Rod Dreher's Blog, page 188

Our Lying Military, Our Lying Government

Everybody’s talking about the FBI report today, but as far as I’m concerned, this long piece in the Washington Post is the real news. Here’s how it begins:

The documents include transcripts of interviews with soldiers, diplomats, and others with direct experience in the war effort. Excerpts:

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

More:

“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.

Look at this:

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

One more:

As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same thing. They would avoid falling into the trap of “nation-building” in Afghanistan.

On that score, the presidents failed miserably. The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan — more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.

The Lessons Learned interviews show the grandiose nation-building project was marred from the start.

Read it all. 

If you can get through it all, good for you. I got so mad that I had to quit reading not long after the paragraph above. We have lost about 2,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, and sustained about 21,000 casualties of war. (Not to mention all the dead innocent Afghan civilians, and the dead and wounded troops of our NATO allies.) We have spent altogether almost $1 trillion on that country. The Afghan officials stole a fortune from us. We never knew what to do there. And every one of our leaders lied about it. Lied! All those brave American soldiers, dead or maimed for life, for a war that our leaders knew that we could not win, but in defense of which they lied.

It’s the Pentagon Papers all over again. You know this, right.

Trump is negotiating now with the Taliban over the possibility of US withdrawal. The story says US officials fought the Post in court over these documents, and have said most recently that publishing them would undermine the administration’s negotiating position. I don’t care. Tell the truth, for once. Let’s cut our losses and go before more Americans die in this lost cause. Poor Afghanistan is going to fall under the tyrannical rule of the mullahs. But if, after 18 years, a trillion dollars, and all those dead and wounded Americans, we couldn’t establish a stable and decent Afghan regime, it’s not going to happen.

If any of my children want to join the US military, I’m going to go to the mat to talk them out of it. I do not want them, or anybody’s sons or daughters, sent overseas to die in hopeless countries in wars that we cannot win, and shouldn’t have fought, but kept doing because of bipartisan Establishment foreign policy delusions. To be clear, we should have bombed the hell out of Afghanistan after 9/11. The Taliban government gave shelter to Al Qaeda, and brought retribution upon itself. But the Bush Administration’s nation-building insanity was never going to work. Eight years of Obama did not fix this. Nor, so far, has three years of Trump, though maybe he will be the one to stop the bleeding. If he does withdraw, I hope he blasts the hell out of his two predecessors and the military leadership for what they’ve done here.

I’ve been writing lately in this space, and in the book I’m working on, about the parallels between late-imperial Russia and our own time and place. And I’ve been writing about what Hannah Arendt had to say about the origins of totalitarianism. Arendt says that one precursor of totalitarianism is a widespread loss of faith in a society’s and a government’s institutions. According to a 2019 Gallup poll, the US military is one of the few institutions that enjoys broad confidence. How can anybody possibly believe them after this? How can we believe our Commanders-in-Chief? According to the secret documents, the men in the field have been were their commanders for a long time that this Afghan thing was not working, and wasn’t ever going to work. But they kept sending them back in.

Why? Pride? Too full of themselves to admit that it was a failure? As soldier John Kerry turned antiwar activist said back in the 1970s, about Vietnam, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” No more American dying in and for Afghanistan. Bring the troops home. They did not fail. Their superiors did.

How do you convince young people to join an institution whose leadership — civilian as well as military — is prepared to sacrifice them for a lost cause, and then lie, and lie, and lie about it? How do you convince mothers and fathers to send their sons and daughters with confidence to that military? How do you convince taxpayers to support throwing more money into the sh*thole that is the Pentagon’s budget?

The questions that are going to come up sooner than most of us think, and, in some version, from both the Left and the Right: just what kind of order do we have in America anyway? Why do I owe it my loyalty? What does it mean to be a patriot when you cannot trust the nation’s leaders and institutions?

These are the kinds of questions that, depending on how they are answered, can lead to the unraveling, and even the overthrow, of a regime. It has been said that the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was a prime mover in the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet system. We are not the Soviet Union — but I wouldn’t be so quick to take comfort in that, if I were a political or military leader.

We learned nothing from Vietnam, did we? Not a damn thing.  It is beyond infuriating. It is beyond demoralizing. And you know, the only thing more infuriating and more demoralizing than this will be if there are no consequences for it, or if people fall back into partisan positions. The report makes clear that this is a disaster that was launched by a Republican administration, continued under a Democratic administration, and has been overseen by another Republican administration.

One of the reasons Donald Trump is president today, and not some other Republican, is he was the one Republican primary candidate who denounced the wars. If he can’t get us out of Afghanistan, what good is he?

UPDATE: I was just thinking about something a military friend told me almost 15 years ago, based on his direct personal knowledge of the situation: that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was lying to the nation about how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were going. And if Rumsfeld was lying, so was the administration. My friend was deeply discouraged. Rumsfeld left office in 2006 — but the habit remained with our leadership.

UPDATE.2:

Evergreen tweet https://t.co/GYD8zXJOvD

— Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch_ALM) December 9, 2019

UPDATE.3:

According to new WaPo report, an unnamed "senior National Security Council official" said "metrics were always manipulated" to falsely show that the Afghanistan "surge" under Obama in 2009-2011 was working. Wonder if Joe Biden has any insight into this alleged "manipulation"?

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 9, 2019

UPDATE.4: The freshman GOP Senator from Missouri:

Hawley is new in Washington, but I would stand up and cheer if he establishes himself as a right-wing critic of these lying liars, and forces the Establishment to do right by the fighting men and women of this country, and their families, instead of serving the interests of these g.d. defense contractors, think tankers, the “expert” class, and the rest.

UPDATE.5: Just posted:

It’s time we addressed these questions in public. The Senate Armed Services Committee should hold hearings on the state of the Afghanistan conflict and the infuriating details & alleged falsehoods reported today

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) December 9, 2019

YES! YES!

The post Our Lying Military, Our Lying Government appeared first on The American Conservative.

In Defense Of Doomsayers

Over the weekend, the moderately conservative Evangelical Pete Wehner published a column in The New York Times in which he admonished “Christian doomsayers” for their anxious pessimism. I’m sure readers of The New York Times were pleased to have a conservative Evangelical tell them that they don’t have to pay serious attention to the anxieties of the Religious Right, because those people are bonkers. But Pete Wehner is a serious, thoughtful Christian, and his column is worth taking seriously. Excerpts:

After all, they insist, Mr. Trump may be personally immoral, but he is also a viciously effective street fighter for their cause. He is also the only person preventing a takeover of America by the Democratic Party and progressives — and that, they insist, would produce a moral calamity nearly unmatched in American history.

The view that Mr. Trump is all that stands between America and a moral cataclysm was encapsulated by Eric Metaxas, an influential evangelical author and radio talk-show host, who said in 2016, “The only time we faced an existential struggle like this was in the Civil War and in the Revolution when the nation began.” He added, “We are on the verge of losing it as we could have lost it in the Civil War.”

This wasn’t just election-year rhetoric. Last year, Mr. Metaxas told the journalist Jon Ward that while he did not mean to compare Hillary Clinton to Adolf Hitler, “Christians who think the Church in America might have survived a Hillary Clinton presidency are something like the devout Christian Germans who seriously and prayerfully thought it un-Christian to be involved in opposing Hitler because to do so would have dirtied their hands with politics.”

More:

Sohrab Ahmari — a convert to Catholicism who is both the op-ed editor of The New York Post and a contributor to the religious magazine First Things — was so outraged that drag queens were reading stories to children at a library in Sacramento that he has relegated civility to a secondary virtue while turning against modernity and classical liberalism.

Mr. Ahmari and those who share his worldview believe our traditions and way of life are under assault by an aggressive, ruthless adversary and that liberalism is a huge part of the problem.

