Rod Dreher's Blog, page 191

Trump’s Progressive Allies

Turns out that the President of the United States is afraid to work in the Oval Office, partly out of fear that his own people will betray him: 

Maintaining a sanctuary to work and think has taken on greater importance for the president as he increasingly feels under siege by the Democratic impeachment inquiry. Frustrated by the whistleblower complaint and a parade of administration officials testifying on Capitol Hill, Trump is as wary as ever of the staffers around him and distrustful of the traditional White House infrastructure. Working from his private quarters gives him space away from what he perceives as prying eyes and guards against his omnipresent fear of leaks to the media.

It also gives Trump a greater sense of control as he faces the dual challenges of impeachment and his reelection, according to interviews with a half dozen current and former senior administration officials.

“The Oval presents itself as historic and it gives off a sense of power, but the residence has a sense of exclusivity,” said a former senior administration official, describing Trump’s affinity for conducting business there. “He works more in the residence because he is not constrained there by staffers knocking on the door.”

Good grief.

And yet, even if our embattled and not-entirely-sane president might win re-election, even if impeached. Why? Because as crazy as he is, to many of us, the idea of him staying on for four more years is not as scary as the Left coming to power. Mediaite columnist John Ziegler says the climate protest that stopped the Harvard-Yale game over the weekend may be a small thing, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that could help Trump’s re-election. Here’s why:

I get mocked on Twitter all the time whenever I mention a crazy episode like this helping Trump’s re-election efforts. Obviously, no one is going into the voting booth next November with this debacle on their minds (though, now that this horrible precedent has been set, I can see stuff like this happening more frequently and becoming a prominent news topic).

Instead, what I mean by this is that there is a whole group of key voters, particularly in critical states, who are more than willing to ditch Trump as long as that doesn’t mean giving liberals the power to completely mess with their lives in a radical way. Seeing a major college football game almost destroyed because of this kind of liberal nonsense and overt hypocrisy is the exact type of story which makes those voters very nervous about handing everything over to a bunch of lunatics.

As I have said many times before, Trump’s political rocket-ship is fueled by the extremely negative reaction Middle America has to political correctness. What the kids at Yale did was just add a bit more gas to his tank (which is ironic given their protest of fossil fuels).

If you read it all, you’ll see that the Yale authorities appeared to indulge the student climate-change protesters, not have them immediately removed from the field. Ziegler observes that it’s unthinkable that had pro-life demonstrators shut down the most important game of the year, and in a stadium in which its impossible to play in the dark (because Yale Stadium has no lights), the school administrators would have had them hauled off at once. But as we know, elite colleges, like many American institutions, pamper left-wing brats.

Again, if you think that Ziegler (and I) claim that voters in Wisconsin are going to go into the voting booth next fall thinking about the Harvard-Yale game, you’re being silly. It’s rather that these things — like Ann Coulter and her fans needed heavy police protection to meet at Berkeley — accumulate, and signal to normal people that the loony Left cannot be trusted with power. Not all liberals are like the nutters, but many liberals are afraid to stand up to the nutters. This comment on the Coulter-Berkeley thread speaks about this concern:

I’m a senior university administrator, and whenever I read about protests like this I ask myself, “Are the conservative news sources I read cherry picking these incidents, which are unfortunate but fairly rare (given the thousands of talks that occur without incident every month at universities across the U.S.)?” Yet the answer I give myself is not reassuring.

Yes, it’s true that at my campus we have never had a major de-platforming incident. But the reason, I’m quite sure, is that our faculty and students self-censor to such a great extent that we rarely, if ever, invite conservative speakers to give talks. Why would we, they are wrong about everything, and our mission is to teach “The Truth”, right?

Once a group of students independently tried to invite an internationally known conservative politician, very high profile, and our faculty nipped it in the bud immediately. Incidents like the one described in this article are simply the most visible symptom of a much deeper, festering disease, let’s say the outward manifestations of Stage 4 of a cancer that has been lurking in the bone marrow for some time. The observers, which include many of my “moderate” (read, just slightly left of center) colleagues, who claim that the campus free speech hysteria on the right is overblown, are willfully ignoring the chilling effect of an ideology that permeates every aspect of our institution. We don’t have these protests because it would simply not occur to anyone to invite a right wing speaker (or, God forbid, a “Controversial” right wing speaker!).

Just last week I was told by a faculty member, who was interviewing prospective students, he had spoken with a very impressive woman, a self-described conservative, who somewhat sheepishly inquired whether we had “diversity” at our campus (his description of her to me was revealing, he said, “she’s a conservative, BUT she was very smart”). “Of course!” he replied, “we have students from many countries, races, backgrounds, etc.” She replied that what she meant was diversity of opinion, of thought. He tells me he pointed out that we were still teaching “the great books” (you know, old white men), so yes, definitely.

I initially asked him to put her in touch with me, I would beseech her to give us a chance, tell her that there was at least one like-minded person on the campus (albeit in the administration). But ultimately I think that it would not be fair of me to invite her into our liberal lion’s den, would it? Of course if her alternatives are Yale, Georgetown, et al, then perhaps we are the lesser of evils, I don’t know.

Madeleine Kearns’s utterly chilling National Review piece on the politicization of pediatric gender identity care is another instance of what happens when the activist left takes over an institution — in this case, key institutions in medicine. Excerpts:

Then there is a third option — informed by an ideology according to which it is possible for a child to be “born in the wrong body.” In this option, clinical activists recommend a drastic response when a child expresses confusion about gender. First, parents should tell the child, however young, that he truly is the sex he identifies with. Second, parents should consider delaying his puberty through off-label uses of drugs that can have serious (and largely unstudied) side effects. Third, parents should consider giving their child the puberty experience of the opposite sex, through cross-sex hormonal injections and gels (which result in sterility). Finally, parents should consider greenlighting the surgical removal of their child’s reproductive organs.

Since there are no objective tests to confirm a transgender diagnosis, all of this is arbitrary and dependent on a child’s changeable feelings. To make aggressive treatment more acceptable, its advocates have come up with a media-friendly euphemism, “gender affirmation.” If it’s affirming, activists say, it’s also kindness, love, acceptance, and support. The opposite, trying to help a child feel more comfortable with his body, is a rejection: abuse, hatred, “transphobia,” or “conversion therapy” likely to lead to child suicide. This is a lie — a lie designed to obscure a critical truth: that neither a child, nor his parents on his behalf, can truly consent to experimental, life-altering, and irreversible treatments for which there is no evidentiary support.

More:

In his deposition in the James Younger case, Dr. Hopewell stated that “you’re not going to cut off [healthy] body parts unless something’s wrong with your thinking.” But Dr. Olson-Kennedy — again, the head of the largest transgender-youth clinic in the United States and one of the leaders of a publicly funded NIH study — took a rather different view in her own deposition. Younger’s lawyer, Logan Odeneal, asked Olson-Kennedy whether it is safe or ethical to remove healthy breast tissue from adolescent girls as young as 13, as has been recommended at her clinic.

Odeneal: Well, if you remove the breasts from a young woman, she will never be able to lactate or to breastfeed an infant; is that correct?

Olson-Kennedy: Well, I, I don’t advocate removal for breast tissue from young women. I advocate for chest reconstruction in young men.

Odeneal: Well haven’t you referred girls to have the chest surgery from your clinic?

Olson-Kennedy: They’re, they’re, they’re not girls. They’re not girls. They don’t identify as girls. So I have referred people who identify as transmasculine or as boys or young men for surgery, yes.

Odeneal: But do their birth certificates identify them as girls?

Olson-Kennedy: Sometimes, and sometimes they’ve had their gender marker changed on their birth certificate.

Odeneal: How many patients have you referred for the chest surgery?

Olson-Kennedy: Probably about 200.

When Odeneal asked whether the procedure involved the removal of “healthy” breast tissue, Olson-Kennedy explained that she takes “issue with the word ‘healthy’” since it’s not healthy “if it’s creating a lot of distress in their life.” Elsewhere, she told an audience, “If you want breasts at a later point in your life you can go and get them.”

The National Institutes of Health study on early intervention in transgender youth that Olson-Kennedy oversees along with three others involves multiple sites and hundreds of participants. In a talk at an activist-clinician conference in September of this year, she explained that the study was “observational” and didn’t have a control group (a group of participants receiving the standard, accepted treatment for the purposes of comparison). “When we first put this grant into the NIH five years ago, they came back with primary concern that we didn’t have an untreated control group. Yeah, so we’re not going to have an untreated control group, I’m warning you right now,” she said, prompting audience laughter.

Presumably, Olson-Kennedy’s reasoning for not having a control group is that it is unethical for a physician to treat (or not treat) a patient in a way he considers not to be in the patient’s best interests. Olson-Kennedy told Younger’s lawyer, Odeneal, that the reason this study does not have a control group is “because not treating people with gender dysphoria who are seeking treatment is unethical practice.” Does this mean she considers treatments other than gender affirmation “not treating” patients? If so, to repeat, the evidence for gender affirmation is unclear and unconvincing, while the majority of children who have been managed under a watchful-waiting or talk-therapy strategy have apparently improved. The latter is the clinical standard for which there is the most substantial, albeit imperfect, evidence of effectiveness and safety. I have to speculate here because, although Olson-Kennedy agreed to an interview last summer, she twice failed to dial in at the appointed time to the conference number her office had emailed me. Her office has since gone dark.

More:

Ordinarily, when investigating complicated and life-altering treatments emerging in medicine (and especially pediatrics), investigators must follow a series of steps: First, the researchers must demonstrate to their institution’s Institutional Review Board that their treatment is credible and ethical. Second, the patients and parents of children must sign an informed-consent paper, with emphasis on the word “informed,” especially if the treatment is experimental. Third, the group of patients receiving the treatment must be paired with a control group that is treated in more standard fashion.

But why is the NIH facilitating this study on early intervention among trans youth in the first place? What do they hope to learn? What kind of information about risks has been given to parents and children? These are some of the questions to which I might have found answers if the relevant documents, which a concerned medical doctor obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, had not been so heavily redacted, most notably in the sections related to informed consent. Does the NIH, or do those in charge of this study, have something to hide?

Please, please read it all. This could happen to your family. This is a national scandal. Mind you, the Trump Administration and GOP lawmakers, to my knowledge, are doing little or nothing to stop this medical abuse. They should! Do they really think that the public, once it knows the facts, would be against them? In any case, they may not be trying to stop it, but we know — we know — that a Democratic administration would fast-track these atrocious policies.

These stories in which doctors lop the breasts off of teenage girls, or peeling the skin off a boy’s penis and inverting it to make a fake vagina, are a long, long way from Yale Stadium or the faculty lounge. But there is a continuum here. Left-wing extremists are controlling institutions, mostly because liberals within those institutions and fields are afraid to say no to whatever the extremists want. And conservative lawmakers are afraid to touch this stuff too.

Many, many people feel powerless to stop these cultural revolutionaries. (By the way, I’ve reached out to the reader who commented here the other day about his wife, a Chinese immigrant who saw people killed during the madness of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, bursting into tears when she saw the raging mob at Berkeley on the TV news the other night; she wept because she fears for her adopted country, and doesn’t understand why Americans can’t see the mounting danger. I am going to have an interview with her in this space soon.) Anyway, people don’t know what to do about this. One thing they feel that they can do is throw a roadblock in front of the militants’ triumphal march through the institutions, by voting for Trump. It is a vote of despair, maybe, but what other choice do they have? Vote Democratic, and acquiesce in their conquest by cultural revolutionaries?

I received the other day the galleys of Ross Douthat’s upcoming (February 25, 2020) book The Decadent Society. My initial impression, based on reading around in it: this is going to be his best and most important book yet. I’ll give a full review when it’s out. In it, I was pleased to run across this quote from a Freddie de Boer blog post from a while back. Freddie, as you’ll recall, is not a liberal, but a true man of the Left:

The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.

And in 2020, some of them are going to run right into the arms of Donald Trump, not because they love him, but because they fear and loathe the alternative.

The post Trump’s Progressive Allies appeared first on The American Conservative.

Gardening During Cultural Wartime

Late last week I wrote a long blog post called “Prophet Or Alarmist,” inspired by a young reader’s criticism of my writing. That reader, Anthony Barr, had tweeted that he used to admire my writing, but that of late it had become “a punchline in the young conservative crowd” because of the culture-war style of my subject matter. You can follow the link to read my response. Over the weekend Anthony Barr wrote me a thoughtful reply, which I publish here. My response to the response follows:

Rod, I am grateful to you for your thoughtful and generous essay in response to the Twitter exchange. I’ve read your essay several times now, and I especially appreciate those opening paragraphs, and also the historical context surrounding some of the religious liberty judicial trends. I can certainly appreciate that there is a difference between your living through the shift, and my coming-of-age afterwards. I thought that to respond to your essay, I’d start with a little autobiographical stuff because I think to understand my perspective, it’s important to know I was raised in a hyper-conservative, politically attuned context. And so when I say that I reject the culture war, it’s not as one who merely observed it from a distance.

