Rod Dreher's Blog, page 204

The Ballad Of Flyover Man

David Brooks is an original Never Trumper, but in his new column, he imagines a conversation between “Urban Guy” and “Flyover Man” who is sticking with Trump. He’s onto something for sure. In this excerpt, Flyover Man has just accused people like him of caring more about Trump than about dealing with the serious problems that brought Trump to power in the first place:

U.G.: We became Trump-O-Centric because his daily outrages undermine norms, spread xenophobia, degrade public morality.

F.M.: You think that because you have the kind of jobs that allow you to follow Twitter all day. I don’t have that luxury. So all that passing nonsense seems far away. I have to deal with the actual realities of life.

One, mass immigration is changing my town, region and state. Two, the cultural liberalism you preach but don’t practice is leading to the breakdown of families up and down my block. Children out of wedlock. Young men with no dad when they’re young and no wife in their life when they’re grown. Third, an Ivy League elite running government and the economy for itself and shutting out those of us who actually make things with our hands. Fourth, China is replacing us.

U.G.: I’m happy to talk about these big problems.

F.M.: Like hell you are. The media fixates on scandals because they’re easier to talk about than complex issues like why urban and rural America are drifting further apart. You wasted billions of hours speculating about the Mueller report, and now news about Adam Schiff overshadows everything else while my world burns. Let’s face it: Bashing Trump is the media’s business model. That’s what drives eyeballs and profit.

U.G.: We can’t have a productive conversation with Trump around. He lies with abandon. He slanders and insults. He pollutes the water near and far.

F.M.: We can’t have productive conversations if every time I open my mouth you call me a bigot. You may not realize this, but you have Trump supporters around you all the time. It’s just that we’ve learned to keep our mouths shut in your presence. The crushing climate of blue cultural privilege is too strangulating.

Read it all. 

Or better yet, read the entire book about Flyover Men (and Women): Chris Arnade’s Dignity. It’s not an imagined conversation. Arnade spent five years interviewing actual Flyover People — including black ones and brown ones — and hearing the same kinds of things that Brooks imagines. It’s real. And Arnade is a leftist! But he understands that class and culture are the real dividers here.

Along these lines, here is a version of an e-mail I received from a reader yesterday. I had published a portion of an earlier e-mail from him on the Trump’s Big Mouth post; he wrote further to clarify his views. I edited it to protect his mother’s privacy, but otherwise, this is what he wrote. He has approved this version for publication.

The reader writes:

I don’t support Trump. I did not vote for him in 2016; like you, I was fairly appalled at the choices. I’m not sure I can bring myself to vote for him in 2020. If things keep getting worse, then maybe, but not yet. But, also like you, I am quite familiar with those that support Trump, and my email was an attempt to see things their way.

I’ll share some personal details that provide context for my previous letter. My parents have been devout Catholics my entire life; dad is a white man raised in the rural South. My mom is a first-generation Asian immigrant, a war refugee. Guess which one is a die-hard Trump supporter? Spoiler: the first-generation Asian immigrant. I don’t fully understand it, and because I never learned her language, there is a language barrier between us, keeping her from fully articulating her reasons to me. But I think I could sum it up as, she hates, and I mean detests, what the liberals stand for, and hates almost as much what the Republican response pre-Trump has been, because they weren’t standing up for the things they said, and she believes, are of immense and sometimes literally eternal importance. She sent three sons, including myself, off to Iraq. She took war protests personally. When there is an “evil regime”, it takes on a different meaning for her than it does for us. We see its existence in the abstract: pros and cons of toppling it, what can be gained, what is realistic, what the cost will be. She sees it viscerally, because such a regime literally uprooted her young life, took everything her family had, and forced them to flee across the ocean. In her mind, her sons were risking their lives to make sure that what happened to her once would not happen again. She’s not a deep political thinker or what you’d consider an intellectual–but she sees our current situation for what it is: those who love the country for its ideals, and those that seek to destroy it for its flaws.

She learned English while cleaning floors and toilets at a nearby university. She took on every odd job she could. She was always working, even though, as my dad grew more successful, she didn’t have to. She taught herself accounting, and even though the highest academic credential she ever earned was an associate’s degree in bookkeeping, she was so good at what she did that employers begged her to stay with them and let her work a flexible schedule so she could raise us, her four sons. I remember being picked up at school every day and brought to a seedy bar where she did the bookkeeping (it could have been the inspiration for Moe’s bar in The Simpsons). The bartender would give me a little dish of jalapenos; the regulars thought it was funny a little kid liked such a thing. She didn’t have to go back to work after picking us up, but that was her work ethic. She wanted to make the most of her American opportunity. She started her own business, and has become one of the most successful in her line of work, in her region. Clients love her. She is proud of her accomplishments, and in my opinion, she absolutely should be. It means something to her that she was given an opportunity. Not a guarantee–an opportunity, and believe me, she recognizes the difference. And she made good on it. She’s a hustler, in the good “attaboy, hustle!” sense of the word.

In her business dealings, she interacts with many immigrants, some of them illegal. They go to ‘underground’ classes–not kidding, actual classes–on how to game the system, what to claim to maximize tax refunds when they’ve paid nothing in. A lot of folks in her line of work will gladly help these immigrants cheat the system, as long as they have plausible deniability. My mom kicks them out. Now why would one immigrant not help another?

I don’t want to put words in my mom’s mouth, but I believe it is because she sees “American” not as a race or birthplace, but as a symbol for something bigger, a way of being. To her, your nation of origin or skin color doesn’t matter one bit. That doesn’t make you American, or not. To her, there’s the American way of doing things–God and Country, work hard, claw your way up, defend freedom–and the non-American way. To her, the non-American way is to treat certain groups better than you treat others. Discriminate (and she couldn’t care less whether you claim it is for a ‘good cause’). Lie down, don’t work hard, blame someone else. Expect a handout. I’m not even saying I agree with all of this, but here this person exists.

When Trump came along, I was extremely surprised to find her as one of his biggest supporters. Here was someone that spoke to her, an immigrant. He spoke directly and simply. He didn’t use weasel words and phrases or artfully dodge thorny subjects like the rest of the GOP field. She saw what liberals were doing and saying to and about people like her: on the one hand, a conservative Christian mother. On the other hand, an immigrant. And she knew in both cases they were lying. Of the two categorizations I gave, the former (conservative, Christian, mother) is by far more important to her. Donald Trump didn’t attack her for holding conservative views, or call her a racist (which, ironically, lefties would) for having them. He didn’t try to silence her expressions of faith, or promote the celebration of abortion. He didn’t shame her for being a mother and undoubtedly sacrificing so much for four rambunctious boys. And he didn’t try to be politically coy on the matter, either. He bluntly spoke up against the Democrats, and like him or loathe him he called them on a lot of their bullshit. And my mom saw that as someone speaking up for her.

I can’t tell you how many times people have said to my mom, “You’re an immigrant! How can you support Trump?!” But my mom cares for borders because she knows what happens when they fall. She cares for equal opportunity, because she knows you can leverage that to rise above a mediocre handout. She cares for fairness regardless of your identity group because that ensures she’ll have opportunity. Like I said at the beginning, I am not a fan of Trump. The man has serious flaws. I couldn’t even hold my nose and vote for him, knowing full well that from an ‘existential threat’ perspective the DNC is far more dangerous. But he offered my mom a choice no one else in the GOP field did.

What surprises me more than anything in all of this is that, though you would never guess it by looking at her, my mom fits the mold of Hillary’s “deplorable” or Obama’s “clinging to guns and religion” better than your reddest Southern redneck ever could. She has her own serious flaws, but she is not alone: an immigrant, brown, die-hard Trump supporter. They’re out there, but you’re unlikely to see them because the media doesn’t want you to. That would cut against ‘the Narrative’.

And that’s why I wrote, as you said, “in defense of Trump”. That’s what I meant by not playing by the rules of a rigged game and calling the emperor naked. Not to defend the man, but to understand people I respect and love and care about.

You said that if this is an existential fight, then the country is already a thing of the past. Do you really think it otherwise? I’m asking honestly, not critically. I would wager that you already know, deep down, that it’s over, and that this is in part why you wrote the Benedict Option to begin with (incidentally, it is one of my favorite books and I’ve given or coerced friends into reading at least 10 copies). What possible scenario would you have to believe in to think otherwise? Maybe people will get fed up with certain elements of the progressive culture–the shouting down or deplatforming “cancel culture”, for instance–but there is some toothpaste you’re never getting back in the tube. Traditional marriage, an end to abortion, the religious ‘enchantment’ of the world that for so long provided deeper meaning than mere self-identification. Good luck getting our culture to re-embrace those. There will be perverse bizarro-world simulacrums that will rise to take their place (isn’t that what the Antichrist is a metaphor for?), sure. But those ships have sailed. And if you really do believe that these things are fundamental to a functioning society, then the conclusion is self-evident. If these things really matter, and the things happening to these things are really happening, then if this isn’t existential on both sides, what is?

The sense of frustration as we watch Trump do whatever crazy thing he’s doing, and the Democrats respond in an equally crazy manner, with the insane media gleefully spinning it all, comes from a place of powerlessness. These big forces are beyond our control, and all we can do is wring our hands and write about it. Trump (and again, you now know my position on him) is in some ways a rational response to a powerful system completely and utterly out of control: blow it up, because the consequences from the blast will be at worst equal to the consequences of not blowing it up (after all, to borrow from Keynes, in the long run this culture is going to kill us anyway). And who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and end up with something better. I’ve had to ask myself honestly: in a world where Trump wasn’t elected and the system kept on churning down its former path, do we really end up anywhere different?

I’ll close by thanking you for the Benedict Option. I really do get frustrated by the decisions being made across the country from where I live, that seem to eat away at all I hold dear for both myself and my family. BenOp is a message of hope, something tangible I can do, even if only in a small way. Something is better than nothing. I want to cling to that, and not the latest news cycle. Regardless of what you think of my rantings here, I am grateful for that.

