Rod Dreher's Blog, page 199

‘An Antichristic Church’

I met Canadian Catholic theologian Douglas Farrow at last week’s Touchstone conference. He is a gentle, thoughtful man. Which makes the powerful rebuke he delivers to the Vatican in this First Things column about the Amazon Synod even more devastating. As someone raised in the era of John Paul II, who came into the Catholic Church in part because of JP2’s witness, and who left the Catholic Church in sorrow in part because I was leaving behind the great Benedict XVI, I never, ever imagined I would see anything like this said about the Roman Catholic Church. But we are not in normal times. Not remotely. Excerpts:

Our times are times when eco-theology in the Amazon basin and sexual theologies in the bowels of Europe can, with a “liberationist” flourish, flush the gospel of Jesus Christ down [Liberation Theology founder] Leonardo Boff’s drain.

The real problem here is not, as some suggest, the expensive German plumbers who, after all, are doing the flushing for free. The real problem is the Great Apostasy, now several centuries in the making, which has at last produced a global union of such plumbers—a union now so powerful that it can elect popes and conduct its dirty business in the name of the Church itself.

The Amazon, we are told in the name of the Church, “is living a moment of grace, a kairos,” because it is “living the culture of encounter.” Encounter with the God and Father of Jesus Christ? No, encounter with itself and its own lands, peoples, and cultures, which are veritable sources of revelation. Encounter also with “the other,” with “love lived in any religion” and in every cultural space. Except that of the colonialists and neo-colonialists, of course, who do not know how to love. (The neo-colonialists, one would think, must surely include the European Marxists and Gramscians running this synod, but apparently not.)

In this moment of grace, of encounter, the oppressive space of “petrified doctrines” is broken open. Old wineskins, to change the metaphor, are burst, that the new wine may flow freely. Dogma gives way to dialogue, christology to pneumatology, the exclusive to the inclusive:

Many peoples of the Amazon are inherently people of dialogue and communication. There is a broad and essential arena of dialogue between the Amazon’s spiritualities, creeds and religions that requires an approach of the heart to the different cultures. Respect for this space does not mean relativizing one’s own convictions, but recognizing other avenues/pathways that seek to decipher the inexhaustible mystery of God. Insincere openness to the other, just like a corporatist attitude, that reserve[s] salvation exclusively for one’s own creed, [is] destructive of that very creed. This is what Jesus explained to the Doctor of the Law in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:30-37). Love lived in any religion pleases God. “Through an exchange of gifts, the Spirit can lead us ever more fully into truth and goodness” (EG 246). [A quote from the working document of the Synod — RD]

More:

The kairos, the culture of encounter, being lauded in the Pan-Amazon Synod is a Bergoglian kairos and culture. The church “called to be ever more synodal,” to be “made flesh” and “incarnated” in existing cultures, is a Bergoglian church. And this church, not to put too fine a point on it, is not the Catholic Church. It is a false church. It is a self-divinizing church. It is an antichristic church, a substitute for the Word-made-flesh to whom the Catholic Church actually belongs and to whom, as Cardinal Müller insists, it must always give witness if it means to be the Church.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us, quite frankly, with the question of how both the true Church and the false can have the same pontiff, and what is to be done about that fact.

Read the whole thing. It’s stunning. These are the words of a prominent Catholic theologian.

Along those lines, here’s an interview in National Catholic Register with an English Catholic who, in the late 1960s, submitted to an Amazonian healing session with a female shaman. It demonized her. Excerpts:

With hindsight, I believe the physical illness throughout my life was exacerbated by the false “healing” in Brazil which I later learned was known as umbanda, the white healing aspect of the occult religion known as Macumba. The latter I experienced in Brazil when I went with friends one evening to attend a samba school event. I did not realize until too late that the beautiful and rhythmical spectacle of the samba dance would become a religious ritual of hate and revenge, Macumba, whereby the practice of killing chickens and extracting their blood is performed with the intent to raise “natural spirits” who would inspire/entrance someone to injure or kill a specific person, usually before the night was finished. The famous poesias and songs accompanying samba can be very dark, encouraging shunning light to enter darkness and suicide. Contrary to our culture, I learned in Brazil that life was cheap and at that time in Rio I remember seeing dead bodies wrapped in paper lying at the side of the road, the authorities and passersby seemingly unconcerned.

What else besides the physical sickness did you feel?

The spiritual aftermath of the false “healing,” however, was a far greater suffering.

For 10 years afterward I experienced constant attacks and visitations of evil; the most notable was in my studio flat near Avenue Louise, Brussels. There I was woken one night by the sound of my windows crashing in the hall, kitchen and bathroom. I thought it was a burglar, but no one was there except for a hostile presence. I believed it was an unhappy spirit who had formerly lived in the flat, so I got up and prayed for the spirit for about two hours with my rosary. This occurred every night for a week until on the last day, the crashing was louder than usual. I realized I could not move, speak or open my eyes but sensed an overwhelming presence of evil around and above my bed. I felt I was being strangled. In my mind, I heard the words, “I am stronger than you and you can do nothing.”

I was terrified, and envisaged the Sign of the Cross in my mind at that moment, I imagined I saw the figure of a woman standing at the foot of my bed, whom I thought was my mother, and the evil presence disappeared. I now believe the woman may have been Our Blessed Mother, Mary.

She was not delivered until many years of suffering later, when a Catholic priest who practices deliverance ministry exorcised her. More:

What aspects of the upcoming synod make you concerned that the experiences you had could find their way into the Church?

The instrumentum laboris clearly indicates its willingness to introduce into the practice of the Catholic faith aspects of the cosmological culture of the Amazonian tribes, which is pagan and open to the occult: “Harmonizing relationships between nature, men, the supreme being and various spiritual forces (12-13) … the beliefs and rights of the elderly healers (88-89) … in dialogue with the spirits (75) … regarding the many-named divinity (87) … (to) live in harmony with Mother Earth” (85) describes characteristics of the syncretized religion of the occult healing practice of Umbanda, from which I received a false “miraculous” healing, leaving me “bound” by physical illness, evil attacks and spiritual darkness for 48 years.

This is the origin of New Age pagan practices developed in the West, including the U.K., for which samba music, chanting poesias, drums and rhythmic dance entice and raise the spirits, with Gaia Mother Earth as principal symbol. The “supreme being” mentioned in the document would suggest to me the originator of the occult,

God’s enemy, together with his legion of “various spirits.” My experience would warn anyone from becoming involved.

The document’s insistence of tailoring Catholic ministries to the ancestral customs of the aboriginal peoples would freely allow native “elderly healers” (88), including women, to perform “shamanic indigenous rituals and ceremonies integrating (their own) rites, symbols, styles of celebration into liturgical and sacramental rituals of the Church without any structural controls, i.e., no “censorship, dogmatism or ritual disciplines.” This risks introducing into Catholic liturgy a practice similar to the one I experienced in Rio de Janeiro i.e., a woman in a ministerial/priestly role possessed by a “healing” spirit. which had a “preternatural” power sufficient to abnormally reverse an extreme physical facial disfigurement within two hours, a condition that medically takes weeks on strong medication to cure.

I would be concerned that if the Catholic Church does not maintain control of its liturgy and protect its Sacred Tradition, a powerful influence of the “supreme being” of death and darkness would risk overwhelming the Church and men’s hearts and souls — at its worst, encouraging sacrilege and defilement of the Eucharist, as well as pagan sacrifice and inspiration to kill from a spirit of hatred and revenge as contained within the samba ritual, Macumba. This “being” is deceitful and, from my experience, man only knows he is “bound” once it is too late.

Although many kind priests have listened to my story, only few fully understood the nature and dangers of my experience with evil and its effects from occult practice.

