Rod Dreher's Blog, page 198

Desktop Flannery O’Connor

Artist Kevin Lindholm, who teaches art at Sequitur Classical Academy, has added a Flannery O’Connor bust to his catalog of busts you can have 3D printed to order. Here’s the complete list. It includes all the Inklings, and Chesterton. Several saints and classical figures. My wife gave me a Dante bust from Kevin for Christmas last year. It’s pretty great.

You can custom order these figures as full busts, half-busts, wall reliefs, bookends, or Christmas ornaments. Here’s the thing: Order them NOW in time for Christmas. Kevin prints them on demand, so you don’t want to get at the back of the line.

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James Younger: A Woke Edgardo Mortara

James Younger is a seven year old boy in Dallas. His father Jeffrey has been waging a court battle to save James from his pediatrician mother, Jeffrey’s ex-wife, who claims James is really a girl named Luna. The mother has been dosing James with puberty-blocking medications, and will eventually start injecting estrogen. [UPDATE: I just learned that the mother has not started the child on medications yet. I apologize for the error. — RD] [UPDATE: According to this 2018 court transcript, the mother is not giving the child any drugs now, but says that she will have the child evaluated at age nine, according to the standard protocol, and if puberty blockers are recommended, she will consent to having them administered — RD]

A jury in Dallas just ruled that the mother, Dr. Anne Georgulas, will have full and sole custody of James. The gender transition will proceed as planned.

The Catholic who tweets as Irenist remarked:

We already live in an Integralist regime. But the religion is secular progressivist wokeness.https://t.co/R8Ekn3JbGP

— Irenist

SJWs As Bourgeois Bolshies

I’m reading one of the best books I’ve ever seen, historian Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. It’s a massive — over 1,000 pages — history of the Bolshevik movement, focusing on the people who lived in a vast apartment building constructed across the Moskva River from the Kremlin, for party elites. In the 1930s, during the purges, it was the most dangerous address in the country. The secret police came for people there all the time.

The book has given me a breakthrough in understanding why so many people who grew up under communism are unnerved by what’s going on in the West today, even if they can’t all articulate it beyond expressing intense but inchoate anxiety about political correctness. Reading Slezkine, a UC-Berkeley historian, clarifies things immensely. Let me explain as concisely as I can. All of this is going into the book I’m working on, by the way.

In my book, I identify two main factors that make the “soft totalitarianism” we’re drifting into different from the hard totalitarianism of the communist years. One is the vastly greater capabilities of surveillance technology, and its penetration into daily life in this current stage of capitalism. The other is the pseudo-religion of Social Justice, the holy trinity of which is Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. The mathematician James Lindsay last year wrote an insightful essay analyzing Social Justice ideology as a kind of postmodern religion (“faith system,” he writes). Reading Slezkine on Bolshevism illuminates this with new depth.

To be clear, Social Justice religion is not the same thing as Bolshevism, which conquered a nation and turned it into a charnel house. But the psychological dynamics are so similar that I can understand now why Soviet-bloc emigres feel in their bones that something wicked is coming, and coming fast.

I’m going to give a brief overview of the ideas in this part of Slezkine’s book. Slezkine describes the Bolsheviks as “millenarian sectarians preparing for the apocalypse.” He gives a short history of apocalyptic sects, which he said began in the Axial Age, the period between the 8th and the 3rd centuries BC that saw parallel developments in civilizations — Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Greco-Roman — that caused a fundamental shift in human consciousness. The Axial Age introduced some concepts that are still with us today, including the idea that history is linear. Religion and philosophical systems of the Axial Age developed a sense of separation from the Real (that is, what is material), and the Ideal (what is transcendent). They also introduced the idea that time would culminate in a final battle between Good and Evil that would result in the End of History and the everlasting reign of Justice. The rich will be conquered, and the poor will triumph.

Slezkine writes at some length about these themes in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), but points out that they also existed in parallel in other religions of the era. The two Abrahamic religions that emerged from Axial Age Judaism — Christianity and Islam — modified these same concepts for themselves. The Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible is the standard Western account of the Apocalypse, but not the only one.

In the 16th century, the radical Protestant theologian Thomas Müntzer, leader of an apocalyptic Reformation sect, led an armed revolt against the Catholic Church, Martin Luther, and feudal authority. He and his followers believed the Last Days were upon the world, and that revolutionary violence was necessary to prepare for them.

These movements, says Slezkine, often depend on the virtuous mutually surveilling each other to keep everyone in line. Calvin’s Geneva was like this, and had laws prescribing the death penalty for relatively minor violations of its purity code. In the 17th century, the English Puritan movement under Thomas Cromwell (the “Puritan Moses”) was in this same vein.

The Enlightenment birthed apocalyptic millenarianism without God. Slezkine doesn’t mention him, but I want to put in a plug for the book Black Mass by the English political philosopher John Gray, which I wrote about here. Gray is an atheist, but he cannot stand the militant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. In the book, Gray writes about how the instinct for utopia, born out of religion, keeps surfacing in the West, even without God. Nothing is more human, he writes, than to be prepared to kill and die to secure meaning in life. More Gray:

Those who demand that religion be exorcised from politics think this can be achieved by excluding traditional faiths from public institutions; but secular creeds are formed from religious concepts, and suppressing religion does not mean it ceases to control thinking and behaviour. Like repressed sexual desire, faith returns, often in grotesque forms, to govern the lives of those who deny it.