I am so grateful for this letter. You never see people like this reader’s Asian mother in the media. She sounds a lot like my late father, who died before the 2016 election, but who would have voted for Trump for the same reasons.

I also appreciate this reader’s challenge to me on the Benedict Option and the future of the country. He asks, “In a world where Trump wasn’t elected and the system kept on churning down its former path, do we really end up anywhere different?” No, I really don’t think so. Trump was inevitable. If it hadn’t been Donald Trump, it would have been someone else. The establishment has been driving this country into a ditch. It would be great if Trump were actually a competent politician who could get things done. Is the alternative a competent Democrat who wants to host federally-funded Drag Queen Story Hour at abortion clinics, and fire people for not being au courant with whatever the pronoun of the week is? Then vote for the crook; it’s important.

This is why I don’t know that I would support impeachment even if Trump is guilty of impeachable offenses. Maybe I would. I don’t know. I think he’s bad news. But I don’t know that he’s the worst news. We’ll see.

The reader’s e-mail got me to thinking, though, about, in his words, “what possible scenario” I can come up with that causes me to believe that the America we knew is not “a thing of the past.” That it can be recovered in some way. The truth is, I really don’t see that happening. If I did, I wouldn’t have written The Benedict Option.

It is true that I wrote it in the expectation of a Hillary Clinton victory, and had to revise at the last minute. But I don’t think Trump fundamentally changed the course of the country, in the ways that matter most to my critique. We are losing our Christianity, and with it a way of understanding what human beings are. You cannot vote that back into existence. I wish you could! For traditional Christians, the best reason to have voted for Trump is that he stood a chance of slowing down the inevitable, with his policies and court appointments. The best reason to vote for him in 2020 is the same.

To be clear: I don’t believe that we are going to pull out of this decline-and-fall trajectory.

So why do I resist going full Flyover Man regarding Trump?

There are several reasons.

First, I could be wrong. The system might be more resilient than I think. I believe, with John Adams, that our Constitution cannot survive the decline of religion and morality among the people. Maybe it can, though, or maybe religion and morality will reappear.

Second, if I’m right, then for as long as the Republic lasts, the First Amendment (and a judiciary willing to interpret it traditionally) is the only thing that will protect minorities like me. This is what David French gets that Sohrab Ahmari doesn’t. Ahmari wants to fight, but it is not at all clear that he can muster enough people to fight for the things that matter most to him (and to me). We can’t agree on the common good. And if we get politicians favorable to us into power, the good they can do is limited by the nature of their office. As Viktor Orban has said, a politician can only give you things; he cannot give you . meaning. Anyway, if the system falls, then what will protect unpopular minorities — as traditional Christians will surely be in much of the country.

Finally, and most importantly, conservatives must, by definition, be suspicious of radical change. You can’t have read modern history without being acutely aware of how much worse things can be after a revolution. For all the problems of tsarist Russia, what followed it was infinitely more savage. The US establishment is failing? I’ll buy that. But what are we going to replace it with?

Trump’s brash behavior invites contempt for the system. You don’t have to convince me that the failures of the system prior to Trump — I’m thinking mostly of the Iraq War, and the financial crash — invited far more contempt for the system. (By the way, here’s a fun fact: consumer debt is now greater than it was just before the 2008 crash.) This, as we know, is how we got Trump. We have never known any other governing system in the United States than the one we have now. My fear is that allowing Trump’s flagrant abuses to go unpunished is going to bring the entire thing crashing down. I think lots of people might like that. They have not thought of the alternative. It could get very, very bad. We take stability for granted in the United States. We shouldn’t.

I wrote The Benedict Option not as a guidebook for what Christians should do if the system collapses — as the Roman Empire in the West did — but for what to do if Christianity itself collapses. This is what is happening in the West today. For believing Christians, the collapse is well underway, though many of us don’t see it because it hasn’t reached us yet, or because we are still living in a prosperous society, or because we just flat-out don’t want to see it. Reality is not going to wait for our permission to assert itself. The Ben Op is a project not for political collapse, but for religious collapse — which, as modern Europe shows, can happen amidst peace and prosperity.

Politics, as the saying goes, really is downstream from culture. A culture that has ditched its Christian morality is one that will not be able to sustain liberal democratic norms in the long run. The British historian Tom Holland writes about how his work studying the ancient world made him realize that even though he does not believe in God, his morals and ethics are “proudly Christian” — this, because of the cruelties of the Greco-Roman world, which came to an end (or at least diminished) as those civilizations Christianized. Our de-Christianization will occasion a re-barbarization. My despair is such that voting these days has to do with whether we want to fast-track it, or slow it down. If that’s the choice, I’ll go for the slow route, and hope that something unforeseen happens to change history.

The question is: is Trump an accelerant, or will he slow things down? Or can he be both?

From the reader’s letter:

…blow it up, because the consequences from the blast will be at worst equal to the consequences of not blowing it up…

As a conservative, I can’t accept that. Again, history demonstrates that it could always be much worse. But I get why people who have been left behind, and who feel dispossessed in their own country, would come to think this.

Anyway, some solemn thoughts for you to ponder.

Readers, I will be traveling for most of today to Miami. I will be speaking on Saturday late morning (10:30am) at the OCA Cathedral in Miami Lakes. Get your tickets here. I’ll be back to approve comments as soon as I get settled in my Miami hotel on Friday afternoon.

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Eric Zemmour’s Blockbuster Speech

Eric Zemmour, an Algerian-born French Jew, is a best-selling author and the most popular figure on the French Right. He delivered the keynote address at Marion Maréchal’s big Convention Of The Right in Paris last weekend (TAC’s Scott McConnell reported on it here). Zemmour is an extremely controversial figure in France. A French-speaking reader writes to say that after delivering his speech on Saturday

Zemmour is now facing multiple lawsuits from anti-racist groups, has been roundly condemned in a petition by a French journalists’ association and has had media appearances and contracts cancelled. If nothing else, [the speech] should inform you as to the mood in France, at least among a rather large faction of the right.

The reader translated the speech into English for this blog, though he asks that I not identify him, as it could hurt him professionally to be associated with Zemmour in any way. I am publishing the speech below not because I endorse it, but as an important political document for American readers to understand what’s happening in France now.

Below, the speech by Eric Zemmour, delivered in Paris on September 28:

“Hello. Ah, I see there are quite a few of you! I… I didn’t expect that. I had been warned but didn’t believe it. All these people who come when you talk about a convention of the right, a union of the right, of bringing together all forces of the right, of a popular and – who knows? – even populist gathering, of an alliance between the Rassemblement National [ex-National Front] and the Républicains [center right], of a gathering bringing together populists and the dissidents of France Insoumise [far left]. So many impossible, forbidden words. I’ve been told that people love their illusions but I didn’t think it was to this point.

But, really, where do you think you are? In the United States? In Hungary? In Poland? In Italy? In Austria? Do you really believe you’re going to avoid Marine [Le Pen]-Macron in the second round [of voting in the 2022 presidential election] and the reelection of Macron? You’re not serious, not reasonable, you can’t really believe it, can you? I know that Joseph de Maistre said that the French people were the easiest to deceive, the hardest to set right, the best at deceiving others, but even so! It’s settled, it’s done, you came for nothing. Move along, nothing to see here! You know that you’re in France, don’t you, and that the French right is the world’s most stupid. We’re the country of human rights and the world’s most stupid right. They go together.

No, you really aren’t very reasonable. And I’ve read over the theme of this Convention: “How to find an alternative to progressivism?” But how and why would you seek an alternative to progressivism? Don’t you hear that the word progress in this pleasant term? Have you given a thought to our peasant ancestors dying from hunger or to Louis XIV as he was tortured by Molière’s doctors?

No, you are not serious, not reasonable. There’s nothing more important to our era than progress, it’s our great religion. Better than Jesus Christ or Moses. And do you realize it’s been two centuries? How can you refuse the outstretched hand of progress? How can you not praise the magnificent industrial revolution that paved the way for the slaughter of Verdun? How can you not praise the science that gave us the atomic bomb? How can you not go into raptures over the sublime French Revolution, which gave us the Terror, and the bright future of communism, which gave us the gulag? Come on, really, how can you not be progressive?

It must be admitted we long hesitated. And there was ample reason. Alongside these massacres, so very progressive, there were also antibiotics, penicillin, social security and cortisone shots for your voice.

But in the last few decades, the least hesitation has become impossible. Progressivism can no longer be debated. The reign of the free individual has brought down ancient prejudices and the old barriers between humans. The patriarchy is dead and women are freed from thousands of years of oppression. The slaves have been released from their shackles, Caroline de Haas [feminist activist] and Rokhaya Diallo [anti-racist activist] are queens of the world. It’s a far cry from Bonaparte and Victor Hugo.

Happy globalization has freed hundreds of millions of Chinese and Africans from misery. Too bad if it has plunged tens of thousands of Westerners into poverty and unemployment. Everyone gets their turn. After all, white workers profited from colonization and unequal trade. It’s only justice that they pay for it now.

The beauties of the most recent progress leave me each day more astounded. How can you resist the charm of this wind of freedom now blowing across France and the West? How can you not approve all these laws that punish thought and speech since one is much freer when one thinks correctly and silences bad thoughts?

How can you not be happier when you see these very hairy men finally admit their true nature as women, when you see these women who no longer need the disgusting contact of men to make babies, when you see these mothers who no longer need to give birth to be mothers? As the wonderful Agnès Buzyn [French government Minister of Solidarity and Health] puts it, “a woman can be a father”.

How can you not be swept away by the brilliant exam results of these countless high school graduate piling up year after year? How can you resist the heady charm of this inclusive language, with all its little points resembling the toy trains of our childhood? How can you not appreciate the verbal ingenuity of our masters: “femicide”, “gender prejudice”, “intersectional struggle”, “racialized woman”? This magnificent jargon that only squares refuse to adopt.

