Rod Dreher's Blog, page 208

You Are Not ‘Innocent’

From Edward Snowden’s new memoir, Permanent Record, this passage about stumbling in 2009 across an extremely classified internal National Security Agency report detailing what the agency had been doing to gather electronic intelligence post-9/11. The report showed up on his desktop at his NSA outpost in Japan by mistake, because he was a systems administrator. The report he saw was completely different from the officially classified one the agency had previously released. In other words, the agency created a fake report for lawmakers, to conceal what it was really doing.

What the extremely classified report disclosed was “the NSA’s deepest secret”: the existence of a program called STELLARWIND, that collected every bit of electronic communication in existence, and stored it permanently. Here’s Snowden (p. 178):

[T]he US government was developing the capacity of an eternal law-enforcement agency. At any time, the government could dig through the past communications of anyone it wanted to victimize in search of a crime (and everybody’s communications contain evidence of something). At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration — any future rogue head of the NSA — could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, now who they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past.

Snowden explains that more important than the actual content of our messages are the “metadata” that surveillance agencies get from monitoring us. Metadata, he says, “is data about data.” It’s “all the things you do on your devices and all the things your devices do on their own.” A surveillant does not have to access the actual content of your e-mails (the “data”) to learn a lot about you from the metadata. For example:

the address you slept at last night and what time you got up this morning. It reveals every place you visited during your day and how long you spent there. It shows who you were in touch with and who was in touch with you.

More:

There’s another thing, too: content is usually defined as something that you knowingly produce. You know what you’re saying during a phone call, or what you’re writing in an email. But you have hardly any control over the metadata you produce, because it is generated automatically. Just as it’s collected, stored, and analyzed by machine, it’s made by machine, too, without your participation or even consent. Your devices are constantly communicating for you whether you want them to or not. And, unlike the humans you communicate with of your own volition, your devices don’t withhold private information or use code words in an attempt to be discreet. They merely ping the nearest cell phone towers with signals that never lie.

More:

I now understood that I was totally transparent to my government. The phone that gave me directions, and corrected me when I went the wrong way, and helped me translate the traffic signs, and told me the times of the buses and trains, was also making sure that all of my doings were legible to my employers. It was telling my bosses where I was and when, even if I never touched the thing and just left it in my pocket.

Reading this, I recalled my interview earlier this year in Prague, with Kamila Bendova, the Czech dissident and widow of dissident Vaclav Benda, who did a four-year prison stint for his anticommunist resistance. I interviewed Kamila and her son Patrik for my forthcoming book on resisting the present and coming soft totalitarianism. Kamila told me that she does not understand why people today are so careless about their personal data. She said (this is a quote from the transcript):

People still think that openness is all right. They think “I am innocent. I did nothing wrong. I don’t have to be afraid of anything.”

The truth is, said this old dissident, is that nobody collects this information innocently. Reading Snowden tonight brought home the hard-won wisdom of Kamila Bendova and the anticommunist dissidents who suffered under a totalitarian surveillance state.

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Fake Church Transformation

A reader at an Episcopal parish e-mailed to share part of a letter he sent to his pastor. The leadership team of the “leftish” (his word) parish is reading together a book called The Art of Transformation: Three Things Churches Do That Change Everything, by Paul Fromberg, rector of an Episcopal parish in San Francisco. Here is what the reader had to say to his pastor about it:

According to the Gospel, Jesus honored solitude. Sometimes, he drew away as a challenge and an invitation for others to follow him. Sometimes, he drew away because he had work to do that could only be done in isolation.

I believe that our selves are more porous than is taught in the Enlightenment view of the atomistic individual. There is little evidence that the self/other distinction is illusory. Whereas there seems to be plenty of evidence that the self/other distinction is real, albeit not as neat and well-defined as our society tends to assert.

We’ve talked before about the cross as a metaphor for directions of relationship, with some churches in America emphasizing the vertical, individual relationship to God while missing the horizontal, communal relationship to the people around us. It seems that Fromberg has gone too far to the horizontal. I understand him as advocating for a dissolution of individual identity into the collective congregation. He strikes me as dismissive of any assertion of individuality and corresponding desire for solitude. This, in my opinion, is not only wrongheaded, it is demeaning to the diversity that Fromberg claims to celebrate. See, e.g., his description of a parishioner who preferred not to be touched during the peace, for reasons Fromberg apparently failed to explore.

It also seems to me that Fromberg’s emphasis on transformation is actually a form of born-again spirituality. Right-wing born-again Christianity says we must be transformed individually, whereas Fromberg’s left-wing version seems to say we must lose our individual identities and be transformed collectively.

I don’t see anything in Fromberg attempting to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the positions (1) “You are loved as you are”; and (2) “You need to be radically transformed.”

Also, seeking either right or left versions of transformation and the corresponding subjective experience of transformation strikes me as a form of demanding signs as validation of faith.

I also question an emphasis on “feeling the presence of God.” What if somebody never felt the presence of God, was never validated in faith, experientially or materially, and yet trusted Jesus and continued to trust through life and into death, solely because it was right to do so? Wouldn’t that be the most beautiful and holiest faith of all? After all, blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

Now I’m reacting not only to Fromberg’s book but to a year of subscribing to the Christian Century, which I did not renew because it appeared to be written solely by and for baby boomers.

I am convinced that the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States will not exist in any meaningful way 25 years from now. The moment I became convinced that it and other mainline denominations are doomed was the “Reclaiming Jesus” declaration put out last year or the year before. The video trailer builds it up spectacularly, a bunch of famous progressive pastors proclaiming that in this historical moment the church “cannot remain silent.” And then the actual statement was a mealy-mouthed, milquetoast little thing that basically boiled down to saying “we’re baby boomers and we don’t like Trump,” but they couldn’t even bring themselves to say that very strongly. There was nothing wrong per se in the content of the document, but if this is all they have to proclaim or “reclaim,” they are irrelevant and doomed.