In this respect, I am concerned there may be clergy and priests at the synod unaware of the dangers these proposals may hold for the faith and the Church. They may, therefore, agree with its suggestions out of a loving benevolence and inclusion toward indigenous peoples by accommodating their practices within the Church, but which are an antithesis of the Truth, neither evangelizing them nor enriching the life-giving faith of the Church.

Please read all of it. It’s extremely important. What is happening now in Rome is something of world-historical spiritual significance.

The English lay Benedictine writer Esther de Waal said that St. Benedict of Nursia arose in a time of great chaos, when “life was an urgent struggle to make sense of what was happening.” Like today! In 2015, when I had my first conversation with Father Cassian Folsom, the former prior of the Benedictine monastery at Norcia, the saint’s birthplace, about the Benedict Option, he told me:

“Those who don’t do some form of what you’re talking about, they’re not going to make it through what’s coming.”

Father Cassian could not have foreseen the Amazon Synod. But my Catholic brothers and sisters, my strong belief is that the Amazon Synod is one of the things that the old monk was talking about. Read the signs of the times! Prepare yourselves, your families, and your communities! 

Earlier this month, Pope Francis and various cardinals gathered in St. Peter’s Basilica around a pagan idol of Pachamama, brought to Rome by Amazonian native peoples gathered in Rome for the Synod:

This is from a video report on Lifesite News.

One cannot see this without thinking of Jesus’s words about the End Times, in Matthew 24, verse 16:

“So when you see the appalling abomination, of which the prophet Daniel spoke, set up in the holy place (let the reader understand), then those in Judaea must escape to the mountains… .”

Here, from the same video, is a photo of a display from the nearby church of St. Maria in Transpontina, where the statue and other Amazonian figures are displayed. Notice the native woman nursing an animal in this banner illustrating the cosmos of the pagan peoples there. “Everything is connected,” reads the text.

 

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The Shifting Ground In Washington

MSNBC screenshot

This morning I was listening to a discussion on the radio, in which DC journalists were marveling that Trump, when he is in trouble, has a habit of doubling down on politically dangerous behavior. They were wondering if he really does think he’s invulnerable, and is just daring his political enemies to go at him, or if he has a strategy here.

In her column today (paywalled), Peggy Noonan says that Trump’s behavior in the past couple of weeks has compelled the ground to shift somewhat in DC, over impeachment. Excerpts:

Here are three reasons to think the situation is more fluid than we realize.

First, the president, confident of acquittal, has chosen this moment to let his inner crazy flourish daily and dramatically—the fights and meltdowns, the insults, the Erdogan letter. Just when the president needs to be enacting a certain stability he enacts its opposite. It is possible he doesn’t appreciate the jeopardy he’s in with impeachment bearing down; it is possible he knows and what behavioral discipline he has is wearing down.

The second is that the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, told his caucus this week to be prepared for a trial that will go six days a week and could last six to eight weeks. In September there had been talk the Senate might receive articles of impeachment and execute a quick, brief response—a short trial, or maybe a motion to dismiss. Mr. McConnell told CNBC then that the Senate would have “no choice” but to take up impeachment, but “how long you are on it is a different matter.” Now he sees the need for a major and lengthy undertaking. Part of the reason would be practical: He is blunting attack lines that the Republicans arrogantly refused to give impeachment the time it deserves. But his decision also gives room for the unexpected—big and serious charges that sweep public opinion and change senators’ votes. “There is a mood change in terms of how much they can tolerate,” said a former high Senate staffer. Senators never know day to day how bad things will get.

The third reason is the number of foreign-policy professionals who are not ducking testimony in the House but plan to testify or have already. Suppressed opposition to President Trump among foreign-service officers and others is busting out.

She goes on to observe that every single day, Trump does something that further erodes his position. But, she says, the needle on impeachment and removal will only move significantly against Trump if 1) the hearings are perceived as fair, and 2) something else emerges that makes people feel “alarm” over the conduct of foreign policy and national security policy under Trump. At this point, she says, we aren’t there.

Interesting column. It really is interesting to observe Trump’s natural brinksmanship, even when there is absolutely no upside to it for him. It has made me think this past week that the man really might be dangerously unstable.

I’m about to drive for the rest of the day. I’ll check in with y’all later.

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Our Coming War Of Religion

I think I’ve found something new to say about French-Ahmari. But first, a couple of things.

Reader Matt in VA, a stalwart Trump backer who really does hate with the hate of a thousand million suns what he calls “Respectable Conservatism” (= any conservatism that criticizes Trump) so much that it colors everything, comments on why people like him feel the way they do:

It’s emotional. Trump voters think that movement/respectable conservatives are worse, and more, than they are *traitors.* It is an intensity of feeling like how Dante put traitors at the very center of Hell. Trump voters feel *betrayed* by the Republican Party.

It is emotional and connected to the way people feel about those deep and mythopoetic topics, blood and soil.

The media dropped story after story after story after story, wall-to-wall-to-wall, about Trump’s corruption and self-dealing in 2015 and 2016. It didn’t make a difference then, and it won’t now. This is about matters of the heart. Movement conservatism/respectable conservatism has lost people in a way that is emotional; and other people, people like me, hate it in a way that colors everything. It would not be unfair or false to say that this political question touches the very way we feel about our own fathers.

Similarly, back in 2017, the left-liberal Swarthmore professor Tim Burke wrote about “Trump As Desecration”. Excerpt:

Why are so many of us feeling deep distress each day, sometimes over what seem like relatively trivial or incidental information (like Trump pushing aside heads of state?) Because Trump is sacrilege.

Trump is the Piss Christ of liberals and leftists. His every breath is a bb-gun shot through a cathedral window, bacon on the doorstep of a mosque, the explosion of an ancient Buddha statue. He offends against the notion that merit and hard work will be rewarded. Against the idea that leadership and knowledge are necessary partners. Against deep assumptions about the dignity of self-control. Against a feeling that leaders should at least pretend to be more dedicated to their institutions and missions than themselves. Against the feeling that consequential decisions should be performed as consequential. Against the feeling that a man should be ashamed of sexual predation and assault if caught on tape exalting it. Against the sense that anyone who writes or speaks in the public sphere is both responsible for what they’ve said and should have to reconcile what they’ve said in the past with what they’re doing in the present. These are emotional commitments before they are things we would defend as substantive, reasoned propositions. They’re interwoven into how many of us inhabit social class and working life, but sometimes spill over both class and work to connect us with unlike people who nevertheless have similar expectations about leaders and public figures.

Even when we intellectually understand that our sense of the sacred in civic and public life may be dysfunctionally entangled in stifling technocratic arrogance or neoliberal visions of governmentality, even when we believe ourselves to be open to a more carnivalesque or improvisational mode of public leadership, we still have very deep feelings about what’s proper and improper, righteous and demonic, sanitary and repellant. And Trump is violating every intuition, every deep reservoir of feeling we have about how one ought to be a man, a leader, a symbol of our national identity. We are not distracted when we respond to those feelings. In fact, we might be better off to articulate our responses as feelings, as intense and profound and utterly righteous feelings.

I encountered that Burke piece via a great 2017 New Atlantis essay by Alan Jacobs, in which he attempted to explain campus wokeness as a form of myth.  I can’t do justice to this essay by quoting it at length here. Let me just quote this from the beginning, where Jacobs talks about the intractability of campus protests:

The problem lies in a failure to grasp the true nature of the students’ position. If we are going to understand that position, we will need to draw on intellectual sources quite other than those typically invoked. What is required of us is the study of myth — and not in any pejorative or dismissive sense, but in the sense of an ineradicable element of human consciousness.