How can you not be dazzled by the elegant clothing of our favorite minister, Sibeth N’Diaye [French government spokeswoman], the height of French refinement? How can you not swoon before the beauty of contemporary art, its beauty consigning all the great painters of the past to the dustbin of history? And how can you not go into raptures over the oh-so-elegant prose of Christine Angot [French novelist], which makes Voltaire and Stendahl look like obscure hacks?

Yes, and that’s without mentioning the genius of our architects, next to whom a Gabriel or Lebrun is no more than an academic drudge?

* * *

No, you really aren’t very reasonable. But since I’m already here and there are so many of you, I may as well try to help you out.

To find an alternative to progressivism, you first have to define it. Or at least that’s how they used to teach us how to go about things. So I’ll offer you a definition: Progressivism: the religion of progress, a form of millenarianism that makes a god of the individual and a sacred and divine right of even his most capricious desires.

Progressivism is a form of deified materialism that sees men as undifferentiated and interchangeable beings without sex or origin, beings that, like so many Legos, have been entirely constructed and may thus be deconstructed at will.

Progressivism is a form of secularized messianism, as were Jacobinism, communism, fascism, Nazism, neoliberalism and the ideology of human rights.

Progressivism is a revolution. Indeed, you may recall that our dear President titled his campaign book, Révolution. A revolution that can tolerate no obstacle, no delay, no qualms. Robespierre taught us that the wicked must be killed. For Lenin and Stalin. the good were to be killed, too.

The progressive society that values freedom is deadly to freedom. There is no freedom for the enemies of freedom. Saint-Just’s cry is still on the agenda. Since the Enlightenment, since the French Revolution, since the October Revolution and all the way up to the Third Republic and its radical freemasons, all the way till today, it’s always been the same progressivism: freedom is for them, not for the others. They alone can appreciate and exercise freedom. They alone are worthy of freedom.

We believe we’ve escaped this deadly spiral when in fact we’ve reentered it. This is because our dictatorship clothes itself in unfamiliar garb and our masters have had the cleverness to retain the forms of democracy so as to all the better empty them from the inside.

To serve this tyrannical power and impose its diversitarian ideology upon us, as my friend BockCôté aptly calls it, a system of propaganda has been created that brings together television, radio, film and advertising, to say nothing of the watchdogs of the internet. It has proven so effective that it makes Goebbels look like a humble artisan and Stalin a timid novice.

Progressivism is the omnipresence of so-called free speech served by a technology with a historically unprecedented power of diffusion but which at the same time, as they like to say, doubles as an ever more sophisticated repressive apparatus to channel and censor [that speech]. On the one hand, the liberals and the market have opened up our country to the high winds of globalized free trade, pulling down borders and corner stores, transforming those who were once citizens into individualistic and quasi-hysterical consumers subject to the edicts of advertising agencies and large corporations.

On the other hand, the far left has swapped Marxism and its holy bible of class struggle for the saintly cause of minorities, whether sexual or ethnic, and replaced the street and the barricades with the courts.

Conditioned by the left’s propaganda starting at the School of Magistrates, judges have become the conduits and often the accomplices of various associations, serving as their enforcers to bully dissidents and terrorize the once silent, now paralyzed, majority.

* * *

All those who felt cramped in the old society governed by Catholicism and the common law, all those before whom the gleaming promise of liberation was dangled and who legitimately believed it – women, young people, homosexuals, the dark-skinned, Jews, Protestants, atheists – all those who felt themselves to be a despised minority within the heterosexual white male Catholic majority and who joyously tore down the statue to the staccato rhythm of Mick Jagger’s swaying hips, they were all the useful idiots of a war of extermination against the heterosexual white male.

Not a women’s liberation movement. Not a fight for equality between men and women. Not even a drive to bring down all men as universal revenge for the patriarchy. None of that. The heterosexual white male Catholic was the only enemy to be destroyed.

He is the only one made to carry the weight of the mortal sin of colonization, of slavery, of

pedophilia, of capitalism, of destroying the planet, the only one forbidden what since the dawn of time have been the most natural masculine behaviors, the only one from whom the role of father has been torn, the only one who is turned, at best, into a second mother, at worst, into a gamete, the only one accused of domestic violence, the only one to get #metooed [le seul qu’on balance comme un porc].

A Bernard Pivot [French journalist and chairman of the Académie Goncourt] is held up to public obloquy because he mentions that he was enamored of pretty Swedish girls in his youth and all is forgiven the rapper who insults and calls for raping, even murdering white women.

I suggest you read the prose of indigenists, of racialized women, of intersectional struggles that blight our colleges after having corrupted the greatest American universities. What do they say? That they are above all black or Arab or Muslim. That they belong to their race – yes, yes, they have the right to use the word – to their religion – Islam – to their country or in any case that of their parents. That they could not care less about solidarity with women who are for them primarily French women, bourgeois women and above all white women. That their men are as they are, with their flaws, their huge gender prejudices and even their violence. But that they’re that way, not because they are men, but because they had been dominated and enslaved by the white male. That their only enemy is the white male.

And that they need their men to destroy him.

These women have understood how the balance of power has changed. The heterosexual white male Catholic is not attacked because he is too strong but because he is too weak, not because he is not tolerant enough but because he is too tolerant. It was the weak and humanist Louis XVI that lost his head in the guillotine, not the inflexible and powerful Louis XIV.

One must thus go for the kill, put down the wounded beast. Cioran had warned us: “As long as a nation is aware of its superiority, it is fierce and respected. As soon as it no longer is, it becomes more human and no longer matters.”

As long as white feminists continue to join them in this single combat against the heterosexual white male, they are welcome. The same goes for homosexual, LGBTQ and other XYZ movements. As soon as the latter are no longer content with confining themselves to this one fight to the death between races and civilizations, they once again become, like Cinderella’s stagecoach once again becoming a pumpkin, dirty white middle-class women.

What an excellent, incredible success! Our progressives – so brilliant, so arrogant, so keen on the future and as interested in the past as they are in their last iPhone – who thought they had moved beyond the archaic stage of the war of nations and of classes, have brought back the war of races and of religions. They have brought the future back to Charlemagne and the 1683 siege of Vienna, they have brought the future back to the quest for fire.

We are thus trapped between the anvil and hammer of two universalisms that crush our nations, our peoples, our territories, our traditions, our ways of life, our cultures: on the one hand, the market universalism that, in the name of human rights, enslaves our brains to turn them into deracinated zombies; on the other, the Islamic universalism that very cleverly takes advantage of our religion of human rights to protect its operation to occupy and colonize portions of French territory, which it is gradually transforming, by the sheer force of numbers and religious law, into foreign enclaves, into what the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who saw the Islamists in Algeria operate in this way in the 1980s, calls “Islamic Republics in the making”.

Human rights universalism prevents us from defending ourselves in the name of a short-sighted individualism that does not see that it is not individuals who are in question but rather great masses of people, that it is civilizations that are confronting one another on our soil in a thousand year struggle, not individuals who rub shoulders in the short lapse of their lifetimes. These so-called liberals have forgotten the lesson of one of their most famous masters, Benjamin Constant, who said: “Everything is moral for individuals but for the masses everything is physical. Every individual is free as an individual since he or she has only to deal with himself or with forces that are no greater than his own. But as a member of a group, the individual is no longer free.”

These two universalisms are at once rivals and accomplices. The market can adapt to anything as long as there’s a profit to be had from it. It has put men at the head of the state to use its monopoly of legitimate violence as an enforcer. Thus, the French state, which was the benevolent genius of French populations, which protected them from feudal lords and foreign predators, which made this people assembled on the land between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic the great nation feared throughout Europe and the entire world, became, by an astonishing reversal, the arm of the nation’s destruction and the enslavement of its people, of that people’s replacement by another people, another civilization.

These two universalisms, these two globalizations, are two totalitarianisms. Since our great progressive consciences, since our media and even our President of the Republic himself so love the 1930s, I’ll give them some 1930s. I’ll make a comparison with that time.

We live under the reign of a new Hitler-Stalin Pact. Our two totalitarianisms have allied to destroy us before tearing each other to pieces. This is their shared objective, their Holy Grail. To the liberal human-rights crowd go the cities. To Islam goes the suburbs [les banlieus]. For now, the one group provides the other with domestics: pizza delivery, taxis, nannies, restaurant kitchens and drugs. With their media and judicial power, the others protect their domestics against the muted abhorrence of the French people they both loathe – one group because they are French and not American, the other because they are Catholic by culture, not Muslim.

In recent years, many clever people have compared the European Union to the defunct Soviet Union and the monetary weaponry of the ECB to the Warsaw Pact tanks launched in service of the Brezhnev Doctrine of limited sovereignty. In Italy, in England, we presently see the unusual effectiveness with which parliaments and judges are fighting the people’s will. Law and so-called constitutional procedures against the freedom of peoples. We have fully returned to those regimes that, in their turn, also claimed to be people’s democracies.

As for Islam, we have an embarrassment of riches. In the 1930s, the clearest-eyed authors who denounced the German threat compared Nazism to Islam. Yes, Islam they said, and no one complained that they were stigmatizing Islam. At most, many found that they went a bit far. Of course, they said, Nazism is sometimes a little stiff and intolerant but from there to compare it to Islam…

A few years later, in the postwar years, another totalitarian threat – communism – appeared on the horizon. And the same comparison came back into style. Maxime Rodinson, one of the greatest specialists of Islam, said: “It’s a form of communism with God.” Always this same comparison, this same obsession, some will say.