Why are Christians so freaked out? asks Wehner. Abortion rates are down. So is teen alcoholism, sex, and drug use. Violent crime rates are way down. Sure, we have some serious problems, he says, but

To my fellow Christians, then, a friendly reminder from a conservative who shares many of your concerns: We are not living in Nero’s Rome. In world history, there are very few nations that have been as accommodating to Christianity as the United States is today; and America is hardly on the edge of a moral abyss.

One of the things I have been most struck by in my conversations with Christian conservatives is how moral concern has given way to moral panic. It distorts their perceptions about the very real progress that has been made while causing feelings of deep insecurity and fear, despite “fear not” being one of the most frequently repeated commands in the Bible.

Many Christians have become invested in a dark narrative. As a friend of mine puts it: “They seem to have some kind of psychological craving for apocalyptic fear. I wonder if walking it back is even possible.”

Read it all. 

Full disclosure: Eric Metaxas and Sohrab Ahmari are friends of mine. I don’t agree with them on all things — I’ve publicly criticized Eric for what I consider to be his excessive Trumpism — but they’re both good men, in my view. I don’t know Pete Wehner well, and I certainly disagree with him on some things, but I’ve always found him to be a generous, gracious man. I like all three of these guys. But I think Wehner is mostly wrong here, and here’s why.

First, I do agree with him that some on the Christian Right are prone to extremist thinking and language about the state of the world (just as some on the secular Left are). And Wehner is right to point out that on some key social metrics, society is improving. Christians who don’t recognize that risk making themselves look silly.

But you can’t say that having achieved a stable bourgeois social order is the same thing as having achieved Christian aims. I am grateful that abortion rates have gone down, that violent crime is down, etc., but did Jesus not say that it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world, but lose his soul? Secular, post-Christian Scandinavia is probably the most peaceful, orderly, bourgeois place on earth — and it is largely godless. If you think religion is only about establishing social order, then you’ve got no problem with that. But if you believe what the Bible actually says about Christianity, then a prosperous social order is no sign of holiness. You can die peaceably in your bed at your McMansion and still go to hell, while the poor man on the other side of town, who lives in a violent neighborhood, whose daughter has two kids out of wedlock, and who struggles with alcoholism, may well go to heaven, because he had the humility to say, “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

We should celebrate good news on the social front. However, please note that the abortion rate is going down because we’re living through a fertility collapse, and the downturn in teens having sex is probably not because they’ve been remoralized, but because young men are satisfying their sexual urges with porn and masturbation. Plus, family formation is in decline, and there’s this opioid addiction crisis, and the “deaths from despair” skyrocketing among the white working class.

I also believe that the world looks a lot less threatening to Christians who have accepted the normalization of LGBT within Christianity, as Pete Wehner has, than it does to we who hold to orthodoxy. And though I don’t believe we are at a Nero/Hitler moment in our history, nor do I believe Donald Trump is the savior of Christian orthodoxy, it is nevertheless true that the liberal cultural and political Establishment in this country is hostile to Christian orthodoxy on LGBT matters, and seeks to marginalize and punish Christian dissenters. The GOP Establishment is not as gung-ho as the Democratic Establishment, but it has little stomach to fight for the religious liberty of dissenting Christians. The big-money donors to the Republican Party are on the side of gay rights. While some Evangelical leaders have gone way, way over the top with their Trump enthusiasm, it is an inconvenient truth that the short-fingered vulgarian from Queens, who has given no evidence of being a Christian in anything but name only, is the only major Republican figure who seems willing to side with us deplorable Bible-thumpers on these matters.

I devoutly wish it were otherwise, but that’s a call that national GOP leaders made before Trump came onto the scene. I remind you that in the autumn of 2015, three months after Obergefell, I was personally told in a Capitol Hill meeting that Republicans had no plans — zero — for religious liberty legislation to try to give some kind of protection to dissenting Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others.

Anyway, my point is simply this: the external social order is not necessarily a sign of spiritual health. I am one of those Christian doomsayers, as you know —  The Benedict Option — who is probably more pessimistic than the Christians Wehner criticizes in his piece. Ahmari and Metaxas, after all, still have confidence that a political solution to the crisis is possible. I don’t, not really. To be clear, I believe that small-o orthodox Christians should stay involved in the political process both to work for the common good and to work specifically to fight for religious liberty, to protect our own communities, I believe that politics are at the moment nothing but a delaying action. That’s not nothing — they can give us time to prepare, and besides, as the progressive legal analyst Ian Millhiser says apocalyptically, the Trump effect on the federal courts is big and long-lasting. Over the next couple of decades, I believe that conservative federal judges are going to pretty much be the only serious line of defense dissident Christians have in the government.

The real reason to be apocalyptic is something that most conservative Christians don’t yet see, and refuse to acknowledge: the collapse of Christian faith in the lands of the West. I’m not going to give you the links here; regular readers have seen them often in this space. Most recently, Pew reported that the Millennials are the first generation in US history in which a majority say they have no particular religious affiliation. Absent some sort of religious revival, this is the new normal. Yesterday I spoke by phone with a plugged-in Evangelical leader who is around my age (I’m 52), and he told me that the faith landscape among churchgoing Evangelical youth in his children’s generation (Generation Z) is a blasted heath when it comes to doctrine, Scripture, and anything substantive. They have been raised in a youth group culture that has made the Christian faith entirely relational and emotivist. They have no real anchor in anything deeper than their feelings. It’s an extremely unstable situation. Mind you, these are young people who are still in church; they’re heavily Moralistic Therapeutic Deists. It’s the same thing with Catholic youth, as Notre Dame researcher Christian Smith has demonstrated.

They are either going to abandon Christianity when the post-Christian, and increasingly anti-Christian, culture pushes them hard enough — and it’s not going to take much — or, lacking any binding source of authority outside their personal interpretation of Scripture and/or their tradition, they’re going to turn Christianity into something unrecognizable by any historic measure of orthodoxy.

This is the real apocalypse. It may or may not be the end of THE world, but it is absolutely the end of A world.

Moreover, the loss of Christianity, and its core idea of human identity and dignity, is going to be keenly felt this century as science and technology make possible all kinds of extreme manipulations of human beings. Wehner talks about how much worse things were in the past regarding slavery and racial discrimination and cruelty, despite the far more robust presence of Christianity in our society. He’s right to some extent: Christianity did not stop those evils. But Christians did! Slavery has been present in many human societies around the world for thousands of years. The anti-slavery movement began in Britain in the latter part of the 18th century, and spread to America. Prize-winning historian Graham Wood points out that slavery existed in many places around the world “without substantial criticism,” until a small number of Anglo-American Protestants began speaking out against it. They did so on Christian grounds. The great anthem of the Union Army as it marched into battle to end slavery was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — a song that rendered the Civil War into a holy crusade.

Of course they went into battle against Christians who believed slavery was either God-ordained, or at least that God didn’t have a big problem with it. The point here is that abolitionism depended on the Christian belief that all men are created in the God’s image. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights movement was led by black pastors, whose rhetoric was soaked in Biblical teaching, language, and imagery. It is impossible to imagine any future crusade for social or moral reform in this country being carried out in the same way. We have lost the faith that made the rhetoric of Dr. King and others so powerful. Some of us alive today have enough cultural memory to feel what we have lost. The younger among us do not.

There has never been, nor will there ever be, any utopias in this life. The church and the world will always need to be reformed. But having lost our religion, how will we know when we need to be reformed? How will we know how what we are doing wrong, and how to do right? If it’s all relative, we are well and truly lost. We have nothing but popular passion. This is not going to go well for any of us, Christian and otherwise. There are whole communities in the US that have lived through several generations without the nuclear family. Cultural memory of intact families has dissolved. How are those people supposed to pull themselves out of their crisis, if they have no means by which to measure the depth of their descent?

