Rod Dreher's Blog, page 190

Gratitude For Friends Far And Wide

On this Thanksgiving day, I’ve been reflecting on how much travel I’ve done this year. I began the year by going to Spain for the Benedict Option book tour. Madrid, Sevilla, Valencia, Barcelona, and Zaragoza — I made good friends in each place. One of the greatest joys of my life is to go to a foreign country and meet other Christian believers who are walking the same pilgrim path as I am. Here I am in Sevilla with Manuel, Elena, and Scott (sorry it was fuzzy) before my talk there:

Here’s my Madrid host Eric Halverson and Self, at the Mercado:

After Spain, I made my first-ever trip to Ireland, to give a Ben Op talk in Dublin. Here I am enjoying a pint with Brian Kaller, author of the Restoring Mayberry blog.

After returning from Ireland, I reached a deal with Sentinel, the Ben Op publisher, for my next book. This meant I would spend the rest of the year journeying to former communist countries in what we call “Eastern Europe,” but which they prefer to call “Central Europe.”

My first stop was Slovakia, where I was headed anyway because I had a prior agreement to speak at the Hanus Days, an ideas festival. My Hanus Days hosts helped me tremendously with my book project, setting up interviews with members of the underground church, and others. For example, here are Jan Canigursky and Frantisek Miklosko, two real heroes of the anti-communist resistance. Jan, a lawyer, served in the first post-communist government of Czechoslovakia. He said, “They let me out of prison, and two weeks later I was sitting at the table with Havel, negotiating the handover of power with the communists.”

Here’s my interpreter, Viliam Ostatnik (whom I first met at the TAC Gala in 2018), with historian Jan Simulcik. They’re standing in a hidden underground chamber where Catholic samizdat was printed under communism. In this little room, faithful Catholics kept the faith alive under persecution. Jan, now a historian of the underground church, was part of the samizdat operation, though he did not know that the literature was being printed in that very room, until the fall of communism. That secret was too dangerous for most people to know:

I made friends with the Bratislava photographer Timotej Krizka and his wife Petra. Timo recently published a gorgeous book of photographs and interviews he made with elderly Slovak Catholics who had served prison time for their faith. I’ll be writing about it separately:

On that same trip, I took the train up to Prague, where I interviewed the amazing Benda family. Here’s a selfie inside their apartment, with matriarch Kamila on the left. The priest, Father Stepan Smolen, was my interpreter:

Later, I was off to Australia for the first time, for a series of Benedict Option lectures in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne. I had never been to that country. It turns out that Aussies are just as kind and fun to be with as you think. Here I am with Paul Morrissey, my host, in Melbourne:

Anna Hitchings organized the press for the trip. Just before I arrived in country, she published an article in the Catholic press about how difficult it is to be single and faithfully Catholic. It went viral. We talked a lot about whether or not she should start a blog about the topic — and she did! It’s called Agony & Hope, and I encourage you to check it out.

The legendary Australian prime minister John Howard came to hear my final Ben Op lecture:

 

Over the summer, Julie and I took the kids to see friends in England. While there, I interviewed Sir Roger Scruton for my book. Here we are in his study. Sir Roger seemed much more subdued than I recalled from our previous meeting a couple of years earlier. He learned shortly after this meeting that he was suffering from cancer:

Later, on the same trip, I heard from James Orr, a professor on the Cambridge University divinity faculty. He saw from Twitter that we were in town, and asked if we could meet. Of course! He gave the kids and me a tour of the tower at St. John’s College; this photo was taken by one of my kids, on the roof of the tower:

We were only in Cambridge for a couple of days, but we got to spend time with the great John Shelton Reed, the sociologist of Southern life and a master of all things barbecue. This is my wife Julie and me, with John:

In July, I went to Poland for nine days, most of it spent interviewing Poles who fought communism. Here I am after my interview with Zofia Romaszewska, considered a Polish national hero. I wrote about that meeting here. To be in the presence of such a woman, knowing what she did for the cause of freedom, is to be humbled and inspired. That generation is passing away, though. We have to cherish them while they’re still with us!

Here’s my interpreter, Lukasz Kozuchowski, an inspiring young Catholic student who made everything work for me in Poland:

Here’s an American friend I made in Krakow. Ramon Tancinco is living the dream with his Polish wife and kids at their farm in the countryside:

In September, I headed back across the pond to Austria, where I gave a Benedict Option lecture at a Catholic parish festival. Here’s a picture of Self with Father Thomas Sauter, the pastor and organizer of the festival. I had just arrived, and gave him a tin of chocolate chip cookies that my daughter Nora baked for him:

I visited a Swiss family farm across the border, and met young Catholics who are struggling to be faithful in a time of apostasy. I was so moved by the courage and hope of these young people, who are well cared for by Father Thomas. Some Swiss Reformed pastors and theologians motored over to Austria to hear my lecture. Here we are enjoying a beer in the Gasthaus afterward; the tall guy in the t-shirt is Tobias Klein, the translator of the Ben Op into German:

I left western Austria for Vienna, where my Slovak hosts met me. As I arrived off the platform into the main station, I ran into my friend Eduard Habsburg, Hungary’s ambassador to the Vatican. It was simply perfect to arrive in Vienna for the first time, and within two minutes meet a Habsburg:

 

For some reason I can’t find photos of the wonderful nuns and priests who hosted me in Nitra. It was a real joy to be with them. They sent me away with jars of their homemade apricot preserves. In fact, for breakfast this morning, I ate two spoonfuls on homemade cornbread.

I went back to Bratislava, and visited a monument to Father Tomislav Kolakovic, who was more of less the founder of the underground church in Slovakia. I am dedicating my upcoming book to him. In 1943, he escaped the Gestapo in Zagreb, hiding in Slovakia. He encouraged the Slovak Catholics by telling them that the Germans were going to lose the war … but told them that their country was going to fall to the communists. He worked to prepare the people, by building cells of committed Catholics, for the resistance. In 1948, his dire prophecy came true — but the Church in Slovakia was ready. Here are Timo Krizka and Juraj Sust with me at the monument:

 

On that same trip, I went down to Budapest to give a talk at a religious liberty conference, and to do a series of interviews with Hungarian dissidents for my book. Here I am with Maria Wittner, a national hero of the 1956 anti-Soviet resistance. This lady — and I say this with the utmost respect — is a badass. The commies didn’t have a chance up against her. Nobody would:

Before I left, I took this portrait on the street with my friend and translator Anna Salyi, her husband Ormos Molnar, and their beautiful little boy Örsy. Last week, a new little Molnar joined the family. Welcome, baby Pitroska Terez!

 

I also made some fun trips in the US, on which I made new friends, and renewed old friendships. Here I am with my new pal Coleman Jones, a manager at Howdy Homemade Ice Cream, a Dallas ice cream parlor that gives people with disabilities a chance to show what they can do. Watch this TV report about Coleman.

What brought me to Dallas that weekend was the birthday of my old friend and Orthodox godfather Vladimir Grigorenko, originally from Ukraine. Here he is at his party, on the right, with our old friend Misha Gladtskov, a native Siberian. You will not find two greater American patriots anywhere.

In a sign of the End Times, the G.K. Chesterton Society gave me its Outline Of Sanity Award at its annual conference. I’m convinced it must be a prank. Here I am at the afterparty with Dale Ahlquist, the American master of all things Chesterton:

I also flew to Cincinnati, where I was present to see my friend J.D. Vance received into the Catholic Church by the Dominican Father Henry Stephan, below:

In Massachusetts this fall, at a Ben Op conference, I met two extraordinary Anglicans: Nigerian Bishop Emmanuel Maduwike and his wife Anuli:

The last trip I took in 2019 was my recent journey to Russia, where I interviewed gulag survivors and others. Here I am with Father Kirill Kaleda, archpriest of a church built as a memorial to the New Martyrs of Russia — that is, those slaughtered by the Bolsheviks. It is thanks to Father Kirill’s advocacy that there is a national monument to 21,000 political prisoners, among them about 1,000 priests and bishops, massacred in a 14-month period on the Butovo shooting range, during Stalin’s Terror.

Here I am with Alexander Ogorodnikov, one of the most prominent Christian anti-Soviet dissidents. He spent a decade in the worst of the gulag for his faith:

With Father Alexey, a Moscow pastor:

Unfortunately, not all the photos I posted from Russia to this blog made it through the transfer to the redesigned format. I would like to show you images of the Russian Baptist Yuri Sipko, the Georgian filmmaker Vakhtang Mikeladze, and my indefatigable Moscow guide and translator Matthew Casserly … but the redesign swallowed them up. And, I have so many more photos from every place I visited. If I had posted them all, I would have been here all day. It was such a blessing to see those faces this morning, as we near the end of an extraordinary year for me. I thank you, dear friends, for your presence, and I thank God that He brought you into my life.

I will end with this. Father Kirill Kaleda told me the story of St. Alexey Michev and his son, St. Sergey Michev. Both were Moscow priests. Father Alexey died in 1923; Father Sergey was killed in the gulag sometime in the 1940s. I visited the church they had both pastored in Moscow. I was so deeply moved by their stories that I bought an icon there at the church, and have developed a real devotion to these fathers in the faith, who came home from Moscow with me. Glory to God for all things!

I am eager to read in the comments section what you’re grateful for this year.

The post Gratitude For Friends Far And Wide appeared first on The American Conservative.

Tom Edsall’s Plant: A Fable About Family

I had planned to do a lot more work on my book today, but the news just kept coming. Well, at least tomorrow, Thanksgiving, will be a day of rest (though I have a neat post already lined up, so come read it after you eat your turkey).

I’ve said in this space on a number of occasions that the New York Times journalist Thomas Edsall is a consistent must-read for those who want to understand American politics. Today’s Edsall piece, though, is one that he uncharacteristically wrong-foots his topic, and does so in a way that I think is profoundly revealing of how liberals understand — and misunderstand — conservatives and traditionalists. Here’s how his piece is headlined:

Normally I would evaluate his argument piece-by-piece, but because I’ve subjected my readers to acres and acres of prose today, I’m going to summarize his argument.

Edsall begins by quoting from recent speeches or books by Attorney General Bill Barr, Prof. Robert George, Mary Eberstadt, and Patrick Deneen, in which all of these Catholic conservatives say that the secular liberal order is responsible for the degeneration of society, and in particular, the family. To be clear, there are meaningful differences among even this small group: Deneen, for example, is more critical of classical liberalism than George is. But in the main, they all contend that the dominant liberalism of our cultural order, for various reasons, has caused and is causing it to disintegrate.

You can’t expect a journalist to give a satisfying account of these four conservatives’ theories in one column, even though Edsall, who writes for the online version of the Times, has more space than the print columnists do. Still, it’s remarkable what he leaves out in his rush to prove them wrong.