At my homeschool graduation ceremony, our commencement speaker read from the book of Joshua and charged us to “take back the land.” His generation was Moses, liberating us from the lies of the Government Schools, leading us to the border of a brave new world: it was our task to enter the promised land, which we possessed at America’s Christian Founding, and then lost along the way, probably in the 1960s, and which now needed reclaimed for Christ.

We were well prepared for this charge: we went to Worldview Academy and drilled in presuppositional apologetics and did the political boot-camps created by organizations with names like Generation Joshua. While our Public School Friends were wasting their time on violent video games and wayward women, we were reading I Kissed Dating Goodbye and talking about how to create Christian movies that could transform “the culture.” (At sixteen, I studied scriptwriting under the writers for Focus on The Family’s longrunning audio drama Adventures In Odyssey. A story for another day.)

I lived in the makeshift training campus of the culture wars. And then just as I was stepping out to join the fray (or more accurately: argue with atheists on blogger.com), I looked around and I didn’t see Christ fighting in front of me, and I didn’t see Christ fighting beside me, and so I stopped fighting.

All of that was eight years ago, and I’ve undergone profound shifts since then. I abandoned young-earth creationism, for example, and also the apocalyptic end-times theology that taught me to be fearful of government. I’m also not a Calvinist any more, thank God. I attended a Great Books program, minored in Eastern Orthodox history and theology, attended a conservative Anglican parish, became close friends with a number of LGBT+ Christian friends, converted to Catholicism, stopped using the phrase “the culture.” Now I teach Beowulf to 2nd graders at a religion-friendly-but-not-religious classical school.

Look, I’ve read MacIntyre and Taylor, Ratzinger and Wojtyła, and all the rest. I get that the stakes are high when we’re dealing with metaphysics in a world that implicitly accepts the axioms of utilitarianism. I didn’t become some wishy-washy progressive, didn’t sell out to some feel-good Moral Therapeutic Deism. If I get an opportunity to pontificate on contraception (all my friends will groan here because they know how much I talk about this stuff), I get really animated as I explain classical teleology. And if you ask me about gender reassignment surgery, I’ll talk about Descartes and the dangerous error of seeing our “self” as something distinct from “our body.” I’ll say something like, human flourishing is found in the integrated self as the harmony of our objectivity (object-ness, our material reality, being in space and time) and our subjectivity (subject-ness, the self-determination and self-consciousness that are an emergent property of our embodiment.)

But yes, when I’m talking to a trans friend, I use their preferred pronouns. And I do so because words are signifiers, not of reality directly, but of the interpretive framework through which reality as such is mediated to me, in terms and concepts I can understand. And who can ever really say that the signifiers and the signified are squarely aligned? (I became Catholic in part because I didn’t want signifiers, a symbol in bread and wine: I wanted Christ himself. As O’Connor quipped, if the Eucharist is only a symbol, then to hell with it.) But I also use their preferred pronouns because I don’t think everyday human interactions should require a 100-hour grad school seminar on ontology and epistemology. And I do so because my study of patristics reminds me that the chief end of man is theosis, union with God, and in that teleology, gender and sex (which are so integral to procreation now) become irrelevant. As the Apostle says, “neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female.” But mostly, I use their preferred pronouns because it is kind, because it meets my friend where they are at rather than demand that they conform to my vision of reality in order to interact, because to do otherwise is a cruel disregard for their expressed wishes, because as O’Connor also tells us, “certainty without experience leads to harshness” and the world is already unbearably harsh to my trans friends, why the hell should I add to that?

This isn’t a compromise in first principles. But it is a prudential recognition that we are first and foremost persons in the world, not Brains on A Stick, not Walking Collections of Axiomatic Beliefs. And that means that in the real world, the offline world, it’s much easier to build the kind of intra-tradition dialogue that MacIntyre envisions when we don’t fixate on the cosmetics like what grammar conventions to use, and when we are willing to enter the morally fraught conversational space with the courage to risk our very selves in vulnerability before the questions and ideas those conversations include. And so maybe you can find fault in me for using preferred pronouns, but I can guarantee you that doing so has allowed for more dialogue than if I had made this the hill to die on, and guarded my perceived moral purity or ideological coherence in some echo-chamber enclave.

I think a similar dynamic is at play in the Sohrab Ahmari / David French debate from a little while back. Ahmari wrote some interesting columns and a decent memoir, fine, but French has spent his whole career litigating pro-life cases, etc. You can try to fault French for being too polite, for hoping perhaps unrealistically that the civic and civil norms and institutions are reliable. But at a certain point, step back and ask, who is actually doing the MacIntyrean work here? And besides, drag queen story hour? Really? Drag queen story hour, that’s the straw to break the camel’s back? Our country was made to endure Jim Crow as the law of the land, but it’s drag story hour that somehow signals the end of all good in the world? Be resilient, gird up your loins, go to church with a little black grandma who knows what it feels like to be called a racial slur by “good [Christian] country people,” and then face the far less severe contingent cultural moment you are in with the kind of dignity and quiet strength befitting a follower of the Crucified One.

Okay, so what I’m saying is that maybe a better path is to accept the culture war loss with generosity of spirit, and to focus again on the fundamental virtues like hospitality (in the Homeric sense.) Maybe I’m saying that it’s time for less Benedict Option stuff, and more books like The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, where you share from the heart, from the lived experience you have and the wisdom you’ve gleaned. Maybe it’s time to stop with the alarm-sounding, and get back to the gardening, the cultivation of the kind of little acts of great love which animated the life of the saint we call the Little Flower. Maybe the Benedict stuff needs to be more Benedictine: less concerned with the imperial power, who has it and how that can help or hurt the abstract cause of “religious liberty” (to riff on MacIntyre, “whose liberty, which religion?” Is this just pretext for certain corners of Christendom in a proxy war culture war, or more representative?), and more concerned with the Benedictine care of the people in our orbit: the quiet work of the orphanage, the hospital, the school, the parish church. I get that this is what you claim your Benedict Option is about, but it certainly isn’t what you spend your time blogging about.

So many of my agnostic friends associate Christianity with the pro-life marches and the Supreme Court battles and the Trump-support, and all the rest. And they aren’t interested, because they don’t encounter Christ there. And neither do my ex-evangelical friends who got burned badly in the church, who came out of the closet and were kicked out, cursed out, told they didn’t belong. I think that’s what I mean when I say I looked around as a young culture-warrior and I didn’t see Christ. Because in the Gospels, it isn’t just that Christ eats with the sinners – we’re all sinners! – it’s that he eats with the prostitutes and tax collectors, the kind of sinners that the institutional church excluded.

And so to bring it all full circle, I do not think Christ oversaw the culture war. And I certainly don’t think He fought in it. I think Christ was not sitting with us in the homeschool worldview seminar, he was at the gay nightclub keeping vigil with a lonely addict shooting heroin in a dim-lit bathroom. This is my body, broken for you.

I thank Anthony Barr for this response. I’m going to try to keep mine short. (Wish me luck.)

First, I appreciate the biographical back story. If I had gone through the Christian culture war boot camp experience like Anthony did, I would almost certainly have a different take on things. Not that I would have been a progressive, or a semi-hemi-demi-progressive, but like Anthony, I would have probably developed a weariness with the culture war’s tropes and themes. Moreover, had I grown up in a Christian culture where my elders pumped me full of rhetoric about the critical importance of having Godly political leaders, and then all jumped on the Trump train with pompoms shaking as it left the station, I would have surely been a lot more cynical than I am.

Anthony is clearly intelligent and well-educated, but I can’t help wondering if he’s reacting more in rebellion to his youth than to the ideas that animate the culture war. I’ll get to that in a second, but first, let me say that the kind of culture-warrior formation that Anthony had — the Take Back America For Christ stuff — gives me the hives. I’m with him mostly on that. I didn’t have anything like his direct experiences in my own background, but generally, the idea that “taking back America” is largely a matter of achieving political power, and that making better apologetics arguments is key to that project — well, no, I don’t believe that, and I believe that conservative Christians who have believed that need a serious rethink.

That said, I believe that Anthony makes a common error among progressives in thinking that the only culture warriors are right-wing people who just can’t stop being annoying. The thinking goes something like this:

Progressive: “Let’s invite a drag queen to the library read storybooks promoting gender fluidity to children!”

Conservative: “No, that’s wrong!”

Progressive: “Help, help! I’m being aggressed!”

What I mean is that in almost every case, conservative culture warrior types are fighting a defensive war. It was they who were aggressed against by people who want to push hard against every established boundary, in the name of cultural revolution. To Germany in 1939, the existence of Poland was an intolerable aggression. To use the “culture war” metaphor, being a cultural conservative today feels like living in Warsaw in the summer of 1939, wondering what fresh hell is coming next from the West.

Anyway, the biographical information from Anthony is helpful, because it seems to me that he’s still fighting with his younger self, rebelling against that formation. I get that — I fought a long internal battle with my father over my raising, and it affected how I saw many things — so please don’t think I’m being condescending. For many of us, our twenties, and perhaps beyond, are a period in which we come to a reckoning, one way or another, with what we have been given in our youth. I don’t think Anthony argues in good faith when he posits himself as a conservative (even though he might believe himself to be one). In this blog post from three weeks ago, he discusses his thinking as a supporter of Elizabeth Warren (subtitle: “What exactly do we love about Elizabeth Warren?”)

If you love Elizabeth Warren, a high-octane liberal technocrat, in what sense are you a conservative, especially a cultural conservative? Warren has staked out positions that are devoutly on the far left of the US spectrum on abortion and LGBT rights (which unavoidably affects religious liberty). A critic’s words stand on their own, of course, and if Anthony is right about my own writing, then he’s right no matter what his personal politics. That said, it’s one thing to take “you’ve lost us, man” from a Zoomer who identifies as a conservative, but another thing to receive the same criticism from an Elizabeth Warren supporter. Why? Because despite Anthony saying that this is not a matter of “first principles,” it almost certainly is. I’m not sure why Anthony identifies in any way as a conservative.

This matters because in the text above, if I’m reading him correctly, he’s advising conservatives on a better conservative strategy for accepting our culture war loss. But he seems to believe that the right side won! If it’s a matter of frustration with right-wing dead-enders who still think that worldview camps and the lot are going to turn this war around, well, I share that with Anthony. The old strategies failed, and there is no reason to believe that they are going to find success going forward. But that’s a very different thing than accepting that the winning side was the one with the theologically and morally correct principles, which is how I read Anthony’s remarks above.

He appears to believe that for Christians, there is nothing theologically or morally problematic about homosexuality and transgenderism. He’s a Catholic, and by taking that stand, he aligns himself with fashionable Francis-era Catholics like Father James Martin, SJ, but against the vast weight of the Catholic Church’s authoritative teaching on sexuality and anthropology, derived from Scripture and Tradition. That is no small thing. There is simply no way to reconcile that with any sort of conservatism. It seems that the best way for cultural conservatives to be culturally conservative, in his view, is to cease being conservative precisely on the most neuralgic points of intersection with contemporary culture. That is, at best, unpersuasive.

It seems to me that Anthony has set up a series of manipulative dichotomies. Either we are Walking Collections Of Axiomatic Beliefs, or we are human beings. Either we are head, or we are heart. This is inaccurate and unhelpful. I have written extensively about my own failure a couple of decades ago to understand the head-heart distinction, and how my error led to the collapse of my Catholic faith. I had put far too much emphasis, and faith, on intellection. But the answer is not to make the opposite mistake, and to sacrifice intellection for emotion and intuition. As I see it, the authentic Christian stance toward the world is to lead with a heart that is tempered by the head. The Catholic writer Sophia Feingold has a helpful short post on the importance of teaching kids the art and craft of moral discernment, as distinct from laying out rigid lines beyond which one must never, ever cross.

So, for example: the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love tell the believer that he must love the drag queen reading stories to children, because that drag queen is made in the image of God, however disfigured he has rendered that image. But reason tells the believer that he must not bless, or appear to bless, the drag queen’s beliefs or actions, that in fact you must oppose them as morally wrong, and meaningfully so.

About that: Anthony doesn’t understand why Drag Queen Story Hour is such a big deal to cultural and religious conservatives. To us, it is a grotesque case of sexualizing children, and deforming their moral imaginations. Drag queens don’t sit there and read Richard Scarry classics; they read books that catechize little children in gender ideology. This is not the place to make an argument about that, but I will simply say here that for most of us,, when you have children of your own, the world looks a lot different. Even though I figured this would happen to me when I became a father, nothing prepared me for the instinctive sense of protectiveness I felt when my firstborn actually arrived. I was compelled to imagine the kind of world that he was going to grow up in, and it changed me.