In his book The Presence of Myth, first published in English translation in 1989, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski divides our civilization into two “cores.” This is his term for two cognitive, social, and ethical networks, “two different sources of energy active in man’s conscious relation to the world.” One of these cores is “technological,” the other “mythical.”

The term “technological core” is potentially misleading. Kołakowski is speaking of something broader than what we usually mean by “technological,” something influenced by Martin Heidegger’s understanding. To Heidegger, and therefore I think to Kołakowski, technology is not the product of science; rather, science is the product of a “technological enframing.” Technology, on this view, is not a set of methods or inventions but a stance toward the world that is instrumental and manipulative, in relatively neutral senses of those words. The technological core is analytical, sequential, and empirical. Another way to put this is to say that what belongs to the technological core is what we find to hand: whatever occupies the lifeworld we share, and is therefore subject to our manipulation and control, and to debates about what it is and what might be done with it. To this core belong instrumental and discursive reason, including all the sciences and most forms of philosophy — everything that reckons with the possible uses of human power to shape ourselves and our environment. The technological core undergirds and produces the phenomena we typically refer to as technological.

The “mythical core” of civilization, by contrast, describes that aspect of our experience “not revealed by scientific questions and beliefs.” It encompasses the “nonempirical unconditioned reality” of our experience, that which is not amenable to confirmation or disconfirmation. As will become clearer below, the mythical core describes our most fundamental relation to the world. It is our metaphysical background, the elements prior to our manipulation and control. For Kołakowski, the failure to distinguish between the mythical and technological cores leads to a failure to understand many social trends and events.

Kołakowski brackets the question of whether “nonempirical unconditioned reality” actually exists — that is, of whether metaphysics is fictional. He is interested, rather, in the impulse toward connecting with such a reality, which he says is persistent in human civilization, though it takes many forms.

He also wants to understand this mythical core on its own terms. But this understanding can be difficult, for our society “wishes to include myth in the technological order, that is … it seeks justification for myth.” And the only way to seek justification for myth is to analyze it into components and reassemble them in a logical sequence. That is to say, myth can only be justified by ceasing to be myth:

The Gospel phrase, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” appears to an eye accustomed to rudimentary logical distinctions a jumble of words justified at best as metaphor translatable into several distinct utterances: “I am offering you proper directives,” “I proclaim the truth,” and “If you obey me I guarantee that you shall have eternal life,” and so on. In fact, these sorts of conjectured metaphors are literal, do not demand to be understood and to be translated into the separate languages of values and information. One can participate in mythical experience only with the fullness of one’s personality, in which the acquisition of information and the absorption of directives are inseparable. All names which participators in myths have given to their participation — “illumination” or “awakening” or such like — refer to the complete acts of entry into the mythical order; all distinctions of desire, understanding, and will in relation to these global acts is a derivative intellectual reconstruction.

This description is deeply insightful, useful to reflection on many cultural phenomena. But here we need only observe that it helps to explain a great deal of what’s happening on certain American college campuses these days.

Please do read the entire essay. It’s very rewarding.

Borrowing from Kolakowski’s two categories — the Technological and the Mythological — Jacobs concludes that our society has moved from one kind of conflict (Technological vs. Mythological) to a clash of mythologies. 

To go deep into this point, I highly recommend this 2018 essay from Areo analyzing Social Justice as a form of religion. It’s incredibly illuminating, in that it shows how the tenets of Social Justice ideology are held by believers as outside of rational examination. To try to submit them to rational examination and debate is to subject them to demythologizing — and that is what the SJWs fiercely reject. As James Lindsay writes in that essay:

Identities in Social Justice are understood mythologically by being reinvented as ideologies—including whiteness, blackness, and masculinity—established in (“authentic”) expressions of lived experience and defined according to the articles of faith of applied postmodernism. As such, they are not to be reasoned with, and they cannot be disagreed with or challenged “without tearing holes in the web and leaving it dangling and useless.” This is where you should check back with that bookmark about the totalizing understanding of social construction with regard to gender (and even sex), which should make it clear that social (and critical) constructivism is a part of the mythological core of Social Justice. As explained by Kołakowski, “One can participate in mythical experience only with the fullness of one’s personality, in which the acquisition of information and the absorption of directives are inseparable.” This can be taken as a reliable sign that mythological thinking in service to sacrosanct ideas is taking place.

It strikes many of us conservatives (and old-school liberals) as bizarre, hysterical, and manipulative when SJWs react to skeptical questioning of their claims with some version of, “You are trying to debate my right to exist!” But as Kolakowski et al. would say, that’s because we outsiders are trying to subject mythological knowledge to technocratic analysis. Since the Enlightenment, generally, and certainly since the 19th century, Christians have had to get accustomed to our beliefs treated not as facts, but as myth. SJWs react to the same thing, when applied to their core beliefs, with the fervor of a fundamentalist mob. Those who challenge them are not just wrong, they’re evil. They’re blasphemous.

The paradigmatic example of the futility of employing technocratic means to combat mythological fervor is poor Prof. Nicholas Christakis attempting to reason with the SJW mob on the grounds at Yale. Remember this, from 2015?:

No matter how patiently he tried to engage the students with discursive reason, it didn’t work. They were operating from different cores.

There are two basic reasons, I think, why liberals fail to appreciate the challenge from these SJW radicals.

First, they assume that because these students are usually secular, that their orientation towards their cause is not religious. Liberals have it in their minds that only Religious Right people are irrational. They let their guard down around SJWs, thinking that the SJWs are technologically oriented (in the Kolakowskian sense), when in fact they’re mythological.

Second, the SJWs advocate for causes that liberals generally support: equality, diversity, and so on. It’s easy to see why liberals in positions of authority capitulate to these tirades from left-wing students, whereas if they were coming from the right, they would not tolerate it for a second. Liberals, especially those in power, may feel guilty about their “privilege,” and feel that they are not sufficiently committed to the causes of racial justice, gay rights, feminism, and so forth. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

SJWs are conquering institutions everywhere, none as thoroughly, or as consequentially, as the university. They have succeeded in causing institutions to treat their beliefs as knowledge, writes James Lindsay in that Areo essay. More:

Social Justice is an application of postmodern philosophy, we must remember. That means that Social Justice is a moral tribe whose central fascination is power and how it can shape society. And its agenda has never been secret: it is openly to remake society according to its aims and “theories.” This means that Social Justice is a collection of moral tribes, whose primary agenda is its own institutionalization, and they’ve made the universities not only into their cathedrals but also, in something of an ironic throwback, into their seminaries. By seeking to conquer educational institutions first, Social Justice has effected a social and cultural coup that religious hardliners have only been able to dream about for most of the past century.

Emphasis mine. In an advanced, secular, technological society like ours, capturing the educational institutions really is capturing the highest ground. Everyone who will be moving into leadership positions in every other institutions will first pass through university — and that means they will be indoctrinated into the “faith system” (Lindsay’s term) of Social Justice. Many readers who work in media or in corporate America can tell you that Social Justice is already taken as fact within those environments. The New York Times, the most important journalistic institution in America, is facing a civil war within its ranks, between old school liberals in higher ranks, and younger reporters and editors coming from colleges that have inculcated them with the SJW gospel. Using the Kolakowski model, older journalists were trained to consider journalism as a craft within the Technological core; the younger ones see it as part of the Mythological core.

So, what does this have to do with David French and Sohrab Ahmari?

French, as you’ll recall, is a conservative Evangelical lawyer who believes that the classical liberal system we have now offers us enough resources to fight against left-liberalism’s excesses.

Sohrab Ahmari is the journalist who believes that French’s approach is too polite, and that the right needs to fight harder, with gloves off.

