Rod Dreher's Blog, page 184

Disrupting Schools For Racial Justice

I’ve mentioned in this space before what a revelation it was to me to transfer to a new school for my 11th grade year. I went from a good public school to a better public school: a boarding school for gifted kids. The revelation was what a classroom environment could be like when teachers didn’t have to spend so much time trying to make kids be quiet so she could teach. I had never experienced that before.

In my old school, I don’t recall that it was a racial thing. Kids just would not shut up. I remember going back to visit my favorite teacher in my old school, on the first break we had from my new one, and being gobsmacked by how much time she had to spend trying to discipline her class. And this was normal for every class! Like I said, my old school was considered to be one of the better ones in the state, too. The impression I had — and this was coming up on 40 years ago, so take it with a grain of salt — was that our poor teachers had to spend a shocking amount of time as disciplinarians. There was nothing bad, just the constant chit-chat of restless teenagers who refuse to keep their stupid mouths shut.

I cannot imagine how the teachers in the State of California, always on the cutting edge of things progressive, feel after the passage of this law:

A California bill that passed the Legislature would prohibit schools, including charter schools, from suspending students for willful defiance.

That means if a student is acting up in class, teachers and school officials will not be able to suspend them from school.

More:

The bill by Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, would ban the suspension of students in grades K-8 for refusing to obey a teacher or administrator, a practice known as willful defiance.

“I’ve dealt with a lot of these cases,” said Berry Accius, founder of Voice of the Youth, a nonprofit mentoring program in Sacramento. “Unfortunately, I’ve had kids that have been suspended for sometimes three months.”

Accius said school suspensions are used disproportionately against students of color.

“African American males and females, they are suspended at a higher rate — especially the African American males,” Accius said.

Maybe African American males and females, for some reason or reasons, disrupt at a higher rate. Ever thought about that? Of course they haven’t. In the Kingdom of the Woke, it is forbidden to act on the evidence of your senses when that evidence contradicts progressive dogma.

Now state legislators, in their wisdom, have condemned elementary school teachers and the well-behaved students — black, white, Latino, Asian, whatever — to the tyranny of brats. Progressives are dismantling the ability of a basic social institution — the school — to defend itself, and to maintain order sufficient to fulfill its function. And then, when the parents who can afford to get their kids out of the public schools do so, progressives will call them racist.

A couple of weeks ago I saw a black friend, an older woman, who retired a few years back from a lifetime of teaching in Louisiana public schools. She could have taught longer, but she was sick and tired of having to deal with disruptive students and the parents who did nothing but make excuses for how their poor little preciouses were being picked on by the mean old teacher. I don’t blame her a bit, but I do feel the most sorry for the kids who come to school to get the education they deserve, but which the state and society won’t provide for them, because parents and school authorities lack the will to impose basic classroom discipline.

At least in the Golden State, disruptive students will be able to go act up in, by law, the bathroom of their gender choice, because as the state’s public school superintendent said, “In California we move forward, not backward.”

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Breaking News

In his column today titled “The Media Is Broken,” David Brooks writes:

An event is really two things. It’s the event itself and then it’s the process by which we make meaning of the event. As Aldous Huxley put it, “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”

When a whole country sees events through a similar lens, then you don’t have to think a lot about the process people use to make meaning. It’s similar across the land. But when people in different regions and subcultures have nonoverlapping lenses, the process by which people make sense of events is more important than the event itself.

For reasons I don’t understand, we’ve had an epistemic explosion over the past few decades. Different American regions and subcultures now see reality through nonoverlapping lenses. They make meaning in radically different ways. Psycho-social categories have hardened.

Brooks goes on to say that the media “underreport on how meaning is made in different subcultures. You can’t make sense of reality without that.” He continues:

The big difference for those of us in media is that the main story is not only where the decision makers are creating events. It’s also and maybe more so in the eyes of those doing the perceiving.

Obviously, in this era it’s even more important to have a news organization that is ideologically, culturally and geographically diverse, so you can surface and explore the different unconscious ways groups see.

Read it all. This is an important column, and its importance is belied by Brooks’s characteristically modest tone. What he’s saying is that the old model of journalism is broken, and has not adapted itself to covering effectively the country as it exists. There has always, of course, been a gap between the country as it is, and the country as those in the media reflect it in their reporting. But Brooks points out that something fundamental has changed, not just in the media, but in the country itself, and the way the American people interpret news and events.

Put simply, we have lost a common narrative. If David wants to understand the “epistemic explosion” of recent years, he might start by reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which, though now almost 40 years old, anticipates the epistemic fragmentation through which we are all now living — and the resulting clashes. Public life now is like an Arctic sea that is melting and breaking up, with giant icebergs smashing violently into each other .

There has never been a Golden Age when all people thought the same thing, and saw the world in precisely the same way. It is certainly true that in past eras, the media privileged certain voices, and marginalized others. It is kind of amazing to think now about my youth, when there were only three television networks (plus PBS), and most people tacitly agreed that the stories we heard on the national news each night were reliable guides to what really happened. “And that’s the way it is,” Walter Cronkite famously ended every newscast. Most folks assumed it was true. It’s very hard to convey to younger people, who did not live through that era, how different it was.

There’s a lot of psychological security in having a shared narrative constructed by the media. I wouldn’t go back to it, but I can recognize its therapeutic value — and I don’t say that sarcastically. The world is a violent, confusing, complicated place, and it matters a lot when we can share a story that orders it and gives it meaning. Alasdair MacIntyre does not talk media theory — he’s a moral philosopher — but rather explores the implications of ceasing to believe in truths that transcend us and bind us together. His core insight is that the Enlightenment freed Western man from imposed and inherited narratives that relied on God and other traditional authorities, but failed to create an effective replacement from Reason alone. Since then, we have all been living out the unwinding.

When I graduated from journalism school in 1989, I carried with me into the world fundamentally liberal assumptions about journalism. I don’t mean liberal in the sense of “the politics of the Democratic Party”; I’m talking more a matter of a basic approach to what newsgathering is. I believed that our jobs as journalists was to assemble the most factually accurate portrait of reality that we could, recognizing that it will always be incomplete, but doing our best anyway to represent the world as it is as free of our own biases as possible. This required talking to a variety of people surrounding a news event, to get their perspectives. Out of their multiple subjective views, and refining them based on what can be factually known, the journalist can sketch out a reasonably accurate version of events — one subject to revision, as more facts become known.

This is not what an opinion journalist does, mind you. That’s a different form of journalism, one that’s important, but not the same thing as how the newsroom works. In traditionally structured news organizations, there have been walls between the newsroom and the editorial staff, and between those two and the advertising department.

The important point to be made here is that I approached journalism — we were all taught to do this, if only implicitly — with the sense that The Truth Is Out There, and our task as journalists was to do our very best to discern it and reproduce it as accurately as possible. You might say that this is a “metaphysical realist” approach to journalism — that is, one dedicated to the belief that Truth has an existence independent from observers, and that it can be known, however imperfectly, through the methods of fact-gathering and sifting professional journalists learn and practice. We know that perfect knowledge of the Truth is not possible, but we believe that if we work hard enough, and are constantly questioning ourselves and our reporting, seeking to refine it, we can produce something good enough.

I am still a metaphysical realist, both philosophically and journalistically (in that I believe the approach to journalism that I, and my generation, was taught is a sound one). But I don’t believe that American journalism is dedicated to that foundational proposition, not anymore. Rather, to fall back on High Middle Ages philosophical concepts, it has become nominalist — that is, journalists believe that there is no such thing as Truth, only interpretations. Well, let me rescind that remark. That’s not really what nominalism is; that is what postmodernism is, which is a kind of completion of nominalism. Nominalism is the philosophical idea that there are no universals, and that the meaning of objects in the sensate world is what we impose on them. You can be a good nominalist and a good journalist, certainly; nominalism does not take a position on the facticity of events.

Postmodernism, though — that not only assumes nominalism, but also extends its skepticism of metaphysical meaning to facticity itself. As I see it, most journalists today believe — and most are unconscious of it — that truth claims are really masks concealing the exercise of power. As such, they believe that the journalists’ task is to create and shape narrative to achieve certain political and social goals.