I remember watching the Scorsese gangster movie Goodfellas on cable when my son was one month old, and being excited that I had the whole afternoon to babysit him and watch that movie while my wife was out shopping. That had been my favorite movie of the year when it first came out in the early 1990s, and I was looking forward to re-watching it. But I ended up turning it off about 45 minutes in, because I couldn’t take the violence. What had happened to me? It was the little baby sleeping in my arms. I couldn’t bear watching bodies (of gangsters!) being treated so violently, not as I cradled new life, so vulnerable and precious. This response was quite involuntary, I assure you, but it taught me something about how being responsible for children forced me to abandon some of the positions I had held, and thought unproblematic. Should he marry and have kids, it will almost certainly happen to Anthony Barr. Biography matters in many different ways, including ways that surprise us. As I’ve aged, I find it harder to take life advice from people who haven’t ever had to raise children, and who haven’t ever suffered in a serious way. It’s not because they are bad people, heaven knows, but because there is so much wisdom to be gained through those fundamental human experiences, things that are very difficult to know in any other way. I first came to Dante’s Divine Comedy in a terrible mid-life crisis. The poem meant so much to me because I could read it and say, yes, that’s the way life is over and over — something that I just could not have done had I read it in my twenties or thirties, when much of what the poet has to say would have been merely theoretical to me.

Anyway, reading Anthony’s text above made me think about Sophia Feingold’s point, though from the other side. She writes:

Explaining to your 10-year-old that Uncle Joe is a good man, but has made some mistakes, and we need to love him and be polite to him and not ask awkward questions, but also not take him as an example in everything, only in some things, is complicated; not seeing Uncle Joe is simple. And perhaps the epitome of the easy, simple thing is to join a very close-knit, very strict group, and shun outsiders altogether. Not only do you avoid hard explanations, but you are surrounded by people who are doing the same. You don’t need to make judgment calls, because everything is perfect—at least, everything is inside the hard, fat, straight, bright-red line.

But there are problems with this approach. In the first place, the line tends very quickly to become unjust. Maybe Uncle Joe has a long relationship with the kids, and is a very kind man, and in many ways a good example. Cutting him off entirely so that “the kids don’t get the wrong idea” is quite possibly an offense against charity—towards him and the children. As for those sack-dresses—well, anything looks good on a 2-year-old hunk of chub, but it isn’t actually kind, or necessary, to insist that your 18-year-old dress as if she or he lacks a figure.

In the second place, the hard, fat, straight, bright-red line cannot, by its very nature, separate human beings into sheep and goats, the good and the bad.  Inside the line is actually imperfect, because it is human; outside the line is, for the same reason, full of potential good (tailored dresses! Uncle Joe!).  As a result, children brought up inside eventually grow suspicious of the line. They rediscover Uncle Joe—and his sexual mores; they rediscover tailoring—in the form of skank. And because their parents never modeled discernment, but contented themselves with the hard, fat, straight, bright-red line, their departed children end up like the Victorian lady without her corset: charming figure, no abdominal muscle, very little backbone, and a newly discovered tendency to let herself go.

These are important points. But isn’t the obverse also true? That if you draw that “straight, bright-red line” with your left hand, so to speak, you avoid having to do the hard work of moral discernment. You can just write off Christians who object to Drag Queen Story Hour, or using trans pronouns, as goats who lack compassion, and in so doing excuse yourself from having to take a difficult stand based in what your religion tells you is moral truth.

I confess that I weary of false dichotomies such as “would Jesus be at the worldview seminar, or hanging out in the bathroom at a gay bar?” What kind of question is that? Again, it’s the (self) deceptive division between head and heart. It’s a rhetorical question designed to produce a particular answer. It’s a way of saying, “Thank you, Lord, that I am not like those right-wing Pharisees.” The problem is not that Jesus would not have been keeping vigil with the heroin addict in a gay bar; the problem is that the progressive Christian who makes that sort of claim would never say to the addict, “Repent, choose life.” I can’t read Anthony Barr’s mind or heart, but whenever I hear that sort of line from progressive Christians, I take it as a rationalization for the fact that they actually don’t believe that there is anything wrong with abortion, homosexuality, gender ideology, and the usual culture-war issues — but they can’t admit to themselves that Christianity is overwhelmingly clear on these moral matters, just not in the way they wish it were.

This was me when I wasn’t that much younger than Anthony: “Does God really care what we do with our genitals? Doesn’t He have bigger things to worry about?” This was my way of trying to avoid the undeniable truth, via Scripture and Christian tradition, that God very much cares what we do with our genitals, because sex is not merely flesh rubbing against flesh. My questions were posed sincerely, but it bad faith, because they were my attempt to banish a guilty conscience, and to convince myself that I could have the God of the Bible on my terms, not His.

To wrap up — gosh, I failed to be brief; who could have predicted that? — I agree with Anthony Barr that the old ways of waging the culture war from the conservative Christian side have failed. In fact, the pushback I get from the Christian Right against The Benedict Option is from believers who don’t accept that, and who think that if we only work harder, make better arguments, and win more elections, we can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. This is self-deception, and the longer it goes on, the more difficult it is going to be to recover. Barr doesn’t want conservative Christians simply to admit defeat; he wants us to accept that our conquerors were right. There is nothing surprising about this coming from a liberal Christian; I wonder if the Liz Warren-backing Barr has yet come out to himself as a liberal Christian.

So why keep resisting if we’ve been defeated? Because it is perfectly clear that the victorious Left will not be satisfied until it has compelled all of us to affirm that they are correct. It is still possible to win partial political victories, and we have to keep fighting for them for as long as we can. Conservatives who think Donald Trump can or will turn things around are beyond deluded. But sensible conservatives recognize that having Republicans in power at least delays the Left’s endgame for social and religious conservatives, which is to turn us into total pariahs and push us out of the public square. This, by the way, is why the Chick-fil-A capitulation was so symbolically important in the culture war. It showed that not even winning — more than doubling in size since 2012, despite being the target of merciless progressive smears — is enough.

Christians who understand how the culture war’s terms have changed will grasp that we have moved to the resistance-under-occupation stage of the conflict. They also understand that the Left does not want to live in peace; it will not rest until it grinds our beliefs and our institutions to dust. Those leading the charge don’t simply think we’re wrong; they think we are evil. So, when Barr says:

Maybe it’s time to stop with the alarm-sounding, and get back to the gardening, the cultivation of the kind of little acts of great love which animated the life of the saint we call the Little Flower.

… I think that this is the advice of someone who is tired of hearing the alarm, even though conditions grow more alarming. The other side is poisoning and parching the soil in which we are to raise the next generations. The culture war — at least the parts that grieve Anthony Barr — have to do not so much with what one does with one’s genitals, and whether or not one believes oneself to be male, female, or something in between, but rather with what it means to be made in the image of God, what a human being is for, what sex means, and what Genesis 1:27 means:

So God created mankind in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

Let me end on this appropriation of Barr’s gardening metaphor. He is insisting that we small-o orthodox Christians focus on working our own gardens, but that we don’t pay attention to the fact that the climate is radically changing, such that growing gardens that produce healthy fruit is more and more difficult.

UPDATE: Amazing and encouraging comment from a reader:

I am the mother of a child who decided she was non-binary and wanted to dress in androgynous clothes and asked people at school to call her by a gender nonspecific name. I am incredibly grateful that she attends a Catholic HS and when we found out about this we went to administration and a text was sent out to all of her teachers informing them that she was to only be called by her given name and called by female pronouns. A few of the teachers at school had allowed her to sign her “new” name in any communication they had with her. The school also implemented some other checks and controls, as we did at home, to keep her from getting any positive feedback about her trans-positive inclinations. Over several months she began to move back towards a more feminine style of dress and dropped the extreme image she was attempting to create. My daughter has suffered from anxiety and depression since 8th grade and also has ADHD. She has always been a different kid that found it hard to fit in. That the school did not give into her confusion is worth every penny I have ever paid for Catholic school tuition. With a new Catholic therapist and many open conversations between her, her dad, and myself she has realigned her self image with her biological reality. People continue to say how kind and loving and Christian it is to support young people (in this case a 15 year old girl with a history of mental health issues) by using their preferred pronouns and new names and self professed gender identity. But when it is your child you may feel very different about that. I think it was kind and brave of the school to uphold the truth of her femaleness and not cower and misgender her as a boy, or as a nothing. She was not able to see the truth so we her parents and the administration of the school showed her the truth. That is the Christ-like thing to do.

I once read a story, I think it was fictional, about a tribe in that had a song for each member of the tribe. When a member of the tribe would do something wrong the people of that tribe would sing that person’s song so they could remember who they were in the family of the tribe. My daughter’s Catholic school sang her song to her and helped us bring our daughter back to herself.

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Cosmopolitanism In Europe & The Americas

Really interesting thread by one of Silicon Valley’s most provocative and interesting voices:

Click here to follow Antonio Garcia Martinez on Twitter.

I’ve never been to Latin America — a deficit that I hope to address in the next few years — so I can’t judge AGM’s claim. But I have been to Europe many times, and I know that the distance between the kind of cosmopolitanism that exists in Europe is not the same thing as American cosmopolitanism. In some ways America’s kind of cosmopolitanism is better than Europe’s, other ways it’s worse. But it’s a different thing.

When I’m in European cities, I often wonder why we can’t have nice public spaces like they do. Then I realize that for one, Europeans are willing to pay a lot more in taxes than we Americans are, and for another, the general European ethos is more communitarian (versus libertarian) than the American ethos. (An interesting distinction that I’d love to read comments reflecting on: the extent to which the British ethos shares more with the American one than with the continental European ethos.)

On paper, the Netherlands ought to be a chaotic cesspit of permissive hedonism. The Dutch are far more liberal in their values than Americans are, in general. Yet the Netherlands is a pleasant, orderly country. The Dutch people, for better or for worse, have internalized a sense of order (residual Calvinism?) that allows them to live rather bourgeois lives, despite the fact that they are far more secular and liberal than your average American. Why is that? In the Netherlands, the monarchy is vastly wealthier than the British royal family (the Dutch royals are majority shareholders in Royal Dutch Shell), but they are incomparably more modest in their public profile. That’s the Dutch way.

My favorite example, one I’ve mentioned in this space before, is the time a couple of decades ago when a Dutch friend asked me why America didn’t have sensible drug laws like the Netherlands. I told him that I didn’t think permissive drug laws would work in America as in Holland for the same reason that you never see an all-you-can-eat buffet in the Netherlands, but they’re standard in the US. As a people, we Americans are pretty bad at controlling our consumption. Of course today, American states are busy liberalizing marijuana laws, so I guess we’ll see if I was right.

Anyway, I would love to hear from European and Latin American readers commenting on AGM’s thread. Also Americans, of course. If you are commenting based on experience living in both the US and either one of these regions, please say so.

 

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Prophet Or Alarmist?

On Twitter today, a recent college graduate said, in response to my tweeting this week:

I accept the criticism — to a point, and in any case I’m glad to be able to talk about this stuff. I laughed a bit when I read it, because not one hour earlier, I had been talking to a friend who owns a small business, and who was complaining about the poor work ethic of younger people. He said he puts in 70 to 80 hours each week trying to make the business succeed, and finds it hard to deal with workers in their twenties who gripe about how worn out they are after 30-hour workweeks. My friend is not quite 40, and he’s already in a “kids these days” mode. I’m 52, and that means I’m old enough to laugh at myself when I was in my twenties, and how much I thought I knew, versus how much I actually knew. And, of course, my dad and I had some good laughs over how “wise” he became as I grew older.

I often reflect on how angry I was at him for refusing to sign off on my applying to Georgetown because he did not want me to go into debt for an undergraduate education. He was a child of the Great Depression, and had a great fear of debt. I thought he was mean, and out of touch with the reality of life today. So I went to LSU, and entered the workforce in 1989 without a penny of debt encumbering me. It took about a decade for me to fully appreciate the kindness that my father had done me by holding the line of accumulating student loan debt. (Had I sought a graduate degree, he probably wouldn’t have objected to me taking out a loan.) That story has never been far from the front of my mind when I think about how rashly a younger me dismissed the wisdom of my father. My dad really was out of touch about a lot of things, but he knew a lot more than I gave him credit for. I bet most of you have a similar story.

On the other hand, honesty compels me to say that there really were some things I understood that the generation ahead of me did not. This is not only the case with my dad, but also in journalism. For example, as my career advanced, it frustrated me how some of my older peers did not grasp that the world had changed. I’m thinking in particular about people — good people, mostly — whose mindset was stuck in an earlier decade, and who didn’t understand things that were much clearer to my generation. Of course nobody who reads history can possibly be under the illusion that the same thing won’t happen to them as they age. All of us are bound to become Grampa Simpson one day. And you know, that’s not always a bad thing. Is there any figure quite as ridiculous as an older person trying to stay relevant to younger people?

Now, to Anthony Barr’s points. I’m not sure how many people Barr speaks for, but I assume that he’s correct about a sizable number of younger people who position themselves on the Right, and who find my writing to be a “punchline” for its “hysteria.” It is true that I often write with alarm about culture war topics, and if you don’t share that alarm, or an interest in these topics, it probably strikes you as paranoid and overwrought. I get it. Maybe my alarm is unjustified.

But here’s the thing: what if he’s wrong? What if I see these things more clearly than he and his co-generationalists do?

It’s interesting that Barr references Turgenev’s novel Fathers And Sons, which is about the generational conflict between a generation of Russian liberals and their nihilistic children. The nihilistic children eventually birthed the Bolsheviks — and we see how well that worked out for Russia. If Barr wants to say that the culture war, as it has been framed since the 1960s, is over, and the left has won, well, he won’t get any serious argument from me.

