Rod Dreher's Blog, page 193

Yes, It’s Totalitarianism

Andrew Sullivan today writes about Ibram X. Kendi’s bestselling book How To Be An Antiracist, praising what he considers its strong parts — the award-winning black author and professor’s life story, and painful reckoning with some of his own racist ideas — but ultimately seeing it as “a glimpse at the intersectional left’s political endgame.” Excerpts:

Everything in the world, he argues, is either racist or antiracist: “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy … If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.” Inequity is defined as any difference between any ethnic groups in their average outcomes in any field of life or work. Any policy that leads to any racial differentials in anything that doesn’t roughly reflect the racial demographics of the society is ipso facto racist.

Liberal values are therefore tossed out almost immediately. Kendi, a star professor at American University and a recent Guggenheim Fellowship winner, has no time for color-blindness, or for any kind of freedom which might have some inequality as its outcome. In fact, “the most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right’s unlikely drive for a White ethno-state, but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one.” He has no time for persuasion or dialogue either: “An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change.” All there is is power. You either wield it or are controlled by it. And power is simply the ability to implement racist or antiracist policy.

The book therefore is not an attempt to persuade anyone. It’s a life story interspersed with a litany of pronouncements about what you have to do to be good rather than evil.

Sullivan goes on to talk about Kendi’s jaw-dropping proposal for government bureaucrats (“formally trained experts on racism”) to police all public and private life, and coerce everyone into obeying their dictates on antiracism. I urge you to read Sullivan’s column to see the details, but imagine your Fox News-aholic Uncle Morty at Thanksgiving dinner, describing a left-wing book about antiracism. He could not outdo the actual things that Ibram X. Kendi believes!

Sullivan continues:

Every now and again, it’s worth thinking about what the intersectional left’s ultimate endgame really is — and here it strikes me as both useful and fair to extrapolate from Kendi’s project. They seem not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion. They have no clear foundational devotion to individual rights or freedom of speech. Rather, the ultimate aim seems to be running the entire country by fiat to purge it of racism (and every other intersectional “-ism” and “phobia”, while they’re at it). And they demand “disciplinary tools” by unelected bodies to enforce “a radical reorientation of our consciousness.” There is a word for this kind of politics and this kind of theory when it is fully and completely realized, and it is totalitarian.

Read the whole thing.

Of course Sullivan is right. I call it “soft totalitarianism,” because it’s not going to have gulags, or interrogations at the Lubyanka. They’ll just cancel you, and you won’t work again. They’ll teach your children to hate you, and to hate themselves. And so forth. People who grew up under Soviet and Soviet-bloc communism keep telling us that we are welcoming this totalitarianism into our own society, and we don’t even see it. Did you hear about the acclaimed Romanian-born theatrical director who quit Columbia University’s faculty recently? Read on:

During [director Andrei] Serban’s [Romanian] television interview, the host seemed shocked to find out that the American higher education system is headed towards communism.

The professor recounted in the interview that after a professor had retired, he and the other professors in the department were called into a meeting with the dean of the arts school. During this meeting, the dean told them there were “too many white professors, too many heterosexual men.” The group was told it would be best to hire a minority, a woman, or a gay man.

Serban was the director of the hiring committee. He was told the new hire could not be someone like him because he is “married, a heterosexual man who has children.”

The professor said when he asked if the most qualified candidate happened to be a straight white male, could this person be hired? No, came the swift reply.

“I felt like I was living under communism again,” he said.

And then Prof. Serban, who is a big international deal in theater circles, was chastised by colleagues for saying that he would not find a male-to-female transgender credible playing Juliet in Romeo And Juliet.

You can watch the four-minute interview segment on YouTube here. Click the “CC” button to get English subtitles. Here’s a screenshot from the subtitled version:

 

 

Libby Emmons, who studied under Serban at Columbia, writes:

During my study in the theater division at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Romanian emigree [sic] acting professor Andrei Serban was legend. Beloved by acting students, lauded by faculty, he was tenured, established, and had seemingly free reign over his department. Imagine, she said, what it is like for a man who grew up under communism, and rose to the top of his profession in the arts, to find himself forced to hire and cast not according to artistic excellence, but according to political correctness. Emmons goes on:

It’s no secret that Columbia is a left-leaning university, and the School of the Arts might be the most woke college within the ivy-covered walls. While heterodox political views are a given in theater arts, this push to center identity over the creation of good work will lead to the decline both of the School of the Arts and the expression of theater arts itself. In fact, it’s already happening.

Columbia is where I learned that contemporary artists need to stay in their lane and only create work about their own personal experience. I learned about white women’s complicity, and the problem with ‘heteronormativity’. But it’s also where I was taught to drive my work as hard as I could, without regard for my feelings or anyone else’s. The work was paramount, as it should be. If the arts are to be taught, they need professors like Andrei Serban who fight against the nonsensical view that anything in the rehearsal room is more essential than creating the most honest, truthful, compassionate work possible.

Well, under Ibram X. Kendi’s utopian scheme, the state would come in and smash people like Andrei Serban. But you know, it doesn’t really have to; the woke faculty at the Ivy League university is doing it already.

Regular readers know the book I’m working on now is about this kind of thing. People like Andrei Serban are the canaries in our cultural coal mine. They see what’s coming, and they’re warning us.

Again, reading Yuri Slezkine’s stunning history of the Bolshevik Revolution, The House Of Government, has been quite an education for me. I wrote here about what its description of the revolutionary generation of Bolsheviks taught me about our own cult of Social Justice, and its prophets now leading many American institutions (like the theater school at Columbia). Imagine utopian radicals like Ibram X. Kendi gaining full control of the state, and the police and armed forces. Now imagine they had the vision, the will, and the power to do whatever it took to eliminate the Bad People.

You think it can’t happen here? When a man of Andrei Serban’s talent and accomplishment is driven out of one of our top universities, because he refuses to compromise his artistic standards to fit utopian left-wing politics, that is a sign. These signs are coming to us every day. Ibram X. Kendi’s book is a bestseller, and he is widely quoted in prestige media (e.g., in an essay in The Atlantic, where he delivered this pronouncement:  “To oppose reparations is to be racist. To support reparations is to be anti-racist. The middle ground is racist ground.”)

This. Is. Totalitarian. And we are getting used to this kind of thing. Andrew Sullivan is right: these people have no interest in free speech, free inquiry, freedom of association, or any of the classical liberal virtues. It’s all coercive virtue, and the destruction of lives and careers. This is the ultimate endgame of the intersectional left. Wake up!

The post Yes, It’s Totalitarianism appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Persecution Of Päivi Räsänen

Päivi Räsänen is a member of the Finnish Parliament from the Christian Democratic Party, and a practicing Lutheran. She is also facing hate speech investigations for having questioned publicly her own church leaders’ decision to affirm LGBT pride. Now, the Finnish police have expanded the investigation to consider charges against her over a 2004 pamphlet she wrote defending the Lutheran Church’s traditional teaching about marriage (which entails denying that same-sex marriage is a real marriage). It’s worth noting that Räsänen wrote that pamphlet seven years before LGBT was added to the national hate-speech law as a protected class. She was investigated once before for the pamphlet, and cleared — but now she’s going to undergo another interrogation.

Here’s a screenshot of the tweet (with a translation) that started it all. I’ve cut off the entire image; it’s simply verses from the Bible that back up Räsänen’s claim. “Kirkko” is Finnish for “the Church” — in this case, the Finnish Lutheran church, in which Räsänen’s husband is a pastor:

Räsänen agreed to answer my questions via e-mail. Below is our interview:

ROD DREHER: You were interrogated for four hours by the police for things you have written about Christianity and homosexuality. What did they want to know?

PÄIVI RÄSÄNEN: There are two separate police investigations, although they both have to do with freedom of religion and free speech. In both cases, the criminal offense I am suspected of is agitation against an ethnic group.

The background of the first case is this: I was shocked when I heard that the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, which I am a member of, announced its official affiliation to Helsinki LGBT Pride 2019. In June, I decided to write a tweet where I asked that how can the church’s doctrinal foundation, the Bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of pride?

The police started a criminal investigation about this tweet in August. I was then summoned to a police interrogation that was conducted November 1 at the Pasila Police Station, Helsinki. I was interrogated for almost four hours concerning this tweet. The police asked me if I agree to remove the tweet within two weeks. I answered no. I was asked about the contents of the Letter to the Romans and what I meant by saying that practicing homosexuality is a sin and a shame. I answered that all of us are sinners, but the sinfulness of practicing homosexuality is nowadays denied.

The other police investigation has to do with a pamphlet I wrote 15 years ago. The investigation started in August this year. I have not yet been summoned to the interrogation concerning the pamphlet, but I have understood that it is likely to take place in December. The content of the pamphlet is quite the same as my tweet’s.

The pamphlet is a publication of Suomen Luther-säätiö [The Lutheran Foundation Finland] from 2004. It takes a stand on ecclesiastical policy, social policy, sexuality and marriage from a Christian perspective. It is noteworthy that previously, in October, the police already concluded that there was no need for an investigation, as there was no reason to believe that a crime had been committed.

The Prosecutor General, who was requested to re-evaluate this matter, reached a different conclusion than the police. According to the Prosecutor General, there is reason to believe that because of the defamation of homosexuals by the violation of their human dignity, I am guilty of incitement to hatred against a group.