An example I bring up often in this space is an enlightening (for me) argument I have around 2006 or so with a fellow journalist about the way our profession was covering the debate about same-sex marriage. I complained that the media were doing a poor job of exploring the complexities of the issue, especially the socially and religiously conservative take on the matter. My indignant colleague said that there weren’t two sides to this issue: that there was Good, and there was Evil. He said, in all sincerity, “If this were the Civil Rights era, would you believe that we had a responsibility as journalists to give equal time to the KKK?”

Dwell for a moment on the fact that a professional journalist at a major news organization seriously believed that Christian churches and individuals who believe what almost everybody in the world believed about the sexually complementary nature of marriage until basically the day before yesterday — that those people are the moral equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan. This journalist was serious. And that statement he made was only the first time I’d heard it put like that.

More seriously, as a matter of fact, I do believe that a professional journalist would have a responsibility to fairly represent the views of Klansmen, insofar as people holding those views were meaningful actors in events, and understanding that people believed such things, and why they believed such things, was important to understanding events in the world. My colleague, though, believed that the journalists’ role is to advance a particular narrative for the sake of bringing about social change of which he approved. How many times have I heard from journalists that old chestnut that holds journalism’s role to be “to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable.” The sense among journalists that the profession is a prophetic one, one that speaks truth to power, and advocates on behalf of the powerless — that goes very, very deep.

It can take on absurd, even dangerous, qualities. When I was working at the Dallas Morning News in the previous decade, one afternoon a news alert went out in the city. A suspect had shot one or more people in a popular pedestrian area of Uptown Dallas, and was at large. Police were hunting for the man, and told the public in the area to stay inside and take precautions. Cops put out a description of the shooter, who was a black man. Get this: none of the Dallas media — not the newspaper, not the TV stations — included the race of the suspect in their immediate reporting. The idea was not to “reinforce stereotypes” of the kind of people who commit violent crime. In this particular case, the news media chose to deny the public information it needed to protect itself from a shooter at large, because it was more important to protect the Narrative. I remember exactly where I was sitting when I watched that play out. It was real moment of de-conversion for me, from once believing in my profession to seeing it as, in some important ways, a menace to society.

Anyway, if you believe that journalism’s mission is to side with certain classes of people against other classes of people, then you will have little to no interest in telling the stories of those you have identified as privileged or otherwise deplorable in the value system you hold, and that most of your colleagues hold (and study after study has documented that journalism is overwhelmingly populated by liberals and progressives). Further, you may convince yourself that the stories you assign, you report, you publish or broadcast — that they all be focused on advocating a particular narrative, or narratives, and de-emphasizing, or even ignoring, competing narratives.

I used to think that it was sufficient to point out to journalists their biases in particular stories, and that out of a sense of professional obligation, they would seek to correct those biases. Now I think that’s naive. The belief that epistemic bias is something to be overcome in the practice of journalism is a concept from a previous era. Now it is embraced as a virtue — but only if it’s a bias towards the Left.

Thus do you find The New York Times publishing stories like this:

(Link to story here.)

And this op-ed (link here):

 

I cite the Times constantly because a) it is the best and most important newspaper in the world, and as such b) it sets the agenda for other American news media, and c) it reflects the thinking and biases of the US cultural elite, as The Guardian does for Britain. The frequent refrain I hear from commenters here — “Who cares what The New York Times thinks about anything?” — reflects a serious misunderstanding of how media ecology works in the US. Though I’ve angrily quit subscribing to the Times twice over its outrageous bias against traditional Christianity, I always go back because I need a comprehensive source of information to do my own work — and when it’s good, nobody can touch the Times for quality — and because if you want to know what the cultural elite in this country think, and what they will be trying to do to the rest of us, you need to read the Times in the same way that Cold war Kremlinologists needed to read Pravda. I’m not joking.

So, to go back to the David Brooks column today, I’ll repeat these grafs:

The big difference for those of us in media is that the main story is not only where the decision makers are creating events. It’s also and maybe more so in the eyes of those doing the perceiving.

Obviously, in this era it’s even more important to have a news organization that is ideologically, culturally and geographically diverse, so you can surface and explore the different unconscious ways groups see.

I think Brooks is both 100 percent right, and 100 percent tilting at windmills. In most cases, the elite media do not want to know any facts that complicate the Narrative. If you are a traditional Christian, or a rural white person, or member of any other demographic disfavored by cultural elites, then you are either not seen at all by these people, or you are seen as a Problem To Be Solved. We all went through a Moment in 2016, when the national media wondered how on earth they missed the rise of Trump. Do you think they are any closer in 2019 to understanding why so many Americans still stand by Trump, despite everything we’ve seen from him? Do you think they want to understand?

I don’t. I really don’t. I regularly read the Times and other national news sources, and listen to NPR, and very rarely see or hear stories about people like me, and those I know. If you listen to NPR, you will know more about the lives and struggles of Central American migrants than you will about the lives and struggles of working-class white people in Alabama, or middle-class churchgoers in the Midwest. This is who NPR cares about — and as much as I like NPR in general, I don’t think the people who run it care about how out of touch they are with the people of the country they cover. You can find all flavors of diversity on NPR, but ideologically, it’s all vanilla progressivism.

I’ll stop now. You’ve heard this all from me before. And look, this is going to disappoint some of you conservative readers, but I don’t believe either than conservatives and other kinds of people routinely ignored or diminished by the coverage in mainstream sources have any greater desire for balance than liberals. Some do, but mostly, I think all people these days prefer to have their chosen narratives reinforced by news coverage. One of the earliest lessons I learned in this was in helping a German journalist friend cover a story in south Louisiana’s chemical industry corridor in the early 1990s. I met a small-town pharmacist who noticed an alarming number of prescriptions for a special drug used to treat a rare form of cancer. She went to state authorities with her findings, and the media. For her trouble, she was made into a pariah by the people of her hometown. She was telling them something they didn’t want to hear — even though she was trying to save their lives. I heard her tell the German journalist that the priest of her and her husband’s parish had asked them to go somewhere else to mass, because their presence was too disruptive.

I’ve seen versions of that play out over the years — even within myself. Between September 11, 2001, and the start of the Iraq War in 2003, I, conservative media sophisticate that I am, routinely dismissed journalism — even journalism that appeared here in this very magazine — that contradicted the narrative I preferred to believe about the coming war. It is unnerving to think about this, even today, because not once was I aware of what I was doing. It was obvious that all intelligent and virtuous people believed that war was necessary. This belief of mine was reinforced by those in my social circle, and by the media I consumed. I wasn’t one of those mindless liberals who were hostile to the facts, and to logic. Not me!

We know how well that all turned out, don’t we?

I tell you that as a warning that every single one of us is subject to epistemic closure — especially in a time like today, when there is no cultural pressure from the expectation that the unbiased search for Truth is something to which we should all aspire. People don’t actually want to know the complex truth. They want help building an epistemic Maginot Line. The problem is that reality always finds a way through the Ardennes.

This epistemic shattering is not something that the “liberal media” is imposing on us all, though the liberal media certainly reinforce it. This is what it means to live in postmodernity, which is above all a time of collapsed metanarratives (in simpler words, a time when we can no longer agree about the larger story within which we all participate). I mean, look: The New York Times takes it as an uncontestable truth that penis-havers who say they are women really are women, and that to deny that “fact” is to mark yourself out as a wicked person. In Britain last week, a judge ruled that Maya Forstater — a feminist — who denies that penis-havers are truly women holds an opinion that is “not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

Consider what would happen to a journalist who stood in The New York Times and said that Maya Forstater is correct, and that a person born male can never truly be a woman. Do you think that journalist would long be employed at that newspaper? This is where we are today.

And this is why liberalism has reached its end: it depends on an Enlightenment metanarrative to sustain itself. The epistemic value of the scientific method was a core of that metanarrative. So too is the epistemic value of journalism that holds rigorous efforts to overcome bias as a professional virtue. All of this is going away now. Our news media are broken because it mistakes its ideological dream for reality, and by hypermoralizing its craft, has placed obstacles to observing the facts in front of its eyes.

It is difficult for someone like me, a professional journalist, to give up the idea that my profession is dedicated, deep down, to the proposition of telling the truth without fear or favor. But I think it’s probably necessary at this point, for the sake of protecting the people and the institutions I care about from the culture war these journalistic combatants wage on us. I cannot express to you how much this depresses me. I still believe that journalism is an honorable profession, and that there are journalists — liberal ones too! — who do courageous, honorable work. But the profession is no longer what it was, because our liberal democracy is no longer what it was. Better to face that and figure out a way forward than to dwell in the nostalgic past.