That’s the kind of doom that’s facing Christians today. And no politician can stop it, because that’s not what politicians do. I don’t fault Christians for being concerned — greatly concerned — about the social and political order, nor do I fault them for wanting to do something about it. But I do fault them — I fault us — for not looking first into the deep decay of Christian thought and practice within our own church communities and families, and taking up the crusade to rebuild the church as a bulwark, a lighthouse, and an ark.

Dark days are upon us, and they’re going to get darker. I don’t see how even a liberal-ish Christian can regard the collapse of the faith within the younger generations of Americans and be sanguine about it. “Be not afraid” is wise counsel, but not if it is deployed as a means of convincing Christians to sit quietly while the floodwaters are rising to the doorstep, and to do anything about it, because surely things will come right again if we could only keep quite still and wait.

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The Ed Orgeron Rule For Sartorial Normalcy

OK, I’m ready for Reaction now, and please, make it anti-capitalist. This ad for a dress for boys makes me think that anything to the left of LSU Tigers Coach Ed Orgeron on the masculinity spectrum ought to be sent to Siberia, or at least Long Island:

 

That’s a teenage boy. If you don’t believe me, the coding on the image says “the-boys-long-sleeve-dress_little_cobalt_front.jpg”.

The mom who sent me that thing is disgusted that gender ideology is now creeping into everyday shopping for her kids. Woke Capitalism, people. I’m telling you, in our consumerist republic, Big Business is a greater threat to normalcy than Big Government.

Needless to say, we won’t be buying anything from Primary.com, at all. Thing is, the clothes aren’t bad. This is how the business presents itself on the website.

It was founded by “two moms,” Galyn and Kristina:

Yeah, you know what else doesn’t make sense? You rich capitalist women normalizing putting boys in dresses.

Here’s a crude but effective rule of thumb: When trying to decide how to dress your son, imagine asking Coach O what he thinks of the outfit. “Hey Coach O, does my boy look good in this?” That’ll stop every bit of this crap, cold.

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How ‘Bout Dem Tigahs, Baby!

You should be here in the Bayou State tonight. The LSU Tigers, led by Coach Ed Orgeron and quarterback Joe Burrow (who will win the Heisman Trophy, for sure), won the SEC Championship tonight by destroying the Georgia Bulldogs. CBS Sports quoted Coach O saying that Joe Burrow is the “most important” player ever to come through LSU. What an incredible compliment — and, if you watched tonight’s game, you can understand why he said that. Just look at what Burrow did tonight, would you?

Joe Burrow is a magician. pic.twitter.com/PU55GUFXhx

— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) December 8, 2019

After the game, interviewed on CBS, Burrow said that he is so grateful to the people of Louisiana for allowing him to become “a Louisiana native.” Man oh man, we love that man so much. And we love Coach O. Straight off of Bayou Lafourche! You can’t get more Louisiana than that. Here’s an interview with his mama, Coco:

Look at this one too. Coach O and his mama are speaking a little Cajun French. Watch to the very end, when she talks about how much she misses Big Ed, Coach O’s father, who died of cancer in 2011:

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a couple of Coach O Christmas ornaments for my tree. Seriously, you can buy them right here.

My son Lucas and I watched the first half of the game at The Chimes East here in Baton Rouge. Here’s a View From My Table, with my lunch, and the first Tigers touchdown of the game:

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

What a night! We watched the second half at home. During the game, Lucas had to make a quick trip down the street to a friend’s house. When he came back in, I was shouting at him about all the scoring the Tigers had done while he was out. He said, “I knew something big was going on. As I was walking down the street, there was whooping and hollering coming from every house.”

It’s that kind of night here. What a season this has been! And it’s not over yet! I’m so proud to be an LSU alumnus, and so grateful to live in Louisiana. Coach O, Joe Burrow, and the 2019 LSU Tigers have given all us Louisianians an incredible gift. Thank you, men!

UPDATE: Magical words from the Washington Post:

They wear purple, the color that happens when blue and red mingle to make rarity. This fresh American powerhouse from Louisiana plays football the way football ought to be played in purple: vividly, magically, creatively. It just completed an autumn so kaleidoscopic that it’s still hard to process, a season in which it flattered purple even as purple is hard to flatter.

If anybody ever had more fun than LSU and its devotees had in the autumn of 2019, then we all should get to see it. Even as it wore mostly white in its 37-10 wreckage of No. 4 Georgia on Saturday in the SEC championship game, No. 2 LSU is headed for the playoff at 13-0 and as an apparent superteam with an enviable level of collaboration and a rare knack for adaptation.

LSU in 2019 has remade LSU, remade 58-year-old coach Ed Orgeron, remade quarterback Joe Burrow, remade long-overlooked 5-foot-8 running back Clyde Edwards-Helaire from Baton Rouge, remade life in Baton Rouge. Against a wall Saturday night, a man credited with a heap of the remaking, ­30-year-old passing coordinator and former William & Mary wide receiver and film geek Joe Brady, said of his receivers: “I want them dancing every single time they get in the end zone. That’s what football’s all about. Football’s — you’re supposed to be having fun.”

The color purple should feel like that.

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Black Evangelical: ‘White People, Chill Out’

Really interesting e-mail from a black woman who reads my blog, responding to the post about race, identity politics, and Evangelicalism.

I have been reading your blog for a few years and I think you are long overdue to feature the emergence of a growing number of black conservatives who are being ignored by the media. I awoke this morning and read your post about the woman who spoke at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. As I read through the comments, I felt what has become an all-too-familiar feeling online. Namely, that I am living in an alternate universe where my family is the only black family which isn’t cowering in fear of latent white racism or overt discrimination from white evangelicals who owe me a “safe space” to be black.

I grew up in a home which was extremely religious and socially conservative, but also a family where my parents reliable voted Democrat. And so, when I first stepped into the voting booth in 1992 as an earnest 20-year-old, I voted Democrat as well. By 1996, I had done a complete about face. Carrying a child brought home to me the reality of abortion as the brutal, murderous act that it is. My parents didn’t change political affiliations with me, but as they came of age during a time of intense racial discrimination and unrest, I completely understood and appreciated their position. Black People my age and younger really have no reason to be so politically wed to any particular ideology to the extent that they are. That they are is the fruit of a highly effective educational and media propaganda campaign to embrace victimization wholesale. And not to their benefit, as any marginally observant person can see.

They are a contrast the numbers of black people I have encountered over the past few years who do not hate Trump, are quietly divesting from the Democratic Party –mostly because of the Tyranny of the Alphabet People — and are closet fans of people like Thomas Sowell, Candace Owens and Sheriff David Clarke. We are, indisputably, a distinct minority. I highly doubt that more than 10% of black voters will pull the lever for Donald Trump in 2020. What is worth noting, however, and is often ignored, is that a number of black voters are simply going to sit the thing out. They’re not going to vote for Trump, but they are also not going to vote for the agenda of people who think that “trans is the new black”.

The mainstream media and the people who run our government and academia are heavily invested in ignoring the growing number of blacks and other minorities withdrawing from their coalition. Since it seems important enough for them to hide it, it’s equally important for people with your platform and influence to periodically highlight it.

Not all black people (not even most black people) are afraid of being racially discriminated against. To the extent that they are, you can be sure and certain that they 1) live a very segregated lifestyle already and 2) get the vast majority of their news and commentary from CNN, MSNBC and the likes. No black person who lives and moves outside of their bubble is sincerely afraid of racial discrimination.

My experience has been the exact opposite. We are a homeschooling family whose children attend a part-time, classical Christian school. It should go without saying, but we are a minority in our educational community. My experience has been (overwhelmingly) one where I have had to implore my caring, sensitive white Christian friends to shed their sackcloth, ashes, and white guilt in my presence because it is not needed. More than that, it is not desired and is quite frankly, problematic. The evangelical church in America has, with few exceptions, gone the distance to forge racial reconciliation. I have frequently said to the people I interact with, “If you are loving everyone you meet with the love of Christ, there is quite literally NOTHING you can do to top that. Stop trying. It’s an affront to the faith.”