According to the Criminal Code of our country:

Criminal Code, Section 10: Agitation against an ethnic group

“A person who makes available to the public or otherwise spreads among the public or keeps available for the public information, an expression of opinion or another message where a certain group is threatened, defamed or insulted on the basis of its race, skin colour, birth status, national or ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation or disability or a comparable basis, shall be sentenced for ethnic agitation to a fine or to imprisonment for at most two years”.

By the way, this section in our legislation came into force just in 2011, that is seven years after writing the pamphlet.

According to the information I have received, these police investigations will lead to consideration of charges, which will result probably in a prosecution.

It is impossible for me to think that the classical Christian views and the doctrine of the majority of denominations would become illegal. The question here is about the core of Christian faith; how a person gets saved into unity with God and into everlasting life though the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus. Therefore, it is crucial to also talk about the nature of sin.

RD: Is it effectively against the law in Finland to speak about basic Christian beliefs concerning homosexuality?

PR: The law does not prohibit this, and it is legal to speak and preach about what the Bible teaches. Freedom of religion is strongly guaranteed both in our Constitution and in the International Human Rights Treaties. However, more and more so, it seems to be that expressing opinions relating to, for example, marriage belonging between one man and one woman, or the sinfulness of homosexual acts, is politically incorrect, subject to silencing, and frowned upon. My case is a precedent. The Bible is a totally legal book and our church’s doctrinal foundation, according to our law.

Our Church Act states that “All doctrine must be examined and evaluated according to God’s Holy Word.” When our Parliament was discussing the Church Act this autumn, I read aloud the exact same verses from the Letter to the Romans that I cited in my tweet that led to the police investigation. I did this because I thought it was necessary for the parliamentarians to pay attention to the fact that although there were some minor changes proposed to the Church Act, most of the Act stayed the same. The Act still prescribes that the Lutheran Church confesses the Bible-based Christian faith.

This means that the Parliament has not only allowed the Church to confess its faith in its doctrine and action, it prescribes it to do so. The General Synod is the highest decision-making body of the Church. The General Synod makes key decisions relating to the Church’s doctrine and ministry. It has an important legislative function, drafting and presenting Church law for approval or rejection by the Finnish Parliament.

The Christian view of man is currently attacked, whether we think of questions relating to sexuality and gender, protection of life, or concepts such as man or woman, boy or girl. This is sad, as the foundation of the Finnish legislation and civilization lie in Christianity. In these questions we are at the core of unalienable truths. God created man in His own image – therefore human life is sacred and worthy of protection from the beginning to the end and meant to bring glory to God. Our legislation may change, but the laws of nature do not change, nor does the Word of God. As a Christian, I believe it is always the right time to speak about the truths of the Word of God.

I have emphasized that my purpose was in no way to insult sexual minorities. My criticism was aimed to the leadership of the church. As a Christian, I think that if someone expresses an opinion that is against my faith or my conscience, it does not mean that I have been threatened, defamed or insulted the way the Criminal Code means it. As we are living in a democratic country, we must be able to disagree and express our disagreement. We have to be able to cope with speech that we feel insults our feelings. Many questions are so debatable and contradictory that we have to have the possibility of discussing. Otherwise the development is towards a totalitarian system, with only one correct view.

RD: What do the Finnish people think about this? Do they favor the government’s position, and if so, why?

PR: My tweet created a huge uproar and the police investigations have got a lot of attention. The current government of Finland is not involved with my cases in any way. The criminal complaints done against me have been done by Finnish citizens. The criminal investigations are conducted by the police. The judiciary, which is a completely separate body from the government, interprets and applies the law in Finland.

I am surprised that the investigations continue on these cases that have deeply to do with freedom of religion and free speech. I do not see I would have committed a crime, as I believe that many Finns still consider for example marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. The problem is that many of the conservative-minded people are silent about these issues, whereas the advocacy groups of sexual minorities are very aggressive and well organized, and have strongly affected the development of the church, the media and people’s minds. The media’s viewpoint is biased, and it tends continually to give more space and voice to liberal perspectives regarding these issues.

I have to say that I have had amazingly much support from Christians, both from Finland and from abroad, so there seems to be a lot of understanding towards the values I present.

It nevertheless seems that Finnish people are quite divided regarding these issues that have deeply to do with values, and the majority expresses quite liberal thoughts. Out current government is also liberal and the government has announced that an act on the legal recognition of gender based on self-determination will be enacted and the requirement of infertility will be removed from the act. This means that a person’s gender could be changed simply by one’s own application, based on the person’s experience of representing the other gender. I must say that as a medical doctor, Christian and parliamentarian, this kind of policy developments are bad and must not take place.

RD: Do you foresee persecution coming for Finland’s Christians?

PR: If expressing Bible-based views will become more intolerable and considered to have the constituent elements of agitation against an ethnic group, then spreading the Bible or offering access to it should logically be criminalized. Already at the moment it seems that especially the young people are afraid that if you are labelled as a Bible-believing Christian, it will hinder your career and social acceptance. In my opinion, it is specifically Christianity that is being attacked and will be attacked even more aggressively in the future. We are clearly living in a time when the core of the Christianity is being questioned.

A major threat for the freedom of religion is that we don’t exercise this right. These police investigations raise concerns about limiting our basic freedoms that have been guaranteed to all of us, also MPs, in our Constitution and International Human Right Treaties. We have to know our rights and use them!

I hope these criminal investigations won’t lead to self-censorship among Christians. I am worried that the police investigations might have a chilling effect among Christians. It seems that many Christians in my country are now hiding and going to the closet now that the LGBT community has come out to the public. I am concerned that in the future Christians will have a higher threshold at citing the Bible or presenting teachings based on the Bible. The more we keep silent about these controversial topical themes, the narrower the space for freedom of speech and religion gets.

RD: In the US, gay rights advocates years ago spoke of the necessity of “tolerance.” But we have found that once they gain power, many of them are extremely intolerant. I was just in Russia for 10 days. It is incredible to watch the faces of ordinary Russians when I tell them how far LGBT activism has gone in the US (for example, Drag Queen Story Hour, and Christians losing their jobs and businesses for opposing LGBT claims). What is happening in the West?

PR: I believe that ultimately the purpose of these attacks is to eliminate the Word of God and discard the Law of God. It is very problematic that expressing Christian beliefs is often seen as insulting in the West. For example, marriage between a man and a woman has become a concept that is understood as restrictive, even threatening. Concepts such as man and woman, father and mother, are dearly loved concepts, and as old as the history of humanity. The attempt to break down the gender system based on two different genders hurts especially children. It is unfortunate how uncritically the ideology of sexual diversity and LGBT activism has been supported and endorsed even by churches.

I believe that every person has the right to hear the whole truth of God’s Word, both the Gospel and the Law. Only people who recognize their sins need Jesus, the propitiation for our sins. We must have the courage to speak about the dangerous effects of LGBT activism. Debatable themes such as immoral sexual relations have to do with guilt. Guilt cannot be solved by denying it, but only by confessing it and receiving mercy and the message of forgiveness in Jesus’ sacrifice. It is impossible to think that classical Christian doctrine would become illegal in the West.



RD: What is coming next in your case?

PR: After the police have finished the criminal investigations, the police will send their decision to the Prosecutor General, who will decide on whether to raise charges or not. Depending on the decision of the Prosecutor General, the cases will be handled by district court. The court either disapproves or approves the charges. It is possible to apply to the higher courts if the defendant disagrees with the court’s decision.

Irrespective of the outcome of the criminal investigations, I am going to use my freedom of religion, which is strongly guaranteed both in our Constitution and in the International Human Right Treaties, and publicly speak about the teachings of God’s Holy Word in the future. I encourage others to do the same. We must not be intimidated. If the Prosecutor General raises charges against me, it is likely that this will be a process of several years.

In all this I have a completely calm mind. “…in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me?” (Psalm 56:11)

—

Here is a link to Päivi Räsänen’s website in English,with contact information. What’s happening to her in Finland is not merely about Finland. It’s about all of us. Remember her words: “The more we keep silent about these controversial topical themes, the narrower the space for freedom of speech and religion gets.” Silence means collaboration in your own eventual persecution. Notice too that the hostility to this Christian woman is also coming from within her own church, because she stands up for what the church claims to believe. She’s a prophet.

By the way, CBN News interviewed her a couple of weeks ago. Here’s that piece. Watch it and think about how it is that this slight, soft-spoken Finnish woman — a doctor and mother of five — has more courage than many, many of us American Christians:

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Stiffening Woke Giblets In St. Louis

I’ve been trying to be restrained, folks, but as Krusty the Clown once said, explaining why he endorsed faulty products, “They drove a dump truck full of money up to my house! I’m not made of stone!” Well, readers drove a dump truck full of Dreherbait up to my inbox. I’m not (yadda yadda yadda)!

A reader at Washington University in St. Louis writes that by virtue of being on that super-woke campus, they are

subjected to a pretty strong dose of Social Justice absurdity. But this, from our student paper today, struck me as some next-level stuff. It’s a nearly unreadable smorgasboard of woke language and buzzwords with little meaning, and reads like satire (it’s not).

Here’s the headline:

So you know this story is bound to be good. Below are excerpts from the paid lecture delivered by Ericka Hart, a black Myrna Minkoff, whose appearance was under the aegis of an annual lecture devoted to the memory of Masters & Johnson, the pervy academics who studied the stiffened giblets of mid-century Americans right there at Washington U. More:

Before Hart took the stage, Interim Provost Marion Crain briefly discussed the legacy of Masters and Johnson’s seminal sex studies. Crain, a law professor who once taught feminist legal theory, said Masters and Johnson’s work “fueled gynocentric sex-education and sexual equality among all people.”