The post Breaking News appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Vatican’s Pachamama Christmas

A distressed Catholic reader sends in this clip of the Vatican’s  Christmas pop concert, a fundraiser of some sort, which featured a moment on stage in which an indigenous young woman from Latin America taught the audience to embrace the presence of Pachamama (Mother Earth) within. This, in the presence of bishops and cardinals, some of whom can be seen on camera following her instructions with smiles on her faces. For speakers of Spanish and Italian, you can see the moment beginning just after the 1:44 mark on the video.

Here’s an English translation of what the indigenous woman said in Spanish, after instructing the audience to cross their arms over their chests:

You will feel a strong vibration. It is the heart. Your heart, but also the heart of Mother Earth. On the other side, where there is silence, it is the Spirit. The Spirit that allows you to hear the message of the Mother.

For us indigenous peoples, mother earth, Hitchauaya, is everything. It is the Mother who gives us food, food, sacred water, medicinal plants; and what we offer to the earth is to pay homage to it, the placenta and the first hair we cut. For us, Mother Earth is fundamental, our connection with it is constant, how the pulse feels, how the heart feels. 

The American priest Father Zuhlsdorf points out that at the end of the Indian woman’s words, a celebrity Italian priest compares the fire-stricken Amazon rainforest to the Burning Bush before which Moses stood, in the presence of God. The deification of the Earth proceedeth.

The Vaticanist Marco Tosatti says angrily:

Even at Christmas. Can you say that you can’t take any more of these antics, or does this seem rigid too?

So there was earth worship at the Vatican’s Christmas concert. Also, Lionel Richie, an Ancient of Days for the OK Boomer set, singing “Party All Night Long”:

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Professor Bainbridge, Hero Of Diversity

The UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge is up for a merit raise this year, and according to new regulations, is required to sign a McCarthyite loyalty oath submit a statement of how he contributes to UCLA’s goals in “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” On his blog, Prof. Bainbridge posts the statement that he e-mailed to the administration:

Although I am aware and respectful of the many dimensions within which a university properly seeks a diverse faculty and student body, I have long been particularly concerned with the lack of intellectual diversity at the law school. A survey of U.S. law professors in general found that white Democratic professors (both male and female), Jewish professors, and nonreligious professors “account for most (or all) of the overrepresentation among racial, gender, religious, and ideological groups in law teaching.”[1] The groups that “account for most of the underrepresentation among racial, gender, religious, and ideological groups in law teaching” are Republicans (both male and female), Protestants, and Catholics.[2] This disparity persists even though “religious and political diversity are probably more important for viewpoint diversity than gender diversity and roughly as important as racial diversity.”[3]

At UCLA, we know that the campus as a whole leans substantially to the left. “A study of various university faculties showed that at Cornell the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty members was 166 to 6, at Stanford it was 151 to 17, at UCLA it was 141 to 9, and at the University of Colorado it was 116 to 5.”[4] Conservative students at UCLA have been “harassed, stalked, and threatened.”[5] I recently searched the opensecrets.org donor database for political contributions made by persons who claimed UCLA School of Law as their employer. Thirty-eight of those persons contributed solely to Democratic candidates, the Democratic Party and various affiliates, and liberal PACs. One person contributed to both Republicans and Democrats. Three persons contributed exclusively to Republican candidates, the Republican Party, and various NRC affiliates. Of the faculty members who contributed exclusively to Republican candidates, the most recently hired of the two was hired in 1997. As a monetary matter, 92.67% of all contributions went to Democrats and affiliated groups.[6]

Because conservative students and students of faith often feel alienated and estranged in an environment that is so relentlessly liberal and secular, I have made particular efforts to reach out to and support such students. I have served as a mentor for leaders of The Federalist Society and Christian Law Students Association. I have given talks to both organizations. I taught a Perspectives on law and Lawyering seminar devoted to Catholic Social Thought and the Law, which gave students—whether Catholic or not—an opportunity to consider how their faith (or lack thereof) related to the law and an opportunity to learn about a coherent body of Christian scholarship that might inform their lives as lawyers. I have also tried to lead by example, such as by serving as a volunteer with the Good Shepherd Catholic Church’s St. Vincent de Paul chapter, which raises funds for distribution to poor persons who are in danger of losing their home due to inability to make rent or mortgage payments.

Read the whole genius post here, including details on the numbered citations above. You can also leave a comment for him there. It’s a good blog to follow, too, especially if you’re a conservative in the legal field.

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The Coming Oppression Of Christians

About an hour ago, I finished writing what will probably be the most intense chapter of my forthcoming book about the lessons for us from the experience of those persecuted by Soviet-bloc communism. It’s a chapter on the meaning of suffering. It consists almost entirely of stories of Christians who endured persecution, even torture, at the hands of Communists. Most of it comes from original interviews I conducted, but several occasions, I draw from testimonies of former prisoners that have been published elsewhere. For example, this from an interview Father Gheorghe Calciu, a Romanian Orthodox priest, gave in 1996 about the year he spent in a dungeon cell caring for a fellow Christian who was dying from tuberculosis and the battering he had received under torture:

Constantine Oprisan

They had beaten him on his chest, on his back and had destroyed his lungs. But he prayed the whole day. He never said anything bad against his torturer, and he spoke to us about Jesus Christ. All the while, we did not realize how important Constantine Oprisan was for us. He was the justification of our life in this cell. Over the course of a year, he became weaker and weaker. We felt that he had finished his time here and would die.

… After he died, every one of us felt that something in us had died. We understood that, sick as he was and in our care like a child, he had been the pillar of our life in the cell. Then we were alone without Constantine Oprisan.

Read more about this interview here. 

It comes from this collection of interviews, sermons, and essays by Father Gheorghe, who died in 2006.

Anyway, I just put that chapter of my book to bed, and checked Twitter. There I found this from an Australian journalist I follow:

China is pretty much just wokeness with guns now. https://t.co/Wn3iRCFOSr

— James Morrow (@pwafork) December 26, 2019

Here’s a link to that story. Here’s how it begins:

China will rewrite the Bible and Quran to ‘reflect socialist values’ amid crackdown on the country’s religious groups, a report has revealed.

New editions must not contain any content that goes against the beliefs of the Communist Party, according to a top party official. Paragraphs deemed wrong by the censors will be amended or re-translated.

Though the Bible and Quran were not mentioned specifically, the party called for a ‘comprehensive evaluation of the existing religious classics aiming at contents which do not conform to the progress of the times’.

The order was given in November during a meeting held by the Committee for Ethnic and Religious Affairs of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which oversees the ethnic and religious matters in China.

“The progress of the times.” Right. One thinks back to this 2018 piece of news from the Vatican:

“Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese,” a senior Vatican official has said.

Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, praised the Communist state as “extraordinary”, saying: “You do not have shantytowns, you do not have drugs, young people do not take drugs”. Instead, there is a “positive national conscience”.

This is important to know — which side churchmen like Bishop Sanchez are one. Don’t you dare forget this. Nor dare you forget the courageous witness of Christians like Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired archbishop of Hong Kong, who is not having this Francis regime propaganda. Excerpt:

As he has in the past, Zen criticized [Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro] Parolin and his methods, saying “nobody can be sure” of what he wants at a given moment.

“It’s a real mystery how a man of the Church, given all his knowledge of China, of the Communists, could do such a thing as he’s doing now,” Zen said, adding that in his view, “the only explanation is not faith. It’s a diplomatic success. Vainglory.”

Zen also criticized Francis’s approach, arguing that in his view, given the pope’s moves on China, “he has low respect for his predecessors.”

“He is shutting down everything done by John Paul II and by Pope Benedict,” he said, accusing Francis’s allies of giving “lip service” when they insisted the pope’s moves are in continuity with his predecessors. “But that’s an insult,” Zen said.

I’m telling you, folks: watch China. I believe it is going to be a model for the West in the decades to come, as we move into what I call “soft totalitarianism” — “soft” because unlike in China, I don’t think our governments will resort to prison camps, but I do believe they will adapt Chinese methods of social control, e.g., the social credit system. I’ll explain why in the book.