If Mainline Protestant denominations do not learn to say something more than “we’re not right-wing” they will (and deserve to) go extinct. For example, left-wing churches seem to think it’s enough to welcome all sexual and gender identities, but have little to say about developing a Christian ethics of sexual behavior that recognizes the physical, emotional, and financial risk to which we, gay or straight, expose ourselves and others through sexual intimacy. To view sexuality solely through the lens of self-expression is selfish and reckless. Rod Dreher, I believe, has written that sexual liberation is the prosperity gospel of progressive churches, and frankly, I don’t see much effort to prove him wrong.

In my opinion, our society is ripe for the emergence of a powerful vision that emphasizes, reconciles, and honors both the vertical and the horizontal: the individual in relation to God and community. Today, nobody seems to be able to get the balance right.

Probably these concerns have been addressed in papers and books somewhere, but if solutions are not manifest in the world, then what is written may not matter.

Thoughts, readers?

The same kind of critique could be leveled at individual churches that seemed to aspire to little more than being political conservatives at prayer. In a new essay in The Atlantic,  Alan Jacobs, who has long identified as an Evangelical, writes of the current crisis of Evangelicalism:

But it seems to me that of all the traits that attracted evangelicals to Reagan, perhaps the most important was his sunny and fervent patriotism. Already white American evangelicals had a tendency to associate Christianity closely with the American experiment, and to think of their country as a “Christian nation” or, at the very least, actuated by “Judeo-Christian values.” But as the decades passed and American church leaders in almost all denominations became less interested in traditional Christian doctrines and more interested in what some scholars have come to call moralistic therapeutic deism, a larger and larger proportion of white evangelicals became what Pew Research calls “God-and-Country Believers.” These folks, almost all of whom are white, may not attend church often or at all, and they may not be interested in, or even aware of, the beliefs that have typically characterized evangelical Christians, but they know this much: They believe in God, and they believe in America, and they love Donald Trump because he speaks blunt Truth to culturally elite Power, and when asked by pollsters whether they are evangelicals, they say yes.

By now, God-and-Country Believers are so accustomed to voting Republican—and to being disdained or mocked by Democrats—that few of them can remember doing anything else. And God-and-Country Believers are what most Americans, whether religious or not, now think that evangelicals are.

I think that’s right. When I meet a white Evangelical, I assume that is true until shown otherwise. The conservative Evangelicals I count as friends, whether or not they voted for Trump, are not like that at all. But it’s so common that I take it for granted. And Jacobs says that many contemporary white American Evangelicals would not dispute that God-and-Country characterization. For them, “Evangelicalism” is more of a racial and cultural identity than a specific theological commitment.

A few years back, I spoke at length with the pastor of a large (but not mega) Evangelical church. He was burning out. He told me his congregation all affirmed the doctrinal things that Evangelicals are supposed to affirm, at least nominally. But deep down, they were resistant to his leadership. He was (is) a theological conservative, but he was trying to lead them away from their deep fear of Muslims, gays, and the turmoil in the culture. It’s not that he disputed that there are grave challenges to the Christian faith in this post-Christian culture. It’s rather that he believed that the core challenges were not necessarily the same ones, and in any case, the authentically Christian response to these challenges is not to remain petrified by fear, and to live as if the answer was to vote Republican, watch more Fox News, and hope that some great politician will come along and save us all from the apocalypse.

The congregation didn’t want to hear it. If I’m recalling our conversation accurately, the congregation — at least the middle aged and older ones — were transfixed by their Christianity as a political and cultural identity (and perhaps a racial one too — this was a white congregation).

I wonder if the frustration of the reader above with the idea of “transformation” in his leftish parish resonates with the frustration of that Evangelical pastor, who could not move his rightish congregation away from their unstated belief that the most important thing about their corporate Christian identity is “we’re not left-wing.”

It’s a hard balance to strike. Nobody is satisfied with pastors who avoid taking hard stands on any issue, out of fear an abundance of caution over being too political. We all know the types. Years ago, I got into an argument with a pastor who was personally pro-life, but who told me he would never preach about abortion because he believed it was wrong to “divide the congregation.” This rationalization allowed him to avoid preaching anything controversial, ever. Not about abortion, not about racism, not about sex, or greed, or anything that might trouble anybody’s conscience — or, actually, spark anybody’s interest.

Christianity is a faith that has a public dimension. If our faith is only a matter of private devotion, it isn’t Christianity. But the Christian faith also can’t be neatly fit into political categories. I tell you, I am glad that I am not a pastor these days. As I’ve said before, the churches really are suffering from a dearth of good leadership. But they are also suffering from a dearth of good followership.

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Mrs. Thatcher On How To Be A Grown-Up

This clip should be played at the beginning of every semester, in every American school. Children should be told: “Mrs. Thatcher demonstrates what it means to be a grown-up. Go and do likewise.”

The amazing thing about this clip is that the Swedish TV interviewer does not want to take no for an answer.

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‘I Will Shoot You!’ I Said

View on my street this afternoon. The man on the left is a mentally ill man who was threatening his mother

Here’s a line no child should ever hear their father say: “If you come onto this property, I will shoot you!”

My kids heard me shout it three times this afternoon, at a large (6’5″) man in his twenties who was pursuing his mother. I saw her in the street and invited her to come shelter in my house. He followed her up my driveway, screaming at her. He only stopped when I threatened him with violence — and then only after I yelled it several times.

I called 911. A sheriff’s deputy came and arrested the young man. This was not the first time I’ve called 911 on this guy. He and his mother moved in to a rental house on our block a few months back. The first time I called was when I saw him screaming and cursing at her in their front yard, and he took a swing at her. It has been a nightmare over there all summer. According to the deputy today, the sheriff’s department has been out ten times to deal with him.

The man is bipolar, and won’t stay on his medication. He is large, and extremely intimidating. His mother is scared to death. After the first incident, I went to their landlord, a dentist in town who does not live here. He denied that what I said happened had actually happened, and when I told him that my daughter and I had witnessed it ourselves, he got cagey, and said that if it did happen, there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

That turns out to be untrue, as further research showed. But I don’t know what we neighbors can do about this at all.