Slezkine writes that this same apocalyptic millenarianism erupted in anti-Christian form in the French Revolution. The Jacobins were Enlightenment apocalyptics, believing in the triumph of Reason, Science, and Virtue. And they were proto-Bolsheviks. Robespierre, in a 1794 speech to the National Assembly, praised “virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. The Terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue.”

In 19th century America, millenarianism took more gentle forms, but was still popular. Baptist preacher William Miller prophesied the end of the world in 1843, and reached a national audience with his forecast of doom. It didn’t happen, but his work gave rise to the Adventist movements, which are still with us today. Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-Day Saints faith, was another millenarian — a more successful one.

Slezkine says that apocalyptic millenarianism in 19th century Europe often took the form of nationalism. Karl Marx advocated German nationalism as the first step in the worldwide communist revolution. Following Hegel, History was Marx’s god. Slezkine:

[F]aith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity (‘progressive’ means ‘virtuous’ and ‘change’ means ‘hope’). ‘Totalitarianism’ is not a mysterious mutation: it is a memory and a promise; an attempt to keep hope alive.

By “totalitarianism,” he means the system by which apocalyptic millenarians enforce the conditions they believe will constitute the New Jerusalem — the utopia in which their sect believes.

The Marxist faith system prophesied a worldwide conflagration — Revolution — that would see the saints (the Proletariat) cleanse the world of the wicked (the Bourgeoisie) and their false religion (Capitalism). The Revolution would establish Communism: a paradise in which the state would wither away, because the cause of man’s alienation would have been dealt with. Marx despised religion, but he did not believe that his system was religious at all. It was, he taught, entirely scientific — thus making Marxism entirely compatible with what Enlightenment-era elites believed was the prime source of authority.

In Russia of the late 19th century, there was a great deal of apocalyptic fervor, and, of course, a number of Marxist and other left-wing revolutionary groups. The Bolsheviks were the most ruthless and disciplined of them all. Slezkine says it doesn’t matter whether the faith of the Bolsheviks was really a religion or not. The fact is, it functioned like one. If religion is a set of agreements about sacred realities, though sacred realities believed to be objectively true, and the community organized around those beliefs, then every state on earth is religious. The Bolshevik “faith” united people, focused them around what Slezkine calls “the ultimate conditions of their existence,” and told them what they had to do.

For the pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks, the priests and the prophets were their intellectuals, who were “religious about being secular.” Writes Slezkine: “A conversion to socialism was a conversion to the intelligentsia, to a fusion of millenarian faith and lifelong learning.”

The Bolshevik faith was initially spread among the intellectuals primarily through reading groups. Once you adopted the Marxist faith, everything else in life became illuminated. The intellectuals went into the world to preach religion to the workers. These missionaries, says Slezkine, appealed to and tried to intensify hatred in the hearts of their listeners. They spoke to the moral sense within the common people, and gave them what, if taken in a strictly religious sense, would be called prophetic revelations.

The pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks denounced “Philistines” — people who are sunk in their everydayness, and lack revolutionary consciousness. It is chilling to read the lines of description they had for people like this. Slezkine calls the Philistines the “stock antipode of the intelligent” — that is, the kind of person that a member of the intelligentsia saw as his exact opposite. In pre-revolutionary Russia, the intelligentsia saw themselves as a kind of secular priesthood. The way they wrote about their enemies, and the way they rhapsodized about revolution, was utterly fanatical and inhuman. Slezkine:

The revolutionaries were going to prevail because of the sheer power of their hatred. It cleansed the soul and swelled like the flood of the real day.

The “real day” is the day of Apocalypse, when the truth is fully made manifest, and all evil, injustice, and lies are cleansed from the earth. It would come about through “sacred fury.” Slezkine quotes Bolshevik memoirs recalling the revolutionary days of 1917-18. Pure ecstasy, like the day of Pentecost in the New Testament.

Slezkine draws this interesting distinction:

Marx and Engels were not utopians – they were prophets. They did not talk about what a perfect system of social order should be and how and why it should be adopted or tested; they knew with absolute certainty that it was coming – right now, all by itself, and thanks to their words and deeds.

The Bolsheviks, however, did have a complex plan for creating utopia. Reading Slezkine, you can’t help but be impressed by the power and discipline that Lenin and his lieutenants exercised. He was one of the most evil men who ever lived, Lenin — Slezkine’s accounts of Bolshevik mass murder of class enemies on Lenin’s orders make Robespierre’s bloodthirstiness seem like amateur hour. But he was a true revolutionary genius.

For young people in pre-revolutionary Russia, being part of these leftist groups “gave one a great sense of purpose, power, and belonging.” Note this: one reason for the advance of revolutionary consciousness is that parents, despite depending on the stability of Tsarist autocracy, would not turn away from their radicalized children. Slezkine: “The ‘students’ were almost always abetted at home while still in school and almost never damned when they became revolutionaries.”

Bolshevism in power tried to destroy the traditional family, seeing it as an incubator of capitalism. Slezkine writes about how this form of Bolshevik radicalism had to give way to a more conservative ideology of the family, because it caused problems that Soviet society could not deal with.

In power, Bolsheviks carried out apocalyptic destruction of the old order, including the mass murder of class enemies. I have just now arrived at the point in Slezkine’s narrative in which he describes the “Great Disappointment” — a term (borrowed from the Millerites) for the experience of the New Jerusalem not having arrived as promised. As I understand it, Slezkine will describe the homicidal spasms of the 1930s, under Stalin, as the vengeful Bolshevik reaction to utopia’s failure. Utopia can only have failed because its proselytes were weak in faith — and therefore deserve to be punished for their infidelity.

