Rod Dreher's Blog, page 216

Jeffrey Epstein’s Hyoid

Prof. Rob Swatski identifies the hyoid bone (Rob Swatski YouTube channel)

Well, well, well. From the Washington Post:

An autopsy found that financier Jeffrey Epstein suffered multiple breaks in his neck bones, according to two people familiar with the findings, deepening the mystery about the circumstances around his death.

Among the bones broken in Epstein’s neck was the hyoid bone, which in men is near the Adam’s apple. Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they are older, according to forensics experts and studies on the subject. But they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the experts said.

More:

The revelation of Epstein’s neck injuries follows reports that officers at the Metropolitan Correctional Center broke protocol and failed to properly monitor him.

Corrections officers had not checked on Epstein for “several” hours before he was found hanging in his cell, a person familiar with the matter said, one of a series of missteps in the hours leading up to his death.

Veteran prosecutors and law enforcement officials were shocked that one of the most high-profile inmates in the country wasn’t more carefully watched. Barr said over the weekend he was “appalled” at serious “irregularities” in jail protocol, and he later transferred the warden to another facility.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

I am an internist.

I am sure that many medical students all across the country will testify to the fact that this very issue is a very common teaching point in Gross Anatomy in the very first semester of medical school.

It is exceedingly important to recognize that there are two different kinds of “hanging” and the injuries left behind are completely different.

The Old West “drop the floor out” 15 foot above the ground is the kind of hanging that comes to most people’s minds. The person in this case is instantly pithed. Their spinal cord is instantly severed between the fracture of their C1 C2 or C3 vertebra. The hyoid is also almost always snapped as well. Death would be rather instant. The diaphragm would be denervated and they would quit breathing instantly.

The victim has to be weighed ahead of time – and the number of knots the hangman places in the rope is based on their weight. The tightness of the rope guarantees the preferred outcome. Too few knots and the neck will not break – but rather they will just be smothered – a miserable way to die. Too many knots – and the fall from the drop will decapitate them. Just the right number of knots – and the person will have their neck broken as above – and the death will be clean and quick. Their weight is critical to the process. The preparation of the rope is quite a skill – and is not easily done by amateurs.

As you can imagine – this type of “hanging” is impossible to accomplish in a jail cell.

The other method is to tie the person up, place the noose over a tree – and kick the bucket out from under them – or have the horse gallop and leave them hanging. There is no meaningful fall. This will break ZERO bones. The victim will be left tied up and hanging – but their brain will slowly be starved of oxygen as the noose is tightened around the carotid arteries. They will slowly suffocate – and often there are seizures, involuntary movements – vomiting, urination and defecation for the next 10-15 minutes as the person died. A miserable way to die.

The most important thing to note about these two is that the second way described above would be the route taken by someone in a jail cell with sheets or clothes or whatever they had. I have worked in an inner city hospital system for decades – and the number of people who successfully suicide this way is vanishingly small unless they also dope themselves up with drugs. Why? The misery is so intense they always stop no matter how much they want to die. Also – in my entire career – I have never seen a single case like this where there were broken bones – including the hyoid.

Today – I had occasion to speak to an old friend of mine from residency who is the medical examiner in a major US city – and asked him had he ever seen a prison hanging suicide attempt with broken bones. His experience is 30 years. The answer is HELL NO.

The broken hyoid then is indeed the issue. A strangulation with hands or other instruments such as belts or ropes will actually often break the hyoid. (This is because the victim almost always will have their head bent back by the force – and the hyoid will be exposed right around the middle). In a jail cell by ones self, there is very little else that would break the hyoid. I have seen it damaged in car wrecks, sports injuries and skiing accidents – but not someone sitting in a jail cell. The bone itself is very thin and fragile. However, it is a very very difficult bone to bother in a normal human – it is mostly completely protected by the mandible (jaw bone) – one of the hardest and most solid bones in the human body.

What I am saying is this is very very fishy – this does not make sense – and I would never accept this report on a patient of mine.

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California To Become Yugoslavia

It is hardly a controversial opinion to state that the United States is disintegrating. To be more precise: the ties that bind us together as Americans are fraying, and even dissolving. I don’t believe that this is going to result in the political disintegration of America, as in the Civil War, but I could be wrong about that. The forces of disintegration grow stronger, and there are no counterforces of any potency. The media love to bang on about how Donald Trump is dividing the country by practicing racial politics, and they’re not entirely wrong about that. But I submit to you that nothing Donald Trump says will have remotely the impact that the State of California is about to have through revising its public education curriculum to fill it with Social Justice Warrior content, particularly on race.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

In actions that would affect more than 6.5 million California students, state lawmakers are poised to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement in high school and at Cal State universities, raising the stakes for a team of educators drafting the model curriculum, those who are arguing for changes to it, and also for critics — who see an academic field dominated by one-sided, insular political correctness and separatism.

More:

The high school requirement — the first such in the nation, according to a legislative analysis — appears to have broad backing among Sacramento lawmakers and beyond. A separate bill, mandating an ethnic studies class for every Cal State student, has drawn a mixed reaction at campuses. Although there is wide support for ethnic studies courses, some Cal State faculty and administrators strongly oppose a state requirement. The public’s chance to comment on the model curriculum closes Thursday.

“California is committed to getting this work right,” Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the state Board of Education, said in a letter to the Los Angeles Times. “We will not accept a curriculum that fails to address difficult issues in a way that promotes open-mindedness and independent thought — skills our students need to understand vital societal and civic forces.”

At its core, supporters say, ethnic studies classes teach students how to think critically about the world around them, “tell their own stories,” develop “a deep appreciation for cultural diversity and inclusion” and engage “socially and politically” to eradicate bigotry, hate and racism. This description, from the draft of the model curriculum, is meant to guide California K-12 educators in creating coursework whether or not the new graduation requirement becomes law.

Among those who say the proposed curriculum falls short of its lofty goals is Williamson M. Evers, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution , based at Stanford.

“Instead of an objective account of the history of ethnic groups and their current situation, this is a biased portrait emphasizing suffering and victimization, serving as a kind of road map to create ideological activists based on racial identity,” Evers said. “Will you be graded on having the politically correct answers?”

Among other things, Evers objects to the association of capitalism with forms of oppression. He also is put off by the academic language that has grown up around the field, which employs such terms as “herstory” and “hxrstory” to replace “history.”

The curriculum’s supporters don’t deny that it’s politicized:

Supporters of ethnic studies embrace their intensely political focus. The model curriculum dives right into how the Trump administration has handled unaccompanied immigrant children: “Rather than reunifying children with family members, family members are being detained and possibly deported for immigration violations. Furthermore, the administration is trying to roll back existing legal protections for the length of stay and quality of treatment at immigration detention centers.”

“We are teaching an antiracist curriculum,” Espiritu said. “We are trying to teach students what is oppression, what are systems of oppression, how do they interact with minorities.”

Who is “they”? Answer: white students. The purpose of this program is to indoctrinate white students into the claims of the Grievance Studies ideologues. There’s anti-Semitic stuff in it too, by the way. Read the entire story for more.

Here’s a link to the “model curriculum” put forth by the state. I strongly urge you to read it. Here are some excerpts:

At its core, the field of Ethnic Studies is the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States. Further, it is the xdisciplinary [sic], loving, and critical praxis of holistic humanity – as educational and racial justice. It is from communities of color and our intergenerational worldviews, memories, experiences, identities, narratives, and voices. It is the study of intersectional and ancestral roots, coloniality, hegemony, and a dignified world where many worlds fit, for present and future generations.

The field critically grapples with the various power structures and forms of oppression, including, but not limited to, white supremacy, race and racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, islamophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia, that continue to impact the social, emotional, cultural, economic, and political experiences of Native People/s and people of color.

Ethnic Studies is xdisciplinary, in that it variously takes the forms of being interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, undisciplinary, and intradisciplinary. As such, it can grow its original language to serve these needs with purposeful respellings of terms, including history as herstory and women as womxn, connecting with a gender and sexuality lens, along with a socioeconomic class lens at three of its intersections. Terms utilized throughout this document, which may be unfamiliar to new practitioners of the field, are defined in the glossary.

Oh man. Here we go. More:

Ethnic Studies courses, teaching, and learning will

cultivate empathy, community actualization, cultural perpetuity, self-worth, self-determination, and the holistic well-being of all participants, especially Native People/s and people of color;

celebrate and honor Native People/s of the land and communities of color by providing a space to share their stories of struggle and resistance, along with their intellectual and cultural wealth;

center and place high value on pre-colonial, ancestral, indigenous, diasporic, familial, and marginalized knowledge;

critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society;

challenge imperialist/colonial hegemonic beliefs and practices on the ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized levels;

connect ourselves to past and contemporary resistance movements that struggle for social justice on the global and local levels to ensure a truer democracy; and

conceptualize, imagine, and build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance, critical hope, and radical healing.