For example, Eberstadt’s latest book, which I wrote about here, argues that the current curse of identity politics, which is by definition illiberal, comes in large part from the collapse of the traditional family, and the steady erosion of traditional sources of identity and stability. Eberstadt writes:

Yes, racism, sexism and other forms of cruelty exist, and are always to be deplored and countered. At the same time, the timeline of identity politics suggest another source. Up until the middle of the twentieth century (and barring the frequent foreshortening of life by disease or nature) human expectations remained largely the same throughout the ages: that one would grow up to have children and a family; that parents and siblings and extended family would remain one’s primal community; and that, conversely, it was a tragedy not to be part of a family. The post-1960s order of sexual consumerism has upended every one of these expectations.

Who am I? is a universal human question. It becomes harder to answer if other basic questions are problematic or out of reach. Who is my brother? Who is my father? Where, if anywhere, are my cousins, grandparents, nieces, nephews and the rest of the organic connections through which humanity up until now channeled everyday existence? Every one of the assumptions that our forebears could take for granted is now negotiable.

… Wherever one stands in matters of the “culture wars” is immaterial. The plain fact is that the relative stability of yesterday’s familial identity could not help but answer the question at the heart of identity politics—Who am I?—in ways that now eludes many. The diminution and rupture of the family and the rise of identity politics cannot be understood apart from one another.

I can’t say why Bill Barr and Robbie George take the stances that they do, because I’m not nearly as familiar with their work as I am with Mary Eberstadt’s and Patrick Deneen’s. But the latter two writers are by no means simple culture warriors who blame “the Sixties” (as a synecdoche for “sexual liberalism”) for all the ills of today. Both of them acknowledge forthrightly that economic liberalism (that is, free markets), of the sort so dear to the Republican Party and mainstream conservatives of the last few decades, has also played a role in this decay.

Edsall spends a goodly part of his column arguing that the economy has had a major role in this process … which is something that Deneen and Eberstadt, at least, would agree on! This has been one of the most consequential, and most difficult, lessons for conservatives to have learned — and many have yet to learn it. It has always been there within traditional conservatism, but as I wrote in my 2006 book Crunchy Cons, that school of conservatism was pushed to the margins by the anti-statist libertarians, who dominated the post-1964 fusionist project. Fusionism tried to unite the free-marketeers, the anti-statists, the defense hawks, and the social conservatives. Reagan was the embodiment of this ideal. We have now seen that conservatives were wrong to think that one could liberalize the markets without negatively affecting the family and other traditions that held society together.

What Edsall completely fails to consider is that social and cultural liberalism has also played a key role in the disintegration. It’s telling that he doesn’t even think it’s worth acknowledging, not even with a line or two. Has he never read Christopher Lasch on radical individualism? Lasch denounced from the Left what he called “a culture of narcissism,” which is “a way of life that is dying—the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.”

Has he not read Philip Rieff, on the therapeutic society — a society that commits itself to keeping the individual’s options open, and making its highest goal helping us to live happily in the ruin? Or the Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman on liquid modernity, and the impossibility of maintaining solid social structures in such a condition? Or Wendell Berry on just about anything? None of these thinkers are, or were, men of the Right, but they saw, in their own ways, where radical individualism and the consumerization of American life was taking us.

I want to return to this passage from something I wrote in 2016 about Yuval Levin’s book on fractured America:

According to Levin, the great conceptual barrier to reforming and modernizing American politics is baby boomer nostalgia for the 20th-century Golden Age of their memories. He writes:

Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern. And Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us. It is hardly surprising that the public finds the resulting political debates frustrating.

What neither side can see is that they expect the impossible. Generally speaking, liberals want maximal individual liberty in personal life, especially on matters related to sexual expression, but demand more state involvement in the economy for the sake of equality. Conservatives desire maximal economic freedom but lament the social chaos and dysfunction—in particular, the collapse of the family among the poor and working classes—that afflict American society. The uncomfortable truth is that what each side loathes is the shadow side of what it loves.

As Alan Ehrenhalt pointed out in The Lost City, his 1995 book about Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, contemporary people lie to themselves about what things were like in the Golden Age. The thick social bonds and sense of community Americans enjoyed back then came at a significant cost—including cultural conformity and a lack of personal and consumer choice—that few of us today would tolerate. Ehrenhalt wrote that beginning in the 1960s, however, Americans embraced “the belief in individual choice and suspicion of any authority that might interfere with it.”

America’s political, social, and economic life of the last half-century has been a working-out of that belief—thus, the Fractured Republic. The inability of the U.S. political class, now dominated by boomers, to deal with the consequences prevents them from coming to terms with realities of the 21st-century world. We are stuck in what Levin describes as a “politics of dueling nostalgias.”

Our tragedy is that the same tectonic forces that gave us all more individual freedom also damaged or destroyed the structures that allow free individuals to thrive. Levin calls this the “paradox of liberation” and says it afflicts all modern societies. His deepest insight is the idea that we cannot hold back the towering wave we unleashed at mid-century but must figure out how to ride its crest. He writes that “the forces of individualism, decentralization, deconsolidation, fracture, and diffusion … have been the chief sources of many of our deepest problems in modern America, yet they must also be the sources of solutions and reforms.”

Levin is right about this. Both Left and Right have embraced and promoted extreme individualism. I say this as an admirer of Tom Edsall’s writing, but I don’t understand how someone of his intelligence and experience can claim that many on the contemporary Left do not wish the traditional family, and traditional social structures, to fall apart. Only the most radical affirmatively wish for this (it has been a core belief of Marxism from the beginning), but most liberals and progressives today simply do not want to privilege the nuclear family, or to back public policies or laws that recognize what Rieff called “sacred order” — in our case, an order that places the traditional family and the needs of children at its foundation. For the dominant strain of the Left today, there is no sacred order; there is only individual desire, and setting it free.

As I’ve made clear, far too many on the Right believe this to be true when it comes to economics. Libertarians believe it’s true about both economics and social morality. But I’m sorry, you cannot possibly claim that the political party and movement that embraces and advocates for privileging individual sexual autonomy, including making the law reflect the claim that people can be whatever gender they choose, is a party that cares about preserving the family, or society. For the Left — and for too many on the Right, it must be said — “society” is nothing more than a collection of individuals.

Edsall points out that the white working class, the demographic that is arguably the one most hostile to liberal values, is suffering the most acute decay in its morals. As if that proves anything! He appears to blame that on economic liberalism, and what it has done to working-class jobs. He’s certainly got a point — a point that the emerging leaders of the post-Trump Right, like Sen. Josh Hawley, seem to understand. But what Edsall misses is that these lost white working class people, like lost black working class people before them, have jettisoned the strong, cohesive, Christian moral code that would have helped them thrive despite material deprivation. The right-wing, white working class people who talk about God and traditional family values, and who vote on them, but who don’t live them out — are they hypocrites? Probably so. But that does not mean the moral code is wrong. It means that they, like all of us, have sinned and fallen short.

Edsall also says that the Left is more willing to compromise on these issues than the Right. This is complete gaslighting, whether he realizes it or not. Where are the people in positions of power on the Left who are willing simply to leave churches and conservative institutions alone when it comes to LGBT matters, for example? The agenda of the contemporary Left is driven by various tribes of Social Justice Warriors who are fanatical puritans. The old-school, Tom Edsall liberals are fading; the new Jacobin generation is coming to power — and they are not interested in compromise with what they regard as evil; they want to win.

I’ll say it again: Edsall is one of the smartest political journalists out there, and he’s always worth reading. I hope in a future column he will subject his own liberal side to the kind of critique that a Christopher Lasch would have given it. This so-called “preposterous idea” that liberals want to destroy the family found its way to the forefront of conservative thinking because conservatives actually pay attention to what liberals advocate, and see that they believe laws and policies governing moral and social behavior should be made to serve the end of liberating the choosing individual from any unchosen obligation.

(The fact that lots of self-described conservatives believe this too, but hide it from themselves, is a topic for a different column.)

I would also ask Tom Edsall: there are plenty of conservatives and moderates working in universities, corporations and other places, who are afraid to object to progressive claims because they are terrified of being denounced and ruined for going against left-wing identity politics. Catholic parishioners in Grand Rapids told a TV reporter that they are afraid to stand up for their parish priest, who refused communion to a gay activist judge, because they’re afraid of what would happen to them. Simply for saying they support their priest! I received a letter from a Catholic reader there who said the same thing. While I strongly believe that people should stand up to defend their priest and their beliefs against progressive bullies, and though I believe that things will not change in this country until people get sick and tired of being pushed around by progressives, and take a public stand, I also know perfectly well that what these Catholic parishioners fear is something real. It’s how progressives do business today: by demonizing and attempting to destroy their opponents.

What does this have to do with the “liberals want to destroy the family” claim? Conservative Catholics, and other Christians, often take a huge risk by defending their conception of the family, which they believe to be normative. The fact that they cannot make their arguments in public, or even be seen to take the side of priests and others who do, without having to fear that they will lose their jobs, or see their reputations destroyed, leads them to conclude that yes, liberals are happy to see the family (as Christians and everybody else has understood it for centuries) destroyed, as long as their idea of family — a collection of autonomous individuals who call themselves a family — becomes the rule.

Liberals don’t want to “destroy the family”; they just want to deprive it of the things it needs to thrive. It’s like this: I don’t want my wife’s plants to die while she’s out of town, but I don’t want to be bothered with giving them the water they need to survive. If she comes home and finds them dead, and accuses me of killing her plants, do you think it will do me much good to tell her, “Hey, settle down, it’s not like I wanted them to dry up!”?

To put it pointedly: when the act of defending the traditional family, however mildly and rationally, is to put your own job, your career, and your reputation at risk, and liberals stand by and permit you to be doxxed and destroyed for your “bigotry” — then yeah, they want to destroy the family. Stands to reason.

I wonder how long Tom Edsall would last in The New York Times newsroom if he marched into it, held up the Catholic Catechism, read aloud paragraph 2022:

A man and a woman united in marriage, together with their children, form a family. This institution is prior to any recognition by public authority, which has an obligation to recognize it. It should be considered the normal reference point by which the different forms of family relationship are to be evaluated.

and paragraph 2207:

The family is the original cell of social life. It is the natural society in which husband and wife are called to give themselves in love and in the gift of life. Authority, stability, and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security, and fraternity within society. The family is the community in which, from childhood, one can learn moral values, begin to honor God, and make good use of freedom. Family life is an initiation into life in society.

.. and, having read those aloud, said solemnly, “This I believe.”

They would eat him alive. And that is why conservatives believe that many liberals want to destroy the family.