I honestly believe that if the black conservatives who are on the front lines received as much attention as the grievance peddlers, a lot more black people would feel free to come forward with their objections to the left’s narrative, and even more would be snapped out of the trance of comfortable mental oppression and begin to think outside the box. It may not mean that they will vote Republican, and I’m perfectly fine with that. As noted in your Tucker Carlson piece, it’s not as if the GOP has any lock on truth and righteousness. It’s more important that more of them withdraw their blind support for a Democratic Party that literally cares nothing about them, but rather uses the correct series of buzz words, with the expectation that they will react as predictably as Pavlov’s dogs. If that’s not racist, then I don’t know what is.

Lots to think about there. Thanks, reader. She posts here from time to time, so commenters should realize that in moderating comments, I draw a line against people speaking insultingly of those who are within this blog’s community. I know some of you liberal readers are going to get your backs up over this, but do it respectfully and civilly, or don’t waste your time writing a comment.

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Race, Identity Politics, And Evangelicalism

I was really struck by this comment from a reader this morning. He said he left his conservative Evangelical church when it embraced identity politics, and held a seminar about “white privilege.” He adds:

“Racial politics will be to conservative churches what sexual politics was to liberal ones.”

By “conservative churches,” he surely means “conservative Evangelical churches.” It’s not that racial conflict is not, or could not, be an issue in Catholic and Orthodox churches, but rather their ecclesiology prevents the racial fault line from emerging like it would in Evangelical churches.

As readers know, I am not well informed about the culture inside American Evangelicalism, so I would like to know what you Evangelical readers have to say about this. I have read that the number of white Evangelicals who have embraced Trump has caused racial animosity in some churches and communities. I’m not disputing that this is real. What I’m asking is if racial conflict will divide conservative churches as the homosexual issue has divided predominantly liberal ones over the past generation. If you answer, please be specific. I would like to learn more about this.

I have only one story to tell. After my Dante book came out in 2015, I spoke on it at a Christian study center, where I had standing room only crowds. These were overwhelmingly white Evangelical college students. I talked to a group of them afterward about my Benedict Option idea, and made plans to return to interview them for that book.

Before I could get back there, I wrote (in January 2016) critically of Michelle Higgins, a Black Lives Matter activist, who spoke at the annual Intervarsity Christian Fellowship national gathering. I wrote that she

 said that the pro-life movement is “a big spectacle.” At about the 13:30 mark in her presentation, she began denouncing pro-life Evangelicals as hypocrites:

“We could end the adoption crisis tomorrow. But we’re too busy arguing to have abortion banned. We’re too busy arguing to defund Planned Parenthood,” charged Higgins. “We are too busy withholding mercy from the living so that we might display a big spectacle of how much we want mercy to be shown to the unborn. Where is your mercy? What is your goal and only doing activism that is comfortable?”

Her entire talk was more or less progressive boilerplate, some of it worthwhile, some of it absurd (e.g., praising pro-Soviet radical Angela Davis as an apostle of “hope,” accusing white Evangelical churches of being racist if they don’t embrace exuberant African-American worship styles), some of it bizarre coming from a confessing Evangelical (e.g., blaming missionaries to North America for “proselytizing” Native Americans), all of it intended to convince her audience to be ashamed of themselves if they have not joined #BlackLivesMatter.

I went on to quote a Damon Linker column (which was not written about the Higgins speech, but which, I said, reminded me of Higgins’s talk):

And there you have it: the identity-politics-addled mind at work. Its first thought is always an ethnic, racial, gender, or ideological category, like “white privilege,” which it uses to size-up the world in an instant. Next comes judgment, usually quick and severe, using a single measure: relative power among the various ethnic, racial, gender, or ideological groups. And then there is the final ingredient: the moralistic edge tinged with grievance that makes the American style of identity politics so potent and distinctive, an obsessive fixation on justice understood as equality.

That commentary of mine stirred up a lot of discussion, and a response from Greg Jao of InterVarsity, which I posted here, with further remarks. My own view is that “racial reconciliation” — their word — really is important. Race, and racial hatred, has divided Christian churches in this country for far too long. It really is important to repent and reconcile. My objection — and it is a strong one — is that reconciliation cannot possibly mean “agree with and accept left-wing cultural politics, and never criticize anything black Christians say, do, or stand for.” That’s not reconciliation; that’s surrender. It is not the case that seeking racial reconciliation (as all Christians must) requires a Christian to surrender protecting the unborn, or defending religious liberties. It is not the case that racial reconciliation means accepting uncritically the claims of Black Lives Matter, which advocates for some startlingly anti-Christian things. That was my view then, and is my view now.

Well, those comments I made online about Michelle Higgins closed the door to me with that Christian study center community. Again, my understanding was that these were all fairly conservative white Evangelical college students. They were part of InterVarsity. My criticizing Higgins, Black Lives Matter, and InterVarsity’s embrace of it, made me persona non grata there. It wasn’t just that they thought I was wrong; they thought I was so bad that I was not worth speaking to. I was able to convince a couple of the guys there to give me an interview about their work, and I’m grateful for that, because they too were angry at me.

I don’t want to re-argue these events of 2016, but I do want to say that this was the first time I realized how powerfully racial identity politics were manifesting themselves among middle-class white Evangelicals of the Millennial and Zoomer generations. My previous work criticizing LGBT rights and Obergefell — I had been unambiguously clear about this for years — did not make me unwelcome among those white Evangelicals, but criticizing Black Lives Matter did. Most of the students there when I was present will have graduated by now, and I would not be surprised to learn that my orthodox Christian beliefs on homosexuality are now problematic there.

But it was race that did it. With that group of young white conservative (conservative-ish?) Evangelicals, Black Lives Matter was not an issue that Christians could agree to disagree on; it was absolute. (“Next comes judgment, usually quick and severe, using a single measure: relative power among the various ethnic, racial, gender, or ideological groups.”)

As we know, it became impossible for Mainline Protestant churches to agree to disagree over homosexuality. And I understand why not: if you believe that there is nothing morally wrong about homosexuality, Christians who adhere to traditional Biblical teaching are upholding unjust discrimination. On the other hand, if you hold to tradition, then there can be no compromise. It’s either right, or it’s wrong, and though it makes the vast middle uncomfortable, activists on both sides of the gay rights in churches argument saw things more clearly than the others: there really is no middle ground. Eventually, the orthodox were driven out of most Mainline churches, and now it looks like the Methodists are going to schism over it.

Will things go this way in Evangelicalism over race? It seems to me that the moral lines from a doctrinal Christian point of view are not remotely as clear as they were in the homosexuality debate. Every Christian believes, or should believe, that racism is wrong. As I see it, the conflict is over what constitutes racism, and what to do about it?

Is it racist not to support Black Lives Matter? Is resisting the standard progressive model of race and inequality a sign of racism? If so, well, then you cannot argue with a racist, because his bigotry is irrational. You can only separate yourself from him.

It’s a minefield. If I were Evangelical, I would hope my church was sensitive to the painful, even shameful, history of the church’s complicity with racial oppression. (Michelle Higgins speaks truthfully and winsomely of some of them here; believe me, here in south Louisiana, there are also shameful historical examples of white supremacist bigotry within Catholicism. White Christians of my generation and younger are in many cases simply ignorant of this history — and that is wrong. These things happened, and they were terrible, and they need to be acknowledged and repented of.) And I would expect us to be doing something concrete to overcome that legacy. If my pastor, or the leadership of the church, in any way preached or defended racism, I would be gone.