According to Crain, their work exposed the double standard of women not being able to initiate sexual intercourse, a standard she said concentrated patriarchal power.

“How often do I get to say that in the provost’s office?” Crain said.

Oh, my valve! More:

Hart asserted throughout the talk that radical sex positivity cannot be achieved without a sex-postive framework which requires the absence of all forms of bigotry and academic inaccessibility.

Hart also posited that the word “radical” has become watered down, pointing to the work of Masters and Johnson as an example. Hart alluded to the fact that St. Louis, and thus the University, is built on land taken from indigenous people and mentioned that the University’s founder was a gradual emancipationist who, rather than lobbying for abolition, believed slave owners should voluntarily release slaves.

“There’s nothing—I repeat nothing—radical about a sex researcher working at a school founded on stolen land and chattel slavery,” Hart said.

Hart often recycled her opening tactic of call-and-response, prompting the audience to yell “Tear that down” when referring to white settler colonialism and having them repeat “redlining” when discussing discriminatory housing practices.

Hart showed a map illustrating redlining in St. Louis before highlighting a recent University study examining its effects on Black residents.

“How can people focus on pleasure or bodily autonomy when it has been stripped from you by the state?” Hart asked. “What is a sex educator’s role in tearing down systems of oppression?”

If Ta-Nehisi Coates ever writes a dirty book, I’ve got a heroine for him. Hart, a professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, concluded thus:

Hart ended her talk by showing 11 rules for sex positivity, having the audience read each one out loud.

“Sex positivity is very Black, queer, indigenous, pro slut, sex work, asexual, trans femmes thriving, reparations from the state for Black people,” one of them read. “Sex positivity is always radical, not optional,” the last rule read.

Read the whole thing. 

It costs $72,000 per year to study at Washington University in St. Louis. But look at all the benefits!

In other news from the world of the crackpot left, while I was overseas recently, Katherine Ragsdale, a lesbian Episcopal priestess, was named head of the National Abortion Federation. From :

Throughout her career, Rev. Ragsdale has been outspoken about abortion rights, LGBTQ equality, and public policy issues affecting women and families. She has testified before the U.S. Congress as well as numerous state legislatures about the importance of abortion access and was a featured speaker at the 2004 March for Women’s Lives in Washington, DC. Rev. Ragsdale served for 17 years (9 of them as chair) on the national board of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. As Chair, she led the Coalition through a change of its name, mission, and organizational structure. During that time the Coalition’s budget, staff, and office space more than doubled in size.

“The work that NAF and their members do to secure and expand abortion access every day is at the heart of my own values and commitments,” said Rev. Ragsdale. “Throughout my career, I have preached that abortion is a blessing and that providers are modern-day saints and heroes, and I have seen firsthand how access to abortion can improve the lives and health of women and their families. It is an honor to join an organization I have long admired and to be able to support abortion providers during such a critical time.”

Emphasis mine. Really, the thing speaks for itself.

In our last item this morning, an ex-Episcopalian reader sends news of a new hymnal making the rounds in progressive circles: Songs For The Holy Other: Hymns Affirming the LGBTQIA2S+ Community. You can’t read the Alphabet People songbook unless you register, but I did find this hymn from the collection on another website:

Well. Like our fabulous-and-full-of-Lucky-Dogs spiritual father St. Ignatius of Constantinople Street hath said:

“A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.”

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Tucker Carlson Defense League

A year ago, when Antifa protesters assaulted Tucker Carlson’s DC home, my mother — Tucker’s biggest fan — was outraged. I went up to the country to bring in some firewood for her on the day after the Antifa assault, and she was fuming.

“I tell you what,” she said. “If I’d have been there, I’d have taken a gun and held ’em all off.”

(Actually, what she said was a bit spicier than that, but this is a fambly blog, most of the time.)

I asked her to go get one of her guns, and let me take a photo of her with it, and send it to Tucker. Mama has a good sense of humor, so she posed with a total lib-owning scowl, and let me photograph her with the gun. I texted it to Tucker, who was so delighted he actually telephoned her to thank him for having his back. She went to the beauty shop and told all her fellow little old lady friends about her friend Tucker calling her up.

Yesterday I went back up to the country, and took along the Russian ushanka, a traditional Russian winter hat, that I bought in St. Petersburg this month, for her to see. We got to joking, and I asked her if she wanted to do a repeat of last year’s Tucker Carlson Defense League propaganda poster — this time, with the ushanka. She said yeah, that would be fun. Here you go! Mama is a hoot — and she loves her Tucker Carlson:

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Heroes & The Power Of Ideas

Will Arbery’s Off Broadway smash Heroes Of The Fourth Turning closes this weekend. I’m really sorry that I didn’t have a chance to see it on stage. I understand from friends who did see it that there are things about the play that don’t really come out in the script, but do on stage. For example, the wordiness of the characters’ arguments, in print, evaporates on stage, I’m told. If you have a chance to see one of the final performances (it closes Nov. 17), by all means GO!

I see that Will was on NPR’s On Point show while I was away in Russia. I missed that broadcast, but I have to say that Alissa Wilkinson’s interview with him in Vox was my favorite so far (and helps me understand why he didn’t respond to the interview questions that I e-mailed him). Here are some excerpts:

Alissa Wilkinson

That’s part of what’s interesting about the conversation they have regarding empathy throughout the play. Art is, at least supposedly, the thing that can make us more empathetic. And yet I can imagine for instance an audience member with liberal commitments wondering if they’re supposed to be empathizing with the characters onstage, and whether that’s a good thing. If you don’t issue a rebuttal to their point of view within the script, then are you giving them a platform?

I can see how a left-leaning person could look at it and say, “I’m being asked to empathize with people who I think are bad people I don’t want to empathize with.” But I can also imagine people thinking you’re giving them a glimpse into an “enemy camp.”

Will Arbery

This is something I get on the right, as well.

It basically boils down to a dissatisfaction with the ending, on both sides. People want a clear thesis, or they want to know what my diagnosis is. On both sides, you hear, like, Clearly, he’s still confused and doesn’t know where he falls.

That for me is sad, because I don’t think that what they’re talking about is art. I think they’re talking about something else that I’m not interested in making.

But I understand the temptation, on both sides. The play is dealing with things that are very timely, and there’s a lot of debate, and so you want to be able to know who wins the debate.

I’m much more interested in what debate does to a person’s body, how it changes the air. How it turns fugues into these aggressive ways of thinking, and makes Teresa unrecognizable to her mentor. I’m so much more interested in all of those elements, rather than just giving people some answers.

Also, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t my total intention to leave people feeling like they had to figure it out for a long time. If they could settle it in the space of the theater, then I would have failed.

He’s onto something, isn’t he? Reading the play as a conservative Christian who once was Catholic (and who is intimately familiar with the debates the characters have), I relished the messiness and the contradictions in the lives of these characters. They reflect the messiness and contradictions in the lives of myself and many of my friends, though I think that because of our age, we’re more settled than the Millennials of Heroes are. But if you go to this play from the Left or the Right, expecting to see winning arguments, then you will be disappointed — and you should be disappointed, because the challenges in front of us do not lend themselves to a neat ideological solution. In fact, one of the deeper themes of the play, as I read it and reflect on it, is that the eagerness for a clear, sharp resolution to these difficult questions forces people to take stances that aren’t necessarily truthful, but give them the psychological comfort of certainty. The Teresa character — the self-appointed Steve Bannon acolyte — is not exactly wrong in her perception of the coming fight, but as the play goes on, it all comes to seem like a way for her to hide from herself, as a substitute for a meaningful religious or personal life. She’s performing the role of an alt-right culture warrior, but it emerges later in the play that she’s doing so to hide from part of herself.

Don’t you think that a lot of this Social Justice Warrior rage on the Left is the same kind of thing? Performance. Turning life into a series of performative, purgative rituals to ward off meaninglessness. Yesterday I was talking with a friend about a completely different, non-political situation, and I described a group as clinging to a particular narrative, despite mounting evidence that the narrative was dangerously incorrect, because they believed that the harder they leaned into that narrative, the more likely they would be to keep chaos at bay. It didn’t work, and they met disaster. The group no longer meets. In their case, the master narrative wasn’t an answer to hard questions; for that group, it was a way of avoiding hard questions.

And this wasn’t a religious group! But that dynamic can be seen in religious groups, in political groups, among activists, and so on. It’s so difficult to know when keeping faith with a narrative (religious or otherwise) is a sign of strength, and when it is a sign of weakness.

Anyway, the ending of Heroes really is confusing, and open to various interpretations. I talked not long ago to a fan of the play who hates the ending, and makes a good case for why it fails aesthetically. It does fail to resolve the questions the play’s dramatic narrative raises … but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

More from the interview:

Alissa Wilkinson

I want to go back to what you said about debate. “Debate me” is practically a meme at this point, but it’s also interesting to see how debate has shaped our political culture in really big ways. When I was a homeschooled teenager in the 1990s, debate was the thing to do, especially in conservative circles. It promised to teach you how to think like “the enemy.” But that kind of sparring seems like it values winning over thought.

Will Arbery

Yeah. It’s in the play, too. The only way anyone ever wins a debate in the play is by resorting to something personal.