So, what does this have to do with our own Social Justice Warriors? There are clear parallels. Again, I encourage you to read James Lindsay’s analysis of the postmodern faith system of Social Justice for more.I believe that this is what those who lived under communism intuit from the Social Justice Warriors — I mean, why it frightens them:

Like the early Bolsheviks, the SJWs are radically alienated from society. They regard ordinary people as the intelligents regarded the so-called Philistines: with visceral contempt.

Justice depends on group identity. For Marxists, the line between Good and Evil ran between classes: the Proletariat and the Peasants on one side, the Bourgeoisie on the other. Marxism sees justice as entirely a matter of taking power away from the Bourgeoisie, and giving it to the revolutionary classes. Some in the bourgeoisie acquired revolutionary consciousness, and aided the Revolution.

Similarly, for the SJWs, the line also passes between groups, based on group identity. The Oppressors are whites, males, capitalists, heterosexuals, and Christians. The Oppressed are ethnic minorities, women, anti-capitalists, LGBTs, atheists, and other “marginalized” people. Justice is about taking power from the Oppressors and giving it to the Oppressed. Some among the Oppressors acquire revolutionary consciousness and aid the revolution; they are called “allies,” and practice “allyship.”

Social Justice Warriors, like the early Bolsheviks, are intellectuals whose gospel is spread by intellectual agitation. It is a gospel that depends on awakening and inspiring hatred in the hearts of those it wishes to induce into revolutionary consciousness. This is why it matters immensely that they have established their base within universities, where they can train those who will be going out to work in society’s institutions in ideologized hatred.

SJWs believe that science is on their side, even when their claims are unscientific. They are doing the old post-Enlightenment utopian trick of making essentially religious claims, but claiming that they are objectively true. Quote from a Times story: “We’re all born nonbinary. We learn gender.”

SJWs are utopians who believe that Progress requires smashing all the old forms for the sake of liberation. After we are freed from the chains that bind us, we will experience a new form of life. From a June 4 New York Times Magazine story on destroying gender binaries:

Our talk shifted again from the past to the future. Jacobs spoke about foreseeing a time when people passing each other on the street wouldn’t immediately, unconsciously sort one another into male or female, which even Jacobs reflexively does. “I don’t know what genders are going to look like four generations from now,” they added, allowing that they might sound utopian, naïve. “I think we’re going to perceive each other as people. The classifications we live under will fall by the wayside.”

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.

In the case of transgender SJWs, parents can become the greatest advocates for their children, as in pre-revolutionary Russia with the radical youth. A distressed parent of a female-to-male transgender told me that in her child’s high school, the pressure on parents from other parents to suppress all doubts about transgenderism was intense. Here, from that same NYT Magazine piece I quote above, is another anecdote:

Kai grew up in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington; both his parents are economists. He came out to them as genderqueer a year and a half ago, and they, as he put it, were willing “to step through the door” he held wide for them, the door into his way of seeing himself. They read a piece of creative writing he gave them, a meditation using Dadaism to explicate the nonsense of either-or. His mother asked if she could buy him new clothes. “Shopping for clothes was something we’d always done,” he said. “It was her way of saying, ‘I want to keep being part of your life.’ That was really stepping through the door. And then, all the nerve-rackingness of shopping in the men’s section of a department store and trying on pants and worrying about how people are looking at you and reading your gender, it would have been really hard to do on my own. But my mother was there. Just like when we’d shopped together before. And that made it normal.”

Here’s an interesting difference: from what I can tell, most SJWs don’t have a clearly envisioned utopia. What will the world look like when whiteness is once and for all defeated? When toxic masculinity has been fully vanquished? And so forth. They don’t know; all they know is that these things must come to pass, and will come to pass. We have to first destroy the old world and its corrupt structures. From the point of view of someone who stands to be smashed by these revolutionaries, it doesn’t really matter whether or not they have a plan for what to do after you’re overthrown.

Here’s another interesting difference, and an important one: SJWs may want to destroy the oppressive practices, but unlike the Bolsheviks, they don’t want to destroy the institutions of society. Rather, they want to conquer them and administer them. The religion of Social Justice has already conquered the university, as James Lindsay points out, and is moving quickly into other institutions: media (the NYT is its Pravda), law, tech, entertainment, and corporate America. The Social Justice faith system can be easily adapted by the institutions of bourgeois capitalism — a fact that conceals its radicalism.

The people who have lived in societies suffused with this kind of ideology — emigres from Soviet-bloc countries — can see through the veil. With this new book I’m working on, I’m going to do my best to help readers see through their eyes. Meanwhile, if you are really interested in the Russian Revolution, I strongly urge you to read The House Of Government — all 1,128 pages of it. Yuri Slezkine is a masterful storyteller. It reads like a novel.

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Dallas Tornado Check-In

Dallas Sunday night tornadoes (@athenarising, via VOA)

Because I’m not on Facebook, the news was slow to reach me tonight that two of my friends in Dallas — families, I mean — suffered from the tornado that hit there. One family lost one of its vehicles, and part of its roof was torn off, and the other family lost their office. “It’s no more,” H., the wife and mom, wrote to my wife just now.

