Rod Dreher's Blog, page 221

Poland’s Anti-Gay Violence

Anti-gay counter protesters in Bialystok (PBS Newshour screengrab)

A couple of readers have pointed out to me that there was serious anti-gay violence at a big LGBT parade in the Polish city of Bialystok recently. The NYT reports:

All along the way, they were met with scorn and derision. One image that has spread around the country showed a man, his small child in a stroller in front of him, confronting the police and shouting at the marchers as he tried to stop them.

An older lady on a balcony waved at the marchers only to be met with shouts from hooligans in the crowd. “We know where you live, you whore!” they chanted.

Videos showed mobs chasing people. One ended with a young boy being stomped on by a group of large men.

Talk of the violence has gripped Poland in the days since, with endless hours of discussion on radio and television.

Even as political leaders and church officials have tried to distance themselves from the violence, the campaign against the L.G.B.T. community has shown no signs of abating.

Przemyslaw Witkowski, a journalist, was riding a bicycle with his girlfriend in the city of Wroclaw on Thursday evening when he spotted anti-gay graffiti and told his girlfriend it was shameful.

Apparently, someone overheard Mr. Witkowski. A short time later, a man confronted him.

“You don’t like this graffiti?” Mr. Witkowski said the man asked him.

“I said I did not,” Mr. Witkowski responded.

The man attacked him.

This is repulsive. Violence is not acceptable, ever. Not only is it cruel and wrong in and of itself, it also only serves to help discredit the Polish opposition to the spread of gender ideology and suchlike. The Times story blames anti-gay “propaganda” for the violence. It is reasonable to assume that there has been hateful propaganda in Poland — and shame on anybody who has broadcast or published it.

We should be skeptical, though, because to many liberals, any pushback at all against LGBT messaging is considered “hate” and “propaganda.” Catholic, conservative Poles have a right and a responsibility to defend their values in the public square. There are plenty of Poles who oppose the LGBT movement, but who would never lift a hand in violence against a gay or transgender person. I met Poles like this earlier this month on my visit to Poland.

Whatever the truth about the state of the debate over gay rights in Poland, people should be free to demonstrate peacefully without having to fear physical assault from hooligans.

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Whither Evangelicalism?

This post of mine about driving people away from the church has drawn some really interesting comments from Evangelical readers. I urge you to read the two updates at that link. Rather than add this comment that just came in via e-mail to it, I’m going to set it aside in a new post. The reader who sent this is an Evangelical:

I think in all your discussions of “evangelicalism,” it is important to keep one thing in mind: relative to Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and even Anglican/ Lutheran traditions, “evangelicalism” is a much looser and harder to define thing. We don’t have a doctrinal magisterium in Rome or Canterbury, or a shared liturgy and language of worship, and so It encompasses everything from historic, confessional reformed churches like the PCA/ OPC to pentecostal storefront churches to Southern Baptists to the Black church, and to see how “evangelicalism” is doing in the sea of liquid modernity you really have to look at each of these strands.

You tend to focus–as do I–on the camp that reflects you the most, which is the Tim Keller/Russell Moore/ culture-forward conservative evangelical leadership. The kind of people who would rather go to a new Indian restaurant than to Denny’s. And I agree with your commentator Northland [see original post linked above — RD] that that is a smaller segment of evangelicalism than most of us would like to believe. Where I disagree with him is on the idea that the young welder in Muskogee or nurse in Terre Haute will continue filling the pews. Most sociological data is against that, with the steepest declines in attendance coming in the poor and working class.

Fundamentally, in the more educated/ formally organized area of Evangelicalism (let’s say the SBC, the orthodox reformed churches like the PCA/ OPC/ Ev. Free Church/ ARP, RPCNA), I think you are seeing the same dynamic as in RC churches in Poland that you wrote about the other week. There is a somewhat complacent older class of “neutral world” pastor-leaders that think with sound doctrine and winsomeness we can beat this thing, and because the money keeps coming from older, wealthier Christians in the pews, they are kind of oblivious to the flashing warning lights in the young, both legitimate (nationalism in worship services, uncritical Trumpism) and not (acid bath of liquid modernity is eating up young evangelicals too, and they want their churches to go soft on LGBTQ stuff just as much as anybody else). I would say the conservative reformed church as I have experienced it does a better job than the Catholics at catechesis and making sure pastors/ churches are adhering to doctrine, but the rot is here too, without a doubt: parents who think their kids’ spiritual development is fine because they go to our area Christian school or youth group every week, a sense of self-congratulation because our church is big and lots of people come every Sunday, and just a steadfast refusal to believe that things really are as bad as they are in the broader culture and that their kids are vaping in their cars after youth group.