Here, from the “Sample Course Model” section, is an overview of the general Ethnic Studies course:

Sample Key Concepts of This Course:

agency
capitalism/class/classism
colonialism/imperialism
economic/political/social/cultural
four I’s of oppression – ideological, institutional, interpersonal and internalized
gender
hegemony/counter hegemony
humanization/dehumanization
ideology
indigeneity
intergenerational trauma and healing
resistance
patriarchy/sexism/heteropatriarchy/cis-heteropatriarchy
race/racism
white supremacy
xenophobia

The document gets into detail about what it would mean to implement study of these concepts in classrooms. It is entirely ideological, and doesn’t even try to pretend otherwise.

Notice this definition:

Interpersonal Oppression: Interactions between people where people use oppressive behavior, insults or violence. Interpersonal racism is what white people do to people of color up close—the racist jokes, the stereotypes, the beatings and harassment, the threats, the whole range of personal acts of discrimination.Similarly, interpersonal sexism is what men to do to women—the sexual abuse/harassment, the violence directed at women, the sexist jokes, ignoring or minimizing of women’s thinking, etc. Many people in each dominant group are not consciously oppressive. They have internalized the negative messages about other groups, and consider their attitudes towards other groups quite normal.

Got that? Racism is what white people do to nonwhites. Sexism is what men do to women. Only whites can be racist. Only men can be sexist.

Imagine what it’s going to be like to be a white male kid in these classrooms. Imagine what it’s going to be like when you get outside the classrooms, and have to interact with other students who have been instructed by teachers to think of you as evil because you are white and male, and that all the problems your non-white, non-male classmates suffer are ultimately the fault of people like you.

You think I’m making this up? Read the documents.

From the Glossary section, here’s one of the concepts the teachers want to get across:

Accompliceship – the process of building relationships grounded in trust and accountability with marginalized people and groups. Being an accomplice involves attacking colonial structures and ideas by using one’s privilege and giving up power and position in solidarity with those on the social, political, religious, and economic margins of society. This is in contrast to the contested notion of allyship which is often performative, superficial, and disconnected from the anticolonial struggle.

If this passes — and according to the LAT, it has wide support in the California legislature — the public schools in California will undertake to teach students the SJWs consider to be “privileged” (whites, males, Christians) to capitulate to the power of ethnic and other groups the SJWs consider to be “marginalized.” According to this Marxist ideology, “justice” is about power relations between groups.

This is what the State of California is likely to be teaching its students.

Again: read the documents if you doubt me. The leftists are going to destroy that state by institutionalizing ethnic hatred. Serious question to California readers, white and non-white both: why would you stake a future in a state that is forcing its students to drink this poison?

The reader who tipped me off about this does not live in California, but rather in a very blue city in a red state. He says of the proposed California curriculum:

This is advocacy pure and simple, the opposite of inductive study of facts and reasoning, intentionally warping history, and it will destroy the institutions that follow it.

I’m supportive of Benedict Option thinking, but don’t we have an obligation to fight too? I feel like in my life I sort of live out both approaches. I fight and vote one way, but I don’t plan on it getting better any time soon, and I’m not going to sacrifice my children to it — so they will never be exposed to this sort of nonsense — but I’m also paying a lot of property taxes to fund this sort of nonsense. Left-wingers took over institutions in a generation, shouldn’t conservatives even try?

I don’t know — California may be a lost cause (and anyway, the Benedict Option is about religion and culture, not ethnic conflict). But it’s not a lost cause in other states. Are there any Republican state politicians who would be willing to fight this openly, knowing that they will be demonized as white supremacists in the media? Any Democratic state politicians willing to do so? I’m 100 percent in favor of fighting when and where we can. It’s not just about what happens in schools. The kids whose minds become warped by this radical ideology will go out into the world and take control of institutions, companies, and government, where they will turn it into laws and policies.

These radical leftists and the California state legislators who do their bidding are laying the groundwork for civil strife. But somehow, it’s Donald Trump’s fault. Right.

UPDATE: PEG responds to a tweet by a member of the New York Times editorial board, about a massive new project the paper has debuted:

If this is true, then the only moral response is to hate America and to want to destroy all its institutions to replace them with ones based on diametrically opposed values. There’s no middle ground. You must either hate America or be a white supremacist. https://t.co/U05piVG9gF

— PEG (@pegobry) August 15, 2019

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Free speech, the rule of law, freedom of religion obviously: these things (“what made America exceptional”) are white supremacy.

— PEG (@pegobry) August 15, 2019

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This is what America’s most important newspaper wants to say. It is literally insane, it is a lie, and it is incredibly, incredibly destructive. More than anything Trump has done or said.

— PEG (@pegobry) August 15, 2019

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Meanwhile, a professor at the Penn Graduate School of Education is making sure that his Ivy League pedagogues enter into the profession hating America:

The Founding Fathers were white nationalist terrorists.

Until we reckon with that fact we will never be able to move forward.

— Nelson Flores (@nelsonlflores) August 6, 2019

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Evangelicals’ Trump Shield

Elizabeth Bruenig spent some time recently down in Texas, talking to Evangelicals about whether or not they’re going to support Donald Trump in 2020. Her Washington Post story is full of nuance, and well worth reading. There’s something in it about Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, that is important. He’s the Trumpiest of all the pro-Trump Evangelicals, but his take on the Trump phenomenon is darker (and, by my lights, more accurate) than you might think:

Could it take a decidedly worldly man to reverse the fortunes of evangelicals who feel, for whatever host of reasons — social, racial, spiritual, political — that their earthly prospects have significantly dimmed?

Jeffress didn’t think so, but not for the reasons I would have guessed. “As a Christian, I believe that regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C., that the general trajectory of evangelicalism is going to be downward until Christ returns,” he explained. “If you read the scripture, it’s not: Things get better and better and more evangelical-friendly or Christian-friendly; it is, they get worse and more hostile as the culture does. … I think most Christians I know see the election of Donald Trump as maybe a respite, a pause in that. Perhaps to give Christians the ability and freedom more to share the gospel of Christ with people before the ultimate end occurs and the Lord returns.”

It was strange to think of Trump as a bulwark against precipitous moral decline. After all, he appears to have presided over a more rapid coarsening of news and discourse than the average candidate. Even if you count modern history as a story of dissolution and degeneracy, few, if any, other world leaders have launched as many headlines containing censored versions of the word pussy.

But Jeffress didn’t see Trump pausing the disintegration of evangelical fortunes by way of personal virtue — or even cultural transformation. He spoke instead of “accommodation,” perhaps alluding to the kind of protections announced only a few weeks after our talk by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, which safeguards the jobs of health-care workers who object to participating in certain procedures for religious reasons. Rather than renewing a culture in peril, in other words, Jeffress seemed to view Trump as someone who might carve out a temporary, provisional space for evangelicals to manage their affairs.

I really did believe that Pastor Jeffress believed in Trump earnestly, in that conventional Evangelical “Take America Back For Jesus” way. After all, it was his church’s choir that performed that “Make America Great Again” song that its choir director wrote. When I spoke with him last fall in LaGuardia Airport, he hinted strongly that his view of Trump and the Christian churches’ future was more pessimistic than people think, but that conversation was not on the record, so I didn’t write about it. Now he’s said it on the record to Liz Bruenig.

What a remarkable thing it is for a Southern Baptist pastor of his stature to take such a bearish stance on America’s future. I sent him a copy of The Benedict Option after we met. If Pastor Jeffress really is that pessimistic about the church in post-Trump America, I hope he will read it and start preparing the people in his congregation for hard times in the near future.

As I’ve maintained all along, the best reason for Christians to vote for a barbarian like Donald Trump is that his administration grants us time and space to prepare for what’s to come. It sounds like Jeffress has come to pretty much the same conclusion as I do in The Benedict Option: that taking the longer view, this post-Christian culture is not likely to be turned around, and that if the faithful can read the signs of the times, they will embrace ways of living that build resilience and resistance into themselves, their families, and their churches.

Judging by his comments to Bruenig, Jeffress does not believe that Trump (or anybody) is going to Make America Great Again. Rather, he’s become very pessimistic about the future, and believes that Trump at best is only going to forestall the inevitable. I don’t want to read too much into what he told Bruenig, but I think this is true.

Bruenig didn’t only talk to pro-Trump Evangelicals, let me be clear. What I found refreshing about her piece, particularly given her own politics (she’s a progressive Catholic) is that she allows for the possibility that Evangelicals who take the despairing pro-Trump line are … right. Right in the sense that they correctly see what the future looks like for people like them.