Seen through Kolakowski’s framework, we can say that French is applying technological methods to a mythological challenge. And this is reasonable, given that the liberal order is a Technological one.

But liberalism, as we know, is in crisis. More and more people on the left and right are losing faith in the fundaments of classical liberalism (see Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed). If you read the James Lindsay essay, you’ll understand better why this is happening with young people in this post-Christian society. Here’s an excerpt in which he comments on a Jonathan Rauch book:

Without getting too far into the details of Rauch’s argument—which insists that people feel that the Enlightenment liberal values and norms of Modernity are a bit too callous and dry in these regards to constitute a human cultural staple—these complaints “speak less to liberal science’s badness than to its completeness.” In short, people often perceive them to fall short in speaking to our deeply human needs for wonder, purpose, morality, mythological interpretation, and shared belief. Thus, it should be sufficiently clear to conclude that what he calls “skeptical faith” makes it difficult for people to meet the precise needs premodern constructs like religion and their attendant mythologies exist to fill.

These dissatisfactions spawned a new postmodern anti-Enlightenment project as a reaction to and rejection of the great, sweeping “metanarratives” of Modernity that so plainly failed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than attempting to go backwards and linking arms with premodernists and their religions, however, the postmodernists recognized and accepted the hardest truth of the Enlightenment: God really is dead. With it, they seem to have adopted the bleak nihilism the premodernists consistently warned would come of such a conclusion, should it be embraced.

Postmodern faith is therefore not like premodern faith, but it is still faith. In Social Justice, for instance, it still looks to the assurance of things hoped for, seeing itself as inexorably on the “right side of history.” It is also the conviction of things not seen.

French believes that Christian faith and conservative principles can exist peaceably within modernity, which is to say, within the liberal order established by the Enlightenment. Ahmari does not and, as a right-of-center Catholic, wants to fight for an order that is built on pre-Enlightenment principles. SJWs, as postmodernists, are trying to create an order based on considering left-wing ideological beliefs as if they bore the force of metaphysical truth.

If current trends continue, though, SJWs will have conquered the institutions that produce lawyers — and may have already done so. The outward forms may remain liberal, but the core beliefs of those who administer the system will have become illiberal. This takeover of the courts by Social Justice may be hard to see, because all other institutions will have moved in the same direction. Anyway, it is difficult to grasp how core institutions of liberal democracy can remain intact if those who administer and populate them are no longer committed to classical liberal principles, but rather have gone over to the religion of Social Justice. Or, to put it another way, the courts cannot remain Technologically oriented if all the judges have a Mythological sense of justice.

The point is, French’s cause may not have much of a future. David Brooks has a powerful column up today, in which he examines what to do if the presidential vote comes down to Donald Trump vs. Elizabeth Warren. He says that Warren is pretty bad for four basic reasons, but

…if it comes to Trump vs. Warren in a general election, the only plausible choice is to support Warren. Over the past month Donald Trump has given us fresh reminders of the unique and exceptional ways he corrupts American life. You’re either part of removing that corruption or you are not. When your nation’s political system is in danger, staying home and not voting is not a responsible option.

Politics is downstream from morality and culture. Warren represents a policy wrong turn, in my view, but policies can be argued about and reversed. Trump represents a much more important and fundamental threat — to the norms, values, standards and soul of this country.

I have said that I would either vote for Trump, or not vote. But it’s not hard to imagine that Trump could lead us into a situation in which I could be persuaded, like Brooks, that the threat a second Trump term poses to the country is greater than what a President Warren would mean. It’s possible.

But if Warren wins, there will be millions of people like Matt in VA who do not see her as legitimate. As he puts it, this is a “matter of the heart.” He believes establishment people like Brooks are guilty of “treason” — a claim that Matt seems to concede in his comment quoted above he holds to as a Mythological claim. I think that is extreme and irrational, but that’s beside the point. The point is that people like Matt in VA — and there are a lot of them — have lost a lot of faith in classical liberalism, which is a Technological system.

Now, if Trump wins again, does anybody doubt that the Tim Burkes of the country — and there are a lot of them — will refuse to accept his legitimacy? As Burke said, he is the “Piss Christ” of the left (for you youngsters: that’s a photo by Andres Serrano, of a crucifix submerged in urine, that caused a national controversy in the early 1990s). Trump is a Mythological figure for the left. If a Technological system (liberal democracy) produced not one, but two Trump presidencies, the sense that democracy is a fatally flawed system will likely be widespread on the left.

The danger is that we Americans could find ourselves approaching the condition of Spain in the first half of the 1930s: a nation where both left and right ceased to believe in democracy, because it was a system that allowed the other side the possibility of gaining power. The chasm between the two mythologies — on the right, Catholicism, monarchism, conservatism, reaction, and falangism; on the left, atheism, socialism, communism, and anarchism — was too great. Eventually, the Republic fell, and there was civil war, which in an essential way was a war of religion.

If I were betting on the future of America, I would say that the Matts in VA and the Tim Burkes had the momentum. The center is disappearing. And that means that Sohrab Ahmari, despite lacking in specifics (he’s getting there), has a more accurate read on the nature of the conflict upon us, and what it’s going to take to join the battle.

Here’s the problem, though: how are we on the Right going to form the kind of warriors capable of resistance? The Left is already doing this through institutional capture. Harvard’s integralist law professor Adrian Vermeule talks about marching through the institutions from the Right, which I certainly hope will happen, but where are these troops going to come from? The churches? At this point, alas, that’s a sad joke. The ranks of homeschoolers, and other Benedict Optionistas? There aren’t enough of us, and as one Catholic homeschooling mom testified here, it is no guarantee at all. The universities? Come on.

I don’t say that to be discouraging, but only to be realistic. We can only fight the Mythological with the Mythological. The pseudo-faith of Social Justice may be shallow, but it has the force of institutional power, and it is well on its way to capturing elites — which, as the sociologist James Davison Hunter has argued in his book To Change The World, is how cultural transformation happens:

The work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites.

By all means let us attempt a Christian march through the institutions! But first, many believing Christians are going to have to march through their own institutions, especially the Catholic Church. This is going to have to be the work of generations, though — and the assault on Christian belief, both intentional and passive, by the forces of liquid modernity is unremitting.

What I’m saying is that a religious war is coming. I don’t think it’s going to be between the Social Justice crusaders and Christians, for the most part. I think it’s going to be between the Social Justice crusaders and the post-Christian Right, which is to say, a confederation of nationalists and populists, and tribalists.

Trump is going away at some point, but the country is not going to return to the status quo. In his must-read new book Return Of The Strong Gods, R.R. Reno analyzes the exhausted liberal society — both left-liberalism and right-liberalism — and says that we are going to see a return of “strong gods.” By that, he means forces that unite us and give our lives meaning and purpose. Mythological forces, in the Kolakowskian sense. The religion of Social Justice offers strong gods. They are false gods, but they are strong. In his  book — I intend to write about it in a separate post — Reno makes a case that we on the other side of that political and cultural chasm had better come up with beneficent strong gods of our own — and I think Ahmari’s traditionalist version of Catholicism would qualify — or the craving for the Mythological will summon up dark ones.

That’s enough for tonight. On Friday, I will be sequestered working on my book in the morning, and traveling in the afternoon. I’ll update the comments as often as I can, and might be able to post a blog or two.

 

 

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She BenOpped. It Didn’t Work

A thoughtful, moving letter (slightly edited by me for privacy) from a reader, responding to my post about the new Pew numbers on the collapse of Christianity in America:

I’ve just read your Christianity Collapsing in America post. I’d like to speak to your frustration or desperation at the end about the importance of working out a response. People for whom their Christian faith is a very, very big thing—the biggest thing of anything in their lives—are  and have been working to defend and pass it on to their children for several decades now, but I think you underestimate how high the number of the “fallen” (using a battlefield metaphor more than a wages of sin metaphor) is likely to be even with intensive Ben-Oplike action.