The young man is in jail tonight, because by returning to the house, he violated a judge’s order. He was not supposed to be living there … but his mother, whose safety the judge’s order was meant to protect, allowed him to be there. She claimed to us and to the deputy that she didn’t realize he wasn’t supposed to be there. I don’t know if I believe that or not. She also said that she is the only person that young man has in the world, and that without her, he might be homeless.

I pity her greatly. I seriously do. As I said, she is terrified of him. She wept, and said that he used to be such a bright, kind boy. When mental illness descended on him a few years ago, it turned everything for them into a catastrophe. She is plainly desperate. You would have to have a heart of stone not to feel for her.

Yet her paralysis is going to get her hurt, or worse. I told her today that we cannot live like this anymore, and that we will not live like this anymore. This neighborhood should not have to live in fear because her son will not take his medication, and because she insists on tolerating his scary abuse of her. What’s more, he medicates himself not by taking his prescribed drugs, but by smoking pot. He offered to sell some pot to a neighbor on this street once. Imagine raising kids with this guy around.

The thing is … what if the mom is right? What if it really is the case that there is no institution for him, that he would become a homeless insane man, sleeping on the streets? I don’t know what the law is in my state governing cases like this, or what kinds of resources are available for people like that young man and his mother. Put yourself in her place. She loves him so much that she is willing to endure his rages, and the humiliations he puts her through in public (he stands in the yard and curses her at the top of his lungs, using filthy language) because in her mind, the alternative is homelessness.

However, like others on this street, I too have children. Children who live in fear now. Children who had to watch their father put himself between a violent, insane man and his mother, and threaten to use his gun on the violent man if he came closer. They deserve better than this.

Ten times the sheriff’s deputies have been here over the past four months because of this violent young man’s behavior. This is a nice neighborhood of middle and working-class families. It is also a neighborhood whose peace and safety is held hostage in part by the indifference of an absentee landlord.

I’m not sure what happens next, but that dangerous, insane young man cannot come back to that house, or this street. Not after today. I don’t know what it’s going to take, but we hit the breaking point today.

I am not a big Second Amendment guy, but I am grateful that in this country, and in this state, one is allowed to own a gun. I am grateful that I do own a gun, and know how to use it. I am also grateful that I live in a state with a castle law, and that if that insane man had come after his mother, to whom I had given shelter, and me, on my own property, I could have used deadly force to stop him — and would not have been charged. Thank God it didn’t come to that. This time. I have to use the time that that man is in jail this next week to make sure that there isn’t a next time. Not on this street.

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Woke Teachers Who Hate Literature

This came in from a teacher — I know his name and the name and location of his school — responding to the “Trashing Unwoke Books” post from earlier. I asked him to rewrite the e-mail to protect his own identity. Here’s the slightly edited version:

I’m a teacher. Right now I teach at a charter school in a red state in a conservative part of the US. Before that, I taught in a small Christian fundamentalist school, the public schools of a Rustbelt state, and then served a rural school in one of the nation’s most disadvantaged regions.

I have a masters in education and a two undergraduate degrees, all with honors, all from state universities. Teaching is a second career for me; before that, I was in manual labor, retail, and mostly in specialty construction.

All of this to say, my path was not the typical one for a teacher.

I was not surprised to read the post you had up this morning about teachers throwing books away. Every school I have taught at has had an ambivalent attitude to literature for very different reasons.

The Christian school was terrified of anything that didn’t fit their fundamentalist beliefs, and as a very conservative Christian from a very different tradition, I can share that concern, but not endorse how it was carried out there.

The wokeness of the department of education for the public schools I have served would have been very proud of this teacher. At the little rural school I taught at, no one cared what I did. I could have had Black Masses in my classroom as long as the kids behaved and their test scores were good.

[NOTE: The reader originally had a graf here that described his current school. I have removed it at his request. — RD]

I despair at the fact that so many administrators, both religious and non, and educators see themselves as vanguards for both the right and left in ideological battles, rather than as those who seek to form the character and minds of young people. At the same time, there are still excellent educators — even liberal educators — but the process of being hammered by parents, and the pathologies of the children that have been damaged by the materialistic and pleasure-centered culture and their parents, is just wearisome. After many years of teaching, I’m ready to go back to manual labor.

When I was serving in a poor, isolated, rural population, our school was about 35-40 percent Native American. The poverty of soul and body, mind, and material needs were heartbreaking. The poverty of the soul of the better-off white students was just as awful. The church was a dead letter there, the richness of their European-American high culture a faint memory. The school was the only thing left holding the community together. Since we left it has fallen apart through the wokeness of a new administrator who sought to remove every trace of local history and community from the school, for no apparent reason whatsoever.

However, not all teachers, even liberals, are wokesters. One of the things I noticed in my public school work in all these different communities was that conservatives don’t do anything. They don’t involve themselves; they don’t fight, they don’t speak up; they just let the left have its way. Some have withdrawn from the system, but that is all.

The wokeness is everywhere: in small rural schools and conservative suburban neighborhoods too. The public schools are just deferred to by Christian and conservative parents, in part because parents don’t always realize what is going on, and in part because they don’t want the opprobrium of the neighbors. They don’t bother to show up.

The corrective of the charter school movement is minimal, because charter schools are captive to the desires of the child. Funding in most states and districts is dependent on enrollment. So, unless you are a charter school in a location where you are offering the only superior alternative, education becomes a game of pleasing the child. Children drive most parental decisions about where they go to school. If the child is happy, say parents, then the child can go to school here; if not, they can change schools. The non-woke charter schools end up in a balancing act between their student populations’ desires and the amount of parental support they receive. Again, what is billed as great education is often a reverse image of the left’s indoctrination, or an anodyne neutrality.