UPDATE: Oh man, University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox, who specializes in family studies, takes that Edsall column apart with the finesse of a sushi chef:

The irony is @Edsall‘s effort to defend liberalism against charge that it has destroyed the family ends up supplying plenty of empirical evidence–from history & our contemporary moment–for the conservative side of this argument. Let me count the ways: https://t.co/as0ZnUPZv6

— Brad Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) November 27, 2019

1. Re. history. Divorce & single parenthood started surging in 60s, well before the factors @Edsall prefers (e.g., de-industrialization) really kicked in. So what got the family decline ball rolling? https://t.co/mzSxAQ0Nho pic.twitter.com/thpGyff182

— Brad Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) November 27, 2019

2. Lots of liberal cultural factors-expressive individualism, sexual revolution, counterculture, attack on the Moynihan report, etc.-& liberal elites played big roles in all this, as @Edsall‘s own cites show https://t.co/A1PEIdE7Gd https://t.co/J5RZuJ5O4R https://t.co/7kh5MyLgsD

— Brad Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) November 27, 2019

3. The import of cultural story can also be seen by comparing 1930s w/ fallout of 60s/70s. As @AndrewCherlin notes “Despite a terrible job market in the 1930s, there was no meaningful rise in nonmarital childbearing because cultural norms had not changed.” https://t.co/BKNEkbVKiB

— Brad Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) November 27, 2019

4. Bigger point is all credible accounts of last half century’s retreat from marriage and the rise of divorce, single parenthood & family instability credit (largely liberal) cultural factors as playing key roles. See, e.g., https://t.co/77vIPFshuD https://t.co/R3mWTThYe4

— Brad Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) November 27, 2019

5. & Today, @Edsall overlooks ways in which liberalism & liberals are much less likely to embrace values & virtues that sustain strong & stable families, a point @WendyRWang and I noted here: https://t.co/MKH2RUir2b pic.twitter.com/276X7T9OyR

— Brad Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) November 27, 2019

6. In fact, today, conservatives are markedly more likely to be (stably) married than liberals, as @asymmetricinfo notes here https://t.co/qUXYRm8hIe & this is true for both the working class and the upper middle class https://t.co/gau6xEob2X

— Brad Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) November 27, 2019

7. @Edsall also quotes a few smart, liberal family scholars saying true things about family life (see below). But can U imagine the media, our public schools, or the pop culture regularly highlighting these themes in the culture? I sure cannot, and I wish I was wrong abt this! pic.twitter.com/7YzdifgNtb

— Brad Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) November 27, 2019

8. Fact is that most liberal elites reluctant to publicly talk abt the importance of family structure when it comes to addressing some of our most pressing economic & social issues. That’s why, e.g., U rarely see news coverage highlighting family structure angle for these issues

— Brad Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) November 27, 2019

9. To be fair, @Edsall is right about ways conservatives have minimized the economic forces also contributing to family decline, as I’ve noted here: https://t.co/ZGe2xnQpJC

— Brad Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) November 27, 2019

10. And he is right that Barr is in a predicament, defending a man who is apogee of 70s style narcissism, divorce revolution & Playboy-ism. Can’t argue w/ @Edsall here: pic.twitter.com/rSQThav2Oq

— Brad Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) November 27, 2019

The post Tom Edsall’s Plant: A Fable About Family appeared first on The American Conservative.

Guess Who Else Believes In The Real Presence?

The Satanic Temple in Houston held a black mass the other day, as part of a promotional event at a local craft brewer’s, to celebrate the advent of its “Black Mass Ale”. Here’s how the Satanists promoted it:

The event drew understandable protest from Catholics, given that a Black Mass involves the desecration of a consecrated host, which, to Catholics, is the Body of Christ. TST tweeted:

The Catholics and their fat mama Mary did not stop our Black Mass. The consecrated host was defiled, destroyed, and swept into the trash where it belongs. Thank you Brash brewing company for hosting this wonderful event! Public Unbaptism early 2020 y’all! #HAILSATAN

— The Satanic Temple – Houston (@HoustonTST) November 24, 2019

There are blasphemous photos from the black mass available online. I’m not going to post them here. I don’t like giving these creeps publicity, but I do so because the following urgent letter went out from the Catholic Diocese of Lake Charles (which is on the Texas border, not far from Houston) to all priests and extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, based on information received from the Louisiana State Police:

As the Catholic reader who passed that on to me said:

While only 30 percent of Catholics believe in the Real Presence, 100 percent of Satanists do.

At a minimum, this is a warning that Satanists are planning to commit an anti-Christian, anti-Catholic hate crime (and Brash Brewing proudly hosted the commission of one on November 26). But of course believing Catholics know that something much more vile than a mere “hate crime” is happening here. People like to say that The Satanic Temple is nothing more than a group of publicity seekers and provocateurs. Well, they certainly are at least that, but if that’s all they were doing, they would not care about whether or not they procured a real consecrated Host for their rituals. They mean business. They’re not kidding. Do not be gaslit by these people. Spiritual warfare is real.

By the way, this tweet from TST sends a clear and unmistakable message:

 

This event is just 10 days away! Come on out to our occult art gallery and help support your local LGBTQIA+ community. Never forget Satan accepts you for who you are #hailsatan #thesatanictemple #Houston #satanism… https://t.co/U7BkTu1L6g

— The Satanic Temple – Houston (@HoustonTST) November 27, 2019

The post Guess Who Else Believes In The Real Presence? appeared first on The American Conservative.

J.D. Greear Clarifies Pronoun Stance

Last week I raised a strong objection to the Southern Baptist Convention head J.D. Greear’s position on “pronoun hospitality” — this, based on an answer he gave on his podcast to a question about how to interact with transgendered people. Greear is a well-known theological conservative; he signed the Nashville Statement, which is not something anyone moderate or liberal would have done. (By the way, on the question of pronoun use, the Nashville Statement says “our duty [is] to speak the truth in love at all times, including when we speak to or about one another as male or female.”)

My claim was not that Pastor Greear has become liberal. In the podcast, he clearly says that transgenderism is not part of God’s design. “I am who God says I am,” he says. My claim in that post was that his “hospitality” stance was effectively ceding ground that Christians cannot afford to cede. I confess that I felt particularly strongly about his podcast answer because it came to my attention on the same week that Chick-fil-A capitulated.

His actual answer to the question begins at about the 5:30 point in his 11-minute podcast (link above), in case you’re interested in checking it out (and I hope you do). At that moment, he says that Christians disagree on how to respond to the challenge: either “generosity of spirit” or “telling the truth.” In the former, Greear says, it’s about calling the trans person by their preferred pronoun as a courtesy, even though you don’t accept their claim about themselves; in the latter, you don’t concede even that much. He says that there are valid reasons for both stances among Christians, but “personally… I lean a little bit towards generosity of spirit.” He says his “disposition” is to refer to trans people by their preferred pronoun. If they talk about gender, the pastor says, he will lay out what he believes to be the truth. It’s rather a pastoral matter for him: is this really the fight Christians want to have?

He explains that a missionary going into polygamist tribal territory doesn’t lead by telling the polygamists that multiple marriages aren’t really marriages, even though as a Christian, you don’t believe that all the polygamist tribal chief is truly married to five women. The idea is that by showing him respect, you open the door to convincing him, eventually, to reconsider his position in light of the Gospel.

This makes pastoral sense. Greear endorses Andrew Walker’s solution of “not using their pronouns altogether.” Which is a contradiction of what he said earlier — that he would use their preferred pronouns. He also said: “You need to do what your conscience is allowing you to do.”

I believe that Greear did not speak in that podcast with the kind of clarity that he ought to have done. Again, within five minutes, he gave two significantly different answers. Today he tweeted out this link to a Walker essay about the subject, with his endorsement. In that essay, Walker says:

Pronouns are not an insignificant issue. How a person wants to be referred to communicates how that person understands himself or herself at their deepest, most intimate level. This means that language has deeply significant meaning embedded in its usage. The use of language is an attempt to name and give meaning to reality. Pronouns and gendered names, therefore, refer to a reality in which the transgendered individual is wishing to live. The question we as Christians have to consider is whether the reality we are being asked to affirm is objective and corresponds to biblical truth, or whether the reality we are being asked to acknowledge is subjective and false. Nothing less than the truth and authority of God’s revelation over created reality is up for grabs in something as seemingly innocent as pronoun usage. [Emphasis mine — RD] Because, at root, the transgender debate is a metaphysical debate about whose version of reality we live in, and only one account—Jesus Christ’s (Colossians 1:15-20)—can lead us into truth about reality and human flourishing. No amount of willing something into existence that is at odds with one’s biology—such as one’s gender identity—can bring that desired reality about.

Before I state how I’ve evaluated the issue and the conclusion I’ve reached, I think it is important to state that Christians of goodwill who seek to obey and believe the Bible disagree, prudentially, on what the best pathway is concerning transgender persons and pronouns. This is important to establish because this should not be an issue that divides otherwise Bible-believing Christians.

More Walker:

The Apostle Paul declares “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18).

Concerning pronouns, this means that Christians should, in principle, not be needlessly combative or confrontational in how we navigate the language of transgenderism. We should attempt to be disarming and defuse circumstances ripe for conflict.

That’s a good and important point. Again, we are talking about being pastoral, which is a matter of prudence. Walker goes on to say that in almost all circumstances, the Christian should avoid using the preferred pronoun, but should not make a point of making a huge issue of it. This can be done by using the trans person’s preferred name. (Though as I pointed out in my earlier post, this did not help Peter Vlaming, the Virginia high school teacher fired for not fully endorsing his student’s transgender identity.) Walker writes about an instance in which a pastor might defer to the transgender person on the pronoun situation:

It is possible you may not know someone visiting your church is transgender and will unknowingly use their desired pronoun and name. If that is the case, a Christian is not at fault. Also, someone who is very obviously transgender may visit your church. I do not know how a question of pronouns would come up in a momentary introduction between persons, but I do think it would be needlessly confrontational to immediately correct someone’s pronoun preference if they are visiting. Again, avoid pronouns altogether. I think the more appropriate route is to gloss over whatever pronoun discussion ensues, greet the person kindly, listen to how they heard of your church, get to know them, and invite them back to church in hopes of building a relationship. Context and relationship matter. To the extent that individuals begin to gain the relational capital to speak truthfully to this person about their confusion, those attempts should be made and made soon. One important caveat: to the extent that a visitor becomes hostile, rudely adamant, or disruptive about pronoun usage, I can foresee the necessity of pastors and elders addressing it immediately in order to guard the flock (Acts 20:28; Titus 1).