This is not to counsel giving up but to emphasize how much more insidious and seductive the West’s soft atheism/agnosticism/scientism/religious mush is. I think it may be worse for the faith than Communism was in Eastern Europe and Russia, because, though the stakes then compared to now (this likely will change some at least) were much higher for Christians in such societies, the seduction factor was less. Also, many people who didn’t have the heroism to remain practicing Catholics or Orthodox or whatever were not convinced into atheism or agnosticism but internally tilted with greater or less slant to the side of the angels.

I sound defeatist, and in part it is because, personally, as a parent of now-grown children, I have been defeated. That is, my two sons are agnostic at best; my two daughters are vaguely spiritual/Christian without, as far as I can tell, doctrinal content, except that God is chill with whatever makes us happy. Nobody goes to church or identifies particularly with any faith. In college, my youngest briefly attended a sort of cool, interdenominnational church called either Liquid or Fluid—I could never remember which, which she found annoying.

I was very consciously contending with the culture while I brought them up. I was quite aware that we needed community to support us, and for 8 years I belonged to a terrific home-schooling group of interesting, faithful, intelligent Catholics having lots of kids and loving and enjoying them while remaining quite firm about what they believed and how they and their children were to live. We talked about the Faith, tried to live the Faith, provided counter-arguments to what was wrong. We celebrated holidays and events together, even had intramural sports together.

Now, I know that a couple of important factors specific to our situation influenced my kids to defect. My husband, though Catholic and technically conservative doctrinally as well as politically (I am not sure even now, however, to what extent he really believes in the truth of God and all that), [had some severe personal problems]. Eventually (when the oldest kids were high school age) things got really bad, we separated, and the kids went to (Catholic) schools since I was working full-time to support everybody. So I can see those fault lines quite clearly. But, not to normalize our experience, there are A LOT of broken marriages, abusive marriages, and alcoholic marriages even among the fervently religious, so there are many people reading BEN OP stuff or in the category that should who also live with the kinds of major dysfunction that don’t make handing on their religion easier.

But additionally, as I said, the softness of the current atheistic/agnostic/pantheistic/fill-in-the-blanks Western society is extremely hard to push or  pull against. As you know, everything the surrounding culture produces proselytizes with greater or lesser subtlety for secular materialism, scientism, whatever you want to call it. As the children grow older, realistically speaking, being a traditional, orthodox Christian in this polarized climate begins to drastically reduce your friend pool, your potential romantic partner pool, your potential employer pool, your odds of getting stellar recommendations from professors, etc. I don’t say that the kids do a cost-benefit analysis—I am sure though that the idea of  writing off most of their peer group and many of their potential mentors is unappealing.

And that is when “ideas” and thinking even come into it! The biggest barrier to keeping the next-generation believers, I think, is the seeming monopoly on tolerance that the surrounding liberal secular world persuades people it has. You still have younger children, and from what I can tell there has been no slippage yet, but once someone’s children have slipped into questioning-the-faith-of-their-fathers mode (not in the way all people do at some point to make a faith their own, but in the way someone beginning to break off from family to sidle over to the culture does), then it is almost impossible (at least, I found it so) to make arguments for the faith that aren’t immediately dismissed because we “won’t just let gay people be happy too” or we’re ignoring the latest research on transgender people. And don’t even start on contraception, or the indissolubility of marriage, arguments about not living together beforehand, etc.

The sexual issues, and particularly the newer same sex marriage/transgender ones, are like an enormous dike walling them off from Christian belief. It is not that there aren’t arguments and there isn’t a vision of life that makes sense of Christianity, as you know, but that they are impervious to these—they won’t listen to these, they discount all of it in their heads as a holdover from past prejudices and tribalism. They are similarly largely impervious to history, or to classic literature, which becomes a storehouse of outmoded, superseded beliefs. And they believe so firmly that science explains everything they need explained. And this includes social science.  I know that whenever I say something along traditional lines they are with greater or lesser patience or hostility thinking, “You have nothing to say to me: You come from a place that history and society have rightly and thankfully journeyed beyond.”

I know it is not impossible for strong Christians to emerge in this culture—I have seen some of them in my children’s generation and under. But there aren’t many, and even in the non-dysfunctional smart, strategic, and heroically faithful families, even in those who surround themselves with supportive families and friends for their children, there is no guarantee that all or even most of the children will enter adulthood faithful.

I say this not to dissuade or dishearten you, but to ask you to be more aware of how much people can be doing and trying even when the desired result does not occur. Just don’t conclude that they didn’t, so to speak, do Ben Op right—don’t be like those test pilots in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff who, when someone crashed a test plane, were driven to coming up with a theory about why, if the pilot had only done this or that, the crash would not have occurred. Sometimes, in some cases, if nothing has worked, it is possible that nothing would work.

Oh, and one observation I had about the PEW figures and tables you showed—though you correctly mentioned that the largest drop occurred in the Northeast, the percentage drop in the South was quite close to it and was I think much more significant, since in the Northeast religious belief and influence have been tanking for some time, but the South is where everyone counts on seeing Christian affiliations.

I am grateful to this reader for her remarks, however depressing. It sounds like she did the very best she could — better than many of us could have done — and still, as she put it, she “was defeated.”

I have always said that there are no foolproof solutions, and that the Benedict Option is at best a strategy that can improve the odds that our kids will hold on to the faith. But anybody who thinks that they’ve got the Plan is at risk of being humbled by reality. One of my oldest friends has a family I have always regarded as just about ideal in terms of Christian family life. Their kids are all grown now. Two are very faithful members of the church. The third left Christianity behind.

There are no guarantees. If you read The Benedict Option looking for the perfect solution, the 10-point plan that will keep your family Christian, you’re not going to find it. That’s because it doesn’t exist. I’d probably sell you more books if I said it did exist, and that I had found the recipe for the secret sauce, but that would be a lie, and it would be giving you false hope. There are things that we can do to make ourselves and our communities more resilient — and I talk about them in the book — but unless you are willing to go full-on Amish (which is a possibility!), there is no escape from modernity. Read what Alan Jacobs said about the Ben Op in 2016, to its critics among Christians.

Reader Ryan commented on that earlier post:

You are definitely correct in thinking that Christians shouldn’t place their hopes for a religious resurgence in Gen Z. I do university ministry at an Ivy League school and the numbers there are pretty sobering. Only 31% of students identify as Christian – less than half the national average of 65%. Now, there are admittedly some demographic quirks (my school has a very large Jewish population and a large number of international students who come from majority non- Christian countries). But still, those numbers point to something.

Also, these numbers don’t reflect the fact that even those who identify as Christians (or regularly attend services) don’t hold traditional Christian views on a gamut of issues – e.g. sexual ethics, the nature of salvation, the reality of hell, etc. The Christian label hides a lot of fragmentation and diversity underneath.

And in a very different context from mine in the Northeast, there is a similar syncretism that occurs between orthodox Christianity and the prosperity gospel. Before working in university ministry, I worked at a medium-sized church in a small town in the Midwest. People expected Christianity to be a Joel Osteen/Oprah Winfrey “inspirational” experience. The picture in “orthodox” Evangelical churches is even depressing, since commitment to Trump/nationalism basically blurs together with evangelical faith.