More from her piece:

As to the cultural facts on the ground, Jeffress might have something of a point: Overall, American culture is hardly trending toward adherence to evangelical beliefs, with approval of same-sex marriage steadily rising among all religious groups (even evangelicals), religious affiliation quickly dropping, and support for legal abortion lingering at all-time highs. Jeffress is hardly alone in believing that evangelicals need some sort of special accommodations from a society that doesn’t share their values and that they feel persecuted by; according to a Pew Research Center survey released this year, roughly 50 percent of Americans believe evangelicals face some or a lot of discrimination, including about a third of Democrat-leaning respondents. If the rhetoric of spiritual renewal that at times illuminated the Bush presidency has ultimately faded, it makes sense that a figure such as Trump should inherit its dimming twilight and all the anger, despair and darkness that dashed dreams entail.

And:

Which raises a series of imponderables: Is there a way to reverse hostilities between the two cultures in a way that might provoke a truce? It is hard to see. Is it even possible to return to a style of evangelical politics that favored “family values” candidates and a Billy Graham-like engagement with the world, all with an eye toward revival and persuasion? It is hard to imagine.

Or was a truly evangelical politics — with an eye toward cultural transformation — less effective than the defensive evangelical politics of today, which seems focused on achieving protective accommodations against a broader, more liberal national culture? Was the former always destined to collapse into the latter? And will the evangelical politics of the post-Bush era continue to favor the rise of figures such as Trump, who are willing to dispense with any hint of personal Christian virtue while promising to pause the decline of evangelical fortunes — whatever it takes? And if hostilities can’t be reduced and a detente can’t be reached, are the evangelicals who foretell the apocalypse really wrong?

Read the whole thing. It’s really worthwhile.

In a post I wrote a few months back, titled “Trump the Katechon” (katechon here means “the force that holds back chaos and disaster”), I explored the idea that Jeffress seems to endorse: that the meaning of Trump is that he is delaying the small-a apocalypse for conservative Christians. In the piece, I talk about how blind many progressives are to their own side’s hostility to social and religious conservatives, and how that blindness prevents them from understanding why people who think Trump is a bad man would vote for him anyway, solely out of self-protection. As a Trump-voting Christian lawyer I met recently said to me, “Donald Trump is going to embarrass me every day of the year, but unlike the other side, he doesn’t hate my faith, and seek to do me harm.”

In that post, I quoted the #NeverTrump Evangelical Erick Erickson, explaining why he has flipped, and will be voting for Trump in 2020:

We have a party that is increasingly hostile to religion and now applies religious tests to blocking judicial nominees. We have a party that believes children can be murdered at birth. We have a party that would set back the economic progress of this nation by generations through their environmental policies. We have a party that uses the issue of Russia opportunistically. We have a party that has weaponized race, gender, and other issues to divide us all while calling the President “divisive.” We have a party that is deeply, deeply hostile to large families, small businesses, strong work ethics, gun ownership, and traditional values. We have a party that is more and more openly anti-Semitic.

The Democrats have increasingly determined to let that hostility shape their public policy. They are adamant, with a religious fervor, that one must abandon one’s deeply held convictions and values as a form of penance to their secular gods.

On top of that, we have an American media that increasingly views itself not as a neutral observer, but as an anti-Trump operation. The daily litany of misreported and badly reported stories designed to paint this Administration in a negative light continues to amaze me. Juxtapose the contrast in national reporting on the President and race or Brett Kavanaugh and old allegations with the media dancing around the issues in Virginia. Or compare and contrast the media’s coverage of the New York and Virginia abortion laws with their coverage of this President continuing the policies of the Obama Administration at the border, including the Obama policy of separating children from adults. Or look now at how the media is scrambling to cover for and make excuses for the Democrats’ “Green New Deal,” going so far as to suggest that maybe, just maybe, the outline of policy initiatives was an error or forged.

One does not have to pretend that Donald Trump is a good man in order to conclude that whatever his sins and failings, he is less of a danger to the things that matter most to conservatives than any conceivable Democrat. To be sure, there will be some conservative Christians who use the same rationale to vote for the Democratic candidate — that is, concluding that no matter how bad the Democrat is in important ways, Trump is worse, and should be turned out of office.

Hey, I understand that reasoning! I really do. What I don’t get is why it’s so easy for people to understand why, say, black Americans vote in defense of their perceived interests, or Latinos do, or gay people do, and so forth … but it is considered appalling when white Evangelicals vote in defense of theirs.

I have decided that I can’t do what I did in 2016, and stay on the sidelines, even though my vote doesn’t really count in a solid red state like Louisiana. If I end up voting against Trump, it will be because I have judged him even worse than the Democrats. If I end up voting for Trump, it will be because I have judged the Democrats as even worse. Either way, it will be a vote from despair. I wish it were otherwise, but rose-colored glasses get in the way of seeing things as they actually are.

Some friends of mine argue that conservative Christian support of Trump is going to make the inevitable backlash that much worse. They might be right. I expect it to be bad, for sure. If my friends are wrong, they’re wrong only because the anti-Christian sentiments and policies from the Left were going to be harsh even if we’d elected a conventional Republican president. Anyway, read Liz Bruenig’s piece. One way or another, the next decade is going to be very difficult for Evangelical Christians, both internally and externally. And not just for Evangelicals…

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Building The Fortifications

David French, who is Evangelical, has a theory about why some of these big-name pop-culture Evangelicals are losing their faith. Excerpt:

As our culture changes, secularizes, and grows less tolerant of Christian orthodoxy, I’m noticing a pattern in many of the people who fall away (again, only Sampson knows his heart): They’re retreating from faith not because they’re ignorant of its key tenets and lack the necessary intellectual, theological depth but rather because the adversity of adherence to increasingly countercultural doctrine grows too great.

Put another way, the failure of the church isn’t so much of catechesis but of fortification — of building the pure moral courage and resolve to live your faith in the face of cultural headwinds.

In my travels around the country, one thing has become crystal clear to me. Christians are not prepared for the social consequences of the profound cultural shifts — especially in more secular parts of the nation. They’re afraid to say what they believe, not because they face the kind of persecution that Christians face overseas but because they’re simply not prepared for any meaningful adverse consequences in their careers or with their peers.

This is exactly true — and this is the main reason I wrote The Benedict Option. The other day on this site, some commenter made what is by now a familiar remark, about the secular left: “They’re not going to let us do the Benedict Option.”

People like that have this mistaken idea that the Benedict Option is about retreating to some sort of redoubt in the mountains after the secularist takeover. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It is about small-o orthodox Christians preparing ourselves and our children right here, right now, for facing adverse consequences in our careers, in our studies, and in social settings. It is about better catechesis, certainly, but it is more about formation, which is to say, discipleship.

You will be seriously tested. All of us will be. How will you hold up? What makes you think that you’re not going to temporize and rationalize?

French’s blog post brought to mind a quote that I cite a lot in this space. It was something a professor at a conservative Evangelical college told me. He said that 99 percent (his estimation) of the students there have been thoroughly formed by the emotivism of church youth group culture. When they leave campus, and get into the real world, and face challenges to their faith, they will collapse. The professor said specifically that they’re not going to know what to do when someone tells them that their Christian convictions are “mean.”

(You shouldn’t read this as a critique specific to Evangelicals. The data, both scientific and anecdotal, show that Catholic college students are significantly worse off than Evangelical youth. See Christian Smith on this topic.)

I posted yesterday about a ridiculous article in Outside magazine celebrating a drag queen who wears high heels in the great outdoors. A younger reader commented:

I  shared this article with my roommate, his reaction was so ordinary that you would have thought it was an article about the life cycle of water; absolutely nothing is wrong with it, more than not being “wrong” it seemed to him to be “good”.

For all those who rip on the baby boomers (I do so myself) you just wait for the next generation to take the reins. Rod is fighting the good fight but we are 10 years away from being utterly obliterated by this.

Is there nothing the broad queering of American life will leave alone?

Many people think this is somehow a fringe movement; that a unique band of freaks is driving this train, but that view is mistaken. Outdoor magazine readers like these stories, like my roommate, the idea of ever increasing sexual boundaries excites them. It is not just a way to virtue signal, they take pleasure in these stories in the same manner many of us take pleasure in seeing someone baptized.

For the readers who will mock this lunacy, don’t, because the sexual revolution v2 clearly has the influence to converge even a magazine who’s mission couldn’t be farther away from sexualization. You laugh, blink, look again, and your own cherished institution/magazine/club is doing the same thing.

For the readers who claim that this is a nothing-burger, don’t, because the sexual revolution v2 clearly has the influence to converge even a magazine who’s mission couldn’t be farther away from sexualization. You deny it’s happening, and then deny it again when it happens somewhere else.

Yep. Signs of the times.

UPDATE: This e-mail just came in from a 21-year-old Catholic reader, who gave me permission to post it:

I’ve been following your blog for the last two years, read the Benedict Option three times, and am looking forward to your next book on tech companies. A consistent theme in BenOp and some of your posts is MTD or something related to it. Considering MTD and the recent mass shooting tragedies, I wish to share some thoughts.

