue with this, and say that holding a “church membership” is not the same thing as being a religious believer. Strictly speaking, that’s true, but it’s mostly irrelevant when trying to understand broad cultural trends, and what they have to tell us about politics.

The bottom line is that for various reasons, the Culture War as it has been defined since 1980 — as something primarily about sex — has been settled in favor of the cultural Left. There are still many, many more conventional social conservatives in the US than in Britain: that is, people who are religiously observant, and who hold traditional views on abortion, marriage, homosexuality, and sexual morality in general. I am one of these people. But we are not ascendant, and it’s hard to see how we could become ascendant in the short term.

Britain is showing to us that the meaning of “social conservatism” has changed there, and is rapidly changing in the same way here. It’s easier to see in Britain, where religion is relatively unimportant. Both establishment liberals and establishment conservatives have their own reasons for wanting to hold on to outdated definitions of social conservatism. If it had not been for the Evangelical leaders who went so gung-ho for Trump in 2016, giving journalists and others reasons to jump up and down about the supposed hypocrisy of those churchmen, we probably would have been able to perceive more clearly the shift of “social conservatism” away from sexual issues, and over to Thomas Fazi’s definition: “society’s self-defence against those factors – internal or external – that are perceived as threatening its members’ need for community, belonging, rootedness and identity.”

If you’ve been reading me since the mid-2000s, you know that I’ve been arguing since around 2006 that the longterm trends for social and religious conservatives on gay marriage were not good, and that we would be much better off basing our activism on the importance of defending religious liberty. In light of Fazi’s tweetstorm, that stance of mine looks to me like a rudimentary way of saying that conservative politics ought to shift towards helping communities and community institutions protect themselves against fast-moving social changes that threaten its need for community, belonging, rootedness and identity.

It’s very hard in America to argue against individual rights. There’s no longterm future in arguing against gay rights in general. That is simply the hard reality of this time and place. And it seems clear that defending ourselves by posing religious liberty as more important than gay rights when the two clash is also a non-starter in a secularizing country. So, I wonder: if the emerging social conservatism in the US, as in the UK, is going to be about the rate of change, and local control over factors that threaten social cohesion and identity, then maybe religious conservatives ought to articulate our arguments not in terms of rights clashes, but instead as part of a general opposition to forces tearing apart community, rootedness, and identity.

I’m not quite sure how this would work, or if it would work. But we need to be thinking in these terms. Remember, sex didn’t become the “key variable” in American politics until the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and its aftermath, re-sorted the political parties. Prior to 1968, there was broad agreement in America on sexual matters. As Edsall pointed out, our politics back then were fought primarily over New Deal economic issues, though the Civil Rights movement pushed race into the center too. Sex, though, was not a big political issue, because there was broad consensus on the political issues emerging from sexual morality.

Until there wasn’t. Now, though, with the possible exception of transgenderism, Americans appear to be well on their way to reaching a new consensus on sexual matters. That Donald Trump became the GOP’s nominee in 2016, and then the president, shows how outdated the old consensus is. I think it’s fair to call out conservative Christian leaders who gave their full-throated endorsement to Trump, but this Facebook statement from conservative Princeton professor Robert George is a good partial explanation of what the political form of religious conservatism looks like in the new era:

Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump (and my own views about the President’s delinquencies are well known) surely it’s not hard to understand why large numbers of Evangelicals and Catholics favor him over any of the Democrats seeking their party’s nomination (despite the fact that many Evangelicals and Catholics aren’t happy about the President’s character, coarse rhetoric, and some of his polices). There is the fealty of every single one of the Democratic nominees–every single one–to the abortion and sex lib lobbies. If you believe, as Evangelicals and Catholics believe, that abortion is the unjust killing of innocent and defenseless members of the human family, then it is nigh impossible to imagine circumstances under which one could support a politician who pledges to work night and day to deny unborn children any legal protection against the lethal violence now visited with impunity upon nearly a million of them each year. And that is precisely the pledge every Democratic candidate makes to Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the entire base of their party. But that’s only for starters.

Evangelicals and Catholics have watched as Democrats and progressives across the country have worked to shut down Catholic and other religious foster care and adoption agencies because, as a matter of conscience, these agencies place children in homes with a mom and a dad. They have watched as cake bakers, florists, caterers, wedding planners, and others (even the pizza shop-owning O’Connor family ad the software designer Brendan Eich) have been harrassed in efforts to drive them out of business and deprive them of their livelihoods because of their beliefs about marriage and sexual morality. They have watched as the Democratic and progressive mayor of Atlanta terminated the employment of Kelvin Cochran, the city’s Fire Chief, for the same reason–he had published a book upholding Biblical teaching on marriage and sexual morality. They have watched as Democrats and progressives have tried to “cleanse” entire fields of medicine and healthcare of Evangelicals, Catholics, and other pro-life people by imposing on them requirements to implicate themselves in the taking of innocent life by abortion. They watched as Beto O’Rourke proposed–over no truly meaningful opposition from his fellow Democratic presidential aspirants–to selectively yank the tax exempt status from churches and other religious organizations that refused to fall in line with progressive ideological orthodoxy on sex and marriage.

I could go on.

Now, none of this is to deny that there are some Evangelicals and Catholics (and other Trump supporters) who seem entirely to overlook Donald Trump’s faults and failings. They see nothing but good in the man. But at least in my experience these Evangelicals and Catholics are in the minority. Most recognize his faults and failings and wish he were better. Their support for him is based on a prudential judgment that the overall situation for the common good would be made much worse if he were to lose to one of the Democrats. And they fear–with justification–that the consequences for themselves and their religious institutions would be dire if such a thing were to happen. In this respect, their position is formally like that of their anti-Trump co-religionists who favor a Democrat because their prudential judgment is that, though a Democratic president would do great harm to values they cherish (such as the sanctity of human life, and religious liberty and the rights of conscience), the harm would be less than the harm Trump will do to those values and others in the long run.

My point here is not to try to adjudicate this dispute. (For what it’s worth, I think that it’s a more complicated business than most people on either side suppose. I may say more about that on another occasion after I’ve reflected on it a good deal more.) It is simply to say that no one should be surprised that many Evangelicals and Catholics (including some like my pal Keith Pavlischek who refused to vote for Trump in 2016) support the President over the Democratic alternatives. Whether one assesses and weights the reasons as they do or not, they do have reasons.

I say a partial explanation, because Prof. George is still arguing on the moral substance of abortion and sexual morality. And there’s nothing wrong with that! I completely agree with him. But note the defensiveness in his articulation of the rationale for voting for Trump Republicans. I don’t say “defensiveness” as a word of criticism. As the socialist Thomas Fazi says, people whose traditions, institutions, and identities are under siege are right to defend themselves. The point I want to make, though, is that we should understand that we are engaging in legitimate self-defense here, and we should explore the possibilities of reframing our own interests as tied to the economic and non-religious cultural interests of working-class people who vote left.

To restate: Tomorrow’s social conservatism will not be about sex. It will be about nationalism and identity. I fear that if this is not managed carefully, it will end up being, in the US, about race. The Left has already staked out its position that social liberalism, on this front, is about being anti-white. I hope that the Right can and will define social conservatism not as pro-white, but pro-American, in the sense of fighting for fair and just treatment for all Americans, regardless of race. I think that still has purchase among Americans. I hope so.

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