On the other hand, if the racial reconciliation initiatives in the church amounted to sacralizing progressive principles and rhetoric, which includes conceiving of America’s complex racial conflicts in simplistic Good vs. Evil terms, then I would leave that church. If you conservatives watch that six-minute Michelle Higgins video — that’s not the speech she gave at the IVCF meeting — you’ll find that there’s a lot you can agree with. But Higgins is also the one who praised the revolutionary communist Angela Davis as an apostle of “hope,” and who believes that to prove one’s racial bona fides, Christians have to affirm things that are problematic, to say the least. It is impossible to have a meaningful conversation about racial reconciliation if one side holds the view that to disagree with them is to prove that you are a racist.

The church is not the Republican Party at prayer, nor is it the Democratic Party at prayer — nor is it Black Lives Matter, or Turning Point USA, at prayer. A church that conceives of itself as any of these things is not a church that I trust to form me according to the values of the Gospel. The line between being politically prophetic and politicized is blurry, but if church leaders — clergy and laity alike — aren’t conscious that they ought to be looking for it, and trying not to cross it, they’re in trouble.

I can tell you from conversations I’ve had over the years with white conservatives, not just in religious circles, there is a great reticence to join these conversations, because the whites fear that these are actually just bad-faith exercises in political punishment. I am thinking right now of a specific case some years ago, in which a white conservative friend was invited to be part of a mixed-race dinner in which people around the table would be having frank discussion about racial reconciliation (this was not a church thing). He told me that he would like to go, but he wouldn’t do it because he would be too afraid to say what was on his mind. He judged that anything he said that did not conform to what the white and the black liberals at the table believed to be true would be instantly characterized as racist, and that his words would be held against him going forward. He asked me what I thought he should do. I told him that he was right — that it was too risky to participate in this kind of thing. The “correct” outcome was predetermined, and he had no way of knowing how any confession of what progressives consider to be wrongthink on his part would be used against him in the future. Identity politics and the real-world stakes for getting on the wrong side of them has driven grace out the door.

Again: in the struggle within broadly liberal churches over homosexuality, there were clear Biblical and traditional teachings to appeal to, and the disagreement over moral and theological principle was clear. Looking in from the outside, in the struggle (such as it is) within broadly conservative Evangelical churches, there is no meaningful disagreement over moral and theological principle: everybody agrees that racism is wrong. In one sense, this makes it easier, in theory, to reach a resolution. In another sense, though, it makes it harder, because everything is so subjective.

So, Evangelical readers — white, black, Latino, Asian — what do things look like from your perspective? What’s going on in your church? What do you think is going to happen? What are you going to do? Is it true that “racial politics will be to conservative churches what sexual politics was to liberal ones”? Help this outsider understand.

This is a topic fraught with emotion, so bear in mind that no matter which side you take, I’m not going to publish comments that, in my judgment, are more about heat than light.

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View From The Culture War Trenches

Michael Brendan Dougherty has written one of the best pieces of political and cultural analysis that I’ve seen in a while. It’s a short essay called “Trump Is Incidental To The Culture War,” and it’s well worth a read. In it, he offers a theory for why Democratic presidential candidates aren’t reaching rightward to try to peel off voters from Trump, as they have successfully done against Republicans in past elections. In fact, as MBD points out, they’re either pushing harder to the Left, or at least holding to strongly left culture-war positions. For example, I personally know Catholic conservatives who are interested in Bernie Sanders’s economics, but who won’t consider him because he’s so militantly pro-abortion. Me, in the past I’ve been drawn to Elizabeth Warren’s hard line on corporate misconduct, but after this stunt (recalled by MBD), there’s absolutely no way I could take a chance on her with my vote:

In a televised forum, Elizabeth Warren was asked what she’d tell a hypothetical supporter who said, “Senator, I’m old-fashioned, and my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman.” (This self-description would apply to a significant plurality of Americans and a significant percentage of African-American Democrats.) Warren said “Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy” — as if women were already uniformly supportive of same-sex marriage — and added, “I’m going to say, ‘Then just marry one woman. I’m cool with that . . . assuming you can find one.’”

The crowd lapped up Warren’s expression of contempt, which was far from unique within the crowded field of presidential contenders: Before he dropped out, Beto O’Rourke said that he believed in stripping tax-exempt status from churches that don’t celebrate same-sex unions.

The line you often here in the comments threads of this blog rings very true: “I may not love Trump, but at least he doesn’t hate me.”

The truth, says MBD, is that the Left is just as dug in on its culture war positions as the Right is. And this is how things look from the right-wing trenches:

In the last decade, conservative Christians have become used to such rhetoric and seen the real-life consequences of its growing popularity. They’ve seen individuals such as Brendan Eich, a true innovator in his field, fired as CEO of Mozilla not because he ever discriminated against anyone, but because others argued that his own Christian convictions, manifested in a political donation to the Proposition 8 campaign in California, made him unfit to oversee their work and made them feel unsafe. They’ve seen mayors who are part of the Democratic mainstream argue for economic blockades of corporations such as Chick-Fil-A for the supposedly dastardly sin of donating to the Salvation Army. They’ve seen hospice nuns dragged through the courts because they want to hire and compensate people in a way that doesn’t make them participants in what their faith teaches is a mortal sin. They’ve seen religious schools dragged into national controversies for hiring and firing teachers in line with their faith. They suspect that legislation such as the Equality Act would make them potentially liable as employers and would revise Title VII litigation to make themselves a legal risk as employees.

In each case, the Left dismisses these complaints as special pleading or whining. It’s just signing a piece of paper, they say to the nuns. It’s just the lack of market access in a town. It’s just anger whipped up by the media. Free speech has consequences, and if you don’t like the laws, just find another profession in which you can follow your religious scruples. None of this can reassure people who know from history that Thomas More was executed for not signing a piece of paper related to state business, that penal laws once restricted Catholics and Presbyterians from access to town markets and certain professions, and that monasteries were burned down because of sensational journalism.

That’s it. That’s it right there. We conservative Christians, we know that the Left’s promises are worthless. I’ve you’ve been paying attention for the past 20 years, you know that the Left’s behavior in the culture war is governed by the Law of Merited Impossibility: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”

Please, read it all. MBD’s core conclusion is that Trump doesn’t really matter in the culture war. Both sides are driven most by fear of each other. I think that is correct.

I can’t speak for all conservative Christians, of course, but to me, conservative Christian support for Trump comes from a place of weakness, not strength. Our side has steadily lost ground in the culture, and within cultural institutions — and the rate of retreat under fire is picking up speed. What does the cultural Right have, other than Trump? He’s not nothing — he’s appointing a large number of federal judges, which will be the last line of defense for conservatives as the Congress and the presidency moves to the cultural Left in the years and decades to come. The thing is, the only real threat those judges will pose to the Left is slowing it down in getting what it wants. Neither a judge, nor a president, nor a legislature, can command people to believe things they don’t believe.

Hear me loud and clear: I understand why the Left fears Trump in power. What is a mystery to me is why they don’t see how thoroughly they’ve conquered this culture — and, eventually, will have conquered its politics. As a religious conservative, if it were possible to trade the presidency for the cultural power the Left has, I would take that deal without thinking twice. As I explained here, power to force one of the most successful corporations in America — Chick-fil-A — to violate its brand and change corporate policy out of the “shame” of having donated a little money to the Salvation Army, of all groups — man, that is some real power. It’s malevolent, but it’s real, and it’s going to dominate American life for the foreseeable future. Some religious conservatives rally around Trump because they really believe the rhetoric that comes out of their own mouths about how he’s the best president Evangelicals have ever had, and suchlike. But others, whatever they say in public, know the truth in private: that absent some unforeseen event, Trump is the last thing holding back the forces of the Left in this culture from doing exactly what Michael Brendan Dougherty, above, says they’re going to do: punish religious believers and their institutions as hard as they can manage. We know this from history. We know from recent history, too, that the Jacobin spirit is alive and well.