The problem is this: without a lack of a clear and articulate metaphysics of humanity and of a robust Christian faith, school reform is pointless. Without those two pieces to bind our culture together, educational choice (that doesn’t include vouchers to pay for a religious education) is a meaningless way to save education. In reality, about 35 percent of charter schools are better than the public option on test measures — and I’m glad for that 35 percent! But many of them are mired in a materialist philosophy, moral neutrality, or [NOTE: I have removed the line that was here at the request of the author. — RD]

I will end with a story, if you are still reading.

At one poor, mostly minority school where I taught, I was the entire English department. When I arrived, the students hadn’t had any real instruction for several years, and were in a state of complete rebellion. The classroom was full of yellowed novel sets, most of them pop-fiction from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, and a fair selection of classics that had never been used. Over three years, I built up a collection of the best of Western European and American literature, and replaced the sets of good books that were too fragile to entrust to students. I also expanded the collection with an excellent selection of novels and poetry and drama from the wider non-Western world.

I also felt morally obligated to include novels and anthologies that focused on Native American literature and local regional writers as well, to show the students that intellectual and artistic endeavors were as much a part of their culture as any other. I hoped that the high quality of great writing, diversity of thought, and the bedrock of the Western Canon would be a solid guide for them through the world of literature.

I was proud of my work there as a teacher. The 400 or 500 old books, such as classics that were too fragile to use as a class set, or were works of fiction that had little relevance to teaching a robust curriculum, I gave to the students. We had reading days on Fridays, when they had to go pick up a book that they had never seen before, and just read it. They were welcome to take as many titles as they would read. Those that remained were put out on a table at parent/teacher night and on sport nights for free. The last 200 or so that remained were given to the library and the charity thrift store.

A year after I left, a new teacher took most of the classic Western novels, (most of which were newly bought) and even some of the classics and recent-classics of world literature, as well as the local novels, and put them in the Dumpster because “they were not relevant to the kids’ lives.”

I received another letter this morning, this one from a friend, quoting his public schoolteacher wife. He writes:

She told me that over the past several years, the quality and rigor of the curriculum declined by 50 percent. They just voted again to water it down further, basically removing any rigorous demands on students. Quality is nonexistent. New teachers are barely literate themselves. It made her very upset. We are talking about a mere three-year span, in one of the highest ranking (and definitely the wokest) school systems in the US. That’s hell of a gradient — one could even call it free fall.

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Devils Of Manhattan

You might remember this from a post of mine about a year ago:

Now, that’s a set-up for me to tell you about a strange telephone call I received yesterday. I’ve hesitated about whether or not to blog about it. The caller, an old friend from whom I hadn’t heard in a decade or so, gave me permission to blog about it as long as I kept names and identifying details out of the story. He said others may draw hope from it. He wasn’t exactly sure why he felt the urge to call me about the matter, but he did.

Background: “Nathan,” as I’ll call my friend, is a devout Catholic who lives in a major US city, and who works in a sophisticated professional milieu. He is in early middle age, and a husband and father. He and his family go to mass daily, and confession weekly.

Nathan started his story with a jaw-dropping line: “For the past year, my wife has been under the care of an exorcist.”

I don’t know Nathan’s wife as well as I know him, but I can tell you that she is worldly and sophisticated, even as she is devout. She is one of the last people you would imagine having a problem like this.

Nathan told me the story of how things came to this point. I won’t give you too many details, out of an abundance of caution. It turns out that his wife had an eating disorder as a teenager, and tried to kill herself twice back then. Now, in the middle of her life, depression returned, but with certain strange characteristics that seemed … off. She began to despise religious things, in an inexplicable way. When she went to a “healing mass,” there was a manifestation that indicated something dark and alien was at work in her.

Catholic exorcists today work in a professional way, ruling out all other medical possibilities to explain the behavior before they start. The exorcism of Nathan’s wife has not been a single event, but has required multiple sessions, which are still going on (Father Gabriele Amorth, the late chief exorcist of Rome, has explained in his books how this works.) Nathan has been part of the rituals.

He told me that eight different spirits have manifested themselves through his wife. He’s been at this long enough now to discern which one is which. They revealed through the rituals that they entered into his wife’s family through her grandfather, who was involved with the occult in a ritualistic way. Nathan said that depending on which evil spirit manifests in a particular moment, his wife’s face contorts into expressions that he has never seen in her, despite their nearly two decades of marriage.

Mind you, Nathan is one of  the least woo-woo friends I have. Again, he works as what you might call a “symbolic analyst” in a very worldly occupation, and lives in one of the biggest and most secular cities in America. He’s been a faithful Catholic for as long as I’ve known him, but not especially interested in that mystical side of the faith.

“Once you’ve seen reality through the eyes of spiritual warfare,” he told me yesterday, “you can’t go back. It’s everywhere.”

He told me other detailed stories, including accounts of bizarre, poltergeisty things happening in their apartment, and his wife being unable to stand the presence of blessed objects (a classic sign of possession). Again, readers: if you knew these people, Nathan and his wife, you would be even more shocked by all this than you are now. This is the kind of family that takes European vacations, and lives a sophisticated cosmopolitan life. And yet this horror has overtaken them. The wife goes through periods in which she hears foul blasphemies, and feels compelled to commit suicide. In the exorcism sessions, Nathan says the demons, under compulsion from the exorcist, speak of these things — in particular, how they intend to destroy Nathan’s wife, and her family life.

When will she be free of them? The exorcist can’t say. The fight continues, in regular sessions. In our long phone conversation yesterday, Nathan says that this ordeal has taught him about the power of prayer, and of the Church’s weapons against these things. He knows that his wife is not his enemy, despite the things that sometimes come out of her mouth, and he is resolved to hold firm to fight for her, through his prayers, and to help her be free of these malicious intelligent spirits. He recommends this lecture by Father Chad Ripperger, a Catholic exorcist. This is the reality Nathan and his wife have been living for the past year.