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The Evangelical Rot Deepens

Paula White-Cain, telling viewers of the Jim Bakker program that if they give money to him, they’re storing up treasures in heaven

I’m wound up today, with the news out from Pew showing, among other things, that the Millennials are the first generation in American history to be majority non-Christian, and with today’s news that Theodore McCarrick molested at least seven more boys than we knew about.

So as long as we’re discussing decay in the church, let’s turn to Trump’s Court Evangelicals. Take a look at this appalling spectacle of Paula White-Cain, one of the president’s spiritual advisers, asking for donations to build convicted felon Jim Bakker a new TV studio. You have to listen to this garbage to believe it:

Presidential spiritual adviser Paula White says Christians “are mandated by God” to send thousands of dollars to help Jim Bakker build a new TV studio and their donations will be counted by “a Department of Treasury in Heaven” that will determine their eternal reward. pic.twitter.com/bU2VoIV7hF

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) October 17, 2019

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White-Cain has a new book out today, called Something Greater. Guess who has endorsed it? Many of Donald Trump’s so-called “Court Evangelicals”. Excerpt from The Christian Post:

Several prominent evangelical leaders took to social media to endorse White’s book.

In a since-deleted tweet, Franklin Graham, president of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, encouraged his 2 million followers to “check out” Something Greater, noting that White has lived an “interesting life.” The move drew the ire of some public commenters who said Grahams’ late father, Billy Graham, would be “disappointed” in his son’s endorsement.

Additionally, Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, tweeted: “My good friend @Paula_White has written a new book which releases tomorrow. It is powerful. I highly recommend it!”

On Twitter, Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, said to give Something Greater to “anyone looking for hope!” While Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, added, “Paula’s life is an encouragement to so many and I’m sure this book will encourage you.”

Responding Jeffress, author and evangelist Justin Peters said, “@robertjeffress I appeal to you to immediately disassociate with Paula White. A lack of discernment of this magnitude is a very, very serious issue for a pastor. She is both unqualified and disqualified on every imaginable level to be in any kind of ministry. This is serious.”

Greg Laurie, pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California, also endorsed the book, as did Ralph Reed, and T.D. Jakes.

White, who is on her third husband, has been called a “heretic” by other Evangelicals. In this piece, theologian Michael Horton explains what is so problematic about her theology. 

She was on the Jim Bakker program today to promoted her new book, which dropped this morning. In her opening remarks on the program, she praised the convicted felon grifter as a “forerunner” for televangelism, and says that people who won’t partner with Bakker are missing out on a “blessing.” Here’s a link to the broadcast. At around minute 44, Bakker begins talking about how God told him to build this new TV studio, called Voice of the Prophets, and how Jesus is going to move into the joint when it’s done. Paula agrees with his tale about how the evil spirits took him out back in the 1980s, and says later that there is mystical significance to the fact that Jim is now 80 years old, and doing this new work of God. Which is why God expects people to obey Him and donate money to build Jim’s new studio.

She says that if people give money to Jim to help him build that studio, they’re storing up treasures in heaven. Gosh, it’s like buying indulgences, innit?

Look, Paula White-Cain is not an Evangelical. She’s a Pentecostal Word of Faith preacher. That means something. But she has been endorsed by all these leading Trump Evangelicals. It can’t be because they agree with her theologically. It has to be because she’s on their side politically. Here she is praising a convicted felon TV evangelist as a “forerunner,” then raising money for his latest grift, and these Evangelical leaders are all on board with her. Why?

This is decadence.

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The Ted McCarrick Rot Deepens

Ted McCarrick, back in the day (EWTN screenshot)

I don’t believe that the main reason that Christianity is collapsing in America is because of church scandals. It has much more to do with broader and deeper trends in modernity — with science, with capitalism, with technology, with the Sexual Revolution. But the churches have hurt themselves tremendously with their sex scandals. A Protestant friend who has been having to deal with this in his denomination told me it is taking a tremendous toll on him. You should know that just because you don’t see it reported in the media, there’s still a lot going on on the scandal front.

Today the Washington Post reports that seven more men are claiming that they were molested by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick as boys — and that these claims are known to the Vatican. In fact, these boys — now men — testified in the Vatican’s own investigation of McCarrick, and in law enforcement’s investigation. One of those boys, whose identity the Post is withholding, per its policy, has written an anonymous essay online, called “Essay For The Faithful.” You should read it. He talks about how Uncle Ted was covered in Teflon:

By the time then-Cardinal McCarrick stepped in front of the cameras and microphones in 2002 as the face of the U.S. Catholic Church’s response to the sexual abuse crisis, he had already completed a personal campaign of predatory sexual abuse of minors and young adult males that stretched back across four decades. While the national media waxed poetic about this charming and charismatic Cardinal with a twinkle in his eye, they had no idea that McCarrick was using them to send a powerful message to his countless victims that he was untouchable and in complete control. Can you really blame any of us for believing him?

In this excerpt, he answers a couple of questions; “The Nathans” is the term he uses for himself and the other McCarrick abuse victims:

Why is the Vatican’s report on McCarrick taking so long?  

I have no insights at all into who is writing that report and how all of that will work. What I can tell you is that if they had completed and issued their report before today, I would be sitting here telling you that they closed the book too soon. Don’t underestimate the sheer volume of information that began coming in last year, the number of different channels that information came in through, and all of the various investigative processes and law enforcement agencies that have been involved with the examination of the information.  

If there is one thing I am sure that Church and civilian authorities can all agree on, it is that McCarrick was a walking jurisdictional nightmare who has left a wake of physical, emotional, and spiritual carnage that stretches back, at this point, more than 50 years. I am personally inclined to grant all of the investigators all the time they need to do whatever work is necessary to get this done right once and for all. 

How could people around McCarrick not have known?

In my view, this is a lazy question. Also, I often see this question get weaponized by special interest groups, usually with cunning precision. If you were to ask any one of the The Nathans that question, each of us would tell you that unless that person in close proximity to McCarrick was (A) a male, (B) of the right age, (C) during the right period of time, it is extremely unlikely they were aware of what was truly going on. We wouldn’t say that because we are wishfully assuming the best in people or giving them the benefit of the doubt. We would say that because we saw how McCarrick groomed, stalked, and eventually preyed on us. We know better than anyone how careful he was about covering his tracks.  

I have no problem at all accepting the idea that there were people close to McCarrick who never saw this coming. If you think you are freaking out, you should see my family. Think about how sick this is: They feel guilty and complicit for not knowing that this happened under their noses all those years ago. I feel guilty and complicit for never having the courage to tell them what McCarrick did to me and for going along with his charade all these years. Meanwhile, the only person who should be feeling guilty about any of this is now giving magazine interviews from inside a friary and telling the whole world that he doesn’t feel guilty about anything. God bless those Capuchin monks. They are better men than me.

Read the whole thing. The author points out that he has known many Catholic priests in his life, and they have all been good men who never harmed him, and in fact helped him. Except one.

I think he is being too easy on the matter of who should be feeling guilty in this thing. In fact, there were people high up in the Church who knew about McCarrick, and who did nothing. I find it plausible that they didn’t know he was abusing minors, but I don’t find that exculpatory at all. They knew that he was forcing himself sexually on seminarians, yet that didn’t make a difference to his rise within the Catholic Church. Last year, Catholic News Service reported that back in 2000, the Vatican had a letter from an American priest warning about McCarrick and seminarians. I was told in 2002, but could not confirm, that a private delegation of prominent lay Catholics went to Rome before McCarrick was named Archbishop of Washington, and met with Vatican officials, telling them that McCarrick was a molester of seminarians, and should not be promoted. Of course McCarrick, a legendary fundraiser for the Church, got his red hat anyway.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has alleged that a number of top Vatican officials knew all about McCarrick, but did nothing. We know that Pope Francis brought McCarrick in from the cold, and made him a special envoy, before everything came crashing down a year ago.