Read all of Walker’s essay. It’s practical and helpful. If J.D. Greear is now fully endorsing Walker’s position, then I’ve got no problem with Greear’s stance. But it does contradict the mixed message Greear sent in that podcast.

In retrospect, let me again point out that I heard Greear’s podcast on the same week that Chick-fil-A abandoned the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, in a transparent attempt to get LGBT activists off its corporate back. I was super-sensitive to Christians ceding any ground to LGBT activists, and might have reacted more strongly to the view of an influential Southern Baptist pastor like Greear than I would normally have done. And I wish I had not included the broader critical remarks about Greear from a former Evangelical reader, who said that he had not read Greear’s work, and was judging him as an accommodationist based only on the titles of his book. Greear may or may not be an accomodationist — his defenders say he adamantly is not — but the reader didn’t know that based on a reading of Greear’s books, and it was irresponsible of me to post that particular criticism.

That said, I still stand firmly by the reader’s criticism of Greear on the pronoun hospitality matter, repeated here:

1) There is no need to use the pronouns. The only pronouns I call someone when talking to them are the 2nd person pronouns like ‘you’. If you must talk about someone in the 3rd person in front of them, you can always use their name or the common (but incorrect) ‘they’ that all of us have used as a 3rd person pronoun when our English teachers weren’t watching. This was virtue-signaling pure and simple.

2) The danger is real. When we give in on this, we are denying reality and forced to commit doublethinks. I cannot take anyone seriously who thinks it is a good habit to engage in habitual doublethinking. We are enabling the PC police to further erode the culture and destroy very important norms–norms essential to the survival of human communities. A human society that is post-sex is not going to last long and will spiral down into unimagined depravities on the way down.

3) More to the immediate situation, this perverse rhetoric is being used to justify mutilating young people–binding breasts, hacking them off, and castrating young men. When you use these pronouns to win the approval of the PC police, you aren’t cutting off any girl’s breasts, but you are approving of it and enabling it. …

Bottom line: I think the pronoun issue is a bigger deal than Greear indicated in his podcast. I also think Greear set himself up for criticism by taking two (mostly) contradictory stances in that podcast. I agree with him that Andrew T. Walker has the best strategy, but I also believe that Walker is significantly more restrictive about pronoun use than Greear is, at least as Greear was on that podcast. But, if Greear is now fully endorsing Walker’s point of view, as he seems to be, then he has brought much-needed clarity to his stance, and I have no objection to his position. It would be helpful, though, if Greear would speak unambiguously on the topic. After all, he said in the podcast that Andrew Walker’s work on the subject guides him, but he also indicated on the podcast that his own pastoral judgment is more permissive on the matter than Walker endorses in his essay. Or at least that’s my read of Walker’s essay in light of Greear’s statement on the podcast. In other words, I agree with Walker that prudence has a role to play in dictating a Christian’s response to the pronoun question, but I think Greear’s prudential judgment endorsing “pronoun hospitality,” as stated in the podcast, is mistaken. And, I think when a conservative pastor with the kind of influence Greear has makes that kind of mistake, it matters.

Whether or not J.D. Greear is, as the former Evangelical reader alleges, part of an urban/suburban Evangelical shift that, perhaps unwittingly, allows the camel to put his nose under the tent, is not something that I can judge, as I have not read Greear’s books. I wish I hadn’t opened up that controversy on that blog post. Signing the Nashville Statement, as Greear courageously did, definitely put Greear on the conservative, Biblically orthodox side of the battle, and was not something that a liberal or squishy moderate would have done. My guess is that Greear simply had not sufficiently thought through the issue and its implications when the question was put to him in the podcast.

Unfortunately, LGBT activists and their allies, both inside and outside of churches, have made reaching any kind of compromise on these issues impossible. As the Peter Vlaming case demonstrates, and as the lesbian judge example at the Michigan Catholic parish indicates. The priest there was willing to compromise by admitting the openly gay, married lesbian parishioner to communion, and had done, but when she pushed him by showing up at mass, and at communion, wearing a Pride badge, he told her not to return to communion. You will never, ever find peace with these activists, who don’t want tolerance, but submission. These activists and their allies will weaponize “compassion” and “inclusivity” to force pastors and congregations to surrender completely to their worldview.

 

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Conservatives At The Maginot Line

Ezra Klein has an interesting piece up about what he rightly calls “the post-Christian culture wars.” Here’s how it begins:

Republicans control the White House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. They have 27 governorships and governing trifectas in 21 states. But many conservatives — particularly Christian conservatives — believe they’re being routed in the war that matters most: the post-Christian culture war. They see a diverse, secular left winning the future and preparing to eviscerate both Christian practice and traditional mores. And they see themselves as woefully unprepared to respond with the ruthlessness that the moment requires.

Enter Donald Trump. Whatever Trump’s moral failings, he’s a street fighter suited for an era of political combat. Christian conservatives believe — rightly or wrongly — that they’ve been held back by their sense of righteousness, grace, and gentility, with disastrous results. Trump operates without restraint. He is the enemy they believe the secular deserve, and perhaps unfortunately, the champion they need. Understanding this dynamic is crucial to understanding the psychology that attracts establishment Republicans to Trump, and convinces them that his offense is their best defense.

I think this is a mostly accurate description of how many conservative Christians see it, but not all Christian conservatives. Personally, I reject the “ruthlessness” idea. Some Christians do see it that way, but in my case, I would leave it at “woefully unprepared to respond,” period. Maybe we’re just arguing over semantics here — a liberal’s idea of “ruthlessness” might simply be a conservative’s idea of meeting a challenge with appropriate and reasonable force — but I have never liked the “at least he fights” defense of Trump from my fellow conservative Christians. Aside from that being a rationalization for behavior they would never accept from people they’ve invited into their own homes, it’s also true that Trump’s “fighting” is mostly performative. What has he actually achieved on the social conservative front that we wouldn’t have gotten from ordinary Republicans? I think of Trump as mostly theatrical in his “fighting.” He’s a “fighter” for an age when people think that pissing off their opponents, especially on social media, is somehow advancing the cause.

If Donald Trump were a skilled political fighter, he would be Viktor Orban: hated by the Left, but effective. For better or for worse, he’s not. Still, he’s all Christians like me have. I know for a fact that in 2015, the Republican Party had no plans at all for religious liberty legislation to give even the flimsiest shield for religious conservatives in the wake of Obergefell. I know because I asked them, and was told that they didn’t. I wrote about this in The Benedict Option. Mind you, aside from appointing Federalist Society-selected judges — for which I’m grateful, but which any GOP president would have done — I don’t really see that Trump has substantively advocated our cause. Still, as I’ve been writing here for a while, the fact that Trump doesn’t actively despise us, and want to surrender the religious liberty cause to the Left, really does matter. After Trump goes, whether it’s in 2021 or 2025, I expect the Republican Party to fall all over itself to appease liberals on LGBT matters, no doubt for the same reasons that Chick-fil-A capitulated from a position of strength.

Anyway, all of this is very familiar to this blog’s readers. I do encourage you to read Klein’s entire piece,because he points out data showing that conservative Christians really do have reason to be panicked. Our numbers are declining, both relatively and absolutely, and the younger generation is particularly alienated. We’re all familiar with this point:

The irony of all this is that Christian conservatives are likely hastening the future they most fear. In our conversation, Jones told me about a 2006 survey of 16- to 29-year-olds by the Barna Group, an evangelical polling firm, that asked 16- to 29-year-olds for their top three associations with present-day Christianity. Being “antigay” was first, with 91 percent, followed by “judgmental,” with 87 percent, and “hypocritical,” with 85 percent. Christianity, the Barna Group concluded, has “a branding problem.”

It seems unlikely that that branding problem will be fixed by a tighter alliance with Trump, who polls at 31 percent among millennials and 29 percent among Generation Z. If young people are abandoning Christianity because it seems intolerant, judgmental, and hypocritical — well, intolerant, judgmental, and hypocritical is the core of Trump’s personal brand.

Sure, I get that. I’m sure the numbers are even worse for Christians than they were in the 2006 survey. Here’s the thing: leaving aside the doctrinal question (that is, for Christianity to liberalize on homosexuality would require a massive betrayal of its teaching), doing so doesn’t actually help you bring young people to church. All US churches are declining, but the liberal ones are declining the fastest. I have a theory for why this is, but it’s enough to point out that liberalizing on sexual matters as part of a strategy to end decline does not work.

The truth is, America is becoming more secular, with the young especially having little to no interest in institutional religion. That’s bad news for both liberal and conservative churches — but conservative churches will have to endure the spite of the public, and, almost certainly at some point in the years to come, will feel the heavy hand of the state come against them for their unpopular social and moral teachings.

Here’s the point: Christian conservatives who feel panicked and besieged aren’t imagining the threat! The threat is real. In his piece, Klein quotes Rich Lowry, originally a Never Trumper, saying that Trump is bad on some things, good on others, but at the end of the day, it comes down to him or one of the Democrats, who opposes conservatives on everything.

However you get around to supporting Trump — whether you do so enthusiastically, or have to be dragged kicking and screaming, or somewhere in the middle — most conservatives are going to find themselves there, because they are afraid of the Democrats. I didn’t like Bill Clinton, but I didn’t feel that his presidency would be a serious threat to people like me. Same deal if Al Gore had won. I actually liked Barack Obama, and wanted to vote for him, but couldn’t because of abortion. Still, I wasn’t afraid of him.

But sometime after 2011, our politics changed. Social Justice Warriors, in substance and style, began their rise. And the falling-away of the young from Christianity — a trend that began in 1991-92 — became much more pronounced. So,, we find ourselves in a situation whose dynamics bring to mind the relationship of Syria’s Christian communities to the Assad regime. They may not like him or approve of the way he conducts his leadership, but they know that should he go, those who replace him will show them no mercy.

Klein writes:

This form of Flight 93ism is more widespread on the right than liberals recognize, and it both authentically motivates some establishment Republicans to enthusiastically embrace Trump, and creates coalitional dynamics by which other Republicans feel they have no choice but to defend Trump against the left. Some protect Trump on the merits, others protect Trump as a form of anti-anti-Trumpism, and others protect Trump as a way of protecting their future careers. But all of them protect Trump as a way of protecting themselves, and a future they feel slipping away.

I am probably the most gloomy of the pundits who take these positions. I really don’t believe that politics can save us from the collapse of Christianity. The best politics can do is hold open a space for us to run our institutions and educate our kids. It might be able to protect us in some ways, as with professional licensing, to prevent discrimination. I certainly hope that the post-Trump GOP does this, but I don’t put trust in them. I am grateful for David French-style legal activism to work the First Amendment for all its worth, and I see the value in it, even if Team Ahmari may not. But I don’t think it will be sufficient in the long run. I don’t see a workable Sohrab Ahmari style plan for fighting, but I’m eager to listen to strategists, and do what they say if it seems like it might be effective and morally sound. So far, I don’t see any plans, but at least Ahmari understands that returning to a Republican politics as usual is only going to amount to negotiating the terms of our total surrender. My dim hope is that Republicans will hold the White House and Senate long enough to get as many conservative judges as possible onto the bench — at SCOTUS and throughout the federal judiciary — before the inevitable progressive deluge.