I hesitate to make this comparison, because it’s genuinely a matter of life and death for the Christians of Syria, but the principle is the same. But here goes: Why do you think the Christian minority in Syria supports Bashar Assad so strongly? Is it because the admire his character, or his political vision? No. It’s because they know that as bad as he is, if Assad were gone, Islamic radicals would slaughter them all, and reduce their churches and monasteries to rubble. They have seen what ISIS did to the Christians of the territories they conquered in Iraq. They can’t take a chance. Do you think the Syrian Christians love Assad, and approve of everything he does? Do you think Assad loves them? Come on. For both Assad and the Syrian Christians, their relationship is primarily transactional.

As I said, we American Christians do not face that. I only bring up that extreme, real-life example, to make the logic of how we reason about our much less dire situation clear. As MBD says, bringing up actual instances, we know what the Left in power wants to do to our liberties and our institutions, if they have the chance. Once we lose them, it’s going to be hard to get them back, if it’s even possible. This is not a theoretical matter. We have seen it happen, right in front of our eyes. It is hard, at this point, to gaslight us, to tell us that we have nothing to worry about, when we quite obviously do. For pity’s sake, we saw what happened to the Covington Catholic boys! We don’t have to love or approve of Trump, or believe that he loves and approves of us. It is enough that he doesn’t despise us, and consider us enemies to be trampled over in the name of social justice.

I wrote The Benedict Option to wake up my fellow small-o orthodox Christians to the reality we face in this post-Christian culture, and to strongly encourage them to start working now to prepare our families and our communities for the dark days ahead. I did not anticipate the Trump victory, but in any case, the best we can hope from it is to give ourselves a few more years to prepare. If you haven’t read it yet, please consider doing so. You may well be pleased by the Trump presidency, but you should also not fool yourself into believing that Trump has turned this culture around. Even if he were a saint, he couldn’t do that; it’s not in the power of this or any political leader to do so. At best, he has held some of these forces at bay, but we should also recognize that he has caused many of those who spited conservative Christianity in the beginning to hate Christianity even more. And to be fair, I get that. If you regarded Christians as hypocrites to begin with, seeing them rally to Trump confirms what you believed, and intensifies it.

But none of that changes the fact that the threat facing conservative Christians is real. If they put down their political weapons and throw themselves on the mercy of their conquerors, it is not going to go any better for them (for us). Some Christians may decide that despite this, it is the right thing to do — more honorable than allying with the barbarian king Trump. I can understand that, and don’t condemn those who make that decision. It is one that I might make myself. But neither should they condemn Christians who make a tragic decision to give Trump their vote, out of well-informed, well-grounded fear of the Left in power. That is a decision I too might make next November.

I think that both Left and Right can agree that the fact that we have come to this point in American politics and society is a sign of profound decadence — that is, of the decay of the body politic. We are a culturally divided country, and each side fears and loathes the other. I can’t see how this ends well. And here’s the thing Christians should understand: the faith is in collapse among the younger generations. If the Left prevails, the core of the anti-Left resistance in the America of the near future will not be among conservative Christians. There won’t be enough of us remaining to make a significant difference. It is going to coalesce along lines of racial identity — “Back to blood,” as the title of Tom Wolfe’s final novel had it — because the Left has made a god of identity politics. Without a healthy sense of nationalism to unite this disparate country, and without a shared religion, it stand to reason that race is the only thing left. This is what I mean when I keep saying that the identity-politics Left is summoning up demons that it can’t control. Christians won’t be able to control them either. We are going to be marginalized, and faced with having to hold our own churches together, and keeping ourselves — white, black, Latino, and Asian believers — from descending into race hatred.

Earlier this week, I got a message from an East Coast journalist, someone I’ve never met, whose name most of you would know. He was commenting on some of the things I’ve been writing — most recently, my piece about the parallels between our time and place, and late imperial Russia. My correspondent said that he’s not one for woo-woo religious stuff, but “I can feel the demonic energy in this country right now, from all sides. There will be violence.”

You feel it too, don’t you? That growing sense of apocalypticism is a sign of the times. Pay attention.

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Seems Like Old Times

In the Year of Our Lord 2019, sixteen years after this nation launched the catastrophic Iraq War, the following words were spoken on Capitol Hill this week:

We have become the shining city on a hill. We have become the nation that leads the world in understanding what democracy is. And one of the things we understand most profoundly is it’s not a real democracy, it’s not a mature democracy, if the party in power uses the criminal process to go after its enemies. And I think you heard testimony — the Intelligence Committee heard testimony about how it isn’t just our national interest in protecting our own elections. It’s not just our national interest in making sure that the Ukraine remains strong and on the front line so they fight the Russians there and we don’t have to fight them here, but it’s also our national interest in promoting democracy worldwide.

This was not the second coming of the Wolfowitz-Cheney-Bolton brigade. This was Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor and Democrat called by her party to testify in this week’s House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing.

Wellsir, I’m old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the often-heard line, “We fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here.” Seriously, young folks, look it up online.

And I’m old enough to remember these lines from President Bush’s second inaugural address, in 2005:

There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

That didn’t work out too well for us, for Iraq, or for the Middle East.

And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play his part as a warmonger.

To be clear, it’s not like Trump’s motivations are clean here. He didn’t do what he did because he’s a non-interventionist. Whether or not it’s a good idea to give military assistance to Ukraine, the Congress appropriated that money, and Trump had no business making it contingent on the Kyiv government doing a political favor for him. That’s beside the point I’m making here, which is: it’s stunning that Prof. Karlan faults Trump’s shenanigans for hurting the cause of America’s global mission to spread democracy, and to fight proxy wars with Russia — on Russia’s own border!

I don’t take a stand on the fight between Russia and Ukraine. I genuinely don’t understand the conflict well enough to make an informed choice. As an Orthodox Christian, I lament it all, and pray for peace and reconciliation. That said, it’s close to berserk to say that America ought to go seeking a fight with Russia within a state that, only 20 30 years ago, was part of the Soviet Union. What if a Russian law professor gave a speech before the Duma saying that Russia has a mission to fund military conflict on the US-Mexico border, because Russia has to fight America there so they don’t have to fight them in Russia. How crazy would that be?

Here is a detail from Google Maps of that region. That big area to the east of Ukraine? That’s Russia:

According to Stanford University professor Pamela Karlan, the United States should fund a proxy war between Ukraine and Russia, because democracy, and to keep the Russians out of America.

The American elites didn’t learn a damn thing from Iraq. At least not that particular American elite.

 

 

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Dictatorship Of The Victimariat

Alan Jacobs has a good reflection on the Rolling Stone piece by ex-Evangelical Alex Morris (whom I wrongly identified as male in my post the other day; sorry) and the comments in it by newly woke ex-conservative Evangelical Gregory Thornbury. For background: Jacobs is an Anglican who is theologically conservative but not necessarily politically. He has strongly criticized Trump, believes that global warming is real, is strongly pro-life, and despises white supremacy. But in this blog post, he comes after this passage from the Morris article:

“The white nationalism of fundamentalism was sleeping there like a latent gene, and it just came roaring back with a vengeance,” says [Greg] Thornbury. In Trump’s America, “‘religious liberty’ is code for protection of white, Western cultural heritage.”

As regular readers will recall, that quote set my hair on fire. Religious liberty is one of the political issues I care about most, and probably the one that draws the least fair, accurate coverage from media (when it is covered at all). Not only is Thornbury demonstrably wrong here — and it’s not even close — the fact that someone who was such a big part of the conservative Evangelical scene would make such a slanderous, dishonorable statement, and in a magazine like Rolling Stone, serves to confirm the prejudices of progressives. “Even former conservative Evangelical college president Gregory Thornbury admits that …” , etc.

Jacobs wasn’t happy with it either. He writes, in part:

So the passage is unclear, but I’d like to know what Thornbury means. I’ve written a good deal about the importance of religious freedom on this blog and elsewhere — just see the tag at the bottom of this post — so does that mean that I am using that topic as “code for protection of white, Western cultural heritage”? If so: explain that to me, please.

