Rod Dreher's Blog, page 196

The Pachamama Synod Ends

Well, Pope Francis didn’t have the pachamama statues at St. Peter’s Basilica at the final mass of the Amazon Synod. Let’s be grateful for that, I suppose. Still, what happened this month in Rome portends a real revolution in the Catholic Church. Vatican journalist Marco Tosatti, on his blog (in Italian), writes:

So he did it again. But this time with even greater arrogance than the previous ones. In a nutshell: he organized a local synod – which should have been carried out locally, to examine locally any local problems of a situation involving a few million faithful on the one billion and three hundred million of the planet – to pass changes, like the tip of the wedge, that will be quickly seized by interested bishops here and there, everywhere, and that would not have been approved if they had been submitted to the examination of a “true” world synod.

Tosatti says — you can translate it via Google Translate — that the synod was paid for by the German bishops, who want to see these changes. And now, says Tosatti, Catholics will by year’s end see Francis confirming everything that the Synod passed. Tosatti ends with this:

We close with what a priest, once Anglican and now Catholic, writes in commenting on the Synod: “For the first time since my conversion to the Catholic faith I don’t think if I was an Anglican now I would have bothered converting. Don’t get me wrong I’d never go back to Anglicanism…but I don’t think that if I was an Anglican now I’d see the point of being a Catholic. At the moment the Catholic Church is simply offering what Anglicans were promoting 20 years ago … just before they collapsed … it’s embarrassing”.

Oh yes, it’s embarrassing, Your Holiness. And also tragic.

I wondered if that Anglican-turned-Catholic priest might have been Father Dwight Longenecker. I looked on his blog for his take on Pachamama. It does not contain the lines Tosatti quoted, but Fr. Longenecker does say this about what he calls “the Pachamama problem”:

The statues were actually idols representing the earth mother goddess Pachamama. She is worshipped with pagan rituals all across South America. They way they worship her is pagan. They present offerings to her, light candles, and make prayers to her asking for protection, prosperity, peace and good luck. The ritual in the Vatican garden and in St Maria Transpontina showed all the evidence of pagan ceremonies. This is in direct contradiction to the Catholic faith and it should have been corrected and excluded from a Catholic church. If the ceremonies were not pagan in their intent and practice, then clarification and explanation should have been provided so the faithful who do not understand Amazonian culture would not be scandalized.

This is what Pope Francis’s English biographer had to say:

“Praying to Mother Earth”? Like that makes it okay? That’s still idolatry.

If Francis formally adopts what the Amazon Synod has approved — on women deacons, on ordaining married men as priests, and, most crucially, on adopting a new Amazonian liturgical rite that incorporates local spirituality (which can only mean syncretism of the St. Pachamama sort) — then this pope will have given Evangelicals and Pentecostals in Latin America a spectacular gift. Not with the women deacons and married priests, but with the syncretism.

After vespers in my Orthodox parish on Saturday evening, our priest talked about St. Demetrios, one of the most beloved saints of the Eastern church, whose feast day it was. (He is also a Western saint, as all pre-schism saints are.) St. Demetrios was a high-ranking Roman military official who converted to Christianity, and who brought a number of pagans into the faith. He was imprisoned and eventually killed in the early fourth century on orders of the Emperor. Listening to our priest talk about the life and martyr’s death of St. Demetrios, I wondered how Catholics could square it with what this syncretizing successor of St. Peter is doing today.

I have never considered returning to Rome’s fold, which I left in 2006, though I have acutely felt the pain of separation when I’ve been at Norcia, and in the company of dear Catholic friends. As regular readers know, I revere Benedict XVI, and even consider him the second Benedict of the Benedict Option. I have always thought of myself working, in whatever small ways I can, for reconciliation between Rome and the Orthodox East. I have always thought it unlikely before the Parousia, but we can at least labor towards that goal of reconciling brothers, right?

I will still work to build bridges, but after what Francis has done this month, I am certain that there is absolutely no way the Orthodox East will ever reunite with Rome. The Amazonian syncretism on display in Rome, blessed by this Pope, is utter anathema to the Orthodox. It breaks my heart to see this, because of the Catholics I know and love, and because as a man who lives in, and loves, the West, I have long believed that the fate of this civilization depends on the strength and stability of the Catholic Church. The crisis of the Catholic Church is not just a matter for Catholics.

I do wonder, though, what effect this is going to have on Catholic evangelization in this country. If Rome is headed the way of Canterbury, as it appears, who would consider it safe harbor? In that regard, Francis has probably done a favor not only for Evangelicals, but for Orthodox churches too. Whatever other problems the Evangelicals have, and we Orthodox have, there will be no prayers in our temples to Mother Earth. What Francis permitted and blessed in Rome this month is something out of a Jack Chick fever dream — but it really happened.

And let me make clear: though the Orthodox churches and some of the Evangelical (and conservative Reformed, and conservative Lutheran) churches may see our numbers rise because of disillusioned Catholics seeking another home, I don’t know a single Protestant or Orthodox who takes any pleasure in watching that scandalous Pachamama spectacle in Rome this past month. It is one thing to disagree about a married priesthood, or women’s deacons, or any of the other serious things that separate our communions. But this? This outright paganism, blessed by the Roman pontiff and brought into St. Peter’s Basilica, and later installed in a side altar at a Rome parish — that feels as if the enemy breached a gate of a walled city, and is pouring through.

To let you know where this is all headed, take a look at the story of “Sister Jaguar” — an elderly American Dominican nun named Judith Bisignano. She went to the Ecuadoran jungle, saw a black jaguar, took ayahuasca, and … well, let her tell it:

While resting on sacred ground under the canopy of a star-filled universe, Pachamama (Mother Earth) invited me to take my place within her web of life that began with the first crack of the Big Bang. I knew I was called to blend my story of forgiveness into a new creation story. I knew I had to live and tell my truth.

She has written a prayer to Pachamama, that includes these groovy lines:

Pachamama, I celebrate the shift; the radical change that is emerging in human consciousness. This transformation transcends national, cultural and religious boundaries, and creates common ground for the emergence of a single Earth community. As I stretch my vision and imagination, I see that I am connected to a much larger family than I ever dreamed possible. This new community challenges my old ways of perceiving consciousness and gives me new visions that include all people, all creation, and the entire universe.

“Sister Jaguar” is a radical nun who tooted up on ayahuasca and went fully native. But you tell me: is the church Pope Francis is creating more compatible with Sister Jaguar’s spirituality, or the faith of a small order of conservative French nuns? Rome smashed that tiny French order earlier this year, sending 34 nuns away because they were too traditional … but Pachamama prevails in the heart of the Vatican.

Embarrassing, yes … but also tragic. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing in Rome.

I’ll end with this. The conservative Catholic blogger Father John Zuhlsdorf writes that he expects serious spiritual aftermath to come now. Drawing on the unsparing rebuke that the aptly named Bishop Athanasius Schneider hurled at the Vatican for this idolatry, Father Z compares the Pachamama debacle to the Golden Calf episode in Exodus 32, which had savage repercussions for the unfaithful, idol-worshiping Israelites. Excerpt:

The point: Glorious and horrible things result from idol worship and the overthrowing of false religion.

I will repeat what I have written before.

God chose us from before the creation of the cosmos to live in THESE days.   It is an honor to be witnessing the crazy stuff going on.  But it is incumbent on all of us now to buckle on the spiritual armor God offers and take places in the lines of the Militant Church of which we are members.

Review your state in life.  Make corrections if you have to.

Use the sacraments well.

Increase your mortifications and acts of reparation.

Review your Faith and be ready to explain what you believe.

Be inviting and be joyful and be confident.

If something truly dreadful results in the Church from what we are seeing, know that Christ the King and Mary, Queen of Heaven, will triumph.  Be on the winning side of that, even though it costs dearly.