I was standing with H. just yesterday at the Orthodox parish in Shreveport after liturgy, talking about how well their family business is going. She was there to pick up kids from St. Seraphim parish in Dallas, who had been at a church work-service weekend in Shreveport. I was there picking up my middle son. And now, in a matter of minutes, their entire business has been destroyed.

Please check in, Dallas readers. Were you hit by the tornado? What can the rest of us do for you?

I loved almost everything about living in Dallas, but the tornado threat was easily the worst thing about it.  We have hurricanes here in Louisiana, but you can know that they’re coming, and prepare for them. There’s no preparation for tornadoes. And, this one hit after dark. There was no way to know it was headed your way until it was on top of you.

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Louisiana Oyster Apocalypse

Holy crap, it really is the End Times! More:

People queued up as usual outside Acme Oyster House in the French Quarter one recent day, while inside the aroma of oysters bubbling on the grill filled the dining room and servers whisked past with trays of po-boys.

But at the marble-topped oyster bar, something was starkly amiss: No one was slurping raw oysters.

Facing a dramatic plunge in the supply of Louisiana oysters, Acme has temporarily stopped serving raw oysters at all seven of its regional restaurants.

“If we can’t get Louisiana oysters, we’re not going to serve raw oysters at all,” Acme CEO Paul Rotner said.

The story reports that the Louisiana oyster harvest has collapsed because of the massive, lengthy spring flooding. All that freshwater devastated the oyster beds. “It’s never been this bad in my lifetime,” says the oyster program manager for the state Wildlife and Fisheries department.

The Bonnet Carre Spillway had to be opened for a long time to relieve pressure on the Mississippi River levees. That sent fresh water cascading through the briny oyster beds. More:

This year marked the first time the Bonnet Carre Spillway was opened twice in the same year, and it set a new record for the number of days it was kept open. It was also the first time the spillway had been opened in two consecutive years.

Experts have attributed the increasing rain and rising water levels that led to its use to climate change.

“If this continues, we‘ll still have oysters, but we won’t have the volumes that we shipped out for years and years and years,” said Jim Gossen, a veteran of the local seafood business and chairman of the Gulf Seafood Foundation.

Read it all, if you can stand it. Hard to imagine New Orleans without raw oysters. Let’s hope the winter brings them back.

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Cartoons In Babylon

Just announced on prism by @Netflix! Meet @JacobTobia – the voice of Double Trouble! pic.twitter.com/6ElwOkFia2

— She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (@DreamWorksSheRa) October 21, 2019

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Netflix and DreamWorks, shaping the imaginations of the young:

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power continues to broaden the diversity of its characters as it heads into season 4.

The Netflix animated series already has multiple gay and lesbian character, in addition to characters of all skin tones. Now the hit show is welcoming its first non-binary character, which will be voiced by gender-nonconforming actor/author/activist Jacob Tobia.

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El Chapo’s Amazing Victory

A guest poster on Claire Berlinski’s site says that we Americans ought to be paying a lot more attention to what’s happening in Mexico than we are doing. He points out that the retreat of the Mexican Army in the face of strong resistance from El Chapo’s forces in the city of Culiacan is a game changer. Excerpts:

It’s an absolutely extraordinary episode even by the grim and bizarre annals of what we mistakenly call the post-2006 Mexican Drug War. The Battle of Culiacán stands on a level above, say, the Ayotzinapa massacre, or the Zetas’ expulsion of the entire population of Ciudad Mier. Killing scores of innocents and brutalizing small towns is one thing: seizing regional capital cities and crushing the national armed forces in open fighting in broad daylight is something else.

“Drug War” is a misnomer for reasons the Culiacán battle lays bare. This is not a mafia-type problem, nor one comprehensible within the framework of law enforcement and crime. This is something very much like an insurgency now—think of the eruption of armed resistance in Culiacán in 2019 as something like that in Sadr City in 2004—and also something completely like state collapse. The cartels may be the proximate drivers but they are symptoms. Underlying them is a miasma of official corruption, popular alienation, and localist resentments—and underlying all that is a low-trust civil society stripped of the mediating mechanisms that make peaceable democracy both feasible and attractive.

More:

This is important because Americans have not had to think seriously about this for nearly a century: there is a place on the map marked Mexico, but much of it is governed by something other than the Mexican state. That’s been true for years.

The Battle of Culiacán, government surrender and all, made it open and explicit.

What happens now, barring an exceedingly unlikely discovery of spine and competence by the government in Mexico City, is more and worse. The country is on a trajectory toward warlordism reminiscent of, say, 1930s China or its own 1910s. Some of those warlords will be the cartels. Some of them will be virtuous local forces genuinely on the side of order and justice—for example the autodefensa citizen militias of Michoacán. Some of them will be the official state, grasping for what it can. Some of them, given sufficient time, will be autonomous or even secessionist movements: look to Chiapas, Morelia, et al., for that.

The lines between all these groups will be hazy and easily crossed. None will be mutually exclusive from the others.

And:

Mexico is not an enemy state, and the Mexicans are not an enemy people. Yet as Mexico falls apart, we need to ask ourselves questions normally reserved for objectively hostile nations. There is a war underway. It won’t stop at the border.

Read it all. 

Can any readers in Mexico shed light on this? Any American readers with serious knowledge of Mexico? Be aware: if you want to make racist remarks or simply troll, I won’t post your comments.

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What Would A ‘Catholic America’ Be?