The storefront church side of evangelicalism–well, that’s a hard nut to crack. A lot of those places don’t have any kind of doctrine, denomination, or accountability, and become MTD for the White working class. There seems to be this implication in lots of quarters that MTD is the religious drug of choice for the educated, the White liberals–it’s just as much, maybe more so, the drug of choice for the working class believer. The notion that we don’t need doctrine, we just know God is real and we’re going to catch the spirit, and he’s going to love you and you can bring anything to him….one of the more damaging romantic mythologies the conservative has, and guys like Chris Arnade (bless him) have with compassion exposed, is that there is some sort of deep well of character and principle in the oppressed common man, the “real American.” The worship in that stratum of the culture in my experience (which is limited but I have some) reflects the negatives as well as positives of that stratum. You may find believers in the pentecostal church in Muskogee, but I don’t know that you will find anything that is really historic Christian doctrine and cosmology. MTD can be authentic without being true.

The Black church is a different deal too. Again, you have all manner of doctrinal issues–you have churches that are quite orthodox, and churches that are not. You have a strong since of ethnic and historical rootedness in those churches–like, say, the Irish Catholics–that may serve them well for a while, and it’s certainly true that the Blackness of those churches will give them cover for a while from secularizing liberals (see the last paragraph of this politico piece https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/15/pete-buttigieg-black-voters-1322396, where Buttigieg acts really nice towards Black voters who are skeptical of him as a gay man, then imagine how he would treat WWC Christians with the same concern). However, the Black millennial drift is happening too, albeit maybe slower than the White one.

Bottom line is that the evangelicals are going to be winnowed one way or the other just like everybody else. I think they are in a marginally better position, at least in the reformed world, because of general doctrinal consistency and catechesis, but it will still happen. The sliver of the Evangelical world that is home schooling their kids, catechizing –they will maybe make it, but even in conservative denominations that’s a minority report for sure.

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Al Sharpton, Democrat

Who knows why Donald Trump does what he does? He’s now going after Al Sharpton, because Sharpton, a total grifter, is going to try to make hay over Trump’s attacks on Baltimore:

I have known Al for 25 years. Went to fights with him & Don King, always got along well. He “loved Trump!” He would ask me for favors often. Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score. Just doing his thing. Must have intimidated Comcast/NBC. Hates Whites & Cops! https://t.co/ZwPZa0FWfN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2019

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Oh boy oh boy. This is how one Democratic presidential candidate responded:

.@TheRevAl has spent his life fighting for what’s right and working to improve our nation, even in the face of hate. It’s shameful, yet unsurprising that Trump would continue to attack those who have done so much for our country.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 29, 2019

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Really? Sen. Harris must have forgotten about the Tawana Brawley case, in which Sharpton took the lead in defending a black teenager who falsely accused four white men of raping her.

Rev. Al with Tawana Brawley (CBS)

She must have forgotten about Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish man killed by a black mob in the Crown Heights riots; Rev. Al had been stoking the mob with anti-Semitic invective. She must be unaware of Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned store in Harlem burned to the ground in a racist attack. From the Christian Science Monitor‘s report on the 1995 incident:

In Friday’s attack on Freddy’s Fashion Mart, the still-unidentified gunman let black customers leave the store and began shooting white workers. He also started a fire in the store that caused the death of seven employees. The gunman then shot himself.

The roots of this dispute were apparently economic. The Fashion Mart had been trying to evict a subtenant, the Record Shack, which had been on the street for 20 years. The black record-store tenant enlisted local residents to protest the eviction. The Fashion Mart leases from a mostly black church, the United House of Prayer for All People, which is based in Washington, D.C.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, a local activist, took up the cause of getting the Record Shack’s lease renewed. He encouraged a boycott of Freddy’s. The gunman was videotaped taking part in a protest. The rhetoric escalated and there were racial undercurrents. A store security guard reported he heard some protesters say they wanted to “loot and burn the Jews,” referring to Freddy’s Jewish owner, Freddy Harari.

Prior to this, Sharpton had publicly said, of Freddy’s, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.”