Today The Guardian, which is The New York Times of the UK — that is, the mouthpiece for mainstream Left opinion — used its Christmas Day editorial to denounce conservative Christians. “The battle to defend the rights and human dignity of all, irrespective of gender, race or sexuality, is having to be fought all over again,” the editorial warns, and concludes with praise of left-wing Christians, urging secular progressives to join with them to resist the Religious Right.

One is not surprised by The Guardian taking this view, of course, but it is interesting to consider it in light of China’s announced move to revise Christianity and Islam to harmonize with the dogmas of Chinese communism — that is to say, to reflect “the progress of the times.” We will see, and indeed are seeing, a similar push in the West to compel Christianity to be the Democratic Party At Prayer.

Of course it should not be the Republican Party At Prayer either — and this is a problem for us traditionalist Christians. We cannot avoid the fact that there are political consequences to the Christian faith, but we must always work to keep it straight in our heads that our politics must come from our faith, not the other way around. Far too many American Christians of both the right and the left get this backwards. Political Christianity cannot be true to itself and be fully a phenomenon of the contemporary Left or the contemporary Right. 

Having said that, I want to urge you to take a look at this Washington Post op-ed from December 23, by political scientist Paul Djupe. The boldface emphasis is his:

Our research found that white evangelical Protestants believe atheists and Democrats would strip away their rights

Political scientist Ryan Burge and I ran a non-probability sample survey from May 17-18 of 1,010 U.S. Protestants, conducted online through Qualtrics Panels and weighted to resemble the diversity of Protestants in the country. White evangelical Protestants made up 60 percent of our sample.

Of those white evangelical Protestants, we found that 60 percent believed that atheists would not allow them First Amendment rights and liberties. More specifically, we asked whether they believed atheists would prevent them from being able to “hold rallies, teach, speak freely, and run for public office.” Similarly, 58 percent believed “Democrats in Congress” would not allow them to exercise these liberties if they were in power. By contrast, 23 percent think “Republicans in Congress” would not respect their rights; those were primarily the views of a small contingent of white evangelical Democrats in the sample.

These are extraordinary proportions for a core question in democratic societies: Are citizens willing to extend rights to groups they dislike? If not, the political process can no longer fairly resolve disputes and the nation may turn to violence — just as far-right commentators and public officials are predicting.

Djupe says emphatically that white Evangelicals are wrong about this, and cites survey data to support his point. He also cites survey data showing that white Evangelicals are more likely to strip atheists of those liberties than the other way around.

I haven’t seen any criticism (yet) of the Djupe piece, and I’m eager to read the informed commentary about it (so post it if you find any from an academic source). I certainly don’t have a problem in theory believing that white Evangelicals and other right-of-center Christians are deeply fearful of what a secular left regime would do to them. I am not an Evangelical, and heaven knows I’m not stockpiling weapons and food to prepare for enduring leftist tyranny, as one far-right conspiracy theorist preacher quoted in the Djupe piece says he’s doing.

But I am confident that oppression, even persecution, is coming, and I believe that pieces like Djupe’s serve both to discourage reasonable critical awareness, and to lay the groundwork for secular leftists and their progressive Christian allies to justify these measures. I’m not saying Djupe intends to do that, but I think that’s the cumulative effect pieces like this, and the Guardian editorial, will have. To be clear, I see nothing wrong in principle with criticizing conservative or traditionalist Christians, but the steady drumbeat of demonization of them — of us; I am one of them — matters, especially as Christianity fades as a force in our secularizing societies. As FiveThirtyEight reported recently, Millennials are leaving religion and will almost certainly not be coming back:

Why does it matter if millennials’ rupture with religion turns out to be permanent? For one thing, religious involvement is associated with a wide variety of positive social outcomes like increased interpersonal trust and civic engagement that are hard to reproduce in other ways. And this trend has obvious political implications. As we wrote a few months ago, whether people are religious is increasingly tied to — and even driven by — their political identities. For years, the Christian conservative movement has warned about a tide of rising secularism, but research has suggested that the strong association between religion and the Republican Party may actually be fueling this divide. And if even more Democrats lose their faith, that will only exacerbate the acrimonious rift between secular liberals and religious conservatives.

“At that critical moment when people are getting married and having kids and their religious identity is becoming more stable, Republicans mostly do still return to religion — it’s Democrats that aren’t coming back,” said Michele Margolis, author of “From the Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity.” in an interview for our September story.

Of course, millennials’ religious trajectory isn’t set in stone — they may yet become more religious as they age. But it’s easier to return to something familiar later in life than to try something completely new. And if millennials don’t return to religion and instead begin raising a new generation with no religious background, the gulf between religious and secular America may grow even deeper.

“The strong association between religion and the Republican Party may actually be fueling this divide.” Does it not occur to these researchers and those that report on them that the strong association between secularism and the Democratic Party may equally be fueling this divide? I don’t think it does. Because academics and journalists are heavily liberal and secular, they assume that secular liberalism is normative. They don’t see people like me and a number of my friends: theologically and morally conservative Christians who are alienated from the Republican Party — typically for reasons of economics, or the environment, or war — but who feel compelled to vote Republican because we are offended and even frightened by the rising tide of anti-Christian spite on the Left.

About the coming oppression, I emphatically do not believe that all of this, or even most of it, will come from the state, either. I think it will be primarily — at least at first — through actions by private institutions and businesses, like the disgusting, outrageous move Nordstroms in Seattle made the other day:

For 19 years, 85-year-old Dick Clarke has raised money for The Salvation Army during the holiday season — 18 of them ringing a bell beside a red kettle for donations outside Nordstrom downtown Seattle store. He loved the conversations and the feeling of giving back through the more than $100,000 he collected. He volunteered five days a week, six hours a day.

“The best thing I like about Thanksgiving is the next day I go to work,” said the retired teacher and principal.

Or that’s how he used to feel. This year, Nordstrom told The Salvation Army it would no longer allow solicitation in front of its doors.

Beyond stating that policy, Nordstrom spokeswoman Jennifer Tice Walker did not answer questions about the change. But Clarke said he was told in a meeting last week with head of stores Jamie Nordstrom that LGBTQ employees said The Salvation Army’s presence made them uncomfortable.

The sacred LGBTQs! Anything they ask for, they must receive, according to Woke Capitalism, because their feelings take precedence over everything. Note well — seriously, pay attention to this — that no law compelled Nordstrom to do this. And: there is nothing that Donald Trump or any other politician could have done to have stopped this — unless, of course, you want the state to have the power to dictate to private business who they must allow to stand outside their stores collecting money. We do not want that.

Take a look at this local TV news report about Clarke — from 2016 — and realize that this dear old man was driven off the street because LGBTQ employees say he makes them “uncomfortable,” simply because he rings bells for the Salvation Army.

It is vitally important to pay attention to the narratives that the political, cultural, and economic elites tell themselves about the world — and the narratives they teach to the rising elites in their institutions. Take a look at this 2017 op-ed from the Harvard Crimson by Laura Nicolae, a student there whose father and mother lived under Communist persecution in Romania. Excerpt:

Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.

Last month marked 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution, though college culture would give you precisely the opposite impression. Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence. Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.

Walk around campus, and you’re likely to spot Ché Guevara on a few shirts and button pins. A sophomore jokes that he’s declared a secondary in “communist ideology and implementation.” The new Leftist Club on campus seeks “a modern perspective” on Marx and Lenin to “alleviate the stigma around the concept of Leftism.” An author laments in these pages that it’s too difficult to meet communists here. For many students, casually endorsing communism is a cool, edgy way to gripe about the world.

After spending four years on a campus saturated with Marxist memes and jokes about communist revolutions, my classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives.

Statistics show that young Americans are indeed oblivious to communism’s harrowing past. According to a YouGov poll, only half of millennials believe that communism was a problem, and about a third believe that President George W. Bush killed more people than Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who killed 20 million. If you ask millennials how many people communism killed, 75 percent will undershoot.

I had a personal conversation with a Millennial the other day, a friend of some local friends, who was visiting for the holidays. She mentioned to me in casual conversation that she identifies with Communism. “It’s a beautiful dream, that everybody can be equal,” she told me. Then she asked me about what I do for a living. I told her about the book I’m working on. Get this: she is a college-educated American, and had no idea at all that there was such a thing as the gulag. I could hardly believe it!