Matthew Schmitz, who is Catholic, reflects on religious liberty and American religiosity. He says something at the end of his UK Catholic Herald column that has caused some interesting discussion on Twitter this morning:

These doubts mattered a great deal, because Tocqueville believed that Catholicism would shape America’s future. He believed that men in democratic society, sick of compromise, would cling to the most consistent form of Christian faith or reject Christianity altogether: “Our descendants will tend more and more to divide into only two parts, some leaving Christianity entirely, others going into the Roman Church.” Those who did not go to Rome would adopt a vision of liberty that scoffed at Christian faith.

America has not yet groaned and found itself Catholic, but in a broad sense Tocqueville was right. The mushy middle of American Christianity is disappearing. Though the “nones” believe in God and often practice ornate forms of spirituality, they are hostile to dogma and discipline. The Protestant denominations have either liberalised entirely or begun to collaborate with Catholics. The result is a nation increasingly divided between Catholic Christianity and outright unbelief.

He clarified later:

For the record, my point is not about formal religious affiliation. It is about the possibility that Americans who identify as Christian will become increasingly orthodox, increasingly catholic, in their belief—wherever they worship.https://t.co/t5AGjrT6dT

— Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) October 21, 2019

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I think the clarification is more or less true, but that’s not what the original column says. In fact, only the Mainline Protestant churches have fully liberalized (and you can still find congregations among them that are small-o orthodox). Evangelical churches are closer to orthodox Catholic beliefs on key moral questions, and on the question of the transcendent nature of ultimate authority. (That is, orthodox Catholics and orthodox Evangelicals do not agree on the source of authority on matters of faith and morals, but they both agree that it is not the individual’s conscience.)

If you follow the work of the Catholic sociologist of religion Christian Smith, you’ll know that in the US, actual, on the ground Catholicism is a lot more like Mainline Protestantism than magisterial Catholicism. I don’t know what it means to say, as Schmitz does in his original post, that the nation is “increasingly divided between Catholic Christianity and outright unbelief,” when many of the Catholic churches here do not offer a clear instantiation of doctrinal Catholic Christianity.

It has been true for quite some time — at least since the early 1990s — that theologically and morally conservative Protestants and Catholics have as much and even more in common with each other than either do with theologically and morally liberal members of their own churches. I wonder, though, how the liberalization that the Catholic Church is undergoing in the era of Pope Francis — especially on questions related to LGBT — changes that observation, a sociological truth that emerged under the papacy of John Paul II. To put a fine point on it, who is closer to Catholic truth, an Evangelical who rejects Rome’s authority but who affirms the Biblical standard prohibiting homosexuality, or the pro-gay, Francis-appointed Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, and Francis’s adviser James Martin, the pro-gay activist Jesuit?

When your average Southern Baptist pastor is more Catholic on a key moral issue like LGBT (around which political controversies having to do with religious liberty revolve) than the Cardinal Archbishop of Newark, what does it mean to say that America is “increasingly divided between Catholic Christianity and outright unbelief”? You will not see Evangelical pastors honoring pagan fertility idols in their churches — but Pope Francis oversaw exactly that this month at St. Peter’s basilica. 

Regular readers know that I am an ex-Catholic (turned Eastern Orthodox), but that I believe as a social fact that as goes the Catholic Church, so goes the civilization of the West, which it built. Even after I left the Catholic Church, in 2006, I believed that Tocqueville was probably right about the future of the United States: that it would come down to Catholicism or unbelief. I thought that despite its many weaknesses, Catholicism would stand firm doctrinally, and American Evangelicalism, though stronger in many ways than Catholicism in the present moment, would not have the internal cohesion capable of withstanding modernity in the long term.

After Francis, I don’t really believe that anymore. I don’t have any more confidence that Evangelicalism will be able to hold the line — though I’m grateful for what they’re doing now — but the changes Francis is making, both personally and through his appointments, convince me that Catholicism won’t do it either. (Nota bene, Eastern Orthodoxy, by virtue of its tiny presence in the US, is at present a non-factor.) I expected Catholicism to decline, and to decline precipitously, in a de-christianizing America, but I expected it to decline while remaining magisterially Catholic. Francis’s unfolding magisterium puts it up for grabs, because it is reconciling Catholicism with certain manifestations of modernity that have caused the Mainline Protestant churches to liberalize.

It doesn’t make sense to claim that “Catholic Christianity” is something other than what the Pope proclaims … but if the Pope and the bishops he has appointed sound and act more like Mainline Protestants than magisterial Catholics as defined by the understanding of magisterial Catholicism that prevailed until Francis’s election, then what does “Catholic Christianity” mean?

If Matthew Schmitz (who’s a friend) contends that more conservative, traditional forms of Christianity are going to be the only ones that endure this time of purification, then I agree with him. Small-o orthodox Christians who worship God — Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox — are facing some trials in common, and some trials particular to our own ecclesial bodies. Any individual Christian, any local church, and any larger communion that surrenders to the Spirit of the Age will not stand. As you know, I wrote a book about this.

Tocqueville, however, was wrong about America’s Catholic future. Catholicism didn’t conquer America. Through assimilation and the dynamic power of individualism and democratic capitalism, Protestant America, the essential nation of modernity, conquered Catholicism within its borders. Over the next decade or two, this post-Christian America will conquer most of the Evangelical holdouts (nationalist pageantry and idolatry will not be a protective totem).

I hope I’m proven wrong. I don’t think I will be, though.