Nathan, the sort of man who would have been played by Jimmy Stewart or Jack Lemmon in a 1950s movie, told me that having entered into this world, he has learned that more and more ordinary people like him and his wife are turning to exorcists. He has come to see that the demonic attacks on marriage and family are increasing — and he wants people to know that there is hope. But laying claim to that hope requires recognizing the nature of the battle.

Nathan and his wife — I’ll call her “Emma” — live in New York City. When I was in the city this week, I went to see them. I write what follows with Nathan’s permission.

Emma has completed the formal Catholic process to have a ritual exorcism (this, as distinct from the deliverance prayers that the exorcist had been saying over her, to limited effect). Part of that process was a psychiatric evaluation by a psychiatrist, to rule out mental illness or any other natural cause for this behavior. She passed that. I want to emphasize this: she has been formally examined by a psychiatrist, who has certified that there is no known medical or natural cause for the things that she is suffering, and that manifest themselves through her. They are still waiting on the cardinal’s approval. In the Catholic Church, no formal ritual exorcism can happen without express permission of the local bishop — which, in this case, is the cardinal.

(I invite you to read this 2016 Vanity Fair piece by the film director William Friedkin, best known for having made The Exorcist. In the piece, he writes about traveling to Italy to make a documentary about Father Gabriele Amorth, an elderly priest (who has since died) who was the chief exorcist of Rome. What Friedkin saw is what Emma is going through. Read down at least far enough to the point where Friedkin shows video he shot of an exorcism sessions involving an Italian woman, to two separate neurosurgeons back in New York. Neither one can explain what they see.)

I paid a call on Nathan and Emma at their apartment. Emma was even more beautiful than I remembered her in person … but she looked pale and tired. We sat and begin to talk. Nathan began our talk with a prayer. Her face betrayed signs of an internal struggle. Suddenly, her head swung back and to the left, her face creased, and a deep voice said through her, “F–king bitch!” She was instantly back to herself, and said weakly, “That’s not me.”

She didn’t really have to say that. It so clearly wasn’t her. If you didn’t know her, you would think that she was suffering from Tourette’s. But again, she has been examined in detail by a psychiatrist. She doesn’t have Tourette’s. Later, when Nathan brought out a relic that someone had given them, she reacted instantly, like a normal person would if someone had presented a poisonous viper. The deep voice demanded that Nathan get that thing away from it.

There was more. I have never seen anything like this in person. The sense of malice and destruction was intense. They intend to destroy Emma, and to take down as many people as they can. She told me that these evil spirits are constantly telling her to kill herself.

Nathan told me later that one of the demons that uses that particular language when Emma is about to share practical wisdom that she has gained from this awful experience. Indeed, that’s what Emma subsequently did. Despite all the scary stuff, I came away from this meeting profoundly inspired — more inspired than unsettled, let me emphasize.

Why? Because I don’t know that I have ever seen such strong faith. Both Nathan and Emma are so thoroughly committed to Jesus Christ. They know how this evil came into their lives — it started with Emma’s grandfather, who was a high-level Freemason — and passed through the family line. When Nathan and Emma were at Emma’s father’s deathbed last year, and called a priest in to do the last rites, the voices began coming out of him, and the growls, and the same curses. What their grandfather brought onto their family has been handed down through two generations, and destroyed the family in a number of ways. Nathan and Emma know that she will be liberated eventually — this is their conviction — but that for some mysterious reason, God is allowing her to suffer a while longer.

Here are their lessons for me, and for you readers (again, I’ve gotten Nathan’s permission to post this):

1. We are all engaged in spiritual warfare. It’s not just a metaphor. It’s happening all around us. They had no idea how real it was until it hit their family. They see especially other families, and marriages, being hit hard now. People should understand that there really is a spiritual dimension to these things.

2. One of the basic markers of it is unforgiveness. Emma said that’s how these entities take root in a person’s soul. There is always some wound that the enemy exploits.  She said all of us should scour our consciences to identify and renounce any and all unforgiveness — and to keep doing this, over and over. (They’re Catholic, so they recommend frequent confession.) If we hold on to anger and bitterness, even when we have been mistreated by others, we are giving evil spirits entree into our souls. Emma was emphatic on this point.

3. There is no substitute for prayer. These entities absolutely hate it. It causes them pain. People who live far away and pray for her — the entities know it, and it weakens their hold on her.

4. Embrace total humility. Be willing to suffer anything for the sake of Christ. Nathan has had to endure awful cruelties from the evil spirits that manifest in his wife. They curse and insult him. He has even been physically attacked by them, through her. When they manifested through her in my presence, he prayed quietly and steadily, forcing them to retreat. He knows that this is not his wife cursing him. He told me — and Emma reinforced this — that one should stay focused intensely on love, on nothing but love, and one should consider all the suffering one bears out of love as a gift. That is, as a share in Christ’s redemptive suffering. Things have gotten better for Emma since a visit to Rome and receiving prayers from an exorcist there, but at the height of it, Nathan told me that he was so exhausted that he didn’t really know what it meant to love his wife. Then he realized that love is not an emotion; love is an act. If he was so beaten down by his wife’s behavior, then he was going to keep showing her love anyway, and do it for the sake of Jesus Christ. He is her husband, and if he won’t be part of the fight for her, who will?

5. Along those lines, Emma said, “Keep your eyes locked on the Cross.” She explained that these demons will do their best to play on your weaknesses. They will tempt you to self-pity, or failing that, they will exploit your own weaknesses, sending thoughts of depression, anxiety, rage, self-hatred, and so forth, at you. She told me, “When that happens, you have to refuse those thoughts. You have to focus only on the Cross. That’s the only way through.”

Nathan and Emma believe firmly that the world is going through a time of intense spiritual turmoil now — more than usual. Where this is going, nobody knows for sure. As Catholics, they say they have witnessed, and do witness, the power of God manifested through the prayers of priests, and of the sacraments, and of invoking the names of great saints as enemies of the devil. All of these things are weapons that God has given us to fight our true Enemy, they said. People should use them. But the most important thing is to put yourself entirely in the hands of Jesus Christ, and humble yourself enough to allow the Holy Spirit to root out all hatred and unforgiveness in your heart. Anything less than that is working for the Enemy.