The thing is, the timidity of conservative Christians is a big part of it too. As I wrote earlier today, gay activists in a Michigan parish are trying to get the priest kicked out because he refused communion to an openly gay lesbian who is married to a woman. The activists have no problem going public, even on television, with their demands. But none of the supporters of the priest in the parish dared to show their face on camera. I get that — they don’t want to be identified as “haters”. But that cowardice has a lot to do with why conservatives are losing this fight, and will lose this fight. If we have nothing to be ashamed of, then why do we act like it? Why do we conservatives expect leaders — priests, politicians, and whatnot — to take controversial, costly public stands when we won’t do it ourselves?

Nevertheless, if liberals like Klein really want to understand why many Christian conservatives are in permanent “Flight 93” mode, they should ask themselves why it is that Catholics in that parish are afraid to take a public stand in support of their priest. What is it about the nature of progressive activism these days that intimidates Christian conservatives? The answer is that ordinary Christian conservatives know that LGBT-backing progressives will attempt to destroy them personally and professionally for dissenting from the party line. From a strictly Machiavellian point of view, progressives have achieved results through these intimidating tactics. But they should not pretend that there’s no rational explanation for Flight 93ism.

Finally, I know that there is genuine befuddlement among liberals about why conservative Christians make such a big deal about LGBT. I have seen almost no effort at all, certainly not by the media, to understand why this is such a big deal theologically for conservative Christians. I am often reminded of a conversation I had back in the mid-2000s with a Dallas Morning News colleague, over our paper’s coverage of gay rights. I was complaining about its overwhelmingly pro-LGBT bias, and how there was no sense of balance to the coverage, and little if any attempt to explain why social and religious conservatives hold the beliefs that we do. My colleague said, quite sincerely, “If we were covering the Civil Rights movement, do you think we would owe equal time to the Ku Klux Klan?”

This colleague wasn’t trolling me. He honestly believed that to oppose gay marriage was to be the contemporary equivalent of a Klansman. I didn’t poll the newsroom, of course, but I would have bet back then that that view was common there. You can certainly see it in the way the Michigan reporter on the priest controversy there frames the story (he begins by saying that parish was at the forefront of racial integration in the 1960s, but now it’s taking a step backwards on inclusion).

For the record, and briefly, the main theological reasons conservative Christians find homosexuality to be sinful have to do with 1) Scripture’s clear and unambiguous prohibition of it, and 2) more deeply, the impossibility of reconciling homosexuality with Biblical anthropology, and what the Bible teaches about the meaning of sex. Obviously there is a lot more to it than this, but these are at the core of the objections. We small-o orthodox Christians do not believe we are at liberty to deny these teachings, even if the world expects us to, and even if it would make our lives a lot easier in contemporary America if we yielded on them.

It is certainly the case that the battle was lost when the churches failed to catechize and form their flocks about how Christianity cannot be reconciled with the Sexual Revolution. Gay marriage was such a successful campaign because it built on what most post-1960s Americans already believed about the meaning of sex and marriage. That said, having lost the culture war on this, if we orthodox Christians were to change our beliefs on sexuality to suit the world’s view, we would be surrendering things we cannot afford to surrender. The sociologist and social critic Philip Rieff predicted in the 1960s that Christianity would not likely survive in a society that normalizes sexual permissiveness, as ours was at the time starting to do. To cite my “Sex After Christianity” essay from 2013:

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the sexual revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s death as a culturally determinative force. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture—a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct. That the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise.

As the theologian Carl Trueman wrote earlier this year in a terrific essay on Rieff, we Christians who oppose the LGBT movement (and the Sexual Revolution of which it is a part) are not even having the same kind of argument that liberals think we are. Trueman writes about Rieff’s “three worlds” categorization:

In Sacred Order/Social Order, Rieff offers a historical scheme for categorizing cultures in light of these basic insights. Rieff calls these First, Second, and Third World cultures. First Worlds are characterized by a variety of myths that ground and justify their cultures through something that transcends the immediate present. These might be the tales of the gods and heroes in the Iliad or the Norse sagas, the philosophy of Plato, or the mythic stories of origin found in Native American societies. Whatever their specific content, what they share in common is that they make the present culture accountable to something greater than itself. Rieff says that a belief in fate is perhaps the key here.

Second Worlds are characterized not by a belief in fate but by faith. The great examples would be Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, where cultural codes are rooted in the belief in a specific divine and sovereign being who stands over and above creation, and to whom all creatures are ultimately accountable. First and Second Worlds are similar in that both set their social order upon a deeper, even sacred, order. It is the Third World that represents a decisive rupture on this point.

Third Worlds are characterized by their repudiation of any sacred order. There is nothing in a Third World beyond this world by which culture can be justified. The implications of this are, according to Rieff, comprehensive and catastrophic. First, because of their rejection of a sacred order, Third World cultures face an unprecedented challenge: that of justifying themselves on the basis of themselves. No culture in history, Rieff notes, has ever done this successfully. It is a fool’s errand that ends in cultural collapse:

No culture in history has sustained itself merely as a culture, however attractive and authoritative. Cultures are dependent on their predicative sacred orders and break into mere residues whenever their predicates are broken. That is the main reason why our late second cultures and early thirds are increasingly unstable.

The Sexual Revolution was, in Rieff’s midcentury view, a more consequential revolution than the Bolshevik one — an observation that both the collapse of Communism and the collapse of the sexually complementary model of marriage after at least two millennia has vindicated. The normalization of LGBT, which is the logical result of the Sexual Revolution’s premises, means the overthrow of sacred Christian order. That’s what’s at stake here. Christians who think they can have gay marriage and retain Christianity over time are lying to themselves in the same way that Christians who thought, and who do think, that they can reconcile the faith with the Sexual Revolution are lying to themselves (as are Christian leaders who think that they can reverse the decline in their churches by capitulating to the Sexual Revolution). Sex is an inextricable part of the cosmic order within Christian thought, and therefore of the social order. Have most ordinary Christians thought through it this deeply? Of course not. But that does not mean that their instincts are wrong.

Second, we orthodox Christians have to make a big deal of this because the culture has made such a big deal of it. I mean, for pity’s sake, a Catholic priest in Grand Rapids, Michigan, phoned an out lesbian, married judge and gay activists and told her not to present herself for communion — and that story leads the late local news! And it’s conservatives who are making too big a deal about this? The refusal of some conservative Christians to affirm — not just to tolerate, but to affirm — the LGBT agenda is considered today to be intolerable. Liberals tell themselves that we conservative church people are making too big a deal over something relatively inconsequential, but in fact it is they who have made affirming homosexuality the Holy of Holies. No Christian churches, charities, or schools are coming under intense legal, political, and cultural attack over standing up for traditional Christian teaching against greed, wrath, and other vices. It is only because they hold their ground on vices that the post-Christian world has turned into a virtue.

A reader the other day came up with a clever formulation regarding the doublespeak LGBT activists to over pronouns. He calls it “Schrödinger’s Pronoun,” a reference to the famous Schrödinger’s cat case in quantum theory. In the cat example, you don’t know if a cat in a box is alive or dead until you open the box and observe it, and, under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, the cat’s life or death doesn’t resolve itself until it is observed. Schrödinger used this admittedly absurd example to illustrate how in quantum theory, light is both a particle and a wave until it is observed, and it became one or the other. The point of Schrödinger’s Pronoun is that among LGBT activists, their demands are either trivial, and ought to be met without fuss, or they are the most important thing in the world, and satisfying them is of enormous cultural importance. It all depends on which characterization advances the goal.

Liberals don’t understand the Schrödinger’s Pronoun aspect of their LGBT advocacy. In the Michigan Catholic case, they are demanding that the parish priest symbolically overturn Catholic teaching on homosexuality, marriage, and the meaning of the Eucharist. That’s a pretty big ask. But they’re presenting it as if it were simply a matter of courtesy and compassion.

If, like me, you’ve been watching the cultural politics (and politics politics) of the LGBT issue over the past 20 years, you know that Schrödinger’s Pronoun is standard operating procedure for activists. The essential uncertainty of what is going to happen next, given that LGBT activists control all the cultural high ground, and whether or not Christians will be publicly demonized for their beliefs, causes fear. Perhaps older Christian conservatives observe that this twenty-year campaign to demonize traditional Christian beliefs about marriage and sexuality has conquered the minds of their children, who now see their parents and grandparents as haters, simply for believing what has always been taught and believed by the churches. They have seen how the broader culture has poisoned the minds of the young against the faith and the older generations that hold the faith. Perhaps they have absorbed the lesson that liberals will stop at nothing to destroy any form of the Christian faith that refuses to give them what they want with regard to gay rights, sexuality in general, and, to a lesser extent, abortion.

Perhaps, as I told Ezra Klein in a podcast interview (which he quotes in his piece), conservative Christians understand that we have lost the culture war, but the Left is determined to keep dropping bombs on us, just to see the rubble bounce and humiliate us.

That being the case, it should come as no surprise at all that there are quite a few conservative, traditional Christians who hold to a Flight 93 view on politics. What else are we supposed to do? Lie down and die? Trump might be crazy, but that doesn’t mean that supporting him is insane.

The pity of it is that the real power is cultural power, and that is all on the Left. Eventually our politics will reflect that. The best we conservatives can hope for is to create legal barriers to the attacks on our institutions. Survival is the prime directive now. Laying the cultural groundwork for a renaissance is going to take a lot of time, patience, and discipline. (This is the Benedict Option.) Conservative Christians who, in this post-Christian culture war, put most of their faith in politics, are like French generals who believed that the Maginot Line would stop the Germans.

UPDATE: Just a note to the regular liberal commenters, to say that I will not be approving your knee-jerk trolling, not on this post. If you have any substantive criticism or commentary, I welcome it. But you can save your efforts if all you have to say is “bigots!” or “whatabout…”.

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Politicizing Catholic Communion

If you take the liberal side of the dispute, a Catholic Church in Grand Rapids is the scene of a hate crime. If you take the orthodox side, then a Catholic priest has done his duty by a parishioner’s soul, and the teaching of the Church about the Eucharist. Here’s a local news report:

Judge Sara Smolenski, chief judge of the Kent County District Court, has been denied Communion at the church where she has been a parishioner for more than six decades because she is married to a woman.