Rev. Al lost a lot of weight and got respectable on the Left — so respectable that Democratic politicians like Kamala Harris either don’t know about his disgusting racist past, or don’t care. Read more about Al Sharpton’s past here. 

Trump brought Sharpton up on Twitter because Sharpton senses opportunity in West Baltimore. Rev. Al and Donald Trump are two New York tabloid types: they will feed off of each other. But look, what’s going to happen is Democratic presidential candidates may very soon find themselves compelled to embrace one of the most despicable race hustlers in America — a man with a proven public record of promoting himself through encouraging racism and anti-Semitism.

If Al Sharpton becomes the face of the Democratic Party on race, it will be a disaster for them.

UPDATE: Crap on a crapstick, Trump’s a genius!

.@TheRevAl has dedicated his life to the fight for justice for all. No amount of racist tweets from the man in the White House will erase that—and we must not let them divide us. I stand with my friend Al Sharpton in calling out these ongoing attacks on people of color.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) July 29, 2019

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UPDATE.2: They’re all falling in line:

.@TheRevAl is a champion in the fight for civil rights. The fact that President Trump continues to use the power of the presidency to unleash racist attacks on the people he serves is despicable. This hate has no place in our country. It's beneath the dignity of the office.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 29, 2019

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Wokeness Driving Gay Southern Liberal Trumpward

Over the weekend I posted a letter from a Latino college student telling how the militant wokeness in his university has driven him to plan to vote for Donald Trump in 2020. I invited readers who aren’t Trump fans but who expect to vote for him out of fear or loathing of the militant left to share their stories.

Here’s a great one, from a man whose name and institutional affiliation I know, but am withholding at his request. He’s not certain he will vote for Trump, but he’s considering it, despite being a liberal gay man. Why? Read on:

So, here is a story that I’ll try to share briefly. I think of this as sharing my reflections for the good purpose of welcoming others to reflect and to speak. It is not a testament or declaration: it is taking my turn in a conversation.

I work in an elite-ranked school of medicine. I have enjoyed my work but will thankfully retire and move away to a smaller rural town with my husband (we are two men, together faithfully for more nearly 40 years).

Some will ask: why would a same-sex couple select to live in a more rural place? Easy to answer: it is a welcoming small town, with a history of civil rights struggles and accomplishments that shape the community’s self-understanding and that inform how the community announces it values. And it is vastly more affordable. And less consumed with ‘wokety’ self-righteousness.

The writer of the ur-narrative in this genre said of himself that

I am a libertarian with traditional leanings who is most comfortable reading econ blogs … I’m only part Mexican and culturally assimilated…

I’ll reflect this narrative patterning to say that I am a Southern liberal — i.e. I am familiar and comfortable working with, worshipping with, and talking about almost any topic with people of color, who are individuals to me, not a ‘race’ or a ‘group’, with respectful humility in the knowledge of historical and continuing racism that broke bones, diminished opportunities, and shattered spirits of actual Black and Brown and other people that I know — and every vote (in every local, state, and federal election since the 1970s) has been with that humility. This makes voting for Mr Trump (pardon, but Southerners of my generation do still use formalities, such as ‘Mr, ‘Ms’, ‘Dr’, ‘The Rev’, etc). feel like betrayal of dear friends, co-workers, people who have helped me and whom I have helped, and fellow members of the Body of Christ who stand firmly against the un-Godly idolatry of racism.

The earlier writer said



The Left is insane. The Right has its issues, but at least I’m certain they don’t want me dead. When the Revolution comes, I don’t doubt for a second that my head will be on a pike next to yours and my capitalist father’s. I’m scared to death of these people.

Again following the ur-narrative, I remark that increasingly in the elite school of medicine and elite university where I work many of its ‘public intellectuals’ appear to be abandoning logical reasoning, intentionally, not ignorantly as it seems in the earlier writer’s example. Perhaps I’ll give away the school by saying that Richard Rorty once taught here. In an essay on ‘solidarity,’ Rorty discussed and expanded Nietzsche’s assault on Enlightenment conceptions of reason, with foundations in principles of morality, law and governance to be applied objectively and fairly to each and all. Rorty’s text demolished such an inclusive and hopeful worldview, advising, more or less, that those who think alike should gather in solidarity to create the world what suits them. And so, our ‘public intellectuals’ are doing that. And as the earlier writer described well this cadre of self-righteous solidarity can be objectively wicked if you ask questions that they don’t like; and if you call them out for opposing inclusivity and diversity of points of view, very wicked names may be called.