Yes, I know, I will be accused of Islamophobia, I’m used to it. We all know that this hazy concept of Islamophobia was invented to make it impossible to criticize Islam, to reestablish the notion of blasphemy to the benefit of the Muslim religion alone. A notion of blasphemy that was abolished, I remind you, in 1789. But the progressives who regard the Revolution as sacred don’t see the least contradiction and are ready chuck one of its victories to protect their dear Islam.

* * *

What our progressives are incapable of understanding is that the future is not governed by economic curves but by demographic ones. The latter are relentless.

Africa, which was an empty land of 100 million inhabitants in 1900, will be overflowing with 2 billion and more by 2050. Europe, which was a land full of 400 million inhabitants – four times more – has only risen to 500 million – one for four. The relationship has been precisely inverted.

At the time, the demographic dynamism of our continent allowed whites to colonize the world. They exterminated the Indians and the Aborigines, enslaved the Africans. Today, we are experiencing a demographic inversion that is resulting in an inversion of migratory flows, leading to an inversion of colonization. I will leave it to you to guess who will be their Indians and their slaves. It’s you.

Each demographic wave comes equipped with its own ideological flag. Eighteenth-century France – it was called the China of Europe at the time – conquered the continent with human rights. Victorian England of the nineteenth century and its nine children per family justified its imperialism in terms of the racial superiority of the WASP. The Germans of the late nineteenth century invented the already racialist pan-Germanism and then Nazism to justify their drive for living space in the East.

This time, Africa’s demographic vitality has a ready-made flag: Islam. Already the flag of the East against ancient Greece and Christianity, Islam has been put back to work. Oh, it has not changed since the Middle Ages, it is ready to be used to conquer us with our human rights and dominate us with its sharia, as the preacher al-Qaradawi said.

* * *

“We have today reached the time of consequences and the irreparable,” said Drieu la Rochelle in the 1930s. In France as elsewhere in Europe, all our problems are worsened – I do not say “created” but “worsened” – by immigration: education, housing, unemployment, social welfare deficits, public debt, law and order, prisons, professional training, hospital emergency rooms, drugs. And all our problems worsened by immigration are worsened by Islam. It’s double jeopardy.

All economists sagely tell us that the economy is primarily a question of trust. Yet the great American sociologist Robert Putnam has shown that, the less a society is ethnically and culturally homogenous, the less trust there is between people. But they continue to drum it into us that immigration is an asset. Spot the mistake.

The that arises for us is thus as follows: will young French people be willing to live as a minority on the land of their ancestors? If so, they deserve to be colonized. If not, they will have to fight for their liberation. But how to fight? Where to fight? Against what to fight?

To fight as some have done for years, bravely, using the old words of the Republic – secularism, integration, republican order? Unfortunately, these words no longer mean anything. Immigration, integration, delinquency, uncivil behavior, harmonious cohabitation and even assimilation, Republic, republican values, the rule of law – none of that means anything anymore. Everything has been overturned, perverted, emptied of meaning.

Old socialists like Jaurès or Blum would not recognize what we today call the Republic. All those who still cling to this old republican language are as old-fashioned as Charles X when, at the dawn of his reign, he wanted to reestablish the coronation of bygone times after the fashion of his absolute monarch ancestors. It was ridiculous because the Revolution and the Empire had swept all away in the meantime.

Contemporary ideological debates are like today’s songs: covers of hits from the eighties. Secularism or freedom, integration or assimilation, the right to asylum, openness or closure… they no longer suit our time. These questions, these debates are out-of-date, outmoded, obsolete. Dead questions that still wander like the dead souls of Gogol.

Formerly, immigration meant coming from a foreign country to give one’s children a French future. Today, immigrants come to France to continue living as in their country of origin. They keep their history, their heroes, their mores, their first names, their wives they have brought from over there, their laws that they impose whether they like it or not on native stock French people, who must submit or go elsewhere – that is, live under the domination of Islamic mores and halal or flee.

They thus behave as if they are in conquered territory, like the Pieds-noirs behaved in Algeria or the English in India: they behave like colonizers. The gangsters and their gangs ally themselves with the imam to bring order to enforce order in the street and in people’s minds in keeping with the old alliance between the sword and the mitre or, in this instance, the Kalashnikov and the jellaba. There is a line running from the rapes, thefts and trafficking to the attacks of 2015 and the countless knife attacks in the streets of France. It is the same ones who commit them, who seamlessly pass from one to the next to punish the kafirs, the infidels. It is jihad everywhere and jihad for all, by all.

For thirty years, all of our ministers of the interior have boasted of fighting drug-traffickers in the suburbs and claimed to reestablish republican order. They do not understand that, in order to restore republican order in the neighborhoods, you first have to bring France back to these foreign enclaves.

In the street, veiled women and men wearing jellabas are de facto propaganda, an Islamization of the street, just as an army of occupation’s uniforms remind the defeated of their submission. For the bygone triptych of “immigration, integration, assimilation” has been substituted “invasion, colonization, occupation”.

* * *

I like Renaud Camus’ way of putting it: “one must choose between living and together” [a play on words on the slogan “vivre ensemble”]. The question today is thus that of the people. The people can remake a nation. The French people against the universalisms, whether market or Islamic. The French people against the cosmopolitan citizens of the world who feel closer to the inhabitants of New York or London than to their compatriots in Montélimar or Béziers and the French people against the Islamic universalism that is transforming Bobigny, Roubaix and Marseille into so many Islamic Republics and which waves the Algerian or Palestinian flags when its football team wins – I mean the team it loves, the team of their parents’ country, not the team of their ID or health insurance card.

We need to put everything back on its feet.

We need to free ourselves from the religion of human rights since it has forgotten that it is also meant for citizens. In his Histoire des Girondins, Larmartine wrote: “When principles are in contradiction with society’s survival then the principles are false, for society is the supreme truth.”

We must free ourselves from the powers of our masters: media, universities, judges. We must restore democracy, which is the power of the people against liberal democracy, which, in the name of the rule of law, is now used to impede the will of the people.

We must abolish the laws that kill freedom and that, in the name of non-discrimination, make us strangers in our own land.

We must to the contrary everywhere restore to its proper place the principle of national preference, which is nothing other than the foundation of a nation which has no reason to exist unless it favors its own to the detriment of others.

We must accept our conception of ecology, an ecology that first defends the beauty of our

countryside, of our sites, of our art de vivre, of our culture, of our civilization.

We must of course be conservative and conserve our identity but what can we conserve since everything has been destroyed? Our task is more immense, nearly hopeless: we must restore.

I do not say that the question of identity is the only question that arises for us. I do not say that the economy does not exist, that deindustrialization does not exist, that scraping together enough money to get through the month does not exist, that poverty in retirement does not exist, that labor law does not exist, that outsourcing does not exist, that the constraints and shortcomings of the Euro do not exist.

I only claim that the question of the French people’s identity precedes them all, that it preexists them all, even that of sovereignty. It’s a question of life or death. A French Islamic Republic might be sovereign but in what way would it be French?

This question of identity is also the most unifying for it joins the working and middle classes and even that portion of the bourgeoisie that remains attached to its country. Yes, it brings together all currents of the right and even that part of the left that continues to have ties with the French people – all of them except the internationalist left and the globalist right, which have already joined ranks with the Macronist progressives and for whom France no longer exists and for whom all that matters are the cities of the world where the banks that manage their money are located.

We must understand that the question of the French people is existential while the others are means of subsistence. Will young French people be a majority in the land of their ancestors? I repeat this question for never has it been so sharply posed. In the past, France was threatened with being broken up, with what was called Polonization in reference to the partition of Poland. It was occupied, ransomed, enslaved but its people were never threatened with being replaced on their own soil.

* * *

Don’t believe those who have been lying to you for fifty years. Don’t believe those who, like

Macron today, use the same words as Hollande, Sarkozy, Chirac and Giscard. When you hear that our immigration policy must be at once firm and human, you can be sure that it will not be firm and that it will be human for immigrants but not for the French.

Don’t believe the demographers and the good news of their media spokesmen. Remember Churchill’s remark that: “The only statistics you can trust are the ones you have falsified yourself.”

Don’t believe the optimists who tell you that you’re wrong to be afraid. You’re right to be afraid: it’s your life as a people that is at stake.

Don’t believe these optimists who are like the pacifists of all eras. They willingly blind themselves. They are like Aristide Briand, that great pacifist of the post-World War One years who cried “war against war” and wrote the German chancellor Stresemann: “Every day, I throw in the trash the reports of my general staff showing the evidence of rearmament in Germany.”

Similarly, our Briands of today throw in the trash all of the Koranic collections they are brought full of sura calling ordering the faithful to cut the throats of all non-believers, infidels, Jews and Christians.

Don’t believe the optimists. Recite the famous words of Bernanos, which many of you already know: “Optimism is the false hope of cowards and fools; true hope is despair overcome.”

But I know that, if you are here today, you have already overcome.

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Degeneration & The Gilets Jaunes

This old song, “Dégénération,” from Mes Aïeux, a French Canadian neotraditionalist folk band has been recontextualized in the video above, for the Gilets Jaunes era. A reader just sent it to me. Here’s a passage from a 2009 First Things essay about the song:

Yet, in order to embolden the listener to the joy of the ancestral dancing at the song’s end, Mes Aïeux sings about a plot of land, of farming and of turning a small profit for a large family. The image is one of continuity: The soil gets passed on from one generation to the next. This stands in contrast to the contemporary descendant, who is cooped up with cabin fever (encabanée) in a cold city apartment. The song ends with an invitation. The disaffected, loveless, childless products of the Quiet Revolution are then invited to get out and dance the way their grandparents danced.

In the Québec of old, dance always had a whiff of defiance. To dance was to express cultural survival in the face of the long odds known as l’hiver, winter. Every March, it is customary to visit a cabane sucre, or sugar shack, after four snowy, wintery months for some pea soup, ham, pancakes and maple syrup, and to celebrate the first fruits of spring in the trees’ flowing sap. Typically, after the meal is finished, much dancing takes place.