Let us close our ranks as never before in the face of the internal and external challenges to come.

Read it all. 

UPDATE: Here’s the former Anglican, now Catholic, priest:

Advertisement

Praying With Viktor Orban

That happened on Friday. A Croatian reader sent me the story. The Hungarian leader is praying with Nick Vujicic, an Australian evangelist who was born without arms or legs. From a Croatian story I’ve translated with Google:

The prime minister, who was born into a Calvinist Protestant family but lost contact with his faith after his grandfather’s death, returned to Christianity at the urging of Catholic wife Aniko Levai, with whom he has five children. In the middle of the last decade, he spoke publicly about his conversion.

I was looking around just now online for information about Orban’s Christian faith. I found this 2017 Christmas address he gave to the nation. Excerpt:

When we draw the boundaries of our identity, we mark out Christian culture as the source of our pride and sustaining strength. Christianity is a culture and a civilisation. It is within this that we live. The essence is not how many people go to church, or how many pray with true devotion. Culture is the reality of everyday life: how we speak and behave towards one another; the distance we keep from one another and how we approach one another; how we enter this world, and how we leave it. For European people, Christian culture determines the morals of our daily lives. In borderline situations, this gives us a benchmark and a compass. Amidst the contradictions of life, Christian culture shows us the way. It determines our understanding of justice and injustice, the relationship between men and women, family, success, work and honour.

Our culture is the culture of life. Our starting-point—the alpha and omega of our philosophy of life—is the value of life, the dignity that every person has received from God. Without this we could not evaluate “human rights” and similar modern conceptions. This is why we doubt whether we can export this into the life of civilisations built on other foundations.

The fundamental elements of European life are now under attack. There is now a threat to the self-evident nature of European life: those things one should not need to think deeply about, but on which one only has to act. The essence of culture is that if it is not self-evident, we the people will lose our reference points: one will have no footholds, and one will have nothing against which to check one’s clock or one’s compass. Regardless of whether or not we attend church—or if so, which one we attend—we do not want to be forced to celebrate Christmas behind drawn curtains to avoid hurting the feelings of others.

We do not want our Christmas markets to be rebranded, and we definitely do not want to have to retreat behind concrete barriers. We do not want our children to be deprived of the joys of Saint Nicholas, Santa Claus and the Christmas angels. We do not want to be robbed of the Feast of the Resurrection. We do not want our religious festivals and ceremonies to be haunted by anxiety and fear. We do not want our women and daughters to be molested in crowds of New Year’s Eve revellers.

We Europeans are Christians. All this is ours, and this is how we live. Hitherto we have seen it as natural that Jesus was born, died on the cross for us and then rose from the dead. For us our religious festivals are self-evident, and we look to them to give meaning to our everyday lives. Culture is similar to the human body’s immune system: as long as it is working properly, we do not even notice it. It becomes noticeable and important to us when it is weakened. When crosses are airbrushed from photographs, when people seek to remove the cross from a statue of Pope John Paul II, when they try to change how we celebrate our festivals, then every right-thinking European citizen bristles with anger. This is also true of those for whom Christianity—as Gyula Juhász brilliantly put it—is “just paganism with holy water”. And it is even true of those like Oriana Fallaci, who feared for Europe as “an atheist Christian”.

Today the attack is targeting the foundations of our life and our world. Europe’s immune system is being deliberately weakened. They do not want us to be who we are. They want us to become something which we do not want to be. They want us to mix together with peoples from another world and, so that the process will be smooth, they want us to change. By the light of Christmas candles we can clearly see that when they attack Christian culture they are also attempting to eliminate Europe. They want to take our life from us, and exchange it for something that is not our life. In return for the life we have lived up to now they are promising one which is new and more enlightened. This, however, is a utopia: not the essence of real life, but distilled from abstract, theoretical sophistry. Utopias are dreams: potentially wonderful, and therefore alluring. But they are just as incoherent, impenetrable, obscure and meaningless as dreams are. One cannot live in them, or be guided by them.

We cannot claim that Christian culture is the peak of perfection. This is precisely the key to Christian culture: we are aware of imperfection, including our own imperfection; but we have learned to live with this, to draw inspiration from it and to derive impetus from it. This is why for centuries we Europeans we have been striving to improve the world. The gift borne by imperfection is that we are given the opportunity to improve. Those who promise a beautiful, new, mixed world now want to take this opportunity from us. Now they also want to destroy everything that we must preserve for future generations; our duty to do so is derived from the knowledge that, when called upon to do so, our ancestors shed blood to preserve it for us.

By the way, if you haven’t yet read Kelley Vlahos’s great piece about the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary, and what it says about Hungary today, please do!

 

Advertisement

The Magical Cracker

In New Jersey, two high school boys stand accused of racially harassing and intimidating four younger black girls. The accused are of South Asian (Indian) descent. You might think that this ugly display is a reminder that the sin of racism is a universal part of the fallen human condition. You would be wrong, according to Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter. Writing in The New York Times, the L’Osservatore Romano of the Cult of Social Justice, Painter tells us that it’s really whitey’s fault. Excerpts:

While it’s tempting to see the reported ethnicity of the boys suspected in the assault as complicating the story and raising questions about whether the assault should be thought of as racist, I look at it through a different lens. Instead of asking what the boys’ reported racial identity tells us about the nature of the attack, we should see the boys as enacting American whiteness through anti-black assault in a very traditional way. In doing so, the assailants are demonstrating how race is a social construct that people make through their actions. They show race in the making, and show how race is something we perform, not just something we are in our blood or in the color of our skin.

At first blush, this reported assault sounds nauseatingly familiar, like the run-of-the-mill American racial harassment that has always been common but has become increasingly revealed thanks to videos shared on social media. The boys’ actions resemble those of people who feel empowered to act out their resentment against nonwhite people who are deemed out of place, confronting them with hostility or slurs or calling the police. The people patrolling what they see as their spaces are often — but not always — white. The Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson calls areas that are policed in this way, “the white space,” even though the spaces in question are officially public. The experiences of black people accused of these purported infractions have acquired a panoply of names that capture the absurdity of facing such hostility while innocently carrying out everyday activities: driving while black, barbecuing while black, walking while black, sitting at home while black. The encounters often end with violent — too often, fatal — outcomes.

In the New Jersey incident, the heritage or skin color of the boys suspected of the assault doesn’t matter. What matters is that they were participating in this pattern and thus enacting whiteness in a very traditional way.

Read it all.

So, even when racist harassers are brown-skinned, they’re really white, and their alleged actions are the fault of white people. Got it. I remind you that this racist screed was written by a Princeton professor, writing on the op-ed page of the most important newspaper in the world.

There is a trope in American fiction and film, called by Spike Lee “the Magical Negro.” He’s a black character imbued with mystical powers of wisdom and goodness, which he uses to help white people out of their dilemmas.

Prof. Irvin and her fellow Social Justice cultists traffick in a concept we might call The Magical Cracker. He’s a white racist that can shape-shift, and take the form of anyone — say, Indian-American teenagers — to work his evil. The Magical Cracker poisons wells, causes crops non-white students to fail, and kidnaps non-white babies and uses their blood to make Wonder Bread.

But in all seriousness, academia and elite media legitimize and spread this racist, illiberal creed. And yet they wonder why people vote for Trump, figuring only racism can explain it.

Advertisement

With The Left, There Is Always A Farther

A Connecticut triad (Barcroft TV screenshot)

The Law of Merited Impossibility: It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.

Waaaaay back in 2012, at the dawn of time, Salon.com published a piece with the following headline:

Excerpts:

Won’t legitimizing same-sex marriage lead to legitimizing polyamorous relationships too? If two men can marry one another, why not one man and two women?  This argument is a favorite of former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, the so-called Christian right and the right-wing blogosphere.