It is a move that for many was the final straw in a pattern of behavior that has them calling for the removal of a priest — a priest who came to St. Stephen Catholic Church about three years ago.

In 1966, under the leadership of  Rev. Msgr. Edward N. Alt, St. Stephen Catholic School became the first integrated Catholic school in Metro Grand Rapids and had a student body that was nearly 40 percent non-Catholic.

This tradition of inclusion and acceptance would be the essence of the school and the church for 50 years.

But now, some here say that is changing.

Ah, you see? The priest is just like the segregationists. The TV journalist who did this story is not a journalist, but an advocate. You have to read, or watch, the piece. The bias is off the charts. The lack of basic contextual information in the story about what the Eucharist is in Catholic teaching, and why a priest might have denied it to the judge, is journalistic malpractice. More:

But it was just last Saturday that Smolenski got a call from the parish priest, Father Scott Nolan.

“The way he said it was ‘because you’re married to Linda in the state of Michigan, you cannot accept communion,’ that’s how he said it,” Smolenski explained. “I try to be a good and faithful servant to our Lord Jesus Christ. My faith is a huge part of who I am, but it is the church that made that faith, the very church where he is taking a stance and saying ho-ho, not you.”

It was a devastating revelation for the lifelong Catholic who months earlier gave $7,000 to the parish building fund.

“Oh my gosh, I’m not going to get Jesus at the church I have devoted my life to,” Smolenski said, fighting back tears. “I thought of my mom and dad who devoted their whole life to raising us Catholic, spending all that money at the Catholic education.”

Ma and Pa Smolenski invested all that money for a Catholic education, but their daughter didn’t learn what the Catholic Church teaches about marriage and sexuality, or the Eucharist. Nobody is entitled to receive the Eucharist. I understand that Judge Smolenski, who was catechized in the post-Vatican II church, may not have received this teaching. But it is the teaching. I can understand why the judge is personally upset, but the fault lies not with the priest, but with her understanding of what it means to be a Catholic. More from the story:

Parishioners met with Nolan and were hopeful that he was changing his ways, until last Saturday when the beloved judge was denied Communion.

Nolan talked to News 8 briefly Tuesday, promising he would speak on the issue but then did not call back or return messages.

There are those who believe Nolan is in the right, but they would not go on camera. Others with kids attending school would not go on camera due to fear of reprisal, but all say they love the church and want healing.

Now, look: if you were a reporter who actually wanted to tell the truth about this story, wouldn’t you wonder why people fear reprisal in that parish? What, exactly, do they think is going to happen to them? Though I don’t know a soul in this parish, I’m 100 percent certain that they’re afraid that they will be denounced in the community as “haters,” and be attacked at work and elsewhere. But you know what, silent parishioners? You need to find a backbone. Your priest is doing the hard work of defending the Eucharist and defending Church teaching, and is being held up by the local media and gay activists as a pariah. You are wrong to let him stand there and take all this contempt and abuse by himself. Conservative Christians often complain that the clergy won’t take tough stands on issues. Well, here’s a priest doing exactly that, but it appears that he’s standing all by himself. This is a test for him, certainly, but also for the orthodox Catholics of Grand Rapids.

I’m told by a lay Catholic source in Grand Rapids, someone who is close to the situation, that Judge Smolenski was part of a group of gay local Catholics who skyped with Father James Martin about his pro-LGBT book “Building A Bridge” (they talked about it on Facebook). A week or two later, Judge Smolenski and others showed up at mass wearing Pride pins. Father Nolan gave the judge communion, so as not to cause a scene, but phoned her later and told her not to present herself for communion any more. If true, that shows that the priest was willing to tolerate the gay-married judge receiving communion, but not if she was going to turn it into a political stunt.

Now she’s leading a campaign within the parish to demand Father Scott’s ouster for acting according to Catholic teaching.

Back in 2016, when Judge Smolenski and her partner married, the same reporter, Barton Deiters, did a story, featuring her fighting back tears on camera because neither her church nor her partner’s church would allow them to marry within either church. So she’s been public for years in her anger at the Catholic Church over this.

A Michigan Catholic priest who is not part of that diocese writes:

Of course, there is a group of parishioners demanding the pastor’s ouster, and mounting a letter-writing campaign. They generously allow that they are “prepared to be very respectful.” But having been involved in these sorts of things myself in the past, I can all-but guarantee that that respect won’t last an hour into any meeting or confrontation. I’ll also note that for the letter-writers, the only conceivable solution is to get rid of the pastor. There is no thought of conversion or submission to church teaching on their part. They also mention their expectation that the *pastor* needs to change. Ecclesial reeducation camps, anyone?

Predictably, they cite Pope Francis, that the church should be “a place for everyone.”

I’ll also point out that the article says that there were parishioners who support the pastor, but they refused to go on camera, some specifically mentioning fear of reprisal. This seems to be an example of the growing cultural silencing of orthodox voices even within the church – they don’t want to be outed as haters.

The Bishop of Grand Rapids, David Walkowiak, has not commented or apparently taken any action yet. A diocesan spokesperson would only say that this is a “spiritual matter between her and her pastor.” I think it’s nearly certain that it’s not going to remain so for very much longer.

It won’t. Will the local bishop defend his priest, the Eucharist, and the Church’s teaching? Or will he throw Father Scott Nolan under the bus to placate loud, liberal, gay Catholic activists, in particular one (Judge Smolenski) from a prominent local family? Whatever happens, this is going to be a teaching moment. (And for the local media too: the TV story makes it seem like a mean priest is denying to a married gay judge what is rightfully hers, but the theology behind the priest’s action is meaningful; and besides, if the judge was part of an organized campaign within the parish to force Father Nolan’s hand, that is an important fact. Will it be reported? Let’s have some real journalism here, shall we?)

I know it’s hard for parishioners who support Father Nolan to stand up publicly for him. But there he is, facing a ridiculously biased local media, and a well-publicized campaign to have him thrown out of his position, and made a pariah in the community, all because he is a faithful Catholic. The way the laity support him, or fail to support him, is going to be a teaching moment for all other Catholic priests thinking about whether or not to stand up to the demands of LGBT bullies and their allies.

UPDATE: Here’s a public letter Judge Smolenski, and two colleagues, sent in October. A “Red Mass” is a traditional Catholic liturgy designed to celebrate the beginning of a legal term in the fall. Catholic judges typically attend. According to this letter, Smolenski acknowledges the right of a priest to deny communion to “those who are not in conformity with the teaching of the Church.” But now, she’s fighting tears on local TV to protest an exercise of the right she publicly acknowledged Father Nolan has. What changed since October 11?

UPDATE: Terrific! The Bishop of Grand Rapids stands by the parish priest. Statement:

We appreciate Judge Sara Smolenski’s service to the community. We are grateful for her past generosity. These facts are not at issue in this matter.

As Pope Francis explains in Amoris Laetitia, “The Eucharist demands that we be members of the one body of the Church. Those who approach the Body and Blood of Christ may not wound that same Body by creating scandalous distinctions and divisions among its members.” (186) Lifelong Catholics would surely be aware of this.

Inclusion and acceptance have been a hallmark of Catholic Churches in the Diocese of Grand Rapids throughout the diocese’s history. They remain so. They presume, however, a respect on the part of individuals for the teachings and practice of the wider Catholic community. No community of faith can sustain the public contradiction of its beliefs by its own members. This is especially so on matters as central to Catholic life as marriage, which the Church has always held, and continues to hold, as a sacred covenant between one man and one woman.

Father Scott Nolan, pastor of St. Stephen Parish, has dedicated his priesthood to bringing people closer to Jesus Christ. Part of his duty in pursuing that end is to teach the truth as taught by the Catholic Church, and to help it take root and grow in his parish. Mercy is essential to that process, but so are humility and conversion on the part of anyone seeking to live an authentically Catholic Christian life.

Father Nolan approached Judge Smolenski privately. Subsequent media reports do not change the appropriateness of his action, which the diocese supports.

 

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Jeremy Corbyn Destroys Himself

You ever wondered how it was that Romans actually enjoyed watching people torn to shreds by wild animals in the Colosseum? Watch BBC interviewer Andrew Neil’s merciless inquisition of Jeremy Corbyn, which aired this evening in the UK. You can’t watch it on the BBC Player in the US, but the full thing is embedded in the Daily Mail story, or, the Conservative Party is airing it on its Facebook page. Once you see it, you’ll understand why. It’s like Corbyn sat down with Neil as leader of the Labour Party, about two weeks before the election, and proceeded to commit slow-motion political suicide.

The Guardian doesn’t have a review up at this writing, but earlier in the day it published an editorial saying Labour hasn’t done enough to deal with Jew-hatred in its ranks.  Here is its straight news report on the Neil interview, which focuses on how Corbyn refused multiple times to apologize to British Jews for grotesque anti-Semitism within the Labour Party — this, on a day when the Chief Rabbi of the country called Labour out for it, and the Archbishop of Canterbury stood with his Jewish counterpart in solidarity. I kept watching Andrew Neil put the question to Corbyn, thinking, “Why can’t this man say that he’s sorry? Why is he dodging?”

The anti-Semitism thing took up the first 10 minutes of the 30-minute interview, though it could have been dispatched with quickly had Corbyn handled it differently. But the whole thing was just staggering. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a senior politician destroy himself quite like that in an interview.

From The Independent’s review:

To wonder whether Neil/Corbyn was as bad as Frost/Nixon or Maitlis/York is to ask the wrong question, really. Because the sheer agony of it could not be contained within the parameters of the simple TV interview format.

Anyone idly flicking through the channels and alighting on BBC One at 7pm might have imagined themselves to have stumbled upon one of those old Japanese humiliation endurance game shows as featured on Tarrant on TV, but with the really cruel twist that there was absolutely no prize at the end. Quite the opposite, in fact.

For the sheer range and volume of horrors, it can only really be compared to a montage that has now been quite rightly taken off YouTube, featuring all the horrific injuries suffered by various contestants on Channel 5’s ill-considered extreme sports celebrity show The Jump.

More:

We would learn that everybody who’s ever done anything antisemitic has been kicked out of the Labour Party, apart from everybody who hadn’t been but that isn’t Jeremy Corbyn’s fault because can I finish can I finish can I finish I’ve been an anti-racist all my life can I finish and OK yes the woman who denied the Holocaust did only get a letter but can I finish I oppose racism in all its forms can I finish can I finish if you’d just let me finish?

That’s exactly how it went. Mere words of description can’t convey the horribleness of it. The Telegraph (paywalled) began its review thus:

Andrew Neil’s interview of Jeremy Corbyn was so brutal, the BBC should have shown it after the watershed. How Labour must wish they had. Ideally, long after everyone of voting age was asleep.