Traditional life in Québec was rooted in the land, its rhythms, the adversities and joys it brings. It was a culture of gratitude. Contrast this cultural landscape with the arid, secular joylessness to which Quebeckers find themselves accustomed, a culture of anxious retirement planning without descendants to care for their parents. (The song refers to the REER, the Canadian equivalent of the American 401k,) It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Take Gilles Vigneault, the Quebec nationalists’ singer-songwriter idol who wrote the now famous unofficial Quebec “national” anthem called Gens du pays , People of the country. The refrain runs: “Gens du pays, c’est votre tour / De vous laisser parler d’amour.” (“People of the country, this is your turn / To let yourselves speak of love.”) Is Vigneault’s call to love the same as the call to joyful dance in “Dégeneration”?

Well, no. Love was killed by the 1960s, precisely as “Dégeneration” narrates. Love is reduced to libertinism—flight from an oppressive past straight into the oppression of a childless society. As for abortion, the members of the group reportedly felt obliged (under pressure, one wonders?) to foreswear any pro-life message in their lyrical lament. So, given the intolerance for any public, pro-life dissent, we are left to lament the inability of those singers to let their own lament be the dissent it really is. Confused? Apparently Mes Aïeux is too. Degeneration has that effect.

By the way, if you haven’t yet read it, check out TAC editor Scott McConnell’s report on Marion Maréchal’s right-wing conference in Paris last week.

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Trump’s Big Mouth

ABC News reports that today, Kurt Volker provided to Congress what appears to be an encrypted text conversation among US diplomats, in which the top American diplomat in Ukraine protested against Trump using military aid to compel Ukraine to help out his political campaign.

Meanwhile, this:

President Trump on Thursday publicly called on China to investigate a political rival, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in an extraordinary presidential request to a foreign country for help that could benefit him in the 2020 election.

“China should start an investigation into the Bidens,” Mr. Trump said Thursday as he left the White House to travel to Florida where he was expected to announce an executive order on Medicare.

Note well:

Look, Trump has a point about the Bidens. The New Yorker did a really good profile of Hunter Biden back in July, focusing on the hot mess of his failson life, and what a drag it could be on his father’s run for the presidency. Look at this passage:

In 2012, Archer and Hunter talked to Jonathan Li, who ran a Chinese private-equity fund, Bohai Capital, about becoming partners in a new company that would invest Chinese capital—and, potentially, capital from other countries—in companies outside China. In June, 2013, Li, Archer, and other business partners signed a memorandum of understanding to create the fund, which they named BHR Partners, and, in November, they signed contracts related to the deal. Hunter became an unpaid member of BHR’s board but did not take an equity stake in BHR Partners until after his father left the White House.

In December, 2013, Vice-President Biden flew to Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping. Biden often asked one of his grandchildren to accompany him on his international trips, and he invited Finnegan to come on this one. Hunter told his father that he wanted to join them. According to a Beijing-based BHR representative, Hunter, shortly after arriving in Beijing, on December 4th, helped arrange for Li to shake hands with his father in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel. Afterward, Hunter and Li had what both parties described as a social meeting. Hunter told me that he didn’t understand why anyone would have been concerned about this. “How do I go to Beijing, halfway around the world, and not see them for a cup of coffee?” he said.

Hunter’s meeting with Li and his relationship with BHR attracted little attention at the time, but some of Biden’s advisers were worried that Hunter, by meeting with a business associate during his father’s visit, would expose the Vice-President to criticism. The former senior White House aide told me that Hunter’s behavior invited questions about whether he “was leveraging access for his benefit, which just wasn’t done in that White House. Optics really mattered, and that seemed to be cutting it pretty close, even if nothing nefarious was going on.” When I asked members of Biden’s staff whether they discussed their concerns with the Vice-President, several of them said that they had been too intimidated to do so. “Everyone who works for him has been screamed at,” a former adviser told me. Others said that they were wary of hurting his feelings. One business associate told me that Biden, during difficult conversations about his family, “got deeply melancholy, which, to me, is more painful than if someone yelled and screamed at me. It’s like you’ve hurt him terribly. That was always my fear, that I would be really touching a very fragile part of him.”

The dodgy relationship between the vice president and his lobbyist/investor son is completely legitimate as a political target. But you don’t ask a foreign government to launch an investigation into your rival! You especially don’t do it when you are about to undergo an impeachment investigation for having asked the Ukrainian president to do the same thing, and having done so under an appearance of a quid pro quo.

China is not Ukraine. Ukraine was at least not a hostile country to the United States. China is our chief adversary on the world stage. And now the President of the United States has appealed to our chief adversary to investigate his top political rival. And worse, the US is now in extremely important trade negotiations with China. The president has just signaled to the Chinese that it would please him if they would investigate his political rival and his rival’s son’s business dealings in China.

It is arrogant, and it is foolish, and it might be illegal. Trump is daring the Democrats to impeach him. And he is putting his defenders in an impossible position. He did not have to do that. He and his media team could be talking about Hunter Biden and China nonstop, and compelling the media to cover it … but he did not have to appeal to China like this.

He couldn’t help himself. Because he’s Donald Trump, and he’s reckless as hell. This is the same man who, one day after dodging a Russia collusion bullet on the Mueller Report, was on the phone with the Ukrainian president asking him to investigate the Bidens.

Where does it stop? Is there anything he won’t do, or won’t say? If this is what Trump is saying in public, what is he doing behind the scenes?

Trump is making it clear why there need to be impeachment hearings. I am not saying that there should be an impeachment conviction. I don’t know yet; I’ll wait for the hearings. But he has to be reined in. This kind of conduct is disgusting.

A reader writes, in defense of Trump:

So egregious have these affronts to obvious reason become, so insistently have the progressives demanded that we compliment the emperor’s clothes, that many people have given up on whataboutism—in other words, “you might have facts on me, but I’ve got facts on you that are more important, damning, legitimate, etc.”—and instead simply rejected the narratives altogether, with no regard for whether they are factual or not.

And that is where we find ourselves with Trump today.  Maybe there was a quid pro quo.  Maybe there wasn’t.  Maybe it was inappropriate to broach investigating a political opponent with a foreign leader.  Maybe it wasn’t.  But the gap between sides is so wide, that whether Left or Right, it really doesn’t matter anymore.  Whether the emperor is naked or not no longer matters.  Truth doesn’t matter.  Only Us against Them, and for Us to win, They must lose.  Impeach, lie, make it all up if you have to, because make no mistake, this is a religious war with Sacred Cows on the line, knives already at their throats.  What this means is that going forward, reasoning will no longer be effective, because we don’t reason when our core identity is threatened.  We, as a people, will pursue our ideologies independent of facts, reason, legality, propriety, ethics, or anything else.  Think this is far fetched?  What do you imagine will happen when or if RGB is replaced and SCOTUS overturns Roe v Wade, which is now considered on the Left to be the full embodiment of a woman’s right to exist?

In the immortal words of Bachman Turner Overdrive, “Baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

If this is true, and if Trump truly can’t do anything to merit impeachment, because this is an existential fight, then the country is already a thing of the past.

On the assumption that we still have a constitutional system to defend, let me say what we cannot carry on with a president who feels at liberty to publicly (or privately) invite countries doing business with the United States to investigate his political rivals. Especially a totalitarian police state like China, which is the No. 1 adversary of the United States. 

What does this guy have to do to earn even a rebuke from Republican senators? If he shot Hunter Biden in prime time on Fifth Avenue, would that do it? At this point, I don’t think it would.

UPDATE: This. Guys on the Right, get out of your bubble long enough to understand that the 2020 election will be decided by a very small number of votes. Trump is making it harder for the sliver of undecided voters to break his way. And he’s doing it for no good reason whatsoever. He could have pointed out the sleazy Hunter Biden in China behavior without also calling for the Chinese government to investigate it.

The ad in swing districts writes itself:

You were rightfully outraged when Barack Obama's IRS targeted tea party groups.

Now Donald Trump is using his White House to pressure foreign governments to target his political rivals.

That's what third world countries do, not America.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) October 3, 2019

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The Black Church After Christendom

Maybe you saw Brandt Jean, in the courtroom, offer forgiveness and mercy — and an embrace — to Amber Guyger, a white woman convicted of killing his brother Botham. If you haven’t, believe me, you need to see it. He called on Guyger to accept Jesus Christ.

Here’s what you might have missed. Judge Tammy Kemp went to her chambers, got her personal Bible, and gave it to Guyger, who is going to prison for ten years for what she did:

Judge Kemp addresses Guyger:

“You can have mine. I have three or four more at home. This is the one I use every day. This is your job for the next month. Right here. John 3:16.”

Here is John 3:16:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Guyger hugs the judge, and says something inaudible in her ear. The judge replies:

“Ma’am, it’s not because I’m good. It’s because I believe in Christ.”

The judge continues speaking to Guyger:

“I’m not so good. You haven’t done so much that you cannot be forgiven. … You did something bad in one moment in time. What you do now matters.”

I don’t know about you, but I cannot recall the last time I witnessed more powerful public expressions of what it means to be a Christian than what Brandt Jean and Judge Tammy Kemp did in that courtroom. Guyger — again, a white woman — is going to prison to do time for her crime — but both Mr. Jean and Judge Kemp wanted her to know that there is hope for her, and redemption.

Man! I am humbled. Aren’t you? What heroes of faith and mercy and love those two black Christians are!

Not everybody feels that way. Here’s a black church leader:

Post Traumatic SLAVERY Syndrome pic.twitter.com/NTXs0PT8Db

— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) October 3, 2019

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Holding on to race hatred is more important to Bishop Swan than obeying the Lord he supposedly serves.