Maybe there’s something that Greg Thornbury and Alex Morris have an interest in not knowing: that even if millions of white Americans abuse the concept of religious liberty, religious liberty could nevertheless be in some danger. Indeed, I think this is one of the key points that progressive Christians make a point of not seeing, because if they did see it then they might sometimes have to come to the defense of people (especially evangelicals) they don’t want to be associated with. They know that as long as they denounce white supremacy and homophobia, and endorse (or at least remain silent about) abortion, they won’t run afoul of the progressive consensus. Why put their status at risk by defending willfully-blind bigots?

One answer might be: Maybe the cultural consensus won’t always be in your favor. Almost a decade ago I warned conservative Christians that if they sought to deny religious expression to Muslims they might someday find the shoe on the other foot, and in the obviously hypocritical position of demanding rights for themselves that they tried to prevent others from exercising. (Update: they didn’t listen.) Perhaps progressives believe that that could never happen to them, that, even if they lose the White House from time to time, they can never find themselves out of cultural power and in need of powerful people to come to the defense of their rights. Well … Isn’t it pretty to think so?

Read the whole thing — and read this letter Jacobs got from a reader, commenting on the post.

It is beyond absurd to claim that “religious liberty” is a code word for “preserving white Western heritage” — but framing the matter in terms that offend the victimariat — like the “proletariat” in Marxist-Leninist philosophy, the class on whose behalf, and through whose agency, society must be revolutionized. If “religious liberty” can be safely written off as a code word for “white supremacy,” then progressives (and former Evangelicals who for some reason feel a need to put distance between themselves and their former commitments and friends) don’t have to think about it, only emote.

In his post, Jacobs talks about a Vox column by a progressive legal analyst who wants to be sensitive to a claim of a religious liberty violation by an American Muslim, against the FBI, but who knows that if the Muslim is vindicated, then … well, the headline captures the sentiment:

Oh yuck, we can’t have that, can we? So this otherwise sympathetic (to author Ian Millhiser) Muslim plaintiff might need to lose to prevent Jerry Falwell, Jr. from potentially winning in the future.

Years ago, a friend of mine who might not appreciate me identifying him here once said that the one rule you need to understand media coverage of issues involving religion, law, and politics, is this:

THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT MUST LOSE.

It’s really true. Political and religious conservatives who work in mainstream journalism see this all the time. It’s so deeply true, I believe, that most liberal journalists — which is to say, most journalists — are not even aware of it.

A parallel rule, not only of liberal journalism but of the way many progressives see and operate in the world, is:

MEMBERS OF FAVORED MINORITY GROUPS MUST WIN.

Case in point: Washington College in Maryland canceled a performance of Larry Shue’s comic play The Foreigner because it might trigger members of the victimariat. Excerpts from the campus newspaper’s account:

Out of a desire to prevent further injury to members of the WC community who already feel marginalized, Associate Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance Laura Eckelman decided to cancel the public performances. The decision was made on the evening of Nov. 7, approximately one hour before the play’s final dress rehearsal.

Senior Megan Stagg, the production’s director, was first attracted to the show 23 months ago.

“I was first drawn to the big idea the show was trying to get across to audiences — that not everyone is who they claim to be and do not feel like they fit in all the time,” Stagg said.

This idea of “othering” is a major plot point of the show, according to Stagg.

“The Foreigner” centers on a group of people who feel “othered” by society in various ways, including premarital pregnancy, neurological differences, and age. According to an email sent by the president’s office on Nov. 11, over the course of the play, these individuals build a community through listening, learning, and humor, but their bond is threatened by the xenophobic anger and self-proclaimed entitlement of two other characters.

Students worked on this production for nearly two years, only to see it cancelled at the last minute. You’re not going to believe what got the show killed:

The play contains some elements that students and staff found particularly offensive, according to Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students Sarah Feyerherm and Provost and Dean of the College Dr. Patrice DiQuinzio.

The climax of the play features the “disenfranchised protagonists” defeating characters who appear in Klu [sic] Klux Klan robes and are clearly set up as the antagonists.

Do you understand this? The play, a comedy, features protagonists conquering Klansmen, who are played as villains! But just the presence on stage of Klansmen, even as comic villains, was deemed too painful for the victimariat to bear. Why? The college journalist who wrote this piece is well on her way to absorbing the new rules of the profession:

Students on campus still face overt and subtle forms of racism from people in the community and on campus.

Not “claim to face,” but rather stating it as a fact. There is no evidence presented so the reader can discern whether the claim of “overt and subtle” racism is valid. It is just assumed that if the victimariat and their self-appointed institutional advocates assert it, it must be true.

Some said this was censorship. The official censors — college president Kurt Landgraf and theater department head Laura Eckelman — Orwellishly denied that they did what they plainly did:

“This was not an act of censorship,” Landgraf said. “The campus was not prepared for the content of the show, and the decision was made to be respectful of our student populations.”

“The Foreigner” has been performed on other college campuses across the country, such as Indiana University in July 2018 and Virginia Tech in Feb. 2019. According to Landgraf, colleges should not be censoring any speaker or production because content is controversial.

“I do not see this as an act of censorship. I view censorship as being shut down against your will. This was a course correction made by and with the theatre department,” Eckelman said.

This is yet one more case of leaders of a key cultural institution — a university — refusing to defend liberal values in the face of an attack by hysterical progressives. It is now not possible to perform an anti-racist play on the campus of Washington College, because the vanguard of the campus victimariat raised the red flag.

It is useful for parents and prospective students to learn that serious learning is much harder to find at Washington College (annual tuition, room, and board: $62,000) because its leadership has granted a heckler’s veto to favored minority groups. Two years of student labor on a play can be flushed down the drain in an instant, because the administrative and academic leadership there lacks the courage to defend the purpose of a college, and of art.

An important lesson to learn from this incident, and the Thornbury one, is how progressives twist language to justify (to themselves and others) doing highly illiberal things. Progressives don’t have to take religious conservatives seriously when they talk about religious liberty, because they’re really talking about white supremacy. Progressives don’t have to permit the performance of a play not because they are censoring material that offends someone, but because they are looking out for the “safety” of students. This allows the cowardly administrators and professors to lie to themselves about what they did, and what it says about their own lack of commitment to academic freedom and free speech. May the ghost of Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident and playwright sent to a communist prison over his work, haunt those frightened conformists.

I hope those theater students who had two years worth of work thrown in the trash by Kurt Landgraf, Laura Eckelman, and the other adults in their lives have also learned that this is the way the world as it is works, within many institutions. Cultural Leninists and the liberal institutional leaders who lack the character and the courage to stand up to them, are moving this country into a dictatorship of the victimariat. Many of those students so deeply wronged by Washington College will conform. As journalist Anne Appelbaum said, explaining why so few in Soviet-bloc Europe rebelled:

And so, the vast majority of Eastern Europeans did not make a pact with the devil or sell their soul to become informers but rather succumbed to the constant, all-encompassing, everyday psychological and economic pressure.

But there is no doubt at least one or two students involved in the production who watched this happen, and in whose hearts a spark of rebellion arose. Watch those kids. We’ll need them later. And they will need us.

 

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Impossible To Please — Or To Parody

If you have about seven minutes of your life to throw away, watch this clip of highlights from a city council meeting in Olympia, Washington. The city decided to light up City Hall in honor of Trans Day Of Remembrance. Naturally, some local transgenders came down to denounce the council in hysterical terms for doing this, even though police officers work in the building. The idea is that cops are anti-trans, and it is cruel to turn the building into a temporary trans monument with defiling presence of the police.

Watch this for some pure, uncut crazy — but be warned that the second speaker drops the f-bomb once:

Now, you regular readers know that I, a passionate Ignatian (Reilly), go catatonic with joy in the presence of freaks. When I heard today about the forthcoming stage production involving puppets, about the space-alien glove that possesses Michael Jackson and drives him to molest boys like a pederastic vampire, I thought, “O Fortuna, please make them film it and screen it at the Prytania!” Well, if Fortuna’s wheel spins favorably, it will land this Olympia clip as the opener, like the way Pixar runs those film shorts before its main features.