The first 10 minutes – a whole third of the interview – were dedicated to anti-Semitism. Under the burning searchlight of Mr Neil’s interrogation, Mr Corbyn floundered. He sounded by turns waffly, defensive, confused, crabby, and clueless.

OK, that’s the Torygraph, you left-wing folks might say. Here’s the Labour-backing New Statesman:

For a party whose electoral strategy is to a large extent predicated on winning the air war over policy, the opportunity cost is huge – let alone with only 16 days to go. But even on the turf Labour believes suits their style of electoral play best, Corbyn struggled. He could not say how a Labour government would fund its £58 billion pledge to compensate Waspi women and admitted for the first time that some earning less than £80,000 a year would end up paying more tax under his government. Neil’s lengthy grilling on his policy of neutrality in a second referendum will have also gone down badly in Labour circles. With the polls tentatively moving in the right direction, it is about as unhelpful an intervention as Corbyn could have made.

You don’t have to know much about British politics to find the interview compelling television. Andrew Neil was a pit bull, but then, he treats all politicians this way. I am hard-pressed to think of an American TV interviewer like him, though Chris Wallace, at his best, is something like this. Watch this short clip of Neil’s recent grilling of Scottish nationalist politician Nicola Sturgeon:

The best 43 seconds of TV I have ever seen. #andrewneil pic.twitter.com/OB7pbylzb1

— Jack Glendinning (@jackgIendinning) November 25, 2019

In his own meeting with the fearsome Neil, Corbyn was … well, let’s just say that it is hard to fathom the British people entrusting their nation to a man like this. Watch the last five minutes of the thing, in which Corbyn can’t bring himself to say he would give the kill order to British special forces if they cornered the head of ISIS as he was about to order a terrorist attack. That, to me, is an even bigger deal than the anti-Semitism mess (which is pretty damning), because it has to do with national security and terrorism. Corbyn is a wet-noodle leftist to the marrow. The Daily Mail is nobody’s idea of a left-wing newspaper, but even Labourites will concede that tomorrow’s cover accurately sums up their hapless leader’s interview:

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‘Idea Laundering’

In a must-read Wall Street Journal piece, dissident academic Peter Boghossian explains how b.s. woke concepts like “fat shaming,” “patriarchy,” “whiteness,” “intersectionality,” and suchlike make it into everyday discourse, despite being sham ideas generated by the Grievance Studies industry. Excerpts:

The reason you’ve heard them is that politically engaged academicians have been developing concepts like these for more than 30 years, and all that time they’ve been percolating. Only recently have they begun to emerge in mainstream culture. These academicians accomplish this by passing off their ideas as knowledge; that is, as if these terms describe facts about the world and social reality. And while some of these ideas may contain bits of truth, they aren’t scientific. By and large, they’re the musings of ideologues.

How did this happen? How have those working in what’s come to be called “grievance studies” managed to extend their ideas far beyond the academy, while convincing people that their jargon adds something meaningful to public discourse? Biologist Bret Weinstein, who was run out of Evergreen State College by a leftist mob in 2017, calls the process “idea laundering.”

It’s analogous to money laundering. Here’s how it works: First, various academics have strong moral impulses about something. For example, they perceive negative attitudes about obesity in society, and they want to stop people from making the obese feel bad about their condition. In other words, they convince themselves that the clinical concept of obesity (a medical term) is merely a story we tell ourselves about fat (a descriptive term); it’s not true or false—in this particular case, it’s a story that exists within a social power dynamic that unjustly ascribes authority to medical knowledge.

That’s stage one. After several more stages, all involving dishonest practices that pass off ideological conviction as substantive knowledge, this stuff is taught to students, who are tested on it, and whose academic careers depend on parroting it back to their woke professors. More:

Students leave the academy believing they know things they do not know. They bring this “knowledge” to their places of employment where, over time, laundered ideas and the terminology that accompanies them become normative—giving them even more unearned legitimacy. And this is why you’ve heard some of the terms we began with: cisgender, fat shaming, heteronormativity, intersectionality, patriarchy, rape culture, and whiteness. They’ve been laundered through the peer-reviewed literature by activist scholars, then widely taught for years, before being brought into the world.

Read it all. It’s important. It’s yet another reason why we have to pay critical attention to the intellectuals. They catechize students in this pseudo-knowledge, and those students graduate and enter into society’s institutions — including business — and bring with them the ideological crusade into which their woke professors initiated them. And believe me, it makes a difference. At The New York Times, for instance, a younger generation of woke writers and editors is pushing hard against an older generation of liberal writers and editors who, despite being leftish, believe in old-fashioned things like journalistic standards. It’s especially vivid in that newspaper, to which I have been a subscriber for years, and whose decline into wokeness (as distinct from being merely liberal) has been astonishing to watch. But it’s the entire media.

Remember political scientist Zach Goldberg’s experiment this past spring, in which he ran certain Grievance Studies concepts through the Lexis/Nexis database, to see how often they appeared in our press over the years? Among his findings:

#3 pic.twitter.com/OxM8FJCZ3G

— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) May 28, 2019

#5 pic.twitter.com/ysaT8Tp7BM

— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) May 28, 2019

You can access all of his results here.

We tend to think of propaganda as something generated by the state. This is a prime example of it coming from ideologues within universities, and making its way to the public via sympathizers in the mass media. Eventually, these lies become de facto truths, either because people really do believe in them, or the cost of questioning them becomes too great, so people conform. In time, younger people — those who grew up being socialized into the lie — don’t know any different. In my interviews for my forthcoming book on lessons we must learn from the communist experience, a Ukrainian immigrant named Olga Grigorenko, recalling her Soviet childhood, said “Nobody told me that I was living in a lie. I was just living my life in my country, the Soviet Union. Nobody said it was a lie.”

As she grew older, she came to see that in fact she lived within a system of lies. Her husband, Vladimir, spoke about how the ideology corrupted all knowledge. From the transcript:

Vladimir: For example, all history was represented as the fight between capitalism and the workers. It takes a really creative mind to see the system of classes from Marxism-Leninism presenting itself in ancient Egypt. But that’s what they did. All history books were filled with that point of view. The Florentine Republic was the equal of the Great October Revolution – things like that. All our history books were like that. Every scientific paper was supposed to have a prefatory chapter describing how Marx and Engels were geniuses in that particular field of science, and how their findings anticipated whatever this scientific article described. Any and all sciences had to show a connection to the decision of the party in a previous convention.

Olga: But nobody believed in it.

Vladimir: But everybody knew that you had to say these things in order to be published.

More:

Olga: In high school and middle school, we had to write essays, like normal school kids do. But you never could write what you think about the subject. Never, ever. The subject could be interesting, but you never could put what do you think. You have to find some way to relate that to the communist view.

Vladimir: The general culture taught you this doublethink.

Olga: I remember when I was eight or nine years old, I came home from school and told my parents a funny anecdote about a famous Red Army hero, one that made him look bad. I just started to tell my parents, and my father looked at me and said, ‘Never do that again. Not in our house, not anywhere. Just stop, and forget. You can’t tell funny stories about communist leaders.’ And I was afraid.

Vladimir: Sooner or later, society would tell you what you shouldn’t say. And if you said it, you would end up in the camp.

We are reproducing that system here, in an American way. It begins with the ideological corruption of knowledge in the institutions of higher education, then moves out from there. How difficult do you imagine it would be within the New York Times newsroom, or any major American newsroom, to mount a serious challenge to the concepts of “whiteness,” “patriarchy,” and the like? In fact, we have an example of it, from this summer: the leaked transcript of the Times‘s internal town hall meeting, in which an unnamed staffer told editor-in-chief Dean Baquet that “I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting.” Baquet declined the opportunity to deliver a Journalistic Standards 101 lecture to this person, and instead gave a fuzzy non-answer (read the transcript; you’ll see) praising the paper’s then-upcoming “1619 Project,” a massive initiative attempting to “reframe” American history around slavery. If you’ll recall, the 1619 Project was named for the year the first African slave arrived on American shores; the Times said that year, not 1776, ought to be remembered as the founding of America.

Recently, speaking to an interviewer from the World Socialist Web Site (of all people), leading Civil War historian James McPherson of Princeton criticized the project as bad history. Excerpts:

Q. What was your initial reaction to the 1619 Project?

A. Well, I didn’t know anything about it until I got my Sunday paper, with the magazine section entirely devoted to the 1619 Project. Because this is a subject I’ve long been interested in I sat down and started to read some of the essays. I’d say that, almost from the outset, I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly, obviously, not an exclusively American institution, but existed throughout history. And slavery in the United States was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries. And in the United States, too, there was not only slavery but also an antislavery movement. So I thought the account, which emphasized American racism—which is obviously a major part of the history, no question about it—but it focused so narrowly on that part of the story that it left most of the history out.

So I read a few of the essays and skimmed the rest, but didn’t pursue much more about it because it seemed to me that I wasn’t learning very much new. And I was a little bit unhappy with the idea that people who did not have a good knowledge of the subject would be influenced by this and would then have a biased or narrow view.

Q. Are you aware that the glossy magazine is being distributed to schools across the country, and the Chicago public school district has already announced that it will be part of the curriculum?

A. I knew that its purpose was for education, but I haven’t heard many of the details of that, including what you’ve just mentioned.

More:

Q. You mentioned that you were totally surprised when you found Project 1619 in your Sunday paper. You are one of the leading historians of the Civil War and slavery. And the Times did not approach you?

A. No, they didn’t, no.

Q. We’ve spoken to a lot of historians, leading scholars in the fields of slavery, the Civil War, the American Revolution, and we’re finding that none of them were approached. Although the Times doesn’t list its sources, what do you think, in terms of scholarship, this 1619 Project is basing itself on?

A. I don’t really know. One of the people they approached is Kevin Kruse, who wrote about Atlanta. He’s a colleague, a professor here at Princeton. He doesn’t quite fit the mold of the other writers. But I don’t know who advised them, and what motivated them to choose the people they did choose.

Q. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead writer and leader of the 1619 Project, includes a statement in her essay—and I would say that this is the thesis of the project—that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”

A. Yes, I saw that too. It does not make very much sense to me. I suppose she’s using DNA metaphorically. She argues that racism is the central theme of American history. It is certainly part of the history. But again, I think it lacks context, lacks perspective on the entire course of slavery and how slavery began and how slavery in the United States was hardly unique. And racial convictions, or “anti-other” convictions, have been central to many societies.

But the idea that racism is a permanent condition, well that’s just not true. And it also doesn’t account for the countervailing tendencies in American history as well. Because opposition to slavery, and opposition to racism, has also been an important theme in American history.