Responding to these arguments is a challenge. On the one hand, I reject the tactic of distinguishing the good gays from the “bad” poly people. Further marginalizing the marginalized is just the wrong trajectory for any liberation movement to take. And it reminds me of the way that some mainstream gay activists have sold out transgender and gender-nonconforming groups. We’re the married gays who make neighborhoods stable and herald the arrival of cool coffeehouses; we’re not those awful drag queens. This is all trash, it sells out members of our own community who deserve more than that, and it’s a punt, really, not an argument.

On the other hand, I don’t want to fail to draw any distinction, either. I don’t know what polyamory’s approval ratings are, but I bet they aren’t high — Newt Gingrich notwithstanding. At the very least, it would be bad politics to agree and argue that there really is no difference.

More:

We should do the same when it comes to polyamory: just decline to answer. Really, there are a host of questions that arise in the case of polyamory to which we just don’t know the answer. Is polyamory like sexual orientation, a deep trait felt to be at the core of one’s being? Would a polyamorous person feel as incomplete without multiple partners as a lesbian or gay person might feel without one? How many “truly polyamorous” people are there? Are there compelling policy reasons why we would want to discourage polyamory (as we do incest or sex with minors), or are those reasons really just fears? These are all important questions, and the answers are not self-evident. We don’t really know.

Yet we do know the answers when it comes to same-sex marriage. We do know that sexual orientation is “a deep trait felt to be at the core of one’s being.” We do know how incomplete and alone many gay people feel without the possibility of fully accepted partnership, and we know there are millions of gay people out there in the world. We do know that the policy arguments sometimes brandished against gay people (child welfare, encouragement of homosexuality) are hot air, unsubstantiated by evidence.

That’s not what the objection was about at all. The objection was about redefining marriage in law to sever its connection with childbearing, child-rearing, and tradition (whether sanctioned by religion or not). The claim was straightforward: if marriage has no referent to a purpose higher than itself; if marriage is nothing other than a formalization of the feelings two people have for each other; if male and female are only incidental to what marriage is … then why not let polyamorous partnerships be accepted socially, and even formalize themselves as marriage?

The answer is: there is no stopping the downward slide to polyamory. It has taken only seven years, but now the mainstream media are covering polyamory with the same sentimental advocacy with which they approached the gay marriage issue starting 20 years ago. See this recent CBS News story. 

See this piece (“Polyamory Works For Them”) from August in The New York Times. Type in “polyamory” on the Times website, and you’ll get lots of results. I found this one just a few weeks after the 2015 Obergefell decision: a column arguing that now is the time to legalize polygamy:

Here’s the lesson: never, ever, ever believe the Left when it says, “This far, but no farther.” There is always a farther.

Advertisement

The Pachamama Pope

The statues of the fertility idol that vandals had removed from a Catholic parish in Rome and tossed into the Tiber have been recovered, said Pope Francis. Excerpt from his remarks:

“Good afternoon, I would like to say a word about the pachamama statues that were removed from the Church at Traspontina, which were there without idolatrous intentions and were thrown into the Tiber.

“First of all, this happened in Rome and, as bishop of the diocese, I ask pardon of the people who were offended by this act.”

So the Pope now affirms that these statues were meant to represent the Incan fertility goddess. Useful to know. He went on to say that they might be displayed at the final mass of the Amazon Synod on Sunday.

There you have it.

On EWTN last night, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who was, until dismissed by Francis, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — that is, the top doctrinal body of the Catholic Church — called the statues “idols,” and said that bringing them into the church was a crime against the law of God. Watch this short clip:

WORLD OVER HOT TAKE: Cardinal Gerhard Mueller on the men in Rome who threw the indigenous “Mother Earth” statues in the Tiber river. See the full interview tonight at 8PM E @EWTN pic.twitter.com/wlTSisYkD9

— Raymond Arroyo (@RaymondArroyo) October 24, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Understand what is happening here: the cardinal who until fairly recently was the top doctrinal official in the Catholic Church is indirectly accusing the Pope of allowing idolatry, and breaking the divine law. If those “pachamama statues” — to use Francis’s own words — turn up at the closing mass of the Synod in St. Peter’s Basilica, it will be seen by many as a profanation of the temple, as an “abomination of desolation,” to use the term of the prophet Daniel, and Jesus of Nazareth.

Many Biblical scholars say that Christ’s warning about the abomination of desolation in the Temple was a prophetic reference to the Roman army attacking Jerusalem and profaning the Temple. This happened in the year 70 AD; the Romans initially intended to capture the Second Temple and turn it into a sanctuary of Emperor worship, but they ended up burning it down. In any event, that was the end of Jewish temple worship.

But some scholars believe that Jesus made a double prophecy, and that just before the Apocalypse, there will be another abomination of desolation in the temple. I am Orthodox, not Catholic; I don’t know if reputable scholars in the Orthodox tradition believe that this was a double prophecy, and if so, what it portends for the Last Days. But if I were a Catholic, and I saw those idols at the final synod mass in St. Peter’s on Sunday, my blood would run cold.

Whatever you think of prophecy, the fact that a senior cardinal — the former head of the CDF! — has called what Pope Francis has blessed a crime against the divine law is a staggering. Last night, I had an exchange on Twitter with a couple of Catholics, including CNA’s excellent editor J.D. Flynn, who wondered why I write in such a crisis mode about events in the Christian world. My answer is: look around you! The crisis is real. 

Let me repeat it in a slightly different framing: In the last 24 hours, the Catholic world has seen the Pope call these Amazonian statues by the Mother Earth goddess name — Pachamama — lament their theft from a church, celebrate their recovery, and suggest that they might be present at mass at St. Peter’s Basilica on Sunday. It has also seen the former doctrinal chief of the Catholic Church denounce these statues as “idols,” and call the placing of them inside a Catholic Church as a violation of divine law. If that doesn’t tell you that the Catholic Church is in a severe crisis at its very summit, what will it take?

In 2018, Cardinal Willem Eijk, the Archbishop of Utrecht, said that Pope Francis’s confusing teaching reminds him of Paragraph 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. That graf reads as follows:

675 Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

In this subsequent May 2019 interview with Lifesite News, the Dutch cardinal elaborated:

LifeSite: You used extraordinarily strong words. You spoke of “apostasy inside the Church”. Could you explain what you meant by that?

Eijk: I quoted number 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Because there are cardinals who plead for the blessing of homosexual relationships, I referred to this paragraph of the Catechism as a warning. It states that shortly before Apocalypse, voices will rise within the Church itself, and even among the highest authorities of the Church who will express divergent opinions in relation to Catholic doctrine. I did this as a warning: let us be careful not to find ourselves in this situation. I must say that, to my surprise, Cardinal Müller took up this idea: on February 9 of this year, he published a statement on the fundamental elements of the Catholic faith, in which he also referred to number 675 (2). It is also remarkable that my interview and the full quotation were also taken up by Bishop Gänswein during the presentation of a book by Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option.

All this has reached many people and many have also started to think about it. In this way, I hope to get more and more people in the Church to open their mouths and create clarity, because many Catholics – but you know this as well as I do – are really confused.

In his “Manifesto Of Faith” from earlier this year, Cardinal Müller said:

To keep silent about these and the other truths of the Faith and to teach people accordingly is the greatest deception against which the Catechism vigorously warns. It represents the last trial of the Church and leads man to a religious delusion, “the price of their apostasy” (CCC 675)  it is the fraud of Antichrist. “He will deceive those who are lost by all means of injustice, for they have closed themselves to the love of the truth by which they should be saved” (2 Thess: 2-10)

Cardinal Müller later gave an interview about the Manifesto to Catholic World Report, in which he said:

CWR: There has been quite a bit of discussion about your references to apostasy and “the fraud of the Antichrist” (§ 5). Were you suggesting that we may be living through the “last trial of the Church”? And what sort of apostasy, specifically, did you have in mind?