I am no stranger to MTD. In high school, I was active in the “Catholic Charismatic Renewal,” and attended charismatic youth conferences. Much of the religious content we were taught through the CCR was vapid and poisonous. What I am referring to as “vapid and poisonous” covers several things, but I will strike on two things: trust in God and chastity.

1) Trust in God has always been a weak spot in my spiritual armor. Whenever I was prayed over at rowdy meetings, and the leader’s intended result by uttering (vain?) words to God didn’t happen, I was blamed for not trusting in God enough. Generally speaking, I suffered with this notion for years that if I did not trust God hard enough, He would not answer my prayers. I recall little emphasis on God as love and mercy, and had a vision of God as a laughing tyrant.

2) No one taught me the positive beauty of Christian chastity. Every chastity talk I was forced through from 7th to 12th grade was a rattling off of the usual no-no’s, weird fixations on pornography addiction, and getting “chastity cards”. No minister, and I repeat, no minister, talked about the beauty of love, the greatness of abstinence, or the necessity of Christian courtship. It was almost implied that being attracted to a woman was treading on dangerous ground. This mindset strangled me for years, scared me from dating, and might have been partially responsible for my first attempt at dating to fail.

Once I got to college, following a near apostasy at the end of high school, I embraced Catholic traditionalism. I found in the traditionalist expression of the Catholic faith real answers and a renewed desire for God’s presence in my life. My trust in God began to strengthen. Recently, my understanding of chastity, courtship, and marriage was corrected by Fr. T.G. Morrow’s “Christian Dating in a Godless World.”

Where am I going with this? Well, MTD, in my case above, was veiled with a pseudo-Roman Catholic veneer. How one felt in prayer was strongly over-emphasized. It was implied that consolation meant God’s favor, and desolation meant God’s disfavor. In addition, discerning the voice of God was reduced to a hit-and-miss clockwork: if you missed it, then He won’t speak again. In modern Catholicism, I can tell you that this principle infects the minds of young men who want to be priests; there is vocation literature which suggests that a man must wait and wait until God speaks. While I agree that a certain spiritual stillness and silence makes one more conducive to hearing God, I don’t think that’s what the vocation literature was aiming at.

MTD creates a dangerously shallow spirituality. Modern Christianity is rejected as ridiculous by society because it comes off as ridiculous. There is a compromise which the faith made with the world and makes the two at least blurred, at most indistinguishable. All the shallowness of the faith and the uselessness of many clergy cause people to turn to unhealthy means of social identity and sanctity. This is what happened with the Dayton and El Paso killers. Christianity, especially Catholicism, can only be taken seriously again when it stops taking the trappings of postmodernism, rejects them, and replaces it with historical Christian doctrine and liturgy; many Catholics, even at my Catholic school, don’t seem to value or understand the need of liturgical solemnity, and I am convinced that liturgical iconoclasm greatly fosters MTD (and sexually abusive clergy, but that’s another rant). I fear the falling away of my peers from the faith because of MTD and the possibility of it creating among them ideological extremists, incels, failed engagements and divorce, and atheists.

These are my thoughts as a Gen-Z Catholic.

UPDATE.2: From a reader:

As a British Christian who has spent many years enjoying friendship and fellowship with American Christians, I have often found them to be a bit naive in regard to the nature of Christianity in America. Both in the US and in the UK there seems to be pervading attitude amongst American Christians that while the US will ultimately face the challenges of a ‘post-Christian’ world, those challenges are 30 or 40 years down the road and, for the moment, the American faith is strong, valid and a bastian from which much confidence can be taken.

And yet, if anything the pace of change in America is such that I think the US has already overtaken the UK in terms of moving beyond Christianity. We – as in the UK – are now in danger of seeing the climate of faith in Britain accelerate to a more aggressive ‘post-Christian’ reality because of the cultural waves coming from America, be they secular or Christian.

I mentioned this to an American pastor at a church in the UK – who has also founded an American-UK exchange programme which seeks to place Americans in UK churches to both serve those communities and learn about the ‘post-Christian’ future – and he responded with utter confusion. Even angry frustration. He was adamant that the US is decades from any form of new faith reality and that it was still the great leader of global Christianity. Which baffled me equally.

Perhaps the pace of rapid change is rooted in the actual reality of the American churches. There are, of course, many good, great, and excellent churches and many faithful people, but my limited experience in the US itself revealled a faith lacking in depth. There was an incredible Christian culture (from a UK perspective), churches on every corner, and vast churches drawing thousands every week. But no-where was there an understanding of the gospel. Instead of meek humility there was Christian thrash metal. Instead of people encouraging one another in Scripture over coffee, there was a school bus with a jet engine. All very strange.

But yes. To me America has already become something else and is changing rapidly. But to many Americans – Godly, faithful folk – all they see is the New Jerusalem. It’s a strange thing.

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The Controlling Power Of Big Data

I’m working this morning on the chapter of my new book in which I talk about how the power and ubiquity of data mining, and the technology that supports it, puts us in an unprecedented position regarding vulnerability to totalitarianism. Just saw this column in the NYT talking about how much health data is available to companies. Excerpts:

I initially got on the phone with Sobhani to get a sense of how our medical devices might be compromised. But the discussion quickly veered into different territory. She argued that our focus on medical data as the information coming out of connected pacemakers isn’t nearly as vulnerable as the information coming from far less secure sources. There’s a bigger security risk here, she argued, saying “all our data is health data.”

What Sobhani is talking about is a relatively new field called digital phenotyping, which was coined at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. It means taking information from our digital behaviors — on websites, via our phones — and using it to gain insight into potential health issues. “People don’t realize that small data points monitored continuously can be very predictive of behaviors and health and that’s why I’m worried,” Sobhani said. She noted research that suggests early Parkinson’s motor issues might be more accurately detected by typing patterns on keyboards. And she mentioned one initial study tying language in social media posts and Facebook likes that accurately predicted depressive episodes.

Social media companies and marketers use this kind of metadata as a way to predict our behaviors all the time; for example, using shopping behaviors, companies often try to gauge whether someone is pregnant. It only makes sense that as technology encroaches deeper into our lives and data analysis gets better, more brazen researchers and organizations would try to glean insights. In such a world, Sobhani argues, even some of our most trivial data — the way our eyes move in a video clip — could be thought of as health data. “As a researcher, I think about the Amazon Echo and if our group had continuous data from voice. We’d learn so much — and I don’t just mean from the emotional content but from the language analysis and things like pauses in your speech.”

What if your health insurance company, as a purchaser of data, has reason to suspect that you are suffering from a particular condition before you do, and decides to cut you off? [UPDATE: A number of readers have pointed out that the ACA forbids this. Sorry for the mistake. — RD]

If this topic interests you, read Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism.

Very few of us understand what’s happening, because it is hard to comprehend. This quote — “People don’t realize that small data points monitored continuously can be very predictive of behaviors and health and that’s why I’m worried” — ought to be lit in flashing neon. Zuboff explains in detail how this works. Essentially, tech companies are constantly mining bits of data from our online activities — which include, for example, every time you pay for something with a debit or credit card, and everywhere you drive with location services turned on in your mobile phone. They have gotten very, very good at using this data to predict what you like and what you’re going to do. As Sobhani says, they are going to be able to detect potential health issues using this data and technology.

Last month in Poland, I spoke to a young, very successful tech entrepreneur, who told me that the technology is getting so sophisticated that the algorithms will “know” what we think before we do, and will figure out how to nudge us in particular ways, without our being aware that we are being directed to reach certain conclusions, and to carry out certain behaviors. We will be unfree, but have no awareness of that fact. This is not science fiction. This is coming, and is almost here.

I’m encountering some conflicting data myself in my interviews with people who grew up under communism. Most of them tell me that they knew that their societies were being run by liars and tyrants, and that knowledge allowed them to build internal resistance. But the first person I interviewed who grew up in the Soviet Union told me that nobody in her environment really understood the extent of the lies and manipulation. Why? She said that unless you lived in a major city (she did not), you had no way of getting outside the totalitarian information environment to compare what they told you with the way the world really was. In the major cities, you stood a chance of getting bits and pieces of information from the West, or at least hearing of dissidents. Where she lived, it was a total Soviet-controlled information environment. People didn’t know that life could be otherwise.

Obviously that kind of information environment is impossible to impose on us today. Would-be totalitarian controllers in our time and place would have to convince us that we are seeing the truth, and living in the truth, amid a radical diversity of information and information sources. In Soviet totalitarianism, the information was top down — and this was possible when the state controlled the information environment. Now, the information environment is vastly more complex and integrated, involving to-and-fro, from countless different directions. A totalitarian controller would have to massage the message.