But I’m not as well educated about Millennial views on such matters as I should be. The 2019 report of the Victims Of Communism Foundation, a US government educational NGO established by a 1993 act of Congress, shows that only 57 percent of Millennials polled believe that the Declaration of Independence “guarantees freedom and equality” better than the Communist Manifesto. This, versus 94 percent of the Silent Generation.

We are losing the young. This is going to have massive consequences for our liberties, especially religious liberty, in the years and decades to come.

This Millennial woman brought to mind the students of a humanities professor from a heartland state college, who said to me on the phone earlier this year that when she was at Yale working on an advanced degree, fellow students shut her down every time Marxism came up, and she tried to talk about life in the USSR. She said: “I saw in them actual rage. They didn’t want to hear it.”

She told me her students are all fresh-faced, corn-fed white kids, and they all think socialism is peachy. She said:

Some people tell me I’m being alarmist, but more and more agree with me. Yesterday a colleague who teaches physics wrote me from [a coastal state]. He told me that he wanted to speak out against [the campus left-wing mob] but is terrified of becoming a pariah – not for his job, because he’s tenured, but because all his friends would leave him.

In my situation, at my university, I have to live an intellectual and spiritual life underground. I’m silent about so many things with [students and colleagues] because I know that they would honestly and sincerely see me as some kind of monster because of the things I believe, which are in no way radical.

In our phone interview, she told me that she cannot stand Donald Trump, but has come to see supporting him as the only way she can register any kind of resistance against the left-wing campus commissars. She also said that people have no idea how vulnerable they are to this mindset, because of social media.

But yeah, it’s the Republican Party, and conservative Christians, that is entirely to blame for driving people into secularism. Tell me another one.

To repeat: I don’t believe in stockpiling weapons, food, and crackpottery like that. But I believe that traditional Christians are fools if they can’t read the signs of the times and make political decisions based on what they see. And  as I wrote in The Benedict Option, and will elaborate on with much greater detail in my next book (out September 2020), I strongly believe that traditional Christians had better start preparing themselves, their families, and their local communities for the long spiritual struggle ahead. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said:

There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.

You had better believe it. You had better not only believe it, but also act on that belief, while there is still time.

The post The Coming Oppression Of Christians appeared first on The American Conservative.

Pop Culture’s Erasure Of Religious People

For your holiday watching pleasure, Showtime offers Work In Progress, a program described by the cable channel thus:

Abby is a 45-year-old self-identified fat, queer dyke whose misfortune and despair unexpectedly lead her to a vibrantly transformative relationship. Chicago improv mainstay Abby McEnany co-created and stars in this uniquely human comedy series.

I watched the trailer. The vibrantly transformative relationship is with a transman (female presenting as male). So there’s that. For TV watchers who like this sort of thing, this is exactly the sort of thing they like.

Still, you gotta admit: could there possibly be a more niche program? Meanwhile, I’m struggling to come up with a single show on American TV that centers itself on the lives of religious people, as religious people. Israeli TV had a dramatic series called Shtisel — trailer here — which ran from 2013 to 2016, based in an ultraorthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem. It’s streaming on Netflix here. It’s really, really interesting. It presents its characters as fully imagined people, living out ordinary lives within the boundaries of strict orthodox religion. You don’t have to be Jewish to get into this show. Watching the joys and sorrows and anxieties of Shtisel‘s imperfect, all-too-real characters kept making me think, “Yep, that’s what it’s like to live with God, and with other people who live with God.”

Seriously, give the show a chance. It takes the lives of conservative religious folks quite seriously — and that means that it doesn’t condescend to its characters by making them saints or villains.

When you think about it, it’s really incredible that there are no TV shows in the US like this — not about Orthodox Jews, not about Southern Baptists, not about Catholics, not about anybody. There are tens of millions of religiously observant people in this country — no doubt vastly more than the potential audience for a comedy about a middle-aged fat, queer, unlucky dyke — and yet, we are invisible to Hollywood.

The only TV show I have ever seen in which the kind of people I come from were depicted was NBC’s great series Friday Night Lights, which is about life in a small Texas town. As much as I loved that series, the only false note in the whole thing was its depiction of religion. They showed some of the characters going to church from time to time, but religion in this program was vague in a way that it simply isn’t in small Texas towns. You could tell that the writers knew a lot about small-town life, but on religion, they were blind as bats. Not hostile to it, mind you, just insensible.

Back in 2013, when my memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming came out, there was some talk about making a movie or TV series of it, but that didn’t go anywhere. It did give me the opportunity to think about how I would turn the story into a compelling dramatic series. I thought about it as a way to showcase a complex way of life that people rarely if ever get to see on American television — and one where religion was a big part of the narrative.

In the book, my sister Ruthie dies about halfway through the story. It’s easy to see how to make a movie out of that, but a series? As I conceived it, the city brother (me) moves home with his wife and kids to the rural small town immediately after his sister’s terminal diagnosis. This sets up dramatic tension, as the family’s own deep conflicts, buried for over two decades by the brother’s living far away, rise to the surface, but also — and this is where I thought it might have something fresh and interesting to say to audiences — the clash between changing Americas would be made manifest.

What I thought would be most interesting about this set-up is that it wouldn’t be a clash between a liberal sibling and a conservative sibling, but a drama between two kinds of conservatives. This was how it really did shake out in my family, though obviously without my sister present. To speak generally, my Louisiana family held firmly to the belief that if they only kept living by norms only slightly changed since the 1950s, they could keep modernity at bay. I had been out into the Real World and saw that this was not really possible, and came home with a bunch of ideas about how to preserve the things we valued most — family, a sense of place, and, I thought, religion — amid a churning world. In real life, there was a tremendous, near-constant clash between these two visions.

Back then, I imagined how this series would handle religion. I was not interested in a Friday Night Lights depiction of religion, where church is the place characters show up every now and then. I wanted to go deeper. Ruthie and I lived such different religious lives — and different from the religious lives of our parents. Our folks weren’t particularly observant — pretty much Easter and Christmas Methodists. I grew up to become an agnostic, then a religious seeker, ending up in Catholicism, which was strange to my family, and then Eastern Orthodoxy, which was about as extreme as you could get to them, and still be within the Christian fold. Ruthie, as a wife and mother, became what neither of us were as kids: a regular churchgoer. Her kids grew up in the church. After she died, the oldest left Christianity, the middle one became devoutly Evangelical, and now the youngest, a senior in high school, is heavily involved in a non-denominational charismatic church in town.

As regular readers know, my wife and I helped to start an Orthodox mission in town, but it didn’t last; after three years, we closed up shop, because though my home parish (county) is friendly to Christianity, and people were encouraging about the mission, Orthodoxy was a flower too exotic to grow in that soil. This was a disappointment, but not a surprise. Still, our life as Orthodox Christians in a small Southern town sparked some interesting reflections on what it meant to be a Christian in the 21st century. For example, our priest, Father Matthew, who came in with his wife and young children from the Pacific Northwest, once took his vestments to the dry cleaners in town to be laundered. Orthodox vestments are elaborate. The young black woman behind the counter said to him, “Oooh, those look like they got God all over ’em!” The two ended up talking about the symbolism of Orthodox priestly vestments, and to the shock and delight of our priest, this young black woman from the rural South knew the Old Testament Scripture verses that Orthodox Christianity draws on to construct its priests’ liturgical garments.

Now that is a fascinating American story about religion in daily life. To add to it, I bet very few white Christians in town would know those Scriptures, though once upon a time they probably would have. That’s a story too. Whites and blacks don’t go to the same churches there, but it’s not a simple matter of racism, as it would no doubt appear to outsiders. It is at least as much now a matter of very different worship styles — styles that came down from the past, and the aesthetics of which represent deep differences in black culture and white culture, and the way each approaches God. And yet, in real life, an outsider priest representing an ancient form of Christianity alien to this land comes to the dry cleaners in a small Southern river town, and unexpectedly finds rich communion with a rural black Baptist, over designs in church clothes.

You see what I mean? There are so many interesting stories to tell about religious life in America — and not just “inspirational” stories, either. I remember back in the early 1990s, when I told my father that I was converting to Catholicism. He was upset by it, not because he had anything against Catholics (the Catholic parish in our predominantly Protestant parish is older than any other church in town), but because to him, religion was about family. We don’t go to church much, and the church we don’t go to is the Methodist church, because it is the Dreher Family At Prayer. Around that time, when a bunch of new people started moving into town, my dad was really put out to show up at church one Sunday and see that the “Dreher pew” (third from the front, on the left side of the church) was filled out with people he didn’t recognize.