To be honest, on many issues, I’m no better than Bishop Swan. But I pray — seriously, I do — that I will have the humility to get out of the way and allow the grace of God to make me over into someone who resembles Brandt Jean and Judge Tammy Kemp. When I listened to what Judge Kemp said to Guyger, I thought about my own sins. I have never shot and killed an innocent man, but I am not innocent. Neither are you. Neither is Judge Kemp, who said, “It’s not because I’m good. It’s because I believe in Jesus Christ.”

If the brother of the victim and the judge were white, I don’t think we would have seen this, even if they had felt it in their hearts. Maybe from the victim’s brother, but not from the judge. We white people are too much for decorum. A white judge most likely would never have gone to her chambers, retrieved her Bible, and witnessed to a prisoner before the prisoner is taken away to jail for a decade. If not out of respect for decorum, then at least out of fear that the ACLU would scream bloody murder.

But that black judge, Tammy Kemp, did, because she was inspired by Brandt Jean’s love. And because Brandt Jean and Tammy Kemp chose not to do the expected thing, Amber Guyger will likely go into prison more free than she ever has been in her life. And not only that, the whole world can see what Mr. Jean and Judge Kemp did, and be inspired to go forth and do the same thing, in their own lives.

They saw an opportunity to save a drowning woman — a murderer who needed mercy. And they gave it to her, for no other reason than they love and serve Jesus Christ.

If this country, the United States of America, is going to be saved, it is going to be through the faith and love and deeds of men and women like Brandt Jean and Judge Tammy Kemp. Not the left-wing and the right-wing political preachers with big congregations and  slots on national TV. Humble, everyday believers like these two — they will be the ones, if there are enough of them left.

I’m serious. These courtroom deeds made me think about my daily life here in south Louisiana. Without question, the people who make me know that I live in a place where Christianity still matters are the black folks I talk with in the public square. Nobody ever pushes religion on you here, but black people in general — at least in my part of the world — speak so naturally and freely about God, and Jesus, and their sense of blessedness. They are not ashamed to be Christian, and are not afraid to talk about it. The news that we live in a post-Christian culture has not yet reached them. We have a million problems in the South, and half of them are race-related, but the public witness of black Christians is one of the best things about living here.

I recently had a discussion with a black journalist, a Christian who writes for a major secular newspaper. He asked me why I didn’t write about the black church in The Benedict Option. I told him that part of the reason was that I had only limited space — 75,000 words was the publisher’s limit — and bringing in the black church’s experience, and making it fit into the Ben Op scheme, would have required using a lot more of that space than was worthwhile.

And I wasn’t confident that I had the capability of writing about the black church knowledgeably and sensitively. Along those lines, I was aware that I didn’t know how to do it without causing a huge row, given the cultural politics of the moment. I was confident that I would be attacked for “cultural appropriation” — that is, being a white man who takes the experiences of the black church to use for his own project. It would have been a petty objection, but had it been raised, the controversy would have overshadowed the book itself.

And I feel certain that it would have been raised. Look, a black church’s self-styled bishop is attacking other black Christians for acting like Christians, and not following the protocols of race politics. This was a no-win thing for me as a white conservative writer.

My black Christian interlocutor said that he’s been thinking for a while about the future of the black church in post-Christian America. He said that if it’s true that America is a post-Christian country, and that these trends are not likely to be reversed any time soon, where does that leave the black church? African-Americans are part of this culture too, and don’t stand apart from it. They will be affected by the de-Christianization of America, even if they resist it. How will they resist? What resources can they draw on? The church was how they endured slavery and Jim Crow, and how they mustered the strength to challenge and defeat segregation. How will they be able to hold on to their faith in a post-Christian country? asked my black friend.

I told my friend that that would be a great book, and that I would do whatever I could to bring his idea, and him, to the attention of publishers.

What happened in that Dallas courtroom this week is a powerful witness to what black Christians, and the black church, mean to America. We cannot afford to lose it. I hope my friend writes that book, and wakes up the black church and all of us.

UPDATE: Hey, white people! Don’t enjoy that beautiful moment of forgiveness too much! warns black theologian policing awe to make sure it stays within the bounds of political correctness.

UPDATE.2: Of course. Texas being Texas, I am confident the state will tell these idiots to get stuffed:

Freedom From Religion Foundation files complaint against Judge Tammy Kemp over her exchange with Amber Guyger at the end of the proceedings yesterday. pic.twitter.com/1X7KXANxze

— Blake Hanson (@BlakeFox4News) October 3, 2019

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UPDATE.3: A reader sends this from a black theologian:

Wow. What made what Brandt Jean and Judge Kemp did was so powerful in large part because it was non-compulsory. Nobody would have blamed Brandt Jean one bit if he had said that he hopes Amber Guyger rots in jail for what she did to his brother. That’s the normal thing to have done. In light of his great deed, I feel bad admitting this, but the truth is, it’s the position I probably would have taken had I been in his place. But Brandt Jean didn’t do that. And Judge Kemp, who had just administered temporal justice (sentencing Guyger to ten years in prison for her crime), showed her the kind of mercy that brought people in that courtroom to tears.

This was the kind of thing that members of the Charleston black church did when the racist monster Dylann Roof murdered their pastor and others in the congregation. This is what the Amish community in Pennsylvania, back in 2006, did for the family of the monster who murdered ten of their children: showed the man’s devastated mother mercy, love, and forgiveness.

These acts are so powerful because they are so unexpected. They come from a place of extraordinary strength, not weakness. This is what holiness looks like. If we come to despise these acts of extraordinary grace, we will sign the death warrant for our culture. It is impossible to create total justice in this world. In my life, I have seen beautiful things destroyed from a lack of forgiveness. And I saw something almost miraculous happen because of forgiveness.

In my Dante book, I wrote about how reading the Divine Comedy, while also under the direction of a therapist and a priest, taught me that the only way I could be truly healed from the wounds of injustice in my family was to forgive my dad, even though he did not acknowledge his culpability. I did not want to do it, but I did it because I was so physically ill from the anxiety that I had no choice. As my priest told me, if I demanded justice before love, what would I say to Jesus, who loved me even though my sins crucified him, and who does love me still even though I fail to love God with my whole heart, and fail to love my neighbor as myself?

He was right. I relied on God’s mercy, even as I withheld it from my dad because he was too proud to say he had wronged me, and was sorry. And because I obeyed the priest (who was speaking the truth to me, even though I didn’t want to hear it), I was able to be there to hear my dad tell me, a few months before he died, that he was sorry. And I was able to care for him, living with him in his room for the last eight days of his life, and to hold his hand as he breathed his last. It was a great gift, the restoration of harmony. The unconditional forgiveness that Jesus Christ compelled me to grant to my father set me free. I can’t imagine where I would be today had I rested on justice, not mercy.

I have a very powerful instinct for justice, one that makes forgiveness difficult for me. My dad had this too. This is a strong point for me, I think, but also a great weakness. Watching the acts of mercy by Christians like Mr. Jean and Judge Kemp, and by the Emanuel AME believers, and by the Amish — that calls me to conversion. It reminds me that we humans, we crucified our God for the sake of justice. And He forgave us even as we murdered Him. This is not at all a reason to eliminate temporal justice. But it is a command — a command — to eliminate hatred in our hearts, even when that hatred is justified by a despicable person’s deeds.

In my case, I find it impossible to imagine forgive abusers of children. That’s just my thing. But Brandt Jean and Judge Tammy Kemp showed me that I cannot rest in that. There is unfinished business.

If we, as a culture, become “increasingly interested in [the] nonperformance” of forgiveness and mercy, then we will be lost in a maelstrom of vengeance and resentment, with no way out.

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The Fog Of Impeachment

To remind you: I’m not sure where I stand on impeachment. I’m waiting to see the facts, and trying to see what the facts are despite the blizzard of spin from the White House and the Democrats. I find myself more or less where Erick Erickson is today. Excerpts:

There are vast parts of me that wish President Trump would just go away. I dislike the chaos. I am tired of it. I think he is self-destructive. I think his tweets do more harm than good. I think he is more divisive than he should be. I think he has been dogmatic on policies that will be economically harmful. I think he has emboldened some awful elements of our society. I think a small portion of his supporters are nasty people who relish conspiracies to explain the world because they’d otherwise have to admit they failed at life and they suddenly feel at large and in charge. I think he relies on a bunch of huckster, grifters, and blue haired charlatans who give him advice because they want to stand in his shadow but not necessarily help him succeed. I think if he said tomorrow that he had made America great again and was passing things off to Pence, we would be in a better place. I am sympathetic to the Republicans who have told me they are tired of the drama and want to move on.

But then I think about this video and I remind myself this is a two way street. The reality is that the offerings from this presidency are largely normal even if the President’s behavior is not. But more so, this is not just about the President. The media has been relentlessly amplifying chaos, division, and more. We’re in a satanic feedback loop of jackassery in Washington fueled with a bunch of thin skinned people and the President is not the cause of it. If President Pence were there instead of President Trump, we’d have the media attacking him for his wife’s career choice and pushing fake racist attacks on him. Oh wait! They already are.

More:

I take seriously that there is real truth. I think we have an obligation to find it. I am willing to take the subtweets from friends because I don’t agree with their twisting of truth and pushing of conspiracy. I don’t think I am getting the truth from either side. There are a handful of reporters who I trust way more than most of the voices defending the President. There are too many conservatives weaving conspiracy theories and too many reporters decrying things as conspiracy that are not.

I’ll move slowly. I will pay attention to the voices of credible, diligent journalists and mature, responsible voices including, yes, the Attorney General. If I think the President has committed an impeachable offense, I’ll wrest myself off the bull in the china shop into the shards of glass and broken china. But I’m not there. I don’t know that I will get there. And I don’t think the media and Democrats have enough good will with people to convince most people even if they were to convince me. The President should stay off Twitter, but he can do so assured he is blessed with idiots for enemies. And he can keep himself up at night knowing Rudy is an idiot too.