I feel people doing that to me too as a creator. “Do you still go to Mass? Are you practicing?” Like, what do you actually think about all these things? Looking for any ammunition they can get to sort of resolve the tension [from the play] in their own lives. But I don’t give it to them.

Ah, now see, I asked this kind of thing of Will in the (unanswered) interview questions I sent to him, not so I could resolve the tensions in my own lives, but so I could get a better idea of his own stance. That’s just natural journalistic curiosity. It’s normal for an interviewer to ask a writer or artist, especially when they have written a play so deeply autobiographical, which parts of their own lives inform their art. I suspect that it’s more the case here that the playwright himself hasn’t resolved these questions (he said in another interview that he hasn’t gone to mass regularly in years) within himself, and is anxious about being put on the spot about them. It is also probably the case that he’s wise not to talk about these things in public, because there are surely people on the left and the right, religious and secular, who would use that information to dismiss the play (e.g., “Oh, he’s a fallen-away Catholic, what do you expect?” “Oh, he’s still stuck in remnants of his patriarchal upbringing, and that’s why he doesn’t understand that these crazy Catholics make the world unsafe,” etc.) Anything to make the hard, painful questions go away.

I like what Wilkinson says about the “debate me” culture. We really have been conditioned to value “winning” over a genuine engagement with ideas. I’ve said in this space before how frustrating it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, being a columnist based in New York City, and being invited to be on cable news panels. I was smart enough to understand that these things are meant to offer the simulation of debate, but I still could not bring myself to play my role properly. I can remember once being on an MSNBC panel in which the producer was saying into my ear that I needed to be more aggressive, and to repeat my points. He was right; I was bad for cable TV. I was trying to listen to my opponents, and take what they said seriously before responding. That’s not what the network wanted. They just wanted a clash.

More seriously, this is a constant theme of mine: the dangers from overintellectualizing life. You’ve heard it from me a thousand times: one of the main reasons I lost my ability to believe in Catholicism was that I made the classic intellectual’s mistake of thinking that mastering the arguments for the faith was the same thing as having faith. What does it profit a man to win all the debates in the world, but lose his soul? The point here is not to dismiss intellection, but to properly order it, and to recognize its limits. I don’t think Teresa, the right-wing ideologue, is a villain; I think she is someone for whom winning the argument is everything. I know a Christian like that, and he’s totally insufferable. He’s often correct in the stances he takes, but he’s a pretty awful person, and has a gift for driving people away.

But you know, just yesterday I was having a conversation with a friend who is a moderate Republican with lots of liberal friends. He told me that he has watched those friendship dry up because in the past few years — under Trump — the liberals have become so ideologically deranged that they can’t talk about anything but how much they hate Trump, and how much they hate people who like Trump. He told me he didn’t even vote for Trump in 2016, but watching what has happened to his liberal friends — them turning themselves into ideological fanatics — it frightens him to think about them coming to power, so he’s probably going to hold his nose and vote Trump in 2020.

The young conservative writer Philippe Lemoine has a good Twitter thread about how people on the left both “grossly exaggerate and vastly underestimate” the influence of right-wing ideas. You’ll have to read the thread to understand what he’s getting at, but in my experience, it’s 100 percent true. Most conservatives aren’t nearly as extreme as many liberals think they are, but they also know that they’re better of just staying quiet around liberals, because liberals will have a hissy fit and condemn them as crypto-Kluckers or fascist-adjacents just for considering ideas to the right of Joe Biden.

In the Vox interview, Will Arbery talks more about how fragile people are — people of the left and the right — when approaching ideas and expressions of ideas that unsettle them. “Like they’re afraid of thinking their own thing, or liking their own thing,” he says.

In my experience, this is almost an entirely left-wing thing — people afraid of liking something that deviates from their own progressive orthodoxies. But I have met people who were raised in super-strict Protestant fundamentalist or traditionalist Catholic circles who say that this was how they grew up — with this terror of having Incorrect Thoughts. We happen to live in a time and a place, though, where in the major producers of culture, progressives hold this kind of tyrannical hegemony. A friend who works inside a liberal church bureaucracy told me the other day that if her coworkers knew how conservative she is, she would likely be fired, or at least they would make her completely miserable. But they don’t see it, because she’s a nice, friendly person; to them, conservatives are all vicious, nasty people, so she can’t possibly be conservative. She’s not trying to hide her conservatism, except that she knows that if she was honest about what she believed, it would ruin her career and cause her coworkers to turn on her. Meanwhile, as an underground woman, she hears things like how the church bureaucrats work to marginalize and destroy any expression of Christian orthodoxy within their denomination, which is not formally a liberal one.

See, this is why it is impossible to dismiss what Teresa, the ideologue in Heroes, says about a coming war.

Anyway, read the entire interview. There are some mild spoilers, but I guess if you haven’t seen the play yet, you’re not going to get to. Even though I think it’s a fantastic play, I don’t think it will last, simply because it is very much a play about our contemporary moment. This line from Wilkinson, the interviewer, speaks to something that is not going away anytime soon:

These characters, for all their expansive education, do seem to lack some ability to imagine others. They think their debates and discussions are the way to fight encroaching secularism — as if arguing and polemics are what matters, when the people they’re arguing about don’t even realize these fights are taking place.

She’s really onto something, though it’s not quite fair to these characters. They’re having these arguments because they all went to this college where people argued like this all the time, and they’ve come back for a kind of reunion. Still, this comment of Wilkinson’s hit home with me, because it made me realize that the kinds of things I — that we, on this site — talk about really aren’t on the radar screens of most people.

Here’s the thing, though: these things really do matter, and they eventually will matter one way or the other in the lives of ordinary people. I can’t emphasize strongly enough something I’ve learned from all the research I’ve been doing this year about Soviet and Soviet-bloc communism: that what were once abstruse theoretical debates confined to small circles of intellectuals came to rule the lives and fates of hundreds of millions of people, who never saw it coming.

Attention must be paid — or else. Whether you are on the left or the right, secular or religious, the kinds of things Will Arbery’s characters argue about matter, whether you realize it or not, though they probably won’t matter in ways they anticipate. Watch and wait; you’ll see.

However — and this is a key point — they don’t matter in one very important sense. Matthew Boudway speaks to this in his thoughtful review in Commonweal:

In one sense, Emily’s fury seems to come out of nowhere. It’s so out of keeping with her manner in the rest of the play, and what does it have to do with Trump or the Benedict Option? Nothing and everything. The exquisitely articulated ideological constructs in the rest of the play all pretend to be in the service of a religion whose God was tortured to death. Even the most secular New York theatergoers know this about Christianity, but if they didn’t, they would never learn it from all the brilliant dialogue of the Catholics intellectuals in this play. It goes unsaid not because it goes without saying, but because Catholicism here has wandered about as far as it can from the Gospel without becoming totally unrecognizable. What remains are its bones, which might or might not be good enough to prop up Western Civilization—Teresa’s real religion—but are of no comfort whatever to Emily. Her agony calls her religion’s bluff. It kills all ideology and sentimentalism on contact. What, if anything, does that leave?

I don’t fully agree with Boudway about the Catholicism in this play having “wandered about as far as it can from the Gospel” — though I suppose that’s what a Commonweal writer would say — but he is spot-on about how hard it is for a Catholicism of the head to deal with the pain and suffering in the body. It’s a very Catholic theme. I would love for a progressive playwright to write a Heroes of the left (secular or Christian). I would love to see the shibboleths of progressivism, religious or secular, be tested against the pain of the body.

 

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Among The Counter-Revolutionaries

Sir Roger Scruton was a genuine hero of the anti-communist resistance in Central Europe. In the 1980s, he would travel to Czechoslovakia and Poland, helping set up underground universities, where free thought could thrive, and where students could earn a meaningful degree outside the corrupt communist system.

Today, he sees a fast-coming need for a similar sort of underground resistance in Britain, a nation that has forgotten the lessons of communism. In this excerpt, Sir Roger speaks of the underground seminars that Czech intellectuals hosted in private apartments. This was part of building what Czech dissident Vaclav Benda called the “parallel polis” — a separate society where truth could live, and be passed on:

In those times, when private education was criminalised, and the universities and colleges were devoted to Marxist-Leninist dogma, the older generation of professors, the best of whom had been expelled from their positions following the Soviet invasion in 1968, had no other way of passing on their knowledge than through such secret seminars. For most of them publication was impossible, and the important books were unavailable or banned.

The chain of intellectual inspiration had been broken, and they were owners and curators of its last severed link. They lived at the end of an educational tradition, and their attempts to nurture that tradition and to pass it on had to be conducted underground. Do not think that this was an accidental feature of communism: it was the real political meaning of the system. Knowledge means privilege, advantage, curiosity, free enquiry, all of which were threats to the proletarian revolution and to the Party that had taken charge of it.

What is so fascinating, from our contemporary perspective, is how consumer capitalism, technology, and radical individualism has managed to accomplish what the communists could not do. As Neil Postman said, George Orwell feared a society where the state burned books; Aldous Huxley feared a society where the state did not need to burn books, because nobody wanted to read them in the first place. Our coming totalitarianism is softer, Huxleyan, not the hard Orwellian kind. The rise of the classical Christian school movement is one response to it. These schools are still permitted to function in the US, though Scruton points out that in his country, Britain, the Labour Party proposes banning private education of all kinds.