“But Daddy, y’all don’t go to church that much,” I told him. “Those people don’t know that that’s the Dreher pew.”

He genuinely didn’t understand what I was saying. At the time, I thought it was an example of Daddy being hard-headed. Years later, I realized that there was something very deep in his reaction. For him, religion had almost nothing to do with theological propositions. It was about family ritual, and about placing the family within God’s order. To see newcomers sitting in the traditional family pew was, to him, an act of transgression. It looked silly to me at the time, but eventually thinking about that helped me to understand why he took my leaving the Methodist church for Catholicism as a personal insult — as disloyalty to the family. And it helped me understand why he was powerless to prevent the religious churn that captured his son, and his granddaughters. I think this explains a lot of the religious churn in America, where almost half the people alive today are not affiliated with the church or religion into which they were born. My dad, who died in 2015, simply was not prepared to live in a world in which religion came to be seen as an individual’s choice.

Eventually he stopped going to church, years before he was physically unable to do it. He refused a church funeral, for reasons that I don’t really understand. And yet, in the last five years of his life, though he rarely crossed the threshold of a church, Daddy prayed more and read the Bible more than he ever did.

People are so mysterious, aren’t they? Man, I tell you, religious life in America is fascinating. You hear secular liberals from time to time blaming conservative people, and religious conservatives in particular, for our own cultural marginalization in film and television. No doubt a lot of  that is true. But I don’t believe it’s mostly true. As someone who has worked in professional journalism for thirty years, I have seen up close and personal how much journalistic gatekeepers — editors and publishers — genuinely agonize over how to get more ethnic minorities, women, and gay people into journalism. They spend lots of money and energy on these efforts, year to year — even in a time of greatly declining revenues.

But they never — and I mean never — talk about how to bring religious believers, especially conservative ones, into newsrooms as reporters and editors. They don’t even see this as a problem, even though there are few places in America more secular and liberal than newsrooms. We are the problem minorities to them. We are the people who represent What’s Wrong With America. And you know, some of us do represent what’s wrong with America. Some of us represent the best of America. Most of us live somewhere in between — just like black Americans, Latino Americans, gay Americans, and everybody else. The point is, we’re here, and our lives have meaning, depth, dignity — and narrative complexity.

Why doesn’t anybody who makes movies or TV want to explore this? I’m not interested in watching pro-Christian, or pro-conservative, propaganda, and certainly not interested in watching a show about generic “spirituality.” I’m just saying that there has to be a more significant audience for a serious drama about the lives of religious believers in contemporary America than there is for a comedy about a 45-year-old self-identified fat, queer dyke, or about a family whose aging patriarch begins to present as a woman (Transparent). This is not an either-or situation — either make the fat dyke comedy, or the drama about the joys and sorrows of conservative people who take God seriously. This is a big country. There’s room for both.

And call me crazy, but if profit is the bottom line, I think there is a lot more money to be made in the religious drama. Transparent won all kinds of awards, and got massive buzz and press attention during its run, but it drew only 1.49 million viewers — a drop in the bucket. Look at this, from Daily Variety, about that show’s low ratings:

That places “Transparent” on a much different, much lower plane than the one occupied by that highest-rated streaming series that Symphony measured: Netflix’s “Fuller House.” The ’90s sitcom revival averaged an 11.31 demo rating and 21.51 million total adults.

Among the other half-hour streaming originals that out-rated “Transparent” were Netflix’s “The Ranch” (4.34, 9.54 million); “F is for Family” (3.47, 7.01 million); “Master of None” (3.28, 5.85 million); “Love” (2.18, 4.09 million); “Flaked” (0.97, 2.07 million); and “With Bob & David” (1.04, 1.98 million); as well as Hulu’s “The Mindy Project (0.88, 1.63 million).

I’ve never seen Transparent, but heaven knows I know all about it. Press coverage was everywhere. I have never heard of thee other programs — well, I did read something about Master of None, because it starred Aziz Ansari — but most of those shows had a lot more viewers than Transparent, but only a fraction of the media attention, and certainly none of the prestige in the industry.

Liberals who like to say that the film and television industry is driven entirely by market demands, and if there are no TV shows or movies featuring conservative and/or religious characters, it’s because there’s no interest in them — they don’t know what they’re talking about. There’s a reason why religious conservatives — and political and social conservatives — have been erased in film and television, and it has to do with the fact that the cultural gatekeepers don’t want to see us, except as a problem.

UPDATE: Got into an interesting Twitter discussion about this post. Zack Stentz is the co-screenwriter of Thor and X-Men: First Class, the writer of TV’s The Flash, and other shows:

I would love to see a serious drama about American Muslim life, but Kamran Pasha’s remarks make me doubt that Hollywood can see them as anything but political ciphers.

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With The Slovak Underground Church

I have received permission from Slovak documentary filmmaker Slavomir Zrebny to post his his 2015 film Footprints In The Snow. It’s a 52-minute documentary about the underground resistance to Communism among the Slovak people — especially the Christians:

In the film, Zrebny interviews men and women who risked prison — and in at least one case, went to prison — for smuggling, printing, and distributing Bibles and samizdat (unauthorized journalism). It’s in Slovak, with English subtitles. Believe me, if you are a Christian who is feeling down and out about the situation in the churches, watch this incredible little movie, and acquaint yourself with what brave believers did back in the 1970s and 1980s to keep the faith alive under persecution. I watched it with my own kids two days ago so they would know what happened there, and what Dad has spent most of this year working on (my forthcoming book).

It was a pleasant surprise to me, in watching this movie, to see Jan Simulcik, a historian of the underground church (and himself a worker in a Catholic cell distributing samizdat), interviewed about the events of that era. There is even a brief passage in which the cameras enter a hidden chamber beneath a house in suburban Bratislava, where there was concealed an offset printer smuggled to Slovak Catholics by Dutch Evangelicals — such a beautiful demonstration of Christian fraternal solidarity. When I was in Slovakia earlier this year, Jan Simulcik himself took me into that very room.

Watching all this in Zrebny’s film made me newly aware of the privilege I was given to meet people who risked everything in the underground church, and to stand in what I consider to be holy ground: that publisher’s catacomb in Bratislava. Please do make time for this little movie. It will stir your soul. Have you even heard of the underground church in the Slovak region of Czechoslovakia, and its heroic resistance to communism? I had not, until I went there earlier this year. It was a blessing I will be talking about, I hope, for the rest of my life. We have to learn these stories, and tell them to our children. We have to!

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How Religious Institutions Obtain Silence

I wrote earlier today about the terrible example of Cardinal Angelo Sodano, and how he protected the evil — there is no other word — sex abuser Father Marcial Maciel for decades. Maciel and his fabulously wealthy order, the Legion of Christ, spread money around the Roman curia generously for decades. That cash bought a lot of silence and averted eyes from men in high places. And the Legion required its priests to take a private vow never to speak ill of Maciel and their superiors. Holiness, in this construct, required silence.

Ruth Graham, writing in Slate, has a long report on an Evangelical spin on this strategy, as it plays out at Liberty University. 

To be very clear, none of what she writes about here involves sexual abuse. The comparison is how Jerry Falwell Jr. and the leadership of this Evangelical institution tamps down criticism and dissent. You’ll see the Maciel parallel in two basic ways: it makes open dissent a spiritual issue, and it spreads around cash to buy goodwill, in effect. Here’s how the story begins:

Micah Protzman was a junior at Liberty University the first time he was summoned to David Nasser’s office. Protzman had tweeted a complaint about the speakers at recent Convocation services on campus, a lineup that included conservative firebrand Dinesh D’Souza and Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. Attendance at “Convo” is mandatory, and Protzman was disgusted. Nasser, the school’s senior vice president for spiritual development, retweeted Protzman’s complaint to his followers, and Protzman replied by slamming the school’s “blind ideology.” Within a few hours, Protzman got an invitation from Nasser’s office to talk.

To Protzman’s eye, everything in Nasser’s sprawling office suite was perfect: industrial chic decor, fresh flowers, floor-to-ceiling windows. There was a fridge of custom Coke bottles and stacks of premium candy free for the taking. Nasser offered Protzman a cup of coffee, and he accepted, thinking it would give him something to do with his hands if he got nervous. It turned out to the best cup of coffee he’d ever had.