But that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that there are no disagreements in first principles, only in how seriously to take them. He says he prefers to ignore old-school culture-war conflict “in favor of deeper things.” This is confused. It reads like the complaint of someone who doesn’t like my positions, but instead of challenging them philosophically, wants to position my caring so much about them as shallow. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, and here’s why.

When people today say they’re “tired of the culture war,” what they usually mean is that they don’t want to argue about abortion, or, more frequently, they don’t want to argue about LGBT issues. Hey, I understand that! I concede that conservative Christians have lost these battles — LGBT more completely than abortion, certainly, but I will note that even as the numbers of abortions have gone down, support for Roe v. Wade has remained largely unchanged since 1973. 

By now, most people understand the stakes in the abortion fight, but I still frequently find that people — among social and religious conservatives, at least — have only a shallow understanding of what’s really at stake on several fronts in the LGBT battle. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the news media’s reporting over the years has been heavily one-sided, advocacy journalism. But it’s also the case that most people just don’t think about these things, and don’t see why they should have to.

Let me send you back to 2006, and Maggie Gallagher’s great Weekly Standard report on religious liberty and same-sex marriage, based on her interviews at a conference of legal scholars who met to discuss this. She began by discussing the decision of Catholic Charities of Boston to withdraw from adoption services after Massachusetts adopted (by court order) gay marriage. As a matter of law, the agency could not refuse then to adopt kids out to gay couples — but as a matter of conscience, it couldn’t do it. So it left the adoption business. Gallagher wrote then:

This March, then, unexpectedly, a mere two years after the introduction of gay marriage in America, a number of latent concerns about the impact of this innovation on religious freedom ceased to be theoretical. How could Adam and Steve’s marriage possibly hurt anyone else? When religious-right leaders prophesy negative consequences from gay marriage, they are often seen as overwrought. The First Amendment, we are told, will protect religious groups from persecution for their views about marriage.

So who is right? Is the fate of Catholic Charities of Boston an aberration or a sign of things to come?

Thirteen years on, it was clearly a sign of things to come. It still is, as religious-liberty cases work their way through the courts. Religious right leaders weren’t overwrought at all. In fact, in the Gallagher piece, there’s a great interview with Chai Feldblum, the law professor and gay rights advocate, who forthrightly concedes — remember, this was 2006 — that yes, there were conflicts everywhere, that gay rights and religious liberty are a zero-sum contest, and that she could not imagine a single instance in which religious liberty should win out over gay rights.

I well remember when that interview came out, because there she was, one of the top gay-rights legal scholars in the country, vindicating what people like Gallagher and me had been saying, amid denunciations for being hysterical. And you know, it made not one bit of difference. We were still denounced as hysterics. Of course we were correct. But one thing many of us didn’t fully appreciate was the extent to which cultural pressure, not state law and policy, would drive the persecution. If you had said to any of us in 2006 that the day would come when LGBT activists could stigmatize a corporation for donating to the Salvation Army, and that that corporation, despite its massive success, would yield to that intimidation, it would have been hard to believe.

Yet here we are. And here we are with people losing their jobs because they will not say that men and women and women are men.

I’m not sure how old Anthony Barr is, but if he graduated college this past spring, that means he was probably around nine years old when Maggie Gallagher published that landmark article. Like everyone his age — it’s not their fault — he has no feel for how swiftly and how radically things have changed since then. The predictions of 2006-vintage “hysterics” have largely come true, and been exceeded by the trans phenomenon. I’ve spoken to religious liberty lawyers and lobbyists who have said that they honestly did not anticipate how fast transgenderism would become a major challenge. After Obergefell, they expected to have a few years before the trans fights ramped up. In fact, it was only a matter of months.

For people of Barr’s generation to say that us old folks are hysterical about these issues is like listening to a middle-aged person say they don’t know why people get so upset about global warming, because as far as they can tell, things aren’t any hotter now than when they were kids. As a matter of fact, I do believe that global warming is happening, and though I find some global warming activists to be, well, hysterical, I have a much higher tolerance for their rhetoric than many conservatives do. Why? Because if they’re right, then we’re foolish to sit back with a “What, me worry?” attitude, and to say that we prefer to focus on “deeper things.”

I have in the past praised the stance of the Dark Mountain movement, which accepts that global warming is happening, but also accepts that at this point, humankind is not capable of making the kinds of radical changes needed to stop it … so the most productive thing to do is to figure out how to adapt. I think traditional Christians are in a similar — not exactly alike, but similar — situation regarding the culture wars around LGBT. We are still in a position when we can win certain First Amendment legal battles, though the purely cultural aspect of the culture war is going to be a much harder slog. There is no reason to give up the resistance, though there is good reason to give up certain forms of resistance. The kinds of battles that right-wing culture warriors were fighting in 2006 are not the kinds of battles that they are, or should be, fighting in 2019. But that’s a different post.

Again, I get it: people of Barr’s generation see many things very differently. But if we’re talking about what Barr terms “the young conservative crowd,” then I would remind them that to be a conservative requires a certain high respect for the wisdom of the past, and a natural skepticism towards moral and cultural innovation. That’s not to say that the past is always right, and that innovation is always wrong. Rather, it’s to say simply that a conservative is not the same thing as a right-wing progressive. Moreover, if being a conservative means anything, it means that when you find yourself not caring about things that motivate the older generations, you should interrogate your own understanding as well as that of the older generation. Progressives assume by definition that newer is better; conservatives ought to take the opposite approach.

Maybe it’s just my generation (Gen X) speaking, but the thing that many of us reacted negatively to about the Boomers is their sense that their generation had discovered the truth about everything, and that we all ought to fall down before their superior wisdom. The narcissism of that generation was off-putting, but it was of a piece with the youth-worship of American culture. To be clear, no generation has a monopoly on truth. Every generation will be wrong about some things, and right about others. I would simply say that as a young conservative, if you find yourself not caring about the same things that older conservatives do, your first move should be to ask if you’ve got that right.

I’m on record in this space complaining that older Reagan-era conservatives are too often stuck in nostalgia for that era’s framing of our problems, and its solutions, and are failing to apply conservative first principles to solving the different problems of our era. I hope that I’ve approached that criticism with some epistemic humility, and I hope that when I and other conservatives of my generation are criticized by younger ones, that we can receive it with epistemic humility. That said, young conservatives should not be lazy about criticizing their elders, and simply assume that because they don’t feel that the things older conservative care about are important, that they are not, in fact, important.

Pro-tip: here are Russell Kirk’s Ten Conservative Principles. If you cannot affirm most of them, then you may not be a conservative after all.

Barr brought up Chick-fil-A and pronouns as an example of Gen X and Boomer-con hysteria. Here, in short, is why young conservatives ought to care about these things.

Religious liberty is important to defend in law. I don’t know Anthony Barr personally, but it sounds from his tweet like he has bought the progressive narrative that says “culture warriors” are only right-wing people. Progressives, especially in the media, assume that anybody who objects to what they want is somehow aggressing against them. In fact, it is they who aggress against us. The reason LGBT issues remain so contested is because progressive activists and litigants keep pushing against us, expanding gay rights at the expense of religious liberty. The main battle lines right now are between religious institutions (e.g., schools) and activists, and professional licensing. As a matter of both law and culture, conservatives — even conservatives who consider themselves pro-LGBT — ought to be defending the right of religious people to be left alone, and to participate in the public square without shame or harassment. Even if you are not personally religious, as a conservative, you ought to recognize the importance of religion to communal life, and defend it, even when you think religious people are wrong. Which brings us to…

Socially conservative beliefs are important to defend in culture. I am a social, religious, and cultural conservative, but I can recognize that if society consisted solely of people like me, it would quickly grow stifling and stagnant. There must be a place for liberals — and unbelievers — to be heard and respected in any healthy society. As a general rule, I am not one for heretic-hunting. Young conservatives who don’t agree with us older ones on LGBT matters ought to still protect our ability to be heard, if only because it’s important for any society to listen to its critics. Besides, do conservatives want to live in an ideologically uniform and monolithic society? I think not. Russell Kirk has said that traditional conservatives “feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems.” If conservatism means anything, my young friends, it means defending older institutions and modes of life from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism prescribed by modern progressivism. For example, you don’t have to like the Latin mass to defend its existence and practice.

Sex and gender matter a lot more than you might think. Earlier today — I think this is what sparked Barr’s tweets — I aired sharp criticism of the leading Southern Baptist pastor J.D. Greear for his policy of “pronoun hospitality.” That is, Greear said that he has decided to call transgender people by the pronouns they prefer, even though as a theological and moral conservative, he doesn’t believe that men become women (and vice versa) only by an act of the will. I agree with Greear that one should not make a point to insult trans people gratuitously, but as I wrote, I think he takes it much farther than he should, and concedes ground that he shouldn’t concede. He’s trying to be polite and pastoral, but in this case, manners is a matter of metaphysics and morals. 

Words are unavoidably connected to reality. The word must be grounded in the truth. This is not uniformly the case. In my earlier post, I talked about an older gentleman in my town, who insisted on being addressed as “Colonel,” even though it was probably the case that he had never reached that rank. He was a fabulist, but calling him Colonel was a courtesy that everybody could afford. This is not the case in the matter of trans folk; if it were no big deal, they would not be so insistent on pronoun usage. In fact, they understand better than the merely courteous why words matter so much. Words cannot make a lie true, but words are how we conceptualize reality, and they can either help us see that reality more clearly, or obscure it from our vision. This is why propaganda is so dangerous.

Ultimately, we are talking about metaphysics and anthropology. On the metaphysical point, traditional conservatism has always recognized — philosophically, theologically, or both — that there is a transcendent hierarchy embedded in reality, and that the purpose of philosophizing and theologizing, as well as worshiping, is to draw ourselves into a more harmonious relationship with the things that are. Is human nature given, or is it entirely plastic? Which parts of it are given, and which parts are we free to make over according to our desires?

There is hardly a more profound question. The Soviet system, perhaps the cruelest tyranny that ever existed, was based in part on the idea that there was no such thing as human nature, that what we call “man” is a creature determined by social forces. Change society, and you can mold man into anything you want him to be. At its worst, this led to the horrors of the Romanian experimental concentration camp at Pitesti. Even Solzhenitsyn said this camp was the most barbaric entity in the entire world. The entire purpose of the camp was to destroy the human personality, and to remold it into the perfect communist man.

The point is not that progressives are building Pitesti in America. The point is that at the heart of these issues about sexuality and gender are some core principles about the relationship of the body to the metaphysical order, and what it means to be a human being. If young conservatives like Anthony Barr don’t recognize that, then they are confused about first principles. To give LGBT activists and progressive allies what they want — total affirmation, even beyond legal rights — is to affirm that they are correct about the body, and about human nature. Is this something that conservatives are willing to do?

It should not be something that religious conservatives are willing to do. To be a Christian means that you believe, as the Bible teaches, that man is made in the image of God. This is at the root of human dignity. This necessarily means that human nature is given. It is not created by us; it is created by God, and given to us. We either receive it, or we don’t. As Christians, we cannot believe that we have permission to create ourselves in our own desired image. Gender complementarity is written into the nature of human beings. This is the template of our given reality. And until the day before yesterday, historically speaking, Scripture and Christian tradition have been very clear about the meaning of sexuality. Sex has meaning beyond the sum total of how we feel about it. Sex is not simply expressive; it is a participation in the cosmic order. If that sounds loopy to you, you haven’t thought about it hard enough. As I wrote in the most popular piece I ever did for TAC, an essay called “Sex After Christianity”:

[Cultural critic and sociologist Philip] Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.

You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).

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.

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.

It would be absurd to claim that Christian civilization ever achieved a golden age of social harmony and sexual bliss. It is easy to find eras in Christian history when church authorities were obsessed with sexual purity. But as Rieff recognizes, Christianity did establish a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways.

What makes our own era different from the past, says Rieff, is that we have ceased to believe in the Christian cultural framework, yet we have made it impossible to believe in any other that does what culture must do: restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes.

Rather, in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions.

How this came to be is a complicated story involving the rise of humanism, the advent of the Enlightenment, and the coming of modernity. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his magisterial religious and cultural history A Secular Age, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.

I want to repeat Charles Taylor’s line:

“The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).”

Can one be a religiously-believing conservative and say that the cosmos lacks meaning? If not, then from what does the cosmos derive meaning? The answer, of course, is from God. But what is God like? If we are made in the image of God, what does that entail? The Bible, and sacred tradition, has answers. You may find the answers unsuitable or boring, or inconvenient for your aspirations to middle-class success in post-Christian America, but the answers are there, and they don’t cease to be truthful because you don’t like them.