As I was leaving their place, I thought about the profound truth of that cliche: “Be kind, for everyone you know is fighting a great battle.” If you saw this couple walking down the street, you would barely notice them, except to say maybe, “What a nice looking pair.” Yet there’s a war for her soul going on inside of Emma, and Nathan is fighting this battle too in their home and in their marriage. As I told you, it was incredibly impressive to see the faith present in this suffering couple. Emma told me, “Believe me when I say that it was a blessing for all of this to come out. For so many years I’ve been fighting depression, and I thought that’s all it was. When these things” — the demons, she means — “came to the surface, it has been a horrible thing to deal with, but at least finally I could know what I was up against.” And get help. The overwhelming impression I had was not one of fright, but of hope — of hard-won hope. I came away both extremely sobered about the times and the nature of life, but also inspired to get my own spiritual life in order, following their advice. It is not possible to stand on the sidelines from a position of neutrality, they say. We are all in this fight whether we know it or not. It is better to know it.

When this ordeal is finally over, I believe Nathan and Emma are going to write a book about it, for the sake of sharing that hope with others. Nathan told me last year, when he first reached out to give me the news: “Once you’ve seen reality through the eyes of spiritual warfare, you can’t go back. It’s everywhere.” I get that. Once you’ve sat in an apartment in a very nice neighborhood of New York City, and seen and heard the things that I did this week, you can’t unsee them. I’ve got to change my life.

When I wrote to Nathan to share the text of this post, and to ask permission to publish it, he responded in part:

I would also add that God has supplied all the graces needed.  If you had told me two years ago that I would have been in this current position, I would have run in the other direction.  I have COMPLETE confidence that as long as I remain close to the sacraments and free of mortal sin, God will supply all of the grace and assistance needed.

Now, reader, believe this or not. It doesn’t hurt my feelings if you don’t believe it. I’m telling you, though, if you had sat there with me and saw and heard the things I saw and heard, you would find it hard to see the world in the same way. There are some of you who need to read this, and who need the hope in Nathan and Emma’s story.

 

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All Hail The Morning Light

Man, I needed that this morning. It’s glorious. Thanks to @andrewtwalk for the tip.

UPDATE: Look, the same outfit, Songs For Change, recorded this in 2011, with a different set of musicians. It’s just terrific — the Red Hot Chili Peppers as worldbeat:

UPDATE.2: I am a terrible person, a child of the 1980s: “Higher Ground” came into being as a Stevie Wonder song. It was covered by the Chili Peppers. I am so embarrassed…

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Trashing Unwoke Books

This week, dumpsters were filled with books that should have left decades ago @TWPSchools and replaced with engaging, relevant, culturally diverse literature. pic.twitter.com/MoRoV1txsL

— Melissa Barnett (@melissa_lbi) September 19, 2019

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This woman is the head of “English Language Arts” for the public schools in Washington Township, NJ. That’s right: the head of the English department for public schools in this town celebrates throwing books into the Dumpster. She’s a self-described “servant leader,” and apparently a Christian. Who throws unwoke books into the Dumpster so all the geniuses in her school (and they’re all geniuses) won’t be tainted by what’s in the pages:

In her school, students have “reading identities”:

Freshmen in Mrs. Lopresti’s classes @linwths started their week at a book tasting to pick their independent reading books! No better way to start the week with a joyful heart then talking to kids about their reading identities! @TWPSchools @twppride #TWPReads pic.twitter.com/xUtmmQu2d9

— Melissa Barnett (@melissa_lbi) September 9, 2019

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I got sucked into Mrs. Barnett’s Twitter feed, and read everything she posted this year. It’s a fascinating look into the mind of one high school English teacher. There is little evidence that she actually loves literature, but lots and lots of evidence that she loves education, and educational theory. In Mrs. Barnett’s school system, they’re all about “equity” in learning. They created a position for a guy, one Steve Gregor, to oversee the implementation of equity there — read all about it. It includes:

Gregor explained with the implementation of this new position, students can expect to see changes in the classroom-level from the fifth grade to high school level, resulting in a more differentiated and personalized approach to the delivery of instruction. This is a result of training teachers in LATIC — learner-active technology-infused classroom.

This teaching approach, according to Gregor, allows students to select individualized learning tasks that appeal to their specific learning style — such as using a podcast instead of writing or taking a test to show what they’ve learned.

Oh lord. Podcasts instead of writing and test-taking, because Bigotry. Teaching as “the delivery of instruction.” This all comes from Prof. Paul Gorski, whose genius (“The lit canon is white supremacy”) tops this blog entry. Mrs. Barnett retweeted this chart approvingly earlier this year:

Those poor children of Washington Township schools. The teachers responsible for their education are throwing old books into Dumpsters, and filling their minds with histories of privilege, oppression, and power. It’s all from Paul Gorski and his “Equity Literacy” idea, which is the Marxisization of teaching high school literature. Look at the Principles Of Equity Literacy:

An important aspect of equity literacy is its insistence on maximizing the integrity of transformative equity practice. That means not being lulled by popular diversity approaches and frameworks that pose no threat to inequity. The principles of equity literacy help us to ensure we keep a commitment to equity at the center of our work and conversation. Download and share these principles here

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Direct Confrontation Principle: There is no path to equity that does not involve a direct confrontation with inequity.

“Poverty of Culture” Principle: Inequities are primarily power and privilege problems, not primarily cultural problems, so equity requires power and privilege solutions, not just cultural solutions.

Equity Ideology Principle: Equity is more than a list of simple practical strategies; it is a lens and an ideological commitment.

Prioritization Principle: Each policy and practice decision should be examined through the question, “How will this impact the most marginalized members of our community?”