 

 

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Liberation Theology Lives

On Sunday, a group of Catholic bishops and others gathered in a chapel in the Roman catacombs to affirm and add to the “Pact of the Catacombs,” a Vatican II-era agreement made by forty of the Council’s bishops. This document — it wasn’t part of the official conciliar proceedings — became synonymous in Latin America with “liberation theology,” the theological school condemned by the Vatican in 1984 as Marxist. In a statement that year on liberation theology, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican’s doctrinal authority, wrote in the Church’s name (and published with Pope JP2’s approval):

The present Instruction has a much more limited and precise purpose: to draw the attention of pastors, theologians, and all the faithful to the deviations, and risks of deviation, damaging to the faith and to Christian living, that are brought about by certain forms of liberation theology which use, in an insufficiently critical manner, concepts borrowed from various currents of Marxist thought.

This warning should in no way be interpreted as a disavowal of all those who want to respond generously and with an authentic evangelical spirit to the “preferential option for the poor.” It should not at all serve as an excuse for those who maintain the attitude of neutrality and indifference in the face of the tragic and pressing problems of human misery and injustice. It is, on the contrary, dictated by the certitude that the serious ideological deviations which it points out tends inevitably to betray the cause of the poor. More than ever, it is important that numerous Christians, whose faith is clear and who are committed to live the Christian life in its fullness, become involved in the struggle for justice, freedom, and human dignity because of their love for their disinherited, oppressed, and persecuted brothers and sisters. More than ever, the Church intends to condemn abuses, injustices, and attacks against freedom, wherever they occur and whoever commits them. She intends to struggle, by her own means, for the defense and advancement of the rights of mankind, especially of the poor.

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5. The new ‘hermeneutic’ inherent in the “theologies of liberation” leads to an essentially ‘political’ re-reading of the Scriptures. Thus, a major importance is given to the Exodus event inasmuch as it is a liberation from political servitude. Likewise, a political reading of the “Magnificat” is proposed. The mistake here is not in bringing attention to a political dimension of the readings of Scripture, but in making of this one dimension the principal or exclusive component. This leads to a reductionist reading of the Bible.

6. Likewise, one places oneself within the perspective of a temporal messianism, which is one of the most radical of the expressions of secularization of the Kingdom of God and of its absorption into the immanence of human history.

7. In giving such priority to the political dimension, one is led to deny the ‘radical newness’ of the New Testament and above all to misunderstand the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, and thus the specific character of the salvation he gave us, that is above all liberation from sin, which is the source of all evils.

8. Moreover in setting aside the authoritative interpretation of the Church, denounced as classist, one is at the same time departing from tradition. In that way, one is robbed of an essential theological criterion of interpretation, and in the vacuum thus created, one welcomes the most radical theses of rationalist exegesis. Without a critical eye, one returns to the opposition of the “Jesus of history” versus the “Jesus of faith.”

9. Of course the creeds of the faith are literally preserved, especially the Chalcedonian creed, but a new meaning is given to them which is a negation of the faith of the Church. On one hand, the Christological doctrine of Tradition is rejected in the name of class; on the other hand, one claims to meet again the “Jesus of history” coming from the revolutionary experience of the struggle of the poor for their liberation.

10. One claims to be reliving an experience similar to that of Jesus. The experience of the poor struggling for their liberation, which was Jesus’ experience, would thus reveal, and it alone, the knowledge of the true God and the Kingdom.

11. Faith in the Incarnate Word, dead and risen for all men, and whom “God made Lord and Christ” [25] is denied. In its place is substituted a figure of Jesus who is a kind of symbol who sums up in Himself the requirements of the struggle of the oppressed.

12. An exclusively political interpretation is thus given to the death of Christ. In this way, its value for salvation and the whole economy of redemption is denied.

13. This new interpretation thus touches the whole of the Christian mystery.

14. In a general way, this brings about what can be an inversion of symbols. Thus, instead of seeing, with St. Paul, a figure of baptism in the Exodus, [26] some end up making of it a symbol of the political liberation of the people.

15. When the same hermeneutical criterion is applied to the life and to the hierarchical constitution of the Church, the relationship between the hierarchy and the “base” becomes the relationship of obedient domination to the law of the struggle of the classes. Sacramentality, which is at the root of the ecclesial ministries and which makes of the Church a spiritual reality which cannot be reduced to a purely sociological analysis, is quite simply ignored.

16. This inversion of symbols is likewise verified in the area of the ‘sacraments’. The Eucharist is no longer to be understood as the real sacramental presence of the reconciling sacrifice, and as the gift of the Body and Blood of Christ. It becomes a celebration of the people in their struggle. As a consequence, the unity of the Church is radically denied. Unity, reconciliation, and communion in love are no longer seen as a gift we receive from Christ. [27] It is the historical class of the poor who by means of their struggle will build unity. For them, the struggle of the classes is the way to unity. The Eucharist thus becomes the Eucharist of the class. At the same time, they deny the triumphant force of the love of God which has been given to us.

It is important for younger readers to know that in the early 1980s, liberation theology adherents — including many Latin American priests and religious — were allied with Marxist guerrillas and fellow travelers. It was a big problem, and Pope JP2 addressed it authoritatively.