About the “hysteria” of people like me regarding these topics, I would point out that from an orthodox Christian point of view, we are living through what C.S. Lewis called “the abolition of man.” A couple of days ago, I was sorting through transcripts of the interviews I’ve done for my upcoming book, and I ran across a startling quote from an older Baptist man in Russia. Talking about the decline of faith in postcommunist Russia, he said that the materialism coming in from the West has done more to destroy religious belief than even the Soviets. Think about that. Geriatric hysterics like me observe the collapse of Christian faith within our civilization, and we see the role that social and cultural change plays in it. Within living memory, the faith has all but disappeared in much of Europe, and we in America are on the same track. I often get comments in this space from people who can’t understand why this bothers me, because according to statistics, people are thriving more today than ever. And everybody is so nice now!

Well, I follow a God who said that it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world, but to lose his soul. If you take Christianity seriously as a description of the Things That Are, as distinct from a mere philosophy of life, or psychologically comforting rituals, then you see the decline and fall of the Christian faith as a civilizational catastrophe with eternal consequences.

Not everybody is a Christian. Not everybody is a conservative. Not everybody is a Christian conservative. But if you do identify as a Christian conservative, and you fail to see how profound this crisis is, then I would say: grow up.

Finally, on the question of being too agitated by the times, let me point you to this interview that journalist Roberto Suro did with PBS for a Frontline documentary a couple of decades ago about John Paul II. Suro covered his papacy for The New York Times and Time magazine. Here’s the relevant segment:

At the end of the day, when you look at this extraordinary life and you see all that he’s accomplished, all the lives he’s touched, the nations whose history he’s changed, the way he’s become such a powerful figure in our culture, in all of modern culture–among believers and not–taking all of that into account, you’re left with one very disturbing and difficult question. On the one hand, the Pope can seem this lonely, pessimistic figure–a man who only sees the dark side of modernity, a man obsessed with the evils of the twentieth century, a man convinced that humankind has lost its way. A man so dark, so despairing, that he loses his audiences. That would make him a tragic figure, certainly.

On the other hand, you have to ask, is he a prophet? Did he come here with a message? Did he see something that many of us are missing? In that case, the tragedy is ours.

You can tell the difference between Pope John Paul II and me pretty easily. He was a great saint; I’m just a middle-aged semi-pious slob who bites his nails. Still, don’t miss the point I’m making. In light of Barr’s comments, consider: What is the difference between a prophet and a hysterical alarmist? How would you know?

The post Prophet Or Alarmist? appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Top Pastor’s Culture War Surrender

A reader — a former Evangelical, but still Protestant Christian — passes along a surprising thing that J.D. Greear, pastor and president of the Southern Baptist Convention — said. The reader, who sends me things from time to time, writes (I’ve slightly edited the text of his letter):

I said in an email the other day that I thought the SBC would schism soon because the urban ones would follow the culture. Well, I think that day may be closer than I imagined. I mean, read the transcript:

Greear said that while there is room for disagreement and Christians should disagree charitably, he sees it as a hospitable courtesy to refer to transgender people by their chosen pronouns, despite knowing that their sex does not match their descriptors.

“There is a spectrum of generosity of spirit vs. telling truth,” Greear wrote in the podcast’s description. “I tend toward generosity of spirit.”

The reader has a very strong view of this. He described this as “mealy-mouthed,” and went on:

From a Sunday School teacher who works at a newspaper or community college during the week, it might be forgivable. Some men are stronger than others. But this guy is supposed to be a leader! Not just a pastor of a megachurch, but the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination by far in the U.S. Really and truly, if the SBC goes down, theologically orthodox Christians across America are in deep trouble.

More:

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. …

4) I looked at Greear’s website. We shouldn’t be surprised at his stance. What I saw looked to me like a whole lot of self-help, inspirational, moralistic therapeutic deism. Jesus is mentioned a lot of course, but sort of as a life coach. Now to be fair, I have not read his books, only summaries. But they seemed all too American, all too consumer culture, all too middle class. I realize that he would probably be utterly bewildered at such a criticism, but the Great Story of Salvation was nowhere to be seen. It looks like fitting God and Christianity into categories suitable for middle class modern life.

5) Raleigh, NC. Like I said, as Evangelicals enter the professional class, they will adopt their values. Raleigh is exactly the sort of urbane post-Southern city I am thinking of here. … Keep your eye on the major urban centers of the South and their suburban churches. I think the Evangelicals in Atlanta, Nashville, and most of North Carolina’s cities are ripe for the plucking by the cultural left. Charlotte, Fort Worth, and OKC are a little bit behind, but I think they will end up in the same place. Places like Shreveport, Lubbock, Mobile still seem relatively safe for now, but don’t count on that lasting. I can’t speak to Baton Rouge, but where there are Evangelicals getting college educations and working in growing white collar professions, they will succumb to the values of the elite very quickly. It isn’t just sociological; their empty ego-centered MTD theology of Jesus-as-life-coach has prepared the ground well.

What do you think? I don’t know J.D. Greear, but the few times I’ve seen his name in the news, I’ve been impressed with him. But I have to say that the reader is generally right about the capitulation on pronouns. It’s discouraging to see a Virginia schoolteacher lose his job because he wouldn’t use the preferred pronoun (he just called the trans kid by the kid’s name), but a major Evangelical leader yield to be nice. I can understand somebody like a teacher, or an ordinary employee at an organization, choosing to yield on this issue in the workplace because they have kids to feed. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I can understand it. But who, exactly, is going to fire the president of the Southern Baptist Convention for not getting with the progressive program on pronouns? As with the Chick-fil-A capitulation earlier this week, it was conservative Christians operating from a position of strength, but surrendering anyway.

I see no reason for us not to take Pastor Greear at his word that he uses preferred pronouns out of “generosity of spirit,” even at the expense of truth. That’s something that makes intuitive sense to me. When I was a kid, there was an older man who lived in our town who insisted that people address him as “Colonel.” I recall that nobody believed that he had actually been a colonel, but everybody used his preferred honorific out of courtesy to him, and because what did it hurt? Let the old man have his fantasy.

But then, as I said, nobody was hurt by this courtesy. As this blog’s reader points out, the ideology that compels us to use “preferred pronouns” is one that leads to the mutilation of young bodies and the ruin of young lives. (Read Madeleine Kearns’s powerful piece on the poor Texas boy caught in the middle of a trans drama with his divorced parents.)

It is causing people who don’t conform to lose their jobs. I interviewed this past summer, for my book project, a senior physician who emigrated to America from the Soviet bloc, and who talked about the transgender issue in American medicine in terms appropriate to Soviet-style political mandates. He is a practicing Christian, and said that the issue of “health” in these matters is entirely determined by cultural politics. He only talked to me after I promised I wouldn’t use his name. He told me the kinds of precautions he takes on social media, and in every aspect of his public-facing life, so he won’t be found out as someone who questions transgenderism, and the rest of the progressive project. I swear, it was like talking to a doctor trying to keep the secret police off his back — but this is America.

If the Democratic Party has its way, and passes the Equality Act — it passed the House this year, but the GOP Senate didn’t take it up — then the use of preferred pronouns will become a federal civil rights mandate.

So, look, I understand the desire for a pastor to be gracious to people he’s trying to evangelize, and not to enter into conversations with them from an adversarial position. But the pronoun issue is not merely a matter of courtesy. It means something substantively. The use of language creates social realities. Read your Orwell: what we say and how we say it frames the way we perceive and interpret the world. Progressives understand this well, which is why they insist on preferred pronoun usage. By doing so, they are creating “facts on the ground.” When religious and cultural leaders concede this territory for the sake of being nice, they surrender more ground than they realize. They are laying down arms in the face of the ideological colonization of our collective moral imagination.

When Solzhenitsyn told the Soviet people “live not by lies,” he was not telling them to refuse to humor an eccentric old man who wants people to think he was a military officer. He was telling them to refuse in every way the fictions that support the malignant Soviet system, which was built of lies, and survived because everybody was too afraid to say, “This is a lie, and I’m not going to participate in it.” Once more, I can see where a school bus driver, or a car salesman, or an administrative assistant, would decide that he or she couldn’t risk losing a job over this, because they had mouths to feed at home. I don’t like it, but I can understand it.

But J.D. Greear has nothing to worry about on the employment front — and his example will lead, or mislead, many, in consequential ways. Leaders lead. Mom and Dad may learn from their conservative pastor that they should use preferred pronouns, even though these pronouns are based on an untruth, but their kids will not make that distinction. The kids, having grown up in a world where everybody uses preferred pronouns, are naturally going to assume that these words correspond to reality. The use of language will train minds to believe that gender really is fluid, and corresponds to biology only incidentally. And eventually, no one will remember a time when people believed anything other than the lie.

Peter Vlaming, a Virginia schoolteacher and Christian, was fired for taking a stance that the president of the Southern Baptist Convention refuses to take, because he judges it discourteous. Vlaming, the sole provider for his wife and their four kids, said at the 2018 school board hearing in which he was dismissed:

“Even higher than my family ranks my faith.”

And then, after he was sacked:

“There are some hills that are worth dying on.”

Which one of these men — Greear or Vlaming — is the better representative of Christianity in the public square? If you are a Christian facing job loss over pronouns, who would offer wiser counsel: an unemployed Virginia schoolteacher, or the president of the Southern Baptist Convention?

UPDATE: In that podcast, Greear advises his listeners to read two books on transgender: Andrew T. Walker’s, and Ryan T. Anderson’s. Both of those writers are friends of mine, and both are quite conservative on gender issues. Greear cites Walker a couple of times as his guide on the issue. Walker has written:

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. 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.

If you read Walker’s long article about it, it’s full of practical wisdom for navigating these situations. If you only hear Greear’s podcast, you might think that his stance is the same as Walker’s. I don’t think that’s true. Walker draws much narrower boundaries for pronoun usage. Greear’s stance, judging by his podcast comments, is to deflect in every case to using the trans person’s pronoun, even though he personally believes that the trans person is not, in reality, the gender he or she claims to be.

For Greear, it’s not an issue of metaphysical or theological truth; it’s about strategy. He says, “Is that the battlefront you want to choose?”

Walker says in his piece that one should not lead with contradicting a trans church visitor’s gender status, but only confront them if they want to be involved in the life of the church. That makes sense to me, prudentially. It sounds, though, like Greear goes further, adopting that context-specific approach to his entire relationship with trans folks.

Greear, like Walker, says that Christians can disagree in good conscience over how to handle this matter. Greear, in the podcast, says, “You need to do what your conscience allows you to do.” The problem with that, as I said above, is that language is a teacher. 

To be clear, I don’t think J.D. Greear is a liberal about this stuff. No liberal would recommend Andrew T. Walker and Ryan T. Anderson on the subject of transgenderism! But I think in his effort to be pastoral, he concedes ground that he should not concede. It’s one thing to use preferred pronouns in very specific situations; it’s another to use them as a general practice. Whether or not he realizes it, Pastor Greear is undermining his own professed convictions on gender and biology.

My bottom line: I think Greear’s heart is in the right place here, but he’s wrong, and a pastor of his authority being wrong is consequential.

UPDATE.2: Reader Harold Steiner:

This is one of those situations where I can kind of understand where he’s coming from. Partly. Somewhat.

When I listen to people who are actually in the evangelism field talk about their interactions with transgender people, they say that they use the preferred pronouns because it keeps the communication channels open. Refusing to use their pronouns basically shuts down the conversation and any chance of actually sharing the gospel or trying to change their worldview.

Which makes sense to me, but appears to me as the proverbial camel’s nose in the tent. It is surrendering a tremendous point of contention for the sake of appeasing people who are not just being unreasonable, but who take every concession as grounds for pushing further. Everyone loves to use Acts 17 to say, “Even Paul knows how to make wise use of an opposing worldview,” but this seems very different.

Reader Robert:

Just as bad (or worse): Like Francis’ mealy-mouthed pastoral statements (“Who am I to judge?”), this leaves his flock exposed.

“This isn’t bigotry,” they’ll say. “We just have a philosophical difference of opinion.”

HR’s response: “Your own leaders don’t agree with you. You’re obviously just a bigot. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

UPDATE.3: Ryan Booth, a Southern Baptist layman:

I was really disappointed to see this from Greear.

As it happens, I basically agree with him on the substance of what he said. As you know, Rod, I welcomed a temporarily homeless transgender couple (a man and a F to M transperson) into my home in the wake of the 2016 flood, and I certainly used “he” and “him” in their presence, as I was specifically trying to be hospitable.

But just because I agree with Greear on the actual issue absolutely does not mean that this was a good thing for him to say. It comes off as capitulating to our sinful culture, it unnecessarily creates division in the SBC, and it fuels the false narrative that our denomination is going liberal.

Greear’s job as SBC President isn’t to create unnecessary confusion and division in our denomination. Again, I am really disappointed that he said this.

UPDATE.4: One of Greear’s congregation defends his preaching:

I do go to the Summit with my wife. We have been there before JD was the pastor. If anyone thinks the Gospel isn’t preached with passion and clarity, they simply don’t know what they are talking about. JD Greear is as good a communicator of the Bible and the Gospel of Christ as anyone I’ve ever heard (and I listen to David Jeremiah, Ravi Zacharias, Matt Chandler, Bill Johnson, John Piper, etc).