Yesterday I was at the gym, on an elliptical machine, and couldn’t watch Netflix on my phone. So I had to watch the crappy cable channels on the machine’s TV. I toggled back and forth between Fox News and MSNBC, both of which were talking about nothing but impeachment. It was dizzying. I thought at the end that I cannot trust fully what I’m hearing on either channel. It’s nothing but confusion, and there are no reliable information brokers anywhere. I read the newspapers too, and listen to public radio, and I simply do not really trust anybody to tell me the truth in a neutral way. Do you?

Did you see this grave piece that former TAC editor Dan McCarthy wrote for The Spectator? It raises a deeper concern about the impeachment issue. I haven’t seen this talked about anywhere else. Excerpts:

All impeachments are partisan, but this one is in doubly bad faith: it has no chance of succeeding in removing Trump, and it has no chance of acquitting him in a way that will strengthen faith in the country’s institutions.

The only outcome possible is to confirm for Democrats and Republicans alike the idea that 2020 is a regime-change moment, for reasons that go far beyond Trump.

McCarthy surveys US politics since Nixon, and makes a case that after the Cold War, the stable national consensus — one that held even through Watergate — began to break apart. He sees Trump’s 2016 election as a radical repudiation of the Establishment, both the GOP Establishment (which Trump beat in the primaries), and the entire US Establishment, represented by Hillary Clinton. McCarthy writes:

That’s why this impeachment attempt is radically different from the Nixon or Clinton episodes. There is no consensus to save this time; there is only an anti-consensus waiting to be radicalized.

More:

The old saying is that if you strike at a king, be sure to kill him. In this case, the regime is striking not a king but at the very idea that an elected official can challenge the establishment. This risks revealing just how weak the country’s ruling class really is: if 40 percent of the country remains with Trump through the ordeal of impeachment, that will show that 40 percent is anti-regime — revolutions are made with less. And that 40 percent would be a floor, not a ceiling; a starting point for a future anti-regime movement.

Read it all. 

McCarthy believes that for the sake of stability, the Democrats should allow the 2020 election to be the referendum on Trump, not an impeachment trial. Have you thought about it like this? Until reading the McCarthy piece, I had not.

If McCarthy is correct, we are in critical trouble as a country. Let’s assume that Donald Trump did everything the Democrats allege that he did, and it is the kind of conduct that can legitimately be described as impeachable. McCarthy is saying that the country’s institutions might well be too weak to survive an impeachment proceeding. I think he’s probably right about that. His column says, “Are we really sure we want to stress-test the system? Because we probably won’t like what we find out about it.”

But look: the fact that we can legitimately wonder whether or not the system would survive that sort of stress test is pretty damn scary. If that is a serious concern, does that not in itself give us the answer?

We know from opinion polling that Americans today, and over the past few years, have relatively little confidence in the nation’s institutions, aside from the military. Political institutions and the media are near the bottom. This entire impeachment process is taking place within the institutions of politics and the media — two of the least-trusted institutions in American life. Impeach Trump or don’t impeach Trump — whatever happens, does anybody think that American institutions, and the American system, will emerge from this stronger? That people will be more confident that the system works?

I know I won’t — and I say that no matter what the outcome. The system was supposed to keep people like Trump out. But the failures of the system called forth a Donald Trump figure. And now it might not survive him. As Ray Bradbury Shakespeare put it, “Something wicked this way comes…. .”

UPDATE: Sobering comment from a reader:

I really liked and appreciated the McCarthy article. I certainly have a deep sense of foreboding about what the future holds for this country. It seems clear that there is a gathering storm. When it will break, what form it will take and what direction it will go, I won’t even hazard to guess. But as an amateur student of history, it certainly seems clear to me that our country cannot continue on this path indefinitely. Something will happen that will either create a new consensus (which I think is unlikely because we are so divided on fundamental values), or that will just drive us apart irreparably.

And I say this as a big believer in traditional American ideals, in the Constitution, and in the overall goodness of the American people. But I’m 34 years old, and I have felt deeply in my own life the loss of confidence in institutions that McCarthy describes.

For me, this loss of confidence began with the war in Iraq, continued with the disastrous rollout of Obamacare (which has tripled my own health care costs), and has intensified as I’ve watched D.C. descend into a circus of petty scandal and spiteful partisanship over the Obama and Trump presidencies. In my own life, I’ve interacted with many people suffering from broken homes, broken families, and severe drug addictions and mental illness. These issues are severely impacting the lives of my fellow Americans but are seldom, or never, acknowledged or discussed in the discourse of the elites reflected in media and politics.

I watched the big Goodyear tire factory in my hometown close in the early 2000s, after China was admitted to the WTO, and heard teachers in the schools around that factory discuss how the schools and families have decayed after those jobs left the community. I saw the financial crisis of 2009, how the government bailed out Wall Street but hung ordinary Americans out to dry as they lost their jobs and homes. I then watched those same financiers subsequently make millions and billions in the stock market boom that followed (much of it pumped up by the Federal Reserve), while ordinary Americans struggled to get back on their feet.

I’ve watched as universities burden young people with immense levels of debt while failing to impart broad-based liberal educations or competent skills; instead, they proselytize with the gospel of intersectionality and loathing of America and Western civilization.

The final nails in the coffin were Drag Queen Story Hours and transgender ideology. All elite institutions, from the academy to public schools to the medical profession to government, immediately accepted transgender ideology and pushed it on the public and those entrusted to their care, pumping the bodies of poor confused young children with hormones and performing irreversible medical procedures. The explicit sexualization of children in Drag Queen Story Hours has been lionized and celebrated as a milestone.

And it is a milestone, for it represents the final apotheosis of our elite classes and institutions, when they crossed the line from mere incompetence and petty self-interest to true evil and maliciousness. I could go on and on and talk about the revolving door between government and business, or the usurpation by the Supreme Court of various issues that properly belongs in the democratic sphere, that should be decided by the people and their representatives, but you get the idea. My faith in elite institutions has been eroding my entire adult life.

I was raised in a good home by good parents and a strong family, many of whom served in World War 2, and I was taught to be a patriotic American, to love our country and appreciate our way of life and our freedoms. I still consider myself to be a patriotic American. But today, as a 34 year old with a 6 month old daughter, I have absolutely no trust or faith whatsoever in the federal government, the courts, public schools, higher education, the medical profession, or even religious institutions (although I am a committed and practicing Catholic). So I absolutely get the point McCarthy is driving at.

Our political and media elites are absolutely clueless about the people and the country they supposedly rule, they are oblivious to how tenuous their own hold on power is, and whether it’s impeachment or race or transgender ideology, they are truly blind to how dangerous the forces they are playing with are. No matter what the facts, this impeachment process will be maximally damaging to whatever integrity is left to our public institutions, and it will further radicalize our politics. It is indeed playing with fire.

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Love And Mercy

This happened today in a Dallas courtroom. That man, Brandt Jean, was permitted to give a victim’s impact statement after the sentencing of Amber Guyger, an ex-cop convicted of killing his brother, Botham. Guyger opened the door to Botham Jean’s apartment, thinking it was her own, and shot him as an intruder. She was given ten years in prison for her deed.

Put down what you’re doing and watch this three-minute clip. I hope that I can one day be half the man, and half the Christian, that Brandt Jean is. The courage will take your breath away.

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Ben Op Miami

If you’re a reader in south Florida, I’d love to see you there. Tickets available here. 

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The Monster Cardinal Egan

New York Cardinal Edward Egan, who died in 2015, had a reputation as a cold-hearted, legalistic man. How cold? There’s a newly-released independent investigation commissioned by the Diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., which Egan led until John Paul II moved him to New York. Catholic News Agency writes about the report — which, again, was commissioned by Egan’s former diocese:

In dealing with survivors of abuse, the report found he “followed a scorched-earth litigation policy” that dragged out court battles and “re-victimized survivor plaintiffs,” not only taxing diocesan assets in the process but poisoning the Church’s standing with the laity and society.

The report also found that Egan “freely acknowledged” that he prioritized diocesan asset preservation and protection against scandal over justice for abuse victims, the report said. Along with Bishops Curtis and Shehan, he continuing transferring known abusers without disclosing the danger to pastors and parishioners.

In a 1993 letter cited by the report, Egan explained that he refused to take any canonical action against an abuser priest, or to seek to have him removed from ministry because the scandal would be worse for the Church than the abuse.

“There can be no canonical process either for the removal of a diocesan priest from his priestly duties or for the removal of a priest from his parish when there is serious reason to believe that the priest in question is guilty of the sexual violation of children, and especially when he has confessed,” Egan wrote.

“For the bishop who would countenance such a process would be opening the way to the gravest of evils, among them the financial ruin of the diocese which he is to serve.”

Think about that. This man Egan, as the Bishop of Bridgeport, believed it would be worse for the Church to remove an abuser from ministry because it might end up costing the Church a fortune. The “gravest of evils” is not a priest sodomizing children, but financial loss to the Church.

The quote in the passage above comes from a document then-Bishop Egan sent to the Vatican concerning a priest named Raymond Pcolka, who molested 16 children, both boys and girls. Here is a part of a deposition given in the 1990s by the father of one of the male victims. The man testified that his son, one of Father Pcolka’s altar boys, told him that the priest tied him to a bed, covered the boy’s backside with shaving cream, and anally raped him. When the man concluded that his son was telling the truth, he called the rectory of the parish where Pcolka was assigned at the time, and ended up talking to the pastor (head priest) of the parish, a Father Petoniak:

That testimony is available in documents on Bishop-Accountability.com, on the Diocese of Bridgeport’s lawsuits. Understand that Bishop Egan knew about all the allegations against Father Pcolka, including the fact that Pcolka did this to an altar boy, and Egan still thought that it would be a graver evil to remove a pervert priest from ministry, because it might open the diocese to financial liability.

In the end, the Pcolka cases cost the Diocese of Bridgeport over $11 million to settle. The cost to its moral credibility in incalculable.