Redistribution Principle: Equity is about redistributing access and opportunity, so equity initiatives should be about redistributing access and opportunity.

#FixInjusticeNotKids Principle: Equity initiatives focus, not on fixing marginalized people, but instead on fixing the conditions that marginalize people.

One Size Fits Few Principle: Identity-specific equity frameworks (like “the culture of poverty” or group-level “learning styles”) almost always are based on stereotypes, not equity.

Evidence-Informed Equity Principle: Equity initiatives should be based on evidence of what works rather than trendiness.

Did I say “poor children”? I’m not talking about their income or social marginalization. Washington Township, a Philadelphia suburb, is 88 percent white, with a median family income that’s about $20,000 more than the US median family income. Only four percent of the population there lives below the poverty line. In 2008, US News & World Report called it one of the best American places to live. It’s prosperous and stable — and yet, the kids in the public schools are being taught to hate their civilization’s literature.

Podcasting instead of writing or taking a test. An English teacher cheering over trash bins full of icky unwoke books. What a crappy country we are creating!

Meanwhile, there’s always classical Christian education, which would probably reduce Mrs. Barnett and her colleagues to fits of foaming rage. Too many Greeks, not enough technology and educational theorizing.

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Murti-Bing Conservatism

In his great 1951 book The Captive Mind, the anti-communist dissident Czeslaw Milosz offered a striking concept to explain why so many people of Eastern Europe who should have known better became defenders of Communism: the Pill of Murti-Bing. Tony Judt explains this briefly:

Milosz came across this in an obscure novel by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Insatiability (1927). In this story, Central Europeans facing the prospect of being overrun by unidentified Asiatic hordes pop a little pill, which relieves them of fear and anxiety; buoyed by its effects, they not only accept their new rulers but are positively happy to receive them.

I wrote about the Pill of Murti-Bing five years ago, saying:

For Miłosz, Polish intellectuals who capitulated to communism and Soviet rule had taken the pill of Murti-Bing. It was what made their condition bearable. They could not stand to see reality, for if they recognized what was really happening in their country, the pain and shock would make life too much to take.

This is why people who have no financial or status tied up in protecting abuse of corruption within an institution can nevertheless be expected to rally around that institution and its leaders. Those who tell the truth threaten their Murti-Bing pill supply, and therefore their sense of order and well-being. To them, better that a few victims must be made to suffer rather than the entire community be forced to wean itself from Murti-Bing.

You can see how useful this concept can be as a tool of analysis. People in troubled churches take the Pill of Murti-Bing all the time. So do people in some troubled families, and other troubled institutions.

I’m thinking about the extent to which Murti-Bing can be applied to American conservatism — this, in context of the French-Ahmari argument. Let me be clear: I’m not saying below that what David French offers is Murti-Bing conservatism. I’m saying that it might be. I offer this as part of my own effort to figure out what I think of this debate.

As you might guess, I’m very sympathetic to Sohrab Ahmari’s claims that liberal proceduralism amounts to a slow-motion surrender to nihilism. That we need a “politics of the common good” (he sets his thoughts down more comprehensively here). His basic complaint against David French is that French’s skillful use of liberal proceduralism (specifically, First Amendment jurisprudence) to defend conservative causes really amounts to negotiating the terms of our capitulation. I think he’s pretty much right about that.

Two things hold me back from full-on endorsing Ahmarism — two points on which I think French is correct.

First, French points out that conservatives actually have won some important victories in court using the First Amendment — which is to say, using basic tools of liberal democracy. Are we sure we can afford to discard those? Are we sure we can afford to discard them in a polity that is becoming less and less Christian by the day? The First Amendment may soon be the only protection orthodox Christians have.

Second, what is the source of the common good to which Ahmari wants to appeal as the basis for a new politics? For Ahmari, a Catholic, the answer is clear, or at least clearer than it is to non-Catholics, and probably even Catholics who don’t agree with their own church’s teaching. Much has been made of Ahmari’s outrage over Drag Queen Story Hour. For Ahmari, DQSH stands as a condensed symbol of a worldview he finds repulsive. I’m 100 percent with him here. French doesn’t like DQSH, but he believes that the good of pluralism requires tolerating DQSH (and for secular lefties to tolerate Bible studies in public libraries).

In my view, healthy cultures would not permit DQSH; the founders of the movement say explicitly that their intention is to queer children (that is, to make their minds open to queerness) by helping them to “imagine a world without gender restrictions.” But I wonder: if a society has to ban DQSH, isn’t it already pretty far gone into decadence? In the recent past, it never would have occurred to most people to bring drag performers out of nightclubs and into libraries to present to little children. It’s an extremely perverse idea … but that’s where we are now. French, who is a constitutional lawyer by trade, no doubt has an important point when he says that the ability to ban DQSH would inevitably give the state the power to ban this or that expression of Christian piety. By defending the right of DQSH to exist, French, in his view, is defending the right of conservative Christians like himself to have the same privileges.

For Ahmari, this is a step too far. It is tolerating a moral and social evil. This is what liberalism has become. One is reminded of John Adams’s observation that the US Constitution was made for “a moral and religious people,” and that without that binding inner sense of restraint provided by moral and religious codes, human desire would tear through the Constitution “like a whale through a net.” If I understand him correctly, Ahmari is saying that we have arrived at the point at which unfettered human desire is destroying the social compact by obliterating the bases that people need to live in healthy, stable community.

Again, this is not about Drag Queen Story Hour per se. It’s about a vision of the Good, and to what extent that should set the bounds of our politics. For French, DQSH is not necessarily good in and of itself; the good is the system that permits people who enjoy that kind of thing to engage in it — the same system that gives conservative Christians the rights to do what we enjoy.

Here’s the thing: I believe, with Ahmari (and Alasdair MacIntyre), that we have lost a shared sense of the Good, and that because of that, we will soon lose the ability to govern ourselves. The sense of the Good that is emerging in the US is one that is hostile to moral, religious, and social conservatism, and favorable to radical individualism — especially sexual and gender individualism. Procedural liberalism cannot ultimately protect us from this.