The conversation was less satisfying. “I felt like I was being sold a car,” Protzman, now a senior graduating this month, recalled in October. He was sitting in a plush chair in the five-year-old Jerry Falwell Library, with sunlight streaming through multistory windows. From his perch in the library, he could see the tinted glass facade of Nasser’s office across a pond where the school performs baptisms. At their meeting, Nasser had quoted a passage in the Gospel of Matthew about how a Christian should confront a community member who has sinned: Don’t air a grievance publicly until you have gone to the person privately. To Protzman, it was clear that the point was to get him to shut up. “I wasn’t asked where I was from, wasn’t asked about my major, wasn’t asked about my work. There was no discipleship,” he said. “It was, ‘Just don’t speak publicly about the university.’ At what point does ‘interaction’ turn into quietism?”

Read the whole thing. 

Graham found in her reporting an atmosphere of deep paranoia on Liberty’s campus, where many people are afraid to criticize the administration and its priorities (e.g., support for Donald Trump), even in ways that normally wouldn’t be traceable. That kind of thing is deadly to a university, as we are learning now from testimonies of people on liberal campuses terrified to speak out against gender ideology or progressive identity politics, for fear that somehow, the administration or fellow colleagues will find out, and hound them out of a job. I am not willing to entertain seriously the objections of liberals to the speck in Falwell U.’s eye, when there is a massive log in the collective eye of liberal colleges. That said, it’s a very bad sign.

From my point of view, though, the way that students are taught that dissenting from Falwell Jr. and his views and practices is a sign of spiritual failure is deeply messed up. This is cult-like behavior, and it’s exactly what the Maciel cult (an actual cult back then, not just a cult-like organization) within Catholicism did, at a more intense level. It must be said, though, that this is fairly common within all kinds of churches and religious organizations. Back in 2002, when I was at National Review, I had a series of agonizing conversations with a man whose brother, a Benedictine monk, had uncovered a nest of sexual corruption at his monastery. It turns out that the abbot had spent generously from the monastery’s treasury on boyfriends, and on payouts to abuse victims of monks in his cabal. The man’s brother wanted to go to the police with the information, but the abbot sternly warned him that by doing so, he would be collaborating with the devil against Christ’s church. The would-be whistleblower could not bring himself to speak ill of his brother monks to police, even though it meant covering up for abuse. According to my source, the aggrieved monk even had a heart attack from all the stress. But in the end, that monk never blew the whistle, even though his lay siblings begged him to tell the truth. The poor man was so intimidated spiritually — that is, he genuinely believed that he would betray Christ by ratting out the abusive pervert monks in his monastery — that he kept silence.

He was an older man. I imagine he’s dead now. His was an extreme example of things I encountered in my reporting, but I heard things like this quite a bit. I have no reason to believe it was just a Catholic thing. I can think of stories and examples from non-religious institutions — schools, families, etc. — where omertà was taught as a moral principle. It’s a very common story from families where incest manifested that the young victims were taught that to tell anybody about it would hurt the family, and was therefore immoral.

There may be a fine line between “come to your brother with your grievance before you take it to the public square” and “keep your mouth shut or God will punish you for your disobedience,” but it exists. My view on these matters is strongly to err on the side of exposure. We have so many examples, from churches, government bodies, schools, and other institutions, of corrupt leaders manipulating victims and others — using money, spiritual pressure, or both — to cover up for evil.

Be not deceived: in the Year of Our Lord 2019, if an official of a church, synagogue, mosque, or religious organization tells you to be quiet because God expects that of you, that is almost always a sure sign that you are listening to the voice of the Devil.

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Cardinal Sodano Deserves A Millstone

Cardinal Angelo Sodano has resigned, at 92, as Dean of the College of Cardinals. Excerpt:

Pope Francis used the occasion to express “my gratitude, including in the name of the members of the College of Cardinals, for the precious and punctual service he [Cardinal Sodano] has offered as dean for many years with availability, dedication, efficiency and a great ability to organize and coordinate.”

“Now it is up to the cardinal bishops to elect a new dean,” the pope said, referring to a group of 12 top-ranking cardinals. “I hope they elect someone who will occupy this very important role full time.”

Remember, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano accused Sodano of covering up for Cardinal Ted McCarrick’s homosexual molestation of seminarians. Rocco Palmo remarks:

Despite being retired as Secretary of State since 2006, Cardinal Angelo Sodano has managed to retain a staggering degree of clout in the Vatican ranks, above all through his proficiency at filling the middle management of the dicasteries with loyalists over his 16 years as the Holy See’s de facto COO under John Paul II. Yet at the same time, as reports piled up of the now 92 year-old cardinal’s direct involvement in several major scandals – above all the cases of two globally known predators: the Legion of Christ founder Marcial Maciel Degollado and Chile’s most prominent abuser, Fernando Karadima, both close Sodano allies – the veteran diplomat remained a glaringly public presence given his enduring role as Dean of the College of Cardinals: by law the church’s #2 figure, and the one who presides over nearly every aspect of a vacancy of the papacy itself.

Direct involvement, note. The Legionaries of Christ has just released some news about its late founder:

Sexual abuse of minors was rife among superiors of the Legionaires of Christ Catholic religious order, with at least 60 boys abused by its founder Father Marcial Maciel, a report by the group showed.

The report is important because for decades until 2006, including during all of the pontificate of Pope John Paul, the Vatican dismissed accusations by seminarians that Maciel had abused them sexually, some when they were as young as 12.

The order said the report, which was released on Saturday and covers the period since Maciel founded it in his native Mexico in 1941 to this year, was “an additional attempt (by the Legionaires) to confront their history”.

Maciel, who died in 2008, was perhaps the Roman Catholic Church’s most notorious paedophile, even abusing children he had fathered secretly with at least two women while living a double life and being feted by the Vatican and Church conservatives.

Cardinal Angelo Sodano, 92, who was secretary of state under John Paul, was for years one of the Legionaires’ biggest protectors in the Vatican.

The Legionaries’ report found that 175 boys were abused by priests of the order. A staggering one-third of them were abused by Maciel himself.

Jason Berry, one of the best-informed journalists on the abuse beat, wrote back in 2010 about how Maciel built his empire.I had not read this story before tonight. It is breathtaking. Maciel bribed senior churchmen virtually from the beginning. Excerpts:

In his time, the late Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado was the greatest fundraiser of the modern Roman Catholic church. He was also a magnetic figure in recruiting young men to religious life in an era when vocations were plummeting. Behind that exalted façade, however, Maciel was a notorious pedophile, and a man who fathered several children by different women. His life was arguably the darkest chapter in the clergy abuse crisis that continues to plague the church.

The saga of the disgraced founder of the Legion of Christ, a secretive, cult-like religious order now under Vatican investigation, opens into a deeper story of how one man’s lies and betrayal dazzled key figures in the Roman curia and how Maciel’s money and success helped him find protection and influence. For years, the heads of Vatican congregations and the pope himself ignored persistent warnings that something was rotten in the community where Legionaries called their leader Nuestro Padre , “Our Father,” and considered him a living saint.

The charismatic Mexican, who founded the Legion of Christ in 1941, sent streams of money to Roman curia officials with a calculated end, according to many sources interviewed by NCR: Maciel was buying support for his group and defense for himself, should his astounding secret life become known.

More:

In 1994 Pope John Paul II heralded him as “an efficacious guide to youth.” John Paul continued praising Maciel after a 1997 Hartford Courant investigation by Gerald Renner and this writer exposed Maciel’s drug habits and abuse of seminarians. In 1998, eight ex-Legionaries filed a canon law case to prosecute him in then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s tribunal. For the next six years, Maciel had the staunch support of three pivotal figures: Sodano; Cardinal Eduardo Martínez Somalo, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life; and Msgr. Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Polish secretary of John Paul. During those years, Sodano pressured Ratzinger not to prosecute Maciel, as NCR previously reported. Ratzinger told a Mexican bishop that the Maciel case was a “delicate” matter and questioned whether it would be “prudent” to prosecute at that time.

In 2004, John Paul — ignoring the canon law charges against Maciel — honored him in a Vatican ceremony in which he entrusted the Legion with the administration of Jerusalem’s Notre Dame Center, an education and conference facility. The following week, Ratzinger took it on himself to authorize an investigation of Maciel.