Cardinal Müller: The Antichrist is a figure embodying opposition to Christ. He does not simply appear at the end of history, but emerges in every age as the one who tempts us into the pit and the one who destroys God’s house. Jesus has asked whether he will still find faith when he returns. And sometimes in Church history, it seems as though faith does run out in the Church. In the struggle against ultra-powerful Arianism, which was sustained by public opinion and political power, Saint Athanasius often seems outmaneuvered. Back then, Arianism was modern and Catholicism premodern in the eyes of those whose faith lay in forward progress. As Saint Jerome puts it with a groan, the world awoke and found that it had become Arian. This is the hour of Saint Peter. Jesus told him that Satan has longed to sift the disciples and the whole Church like wheat. Then followed Jesus’ word of tremendous force and relevance, even in this present time of suffering in the Church: “But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren” (Lk 22:32).

These are days.

UPDATE: Via the website Rorate Caeli, a Catholic from the Philippines wrote to the Italian journalist Sandro Magister, and said, in part:

There is no street, nor TV channel nor Radio frequency that is not infested by preachers seeking Catholic prey. Their first goal is to convince [people] that the Catholic Church is false. Their second is to get them to tithe. Well then, the images showing the adoration of pagan divinities – or anyway of something appearing to be a pagan divinity – during a ceremony in the Vatican Gardens, right in front of the Pope, have indeed made their way  round the world.  And at Mindanao, particularly in areas like South Cotabato where Protestants are now 20 or 25 percent of the population, they have  encouraged all sorts of preachers to point their fingers and say “Look, Catholics are idolaters. We have always told you this. As the Bible says.”  

Chatting today with a young lady, a courageous Catholic catechist, she is also scandalized.  I heard the embarrassment in her voice; in not knowing how to defend her faith, in not knowing how to explain to the young, the truth that Catholics are not idolaters. In deference then, she didn’t even want to comment on FACEBOOK  about what had happened in Rome, because if she had begun criticizing the event she would have aided the Protestants. Try explaining to the people of these regions the subtleties from the  Prefect Paolo Ruffini, about seeing evil where it doesn’t exist. And this happened at Mindanao, I don’t dare think about Africa or South America. 

What is certain is that those images, seen by the south of the world, really break your heart. And render life very difficult for those who, already, on one side, every day risk Islamic terrorist attacks while attending church, and on the other, have to cope with Protestant proselytism when walking the streets.

OnePeterFive quite rightly says that the Vatican is “gaslighting” the faithful. More:

At the presser for the Amazon Synod today, Vaticanista Sandro Magister said that the video of the ceremony in the Vatican gardens before the synod has now gone viral among evangelicals and pentecostals.

“This video is used as a weapon to accuse the Catholics of being idolaters.” Magister explained to the panel. “What is your judgment about these rituals that were made with these people kneeling before objects…?”

Paolo Ruffini, Prefect of the Dicastery for Communications, responded:

“We said here that there was no ritual and no prostration took place, we have repeated this here, so we have to be vigorous in saying things that actually happened before cameras, so we have explained that this did not happen.”

He actually got applause for this answer.

But of course this actually happened, and was captured on video:

Advertisement

One Country, Two Nations

Take a look at this:

Here’s a link to a great graphics presentation, “Red Economy, Blue Economy,” by the Wall Street Journal illustrating how far apart we have grown as a national economically. 

The bottom line is that we have become a nation of haves and have-nots. Of people who are falling behind economically, and people who are moving ahead. The Democratic Party represents the economic winners; the Republican Party, the economic losers. This graphic shows how much things have changed in a decade. The Democratic districts got richer, and the Republican districts got poorer:

The final slide says:

Why does this matter?

“When folks have less in common with one another, it’s hard to expect that they’re going to see the problem the same way,” said Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union, “let alone recognize that a problem exists.”

Please do watch the whole thing. (There’s no audio.) It will only take a minute or two, but it’s really illuminating.

You can see why the economic losers are so angry, and feel so robbed of dignity. (This, by the way, mirrors the geographic Brexit divide in the UK.) Those who have been left behind by the information and tech economy really are suffering economically, and the people who left them behind literally did, moving to the blue districts where the jobs are. In the charts, you see that the blue districts have far more college-educated people.

One thing that the charts don’t tell us, but I’d be interested to know, is to what extent blue areas draw college educated people working in the information economy because that’s where the jobs are, and to what extent social and cultural factors draw them there. I ask because I wonder if a Southern or Midwestern city that invested heavily in building infrastructure for the information/tech economy would have a real chance at holding on to its college grads if the culture there remains conservative relative to the big blue cities.

I know that when I left college, there was nothing that Baton Rouge (where I live now) could have done to hold me. Partly it was economic, but my desire to see the world was overwhelmingly cultural. Washington DC, greater Miami, and New York City are great places to live if you’re single, or newly married without children, and I had a blast doing it. But you get older, start thinking about building for your kids and for your own retirement, and you might find that what the non-glamorous cities you left behind have is what your family needs. (N.B., I lived in Dallas for six years, and I think it does a great job of being a middle ground between having the great things about a big city while still holding on to some conservative values.)

Anyway, the WSJ piece makes it clear that economically, the Democrats are the party of the rich and the rising middle classes, and the Republicans are the party of the working class and the downwardly mobile middle classes. Of course race plays into this too, though that isn’t measured by the WSJ piece. We can say, then, that the Democrats represent the economic winners and racial minorities, while the Republicans represent the economic losers and whites.

With regard to that Roger Johnson quote, I wonder if this explains why none of the Democratic debates so far have focused to any degree on religion. Blue America people — at least in the media and in the political class — don’t know that religion exists. They don’t see it. They don’t even see it in their own cities.

When I worked for the NYPost in the early 2000s, I proposed writing a column about Evangelicals in the boroughs. My editor at the time shot it down, saying, “New York is not a religious city.” He really thought that was true. It wasn’t even close to true, but in his social class, it was true. We lived in adjacent neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and I knew for a fact that there were several established churches, a mosque, two synagogues, and a storefront Pentecostal church within minutes of his front door. But he was secular, and didn’t see them.

Anyway, the WSJ charts show why the Republican Party is going to become more populist — there will be no restoration of the pre-Trump GOP; watch Sen. Josh Hawley rise — and the Democratic Party is going to become more bourgeois. Of course both parties will have their own outliers, but that’s going to be the mainstream of the parties.

By the way, if you haven’t seen it, Chris Arnade’s book Dignity is a fantastic read on all this.

Advertisement

Normalizing Polyamory

When I was in Hungary this past summer, I interviewed a married couple who had grown up in the 1950s and 1960s. One thing they told me was that the propaganda they were all fed constantly told them that the standards they had grown up with, and the customs, were all backward and needed to be cast aside to open the door for the progressive future.

I thought of that when watching this clip from a new CBS News documentary about “consensual non-monogamy,” which us older folks call “swinging” or “wife-swapping.” Here’s an excerpt from the written version:

“One big orgy.” That’s the stereotype about the lifestyle of consensual non-monogamy — an arrangement where committed partners openly agree to have sexual relationships with other people.

But people who have practiced non-monogamy for years say it’s not all wild sex — or even all that wild. It takes a lot of work, and it carries a lot of stigma. There can be serious consequences for the family life and even careers of those involved.

“Many people are trying to create families in different kinds of ways. And a lot of people see that as dangerous,” Diana Adams, a Brooklyn-based lawyer who represents polyamorous families, says in the CBSN Originals documentary, “Non-monogamy.”