This may well be easier to do than you think. Hannah Arendt, in her Origins Of Totalitarianism, says that one precursor to totalitarianism is a people giving up on the idea of Truth, and the importance of Truth, and instead choosing to affirm truth claims that affirm what they already believe. If a person, and a society, comes to believe that Truth is only an ideological construct, they prepare themselves for the controllers. If all digital reality is virtual, then it can be whatever we want it to be. And if the controllers know how to make us want what they want, without us knowing that we are being manipulated, we are in a world of trouble.

I repeat what the anti-communist dissident Kamila Bendova told me a couple of months ago in Prague: That there is no such thing as the innocent compilation of one’s personal data. “You can’t have lived through what we lived through and believe otherwise,” she said (I’m paraphrasing). “Sooner or later, that information is going to be used against you.”

UPDATE: From CNBC today:

Amazon said this week its facial recognition software can detect a person’s fear.

Rekognition is one of many Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services available for developers. It can be used for facial analysis or sentiment analysis, which identifies different expressions and predicts emotions from images of people’s faces. The service uses artificial intelligence to “learn” from the reams of data it processes.

The tech giant revealed updates to the controversial tool on Monday that include improving the accuracy and functionality of its face analysis features such as identifying gender, emotions and age range.

“With this release, we have further improved the accuracy of gender identification,” Amazon said in a blog post. “In addition, we have improved accuracy for emotion detection (for all 7 emotions: ‘Happy’, ‘Sad’, ‘Angry’, ‘Surprised’, ‘Disgusted’, ‘Calm’ and ‘Confused’) and added a new emotion: ‘Fear.’”

From The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism:

How? Through cameras in your smartphone, tablet, and laptop. Smart TVs will soon be equipped with cameras and software capable of reading the reaction of viewers to ads. Again: this is not science fiction. This is happening. And it’s not being done by a totalitarian state; it’s being done by major corporations.

 

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Roger Scruton Has Cancer

We at TAC have known about this terribly sad news for short time, but now Sir Roger Scruton has announced it in his newsletter, which I saw via @amicablefogey:

Please — please! — join me in praying for Sir Roger, whose work means the world to us conservatives.

If you don’t know Sir Roger’s work, please do yourself a favor and watch this Peter Robinson interview with him from a couple of years ago:

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Mass Shootings: A Materialist Horror

Tara Isabella Burton is telling us something very, very important about these mass killers:

Domestic right-wing terrorists, like the man accused of the shooting last weekend in El Paso, are not so different from their radical Islamist counterparts across the globe — and not only in their tactics for spreading terror or in their internet-based recruiting. Indeed, it is impossible to understand America’s resurgence of reactionary extremism without understanding it as a fundamentally religious phenomenon.

Unlike Islamist jihadists, the online communities of incels, white supremacists and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists make no metaphysical truth claims, do not focus on God and offer no promise of an afterlife or reward. But they fulfill the functions that sociologists generally attribute to a religion: They give their members a meaningful account of why the world is the way it is. They provide them with a sense of purpose and the possibility of sainthood. They offer a sense of community. And they establish clear roles and rituals that allow adherents to feel and act as part of a whole. These aren’t just subcultures; they are churches. And until we recognize the religious hunger alongside the destructive hatred, we have little chance of stopping these terrorists.

She goes on to describe how these ideological communities serve as pseudo-religions for their members. It’s hard to overstate the importance of what she’s seeing here. As I’ve been saying, Hannah Arendt says these factors are exactly the kind of thing that, when it went viral (so to speak), created 20th century totalitarianism.

TIB goes on:

It is necessary to condemn these hate groups and their atrocities. But it is simplistic, — and ineffectual — to do so in a vacuum. To characterize these killers as lonely, disaffected, disenchanted men, rebels in search of a cause, is not to ameliorate the atrocity of their actions, nor to excuse them as merely “misunderstood.” Rather, it is to envision a productive way forward — a chance to de-radicalize some of them before they commit acts of violence, to provide people with a different form of “lifefuel.”

The very trappings of interconnected, meaning-rich social life — lost in an increasingly fractured age, with a presidential administration that stokes further division — are very real human needs. Theistic or civic, institutional or grass roots, online or off, we all need to foster churches.

Read the whole thing. A political model is not the best way to understand these killers; a religious model is.

I’ve been re-reading the French literature scholar Louis Betty’s excellent study of the novels of Michel Houellebecq, Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror. If you’ve never read Houellebecq, I bet you’d start after reading this book. Betty interprets the bestselling French novelist’s work as a serious attempt to describe what it’s like to live in this godless world. Houellebecq’s work is not so much “religious,” in the common use of the term, but metaphysical. Betty writes:

Life whittled down to the play of atoms thus represents a kind of materialist horror, and characters unable to see the world in anything but physicalist terms are inevitably prey to depression and suicide.

Betty continues:

One of the principal contentions of this book is that Houellebecq’s novels represent a kind of fictional experiment in the death of God. And this experiment is best understood as a confrontation between two radically opposed domains: the materialism of modern science and the desire for transcendence and survival, which is best expressed in and through religion.

He points out that Houellebecq has always identified as either an atheist or an agnostic. But the novelist is also a Comtean who believes that “religious in a necessary element of social cohesion and happiness.” For Houellebecq, “a religion that does not promise victory over death is doomed; we may sanctify all we want, but without a promise of material survival, we can hope to save neither the world nor ourselves.”

More Betty:

However, the causality I propose, which does justice to the totality of the Houellebecquian worldview, is one in which materialism — conceived of as a generalized belief in matter, which in its political manifestations contributes to the rise of ideologies as diverse as communism, fascism, and liberalism — represents the true menace to human relationships and sexuality in Houellebecq’s novels.

And:

Annabelle offers one of Houellebecq’s clearest demonstrations of materialism’s inexorable logic: there is only the body, and reason dictates that once the body can no longer be counted on to provide pleasure, it is to be abandoned. The great injustice in the Houellebecquian universe is not sexual inequality, maternal abandonment, or capitalism; the great injustice in these novels is matter, and without recourse to the promise of the immaterial — the soul, God, eternity — the injustice is final.

What brought me back to Betty’s book was fooling around on my Kindle on a flight Sunday night. I had been thinking about Houellebecq in connection with the mass killings, along the same lines at TIB’s column: that is, wondering to what extent these killers, whatever their asserted motivations, are really driven by what Betty calls “materialist horror.” When I started re-reading Without God — which, let me emphasize, is not a religious book, but a literary analysis — I began to think of it in context of this new project of mine. That is, I started wondering about whether Houellebecq’s cultural critique offers new insights into the potential in our post-Christian, radically atomizing world for totalitarianism.

If you want to read Houellebecq, start with The Elementary Particles. His book about a dissolute French scholar facing the Islamist takeover of France, Submission, is also good. Note well, that book is not anti-Islamic; in fact, Islam itself is more peripheral to the plot than you might think. The central question of the book is whether or not a society without a common sense of the transcendent can hold together. A warning about Houllebecq: his writing about sex is very direct, and not for the sensitive.

One more quote from Louis Betty’s book, explaining the Houllebecquian worldview:

The unbinding of humanity from God lies at the heart of the historical narrative the reader encounters in Houellebecq’s work: lacking a set of moral principles legitimated by a higher power and unable to find meaningful answers to existential questions, human beings descend into selfishness and narcissism and can only stymie their mortal terror by recourse to the carnal distractions of sexuality. Modern capitalism is the mode of social organization best suited to, and best suited to maintain, such a worldview. Materialism — that is, the limiting of all that is real to the physical, which rules out the existence of God, soul, and spirit and with them any transcendent meaning to human life — thus produces and environment in which consumption becomes the norm. such is the historical narrative that Houellebecq’s fiction enacts, with modern economic liberalism emerging as the last, devastating consequence of humanity’s despiritualization.

“Materialist horror” is the term most appropriate to describe this worldview, for what readers discover throughout Houellebecq’s fiction are societies and persons in which the terminal social and psychological consequences of materialism are being played out. It is little wonder, then, that these texts are so often apocalyptic in tone.

Tara Isabella Burton suggests that the apocalyptic violence we keep seeing in these mass shootings are social and psychological consequences of metaphysical materialism. She’s right, I believe.

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The Great Out-Doors

Outside magazine celebrates the queering of the woods:

At first glance, Pattie Gonia’s Instagram profile (@pattiegonia) looks a lot like every other glossy adventure feed, with dozens of shots of dreamy outdoor landscapes. In her first Instagram video, Pattie wears a green technical shirt and matching hat while carrying hiking poles and a backpack, with the mountains of Colorado’s Never Summer Wilderness looming in the background. Scroll down too quickly and you’ll miss the twist: her patent-leather boots with six-inch heels.