Berry reports on how Maciel used to grease the palms of just about everybody in Rome in a position to help the Legion. Sodano was its most important protector. One of the only Roman curial officials who refused Legion money was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. More:

After the ex-Legion victims filed a canonical case in 1998 against Maciel in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Sodano as secretary of state — essentially, the Vatican prime minister — pressured Ratzinger, as the congregation’s prefect, to halt the proceeding. As NCR reported in 2001, José Barba, a college professor in Mexico City and ex-Legionary who filed the 1998 case in Ratzinger’s office, learned from the canonist handling the case, Martha Wegan in Rome, of Sodano’s role.

“Sodano came over with his entire family, 200 of them, for a big meal when he was named cardinal,” recalled Favreau. “And we fed them all. When he became secretary of state there was another celebration. He’d come over for special events, like the groundbreaking with a golden shovel for the House of Higher Studies. And a dinner after that.”

The intervention of a high Vatican official in a tribunal case illustrates the fragile nature of the system, and in the Maciel case, how a guilty man escaped punishment for years.

“Cardinal Sodano was the cheerleader for the Legion,” said one of the ex-Legionaries. “He’d come give a talk at Christmas and they’d give him $10,000.” Another priest recalled a $5,000 donation to Sodano.

But in December 2004, with John Paul’s health deteriorating by the day, Ratzinger broke with Sodano and ordered a canon lawyer on his staff, Msgr. Charles Scicluna, to investigate. Two years later, as Benedict, he approved the order that Maciel abandon ministry for a “life of penitence and prayer.” Maciel had “more than 20 but less than 100 victims,” an unnamed Vatican official told NCR’s John Allen at the time.

The congregation cited Maciel’s age in opting against a full trial.

An influential Vatican official told NCR that Sodano insisted on softening the language of the Vatican communiqué — to praise the Legion and its 60,000-member lay wing, Regnum Christi — despite the order’s nine-year Web site campaign denouncing the seminary victims. The Legion’s damage control rolled into a new phase with its statement that compared Maciel to Christ for refusing to defend himself, and accepting his “new cross” with “tranquility of conscience.”

Read it all. Sodano was, and is, scum. All those innocent little boys. Sixty of them. That is almost enough to fill a school bus. As a goodbye gift, Francis ought to have given him a gold millstone to drape around his neck.

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The Politics Of Movie Taste

The former chief film critic for The New York Times is worried. Really worried:

The “Little Women” problem with men is very real. I don’t say that lightly and am very alarmed.

In the past day have been told by 3 male friends who usually trust me that they either refuse to see it or probably won’t have time. Despite my saying it’s tied for #1 of 2019.

— Janet Maslin (@JanetMaslin) December 21, 2019

I don’t get this at all. At all. I have no plans to see Little Women either, not because I think it’s a bad movie, but because I only go to the movie theater to see movies I judge that I will probably like. Isn’t that what most people do?

Maslin is a professional film critic, and as such, she has cultivated within herself an ability to appreciate many kinds of movies. I was a professional film critic for a few years, and had to watch all kinds of movies. I saw, and learned to like, movies that I would not normally have seen. But I also learned, after I quit reviewing professionally, that my reviews weren’t as reliable for average readers as I would have thought. I would give three (out of four) stars to movies that I found to be solid and enjoyable, if nothing very special. That was my critical judgment. What I didn’t realize until I was no longer a critic is that ordinary people read movie reviews more from a consumer point of view. Is this movie worth paying $10 to see? Is it worth giving over two or three hours of my day to see? Is it worth paying a babysitter to watch the kids while my spouse and I go watch it?

I had been watching movies for free — not only for free, but being paid to watch them — that I had lost touch with why and how most people watch movies. I changed beats around the time our first child was born, and suddenly, everything changed. We had more expenses, babysitters were not easy to find, and so forth. I realized that most of the movies I had given three stars to were not movies that I would even think about going to see in my new situation. The cost — not only the money, but the difficulty of solving the babysitter problem as a young couple in Brooklyn — was significant, in a way it wasn’t before. To be honest, I don’t know how I could have written my film reviews differently, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a critic to think and write like a consumer guide. Still, being a moviegoing normie made me aware too of how out of touch professional critics are. I don’t say that to put down critics, but only to illuminate a dimension of filmgoing that critics forget about. I know I did.

There are categories of movies that I won’t go see. Superhero movies, for example. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the Iron Man movies … when I saw them at home, on Netflix. They were a lot of fun, but I don’t regret not having gone to see them in the theater. I have seen a couple of superhero movies, but only because I was doing something nice for the kids. The whole genre bores me. My children’s mother loves them, though. Great! I don’t have to take them now.

I also won’t see horror movies. Always have hated them. I don’t care how critically praised a horror movie is, I’m not going to see it. I know I won’t like it. So what?

My wife also deeply loves British costume dramas, especially anything having to do with 18th and 19th century England. Her favorite author is Jane Austen. Generally I don’t care for movies like that, or novels like that, though of course I recognize that Jane Austen is one of the all time greats.

On the other hand, I really go for dark dramas with political or philosophical themes. I really loved the two most recent movies by the Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev: Leviathan and Loveless. I could not have paid her to watch them with me. So what? I enjoy Terrence Malick movies, which strike my wife (and most people I know) as like watching paint dry. Chacun à son gout.

Sometimes our tastes coincide. We are both fond of Merchant Ivory films (despite what I said about my resistance to costume dramas). A couple of nights ago, we watched Howards End, which we had both loved when it first came out. It really holds up — such a rich, gorgeous, moving film. Sometimes I resist her suggestions, and come to realize later that she was right. Julie was into Downton Abbey when it first came out on PBS, but I wouldn’t even try it (costume drama allergy!). One day, I was on the elliptical trainer, and looking for something to watch on Netflix. The first season of Downton was available. OK, why not? Well, I was hooked.

Similarly, I loved the very, very dark HBO miniseries Chernobyl. This is not the kind of series she would normally go for, but she tried it after me, and really liked it. So, it happens. Neither one of us like sports that much, so we didn’t give a thought to the critically-acclaimed NBC series Friday Night Lights when it was on TV. Then, when we were living in Philadelphia, it was available on Netflix, so we decided to give it a shot. It quickly became our favorite show, ever, because it’s not really about football, but about life in a small Texas town. I’m from a small town, and my wife is from Dallas. If not for Netflix, we never would have given the show a chance.

It really is true that people these days tend to play it safe musically, cinematically, and otherwise. And that can be regrettable. But honestly, I cannot imagine being “very alarmed” that people I knew would decide that they weren’t going to see a particular movie, because the genre or subject matter doesn’t interest them. As I said, I don’t much care for sports, but I went eagerly to see Ford v. Ferrari, because I was interested in the actors in it, and because my older son, who cares a lot about cars, had shared with me the real-life back story that the film dramatizes. I knew it would be a movie about masculine pride and competitiveness driving (so to speak) men to greatness. That’s something I am interested in — and I was right. Such an enjoyable movie. But it was a movie that I had to enjoy with my boys, because Mom and Sister figured they had better things to do than watch dudes drive around a race track for a couple of hours.

This did not alarm me. It did not even very alarm me.

There is a certain kind of liberal who gets anxious when people won’t like movies they’re supposed to like, or when people fail to get mad about things like the relative lack of female film directors. These are the same kind of people who go to pieces when people — a world-famous Romanian theatrical director — say they would not cast a transgendered Juliet because it would not be believable.Because it wouldn’t, and all the politically correct shade the woke can throw at you can’t make you believe it.

I, too, sometimes find it frustrating when people I care about don’t love the same things I love. This has happened to me a fair bit over the years, because I have eclectic tastes. It’s often disappointing, because it’s always a pleasure to share your joy in something with others, and it can be frustrating when you are pretty confident that your friend or loved one would love the thing you’re recommending, if only they would open their minds enough to try it. But it is not alarming, and I struggle to understand why anyone would be so anxious and aggrieved by men not wanting to go see a movie about sisters growing up in 19th century America. This review from The Guardian makes it sound really good. Though I’m not interested in the setting, nor do stories like this usually capture my interest, I’m sure I’ll watch it when it’s streaming on Amazon. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to going with my sons to see Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems this holiday season. Maybe we’ll catch a ride to the theater with Julie and Nora, on their way to see Little Women. Celebrate diversity!

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