One thing I have heard over and over in traveling through former communist countries this year, talking about our common cultural crisis: it was easier under communism in one way alone — that you knew where the lines were. Today, you don’t. For example, you knew under communism that if you went to an underground seminar in an intellectual’s apartment that you were doing something very risky, and with powerful meaning. You were doing something revolutionary. Today, if someone wanted to have a seminar in their house to discuss the meaning of Aristotle, it would be just one choice of many on a Saturday night.

But think about it: if people aren’t taught Aristotle in the communist state schools, and they choose not to go to a risky underground seminar, the memory of Aristotle, his teaching, and why it’s important to our culture, fades away. In our society, if people aren’t taught Aristotle in the public or private schools, and they choose not to inform themselves in other ways, the memory of Aristotle, his teaching, and why it’s important to our culture, fades away.

Whether you go the Orwell route or the Huxley route, the result is the same.

A side note. On my recent Russian trip, I interviewed Viktor Popkov, a persecuted Christian dissident from Alexander Ogorodnikov’s circles. Popkov came to believe in Christ in the early 1970s. Back then, to be openly Christian was to align yourself against everybody and everything in Soviet society. It wasn’t only that you would get yourself persecuted. It was also that nobody understood you. This is why coming together for fellowship was so important. It wasn’t possible to do it in churches, Ogorodnikov, also a young convert, organized the “Christian Seminar” in Moscow — a regular meeting of believers who came together to discuss their subversive faith. They were like the Prague intellectuals, only they focused not on philosophy and literature, but on Christianity, both in its intellectual dimension, and its popular dimension. Popkov told me:

“Fifteen to twenty people would get together (at these seminars) on the weekend to talk to each other. Completely surprising things would happen. Obviously we were being followed by the KGB. They knew everything about us. These meetings caused me to feel something very, very deep that I continue to feel today. It was an intoxicating happiness. We gathered together, and the Lord answered us with his presence. This feeling was something we felt only when we were meeting. When I’m reading the Acts of the Apostles, that’s what it felt like. By gathering together, we were able to rise to a new level, and then go back home and live at a higher level.”

He added: “In Soviet life, there were only two colors: black and white. In Western society today, there are a large number of colors, and it’s so hard to make a decision. In that way, we had it easier than people today.”

Anyway, back to Scruton’s new piece. Here he talks about the underground Prague seminars as the seeds of civil society:

What disturbed the authorities was not the fact that these peculiar people were studying Plato. After all, Plato was studied in the official universities too. The problem was that they were studying Plato together, and without asking permission. They had created a club of their own, outside the vigilance of the state, and they had united in friendship to pursue that goal. They had created a fragment of civil society, and in doing so had brought meaning into their lives beyond anything delivered by the grim routines of the communist bureaucracy.

In the Czechoslovakia of those times there was a hunger for civil society. Older people remembered the clubs, troupes, parades, pilgrimages, dances, bands, teams and regiments that were the lost heart of their nation. Younger people looked enviously at those Western societies in which pop groups, dances, festivals and protests offered a life outside the system. And the more serious the desire for those things, the more determined was the Party to forbid them.

Read the whole thing.

It is well known that civil society has been declining these past few decades (the whole “Bowling Alone” phenomenon). This is not happening because a one-party state has been monopolizing power. That’s the Orwell scenario. It has been happening because as Huxley feared, we have become a people saturated with information, and distracted to the point of dissolution. We won’t have it in us to resist future persecution because we will not recognize it when it comes.

In my reading for this new book I’m working on, I have learned a powerful lesson from Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government, a history of the Bolshevik Revolution. The revolution was born among groups of radical intellectuals who met in each other’s houses to conduct seminars, and who were willing to risk serious persecution by the Tsarist state — and willing to suffer imprisonment and exile to Siberia when it came — for the sake of their beliefs. They took what they learned from those seminars, and spread the revolutionary faith to ordinary Russians. Eventually, the country was theirs.

Of course, they destroyed it. That’s not my point. My point is that a great movement began from the seeds planted in these underground seminars, by true believers who were willing to suffer for their faith. Scruton recalls the anti-communist version of this, from the 1980s, and says that the censorious Left, which owns British universities, are creating conditions where such seminars will be necessary to ensure that British students who want a real education can get one.

What would those seminars look like for us if we held them today? I’m talking about seminars like the Czechs did (based on academic and cultural topics), and seminars like the Russian Christians did, focusing on the faith?

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Ten Years, 2010-2020

I answered one of those Twitter things going around:

Buried sister and father

Moved home to Louisiana

Wrote 3 books; collaborated on 4th; made deal for 5th

Made NYT bestseller list 2x

Was subject of New Yorker profile

Interviewed by @marshillaudio (a personal dream)

Traveled a lot, & made friends I love dearly https://t.co/VGA2XBeCfN

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) November 13, 2019

I thought, “Whoa, other than the family deaths, that’s pretty great!” So why doesn’t it feel all that great? Then I answered it a second time:

I forgot some things for my list:

– discovered dark family secret

– became chronically ill for 3 yrs from stress of it

– lost precious things that are irrecoverable

– learned that some pain can’t be fixed, only borne https://t.co/VGA2XBeCfN

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) November 13, 2019

A lot more happened to me in this decade than I could put in two tweets, but you get the idea.

The thing is, I can’t separate the good things that happened to me from the bad things. The hinge is the deaths of my sister and father, which were awful things (especially my sister, who died young, and in pain), but which opened some doors for me that I never thought would open.

But the opening of that door was very far from unambiguously good, as readers of my books know. I guess what shakes me up looking at these two lists is that if you had told me in November 2009 that within a decade, I would have written two NYT bestsellers, been profiled by the New Yorker, and the rest of it, I would have thought I’d hit the lottery. It must look like that to a lot of people on the outside. It’s important to remember, though, that the book that really launched my book-writing career was one about the untimely death of my poor sister. Nothing good that could possibly have happened to me could compensate for that loss. I would trade all that success for her life without a millisecond’s thought.

With the success has come a lot of pain — I talked in How Dante about the family secrets that came to light, and how crushed I was by discovering the truth, but also how God brought good out of it. Still, it will surprise readers who are used to my confessional, TMI style to learn that there are things I don’t write about, and won’t ever write about. There are things that I carry every single day; they’re the first things I think of when I wake up in the morning, the last things I think about as I’m falling asleep, and are never, ever far from the front of my mind. I have resigned myself to accepting that this is a pain I will always have to carry. My task is to figure out where God is in all this.

When I was in Russia recently, I interviewed a number of survivors of the gulag, or otherwise witnesses to religious persecution in the Soviet Union. It was hard going, but also a blessing, to see the resilience of the human spirit. One of my interview subjects spoke with such intimacy and eloquence about having to fight through the pain to find God’s will in it — and succeeding, though at a terrible cost.

I was so moved by the particulars of what he said that I very nearly cried. I blurted out something to him that I wish I hadn’t done. I told him of a special burden that I carry, and said it cannot be compared to what he endured under the Soviets, but that his words about staying faithful through persecution had personal resonance to me.

He looked at me, and said quietly, “I know what you mean. I’m going through the same thing now.”

And then he told me something else that had happened to him, and that he’s carrying in his heart. I nearly fell away.

Since that conversation, he has stayed on my mind. I’ve been praying for him. I hope he has been praying for me. One big lesson I’ve learned over the last decade is how impossible it is to escape suffering. Watching my healthy, never-smoking sister die of lung cancer at 42, leaving a husband and three kids — that wasn’t supposed to happen. But it did. Actually, a lot of things that weren’t supposed to happen, happened.

The contingency of life — that has been the greatest lesson for me of the past decade. We have far less control over events than we think we do. It’s humiliating. And that stupid REM song is true: everybody hurts. I need to remember that more often. I also need to remember the truth in these stanzas of this great W.H. Auden poem:

‘O look, look in the mirror,

O look in your distress:

Life remains a blessing

Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.’

What are the highlights of what happened to you over this past decade? What have you learned? Let’s have a thread.

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Letter From A ‘Benedict Option’ Convert

I received this wonderful letter today from Michael Warren Davis, editor of the Catholic magazine Crisis. I publish it with his permission:

I first read The Benedict Option when it was first published, back when I was still riding the high from President Trump’s 2016 victory. Honestly, I wasn’t impressed. I was probably one of the many Trumpists who dismissed it as defeatist and retreatist. (I’m sorry to say that I even wrote one of those dreadful “The So-and-So Option” copycat articles.) Crunchy Cons I loved, and The BenOp sort of felt like a regression.

Just after Halloween, two of my wife’s friends came to visit us at our home. One night we all huddled in the living room, drinking cider and brandy and talking about… well, politics, of course. At one point, the conversation went like this:

Me: “I really don’t see the point in any of this. The idea that re-electing Trump will solve anything just strikes me as ridiculous. I mean, he’s not even trying anymore. What’s with that slogan, ‘Keep America Great’? Are we really supposed to think he’s solved all of America’s problems in three years?”

Friend: “What do you want to do about it?”

Me: “I don’t know. Move back to New Hampshire, for starters. Reconnect with the Thomas More College community. Get more involved with Winthrop House [a new homesteading non-profit started by a good friend]. Have a bunch of kids, and homeschool them. Buy some land and work it. Smash my laptop. Go to daily Mass.”

Friend: “That’s the Benedict Option.”