On the other hand, what does Team Ahmari have to offer to replace decadent liberalism? To put a fine point on it: what do they have that could win the support of a majority in America, while not crushing the minority? After all, we might hate each other, but we have to live together somehow.

I believe that Frenchism can only hold the barbarians at bay for so long. The Left is becoming increasingly illiberal, and absent some unforeseen radical change, its worldview will have captured all the institutions, including the courts. The arguments David French makes may no longer persuade jurists. Conservatives who put their faith in the ability of liberal proceduralism to defend our interests will themselves be crushed.

That said … what else is there? What else is realistically available to conservatives now? I honestly don’t know. Hence my dilemma.

Listening the other day to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, I thought that whether or not you consider Orban a hero or a villain has to do with whether or not you believe that Hungary is fighting for its survival, or not. That principle is broadly applicable to the Western liberal democracies. If you believe that the system is basically sound, you will be inclined to David French’s point of view. If not, Ahmari’s stance will seem more sensible.

That’s why I’m on Team Ahmari in principle. What deeply undermines my confidence is the fact that we have lost the culture, and show no signs of getting it back. Again: in a morally sane society, Drag Queen Story Hour would not even occur to anybody. I often feel that many of my fellow conservatives have taken the Pill of Murti-Bing, and are willfully numb and blind to what is overtaking us, and maybe even celebrate it as the glory of individual liberty.

Related to the Pill of Murti-Bing in Milosz’s book is the concept of Ketman: the practice of being able to lie in public about what you really believe while concealing your private thoughts, and successfully managing the cognitive dissonance. Those conservatives who have not taken the Pill of Murti-Bing regarding the decadent liberal takeover of our culture are practicing Ketman in this sense: they know, they really do know deep down, that something is sick in American culture. But they rationalize it away. If they really faced their own fears, they couldn’t live in peace with them, and would have to do something.

Sohrab Ahmari refuses the Pill of Murti-Bing and Ketman both. But does he have a realistic idea of what we should do? I don’t know David French well enough to say whether or not he’s practicing Ketman, or popping Murti-Bing pills, but I’m going to assume that he isn’t. I’m going to assume, in charity (because I believe he’s a good man, as is Ahmari), that he simply believes that there is no alternative within our Constitutional and social order, and that to abandon procedural liberalism would fail, and leave Christians and other social conservatives far more vulnerable in this post-Christian culture.

I wish I could say he’s wrong about that. But I can’t. The problem is that Ahmari’s diagnosis is correct, but the disease may well lack a cure. The patient — our Republic — might be condemned to die. That’s a cheery thought. No wonder people want to take the Pill of Murti-Bing…

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A Checklist Of Hate

Hi everybody, I’m really sorry that I’ve been quiet here these past two days. I’ve been in New York City on TAC business, but I also had some other things I had to do. Most importantly, I had to get my visa sorted for my trip to Russia later this fall. I went to the consulate this morning, and began a long journey. The happy result is that I will have a visa, and my passport will be mailed to me with the visa in it. But man, did it ever take some doing. What an incredibly bureaucratic procedure. I’m glad I took care of it in person, though, despite the long delay. I probably would have screwed it up had I relied on mail alone. In fact, I know I would have; the “invitation document” that everyone going to Russia is required to have did not have “Jr” attached to my name. Had I relied on the mail, it would have delayed the entire thing so long that I might not have been able to go to Russia at all.

Anyway, I have a lot to get caught up on here. I’m about to board a plane for home, so I’ll be real quick with this. A reader sent this poster from the workplace. This appears in a state office in Oregon:

Read it closely. Notice all the things that are defined as “love” — which presumably means their opposite is “hate”. Don’t want to be an “ally”? You’re a hater. Don’t agree that “all forms of family” is family, even if you don’t say a word about it? Hater. Don’t want to “share power”? We know what you are, and it rhymes with mater. Aren’t “culturally flexible,” whatever the hell that means? Hatey McHaterface!

And so on.

This is a state agency. This is the face of therapeutic totalitarianism. The reader who sent it to me says that they are living in the closet in this agency, and that this poster and the ideology behind it seems like a serious escalation of ideological thought-policing.

UPDATE: So, I’m in an Atlanta airport hotel courtesy of Delta Airlines, which was late taking off from LaGuardia tonight. One of these days I am going to learn never, ever, ever to book a flight home that relies on the Baton Rouge leg of the journey being the day’s final flight there. I was at the back of the NYC-ATL plane, and huffed and puffed my fat self all over Hartsfield, and galumphed up to the gate just as the jet bridge was pulling away. I tell you this so nobody is wondering why I’m not posting heavily in the morning. I’ll be flying.

Anyway, look, I am really and truly gobsmacked by the fact that more than a few liberal readers of this blog can’t understand why this list is offensive, or at least objectionable. Let me put it to you like this: if this list defined love in ways that quoted the Bible and the Collected Writings Of Pope Benedict XVI and Billy Graham, I would still find it wildly inappropriate, and flat-out idiotic. This is the kind of cheesy office-therapeutic crap that liberals used to make fun of. I’m finding it hard not to get cussy here, but come ON, who in the $%*^@# cares about modulating the inner emotional states of state workers? The Office Of Equity And Multicultural Services of the State of Oregon does. It’s a do-nothing outfit that provides jobs for Grievance Studies degree holders, who make it their job to be political-cultural commissars.

Here’s what a workplace needs: men and women who work honestly, competently, and with respect for and courtesy towards others. “Love is understanding yourself” — whatever that means. “Love is believing my story” — but what if your story is unbelievable? “Love is being in ally-ship” — but if you don’t want to be in ally-ship, are you a hater?

Again: what business is it of the employer here to massage the feelings and internal subjective states of their employees? You’re a freaking state agency, not a New Age retreat center. It’s just so bloody condescending and infantilizing.

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