No sir, there are some people who ought to feel guilty about the matter of Theodore McCarrick. It is one thing to have been deceived by the man. But there are senior people in the Catholic Church who were not deceived, who knew what Ted McCarrick was, and said nothing. Whether they kept their silence to protect the Church’s image, or to protect themselves from retribution, or because they were complicit in the same sexual networks as McCarrick — well, that’s something I hope we eventually learn.

I do not expect that we will learn this from the Catholic Church. As usual, it will have to be learned from the courts and the police. The anonymous victim points out that there are multiple criminal investigations of McCarrick underway now.

 

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Christianity Collapsing In America

The headline on the new study by the Pew Center says it all: “In US, Decline of Christianity Continues At Rapid Pace.” Excerpts:

The religious landscape of the United States continues to change at a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.

More:

Both Protestantism and Catholicism are experiencing losses of population share. Currently, 43% of U.S. adults identify with Protestantism, down from 51% in 2009. And one-in-five adults (20%) are Catholic, down from 23% in 2009. Meanwhile, all subsets of the religiously unaffiliated population – a group also known as religious “nones” – have seen their numbers swell. Self-described atheists now account for 4% of U.S. adults, up modestly but significantly from 2% in 2009; agnostics make up 5% of U.S. adults, up from 3% a decade ago; and 17% of Americans now describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” up from 12% in 2009. Members of non-Christian religions also have grown modestly as a share of the adult population.

Look at how fast things are changing. In only 12 years:

And notice that the decline is among everybody. It’s much more true among Democrats than Republicans, but otherwise, it covers the entire demographic landscape:

And notice how religion falls off a cliff when it comes to Millennials. If you think somehow there’s going to be a recovery with Generation Z, you’re dreaming:

There is no good news anywhere in this report. It breaks down religious decline by region. It’s down dramatically in every region in the country, though the most rapidly secularizing is the Northeast, having lost a staggering 15 percent of its Christians over the past dozen years. It breaks it down by party affiliation too. The Democrats are without a doubt the secular party now. Most white Democrats no longer identify as Christian. Christianity within that party’s partisans is largely confined to blacks and Hispanics, though it is declining among them too. And, most white adults say they rarely if ever attend church services.

Read the whole thing.

Church people, the alarms are ringing. Can you not see it? Just yesterday I heard from a reader who teaches in a school in one of the most conservative, religious parts of the US. He told me that he discussed the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision the other day in class as they were discussing the Supreme Court. He said every one of his students thought that the cake baker ought to be crushed. We will not long have religious liberty in America without religiously observant Americans.

As I always say, we have to stay involved in politics, if only to protect the right of religious believers to run our own institutions and affairs. This is important! But if we are not at the same time doubling down on teaching and forming Christians, our political victories, and our legal victories, will do us no good.

Read The Benedict Option. It’s important. We don’t have all the time in the world to think about this, and to work out a response. The crisis is here. The crisis is now. What we have been doing is not working. Donald Trump is not going to save us.

What is it going to take to wake you up?

UPDATE: I missed this data point:

Pretty momentous finding deep in this big Pew report:

Millennials appear to have become the first generation (in U.S. history, no doubt) to be majority non-Christian.

https://t.co/EoC1wXmDw7 pic.twitter.com/9JWZ3P9SMQ

— Will Jordan (@williamjordann) October 17, 2019

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UPDATE.2: Ouch:

Just a reminder: if you work for the Catholic Church in the U.S., your employer is Blockbuster Video, it's June of 2008, and you're still arguing about how to better display the DVDs on the shelves. pic.twitter.com/1wLe4kaEOI

— Fr. Matt Fish (@frmattfish) October 17, 2019

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#MAGA Mottramism

Back in 2002 or so, Canadian Catholic writer Mark Cameron came up with the term “Mottramism” to describe all-in Catholics like the writer Mark Shea, who fell all over themselves to absolve John Paul II of any fault whatsoever in the Catholic abuse scandal. He wrote:

I would like to propose a name for this phenomenon of inveterate support for any and all Papal actions, imputing to him wisdom and spiritual insight beyond all the Saints and Popes of past ages: Mottramism.

This takes its name, of course, from Rex Mottram, Julia Flyte’s husband in Brideshead Revisited. At one point, Rex decides to convert to Catholicism in order to have a proper Church wedding with Julia. But the sincerity of his conversion becomes suspect when he is willing to agree with any absurdity proposed in the name of Catholic authority, and shows no intellectual curiosity into its truth or falsehood. As his Jesuit instructor, Father Mowbray describes his catechetical progress:

“Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: ‘Just as many as you say, Father.’ Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said ‘It’s going to rain’, would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh, yes, Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’ He thought a moment and said, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’”

These days we see a lot of #MAGA Mottramism around Trump. No matter how foolish or malicious his actions, the #MAGA Mottramists are quick to explain it away. Everything Trump does is genius, only we’re too sinful to see it.

Yesterday I posted a link to a story about how Trump’s incompetent ambassador to the EU is spending over $1 million in taxpayer funds to renovate his official residence in Brussels, and the government is spending $50,000 per month to house him until the work is completed. This is exactly the kind of Swamp Creature behavior that Trump repeatedly vowed he was going to clean up. But some readers were quick to excuse it. #MAGA Mottramism usually takes one of these forms:

Yeah, Trump is rude, but he gets things done.
What about how bad Bush and the neocons were?
I would rather have Trump than a Democrat.
It didn’t happen, and you are a dupe of the media/the Deep State to think it did.
Trump is playing five-dimensional chess, and we’re all too stupid to see it
All criticism of Trump is in bad faith

That No. 5 was Shea’s constant fallback in his scandal coverage back then (I haven’t read him for years, so I don’t know what he’s saying now). He had faith that John Paul II had a secret plan to hold bishops accountable and to clean up the scandal. I think he was entirely serious. He said some good and tough things about corruption in the American church, but when it came to John Paul, his eyes misted over with emotion and sentimentality. Mark Shea understood that papal infallibility did not mean that the pope could never err on prudential judgments, but he was so personally invested in the JP2 cult of personality that his own judgment failed him in an embarrassing way.

This kind of thing did not help the Catholic Church. It only delayed reckoning with reality. The same thing is true of #MAGA Mottramists. For example, this news today:

Quite possibly the stupidest thing you can do while trying to allege Hunter Biden was improperly benefiting from his fathers position

You want to claim Joe Biden is profiting off his position maybe don’t pull something like this https://t.co/9HW6M5Z9MB

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) October 17, 2019

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If that’s not swampy — using government funds to benefit your private business — what is?

Just now, news broke that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has told reporters that there was in fact a quid pro quo in the Ukraine thing:

He said that the aid was initially withheld because, “Everybody knows this is a corrupt place,” and the president was demanding Ukraine clean up its own government. But Mr. Trump also told Mr. Mulvaney that he was concerned about what he thought was Ukraine’s role in the 2016 campaign.

“Did he also mention to me in passing the corruption related to the D.N.C. server? Absolutely. No question about that,” he said. “But that’s it, and that’s why we held up the money.”

Mr. Mulvaney was referring to Mr. Trump’s discredited idea that a server with Hillary Clinton’s missing emails was being held by a company based in Ukraine.

Mr. Mulvaney’s comments undercut the president’s repeated denials that there was a quid pro quo linking his demand for an investigation that could politically benefit him to the release of $391 million in military aid to Ukraine, which is battling Russian-backed separatists on its eastern border.