The writer of the ur-narrative described brightly the moment he found his clear strong voice. And the cadre in his workplace/school treated him wickedly. In part because I am an older person and have exquisite bona fides over a long life of standing up with (a truer meaning of ‘solidarity’) sexual and gender minority persons and communities, persons and communities of color, rural people and their communities, persons with mental illness, and others, supporting their humanity, and human rights — as an ‘Enlightenment’ liberal — the wicked must temper their incantations against me.

But they have other spells to cast: sidelining discussions that I raise, tabling recommendations that I make, and the like. They have fairly openly declared that decades of work supporting the humanity and human rights of others is forgettable, and unimportant now, because ‘wokety enlightenment’ has arisen.

Another scholar who used to teach here — Jonathan Haidt — has described very well the forces in American higher education that are silencing, sidelining, and abusing scholarship and scholars that ‘wokety’ cadres do not like, who reject or confound or offend their ‘wokety solidarity’.

But that is not why I will consider voting for Mr Trump — if he is the candidate — and depending on who is the Democratic Party and/or candidate. I leave it open — that I may vote for Mr Trump because of the abandonment of the generally good and generally wise approaches of scientific, philosophical and ethical rationality that is generally inclusive and hopeful. I do not believe that Mr Trump’s motivations are to destroy rationality, although he tweets irrationally, and with obviously racist meanings (c’mon, they are!) . I do believe that some forces gripping the Democratic Party Primary processes — and in our local and state Democratic Party — are intending to destroy scientific, philosophical and ethical rationality.

There are forces — self-named ‘Antifa’, gun-carrying anti-Capitalist squads, etc — that use threats and acts of physical harm and destruction of property, in ‘woke’ rages, to prove a point, to dare others to react, and destroy people and things. Waves and hordes of history have utterly destroyed societies, cultures, and civilizations. It happened and can happen again. Are we witnessing the rising of such a wave, or horde, or a some new form of consuming destroying rage?

It is ir-rational, im-moral, and un-Godly, I believe, to blithely or blindly partner with current waves of hordes of destruction. So, the ‘wokety cadre’ will call this an accommodation to systems that support racism, misogyny, intolerance, and hatred. It is not, because I am not motivated by racism, misogyny, intolerance or hate. I am motivated to elevate humanity and human rights. And so, if I will vote for Mr Trump it would not be out of racism, misogyny, intolerance, or hate.

I welcome your reflections on this, and your own stories. What I do not welcome are critical comments that are not constructive.

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Josh Harris Apostatizes

Big news from the world of Evangelicalism. Last week, the megachurch pastor Josh Harris announced both that he and his wife of 21 years are divorcing, and that he is no longer a Christian. From his Instagram post making public his apostasy:

I have lived in repentance for the past several years—repenting of my self-righteousness, my fear-based approach to life, the teaching of my books, my views of women in the church, and my approach to parenting to name a few. But I specifically want to add to this list now: to the LGBTQ+ community, I want to say that I am sorry for the views that I taught in my books and as a pastor regarding sexuality. I regret standing against marriage equality, for not affirming you and your place in the church, and for any ways that my writing and speaking contributed to a culture of exclusion and bigotry. I hope you can forgive me.⁣⁣

Harris is best known as the author of the 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a classic text of Evangelical purity culture. Last year, he disowned the book, and withdrawn it from publication.

Earlier this year, Harris gave an interview to Sandi Villareal at Sojourners, the progressive Christian magazine, in which he talked about sexuality. Some interesting stuff there. Excerpts:

Villarreal: You say in the documentary that there are a lot of people who want you to throw out everything that was kind of the basis for your book. But I’m curious when you say “everything,” do you mean your belief in Christianity as a whole or about premarital sex in general? I’m curious what you include in that.

Harris: I think that there’s a push by some people to say being sex positive means — the kind of the historical sexual ethic related to sex outside of marriage, related to homosexuality, is basically laid aside, and embracing a healthy view of sex means just accepting all that as fine within the Christian tradition. … I do think though that, for me, in that change of interpretation of such a fundamental level when it comes to sexuality, it’s just hard for me to … In a way it’s almost easier for me to contemplate throwing out all of Christianity than it is to keeping Christianity and adapting it in these different ways.