Pattie, whose name is a play on you know which brand, is the drag-queen alter ego of 27-year-old photographer Wyn Wiley. (Wiley refers to himself with male pronouns and to Pattie as she or her.) In that first post, from October 3, 2018, Pattie eats hot Cheetos, dances to Fergie, and declares herself the world’s first backpacking queen. Within a week she had more than 12,000 followers, a number that grew to over 150,000 in less than a year. Her fans leave hundreds of emoji-laden comments, praise her outfits, and invite her on hikes. She’s been featured on the websites of Backpacker, Elle, and Vogue, fielded a deluge of attention from advertisers, received DMs from Fergie, and even attended the Tony Awards.

More:

Each new post brings a small delight. Pattie soundtracks wilderness scenes with Beyoncé and Ariana Grande, wears outfits made of recycled materials, and makes pop-culture homages. (She loves Brokeback Mountain.) Solemn moments gazing at sweeping vistas? Not so much. “It’s making light of something that can be so serious,” says Karen Wang, a photographer, through-hiker, and friend of Wiley’s who took pictures of Pattie in Seattle. “Some people are like, ‘Oh, my gosh, those heels—she’s gonna fall down!’ Or some ultralight hiker will be like, ‘Those heels are going to be so heavy.’ Y’all are missing the point!”

Given the size of Pattie Gonia’s following, it’s no surprise that outdoor companies have come knocking, looking for opportunities to reach her fans.

Read it all.

The reader who sent this to me adds:

Is there nothing the broad queering of American life will leave alone? This used to be one of my favorite outdoors magazines. A once-beloved journal, known for recruiting top literary talent to write about the outdoors, which in the fairly recent past featured stories that became famous books by the likes of Sebastian Junger and John Krakauer, but now featuring stories about a drag-queen hiker that wears stiletto heels to hike and you can follow on social media. I stopped subscribing years ago, and has started checking in on it very often. There must have been some major change in the editorship or ownership, cause they’ve gone off the deep end. Every time I’ve tried to read it, it’s just shot-through with identity politics (‘Why aren’t there more women of color in cycling?”), just ridiculous stuff that no one was really asking or caring about – and now I’m just officially done. Magazine publishing is on the ropes generally, and I guess that’s kind of sad, but at this point you can’t say it’s just technology that’s killing it, this is just suicide.

The point here is not Pattie Gonia. The point is a media that will not rest until it has queered everything.

More Pattie Gonia, via Instagram. The Sasquatches are running scared. Not sure how well this would play down here in the Atchafalaya Swamp:

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It’s Not Paranoia If It’s True

Douthat has a good piece this morning about how there are times when conspiracy theorists are actually closer to the truth than their critics. Here’s part of it:

And not only true of Epstein and his pals. As I’ve written before, when I was starting my career as a journalist I sometimes brushed up against people peddling a story about a network of predators in the Catholic hierarchy — not just pedophile priests, but a self-protecting cabal above them — that seemed like a classic case of the paranoid style, a wild overstatement of the scandal’s scope. I dismissed them then as conspiracy theorists, and indeed they had many of conspiracism’s vices — above all, a desire to believe that the scandal they were describing could be laid entirely at the door of their theological enemies, liberal or traditional.

But on many important points and important names, they were simply right.

Indeed they were. My own experience with that world, and that story, has made me far less likely to believe official stories. Let me add some context. Some of this is going to be familiar to many readers, but bears repeating in light of the Epstein drama.

In early 2002, shortly after the Boston trial of Father Geoghan blew open the Catholic sex scandal nationwide, I received a tip from a priest that Cardinal Ted McCarrick of DC had a history of sexually abusing seminarians. The priest said a group of prominent lay Catholics who knew this about him flew to Rome at their own expense, trying to prevent McCarrick from being named as Washington archbishop, which would have made him a cardinal. They met with an unnamed Vatican official to tell them what they knew about McCarrick, but it made no difference. McCarrick got his red hat.

The priest gave me the names of two men who had been on that trip, both of them well-known in their professions. I called the first one, who said yes, he had been on that trip, but didn’t want to talk about it. The second one told me that “if that were true, I wouldn’t tell you about it for the same reason Noah’s sons covered their father in his drunkenness.” Translation: yes, it’s true, but I’m not going to talk about it to protect the Church.

I didn’t know what to do next. But then I was called into my editor’s office. He wanted to know what I was working on (I hadn’t told anybody, because I hadn’t made any progress on the story). He told me that he had received a phone call from a very well known public conservative (I’m not going to name him here) who identified himself as a friend of Cardinal McCarrick, and said that the cardinal was aware that Rod Dreher was going to report a story that was true, but not criminal, and that would be very embarrassing to the cardinal. The caller asked my editor to kill the story.

I was stunned. How did McCarrick find out? I told my editor what I was working on, and he simply asked me to keep him informed. Back at my desk, I called the priest who tipped me off. “McCarrick knows,” I said. I asked him how that was possible. I had told no one else. I’m quite sure that neither of the two potential sources I called tipped him off, because it would not have been in their interest. So how did he know?

The priest was shocked. “The only person I told,” he said, “was my spiritual director, Father Benedict Groeschel.”

Groeschel, who died a few years back, was a famous television priest, known for his theological conservatism. What many people didn’t know about him is that he also ran a psychological treatment center for troubled priests — a place that cynics considered to be a recycling mill for sex-mad clerics. Whether it was or it wasn’t, the point is that Groeschel was professionally implicated in the broader story of priest sex abuse. Furthermore, Groeschel was a company man. Though a theological conservative, he almost certainly felt it to be his obligation to alert a liberal cardinal to a threat to his reputation — even if it was true. I am convinced that Groeschel tipped off McCarrick.

I became even more convinced when I observed Groeschel flat-out lie about his own ducking of a secular journalist’s legitimate inquiries about his (Groeschel’s) therapeutic outfit. It told me that the beloved conservative TV Catholic Benedict Groeschel was willing to smear the reputation of a journalist to protect his own reputation, and the reputation of the Church. Groeschel, by the way, was removed from EWTN in 2012 after he gave an interview in which he said that some of these abuse cases, the underage victim was the “seducer” of the priest.

Does that make Groeschel a bad man? No. I believe he did a lot of good in his life. The point here is that the willingness of so very many people to believe that Groeschel was nothing other than a good man allowed him to get away with behavior that he should have been called on. The same is true of progressive Catholics and their favorite leaders, e.g., Archbishop Rembert Weakland.

Anyway, the guy who phoned my editor on McCarrick’s behalf is a well-known conservative, a closeted gay man, and also a Catholic. What that act showed me, and what Groeschel’s likely ratting me out showed me, was that networks of loyalty can run counter to what we expect. This was all important for my education. I would not have thought that a prominent conservative would run interference for a liberal cardinal whom he believed to be a sexual abuser of seminarians — but he did. Whether he did it because McCarrick was a friend, or because of a lavender mafia thing, or both, I dunno. I would not have thought that a prominent conservative priest would alert a liberal cardinal that a journalist was snooping around his sexual business — but I am certain that Groeschel did this, probably because his ultimate loyalty was to the institution, not to the truth, or to righteousness.

This was a useful lesson to learn, both as a journalist and, well, as a life lesson in how the world works. It happened over and over and over again as I wrote about the scandal. A progressive Catholic journalist and I once shared war stories about covering the scandal, and agreed that the ideological convictions of both the Catholic Right and the Catholic Left prevented people from identifying malefactors who happened to share their ideology. Beyond that, most Catholics simply could not grasp the idea that the institutional Church was in fact honeycombed with networks of perverts. I interviewed a seminarian who told me that his own parents considered him to be a liar when he told them about the homosexual decadence at his former seminary. They found it easier to believe that their son was a lying fantasist than to believe that his seminary was a gay whorehouse.

Back in the early 2000s, the Legionaries of Christ, a hyper-conservative Catholic religious order, spent a lot of money and effort in an attempt to crush a group of men who accused the order’s founder, Father Marcial Maciel, of having abused them sexually. Like lots of journalists, I was lobbied hard by the Legion to stand by poor, persecuted Father Maciel. It sounded completely crazy that the founder of this super-orthodox Catholic religious order beloved by Pope John Paul II could have done all these horrible things.

Guess what? It was all true. He even fathered children, and abused them. He was also a drug addict. Benedict XVI forced him out of leadership of the order in 2006. Maciel died in 2008, refusing on his deathbed to make a confession or repent. Read this long, detailed piece by journalist Jason Berry, detailing how the wicked Maciel made his fortune and manipulated people.

I hardly need to go into detail here about what we discovered over the ensuing years about the networked corruption in the Church. For me, one of the great lessons is that in any institution, corrupt men will take advantage of it, especially if they can work beneath a canopy of presumed innocence. It can happen in a police force. It can happen in the military. This is not just a church thing, not by any means.