There is a reason that the numbers on public support for impeachment have flipped since summer, and that now just over half of American support impeaching and removing Trump from office:

The reason has a lot to do with the fact that the president’s behavior is hard to defend. The kind of people who ought to be criticizing him, not lapdoggishly defending him, are exactly those who stand to lose the most if the GOP loses the White House to the Democrats. All of these troubles Trump has had lately have been entirely self-inflicted.

It was entirely possible to be a faithful orthodox Catholic in 2002, and to at the same time believe, and say, that John Paul II’s handling of the problem of sexual abuse in the Church was poor, and needed to change. The Mottramists — and they were all conservative Catholics, as I was then — were so afraid to say it, or even to face it themselves, in part because they didn’t want to give any aid and comfort to church liberals, that they ended up hurting the credibility and diminishing the authority of the Church.

It is understandable, though, why so many Catholics back then were docile before the Pope, who to them is the closest thing they have to the voice of God on earth. But the GOP isn’t a church, and Donald Trump isn’t a pope. He’s a political leader, with both good and bad qualities. It is not helping him, or the causes he purports to believe in, when his own supporters can’t bring themselves to confront his failures. It is possible to be a Trump supporter and to criticize him when he deserves it. In fact, that is what a true friend does. Sycophancy only delays confronting the crisis, and makes it worse.

All of which is to say that gang, I love you, but I have been through this kind of thing once in my life, and it does not end well for us.

UPDATE: I’ve had some legit criticism for No. 3 (“I would rather have Trump than a Democrat”), especially as it is a position that I tend to favor. Let me clarify by saying that I believe it is a valid conclusion one can draw. I call it #MAGA Mottramism only in the context in which I see it often deployed here in these comments threads by some folks — as their initial (and only) response to any bad thing Trump has done. My thought is, “Yeah, in the end, I might prefer to have Trump to a Democrat too, but that is not an excuse for refusing to consider what Trump has said/done critically.”

Similarly, it is true that Trump has not done anything like start a war with Iraq, as neocon G.W. Bush did, and thank you, Trump, for that. But that’s the kind of logic that liberals use to try to shut down Christian talk about anti-Christian discrimination and mistreatment here in America, e.g., “They’re not killing you or throwing you in jail for your faith, so you can’t claim to be persecuted.” No, they’re not doing the worst possible thing, but that is not any kind of reasonable response to claims that they are doing a bad thing.

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The Ford Foundation & The Amazon Synod

Gotta love National Catholic Register‘s Edward Pentin, who put the screws to a Brazilian divine on the funding his organization (and through that, the ongoing Amazon Synod) has received from the Ford Foundation:

At #SinodoAmazonico #AmazonSynod Presser; @EdwardPentin ask Abp Roque Paloschi, President of Cimi, the Brazilian Bishops’ Conference Indigenous Missionary Council, about the funding Cimi has received from the Ford Foundation, a pro-abortion organisation. Response below [Thread] pic.twitter.com/5E5TgXnCh9

— Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) October 17, 2019

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The response was pure argle-bargle and foofarah:

At #SinodoAmazonico #AmazonSynod Presser; on Cimi, the Brazilian Bishops’ Conference Indigenous Missionary Council, receiving millions of $ from the Ford Foundation, a pro-abortion organisation, Archbishop Roque Paloschi says Cimi’s accounts are “transparent” pic.twitter.com/WIzqnfJOdY

— Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) October 17, 2019

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He didn’t actually answer the question. Perhaps the Archbishop didn’t know, and didn’t want to affirm and later be called out for it.

Pentin said the Ford Foundation’s grants database shows that CIMI received significant funding from 2010 to 2015. It’s true. Here’s a screenshot I took:

According to the Ford site, those grants each year went to:

For capacity building, networking, mobilization and public education to protect and defend the rights of indigenous communities affected by large infrastructure projects in the Amazon

So, nothing to do with abortion or gender ideology. Still, the Ford Foundation is not the kind of philanthropy the Catholic Church should be doing business with. The Ford Foundation, as Pentin said in his question, supports abortion rights. Here’s a screenshot from a Foundation post advocating abortion, and written by its “gender, racial, and ethnic justice” program officer:

This year, according to the Ford Foundation’s own numbers, it has donated just over $5 million to projects supporting “reproductive justice”. It has donated $1.6 million this year to programs in the US and overseas promoting LGBT causes.

The Ford Foundation’s president is Darren Walker, who oversees what the Foundation describes as “an international social justice philanthropy with a $13 billion endowment and $600 million in annual grant making.” That’s huge. Walker is also a board member of the Arcus Foundation, which, according to Catholic News Agency:

Since CNA’s February 2015 report on a multi-million dollar campaign against religious freedom protections, the Arcus Foundation has given an additional $2.8 million in grants earmarked for projects aimed at restricting legal protections for religious freedom, especially religious and conscience exemptions in state and federal law.

Among its recent donations is an ACLU grant designed to “beat back” laws protecting freedom of religion and freedom of conscience.

In fact, a CNA examination of grant listings and other documents has shown that the Arcus Foundation has funded a variety of coordinated projects, focused on limiting religious freedom, redefining religious liberty, and perhaps even shaping religious doctrine itself.

That 2015 report, by the way, revealed that the Ford Foundation has given at least $800,000 to fight against religious liberty protections. (Ford stopped giving LGBT-related grants in 2016, on the grounds that that LGBT rights activism was well funded, and its money could be better spent elsewhere.)

In 2016, Larissa MacFarquhar did a long piece in The New Yorker about the Ford Foundation and Darren Walker. It’s a really interesting piece, talking about how philanthropy at the highest stage works. Walker, a gay black man born into south Louisiana poverty, is a truly fascinating figure. If you don’t know much about the Ford Foundation, you really should read the piece. It has been a “social justice” foundation from the word go. It was started by big stock donations from the Ford Motor Company family. The NYer piece quotes an early 1970s interview with Henry Ford II, talking about how one of his greatest regrets in life was losing control of the family foundation, which subsequently went far to the political and social left. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Gates Foundation are development foundations, but Ford puts all its money into so-called “social justice” causes.

It should not be surprising that the interests of the Ford Foundation and the interests of the Catholic Church intersect at some points. In principle, I see no obvious conflict between the Catholic Church in Brazil’s desire to protect indigenous Amazon peoples, and the Ford Foundation’s desire to do the same thing. Does that make it okay for the Catholic Church to take the Ford Foundation’s money?

Churches — Catholic and otherwise — take money from donors who are not always saints. The Bolsheviks destroyed many Orthodox churches in Russia, which are being rebuilt in some cases with donations from Russian oligarchs. Many of the treasured religious buildings of Europe were constructed with money from Catholic and Protestant oligarchs of their own day.

My spidey sense pricks up too when I see the Ford Foundation’s involvement in anything to do with the Christian church, given how much Ford opposes anything to do with orthodox Christianity. The Ford Foundation, from an orthodox Christian perspective, is bad news. They are Social Justice Warriors with $600 million to donate each year. Edward Pentin’s question was justified.

But if we’re going to talk about whether or not a church can take the devil’s money to do God’s work — and that is an important conversation to have! — well, that’s a conversation that goes far beyond Ford and the Amazon.

 

 

 

 

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President Supervillain Comics

My new favorite Twitter account: President Supervillain (@presvillain), where they take actual Trump quotes and pairs them with comic drawings that already exist. More from the Trump letter to Erdogan:

DON'T BE A TOUGH GUY! DON'T BE A FOOL!!!#PresidentSupervillain pic.twitter.com/SdiwwKJfty

— Pres. Supervillain (@PresVillain) October 17, 2019

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I WILL CALL YOU LATER! pic.twitter.com/4yxTLbE1yZ

— Pres. Supervillain (@PresVillain) October 17, 2019

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