Q. Could you speak on this a little bit more? Because elsewhere in her essay, Hannah-Jones writes that “black Americans have fought back alone” to make America a democracy.

A. From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the NAACP which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism. Almost from the beginning of American history that’s been true. And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.

Read it all. How bizarre that you would have to depend on the World Socialist Web Site to give a more nuanced, balanced view of slavery than you would find in The New York Times. Naturally, Nikole Hannah-Jones denounced this as racism:

LOL. Right, because white historians have produced truly objective history.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) November 21, 2019

And:

Who said it doesn’t. My point — which y’all are intentionally or unintentionally missing — is that there is no such thing as objective history so complaints that the 1619 is an illegitimate reframing of history deny that all history is framed.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) November 21, 2019

Get that? There are no facts; it’s all narrative. One historian’s account is as good as another. “Facts” become whatever is useful to the ideological crusade. This bad idea, along with these highly biased and unreliable claims about slavery and US history, has now been laundered so thoroughly that the most powerful newspaper in the world uses its authority and reach to further legitimize it, and spread the lies to the masses. Think about all the schoolchildren who are now reading the 1619 Project as part of their curriculum, and who will assume that it is the truth. How many of those kids do you think will have the capability, or even the courage, to question the narrative presented to them? This is how freshly-laundered bad ideas become the draperies the system depends on to keep out the light.

UPDATE: You think this stuff doesn’t matter? Read Matthew Continetti’s short piece on Woke Capitalism. It doesn’t conclude as standard conservative narratives do, by saying that companies are forcing PC onto us. Continetti says that young people want corporations to be woke:

America’s corporations, forever in search of yield, cannot afford to ignore the reality that young consumers are drifting left. The Millennial generation is politically moderate compared to the rising Generation Z. The ideologies of diversity, equity, and inclusion, of intersectionality, of gender fluidity, and of environmentalism, secularism, racial justice, and assaultive speech have become the cultural mainstream (to the degree one exists). Woke capitalism isn’t a passing fad. It’s a sign of things to come.

Corporate behavior evinces the dominant beliefs of society. In China, those beliefs are not pluralistic. And that is increasingly the case in the United States.

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Sex Scandal Comes Closer To Francis

Finally some good news: an Argentine court does what the Argentine pope did not: hold sexually abusive priests accountable:

An Argentine court on Monday found two priests and a lay worker guilty of the sexual abuse of 10 former students of a Catholic school for the deaf, the first legal victory for a community of victims stretching from Italy to the Andes whose complaints about one of the clerics to church officials, including Pope Francis, went unheeded for years.

The verdict was another stain on the church’s handling of sex abuse cases in Francis’s native Argentina. Prosecutors last week requested an arrest warrant for Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, a longtime associate of the pope accused of abusing two seminarians.

A Washington Post investigation this year found years of church inaction in the case of at least one of the priests convicted Monday in the abuse of male and female students at the Antonio Provolo Institute for Deaf and Hearing Impaired Children in the western Argentine city of Luján de Cuyo between 2004 and 2016.

The three-judge panel in the northwestern Argentine province of Mendoza ruled against the three defendants in 25 instances of abuse.

If you can stand it — these testimonies are strong stuff — here is a video report about the abuses of the deaf and mute children, both in Verona and in the sister school in Argentina. It features adults telling specifically what was done to them as children by their abusers (trigger warning). If you want to see the true face of evil, go to just before the 2:00 mark and watch the bedside hidden camera interview of a priest called Don Eligio Piccoli, identified by the abuse survivors as one of their attackers. He is bedridden and living in a church home — a church investigation found him guilty of the abuse, and sentenced him to prayer and penance — but apparently in his right mind. He admits that the stories of sodomy and sexual abuse are true, but he laughs about them and downplays them. Some life of prayer and penance that dirty old man is living! There is a second section continuing the interview later in the clip below:

As the Washington Post investigation showed, Francis was told about all this, but as usual, it took the state to do what the Church would not.

And to think that there are people in the year 2019 who actually still believe the Pope who brought Uncle Ted in from the cold really is serious about cleaning up sex abuse in the Church. Meanwhile, pervy Bishop Zanchetta, who was a Bergoglio project from the beginning, is expected to fly this week to Argentina from Rome to show up in court on Thursday on sex abuse charges. It is hard to find an innocent explanation for why Francis brought this hot mess to the Vatican, trailing abuse allegations in Argentina, and gave him a special, just-for-him job in the Vatican Bank.

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Academic Witnesses To The Persecution

I’ve been sorting out the quotes from my interviews with people who grew up under Soviet-bloc communism. Here’s a passage from an interview I did with a professor who teaches on a science faculty at a major American university. She grew up in an Eastern bloc country, under intense oppression. She is a closeted Christian in her academic workplace. In this passage, she is talking about how Americans don’t want to hear her — and how she is afraid to speak her mind anyway when it comes to matters of political and cultural controversy:

So many times I’ve told people that something here is like under communism, and they’ll just shut me down and say oh, but that’s communism, and then ignore me. Once, when I was visiting [a top laboratory], a group of us were talking about politics at the end of the workday. I said that it’s not good to live under communism, but everybody else said well, it was wrongly implemented in your country. Everyone in the room! I had a hard time being there. I believe everybody who was present is in some sense brainwashed. They think the same way. One of them even said that certain people should be eliminated.

Most people in my university, and most scientists — it feels like that at some point if they discover that I don’t agree with the things they’re talking about, my career will be over. Everybody is so open, they’re talking in front of me like I’m really one of them. It really looks like this is what’s normal within a community.

They’re all on the political left. They all do a lot of virtue signaling with these “safe space” stickers. What happens when I’m the only one who doesn’t have that sticker?

Back in communism, we all had to do certain things to protect ourselves. You don’t know, you might be sent to the camps. You might even lose your life. Here’s what I think is happening: they’re trying us little by little, with a few little things. Then they will do something serious.

In communism, you know it’s evil, so it’s easier to start forming some kind of countercultural communities. But here, people think it’s not such a big deal, so they don’t form these communities. As long as we don’t recognize evil as evil, it won’t be possible to resist.

In my university, I don’t have a single person I can talk to about any of this.

Isn’t this incredible? This woman grew up under communist oppression, but when she tried to talk about it among a group of scientists, they shut her down as not knowing what she was talking about. And she is scared to death that if anybody in her university — again, a major US university — finds out that she’s secretly a Christian and a dissenter from wokeness, that her career will be destroyed.

You might call her fears exaggerated. But are you going to tell someone whose grandparents had all their property stolen from them because the communist judged them to be class enemies that she should just trust the system, even though she sees how her left-liberal colleagues talk about conservatives? Are you going to tell someone whose parents were atheists, and professors, but who refused to join the Communist Party, and who suffered serious oppression as a result, that the leftists in America would be just fine if they knew that she was a Christian, and a political conservative? Please.

If I were a liberal academic, I would be ashamed that someone like this professor was too afraid to speak her mind, for fear of persecution. If I were a liberal academic, I would be ashamed that the student government at Hobart and Smith Colleges in New York refused to let a couple of students establish a campus chapter of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute — basically a conservative book club — because they were afraid it would “cause stress to the student body.” 

You know this stuff happens all the time. Can you see why someone who grew up under communism, and who now works in American academia, would be so afraid? I was surprised, frankly, by what this professor told me, because her university does not have a reputation for wokeness.

Just now, a reader posted a link to this short commentary at Inside Higher Education, by Eboo Patel, a Muslim interfaith activist who served as an adviser to President Obama, in which it occurs to him that

talking about identity in terms of power, privilege and oppression is no longer the woke insurgency, but rather the cultural establishment. If you talk in this way, you are not showing your subaltern stripes — you are flashing the badge of insider dominance. The badge of power.

What are the implications of this? [New York Times writer Jay Caspian] Kang [in a piece about Andrew Yang and identity politics] notes at least one:

many people might be coming to see the self-appointed arbiters of racial politics, and the candidates working to satisfy them, as the establishment. Those people will be happy to see anyone willing to break from our rigid prescriptions.

But there are others as well. What if the people who speak in the language of identity politics were to recognize that their framework was the culturally dominant one? The one that helped you get into an elite college or win a coveted internship? If you spoke that language, you were working with dollars in a world of people who earned only rupees, or some other less valuable currency.

I’m not commenting on the accuracy or worth of wokeness. I’m commenting more on its increasing dominance in, as Kang notes, the world bounded by players like Harvard and The New York Times.

Don’t laugh, conservatives. It is a good thing for liberals like Patel to open their eyes and see that wokeness, for all its pretensions of defending the underdog, is very much the overdog in terms of having and exercising institutional power. Their power is so great, and so malicious, that yeah, you pretty much need to stand with people willing to stand up to them.

When I interviewed the émigré professor, I did not ask her if she voted for Donald Trump, and/or planned to vote for him in 2020. It wasn’t relevant to my book project, so it didn’t occur to me. But if I had, I feel certain that she would have said yes. She is a quiet, soft-spoken, middle-aged woman, but she knows who has the power in her world, and how they exercise it. As I type this, I’m recalling the look on her face when she talked about the scientist in that laboratory discussion, the man who talked about a just society as one in which problematic classes of people are “eliminated.” For her, this is what the Left in America is becoming: a Yankee-Doodle-Dandy version of the people who crushed her grandparents, her parents, and her country.

I just went into my file and found a transcript of a phone interview I did with a professor in a humanities field who grew up in the Soviet Union. She talked about how 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 went on:

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. “’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.

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.

You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow. You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works. This is why people like me are so upset today. I’m so glad you’re writing this book.

UPDATE: Oh. Oh! This is the ne plus ultra of privileged cluelessness. A reader cites this hathotic column on CNN.com by the president of Wesleyan University, who claims that “woke students” are being made into scapegoats, like “welfare queens” of the 1980s. Excerpt:

The images of the welfare queen and of the woke student are convenient because they provide excuses to not engage with difference, placing certain types of people beyond the pale. These scapegoats are meant to inspire solidarity in a group by providing an object for its hostility (or derision), and educators and civic leaders should not play along. Instead of arousing easy antipathy, they should strive to cultivate the robust exchange of ideas across differences. In the year leading up to the next national elections, these exchanges are more important than ever.

We desperately need young people to assume their civic responsibilities, and universities have a responsibility to help them to do so. Over the next 12 months, I am optimistic that we will see the activism of college students refute the charge that their politically correct generation just cancels others, or that it is self-satisfied in its condescending “wokeness.” That charge serves only the status quo, and the continuation of the status quo today would mean a very bleak tomorrow.

 

Read it all. I almost want to send that guy a Trumpy Bear for Christmas.

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