Some conspiratorial types like to believe that the media knew all about McCarrick, but refused to report it. That’s not really true. Yes, the stories about McCarrick’s abuse of seminarians were known to some other journalists, but nobody could nail them down. There’s a good reason we have libel laws, and professional journalistic ethics. It’s a very big deal to claim that a man — especially a cardinal — is sexually abusing others. Strong claims like that — claims that could destroy a man’s life — require strong evidence. Off-the-record stories, and the absence of documentation, are not enough. It could have been the case that McCarrick was the target of a conspiracy of liars determined to take him down. Not only would it be morally wrong to accuse McCarrick publicly on the basis of what amounts to hearsay, but any individual or publication that did so could be sued for libel, and could conceivably be destroyed. The only way McCarrick was ever going to be outed is through court documents, and through on the record interviews with victims and others in a position to know what he did. I was dying to tell the truth about McCarrick, but I could not do so without more solid information.

But what to make of this story that follows?

In 2012, a decade after my McCarrick inquiries hit a brick wall, a freelance journalist on assignment for The New York Times Magazine tracked me down in Louisiana. He was writing a piece about Cardinal McCarrick’s molestation of seminarians, and someone told him he should reach out to me. We talked for a long time, and it turned out that he knew everything I knew. But he also knew so much more. He had managed to dig up a buried legal settlement between McCarrick and a victim — something that no journalist to that point had ever found. What’s more, he had an on the record interview with a seminarian who had been a McCarrick victim. He had a lot more information too. It was incredible. Uncle Ted was finally going to be exposed.

I asked the journalist when he expected to go to print. He said he figured in a few weeks. He just had a few loose ends to tie up.

Two months passed, with no story. I called him back, and asked him what was going on. He told me he had no idea. The editor who assigned him the story had taken another job, and the editor who replaced her was throwing all kinds of strange stumbling blocks in his path. I asked him if that new editor is a gay man.

Yes, said the reporter. But what does that have to do with anything?

Maybe nothing, I said, but then I explained to him about something I had run into again and again reporting on the scandal. Liberal journalists, straight and gay both, were very, very eager to avoid drawing any conclusions about homosexual priests and abuse. They did not want to support what they considered to be right-wing prejudices against gays — specifically, they didn’t want to add to the belief held by some conservatives that gay men are pederasts by nature. Part of that desire to protect gays included a deep resistance to any suggestion that there was a network of powerful gay priests, including bishops, who protected each other’s secret sexual lives — including sex lives with adults. The evidence was clear, but most in the media did not want to touch it, because it was politically inconvenient.

I suggested to the freelance journalist that his gay editor might be trying to run interference for McCarrick, because McCarrick’s victims in this case were over the age of consent, and the editor perhaps feared that homophobes would have a field day with the news that the retired Cardinal Archbishop of Washington was a predatory gay man.

I can’t prove that this is what happened. For whatever reasons, though, the story was not published. In 2018, six years later, a different set of New York Times reporters revealed in the paper some of the very same damning information about Cardinal McCarrick that the Times Magazine freelancer had nailed down in 2012. And that brought McCarrick down.

The Times had this story six years earlier, but didn’t publish it. Why not? There are people who assume that the media would never, ever sit on a story that could make the Catholic Church look bad. I am convinced that’s exactly what the Times did in 2012, even though it had hard evidence that McCarrick was guilty. In truth, I have no idea why the Times suppressed the story its own freelancer had, but I’m telling you, do not ever assume that the ideological orientation of a media outlet can reliably predict what they’re willing to report, and refuse to report. Loyalties are complex.

In 1994, I was a young reporter in Washington, living in a group house on Capitol Hill with five others, including some Democratic Hill staffers. When Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution swept the GOP into power in the House, I taunted my housemates, in a friendly way, about what Speaker Gingrich was going to do to their side. One of my housemates said, “We’re not worried about that. We” — meaning House Democrats — “know that he’s cheating on his wife. He knows that we know. He’s not going to push too far.”

In fact, we now know that Gingrich was at the time having a secret (ha!) affair with the woman who is now his third wife. The Democrats weren’t trying to protect Gingrich. They were holding that information back in case they really needed to use it. They had kompromat on him. Did they never use it because they never felt they had to? Or did Team Gingrich have even more compromising kompromat on powerful Democrats? The point here is that the public’s understanding of how ideological rivals would have behaved with this information does not correspond to how they actually behaved.

In the Catholic Church’s case, I have found that the most useful (though not foolproof) principle is to assume that bishops and others who work for the institution will protect the institution, no matter what. Last summer, this blog reported on abuse cover-ups in the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska. This kicked over an anthill. Many conservative Catholics didn’t want to believe it, because Lincoln had a reputation for being a bastion of moral and theological conservatism. And yet, clerical sexual abuse happened there too — and was facilitated in part because nobody wanted to believe that snakes could get into the Edenic garden that was the Diocese of Lincoln. These people not only wanted to believe the best about their diocese, they needed to believe it, for the moral order of the world to make sense.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation that was both heartbreaking and infuriating with an orthodox Catholic friend, detailing an experience they (I’ll use the plural pronoun) had with a church institution that has a reputation for being fairly conservative. This friend said that their experience was “traumatic,” though it did not involve sexual abuse or anything criminal. It was rather a case of learning about extraordinary moral and theological corruption behind a façade of orthodoxy. My friend is thinking hard about whether or not to blow the whistle, though doing so would probably destroy their career. What is so troubling to my friend is thinking about all the innocent Catholics who trust this institution, and who would be walking into a trap that could cost them their faith.

Remember Archbishop Viganò, and his extraordinary claims of a conspiracy at the very top of the Catholic Church? He named names — and he was in a position to know. Remember that Pope Francis has refused to address Viganò’s claims. And remember also that we still do not know about how McCarrick did it, and why Francis brought him out of the feeble exile to which Benedict had sent him. Earlier this year, I came across information that leads me to believe that Cardinal George Pell of Australia was set up on abuse charges to derail his investigation into the Vatican bank — and that the mafia might be involved. Is it true? Who knows. But anything is possible. Seriously, anything is possible.

The Catholic scandal world is the world I know better than any other. I don’t have any serious doubt, though, that the same principles play themselves out in other institutions and communities. I am far, far less trusting of institutions of all kinds today than I was in 2002, when I first started paying real attention to the Catholic scandal.

Douthat continues:

Where networks of predation and blackmail are concerned, then, the distinction I’m drawing between conspiracy theories and underlying realities weakens just a bit. No, you still don’t want to listen to QAnon, or to our disgraceful president when he retweets rants about the #ClintonBodyCount. But just as Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s network of clerical allies and enablers hasn’t been rolled up, and the fall of Bryan Singer probably didn’t get us near the rancid depths of Hollywood’s youth-exploitation racket, we clearly haven’t gotten to the bottom of what was going on with Epstein.

So to worry too much about online paranoia outracing reality is to miss the most important journalistic task, which is the further unraveling of scandals that would have seemed, until now, too implausible to be believed.

These days, it is impossible to find a clear line between realism and cynicism, between a valid critical disposition and sheer paranoia. If we ever do get the true, reasonably complete story behind McCarrick’s rise, it will likely expose the nexus of power, sex, and money in the Catholic hierarchy, with unpredictable results. Similarly, if we ever get the true, reasonably complete story of who Jeffrey Epstein was and how he did what he did, we are likely going to see the nexus of power, sex, and money among the international elites, with unpredictable results.

The world is not ordered as we wish it were. It’s not even disordered as we wish it were. I’m thinking this morning of something a faithful Catholic layman told me in the spring of 2002, about the abuse scandal. He was a close friend of Cardinal Bernard Law, and active in the Archdiocese of Boston. This man — a very intelligent, morally upright gentleman — had direct knowledge of widespread homosexual corruption in the seminary at the time. He told me that he informed his dear friend the cardinal about all of it … and that the cardinal had done nothing. I asked the man how he reconciled his love and respect for the cardinal with the fact that Law had allowed this kind of corruption to flourish unaddressed.

The man sat across from me, unable to speak. The cognitive dissonance left him paralyzed. He could not accept that the world was ordered in such a way that his dear friend the cardinal could be guilty of such gross negligence. I used to be pretty naive, the kind of person who believed that good men (like my interlocutor) almost always wanted to know the truth, and to fight for justice. What I couldn’t have truly grasped until that extraordinary conversation was how the mind will protect itself from having to face something intolerable. That man was not asked to believe a conspiracy theory; he was asked to put two and two together — facts that he did not dispute. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He literally could not summon the will to face the terrible truth about his friend the cardinal, and the truth about the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston.

What’s so frightening to me today, thinking about that, is how every one of us is susceptible to that same paralysis.

One last thing: read C.S. Lewis’s speech about the “Inner Ring”  — that is, his identifying the desire to be inside the circle of those in the know, those in power, as a dominant motivator of human action. Could it be that the man, the friend of Cardinal Law’s, was partly motivated not to see the truth in front of his nose, not just because it would force him to recognize something terrible about his friend the cardinal, but also because it could push him out of the Inner Ring? Lewis said to his audience:

And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

It could happen to any of us. You, me, any of us. This is why the powerful look out for each other: they understand themselves to be part of the Inner Ring. Woe to those who are within the Inner Ring, and who are more afraid of being cast out of it than they are of the truth, or of Almighty God.