Me: “No—I mean, rebuilding Christendom from the ground up. Ignoring think-tankers’ grand strategies, the hack journalists’ hot takes, and the politicians’ empty promises. Pulling my head out of the toxic swamp of mass culture. Withdrawing from consumer capitalism. Rolling up my sleeves and actually making a tangible difference, even if it’s only a small one. Staking out a bit of territory where Christendom can survive until the West is ready to take it back. Leading by example instead of tweets and op-eds.”

Friend: “Yeah, Michael… that’s the Benedict Option.”

Intrigued, I pulled The Benedict Option off the shelf and started reading it again. It’s like I have new eyes.

I don’t know what’s changed in the last two and a half years. I think a lot of it is just “Trump Fatigue.” The schtick is really getting old. Part of it is probably the getting married and starting a family, which shatters many illusions about one’s own powers. It forces you to think seriously about how you can make the world safe for the people you love. Part of it, too, I suppose, is that I—a reactionary from boyhood, when I insisted on going to preschool in tweed and a bow tie—lived to see illiberalism become quasi-mainstream, or at least kosher. Only once I heard my own arguments in the mouths of smarter people than me did I started to notice chinks in the armor.

How on earth are we supposed to erect a Catholic state when the percentage of Catholics is only shrinking? How many of the remaining Catholics would even be open to integralism if they can’t even comply with Catholic moral teachings that are relatively easy to comply with—for instance, the mere 13 percent of Mass-goers (or about one percent of all Americans) who accept the Church’s teaching on contraception? It’s like hanging a new air freshener on the rear-view mirror when the car is on fire. We’re lightyears away from having a population that might even consider adopting some kind of illiberal or traditionalist political program.

It’s amusing to hear myself making arguments that, just a few months ago, I would’ve dismissed as defeatist. I guess it’s kind of like what St. Thomas Aquinas says about faith: To one who gets it, no explanation is necessary. To one who doesn’t, no explanation is possible.

Of course, I don’t find it defeatist anymore. Just the opposite, in fact. Even before I became a political journalist, I felt as though there was something deeply shallow about our politics, and something at once vain and futile about our attempts to solve our problems through policy papers and senate bills. It seemed to me that the more important questions were cultural: our collective addiction to technology, the hideousness of modern architecture, the omnipresence of pop music in public spaces, the decline of regional accents… things that most people, and even most influential conservatives, don’t really think twice about. I assumed I was just a naive, nostalgia-addled fogey. Actually, I think I was right.

I also feel a tremendous sense of relief. I don’t feel like I have to rely on my own powers to save the world. I don’t feel like I have to win 51 percent of the country to my view in order to feel like I’ve made a difference. I don’t feel like I have to sell out my principles and priorities in exchange for a nosebleed seat to root for the Winning Team.

That’s something equally daunting and liberating about the BenOp: it’s by definition not majoritarian, and the object isn’t to be the most popular guy on the block. In fact, as I gather from reading your blog, you actually take quite a lot of heat for rejecting the ideological solutions and abjuring personality cults. Nobody wants to believe they’re actually quite powerless in the face of the cultural/political/corporate/media elites. They want to believe their hashtags and hyperlinks are going to win the day. Nobody wants to humble themselves and do the difficult, tedious work of rebuilding Western civilization from its very foundations. That’s the defeatist attitude. It’s born of despair.

I’m sure there are others like me, who will become disillusioned with the various conservative establishments (pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whatever) and find direction in The Benedict Option. We’re only just beginning to realize the significance of this extraordinary book.

I am humbled by this letter, and thank Michael for it. I think the “Trump fatigue” he’s talking about is very real. It is hard for Christians to give up the idea that if only we vote for the right person, everything is going to be made right. Once you give up that (false) hope, it sets you free to live in reality. It’s better to live in the truth, however confusing and unpleasant, than to live in a soothing falsehood.

This is not Donald Trump’s fault, mind you. The other day, I was e-mailing with a couple of Christian friends, and we were talking about my observation on this blog that a Russian Christian audience stared at me with incomprehension as I told them about Drag Queen Story Hour, and the way US culture catechizes little children into gender ideology — without much resistance at all. One of my correspondents wrote:

I was thinking about how astonished the Russians you met were that American conservatives just roll over when the alphabet people hold a DQSH etc. You can see how the Muslim parents in Britain resisted, so why don’t American conservatives do that?

I think you can make a solid charge that it’s due to the stance promoted by opponents to Ben Opt, presented as “fighting back.” But for virtually everyone, it’s sending out other people to fight these battles for us. We could call it the “Representative” approach, just like representative democracy. We don’t engage personally; if you read an essay someone else wrote that states your views, you did your part.

Though this alternative to the Ben Opt describes itself as fighting back, for nearly everyone it amounts to watching someone else fight back, while they go on doing whatever they are doing. This is obviously appealing because it’s hard work to actually go out and fight battles. It’s demanding, people hate you (and possibly threaten you), and it makes it hot for you locally if people recognize you. It’s much safer to keep a low profile. And why bother to get involved in any practical way, if you can read a blog post that already says everything you think?

As you say so often, Rod, what they don’t notice is that their children are drifting from these values and even from faith. And that’s it’s easy even for themselves to be gradually being turned into something indistinguishable from the world.

I responded:

In heavily secular France, almost a million people turned out in Paris to demonstrate against the proposed gay marriage law. [This was the 2014 Manif Pour Tous. — RD] They didn’t prevail, in the end, but a million freaking people came out to protest it. Not all of them were Catholic. Many were just ordinary people who believe that children should have a mom and a dad. Meanwhile, in the US, which is comparatively more religious and more conservative … nothing.

My other correspondent in this conversation said that she works in a progressive office space, and that if the people around her knew what she really believed, her job might be at risk, and she would certainly face harassment. She said that the fear of being called a “bigot” is very real, and it has real-world consequences (job loss) for many people.

I know that’s true. I know it’s true in part because I hear from you readers every day, testifying to it.  Let me ask you, though: is anything that Donald Trump has done since taking office in 2017 made it less likely that you will be harassed in the workplace or at school for your beliefs, and safer for you to say what’s on your mind? Has the Trump presidency made it more likely that your children will accept and live out the faith? If Trump is re-elected next year, and serves out a full second term, will Christians, and the Christian faith, be better off?

Of course they won’t. This is not a reason to vote Democratic in 2020, of course, or to have voted Democratic in 2016. For all Trump’s many failings, there’s a lot to be said for a president who doesn’t despise one and one’s beliefs, especially on abortion and religious liberty. And judges really do matter. I wish Trump were less vain, less easily distracted, less corrupt, and so forth — because my kind needs him to be good at what he does. He’s not, and we now know that he’s never going to be any better than he has been so far. At some point, endless recitations of “but he’s better than Hillary would have been” are irrelevant, even if true.

Still, even if he were at the top of his game, Trump would at best be a holding action. As I wrote in The Benedict Option (which came out in early 2017, two months after Trump’s inauguration):

No administration in Washington, no matter how ostensibly pro-Christian, is capable of stopping cultural trends toward desacralization and fragmentation that have been building for centuries. To expect any different is to make a false idol of politics.

What’s more, to believe that the threat to the church’s integrity and witness has passed because Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election is the height of folly.

One reason the contemporary church is in so much trouble is that religious conservatives of the last generation mistakenly believed they could focus on politics, and the culture would take care of itself. For the past thirty years or so, many of us believed that we could turn back the tide of aggressive 1960s liberalism by voting for conservative Republicans. White Evangelicals and Catholic “Reagan Democrats” came together to support GOP candidates who vowed to back socially conservative legislation and to nominate conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The results were decidedly mixed on the legislative and judicial fronts, but the verdict on the overall political strategy is clear: we failed. Fundamental abortion rights remain solidly in place, and Gallup poll numbers from the Roe v. Wade era until today have not meaningfully changed. The traditional marriage and family model has been protected in neither law nor custom, and because of that, courts are poised to impose dramatic rollbacks of religious liberty for the sake of antidiscrimination.

Again, the new Trump administration may be able to block or at least slow these moves with its judicial appointments, but this is small consolation. Will the law as written by a conservative legislature and interpreted by conservative judges overwrite the law of the human heart? No, it will not. Politics is no substitute for personal holiness. The best that orthodox Christians today can hope for from politics is that it can open a space for the church to do the work of charity, culture building, and conversion.

I went on to say that “Christians cannot afford to vacate the public square entirely,” and that we have to stay involved in politics for the sake of defending our liberties, and the common good. (This is something that many critics of the Ben Op seem driven to ignore about my book). But we have to do this differently than we are accustomed to:

Above all, though, [the times] require attention to the local church and community, which doesn’t flourish or fail based primarily on what happens in Washington. And the times require an acute appreciation of the fragility of what can be accomplished through partisan politics. Republicans won’t always rule Washington, after all, and the Republicans who are ruling it now may be more adversarial to the work of the church than many gullible Christians think.

Many Christians are so discouraged by the political situation that they have resolved to disengage from

partisan politics or at least to care less about it than they once did. This need not mean a retreat into quietism. Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs magazine and a fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, contends that religious conservatives would be better off “building thriving subcultures” than seeking positions of power. Why? Because in an age of increasing and unstoppable fragmentation, the common culture doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Writes Levin:

The center has not held in American life, so we must instead find our centers for ourselves as communities of like-minded citizens, and then build out the American ethic from there. . . . Those seeking to reach Americans with an unfamiliar moral message must find them where they are, and increasingly, that means traditionalists must make their case not by planting themselves at the center of society, as large institutions, but by dispersing themselves to the peripheries as small outposts. In this sense, focusing on your own near-at-hand community does not involve a withdrawal from contemporary America, but an increased attentiveness to it.