You can read the entire new report here; its findings about Egan begin on page 56.

Egan must have been a human being at some point. What happened? I’m not asking in a sarcastic way. Surely no man enters seminary wanting to become a soulless monster like Edward Egan ended up. I met him once. He was a good preacher, a musician, and a man of regal bearing and firm conviction. But he was a clericalist to the tips of his piano-playing fingers. We know too that Egan was far from alone among the episcopate of his generation in behaving that way. It is hard to know which is more satanic: what beasts like Raymond Pcolka did, or what elegant canon lawyers like Edward Egan, in episcopal robes, did to cover up their crimes and to grind the face of the victims and their families to protect the institution.

I have to give credit to the current bishop of Bridgeport, Mons. Caggiano, for commissioning and releasing this report. To be clear, I don’t know how much of it is new news. The late Gerald Renner of the Hartford Courant reported on a lot of this stuff, and much of it came out in court documents a couple of decades ago. I knew, for example, about Egan’s coddling of Father Pcolka from the reporting in the early 2000s, when he was newly installed in the Archdiocese of New York.

UPDATE: A Catholic reader reminds me of this 2012 MBD column excoriating Egan for retracting an apology. Excerpt:

St. John Chrysostom, once said “The road to hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.”

Here’s proof that he was right.

In an interview this week with Connecticut Magazine, Cardinal Edward Egan, withdrew his 2002 apology for the Church’s handling of the sex-abuse scandal, which was once read in all New York parishes.

A decade after that letter, the former archbishop of New York, and former bishop of Bridgeport, now describes the handling of the priest-abuse crisis under his watch as “incredibly good.” He said of the letter, “I never should have said that,” and added, “I don’t think we did anything wrong.”

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Call The Bearded Man ‘Madam’ — Or Else

In Britain, a Christian doctor, David Mackereth, who refused to call transgender patients by their preferred pronoun has been told by an Employment Tribunal that he had better do so, or else:

Andrea Williams, the chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre, said if the decision is upheld it will have “seismic consequences” for anyone in the workplace “who is prepared to believe and say that we are created male and female”.

“It is deeply disturbing that this is the first time in the history of English law that a judge has ruled that free citizens must engage in compelled speech,” she added.

Here is a link to the full ruling of the Employment Tribunal. What follows is from Paragraph 197:

[B]elief in Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others, specifically here, transgender individuals.

Think about that. Believing in a fundamental precept of the Christian religion’s anthropology (Gen. 1:27 reads “”So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them”) is, in the eyes of this agency of the British state, “incompatible with human dignity.” Indeed, this is seismic. Christianity, in this sense, has been judged by the state’s agency as anti-human. Because Dr. Mackereth told the tribunal that he would refuse to address a six-foot bearded man as “Madam.”

A similar case is now emerging in the US. On Monday, a fired schoolteacher whose case I’ve written about in this space, filed a lawsuit against the local schoolboard. Excerpt:

Peter Vlaming, who was a French teacher at West Point High School, said he was fired because he would not use pronouns such as “him” and “his” to refer to a female student who was transitioning to male.

According to the suit filed Monday in King William County, using the male pronouns would have “violated” Vlaming’s “conscience” and went against his religious beliefs, so he called the student by his preferred name during class and avoided using pronouns altogether.

When the school found out, administrators told Vlaming to either use male pronouns or risk losing his job.

Watch this case closely. As with the Mackereth case in the UK, this is the kind of thing that will determine whether or not faithful Christians — or anybody who rejects the anthropology of transgenderism — will be able to hold certain jobs.

I refer you back to this important 2015 essay by the philosopher Michael Hanby, on the fate of “the civic project of American Christianity”. Excerpts:

By this measure, there can be little doubt that we live in revolutionary times, even if this revolution is the full flower of seeds planted long ago. What availed as the common wisdom of mankind until the day before yesterday—for example, that man, woman, mother, and father name natural realities as well as social roles, that children issue naturally from their union, that the marital union of man and woman is the foundation of human society and provides the optimal home for the flourishing of children—all this is now regarded by many as obsolete and even hopelessly bigoted, as court after court, demonstrating that this revolution has profoundly transformed even the meaning of reason itself, has declared that this bygone wisdom now fails even to pass the minimum legal threshold of rational cogency. This is astonishing by any measure; that it has occurred in half the time span proposed by Jonas makes it more astonishing still.

Such are the logical consequences of the sexual revolution, but to grasp more fully the meaning of its triumph, we must see that the sexual revolution is not merely—or perhaps even primarily—sexual. It has profound implications for the relationship not just between man and woman but between nature and culture, the person and the body, children and parents. It has enormous ramifications for the nature of reason, for the meaning of education, and for the relations between the state, the family, civil society, and the Church. This is because the sexual revolution is one aspect of a deeper revolution in the question of who or what we understand the human person to be (fundamental anthropology), and indeed of what we understand reality to be (ontology).

All notions of justice presuppose ontology and anthropology, and so a revolution in fundamental anthropology will invariably transform the meaning and content of justice and bring about its own morality. We are beginning to feel the force of this transformation in civil society and the political order. Court decisions invalidating traditional marriage law fall from the sky like rain. The regulatory state and ubiquitous new global media throw their ever increasing weight behind the new understanding of marriage and its implicit anthropology, which treats our bodies as raw material to be used as we see fit. Today a rigorous new public morality inverts and supplants the residuum of our Christian moral inheritance.

More:

One needn’t be ungrateful for the genuine achievements of American liberalism in order to question the wisdom of this project and its guiding assumptions. First, a purely juridical order devoid of metaphysical and theological judgment is as logically and theologically impossible as a pure, metaphysically innocent science. One cannot set a limit to one’s own religious competence without an implicit judgment about what falls on the other side of that limit; one cannot draw a clear and distinct boundary between the political and the religious, or between science, metaphysics, and theology, without tacitly determining what sort of God transcends these realms. The very act by which liberalism declares its religious incompetence is thus a theological act. Its supposed indifference to metaphysics conceals a metaphysics of original indifference.

Point is, liberalism is not metaphysically neutral. This can be seen in the British ruling. In his conclusion, Hanby says that events (remember, he wrote this in the months before Obergefell) are overtaking the philosophical debate

For in its enforcement of the sexual revolution, the state is effectively codifying ontological and anthropological presuppositions. In redefining marriage and the family, the state not only embarks on an unprecedented expansion of its powers into realms heretofore considered prior to or outside its reach, and not only does it usurp functions and prerogatives once performed by intermediary associations within civil society, it also exercises these powers by tacitly redefining what the human being is and committing the nation to a decidedly post-Christian (and ultimately post-human) anthropology and philosophy of nature.

This cannot be overstated. The Sexual Revolution is about what a human being is. This was always what was at stake. Remember almost 20 years ago, when people said, “What does my neighbor’s gay marriage have to do with me?” People like me told you that it had to do with the most basic questions of human anthropology. Nobody wanted to listen. Everybody wanted their sexual freedom, and all that comes with it. Now we are at a place, or approaching a place, where the state can command you to call a six-foot bearded man “Madam,” and drive you and your bigot-religion out of the public square if you say no.

More Hanby:

This is not to say that Christians should disengage or retreat, the usual misinterpretation of the so-called Benedict Option. There is no ground to retreat to, for the liberal order claims unlimited jurisdiction and permits no outside. We do not have the option of choosing our place within it if we wish to remain Christian. We cannot avoid the fact that this new philosophy, once it is fully instantiated, will in all likelihood deprive Christians of effective participation in the public square. Hobby Lobby notwithstanding, appeals to religious liberty, conceived as the freedom to put one’s idiosyncratic beliefs into practice with minimal state interference, are not likely to fare well over the long haul as these beliefs come to seem still more idiosyncratic, as religious practice comes into conflict with more “fundamental” rights, and as the state’s mediation of familial relations becomes ever more intrusive. And attempts to restore religious freedom to its proper philosophical place, as something like the sine qua non of freedom itself, presuppose just the view of human nature and reason that our post-Christian liberalism rejects from the outset.

To say that the civic project of American Christianity is at an end is not to say that it will simply cease, however. There will no doubt be those who continue to fight on, like Japanese holdouts after the Second World War, unaware that the war is over. And they should carry on in some fashion, doomed though the civic project may be. Religious freedom is worth defending after all, even in its flawed liberal sense, and Hobby Lobby shows us that it is still possible to win some battles while losing the war. Moreover, if liberalism is indeed absolute, so that there is no longer any outside, then a contest of rights is really the only ground on which liberal public reason will permit itself to be publicly engaged.

Read it all. What he’s telling us is this: we have to keep fighting, and we can hope to win some battles, but we are not going to win the war if liberalism’s metaphysics rule our civilization. And for now, they do. David French’s strategy makes short-term sense, because rights-talk is the only grounds on which to contest liberalism. Sohrab Ahmari’s battle-stations cultural conservatism is appealing on one level, but it is impossible to see how to build a viable political consensus to fight for the “common good” when we cannot agree on a source for the common good, or even on the nature of Nature. Only a distinct minority of Christians in this country are theological conservatives, and could agree to any form of this concise Catholic definition of integralism:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.

Many conservative Christians could affirm most of this, but we cannot agree on the nature of the “spiritual power” that rules man. You could not get non-Catholics to agree with Catholic integralism. Under late liberalism, such as we have today, you could not even get a meaningful number of American Catholics to do so.

Ergo, let us fight, but let us not lie to ourselves about the likelihood of winning. What we face is something that, in the end, can only be endured, and driven out by prayer, fasting, and steadfastness. That, and the sacrifices of white (bloodless) martyrs like Dr. David Mackereth.

The world is mad. It demands that a doctor call a six-foot bearded man “Madam,” and calls his religion inhumane for affirming a fundamental fact of human biology. This is not a sickness that can be defeated at the ballot box.

 

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