I may not agree with JD on this issue, but a “self help” church is a comment based in ignorance. I’ve probably listened to…well…18 years of Sundays. There is no pastor I’ve ever heard that I would rather a believer or non-believer hear for salvation and christian growth than JD Greear.

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What To Do When The Chikin Is Chicken?

Nope, nope, nope:

I picked up the phone & called @DanCathy. Dan was very clear that they have not bowed down to anyone’s demands. They will continue to support whoever they want to. They haven’t changed who they are or what they believe. @ChickfilA remains committed to Christian values. 2/3

— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) November 21, 2019

I believe Franklin Graham is being played here. He should have asked Dan Cathy if, in its future charitable giving, Chick-fil-A has ruled out donating to faith-based organizations that adhere to traditional Christian teaching on LGBT issues. That’s the one question that could clear the air. If he says “no, we have not ruled that out,” then they can accurately said not to have bowed down to the left’s demands. If he says, “yes, we have ruled that out,” then of course they caved.

Until and unless Chick-fil-A answers that question clearly, they should not be given exoneration on this question by Christian leaders.

Jake Meador has a thought-provoking piece about the meaning to intra-conservative politics of Chick-fil-A’s surrender. Excerpts:

Because Chick-fil-A offers a superior product, so the story goes, it is immune to cultural pressures. The market is free and fair. Rod Dreher, no fusionist himself, recently described this narrative: “Quality work and a good product will always win out, even over left-wing prejudice. It was possible to look at Chick-fil-A and draw that conclusion.” This is conservative fusionist theory applied to Chick-fil-A: The soft power of cultural norms is marginally important at best. In America’s pluralist society, conservative Christians are best served by arguing for viewpoint neutrality while aligning themselves with the forces of economic progress, thus carving out a space for themselves alongside progressive businesses. When they do that well, they can thrive and be insulated from woke cultural forces.

Events this week disproved that, says Meador. Why, he asks, did Chick-fil-A yield, even though it was not under meaningful economic pressure to do so (indeed, Chick-fil-A has become America’s third-richest fast food chain, despite all the absurd hatred from progressives)? Meador says it has to do with the fact that progressives are no longer liberal, in the “tolerance for pluralism” sense, and don’t apologize for it. He writes:

I suspect that this is because progressives, unlike conservatives, are willing to say, “We know what the good life is and what human beings ought to be.” And this is so powerful that even businesses that seemingly have no commercial need to do so, like Chick-fil-A, feel pressure to give ground to that vision of the good. The conservative fusionists are wrong about how societies work. Pluralistic societies and neutral markets without a shared vision of the good aren’t natural; human beings need shared loves and a coherent narrative about human identity and common life. That is what the nation’s progressives are offering (however imperfectly) in their story of expressive individualism and LGBTQ+ rights. They know what they believe about human identity. And they know that society ought to reflect that ideal.

Read it all. I agree with Meador in theory, but I’m not sure what Meador wants Christian conservatives to do about it, though. This goes back to the question at the heart of the French-Ahmari debate: are Christians better served by fighting for their rights within liberalism, using liberal means, or should they abandon liberalism for an illiberal strategy, as progressives have done?

David French, a fusionist, can speak definitively about how to defend conservative Christian interests within liberalism. What do you do, though, when liberal values are in decline, and you don’t have a negotiating partner? An academic friend was telling me recently that among his conservative Christian colleagues, there’s still a strong sense that if only we make better arguments, in more prominent places, we can turn this thing around. My friend said that his colleagues don’t seem to understand how emotionally hysterical the situation is within institutions.

For example, I wrote in an update to earlier post today that at Syracuse University, whose campus has been rocked by racist threats, has determined that the threats were probably a hoax … but the school president nevertheless agreed to protesters’ demands for a million-dollar investment in “diversity” classes, and mandatory political education for faculty and staff. This is par for the course these days. This is exactly what you would expect of an institution that is terrified of progressives, so much so that it won’t defend itself when falsely accused. This is the kind of thing we see over and over in all kinds of institutions — including, alas, Chick-fil-A. The idea that by giving to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Salvation Army, it was funding “hate,” is the kind of bullsh*t smear that the left excels at these days. And you know what? It works.

What is the alternative for us on the right? Let’s say we decided to do exactly as the left is doing. Do you really want to harass businesses that donate to LGBT causes until they stop? I don’t, and you’re not going to be able to find many conservatives who do. It’s not a matter of cowardice; it’s a matter of not wanting to live in such a puritanical, emotionally fraught society. It’s not necessarily the case that the left believes in its view of human flourishing more strongly than conservative Christians do. It’s that the view of human flourishing — or at least political flourishing — that many conservative Christians hold allows for them to be tolerant of certain kinds of sin, for the sake of the greater good. Not everything that is sinful should be illegal, or should even necessarily be the target of public vilification.

This, of course, is not at all the way the progressives (as distinct from old-fashioned liberals) see it. The Social Justice Warriors really are a cult. I can’t say enough good things about Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government, a monumental history of the Bolshevik Revolution. Reading it, and getting into the mindset of the Bolsheviks, has helped me understand our own SJWs, and why they are so dangerous. Slezkine describes the Bolsheviks as an apocalyptic millenarian cult — a left-wing political version of religious cults of the past. Though they did not have God, they shared with Christian cults a radical sense of Good and Evil, and the belief that if only the Good severely punish the Evil, then peace and justice will reign. They — these cults, including the Bolsheviks — believed that the line between Good and Evil ran between them and everyone outside the cult, and that to fail to exact strict and severe punishment on ideological deviants was to fail God (or the Revolution). It is very hard for more moderate, liberal-minded people (whether or the left or the right) to stop these fanatics, because they cannot be reasoned with. They see reasoning as a temptation to compromise with evil. The reason the Bolsheviks succeeded in marginalizing the other leftist and revolutionary parties is that they were the most ruthless. They understood the weakness of their opponents — not just the decaying Tsarist order, but also the liberals who would replace autocracy — and hammered-and-sickled them to death. Writes Slezkine:

“The revolutionaries were going to prevail because of the sheer power of their hatred. It cleansed the soul and swelled like the flood of the real day.” [“real day” means here “Judgment Day,” or the “Day of the Lord”. — RD]

You might wonder: What kind of person walks around obsessed with the fact that a chicken restaurant gives money to the Salvation Army, and reads that as a manifestation of evil? The answer is: the kind of people who eventually win, in large part because they can count on a sympathetic media, and an elite class that is either with them, or at least afraid to oppose them.

Do conservatives, Christian or otherwise, want to become that kind of fanatic? I don’t, and you probably don’t either. But we had better be willing to become some kind of fanatics in defense of old-fashioned liberal values — free speech, free assembly, tolerance of difference, etc. — or we will lose them.

Yet Jake Meador — like, I think, Sohrab Ahmari — sees the problem with this. Defending liberalism as a guarantor of the neutral public square is not the kind of cause that fires people up. The SJWs don’t want a neutral public square. They don’t want a public square where they can propose their own version of human flourishing, and let people decide which is more appealing. They want a public square purified of evildoers. Often they use the language of liberals (e.g., “equality”) to describe what they seek, but make no mistake, this is not liberalism as we have long understood it. There is nothing liberal about standing outside a university building screaming and cursing and trying to prevent people from going in to hear an author speak, as happened at UC Berkeley last night.

To recap: though a man of conservative religious, cultural, and political beliefs, I do not want to live in the right-wing version of the coercive left-wing order advocated by the SJWs. I do not want to fight for such an order, because I believe it would be unjust. You will not find me joining a mob surrounding a university building to prevent people from going to hear a left-wing speaker, and not because I’m too cucked, or whatever, to take that stand. I believe that outside of extraordinary circumstances, justice is served by allowing free people to listen to a freely delivered speech. A right-wing mob trying to shut down that talk is not preferable to a left-wing mob doing so.

But, as the history of Spain in the 1930s shows, it is possible for a country to get to a point where there is no liberalism to defend, and one has to choose between which extreme — right or left — with which one will align. It may come to that here. I hope not, but who knows?

In the meantime, I’m at a genuine loss for how to strategize outside the liberal order. This is a major conceptual challenge we on the post-fusionist right have yet to meet. It’s why Patrick Deneen wrote the only realistic conclusion he could to Why Liberalism Failed, but it was still unsatisfying. It’s why Sohrab Ahmari is mostly correct in his diagnosis of the maladies of liberalism, including right-wing liberalism, but he has no plausible solution. We are all so deeply formed by liberalism’s principles that we can scarcely imagine a world outside of it. The SJWs succeed because they make their ideology sound like a distillation of liberalism — like the logical next step, or, as Communist propaganda of the 1930s falsely described their wicked creed, “Liberalism in a hurry.”

That’s why to oppose them appears to a lot of people to be the same as opposing diversity, inclusion, and equality. It’s Stalinist what progressives, and their fellow travelers in the media, have done with language, but this is the world we live in. It’s a world in which they can successfully paint the Salvation Army as a conspiracy of hatemongers. They get away with this in part because the progressives build on what Americans have already come to believe about human identity. How conservative Christians compete with this, I honestly don’t know. We can’t even get many of our own people to understand their own faith, and the implications of a Christian anthropology. It’s like I say to the Catholic integralists: before you can hope to create an integrated Catholic political order, you’d better first convince Catholics to integrate their own lives with the teachings of the Church. Good luck with that.

And look, all of us trad-minded Christians need the same “luck,” as even within our own ecclesial polities, there is a conspicuous lack of, to use Meador’s words, “shared loves and a coherent narrative about human identity and common life.” In the matter of Chick-fil-A, progressives won because they have built on the Sexual Revolution’s narrative that sexual desire is at the center of human identity and dignity. And they have built on the widespread conviction in American culture that religion is a strictly private matter. Again: how would an orthodox Christian counternarrative be effectively incarnated today, in this post-Christian, individualist culture? I’m having a real hard time thinking this one through.

The post What To Do When The Chikin Is Chicken? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Watch The Intellectuals

Hundreds of “anti-hate” protesters took to the UC Berkeley campus tonight to protest Ann Coulter’s speech, and to try to prevent people from going in to hear her. Look at this:

Left-wing protesters at @UCBerkeley form a human wall with linked arms to block others from entering the @AnnCoulter speech earlier tonight. pic.twitter.com/938ZWCP8b7

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) November 21, 2019

Yes, it’s Berkeley, but you know as well as I do that if right-wingers were forming a human wall preventing people from going to hear a prominent left-wing speaker, it would be on all the national news outlets, and we would be talking about the Coming Crisis Of Fascism. But as it is, this is just another day in progressive America.

Seriously, what if a mob of white people at a major American university banded together to prevent people of color and their allies from going into a hall to hear Ta-Nehisi Coates speak? How do you think our media would frame it? They would report the hell out of it, and they should report the hell out of it, because a mob preventing anybody from going to hear someone speak is un-American, and a serious violation of our traditions. This should not happen in America, and especially not at a university.

But like I said: just another day in progressive America.

Here police have to escort students in who just want to hear a campus speaker. Otherwise, they might be beaten up by the mob of peace-loving progressives:

Attendees are escorted by police into Wheeler Hall. T-minus 20 minutes until the event officially starts! #CoulterProtest pic.twitter.com/iLhc99Ptwm

— Anjali Shrivastava (@anjalii_shrivas) November 21, 2019

Look — but better not play this at work. The enraged mob chants, “F–k Ann Coulter!”

Ann Coulter entering Wheeler Hall with escorts

Also: two helicopters above Berkeley pic.twitter.com/aYcBJjP7TP

— Марк (@not_mapk) November 21, 2019

What is it going to take to fight this? It’s so exasperating how little people in this country care about the fact that left-wing mobs are taking our liberties from us, and our political leaders — including Donald Trump — are doing nothing about it. Barely even talking about it. I honestly don’t get it. We should not be living in a country where people who want to go hear a speaker have to be protected by police simply to get into the hall. You know what this looks like?

That’s a History Channel screenshot of an image of the Little Rock 9, black high schoolers who, in order to exercise their constitutional right to go to class, had to be accompanied by, and protected from the racist mob by, US soldiers. It was a disgrace to this country — a different sort of disgrace, because it had to do with race hatred, but nevertheless a similar disgrace to what happens at Berkeley, in that a fanatical mob attempts to stop free people from going to hear a speaker of whom they disapprove.

We know that the US media do not care about things like this. Look at how quickly they sided with the mob against the Covington Catholic boys, simply because the boys were wearing MAGA hats, and (therefore) fit the left-wing narrative. But what about the rest of us? Why don’t the rest of us care? I’m not interested in hearing Ann Coulter speak, but I am very, very much interested in fighting the mob culture that seeks to shut down speakers like Ann Coulter, in part by howling curses at, and attempting to humiliate, Americans who are interested in what she has to say.