That was then. Now Catholicism has a Latin American pope who has been described — by Cardinal Kasper and others — as embodying the Pact of the Catacombs. In this report from Crux, we learn of the details of the renewed Pact of the Catacombs. Excerpt:

The new pact contains 14 points, the first of which is a call to defend the Amazon rainforest in the face of global warming and depletion of natural resources. The first three, in fact, concern care for God’s creation and a reminder that man is not the owner of “Mother Earth, but rather the sons and daughters,” called to be caregivers.

The original 42 bishops who signed the 1965 pact pledged to “try to live according to the ordinary manner of our people in all that concerns housing, food, [and] means of transport…. We renounce forever the appearance and the substance of wealth, especially in clothing … and symbols made of precious metals.”

In the Amazon version, it’s not until the fourth point that signatories affirm their “preferential option for the poor,” underlining native peoples in particular, making them protagonists in society and in the Church, helping them “preserve their lands, cultures, languages, stories, identities and spiritualities.”

The following point calls on the Church to abandon “all types of colonist mentality and posture,” welcoming the cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity in dialogue “with all spiritual traditions.”

In the new document — a full copy of which I have only seen on Twitter; I’ll post a link when I find one — it appears that whereas the 1965 predecessor held up “the poor” as its “preferential” group, this one holds up the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Point 5 reads:

To abandon completely, in our dioceses, parishes and groups all types of colonialist mentality and posture, welcoming and valuing cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity in a respectful dialogue with all spiritual traditions.

Hmm. Does giving up “colonialist mentality and posture” mean surrendering to syncretism? Based on what has been happening at the Amazon Synod so far — see here — it would appear so.

Latin America is home to about 40 percent of the world’s Catholics, but the Catholic Church is hemorrhaging members there, losing many of them to Evangelical or Pentecostal churches. Pew goes deep on the demographics and rationales in this 2014 survey of Latin America. Among the findings:

Syncretism remains a problem for all the Christian churches in Latin America. According to Pew:

Many Latin Americans – including substantial percentages of both Catholics and Protestants – say they subscribe to beliefs and practices often associated with Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Brazilian or indigenous religions. For example, at least a third of adults in every country surveyed believe in the “evil eye,” the idea that certain people can cast curses or spells that cause harm. Beliefs in witchcraft and reincarnation also are widespread, held by 20% or more of the population in most countries. Other beliefs and practices vary widely from country to country. For instance, a majority of Mexicans (60%) and more than a third of Bolivians (39%) say they make offerings of food, drinks, candles or flowers to spirits, but just one-in-ten Uruguayans (9%) do so. Overall, the survey finds the highest levels of indigenous or Afro-Caribbean religious practice in Panama, where most people (58%) – including 66% of Panamanian Catholics and 46% of Protestants – engage in at least three out of the eight indigenous beliefs and practices mentioned in the survey.

SS. Popes John XXIII and Paul VI had their Ostpolitik — an irenic approach to relations between the Catholic Church and the countries of the Soviet bloc. That came to an end with the election of the Polish pope, who was confrontational towards the Soviets. Now Pope Francis’s church, with the Latin American and German episcopate in the lead, appears to be formulating an Amazonpolitik, characterized by an irenic approach to relations with pagan indigenous peoples of Latin America.

Again, it remains to be seen what the signatories of the new Catacombs pact mean by “to abandon completely” a “colonialist mentality and posture” and to “welcome” engagement with “all spiritual traditions.” Events in Rome this month strongly suggest that it means ceasing to claim that the Catholic Church has the Gospel truth, and that the indigenous peoples need conversion. The new Pact of the Catacombs instantiates what you might call a “preferential option for the pagans.” It looks like a surrender to syncretism.

Meanwhile, in Rome last night, some Catholics fought back against the syncretism, stealing the fertility idols — earlier, a Catholic communications official clarified that they were NOT supposed to represent the Virgin Mary, but rather “an indigenous woman who represents life” and is “neither pagan nor sacred” (though there was a pagan ceremony involving prostration before them, in front of Francis) — from the Catholic church where they were on display, and throwing them into the Tiber. The casting them into the river begins around the 3:15 mark:

UPDATE: From a tradd(ish?) Catholic, addressing left-liberal Catholics wailing this morning about the “iconoclasm” of throwing the fertility idols into the Tiber:

I would say that I love all the concern about "iconoclasm" from people who have spent their entire careers defending the systematic destruction of thousands of churches and the erasure of ancient and venerable devotional practices, but the Discourse is too boring.

— Matthew Walther (@matthewwalther) October 21, 2019

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Neighborhood Spirit

Reader PatrickSheaEsq comments:

I would really like to believe that the polarization and political obsessions of the fringes aren’t having an effect on most of the country and the lives of ordinary people, but I can’t disagree more with the idea that daily practical political disengagement shields people from the kind of conflict you find on twitter. Let me explain…

We live in a very ordinary conservative Florida suburb. Nobody ever talks about politics because it’s assumed everyone believes the same thing. There are at least seven churches on the two mile drive to our nearest grocery store strip mall (that’s if you don’t count the two churches under construction and the other one that meets in the public elementary gym and the other one that meets in a local seafood restaurant). They are always busy on Sundays and Wednesdays (and the Catholics on Saturday afternoon!). It’s obvious when it’s time for choir practice.

Ours is a large neighborhood (approximately 1200 homes) of well-maintained tract houses with an active HOA and an associated board that runs our CDD (for non-Floridians, that’s a community development district, a kind of quasi-public neighborhood authority that issues bonds to pay for large common projects within the planned community like roads, schools, or other improvements and has delegated authority from the state to charge homeowners an annual CDD fee which is kind of like an extra property tax — it’s a big deal since the average CDD fee is usually pretty large [for instance, ours is larger than our state and local property taxes combined]). It’s basically a way our state and local governments can get local things paid for with local revenue without making it look like they are raising taxes which is of course forbidden here.