Finally, Hannah Arendt said that one major factor in the establishment of totalitarianism in the 20th century was that people had ceased to believe in hierarchies and institutions, finding them all to be corrupt. That, and people quit believing in truth, preferring instead to believe in stories that confirmed what they preferred to believe was true. Is that not us today? Depending on how it shakes out, the Epstein story could be far more consequential for American politics than we can imagine today.

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Christian Cultural Cognitive Dissonance

The Orthodox blog Byzantine, TX says that people who freak out over Benedict Option responses to the post-Christian world are not being serious. Excerpt:

Many people recoil from the idea of an intentional Christian community as if those people (in some misguided Benedict Option cult-mindedness) are unwilling to engage with the wider world. It’s odd to me that we build our lives around all sorts of things, but when we mention building our lives around Christians living next to other Christians and sharing in a liturgical life together, it’s seen as some form of white-feathered retreat.

For my part I find it odd that we think Christianity is done any favors by living in places that are hostile to it. We can acknowledge the unitive effect of cheering on a sports team and know for certain that wearing a Cowboys jersey in Philadelphia is going to get you jeered at publicly. And yet we live in places where neighbors call the police on Bible studies where too many people show up, our society permits all opinions in public debate except those that have a religious origin for fear of being non-inclusive or threatening, or we find ourselves trying to instruct our children in one way of living while our schools push their institutional bias towards intolerant progressivism.

More:

If the pressure to secularize is omnipresent and the will to evangelize is missing, how can anything other than complete secularization occur?

So, I’m not advocating for walled communities of Christians living in fear of the big, bad areligious soccer mom wearing yoga pants. I am saying that you cannot both live in a civilization barreling towards a societal cliff and be unwilling to point that fact out to people. You cannot look down your nose at people who want to build a network of families who pray and live together and also hold yourself blameless for where our society is headed as you sit there silently effecting no change.

Read it all. Everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

Three years ago, a year before the Benedict Option book was published, Alan Jacobs said something along the same lines.  

The Benedict Option, as I understand it, is based on three premises.

The dominant media of our technological society are powerful forces for socializing people into modes of thought and action that are often inconsistent with, if not absolutely hostile to, Christian faith and practice.
In America today, churches and other Christian institutions (schools at all levels, parachurch organizations with various missions) are comparatively very weak at socializing people, if for no other reason than that they have access to comparatively little mindspace.
Healthy Christian communities are made up of people who have been thoroughly grounded in, thoroughly socialized into, the the historic practices and beliefs of the Christian church.

From these three premises proponents of the Benedict Option draw a conclusion: If we are to form strong Christians, people with robust commitment to and robust understanding of the Christian life, then we need to shift the balance of ideological power towards Christian formation, and that means investing more of our time and attention than we have been spending on strengthening our Christian institutions.

More:

The critical responses to the BenOp I’ve seen have struck me as merely visceral. I’d like to see more careful and thorough articulation of the critiques. But if you don’t believe that the three premises I’ve listed above are true, then I think you’re whistling past the graveyard. And if you accept the premises but don’t agree with the conclusion, then we definitely need to do some exercises in logic.

I bring this up because today I heard news that a Christian singer well known among a number of charismatics and Evangelicals, Marty Sampson of Hillsong, has become apostate. The Evangelical commenter Ann Kennedy quotes Sampson’s now-removed Instagram post announcing that he no longer believes in Christianity:

Time for some real talk…I’m genuinely losing my faith…and it doesn’t bother me…like, what bothers me now is nothing…I am so happy now, so at peace with the world…it’s crazy/this is a soapbox moment so here I go xx how many preachers fall? Many. No one talks about it. How many miracles happen. Not many. No one talks about it. Why is the Bible full of contradictions? No one talks about it. How can God be love yet send 4 billion people to a place, all coz they don’t believe? No one talks about it. Christians can be the most judgmental people on the planet-they can also be some of the most beautiful and loving people…but it’s not for me. I am not in anymore. I want genuine truth. Not the “I just  believe it” kind of truth. Science keeps piercing the truth of every religion. Lots of things help people change their lives, not just one version of God. Got so much more to say, but for me, I keeping it real. Unfollow if you want, I’ve never been about living my life for others. All I know is what’s true to me right now, and Christianity just seems to me like another religion at this point…I could go on, but I won’t. Love and forgive absolutely. Be kind absolutely. Be generous and do good to others absolutely. Some things are good no matter what you believe. Let the rain fall, the sun will come up tomorrow.

Kennedy adds:

The first lamentation, of course, is that this—I won’t say young, because I’m pretty sure, like Josh Harris, he is middle-aged—person was never catechized. That is, he was never instructed in the doctrines of the Christian faith. He, and I don’t think it is a leap to say this based on what he himself has said, was not taught to read the Bible. He wrote songs for a very popular Christian brand without anybody taking the trouble to ground him in the rich substantial heritage of the Christian life. And so he was able, without guile, to make some astonishing and unfounded claims. No one talks about all the contradictions in the Bible, he says. No one wants to talk about the moral the theological failures of pastors. And no one wants to say anything about the relative non-existence of miracles. These are curious assertions. He should get out more. The possibility of the Bible being stuffed with contradictions is a hot topic on the internet at least, and if he turns on the TV during Easter, he will be inundated with documentaries promising to debunk the whole book for him. A brief google search, similarly, will bring up more articles about abusive and sinful pastors than I can read in a week. And finally, his own church makes much of the possibility of miracles—they are constantly going on about it. But perhaps they aren’t delivering on their promises. Finally, he wraps up with the astonishing revelation that Christians can be judgmental.

A few Sunday afternoons of reading and conversation with some thoughtful and educated Christians (of which there are so so so many, it’s a pity he hasn’t met any of them) would correct all these misapprehensions, except the Christians being judgmental one, which is, of course, true. Indeed all human people are judgmental, and Christians are human, therefore Christians are judgmental—stupid me, dropping out of logic 101 after only a week. If anybody in his sphere with some theological acumen and kindness had thought about it, he might long ago have wrestled towards some true and useful answers to some of these difficult, but by no means intractable, questions. Unfortunately, I think the lack of intellectual and theological formation is a feature in the sort of world that made him famous, rather than a bug.

Her entire post is thoughtful. 

Kennedy is right: based on what Sampson says, it’s clear that he was never really catechized, and was formed by a Christianity that is primarily emotional. Here are the lyrics for one of his songs, “The Reason I Live”:

INTRO:

Jesus You are the reason I live (Woah)

Jesus You are the reason I live (Yeah)

VERSE:

When I think of things You’ve done for me

I know You are the reason I live

And I, I want to know You more each day

God please open my eyes

And show me Your way

CHORUS:

You are the reason I live in this world

You are the One that I want to be like

You are the reason I live in this world

Show me the way to live

I want to be like You

OTHER:

I’ll always go Your way

And that will never change

You will be the One for all my days

I’ll always go Your way

And that will never change

You will be the One for all of my days

Listen to the song. That’s it? That’s the faith? Please don’t take me as snarking here, because that’s not my intention, but man, if this guy became a big deal in Christian worship writing songs like this, is it any wonder that his concept of Christianity was so trite, so shallow?

Here’s a clip of Sampson performing in 2014. If you think Marty Sampson and the Christian movement he represents, Hillsong, is nothing, notice that Hillsong fills up arenas with worshippers. They’re successful in attracting young people to a religious experience. It would not be fair to take one Hillsong leader, Sampson, and to judge the entire movement based on his apostasy. But as an outsider, reading his announcement of leaving Christianity, I think about what an Evangelical college professor told me in 2017 about the kids in his university: that 99 percent of them carry in their hearts a Christianity that is entirely based on youth-group emotionalism, and that has no serious theological foundation. He fears that when they leave the bubble of campus Evangelicalism, their faith will shatter under the pressures of the world.

I don’t know the world that Marty Sampson came from, so I am eager to hear from readers who do. It seems to me, though, that he surely must have been surrounded by people who agreed with him, and shared his professed commitments. It’s not like he was a lone Christian ranger making his way through a world of hostile unbelievers. And yet, he lost his faith. It is a painful, tragic thing to lose one’s faith, but again, to underscore Ann Kennedy’s point, what kind of faith did he lose? Marty Sampson is forty years old, and was an internationally successful Christian worship leader, yet his idea of Christianity seems not to have advanced much beyond high school church youth group.

What happened to Marty Sampson is not only about Marty Sampson, is what I’m saying. And it’s not only about pop Evangelicalism. People in every church are at risk of losing their faith — even you and me. It’s always a tragedy when that happens. But it compounds the tragedy when you see that they didn’t really have much substantive faith to lose.

 

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