If you think this is going to stay in Berkeley, you’re mistaken. This mob action might not spread to places outside of the coasts, but here’s what’s going to happen: those young people who join the mobs, they are going to graduate and move into the institutions of American life. They are going to carry their militant illiberalism, including their contempt for free speech and open discourse, into those institutions, and are going to do their damnedest to institutionalize them. One thing I have learned from the past few months spent studying Soviet-bloc communism: watch the intellectual class. It is a very big mistake to think that what they say and do only matters in the shadow of the ivory tower. They are the ones who produce the ideas that are eventually spread through society. If you don’t care about this stuff when it happens now, on campuses, you had better prepare yourself to be made to care later, when graduates of these campuses are setting corporate policy, or serving as gatekeepers to the institutions you want your “deplorable” kids to get into. This is not a joke.

UPDATE: More “Watch The Intellectuals” news, this time from Syracuse University, which has been going through a spasm of alleged racist threats. Read on:

Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud told the university’s student senate on Wednesday that the latest episode of racist activity on campus was likely fake, following protests and criticism from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

“It was apparent that this rumor was probably a hoax, but that reality was not communicated clearly and rapidly enough to get ahead of escalating anxiety,” Syverud said Wednesday.

But:

At a campus forum later Wednesday, student protesters called for Syverud’s resignation and walked out when he wouldn’t promise to sign onto all their demands as written, according to news accounts. They marched to his house, chanting, “Sign or resign!”

On Thursday, Syverud announced he had signed on to “nearly all” of the demands, including mandatory diversity training for faculty and staff and $1 million to change the curriculum in order to better address diversity.

So, a likely hoaxer and his allies bullied the administration of this university into paying a million dollars to teach propaganda, and to compel teachers and staff to undergo political re-education. From what was likely a hoax. 

Again and again: why aren’t Republicans talking about things like this every damn day?

UPDATE.2: A reader points to this passage from a local Berkeley paper’s story on the protest:

However, [UC Berkeley Police Chief Margo] Bennett said she was “sympathetic” to students concerned about the heavy presence of police in riot gear around Wheeler.

“I totally understand that,” she said. “We did messaging to impacted groups that felt the presence of police caused them anxiety.” [UC Berkeley spokesman Dan] Mogulof echoed Bennett. The concerns were “understandable on a lot of different levels,” he said. “We have work to do to continue to find ways we can accommodate profound differences of opinion. We believe we have met our obligations to both free speech and the rule of law, and to provide for the safety and well-being of students and campus guests,” he said. “Having said that, I understand that students are deeply disturbed and unsettled by someone whose views they deeply disagree with.” He said counseling and other services are always available to students.

Unbelievable. The authorities here — the police chief and the university spokesman — sympathize with the mobbed-up students whose fanaticism and violence required police presence so that a conservative speaker could address those who wanted to hear her. No wonder the First Amendment is losing. The authorities pity the tyrannical mob.

 

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Other People’s Money

Former cardinal Ted McCarrick is the perfect symbol for the corruption scandal in the Catholic Church, because he is a cynosure of both sexual and financial corruption in the hierarchy, the latter of which we are only now starting to hear more about. This new report from Ed Condon at Catholic News Agency is not related to McCarrick, but it does draw attention to the Vatican’s moral rot having to do with money:

Developers acting for the Vatican Secretariat of State offered to raze a London [UK] parish hall and rectory and replace it with low-cost housing, in order to try to push through a luxury apartment development. The luxury development project involves two recently suspended Vatican employees, and a nest of Vatican-controlled holding companies led by an architect linked to accusations of money laundering and fraud involving Vatican accounts.

In a June 2016 proposal submitted to local authorities in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, a developer seeking permission to develop luxury apartments at 60 Sloane Ave offered London’s St. Pius X parish hall and rectory as a location for building the low-income housing required by law to offset the luxury development.

The inclusion of the parish property in the planning application was facilitated by officials at the Vatican Secretariat of State, who visited the parish and worked with the local Archdiocese of Westminster to secure the cooperation of the parish pastor.

The involvement of the Vatican in developing the proposal comes to light after Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who authorized the Vatican’s investment, described the Holy See’s involvement in the real estate development as a matter of ordinary business, denying there was anything suspicious about the transaction.

More:

Fr. Peter Wilson, pastor of St. Pius X, said officials from the Archdiocese of Westminster visited his parish before the proposal was submitted, along with an unnamed official from the Holy See, who outlined plans for the property, which would have incorporated substantial low-income housing units into a new mixed use development.

“I knew that there was somebody from the Holy See coming along, whom I met, but I didn’t know why he was involved,” Wilson said. “The wider provenance of the plan was never vouchsafed to me.”

“They were going to knock down the presbytery and build a block of flats here. They told me I could have one flat in the block of flats and my heart rather sank, but who am I to argue with those above my station?”

Read it all. There are lots of details. That poor parish priest, his own obedience used against him by Vatican machers who stood to profit from the destruction of a parish. It’s rotten to the core.

Today, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State (the No. 2 in the Vatican hierarchy), took the fall for the Pope in the corrupt deal involving an attempt to shake down the US-based Papal Foundation, via a compliant Cardinal Donald Wuerl, for tens of millions to cover a Rome investment gone bad. The Papal Foundation is a not-for-profit charity that is supposed to give funds to pay for the pope’s favorite charitable causes. Earlier this year, following his blockbuster 2018 First Things report on alleged gross mismanagement of the Papal Foundation, the Philadelphia writer Matthew B. O’Brien laid out chapter and verse how Wuerl misled the foundation.

An internal Papal Foundation audit documented alleged that the bishops on the Foundation’s board strongarmed the lay members, whom they outnumbered, and outvoted. Note well: these bishops (most of them cardinals) were spending millions of dollars that they had not earned — dollars donated by Catholics for the good works of the Pope — for non-charitable purposes.

Back to the London luxury condo deal: it is at the heart of a recent police raid on the office of the Vatican’s internal financial watchdog, which one of its members, who recently resigned, called “an empty shell.”

All of this reminds a reader of this blog of the so-called “Vati-Con” saga involving Raffaelo Follieri, a young Italian businessman who came to the US in 2003 to make his fortune. He later pled guilty to federal fraud-related charges. According to a 2007 Wall Street Journal story:

When Mr. Follieri arrived in Manhattan in 2003, he had big ambitions. Citing the changing demographics of many U.S. Catholic dioceses and the litigation costs of the church’s sex-abuse scandals, he told potential investors that the church needed to sell lots of property. Buying such properties and redeveloping them could help both the church and urban communities where many of properties were located — and would produce tidy profits for investors, according to Follieri Group marketing material and presentations.

In 2008, after Follieri had been arrested by the feds, Vanity Fair‘s Michael Shnayerson did a profile of him and his scamming. Excerpts:

On this night, because his sinuses were acting up, provoking a bad bloody nose, his mother had let him take the bedroom while she slept on the spare bed. Follieri’s father, Pasquale, was back in Italy. By one report, it was he who had urged his son to parlay his Vatican contacts into a timely business: helping the Catholic Church sell off properties in the U.S. to pay the devastating settlements from lawsuits in the wake of the pedophile-priest scandals. If those properties could be bought at a good insider’s price, and sold or developed for a profit, the sky was the limit. Pasquale is still listed on the Follieri Group’s Web site as its president, and his portly figure had often been seen at Catholic Church events, glad-handing bishops. For a while, at least, none of the bishops seemed to know that Pasquale, a lawyer and sometime journalist, had been convicted in 2005 by an Italian court of embezzling $300,000 from a company whose assets he’d been asked to manage. (The ruling is reportedly on appeal.) Now with both the F.B.I. and the New York State attorney general’s office investigating the Follieris, Pasquale returned to Italy.

More:

The business plan contemplated by Follieri padre and figlio wouldn’t have worked in Rome. The Vatican, one of the largest property owners in the world, handles its own real estate without need of 25-year-old outsiders. But to bishops and monsignors an ocean away, the plan would seem more plausible.

Follieri’s ace was Andrea Sodano, fortysomething nephew of Cardinal Angelo Sodano. Distant as the connection might seem, the relationship was real, and Cardinal Sodano was hardly just another red hat in the flock. Under the ailing John Paul II, he essentially ran the Vatican as secretary of state [the same position that Cardinal Pietro Parolin holds now — RD]. Andrea, who started flying over to New York to help Follieri pitch investors, was fond of flipping open his cell phone to show digital pictures of his uncle. Later, prosecutors would dismiss the contacts as insignificant. But what if they worked?

At first they did, as New York lawyer Richard Ortoli soon saw. Ortoli drew up papers of incorporation for the Follieri Group. Like Shin, he found the young man’s enthusiasm infectious. He let Follieri sleep on his spare bed, then agreed to host a party at the University Club, where he was a member, with all guests invited by Follieri. Into the club’s dark-paneled rooms, above Fifth Avenue, strode a covey of Catholic Church officials, including Cardinal Egan of New York—and Cardinal Sodano himself. Impressed, Ortoli became one of Follieri’s first investors, committing, he says, with lawyerly discretion, something less than $100,000.

Follieri found another investor in Vincent Ponte, a downtown restaurateur and Tribeca real-estate developer. A hard-boiled businessman, Ponte was won over the day Follieri walked into his FilliPonte restaurant, on Desbrosses Street. “And then Cardinal Egan comes in!” recounts a Ponte associate. “And Egan greets Follieri like an old friend!”

Read it all. Follieri eventually did time in a federal prison, then, upon his 2012 release, was deported.

Back in 2006, before the arrest, National Catholic Reporter laid Follieri’s appeal out in plain language:

Still, there is little secretive or subtle about the Follieri Group’s business plan.

“Our intention is to purchase properties from dioceses and religious organizations, to renovate them, and if necessary, convert them to new uses, such as housing (lower, middle and upper income, depending on the area) and commercial use,” the Group’s then-director of business development, Joseph Iallonardo, said in an early 2005 letter to a religious order. “Because of the Follieri family’s deep commitment to the Catholic church,” the letter continued, “and its long-standing relationships with senior members of the Vatican hierarchy, the Follieri Group understands very well the imperatives of the church and is sensitive to its needs.”

The firm’s literature mentions no specific Vatican figures, but the Follieri group clearly has ties to Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state since 1991. Andrea Sodano, the cardinal’s nephew, is a Follieri Group vice president, a fact widely known in U.S. church real estate circles.

Raffaello Follieri, the Group’s charismatic 27-year-old chief executive officer, said the company does not use its Vatican ties to gain access to church officials. Andrea Sodano, Follieri told NCR, is a renowned engineer in Italy with long-standing ties to the Follieri family’s development business there and extensive experience in converting church property to other uses. Sodano is a “technical person” who “does not do [marketing] relations for us,” said Follieri.

In an e-mail response to an NCR inquiry Andrea Sodano said: “I have worked with the Follieri family for the past 15 years as an engineering consultant. My involvement long predates The Follieri Group’s interest in the States. The Follieri Group’s long and successful track record in real estate speaks for itself.”

But others familiar with the Group’s marketing strategy paint a different picture. The Sodano name, and the implicit Vatican endorsement that the Group has promoted along with it, has opened doors that might otherwise be closed to a firm headed by Italian nationals with no real estate development track record in the United States, according to those who have had business dealings with the Follieri Group. “When Raffaello wants to meet with the bishop, they put the touch on from the Vatican and they get the meeting,” said one East Coast diocesan real estate professional. “They’re about as connected as it gets.”

In fact, say church real estate professionals who have met with the group, rather than acting solely in a behind-the-scenes technical capacity, Andrea Sodano frequently accompanies Raffaelo Follieri to meetings with church officials. “They certainly make it clear they have relatives in the Vatican,” said one such official who has met with the Group’s representatives.

… How well wired is the Follieri Group? In early 2005, Catholic blogger Domenico Bettinelli, editor of the Catholic World Report, summed it up: “Unless [Andrea Sodano’s] name was Wojtyla, you couldn’t get a better connection.”

To be clear, there is no connection, known or asserted, between the Follieri affair and the London deal. Nor was criminal activity ever alleged against Cardinal Sodano in the Vati-Con mess. I only bring it up as an example of how the Church rolls at its higher levels, regarding handling filthy lucre. (And, a Catholic reader pointed out something I hadn’t thought of: “It’s fairly obvious that laws doing away with the statute of limitations [on sex abuse cases] provide advantages to anyone who profits from the sale of church property under conditions of duress.”)

These lines from the Vanity Fair piece make the connection between the Follieri mess and what senior churchmen like Becciu, and the Papal Foundation divines, do:

 His role model, he told more than one friend, was Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who’d started poor but made his first $1 million by the age of 25 and perfected the art of using “O.P.M.”—other people’s money.

Other People’s Money. There you have it. This is why the Papal Foundation’s clerical leadership felt they could do what they wanted to do with the money donated by lay Catholics. They were so used to using Other People’s Money to advance their own agendas that they didn’t see the problem.

Trouble is, eventually Other People get tired of having their pockets picked. The Catholic Herald editorialized last month about reports concerning massive investment losses from the “Peter’s Pence” fund, composed of donations from the global Catholic laity for the pope’s personal works of charity. It’s all tied to Cardinal Becciu. As the Herald said:

There has reportedly been a steep drop in Peter’s Pence donations: from just over €100 million in 2006 to just below €60 million more recently. That fall appears at least partly connected to a perception among the faithful that Francis has not come to grips with the broader crisis in clerical culture, the worst symptom of which is the ongoing cover-up of clerical sexual abuse. Francis’s reform efforts in those regards have not reassured the laity, including some who are otherwise well-disposed to him.