More:

CBSN Originals spoke with two women in Durham, North Carolina, who have been in what they call a polyfidelitous closed quad for more than seven years. That means the two married couples are romantically involved with each other — each woman has sex with the other’s husband — but outside of that the couples don’t see anyone else. The women asked to remain anonymous to protect their families, and for fear of consequences in their jobs.

“It’s not just about sleeping with each other’s husbands. Our lives are meshed together,” one of the women said. “Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays are the nights we spend with our extramarital partners. And Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays we spend with our marital partners.”

Polyfidelitous Closed Quad sounds like a Polyphonic Spree cover band.

Anyway, these people are crazy, and their swinging — or, to be precise, the attempt by the media to normalize it — is an example of liquid modernity.

One more clip:

One of the hardest parts of the arrangement is the children. One couple does not have kids; the other does. The couples care for and parent them together, though there is no question about who their biological parents are. And those children had to have all of this explained to them.

“It involves a lot of trust,” the woman with children said. “I, as a mother, have to think, ‘Do I trust these people?’ This could really, really impact my children’s life for the worse.”

“What we were hoping for was that giving the children more adults in their lives that love them would counterbalance giving them a strange life, and would outweigh it,” her partner added.

A total rationalization by selfish adults who will not let the well being of children stand in the way of their orgasms.

This is not, by the way, simply a recrudescent “The Ice Storm” freakshow. Read on:

Last year, the American Psychological Association created a task force on consensual non-monogamy to promote awareness and understanding of non-traditional relationship structures.

“Finding love and/or sexual intimacy is a central part of most people’s life experience,” the APA website says. “However, the ability to engage in desired intimacy without social and medical stigmatization is not a liberty for all.”

You see? This is being mainstreamed by the chief organization for psychologists in America. They’re framing it as a social justice issue — that is, removing the stigma from polyamory as a matter of expanding freedom.

And now a major news network is expanding the Overton window. This is what the networks did for same-sex marriage, and then for transgenderism. You might think it was a wonderful thing that they did it for same-sex marriage, and you might even think it was a wonderful thing that they did it for transgenderism. But you have to concede that they did it, and it worked, and that this propaganda is probably going to work too.

Two years ago, Juju Chang of ABC News did a piece of advocacy journalism that is an embarrassment to professional standards. She reported a story about a woman in Detroit and her teenage son, both of whom are going through gender transition together, to become father and daughter. Follow the link to watch the story, if only for a few minutes. This is not straight news (pardon the pun); this is pure advocacy.

We’re not going to stop this, but we can prepare our kids for a world where everything has melted down. This is the world we’re fast approaching. You can sit there and think that it’s not going to affect you and your kids, or you and your church. You’re wrong. You are very, very wrong.

Last night I got into a Twitter argument with a couple of Catholic guys who don’t understand why I write about everything as if it’s a crisis. My answer is that because we really are in a social meltdown, from a morally and theologically conservative Christian position. Things are falling apart rapidly, with the leading institutions in our society having embraced the collapse, and advocating for it as progress. Like Flannery O’Connor said, “To the hard of hearing, you shout.”

‘Daughter’ and ‘father’ in Detroit: a son and his mom both transitioning together. ABC News heroes (ABC News)

UPDATE: Reader Raskolnik found this in Salon, from 2012:

 

Advertisement

Party With The Godly Honky Haters

A reader calling himself or herself “Concerned Scholar” writes:

On numerous occasions, you have effectively shed light on corrupt crazy wokeness in academe. I am writing anonymously to share with you a particularly egregious instance of this. Yet it speaks to much broader currents in certain sectors of academe, especially religious studies and theology.

The American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) are the two main international professional guilds for scholars of religion. They host a meeting every year in a different location in North America. There are all kinds of meetings that happen at these, from conference papers and book discussions to receptions. Something happening at this meeting does not mean that AAR or SBL has actively approved it, so this is not on AAR or SBL, and I think once it comes to their attention will be recognized as the bigotry that it is.

The Political Theology Network is a major group of theology and religion scholars who study religion, theology, and politics. They are funded by a $350,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. This follows on the heels of a $200,000 grant they received from Luce in 2017. This is huge, huge money, especially for humanities, even more for theology.

How are they spending this money? Well, they are sponsoring a public ‘no whites allowed’ reception at this year’s AAR/SBL. 

Screenshot from American Academy of Religion 2019 conference website

The reader continues:

From 7-8 pm, non-whites will have their own private reception, free from the presence of whites. Then at 8 — and only at 8 — will whites be allowed in. What test will they apply to be sure that someone is officially not white? Will it be based on skin pigmentation? Proof of ancestry? I have seen a lot of insane stuff, but this may top it all.

To be clear, I am entirely supportive of groups that may exist primarily to advocate for this or that marginalized and underrepresented groups. There are good reasons to have these kinds of groups and to offer spaces for folks to make certain sorts of connections and have time with one another. And there are groups like that for African-Americans, women, and so on. These groups exist exactly for solidarity and fellowship among people who often feel or are excluded in various ways. But this is something else entirely.

This is supposed to be a network of scholars who study and research about politics and religion. Period. But instead it is taking its half a million dollars and hanging up a “no whites allowed” sign. This is absolutely disgusting and dangerous. It has to be stopped or it’s going to get worse and worse. The fact is versions of this are already happening in academe but it is rarely so explicit.

Well, I guess it depends on who counts as a member of an “Under-represented Group.” Are straight black men allowed? Anyway, Concerned Scholar says that the Luce Foundation surely doesn’t know about this, because, in CS’s words, “There is no way that Luce would want to pay for racist parties.”

CS adds:

You should also know that even pointing this out or asking a question about it would itself be career-ending and make one a permanent pariah.

It’s crazy that even calling attention to the fact that there is a reception where white people aren’t allowed to go because of the color of their skin would be “career-ending.” But that’s academia today. Non-white scholars have to be protected from defilement by the ick of whiteness — and they’re doing it on a foundation’s dime.

Here, from the PTN website, is its self-description:

The Political Theology Network aims to be a hub for exploring the intersection of religious and political ideas and practices. The Network is interdisciplinary, publicly engaged, and committed to building links between theologians, practitioners, and humanities scholars. Riding a wave of scholarly interest in political theology that itself follows the increasing visibility of religion in public life, the Network seeks to create the infrastructure that will allow this interest to flourish in the long term, supporting discussions of political theology in the classroom, in scholarly research, and in the public arena. By bringing scholars thinking with the term “political theology” from throughout the humanities together with scholars of religious traditions, we aim to thicken the appreciation of religion’s complexity among the former while sharpening the critical edge of the latter.

With support from a major grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Political Theology Network is organizing three sorts of activities. A biennial conference, the first of which was held at Emory University in February 2018, brings together scholars of political theology from various disciplines who would not have the opportunity to connect at their own disciplinary association meetings. This website and the podcast hosted here offer an entry-point into scholarly conversations about political theology and reflect the orientation of the Network as a whole toward social justice and public engagement. Finally, through dissertation workshops, a mentoring program for underrepresented graduate students, and outreach to other professional associations, the Network seeks to broaden the field of political theology while securing diversity and inclusivity as core values.

Emphasis mine. Social justice! I just knew it. The cult is everywhere.

By the way, PTN is based at Villanova, whose theology department is home to Katie Grimes, America’s Theological Sweetheart. I don’t know what Prof. Katie Grimes is going to do with her white self from 7 to 8 pm on Saturday night at the conference.

 

Advertisement

When They Come For Your Kid

Good news from Texas today: the State is going to look into the Dallas area case about the seven-year-old boy whose mother won full custody this week from a court. The mom says the boy wants to be a girl; she’s a pediatrician who is facilitating the transition. The father, who is divorced from his wife, was trying to stop it. The mom has not overseen administration of puberty blocking hormones yet, but she has testified that if the kid’s doctors say that he should have them in a couple of years, she would do so.