Thus, the Benedict Option as a political response to our relative decline in power and influence. If you think Robert Jeffress’s invitations to the White House, and prosperity gospel charlatan Paul White-Cain’s new appointment as Trump’s top religious adviser, mean anything substantive or good, you are in for a very hard fall. In fact, as Michael Warren Davis avers, believing that we can vote and emote our way to renewal and revival, instead of doing the long, hard work of repentance and rebuilding, stone by stone, is the real response of despair.

Last year, a prominent conservative Christian academic told me that he doesn’t think that The Benedict Option is done. I asked him what he meant. He said that when Trump leaves office, the scales will fall from the eyes of many traditional Christians, and they will wake up to the seriousness of our common crisis. I told him I hope he’s right. Reading Michael Warren Davis’s letter helped me understand what the professor was talking about.

I leave you with this passage from St. John Henry Newman, on what the early Benedictines accomplished:

St. Benedict found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it, not professing to do it by any set time, or by any rare specific, or by any series of strokes, but so quietly, patiently, gradually, that often till the work was done, it was not known to be doing. It was a restoration rather than a visitation, correction or conversion. The new work which he helped to create was a growth rather than a structure. Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully copied and recopied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one who contended or cried out, or drew attention to what was going on, but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning and a city.

We can do this! What choice do we have? I am reminded of this fragment from an e-mail I received in August 2018 from a rock-solid conservative Catholic priest, lamenting the spinelessness of the “good bishops”, who believed all the right things, but did nothing when they had the chance:

They will not act. They just talk and wait. Meanwhile the “New Paradigm” spreads ever further so they move from Communion for a few divorced/remarried folk, to homosexuals, to protestants, to preparing to relativize Humanae Vitae, to these games with the death penalty. At any point had the progressives faced bold apostolic witness and determined resistance, they could have been checked. But no, because bishops are chosen to be passive men when it comes to such things, only acting the way every other one acts and always with deference. That may be fine when all is well in the world, but it is catastrophic when things are under threat.

We beg for help from them. Shoot, we even show them how to do what must be done by doing it ourselves. And still they do not act. Just like the abuse victims asking for help and getting nothing. We ask for bread, they give us stones, accuse us of being impatient or disloyal, or charge us with being rigorist Pharisees nostalgic for a Church we never knew.

[The ‘good’ bishops of the John Paul II era] thought they could finesse the situation, gain control, and move things in the right direction. It was all just a matter of time. They did not realize the nature of the war that was being waged.

I responded:

They did not realize the nature of the war that was being waged. This is not only true of Catholic clerics, and it is not only true of the clerical class. All of us small-o orthodox Christians have to wake up and understand the nature of this war. As it is, we are not going to survive it if we fight it by the old rules.

Lots of Christians have the false idea that The Benedict Option foresees the greatest challenges to the faith coming from state persecution. Though I do believe that is coming, by far the greater threats to the churches come from the culture in general, and from internal collapse.

In my view, Michael Warren Davis now realizes the nature of the war being waged — and because of that, realizes the nature that the resistance has to take. That doesn’t mean changing the way one votes. It means recognizing that voting correctly may be necessary, but it is just about the least meaningful thing we can do for ourselves, and the future of the faith.

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Christians Need To Stop Saying This

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a Christian say some version of persecution would be good for us; the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, then I could pay off a big chunk of Cardinal McCarrick’s lawyer’s fee.

It’s the kind of thing conservative Christians like to say when they talk about the possibility of coming persecution. Of course Christians in America have no idea what they’re talking about. None. Reading the literature of Communist anti-Christian persecution, and visiting with Christians in the former Soviet Union, and in the Soviet bloc, who endured prison, even the gulag, for their faith, has given me the resolve to rebuke anyone who says this in my presence henceforth.

What did it for me was reading Dissident For Life, the biography of Alexander Ogorodnikov, who was one of the leading Christian dissidents in the USSR. I met with him in Moscow recently, and interviewed him for my forthcoming book. Here are some excerpts from Dissident For Life:

Back in prison, he immediately began a new hunger strike to protest his conviction and rough treatment; but for punishment he was locked up for ten days in the kartser (punishment cell). In Kalinin this was a stone dungeon that was cold, damp, and filled with an almost unbearable stench. But he got used to even that after a while. It was a tiny cell, barely three paces across. It had no table or chair, only a concrete cylinder about half a meter high and 25 centimeters across with an iron ring around it; the cylinder was impossible to sit on. The cell was lit by a weak bulb that was too faint for reading or writing. During his isolation in the kartser, Ogorodnikov was given no books, pen or paper — not even toilet paper. When he returned, he had to exchange his clothes for thin cotton prison garments. There were no bed linens, and at . night he slept on a plank fitted with iron springs that had to be hung on the wall during the day.

 

More:

On April 7, 1979, Ogorodnikov was condemned to a “strict regime” for confessing [in the religious sense] just before Easter. This meant that he was locked up for fifteen days in the shtrafnoi izoliator, otherwise known as the shizo (the camp isolation cell). As in the notorious prison kartser, a whole range of additional restrictions were imposed there.

While Alexander was on his knees praying in the shizo, a guard came in and commanded him to stand up. Ogorodnikov quietly kept on praying. After this “serious” breach of prison regulations, the guards used artificial air pressure in the sewer system to pump raw sewage into his cell, leaving a layer of much almost ten inches deep. In the middle of this tiny cell, barely three paces across, there was a concrete post about ten inches wide, on which he could not sit; there was only room for one of his feet. For two days Ogorodnikov stood straight up in that stinking pool as the water subsided with exasperating slowness.

In the Siberian prison camp:

These crushing living conditions gradually affected the spirit of the prisoners. By far the worst was the chronic hunger. Like a constantly throbbing toothache, that feeling of hunger gradually undermined the prisoners’ health. After a couple of years a prisoner could no longer sit on a chair or lie on a bed without pain because his bones poked out against his skin. Other common side effects were swollen joints in the fingers and legs, red patches on the body, liver complaints, scurvy due to serious vitamin deficiency, and stomach ulcers.

Prisoners could borrow five books or magazines from the camp library, all of which were propaganda tools for “socialist realism.” It’s no wonder that all the prisoners were permanently consumed by a boundless longing for their wives and children, good food, and freedom.

From a letter he wrote to his mother from prison:

In the three years of my imprisonment I have spent 176 days and nights in punishment and isolation cells. In the Kalinin prison the floor was covered with water. In Komsomolsk the sewage system was deliberately blocked off so human excrement was constantly floating around in my cell. I tried to keep from making it worse by doing my business on a short concrete post. In winter the temperature in the punishment cell never rises above fourteen or fifteen degrees, while you’re sitting on a concrete floor without any underwear. Daily rations are minimal. One day you get 350 grams [12 ounces] of bread and water and the next day you get a hot meal, but according to the “reduced” norm, which means its mostly water.

There’s much more, including force feedings that knocked most of his teeth out, and the KGB destroying his marriage and teaching his son to hate his father. Mind you, Ogorodnikov was only one Christian; the Soviets did this kind of thing to countless others (those they didn’t shoot, at least). At several points in his long and torturous captivity, Ogorodnikov was offered freedom if he would just denounce himself, renounce his faith (or at least his activism), and on at least one other occasion, if he would agree to leave the Soviet Union and go live in the West. In every case, he refused.

Alexander Ogorodnikov never broke. I strongly encourage you to read the entire book, or at least the post I wrote the other day about my interview with him in Moscow. It would be not only wholly inaccurate, but morally obscene, to compare the things that are now beginning to happen in the West to what happened to believers in Soviet Russia. But Ogorodnikov startled me by beginning our conversation like this:

“I’m already shocked by the totalitarianism that already exists in the West, within social opinion. Someone makes some kind of announcement that’s not up to progressive social standards, and immediately there’s an exclusion zone around them. It gets to the point just in order to be understood you have to constantly simplify, in order not to hurt or offend anyone.”

It starts somewhere, people. While in Moscow, my translator Matthew and I went out to the Butovo firing range, now a memorial to the 21,000 men and women the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, shot there in a 14-month period during Stalin’s Great Terror. I wrote a post about that too. There we started talking to an old man standing near a fence. Vladimir Alexandrovich — we didn’t get his last name — comes to the memorial service here every year to pray for his father, who was murdered elsewhere by Stalin’s goons, and for the priest and another member of his church, both of whom were killed here.

“And for what?” he said, not expecting an answer.

Speaking to him in Russian, Matthew told him what my new book was about. When I told him that people are losing their jobs in the US over political issues, he said, “That’s a bad sign.”

“History always repeats, one way or another,” he said, heavily.

In Russia, someone else told me, in a discussion about people in the US losing their jobs and their businesses over their beliefs, “That’s always how it starts.”

My point today, reader, is this: I am convinced that we are headed into persecution. I don’t believe it will be nearly as harsh as what Christians in the Soviet bloc endured. But it will be real, and it will cost us. The depth and breadth of it depends in part on how hard we fight now against the small things those who hate us are doing. But I do not believe that it can be fully stopped. This is why I exhort my fellow believers to prepare themselves and their communities. This is why I’m writing this new book.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this reading, and all these interviews with those who suffered intensely to bear witness to their faith, it’s that we Americans who speak lightly of persecution, and who speak of it as something that might be good for us, and make us more serious about our faith — we have no idea what we’re talking about, and we should never, ever say something like that. Imagine how obscene it would be for Jews to say, after Auschwitz, that maybe some anti-Semitic persecution would be good for them, because it would make them more committed to Judaism, or Jewish identity. After talking with Ogorodnikov (and the others, throughout the Soviet bloc, with whom I’ve spoken), that’s how the easy conversation among American Christians about persecution sounds to my ears these days.