It is a sad truth of our time that with declining church participation, and shifting demographics, some churches and church facilities have to close, and be sold off. But it is a bitter fact that in more than a few cases, the pennies donated by immigrant ancestors to build these churches are now going out the door to pay the clerical buggery bill.

The loss of church authority in the face of hierarchical luxuries and clerical indulgence is not a new theme, nor is it restricted to the Catholic Church, heaven knows. As far as I know personally, most priests and pastors do not live in great luxury any more than they have eventful sex lives. Though, like Father Peter Wilson of the targeted London parish, they have to live with the consequences of those clerics, especially hierarchs, who do.

We’ve expended lots of pixels in this space over the years talking about the consequences to the loss of ecclesial moral authority by clerical sexual corruption. What about financial corruption? Whatever your church or religious tradition, how have these revelations (including the well-known televangelist scammery, e.g., Jesse Duplantis asking his followers to buy him a $54 million private jet) changed the way you regard religious authority, if at all?

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What About The Protestant Catholics?

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The term “cafeteria Catholic” is old-school for theologically conservative Catholics in the US. It refers to Catholics who pick and choose what they prefer to believe from the panoply of Catholic teachings. It has long been a slur term that Catholic conservatives use against Catholics — usually liberal/progressives — who selectively accept magisterial Church teaching. The idea is that they are basically Protestants without admitting it.

But what does “cafeteria Catholic” mean in the era of Pope Francis? Until his papacy, it was easy enough for theologically conservative Catholics (henceforth, “conservative Catholics,” which I mean in the strictly theological sense, not political) to point to the Pope and say, “What he says, I believe.” Now, those days are over. As Ross Douthat wrote (based on his interview with Cardinal Raymond Burke, perceived, fairly or not, as Francis’s chief antagonist):

But you can also see in my conversation with the cardinal how hard it is to sustain a Catholicism that is orthodox against the pope. For instance, Burke himself brought up a hypothetical scenario where Francis endorses a document that includes what the cardinal considers heresy. “People say if you don’t accept that, you’ll be in schism,” Burke said, when “my point would be the document is schismatic. I’m not.”

But this implies that, in effect, the pope could lead a schism, even though schism by definition involves breaking with the pope. This is an idea that several conservative Catholic theologians have brought up recently; it does not become more persuasive with elaboration. And Burke himself acknowledges as much: It would be a “total contradiction” with no precedent or explanation in church law.

The pull of such ideas, though, explains why you need only take a step beyond Burke’s position to end up as a kind of de facto sedevacantist, a believer that the pope is not really the pope — or, alternatively, that the church is so corrupted and compromised by modernity that the pope might technically still be pope but his authority doesn’t matter anymore. This is the flavor of a lot of very-online traditionalism, and it’s hard to see how it wouldn’t (eventually) lead many of its adherents to a separation from the larger church, joining the traditionalist quasi-exile pioneered after Vatican II by the Society of Saint Pius X.

Are there alternatives to Burke’s tenuous position or the schismatic plunge? At the moment there are two: One is a conservative Catholicism that strains more mightily than Burke to interpret all of Francis’ moves in continuity with his predecessors, while arguing that the pope’s liberalizing allies and appointees are somehow misinterpreting him. This was the default conservative position early in the Francis pontificate; it has since become more difficult to sustain. But it persists in the hope of a kind of snapping-back moment, when Francis or a successor decides that Catholic bishops in countries like Germany are pushing things too far, at which point there can be a kind of restoration of the John Paul II-era battle lines, with the papacy — despite Francis’ experiments — reinterpreted to have always been on the side of orthodoxy.

Another alternative is a conservatism that simply resolves the apparent conflict between tradition and papal power in favor of the latter, submitting its private judgment to papal authority in 19th-century style — even if that submission requires accepting shifts on sex, marriage, celibacy and other issues that look awfully like the sort of liberal Protestantism that the 19th-century popes opposed. This would be a conservatism of structure more than doctrine, as suggested by the title of a website that champions its approach: “Where Peter Is.” But it would still need, for its long-term coherence, an account of how doctrine can and cannot change beyond just papal fiat. So it, too, awaits clarifications that this papacy has conspicuously not supplied.

Douthat appears not to be satisfied with any of these outcomes, and he’s right not to be. It is very, very difficult to square any kind of Catholic orthodoxy with being on the other side of this or any Pope. On the other hand, Catholic orthodoxy, as I understand it, is not coterminous with “whatever the Pope says” — and Francis has said some things that are pretty far out there. To say nothing of Pachamama, about which Father Dwight Longenecker has some troubling thoughts about the future. 

The plain fact is, a pope like Francis was not supposed to happen. Everybody knows that there have been bad popes — most notoriously, the popes of the Renaissance, in particular Alexander VI Borgia — but it has also been the case that however personally corrupt they might have been, they did not change Catholic doctrine. No one argues seriously that Francis is personally corrupt, but there is certainly reason to believe that he is either changing doctrine, either de facto or indirectly, by virtue of changing the disciplines of the Church, and allowing disfavored doctrines to wither on the vine.

What to do? Jake Meador, a conservative Presbyterian, says that conservative Catholics these days find themselves faced with their own inherent Protestantism. 

Excerpt:

Thus we come to the fault line that has opened up under the Franciscan papacy: Faced with a liberalizing pope, conservatives in the church are arguing that there is an objectively discernible body of divinely revealed teachings over which the church has no authority and which it is literally unable to alter.

Oddly enough, the relationship between “divine law” and ecclesial authority articulated by these conservatives in the American church is, to my eyes, strikingly similar to the relationship between Scripture and ecclesial authority as defined by the Reformation.

This is not to say that either Cardinal Burke or J. D. are themselves arguing for Protestantism. Protestant theology encompasses much more than its stance on the nature of ecclesial authority, though it is worth noting that this vision of ecclesial authority is the foundation of everything that follows in Protestant thought.

Rather, I am arguing that the current maneuverings amongst conservative Catholics bear a striking resemblance to Protestantism precisely because they are confronting the same problem that vexed the first Protestants: What do you do when the institutional church seems to be endorsing views that contradict what you understand orthodoxy to be? Not only that, they are addressing the problem with a strikingly similar answer: You appeal to a divine law that is able to be discerned independent of the authority of the papacy and which is binding for everyone, including bishops. Thus the much cited problem of private judgment is merely a fact to be confronted and navigated rather than an inherent theological problem from which we must be rescued.

Read it all. 

To be clear, he’s not saying that conservative Catholics are Protestants. He’s too smart for that. But Jake is saying that to no longer be able to trust the theological and doctrinal judgment of the Pope puts even the most reactionary Catholic pretty much in the shoes of Protestants, in  a functional sense. 

How is he wrong? Not “how is he wrong in theory,” but how is he wrong, in the way the Catholic Church operates on a daily basis?

My sense is that the only way this really matters to Catholics who care about it is in the realm of theory. Catholic life in the US has been effectively Protestant for decades, in that Catholics have felt free to pick and choose their beliefs, and have paid no disciplinary price for it — and indeed, in some postconciliar parishes, were taught that this was expected of them. When I was a Catholic, I often met other Catholics who had no idea that being Catholic meant submitting private judgment to the magisterium of the Catholic Church. Though they wouldn’t have put it that way, they just assumed that Catholicism was another form of Protestantism, because in a functional sense, that is how they were formed.

Before Catholic readers get defensive, let me fully concede that in this country, at least, Orthodoxy has a similar problem. We live in a Protestant country, and modernity — which makes the individual sacrosanct — is, religiously, hyper-Protestant. Our Protestant friends may say “sola Scriptura,” but they well know that there are countless interpretations of Scripture. All of us Christians who profess belief in a religious authority higher than individual conscience, and private judgment, find ourselves in a bind. I have no respect for the claims of liberal Catholics who, having dismissed John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have reconfigured themselves as ultramontanists under Francis. But they weren’t to be taken seriously anyway, because they always believed themselves above the law of the Church. Conservative Catholics, though, are in a hard place. But then, as I said, so are all of us small-o orthodox Christians. The point is, the barque of Peter offers no sure escape from the problems of modernity.

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Progressives Who Make Trump Voters

A reader writes:

Posie Parker is a feminist who is gradually being unpersoned by the left. Her crime is that she doesn’t believe trans women are women. She was taken off Facebook, and a recent interview with her was taken down by YouTube for hate speech. This resulted in a strike against the channel that made it, See:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/11/19/telling-the-truth-about-trans-is-not-hate-speech/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7oPkqeHTwuOZ5CZ-R9f-6w/community

I managed to watch about half the video before it was sent down the memory hole, and it was ridiculously tame. But the LGBT movement will accept no dissent.

Also, although I am not a Christian, I often give money to the Salvation Army as their ratings for efficacy are really high. So I am also ticked off about attempts to unperson them as well. [Note: the reader forwarded to me the receipt for a $100 donation he made today to the Salvation Army — RD]

I have never voted for a Republican for president, and I can’t stand Trump. But the “Tolerant Left” is making me so angry with them that I am thinking of voting for him. Since I live in Massachusetts the Electoral College makes it irrelevant, but it would be a protest vote.

From the Spiked story he sent:

An interview with feminist Posie Parker has been taken down by YouTube because it constitutes ‘hate speech’, which could incite ‘hatred and/or violence against protected groups’.

In an interview on the Triggernometry podcast, Parker restated her apparently controversial view that men who transition to female are still men.

The video was online for 24 hours and was watched by around 35,000 people until YouTube took it down. The tech giant also gave the Triggernometry channel a warning. After three further warnings, a channel can be permanently deleted.

Can you believe that? Simply asserting a scientific fact — that biological males cannot be female — is enough to get YouTube (owned by Google) to take down your video, and issue a formal warning.

You might say that it’s stupid to vote for Trump just to stick it to the totalitarian left. At this point, I don’t. I was e-mailing back and forth today with a journalist friend (straight news, not opinion) who works for a major national media outlet. He told me that he doesn’t think his peers really understand how critical a hell of a lot of voters take politics at the moment — that “they are voting for the person who is less likely to wipe them out.”

It’s true. I don’t think he means “wipe them out” literally, in a Stalinist sense, but rather grind them down. I completely believe the Left will attempt to do that once they regain power in Washington, and if I vote for Trump in 2020 (instead of withholding my vote for president, as I did in 2016), it will be 100 percent because of this. Mind you, this kind of thing is happening under Trump. Think how much worse it would be — it will be — when a Democrat is in the White House. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the Republican Party is not raising hell every damn day about these issues. We’re talking basic American liberties here — free speech, freedom of religion, the kind of thing the ACLU used to be about, until they got all woke:

There’s no one way to be a man.

Men who get their periods are men.

Men who get pregnant and give birth are men.

Trans and non-binary men belong.#InternationalMensDay

— ACLU (@ACLU) November 19, 2019

Go on YouTube and say, “Actually, this isn’t true” — and you’ll get banned. It happened to Posie Parker and Triggernometry.

The liberal commenters are already writing their complaints. That will never happen. You’re overreacting.

I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you for one second. I can see what you do, what you say, what you believe in. I see the power you have. I see how much you hate people like us. For example:

John Bel Edwards, a lawyer, was just re-elected Democratic governor of a deep-red state. But the Democratic Attorneys General Association would not support him if he ran for Louisiana AG, because he’s a pro-life Catholic. https://t.co/u81cIxiThl

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) November 19, 2019

I, a conservative, voted for that Democrat, John Bel Edwards, because he doesn’t think pro-lifers like me are bad people who need to be crushed.

A Texas reader writes tonight, about the Chick-fil-A capitulation to the Wokesters:

Really and truly, this is a big deal not because CFA is a paragon of Christian virtue (they’re great as far a big corporations go), but because it’s more like they basically asked for the spotlight to be on them by claiming to be Christian. Once you do that, you have a responsibility to wear that badge well. They pay their fast food employees well, help them get job training. teach them business skills, expect a lot from them morally, and they provide a good product. Once they came under the microscope for giving to groups promoting traditional marriage, they had a duty not to back down–BECAUSE they made such a show of claiming to be Christian. If it had been KFC, I wouldn’t care because KFC doesn’t go around trumpeting that they are Christian. You can’t announce to the world you are Christian and then try and appease bullies over an issue of orthodoxy.

I mean, we are talking about the frickin’ SALVATION ARMY here. Conceding that LGBT activists decide which Christian charities get money from other Christians is a monstrous betrayal.

This is exactly right. This is going to embolden progressives even more.

Say whatever nasty thing you like about Donald Trump, and it’s probably true. A lot of it may also be true about the Republican Party. But for all their sins and failings, they don’t hate churches and church people, and they don’t try to destroy businesses that donate to church causes, and and they don’t despise and silence women who say that penis-bearers aren’t actually women. That counts for a lot. Hell, the crazy Left is even making a secular Democrat in Massachusetts consider voting for Trump, just because he’s sick of these vicious progressive Puritans.

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