I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think I’ve just been so indoctrinated in a certain way of interpreting scripture and viewing sexuality that it’s just hard for me to see the scriptures and its kind of overall, you know, commands and principles and so on and see how that can be consistent.

I think that I probably need to engage with some of those people — like I have people send me their e-books showing why premarital sex is fine, and I just don’t have the energy right now. Like, I do not want to read your book. I do not want to. I do not want to engage in a massive, you know, theological expedition to think about all these things. So it just sounds really exhausting to me, honestly.

But I think what you saw in that moment in the film is it is a real struggle for me. I’m really struggling with — I think that rethinking some of these things and having had my faith look so specific for so long that now as I’m questioning those specifics, it feels like I’m questioning my entire faith.

More:

Villarreal: Depending on what your theology is even within the Christian spectrum, there’s been a different interpretation of what those instructions are.

Harris: It can start to feel like you’re like doing some move from the Kamasutra with the Bible. And I don’t mean to be dismissive, it’s just like from an intellectual standpoint, it actually feels more intellectually honest for me to say I don’t know that I agree with the Bible in general than it is to get it to say these things. And maybe that’s just because I spent so much time in a very conservative environment judging all these more progressive people that I’m now tempted to go past that [and] be like, forget it all.

But it can get to feeling, like, what are you holding onto in Christianity? Why do you need it still? … I guess if we can with one generation make that radical a shift with the Bible, who’s to say that another generation can’t completely shift the Bible to, you know, to justify something that we would all think is horrendous? It starts to just be silly putty.

Read the whole thing.

What’s really interesting about that interview is that it’s about the inability to reconcile the historic, Biblical Christian faith with the Sexual Revolution. I haven’t read Harris’s 1997 book, but it’s not hard for me to imagine that I, as an Orthodox Christian, would disagree with what I take to be its stern legalism. I say that as someone who affirms the traditional Christian teaching that sex is only morally good when it occurs between a man and a woman married to each other. Years ago, as a Catholic, I was complaining in conversation with a former Protestant I know that the Catholic Church lacks the courage of its stated convictions, and rarely if ever teaches about sex and sexuality. My (married) interlocutor said that in the fundamentalist church where she grew up, they taught teenagers strongly about sex … but the only message was, “Don’t you DARE do it till your wedding night!” The woman told me that she was grateful for at least that, but that it took her years to get over the effect of the shrill, simplistic legalism.

Rigid purity culture is not the answer. But neither are progressive pop pastors making sex idols out of purity rings.  I have incomparably more respect for Harris for walking away from the faith entirely than bending and twisting it out to be a fraudulent warrant for holy humping and righteous rutting.

Josh Harris is right: you can’t reconcile Christianity with the Sexual Revolution. If you can make the Bible say that the Sexual Revolution is ordained by God, then you can make it say just about anything. The rock of faith would indeed be made of Silly Putty. There will be a generation of Christians — Catholics, Evangelicals, Orthodox — who try to live within that contradiction, but their rationalizations won’t stick. There’s just too much in Scripture and Tradition to counter it.

Obedience in sexual matters is not the whole of Christianity, but it can’t be severed from it. You can’t serve two masters. Sexual liberation is the prosperity gospel of progressive Christianity. Jesus told the Rich Young Ruler of the Gospel to sell everything he had and come follow him. The Rich Young Ruler went away sad, because his heart was in his wealth. It goes that way with sexual freedom too.

 

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In Rochester, Church Of England Gives Up

Open now! Challenge your friends+ family to a round of bridge-themed Adventure Golf in our free summer activity. Visit our website for more information and opening times. Thanks to @RochesterBridge for creating the course. @VisitKent @Enjoy_Medway @churchofengland pic.twitter.com/8DawCe5RZE

— Rochester Cathedral (@RochesterCathed) July 27, 2019

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Honestly. Honestly. Just sell the old barn to a condo developer, or give it back to the Catholics. Either would be more dignified than this. According to this story, the nine-hole golf course has been installed in hopes of attracting more young people to the church.

Why on earth would they think that would work? Young people won’t come to a church that doesn’t take itself seriously. Why not turn the nave into a disco and have a rave? Oh wait, they did that at the Liverpool cathedral in 2011.