It’s a horrifying situation. It sounds like a terrible divorce. Granted, it is hard for anybody outside a failed marriage to know its internal dynamics. If you take the mother’s side, then the father’s resisting the child’s transgender claims is being cruel to a boy who is really a girl. If you take the father’s side, then the mother is messing with the boy’s head, possibly to exact vengeance on her ex-husband.

[UPDATE: Breaking news: the judge in the case ruled just now that both parents will have a say in medical decisions involving the child. She also imposed a gag order on both.]

What I believe is clear is that no pre-pubescent child should ever receive puberty blockers or other hormones that affect their sexual development. The effects are permanent and irreversible. This is grotesque medical experimentation on children who are not old enough to consent meaningfully to anything. I have no doubt that the child’s mother had lots of expert testimony on her behalf. The medical industry has become besotted with the politics of transgenderism.

This past summer, Dr. Allan Josephson, a distinguished psychiatrist, was fired from his job leading a psychiatric department at the University of Louisville because he gave public testimony dissenting from gender ideology. In an interview with Madeleine Kearns of National Review, Dr. Josephson said:

 

MK: So this is because of your expressed professional opinion on gender dysphoria in young people. I assume you knew, going to the Heritage Foundation, that this is a very hot topic politically. And yet you felt compelled to speak up. Why?

AJ: Well, I was asked by people that I respected. Their concern was that we hear all kinds of information from one perspective. And the leaders of the seminar recognized that not all voices were being heard. I had given a couple of talks in other places. So, they invited me, and I was aware of the potential controversy. But I also had things I needed to say because I felt they were clinically true and appropriate and because this is a perspective that more people need to hear.

MK: How stressful has this ordeal been?

AJ: It has had various phases. The first phase was “this just can’t be happening to me.” I was very successful and very well liked. I built my division up from a few people to probably 15 and we had a clinic of almost 30 people. I was banned from faculty meetings. I was banned from certain kinds of interactions with staff and told what I could and couldn’t say to people. And this was a place that I built, you know. And then the stress of one’s personal relationships. My family worried about me, friends worried about me. It was probably was six months before I felt comfortable and was sleeping again. You know, the personal stress is pretty enormous, but then  I decided to do something.

MK: You mentioned earlier about the politicization of this particular field of medicine more generally and gave the example of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which last year issued a widely criticized policy statement endorsing “gender affirmation” [psychological, medical, and surgical sex-change treatments for minors]. You said something very interesting: that for people who aren’t familiar with this process, this could seem like there’s a medical consensus, when actually, it is a very small number of people driving this change.

AJ: It’s a political process: correct. And the way committees are formed, various people who have various interests get on them. They do intense work, and sometimes very good work, but it often doesn’t meet the scrutiny of a scientific statement. An organization affirming a position is not necessarily science, but it is a group of people agreeing to say something.

MK: So is what you’re saying that, within the profession, a lot of people agree with you in your assessment of this issue?

AJ: Well, it’s hard to know what “lots of people” means. I think it could be that there’s a silent majority. I think there are a lot of people who agree with me: There’s no question. And I’ve spoken with colleagues on various campuses who have had similar situations where someone will come into their office, close the door behind them, and say something to the effect of, “You know, I really agree with you, but for various reasons I can’t speak out.” So whether it’s intimidation, fear of bullying, it’s hard to know how big that number is. But I can assure you since the Heritage Foundation, I’ve had many supportive calls from parents of children experiencing gender dysphoria, etc.

Do you understand what’s happening here? Within the medical profession, physicians and others who do not agree with the maximal claims of gender ideologues are being driven out of their jobs. Jesse Singal’s long 2016 report on how trans activists got the trans-affirming Dr. Kenneth Zucker driven out of the clinic he ran is the classic account of this madness. It means that you cannot accept stated medical opinion as definitive. There is no consensus in this field.

It is time for lawmakers to get involved and start regulating this stuff. Vulnerable children have no one to defend them.

You parents who have kids in school also need urgently to look into what’s happening in your kids’ school. A lot of schools are mainstreaming gender ideology, and parents have no idea what their kids are being taught. Mary Hasson of the Ethics & Public Policy Center, writing about “The Trans-Industrial Complex,” said:

The most potent strategy to drive social change, however, is through education. Gender ideology tiptoed gently into public schools, masked as inclusivity and kindly anti-bullying initiatives (like HRC’s “Welcoming Schools” program). The mask dropped quickly. Programs soon targeted “hetero-normative” and “cis-normative” language and thinking, pretending all students (even kindergarteners) needed freedom to express their “authentic” gendered selves.

School districts adopt gender identity and sexual orientation “anti-discrimination” policies—often over parents’ protests—because of lawsuit threats, state or local regulations, or activists’ pressure tactics. Consequently, the gender agenda affects all children, not only confused children. A welcoming, inclusive, safe school requires everyone to be LGBTQ “allies” and all children to be force-fed a faulty anthropology and destabilizing ideas about identity. Gender ideologues train all school personnel—from bus drivers to principals—in gender terminology, gender transitions, and gender-inclusive language and practices (banishing words like “boys” and “girls”). Worse, activists justify keeping parents in the dark while schools encourage “gender exploration” and gender affirmation, by arguing that children aren’t safe at home when parents (especially religious ones) oppose children’s emerging LGBTQ identities.

Classroom instruction covers gender “definitions” and, increasingly, LGBTQ history. School culture conveys unquestioning acceptance of gender ideology: schools are awash in rainbows, Pride celebrations, safe spaces, gay-straight student clubs, invented pronouns, and transgender-affirming storybooks like The Princess Boy or I am Jazz.

You parents really, really need to learn more. Start with the first three chapters in Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull Your Child From Public School Before It’s Too Late to understand what’s happening. Hasson and Theresa Farnan are the authors. In e-mail conversation with Hasson about the “gender snowperson” being introduced to children (see this post), she told me:

 

This image is actually a variation on the HRC [Human Rights Campaign, the leading LGBT lobby] Welcoming Schools lesson plan on teaching kids about gender diversity. 

Why is that important? Because it’s not a one-off, a rogue teacher. It’s part of a careful, well-funded plan to push this content into the classroom, and into the minds of every child.

You will notice that the HRC gender snowperson continues to erase actual biological differences (male / female)– but in a new way. First “sex” was reduced to an arbitrary label slapped on a baby’s bottom at birth (“sex assigned at birth”). Now the reality of sexual difference is reduced to “pronouns assigned at birth.” As if the amazing design of our bodies tells us nothing about who we really are — a child’s birth is really just a trigger to assign a pronoun and put the child on the moving sidewalk towards radical self-definition. Sex is a spectrum that includes “girl, boy, intersex, and pronoun assigned at birth,” according to this HRC teacher handout.

These LGBTQ groups–from HRC’s Welcoming Schools to Gender Spectrum to Queerly Elementary, etc, have spawned a profitable industry for themselves (supported in part by taxpayer funds meant for real teacher training, not ideological indoctrination) Professional development training for teachers to help them become “culturally competent” on LGBTQ/gender equity issues, combined with all the free teacher resources (propaganda) on “inclusion,” “gender” and “anti-bullying,” means that these ideological (and non-sensical) scripts about “who we are” are flooding our schools even when they are not formally a part of the curriculum.

So, parents, beware. Better yet, “get out now” from the public school. (But be careful where you go — progressive private and faith-based schools are nearly as likely to have incorporated the same harmful stuff.)

I hope that pastors and clergy will finally get serious about creating alternative ways to educate our children so that no parents have to submit their children to trans indoctrination simply because they have no alternative but the public schools. If we cherish our kids–and want to see them flourish humanly and enjoy eternal life — then we need to get them out from under the spell of the trans pied piper….before they all disappear over the hill and it’s too late.