In any event, when we first moved to our neighborhood, the atmosphere was generally friendly, helpful, and neighborly, and that’s despite the fact we moved in during the real estate crisis when many of the homeowners were deeply underwater if not facing immanent foreclosure. Now, of course, living in any HOA community always has its fair share of busybodies and the dumb hoops you have to jump through to get your rose bushes approved by the architectural review board, but the vast majority of interactions between neighbors were cordial and unremarkable.

During the waning year or two of the Obama administration, especially during the lead up to the 2016 primaries, little things started to change. You’d hear about more bullying by big kids up at the community center. More people began to complain on our neighborhood facebook page about speeders at the bus stop and minor acts of vandalism or petty theft. People started being more open about sneaking alcohol into our community center and pools. A couple of fights broke out in the gym and on the basketball courts.

Mind you, the demographics and economic health of our neighborhood has been improving dramatically during this time period, and it was quite good to begin with aside from the mortgage crisis. Our school system is routinely ranked among the best in the state and the whole country, and our unemployment rate is barely measurable.

When we first noticed these dust ups, the tenor of most interactions was still positive, but it started to become clear that something was changing. Facebook interactions became more argumentative and aggressive. When one parent wrote to ask for help because a group of middle school boys were exposing themselves to the kindergarten bus riders every morning, nearly armed camps formed — one outraged that something like this could happen, the other saying “boys will be boys, it’s no big deal” or the ever popular “heck, I did that when I was that age, and I turned out alright”.

That kind of thing rocked on for a while. The election comes and goes, along with the sea of Trump and DeSantis signs, but the level of anger and often just plain old meanness continues to intensify. By this time last year, people had started avoiding each other. People don’t wave anymore, rarely do they speak if they walk by while you’re out getting the mail. Keep in mind, I have never had a single conversation with a neighbor about politics pro or con on any issue or about any party. Ever.

Now, every HOA or CDD meeting is full of shouting and angry, vitriolic language, insults, threats, not to mention a good bit of profanity. People are talking like Trump tweets or a lot worse. Our neighborhood facebook page had to split into various pages run by groups of warring neighbors who now hate each other (some of whom are suing each other at great expense to themselves and to a lesser degree to the neighborhood itself). It’s literally insane. I will spare you all the details of these feuds, but one anecdote represents the whole: a group of neighbors (yes, these are adults and also parents to minor children) mailed themselves chocolate phalluses so they could call the police to accuse another group of neighbors of being sex offenders or something. It wasn’t a prank, it wasn’t funny, the morons called the cops on themselves! The sheriff’s office has basically told them to quit calling or they all will be arrested for wasting police time.

When people used to post about kids up to no good in the past, they would always hint around about who it was or obscure the faces of the children in a photo but still alert the parents they need to be watching out. Now they just post the pictures of the kids smoking weed and tell Karen she needs to go collect Bobby behind the back fence. People have complained for years about kids ringing doorbells in the middle of the night, but now people are describing the firearms they sleep with and saying if it happens to them, they’re going to shoot first and let the police figure it out afterwards.

These are the same people we’ve lived among for more than a decade, perfectly lovely, securely middle class, ordinary Americans, but something big has changed. What happened to the people who moved heaven and earth to help a family whose home was heavily damaged in a nearby tornado? What happened to all the nice people who used to post lost and found animals? Or the lady who was always ready to notarize a school form at 10pm because the field trip leaves first thing in the morning? Or the retired contractor who would offer to come over in the middle of the night to fix a broken AC or flooding pipe? Or the nurses, paramedics, doctors, and military EMTs who would post they were staying through the hurricane if anyone needed emergency medical help while the roads were going to be flooded?

They’re all still right here, they just don’t make the offers anymore. In fact, two of the people I just listed are at the center of one of the worst feuds.

Listen, I’m not longing for some golden age of 1950s Eisenhower Republican niceness, and I’m not some liberal ideologue dreaming of a new utopia either… I’d settle for 2006 or 2012, even with all of their many faults! Here’s the deal: my family and I are literally scared for our physical safety if one of us was to get actively involved in the HOA or CDD. I wanted to put out a yard sign in 2018 (as our HOA rules allow, for two weeks, and as many neighbors do), and I was told in no uncertain terms, “No, honey, they’ll slash our tires or break our windows.” And yeah, well, that was a pretty convincing argument because it was entirely plausible.

Am I trying to lay all of this at the feet of Donald Trump? Not really, though I definitely believe his narcissism, coarseness, dishonesty, corruption, and bullying have accelerated the trend by giving ordinary and sometimes not-so-mentally-healthy people permission to let all of their worst tendencies hang out into public view, too. But really, Trump is more a symptom than the disease, or maybe the right way of thinking of him is as an opportunistic parasite, the staph infection that takes hold while you’re recovering from a cold. If tens of millions of people hadn’t already been willing to let it all hang out, Trump wouldn’t have been possible.

The historical root causes of broad cultural changes like this are no doubt complicated, probably much more so than we realize, but on an individual level it’s plain and simply an inchoate anger and resentment about almost everything that’s driving the changes in my neighborhood. And Trump is thriving on it.

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