But seriously — no kidding here — the clip above shows why there is no satisfying progressive activists. Keep in mind that these loonies are freaking out over the fact that the city decided to honor transgender people. You’ll note too the common theme: that the city, and the normies who run it, are making it impossible for transgender people to live there. The accusation is that they’re murdering trans people by their … .what? Hatred? When the second trans person drops the f-bomb, the mayor calls him out, saying that that language is inappropriate, because this broadcast is going out in public. The self-described “tranny” is offended because the mayor cared more about language policing than listening to his tale of woe. Me me me me me me me me me!

The worst is a disabled person and trans-activist ally who identifies himself as “The Royal Majesty”. He’s near tears the entire time, wailing over the extreme cruelty of the city council, for having chosen to honor the Trans Day of Remembrance in that way. Seriously, the guy sounds like he’s about to have a nervous breakdown. His life cannot be easy, but man, he’s deranged. At one point, he sputters against the gall of the fact that “this town has the nerve to claim progressivism, even though we know that progressivism is proto-fascist anyway.”

“I would say ‘do better,'” The Royal Majesty concludes. “But I know that your job is to oppress my family” — his “family” being the trans activists, apparently. He ends like this:

“I hope when you go home at night to your comfortable houses, to your middle class lives where you have to worry about nothing, that you think of me, and that it hurts you terribly, because that is all I can hope for, since I don’t have hope for much else.”

The man is clearly in torment, and emotionally unwell. But I think this is probably the case for all of the people in this line-up. Remember, this Royal Majesty person is agonizing over the “proto-fascist” progressives who are oppressing trans people by honoring them. And he places all his hope in life in the solemn wish that his audience would come to hate itself at the thought of him.

These people are all 13-year-old girls — or, in two cases, they wish they were girls.

Today a friend sent me a Facebook posting on Thanksgiving in which a progressive my friend knows posted a statement wishing everyone peace and harmony and good vibes for the holiday. It was about as bland and gentle a statement as you can imagine. And don’t you know that it took no time for the progressives in the comments to start tearing each other apart over whether it’s right to enjoy Thanksgiving even thought it’s a “turkey genocide” (seriously!), and then whether it’s racist to use the word “genocide” to speak of animals, when Persons Of Color have been genocided. Honestly, they were at each other’s throats.

There is something about progressives like this, something profoundly disturbed. There’s a fundamental hatred of life, and of anything normal and peaceable. They’ve made their psychiatric pathologies into progressive virtues.

The problem is not that all progressives are like this. They aren’t. But progressives, and even just plain old liberals, who know better will never, ever stand up to these crackpots and bullies. They have bought 100 percent into the idea that to express one’s pain in the face of oppression is the highest manifestation of virtue.

Progressive activists like those Olympia weirdos won’t be satisfied until the entire world hates itself as much as, deep down, they hate themselves. Here’s an essay by Amy Heart, the trans activist pictured above (and the first speaker), on the website of a small publishing house Amy Heart started. Excerpt:

A few years ago, I wrote an essay about desirability as a queer trans woman. At the time, I was really sad that my female body was constantly being othered and/or masculinized because I was coersively [sic] assigned male at birth. I felt ugly and unwanted, all the time. Romantic partnership was out of the question and reach. You see, even though transition had set me free from a lifetime of suffering, I still found myself trapped behind layers and layers of self hatred and internalized transmisogyny. Estrogen made so many things better for me, but self-love was not a part of my HRT regiment.

Oh, how time changes everything.

It’s true that my friends still ask me if I have a partner. And I still always answer “no,” but only because my definition of partner isn’t the same as theirs.

Amy says: “But the most important part is — I am learning how to be my own partner.” More:

Sometimes I wonder what it would be to have a more “normal” life, if I wasn’t trans, jumbo-sized, asexual, etc, and that can make me sad. But I don’t know. I like, even love, what my life has become. I am rarely lonely anymore, and when I am, I have a world to turn to. I am finally just Amy, and maybe that makes me the luckiest girl in the world.

That’s genuinely sad. This is a broken person, full of rage. But progressivism has made people like Amy Heart, and The Royal Majesty, into prophets. Fools, but not holy ones. They don’t turn people towards compassion. They just turn people towards purifying hatred.

UPDATE: Oh look, a progressive dressed up like a bumblebee accuses someone of “being patronizing”:

I am with Jo Swinson here. The Extinction Rebellion protestor accuses her of being patronising. He is an adult dressed up as a bumble bee. https://t.co/9yIBBkaREg

— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) December 4, 2019

UPDATE.2: What are they doing? You’re trying to impeach the president, but you’ve got one of your members complaining about the lack of diversity among the day’s expert witnesses, which your party called. Crazy people, just crazy:

.@RepAlGreen criticizes the lack of black impeachment experts called before today's hearing:

"What subliminal message are we sending to the world when we have experts, but not one person of color? Are we saying that there are no people of color who are experts on this topic?" pic.twitter.com/oGDyodSh3S

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 4, 2019

In other news from the Progressive Circular Firing Squad, a gay activist is threatening to cancel gay man Pete Buttigieg for having helped the Salvation Army two years ago gather donations for Christmas. You can’t make this up:

I know the photos are two years old, but still, I can't help but wonder if Mayor Pete just looks at what LGBTQ activists have been working on for years and then chooses to spite it (e.g. Salvation Army, Chick-fil-A, queer media in general, etc.). https://t.co/zSYzlRLrOX

— Zack Ford (@ZackFord) December 4, 2019

Notice how the NBC News “Out” channel writer framed it:

Pete Buttigieg is drawing criticism after pictures of him volunteering for the Salvation Army, which has historically opposed gay rights, recently resurfaced on social media.

A single tweet from an activist known for his extreme takes! That’s all it took to generate this fake news story from NBC News Out.

I can’t imagine why ordinary people don’t rush to embrace progressivism.

UPDATE.2: What more needs to be said?:

The gay left hates and wants to persecute orthodox Christians, however much good they do. And they’ve taken over the movement. https://t.co/5gQrz4LFrt via @nbcnews

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) December 5, 2019

UPDATE.3: This comment from reader Jonah R.:

Got another one for you, Rod: Washington College in Maryland has cancelled a performance of the play “The Foreigner” by Larry Shue because it’s a satire that blasts and mocks the Klan. The school feared the play “could potentially upset some members of the campus community” because some actors are shown on stage in Klan robes. So now you can’t even stage a progressive, pro-immigrant, anti-racism play that denounces the Klan because some hypothetical sensitive soul might be traumatized by the sight of a fellow student in a bedsheet with eyeholes. The movement to stop the play was led by the student government’s—I kid you not—Secretary of Diversity. The college president, whom the website describes as “a former corporate executive with deep experience in financial accountability, information technology, and integrated business strategies,” told the campus newspaper: “This was not an act of censorship.” The chair of the theater department agreed that it wasn’t censorship and called it instead a “course correction.”

Somehow the Little Rock Nine and the Greensboro lunch-counter protesters grew up to be stable, productive members of society, despite all the abuse they took, but suburban kids at a private college that costs $48,000 a year to attend ($62,000 if you throw in room and board) need to be protected from…a play that shares their generally progressive political views?

When people ask why you focus on the fringe and the freaks, this is why: Because this lunacy does in fact have a foothold in key areas of our culture.

In 1996, when the Catholic University in D.C. banned advertising and charging admission for a campus production of “Angels in America”—but didn’t even go so far as to ban the play itself—there was outrage from the art and theater world. I never dreamed I’d live to see progressives push conservatives out of the way so they themselves could…ban progressive theater! What a joke.

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