Mary Hasson is right. If you think this stuff is only happening to other people’s kids, in other people’s schools — or even only in the public schools — then you might be in for a rude shock.

The situation with the Younger boy in Texas looks like it’s serving as a wake-up call to people all over the country about how far the trans ideology has spread, and how much it has captured institutions. I strongly recommend that you spend some time on the 4th Wave Now website, interacting with parents and others who are having to deal with the trans phenomenon. Not all of them are against transitioning; rather, they have all had to go face to face with the extremely powerful trans lobby, in its various manifestations. Most of us have never had to deal with anything like this. You need to know what’s out there.

For example, Carey Callahan is a “detransitioned” family therapist (that is, she was once a female-to-male transgender, but no longer is). She writes in a new 4th Wave Now essay:

One of the sadder parts of being detransitioned and public about it is that the parents find you. They’ve been told by a doctor or a social worker that the only route forward that protects against suicidality is to affirm their kid’s trans identity. That they need to be open to the possibility their kid may need their pubertal process disrupted, may need to begin what could within a couple of years turn into a life time commitment to cross sex hormones, and could need surgeries to socially function. They’ve been told asking questions about the impact of their kid’s peer group, internet use, drug use, co-morbid diagnoses, internalization of sexism, or family dynamics is transphobia. They’ve been told, no matter what their authentic emotions are, to celebrate their child’s transition.

I’m in the novel position of being both a detransitioned lady and a family therapist. I am not, and probably never will be, your family therapist. At this point in time I won’t work with families with a gender dysphoric young person because I’m scared of the risk to my license. In the past few months activists have filed complaints to the licensing boards of two therapists I’m connected with, both of whom have been public in their defense of the research into Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. To trans activists, promoting and enforcing “affirmative care” as the sole available clinical response to youth gender dysphoria (“GD” for the rest of this essay) is a battle so righteous that the ends justify the means. Those means include punishing mental health professionals by threatening their livelihoods, calling DHS on non-compliant parents, slandering youth GD researchers whose research documents majority youth desistance, harassing researchers whose research suggests the existence of a new cohort of youth GD diagnoses that may have vastly different outcomes than previous cohorts, or slandering and harassing even the reporters who acknowledge these events are happening. There is a group of activists within the trans community who truly believe that doubts about a child’s ability to understand and consent to the long term consequences of medical interventions whose long term consequences are a matter of intense controversy among adult patients can only be motivated by transphobia.

More:

At the end of the day, if I had a kid, they’d have to wait till they were 18 to get themselves on hormones and pursue surgeries, so I don’t feel right recommending parents do anything different. It’s not that I don’t believe I could have a kid who, in order to have a good life, truly did need to move through life in a gender role I didn’t expect. I know trans adults like that, and their medical transitions reduced their GD to such a level that they could function well, with loving partners and meaningful work. But my doubts about the ethics of pediatric transition are not based on assuming a trans kid’s identity isn’t going to be stable and long-lasting. (Although it’s worth remembering in 2009 hardly anyone had heard the word “nonbinary,” so I don’t think we can even can speculate about the gender schemas that will be popular in 2029.)

My insistence that any kid I raise be a legal adult before making these choices is based on knowing trans adults who have been surprised by the challenges of their long term healthcare. I am not going to create a situation where my kid is 25 and gets to blame their mom for pain when they orgasm, fusion of their uterus and cervix, reduced mitochondrial function, or straight up never having an orgasm. No way am I running the risk of allowing my kid to halt their puberty with Lupron shots and create a future spending big bucks at the dentist, rheumatologist, and endocrinologist. I didn’t have steady health insurance till my mid-thirties, so I don’t have faith that if my kid had chronic symptoms like the people in the Lupron Survivors Facebook group do that they’d be able to access specialists without sliding into inescapable medical debt.

Callahan’s essay is about what parents can do to build a positive relationship with their child, so that when he or she turns 18, and can get hormones legally from a Planned Parenthood, they won’t go that route.

Follow the 4th Wave Now Twitter account. The stuff they find is really shocking. Someone from a Facebook support group for trans tots sent them screenshots in which parents talk about strategies to hide their children’s male genitalia. 

And look at this thing that is being sold to parents of little girls — not teenagers or even adolescents, but little girls — who want to present as males:

New product from Tranzwear: “Best boy bump for the little guys.” Because your FTM preschooler needs an “appropriate” sized bulge in their pants. Choose caramel or peach colored.https://t.co/aRZd3EpKZZ pic.twitter.com/I6DWMe1sNF

— 4thWaveNow (@4th_WaveNow) March 9, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I know it’s appalling to see. But you need to know what’s happening — and what is being mainstreamed in schools. What is happening to James Younger — a court ruling that he must be separated from his father and given fully to his mother, who claims he wants to be a girl, and who is prepared to transition him medically when the time comes — is happening within a broader cultural shift. As Carey Callahan observes in her column, a decade ago, almost nobody knew the word “non-binary” — but now we are all expected to embrace this new ideology without question, at the risk of being called haters who are driving our children to suicide.

By the way, you see the photo above, from 2009, of the male-to-female trans child Kyla Lechelt? Here’s what he looks like today, via Instagram:

 

Advertisement

The Meaning Of Liquid Modernity

One of the most useful concepts for understanding the world today is the late Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s brainchild “liquid modernity.” I used it in The Benedict Option, and continue to find that it is a really insightful way to frame the contemporary world.

The basics can be understood in Bauman’s 2012 book titled Liquid Modernity. I bought the Kindle version because it’s easier to use Kindle books for research. I highlighted these passages to share with you:

Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement – acknowledged as temporary and ‘until further notice’. Being always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, ‘modernity’ changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus … What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) ‘post-modernity’, and what I’ve chosen to call, more to the point, ‘liquid modernity’, is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago ‘to be modern’ meant to chase ‘the final state of perfection’ – now it means an infinity of improvement, with no ‘final state’ in sight and none desired.

More:

The modern mind was after perfection – and the state of perfection it hoped to reach meant in the last account an end to strain and hard work, as all further change could only be a change for the worse. Early on, change was viewed as a preliminary and interim measure, which it was hoped would lead to an age of stability and tranquillity – and so also to comfort and leisure. It was seen as a necessity confined to the time of transition from the old, rusty, partly rotten, crumbling and fissiparous, and otherwise unreliable and altogether inferior structures, frames and arrangements, to their made-to-order and ultimate, because perfect, replacements – windproof, waterproof, and indeed history-proof …

Change was, so to speak, a movement towards the splendid vision on the horizon: the vision of an order, or (to recall Talcott Parsons’s crowning synthesis of modern pursuits) a ‘self-equilibrating system’, able to emerge victorious from every imaginable disturbance, stubbornly and irrevocably returning back to its settled state: an order resulting from a thorough and irrevocable ‘skewing of probabilities’ (maximizing the probability of some events, minimizing the likelihood of others). In the same way as accidents, contingencies, melting pots, ambiguity, ambivalence, fluidity and other banes and nightmares of order-builders, change was seen (and tackled) as a temporary irritant – and most certainly not undertaken for its own sake (it is the other way round nowadays: as Richard Sennett observed, perfectly viable organizations are now gutted just to prove their modernization then was a road with an a priori fixed, preordained finishing line; a movement destined to work itself out of a job.

It still took some time to discover or to decree that modernity without compulsive and obsessive modernization is no less an oxymoron than a wind that does not blow, or a river that does not flow …

More:

To put it bluntly, under conditions of ‘liquidity’ everything could happen yet nothing can be done with confidence and certainty. Uncertainty results, combining feelings of ignorance (meaning the impossibility of knowing what is going to happen), impotence (meaning the impossibility of stopping it from happening) and an elusive and diffuse, poorly specified and difficult to locate fear; fear without an anchor and desperately seeking one. Living under liquid modern conditions can be compared to walking in a minefield: everyone knows an explosion might happen at any moment and in any place, but no one knows when the moment will come and where the place will be. On a globalized planet, that condition is universal – no one is exempt and no one is insured against its consequences. Locally caused explosions reverberate throughout the planet. Much needs to be done to find an exit from this situation, but remarrying power and politics, after the divorce, is undoubtedly a condition sine qua non of what one is inclined nowadays to think of as a ‘resolidification’.