And look — what the faithful endured in the USSR was not as bad as what they endured in Romania, in the prison camp of Pitesti. If you read this blog post of mine criticizing the Jesuit magazine America‘s essay attempting to rehabilitate Communism — yes, they actually published such an abomination — you’ll see this excerpt from 1966 US Senate testimony by Pastor Richard Wumbrand, a Lutheran clergyman who endured Pitesti:

[Richard Wurmbrand:] A Westerner can’t understand God is here and knows that I will not tell you the whole truth because if I will tell you the whole truth, you will faint and rush out of this room, not bearing to hear what things have happened. But I will tell you that in a prison they crucified a cat before ourselves. They beat nails in the feet of the cat and the cat was hanging with the head down, and can you imagine how this cat screamed and the prisoners, mad, beat on the door, “Free the cat, free the cat, free the cat,” and the Communists very polite, “Oh, surely we will free the cat, but give the statements which we ask from you and then the cat will be freed,” and I have known men who have given statements against their wives, against their children, against their parents to free the cat. They did it out of madness, and then the parents and the wives have been tortured like the cat. Such things have happened with us.

[Sen. Thomas Dodd:] Did you have any fellow Christians like you imprisoned?

We had hundreds of bishops, priests, monks in prisons; my wife who is near me, she has been with Catholic nuns. My wife tells that they were angels; such have been put in prisons. Nearly all Catholic bishops died in prison. Innumerable Orthodox and Protestants have been in prison, too.

The point I was getting at – and I guess I did not make it clear – where the Christians treated any differently or mistreated any differently?

Everybody in prison was very badly treated. And I cannot be contradicted on this question, because I have been with physicians, I have much more broken bones than anybody, so either I broke my bones or somebody else broke them. And if I would not have been a clergyman but a murderer – it is a crime to torture a murderer, too. The Christian prisoners were tortured in a form which should mock their religion. I tell you again in the prison of Pitesti one scene I will describe you about torturing and mocking Christians, and believe me I would renounce to eternal life to paradise after which I long, if I tell you one word of exaggeration. God is here and knows that I do not say everything. It cannot be said. There are ladies here. There are other people hearing it.

One Sunday morning in the prison of Pitesti a young Christian was already the fourth day, day and night, tied to the cross. Twice a day the cross was put on the floor and 100 other cell inmates by beating, by tortures, were obliged to fulfill their necessities upon his face and upon his body. Then the cross was erected again and the Communists swearing and mocking “Look your Christ, look your Christ, how beautiful he is, adore him, kneel before him, how fine he smells, your Christ.” And then the Sunday morning came and a Catholic priest, an acquaintance of mine, has been put to the belt, in the dirt of a cell with 100 prisoners, a plate with excrements, and one with urine was given to him and he was obliged to say the holy mass upon these elements, and he did it. And I asked him afterward, “Father, but how could you make this?” He was half mad. He answered to me: “Brother, I have suffered more than Christ. Don’t reproach to me what I have done.” And the other prisoners beaten to take holy communion in this form, and the Communists around, “Look, your sacraments, look, your church, what a holy church you have, what fine is your church, what holy ordinance God has given you.”

I am very insignificant and a very little man. I have been in prison among the weak ones and the little ones, but I speak for a suffering country and for a suffering church and for the heroes and the saints of the 20th century; we have had such saints in our prison to which I did not dare to lift my eyes.

I am a Protestant, but we have had near us Catholic bishops and monks and nuns about whom we felt that the touching of their garments heals. We were not worthy to untie their shoelaces. Such men have been mocked and tortured in our country. And even if it would mean to go back to a Rumanian prison, to be kidnaped by the Communists and going back and tortured again, I cannot be quiet. I owe it to those who have suffered there.

The fact that a major Catholic magazine published a big essay attempting to rehabilitate the ideology that led to the torture camps that murdered and tortured countless Christians of all confessions is a sign of the times. 

This and other signs — the public shunning, the losing of jobs, and so on — are ones that all of us Christians must take seriously, and resist. We may be forced to go to places we would rather not go, but we should not go quietly! But let me also warn you not to ever, ever speak of persecution lightly. We Americans have no real idea how bad it could get. What the Chinese Communists are doing to the Uighur Muslims is a contemporary sign for us.

Finally, from the Ogorodnikov biography, here is part of an open letter from Russian Orthodox Christians sent in 1986, and published by the Keston Institute:

In November 1986, the Keston Institute published a forty-four-page brochure on the case. The brochure also contained an appeal to the West from a group of Russian Orthodox Christians in Moscow: Your Christian delegates are keen on visiting our country; your Christian preachers return home with a host of pleasant memories; you are all inspired by the simple beauty of our churches and the numbers of people filling them. This picture lingers in your memory, evoking the best and warmest emotions. But we wish you to understand that what you have seen is the sum total of what is permitted to us. In all other aspects of our lives — family, social, political and cultural — we are not allowed to be Christians. We may only “perform our cult.”

However, the life of a Christian is not confined within church walls; there he receives the highest fulfillment of his Christian endeavors and finds the starting point for all other aspects of his life. But it is precisely in those other spheres of life that we are not permitted to live by simple Christian feelings — to believe, to be merciful, to entreat, to defend, to love, to bring up children, to work and to teach. All these attempts are met by harsh persecution.

“Perform our cult” means “worship in church.” Whenever you hear an American or other Western progressive say that there is no threat to religious liberty here, because the government will not be telling anybody that they can’t worship as they please — understand that this claim is correct, but utterly irrelevant, as the Soviet experience proves.

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Ellie Goulding Cancels The Salvation Army

For certain progressives, there is no amount of good in the world that an organization can do to make up for the fact that it holds religious views that were in the same ballpark as Barack Obama’s public position less than a decade ago. Via The Dallas Morning News:

Grammy-nominated singer Ellie Goulding is threatening to cancel her performance at the Cowboys’ Thanksgiving halftime show. The show, which is set to appear on national TV on CBS during the Dallas Cowboys game against the Buffalo Bills, serves as the kickoff for the Salvation Army’s yearly Red Kettle Campaign.

Goulding made the announcement after fans took to her Instagram to accuse the Salvation Army of trans and homophobia — and condemn her for supporting the organization.

The comments prompted Goulding to respond with a comment of her own:

“Upon researching this, I have reached out to The Salvation Army and said that I would have no choice but to pull out unless they very quickly make a solid, committed pledge or donation to the LGBTQ community,” she wrote. “I am a committed philanthropist as you probably know, and my heart has always been in helping the homeless, but supporting an anti-LGBTQ charity is clearly not something I would ever intentionally do. Thank you for drawing my attention to this.”

An Instagram post Goulding made this morning, showing her visiting a Salvation Army center in New York, was what prompted the exchange.

Here’s the text of what she tweeted this morning from her Salvation Army visit:

Ah, but the organization that does all this good for the poor and needy is Christian, and insufficiently woke. So Ellie Goulding is going to bail on them, because they are nasty, nasty people. 

Quite a few progressives have a habit of denying that there is any kind of anti-Christian hatred in this country, but things like this show progressivism’s true colors. These people will not be satisfied until everyone who doesn’t 100 percent endorse LGBT is driven out of the public square as moral lepers. Even the people of the Salvation Army, who have been serving the poor and the needy since 1865. 

According to the organization, the Salvation Army provides shelter and services to people without regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity, hires people without regard to same, and even provides benefits to same-sex spouses of their employees. It is true that the Salvation Army has not always done this, and that like all traditional Christians, regards homosexuality as morally problematic. But in the way it actually treats LGBT people, what do celebrity bleeding-hearts have to complain about — especially in light of the organization’s incredible record of doing good for the poorest people in our society? These people run homeless shelters, and feed the hungry. But they are not good enough for this British celebrity prisspot.

Ellie Goulding is not boycotting them for what they do; she’s boycotting them for who they are.

This is how it goes with LGBT activists and their allies: If you oppose them, you’re dirt. Their bullying is not going to stop until people stop being afraid of them, and standing up to them. I hope the Dallas Cowboys withdraw their invitation to Ellie Goulding, and hire a performer — even a gay performer — who is not such an anti-Christian bigot, and who is willing to perform for the Salvation Army for the good it does, recognizing that tolerance is a virtue for living in a pluralistic society.

The hatred many progressives — especially young ones — have for anyone who doesn’t completely conform to their ideas of the way the world should be is astonishing. And it matters.

UPDATE: Reader Jonah R.:

So wait…the Salvation Army provides benefits to the spouses of employees in same-sex marriages, now discriminates against no one either in its services or in employment, built a dormitory in Las Vegas for homeless LGBT youth, and has a page on its website that details all of the services it provides to LGBT people, showing an appreciation for their unique needs and written in a style and tone that could be right out of the brochure for an LGBT advocacy group….and that still isn’t enough for this little creature? What sort of horrid person now thinks the group is evil unless it actively donates money under pressure to LGBT activist groups?

 

 

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