I think he is quite wrong about the source of our problems being the separation of power from politics, though that is what you would expect a Marxist to say. Still, his description of the disorder of contemporary life is spot on. Is there any wonder that people today are so anxious? About a decade ago, I read a psychology paper — I can’t find it online now — in which researchers compared people who lived under conditions of oppression, but within stability, to those who lived without oppression, but in a highly unstable environment. It turned out that the people living in a more stable world were psychologically healthier than those living under instability — this, despite the fact of oppression. We humans want liberty, understood as freedom from outside control, but we actually thrive when that freedom is limited, and the society in which we live is more predictable.

This is not an argument for oppression, certainly. Too much oppression and too little liberty also deforms people. You don’t have to convince Americans of this fact. But you do have to convince many of us that too much liberty leads to instability, which leads to psychological suffering. And that suffering has consequences politically, socially, and otherwise.

Let me quote again Bauman:

…‘liquid modernity’, is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago ‘to be modern’ meant to chase ‘the final state of perfection’ – now it means an infinity of improvement, with no ‘final state’ in sight and none desired.

As I explain in The Benedict Option, the current crisis of Christianity in the West is not something you can blame on “the Sixties” — though events in that decade certainly accelerated it — or on any other specific event. It goes back to the origins of modernity itself. The Reformation is the signal event, as I explain, but the Reformation didn’t come from nowhere. It became psychologically possible to break the unity of the Church in the 16th century because of theological and social changes that began in the 14th century. As the literary critic Erich Auerbach has written in his great book Dante: Poet Of The Secular World, only forty years separated Dante and Petrarch, but in that time, the Western world began to turn its back on Scholasticism and toward Humanism, with its celebration of the individual, and his power to dominate the material world. Auerbach says humanism arose from Christianity, and ultimately defeated it.

Gender ideology is the ultimate expression of liquid modernity. It teaches that not even the human body is a stable construct, that it too can be brought under the control of human will. Read this story from earlier this year in the NYT Magazine about teenagers rejecting the gender binary — they are genderfluid (!) — and try to convince yourself that this is anything other than madness. Here’s a quote:

For anyone interested in nonbinary demographics, the surveys had another shortcoming. They excluded anyone under age 18, and according to clinicians who specialize in gender, it’s among the young that nonbinary identity is taking hold most rapidly. “It’s growing exponentially,” Linda Hawkins, co-director of the Gender and Sexuality Development Clinic at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me about the number of kids and youth in her practice — from ages 6 to 21 — who identify as nonbinary. Hawkins, who was a clinical professor of Tate’s, has been working in the field for two decades. She talked about the importance, for young children, of recent picture books about fluidity, and of education programs for pediatricians, who are taught to respond with calm understanding when parents report that their children say they are “in the middle.” At least, she added with a rueful laugh, pediatricians are taught this in places like Philadelphia. For older kids, the internet has delivered “a surge of nonbinary information, of nuances in gender expression, in the last five years,” she said. “It has connected kids to supportive communities. Looking back, there were always nonbinary kids, but it’s only in the last few years that there has been the language — language to not feel alone, to have a flag.”

The culture of liquid modernity is catechizing young people into this. I have no doubt at all that many children and adolescents struggle to some degree with their masculinity or femininity. What has changed is that we have abandoned the customs that enable these young people to navigate the fraught pathways to growing into one’s sexual personhood, and left them to be preyed on by those who would disintegrate the human personality for the sake of ideological victory. Like this person:

Among the voices of the young, there are echoes and amplifications of Jacobs’s optimism, along with the stories of private struggle. “There are as many genders as there are people,” Emmy Johnson, a nonbinary employee at Jan Tate’s clinic, told me with earnest authority. Johnson was about to sign up for a new dating app that caters to the genderqueer. “Sex is different as a nonbinary person,” they said. “You’re free of gender roles, and the farther you can get from those scripts, the better sex is going to be.” Their tone was more triumphal: the better life is going to be. “The gender boxes are exploding,” they declared.

It’s going to be Paradise, if only you get rid of those “scripts.” Said the serpent.

Here’s something from the Times — which is the Pravda of the gender revolution — this past July:

For Jacob “Jayne” Gervich, an assistant film editor from South Slope, Brooklyn — who uses the pronouns they, them, and theirs — identity felt like an elusive concept. Gervich, who was assigned male at birth, went from small-town Midwest boy to a self-proclaimed nonbinary trans-femme film editor and homemaking spouse. And one description they hope to attain in the future: a loving parent.

“My wife and I are trying to start a family in the next few years, and we’re trying to do it the old-fashioned way,” said Gervich, whose wife, Allison, was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman. The two have been together for about a decade and were married two years ago at a farm in Hillsdale, N.Y.

“My wife would be ‘Mom,’” they said. “And I think what we settled on is that our child would call me ‘Baba.’”

Again: insanity. The important thing to understand is that this is a phenomenon of liquid modernity and therefore makes sense in this cultural context. If Bauman is correct that the modern condition is now one of constant change, with the total denial of fixed categories, then the Gerviches and all the rest really are representative of our time. They are normal. They are what you would expect in liquid modernity. You might regard all this as beyond weird, but you should understand that your children are growing up in a culture that is encouraging people to apply liquid modernity to their own bodies and psyches.

The fight is not simply with those advocating gender ideology. It’s with the spirit of the Age. It is a spirit that permeates everything. It certainly permeates religion. Classic modernity, in its most orthodox Enlightenment form, denied the existence of God. Postmodernity — liquid modernity — says it doesn’t matter whether or not God exists; if we choose for God to exist now, then God exists in whatever form seems desirable to us, until it no longer does, then we can change again. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the form religion takes in liquid modernity.

This week a friend texted me from a dinner in Washington to say he was overhearing people talking about the Benedict Option as “head for the hills.” He texted, “Did they even read your book?” No, probably not. I think this is a typical response, even though the book has been out for two and a half years. A related response: “Our kids need to be in public schools to be salt and light.” It’s well meaning, but completely blind to the reality that we Christians find ourselves in. The collapse of all standards around us is not an aberration.

If anything, the Ben Op book ought to have been more “head for the hills” than it is. I may have been too optimistic about the ability of Christian families and communities to withstand liquid modernity. The core point, though, is that the power of liquid modernity is such that trying to face it with ordinary Christianity is like going out into a hurricane with an umbrella and expecting to stay dry.

I understand why many conservative Christians don’t want to deal with the claims I make in my book. If I’m right, then the comfortable strategies they’re living by won’t work, and offer false hope. If I’m right, then they will have to change in ways they don’t want to change — including letting go of the bland optimism that says everything is bound to work out fine. So it’s easier to paint The Benedict Option as a neo-Amish tract, so it can be dismissed.

If the floodwaters are coming, you don’t want to drown because the forecast was too upsetting to take seriously. Read Bauman’s book about liquid modernity to understand the essence of our cultural condition: that the flood is already here, and we’re drowning in it. Last week’s polling data news from the Pew center on the collapse of Christianity in America is more evidence. Bauman was neither a Christian nor a conservative. He was a Marxist. But he understood something central to what it means to live in our time. We who are Christians had better take him seriously.

Here is an eight-minute interview Bauman did with The Guardian before his death. Worth watching, even though he’s wrong about the source of our problems being the separation of power from politics. If he’s right about that, then communist China is the answer to our problems:

Advertisement