The Rochester Cathedral is England’s second-oldest. There has been Christian worship on this site since the year 604, though the present cathedral building dates to 1080. Miniature golf in the nave dates to A.D. 2019.

Who ever thought that Christianity in England would expire not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with a bogey on the ninth hole?

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How We Drive Christians Away From The Church

On Friday, I posted something about how Jerry Falwell, Jr., is breaking Liberty University with the heavy-handed way he and his team run the school. In the post, I raised the prospect that some students are leaving conservative Evangelicalism for the progressive variety, or leaving the faith altogether, as a response. Pushback took one or both of these forms:

Liberty is a private university, therefore Falwell Jr. can do what he wants
People who leave the faith over the sins of religious leaders are weak, and were probably looking for a reason to leave, and blame it on somebody else

In the first case, of course Liberty is private, and has the freedom to operate by different standards. Nobody denies that. At issue is whether the standards Falwell imposes on the school are moral, just, or even wise. Some of the complaints about Falwell and LU’s administration are about the way it treats faculty. Stories are common, though no one still on faculty will talk about them on the record, because tenure doesn’t exist at Liberty, and they’re afraid.

The second point is valid in some cases, but mostly amounts to whistling past the graveyard — a meaningless gesture meant to tamp down fear.

I’ve been through this before. Once again, I’m going to explain it, though I’m going to try to be succinct.

When I left the Catholic Church in 2006, I caught a lot of hell from Catholics who accused me of weakness. I expected that; four years earlier, I would have said the same thing.

First, it is simply untrue that everyone who leaves a church or a form of the faith was just looking for an excuse. I fought hard for three years to keep my Catholic faith, in the face of scandal. It didn’t work. I’ve known people who weren’t ever serious about their Catholic faith, and who used the scandal as an excuse to formalize their exit, and to valorize it — I don’t know this writer personally, but it sounds like that’s what she did — but that was not me, and that was not some others I know. Remainers who tell themselves that all those who left weren’t really believers in the first place are lying, most consequentially to themselves. Consequentially, because that becomes an excuse not to do anything about the problem, which goes on.

More seriously, it is technically true that the sins of religious leaders don’t obviate the truths of a particular religion. Falwell Jr. might be a bad example of a conservative Christian leader, but all that proves is that conservative Christian belief can be professed by compromised leaders. It does not disprove the beliefs themselves.

What it does, though, is make it harder to take those beliefs seriously. People are not logic machines. When a Christian has to live in a social environment in which abuse (sexual and otherwise) is tolerated, hypocrisy is rife, and lying to protect the institution is standard operating procedure, it becomes more difficult to take seriously the moral and theological claims of the religion embodied by that institution and its leaders. To put it plainly, you start asking yourself, “If I am required to affirm these people, or to keep my mouth shut and pretend that this isn’t happening, for the sake of being faithful, what, really, am I being faithful to?”

You can put on your philosopher’s cap and poke holes in that all you like, but it’s not going to matter to the people who are on their way out the door, having lost their belief, or their will to believe. I had the will to believe, until one day, I woke up and realized that I did not. If this has not happened to you, well, count yourself fortunate. I mean that. If you are happily married, imagine that you discovered one day that your spouse had been cheating on you all along, and imagine that for years, you’ve heard your spouse admit that they had done this, and swear that they had repented, but you learned over and over that they were lying. Imagine losing the ability to trust your spouse at all. That’s how you go from having a happy marriage to waking up one day to discover that you’ve lost the ability to carry on with this liar. You want to be married. You’ve tried to be forgiving. You want to trust your spouse. But you can see that your spouse is so corrupt, and so self-deceived, that there’s no hope of recovery.

Even so, you might manage to stick it out. But if you do, you’re going to have to answer the question: Why?

Most of you know my story, so I won’t repeat it here. Most of you probably don’t know the story of William Lobdell, a Christian who was assigned to the religion beat at the Los Angeles Times. He covered Catholic scandals, Protestant scandals, and Mormon scandals for the paper — and it cost him his faith. In this must-read 2007 article, he described how it happened. Early on, he was hard hit covering a particular case:

As part of the Christian family, I felt shame for my religion. But I still compartmentalized it as an aberration — the result of sinful behavior that infects even the church.

This is the first line of defense, and it is a rational one. But then the Catholic scandal broke, and Lobdell had to write about it. He was at the time undergoing RCIA, the Catholic class to prepare converts for full reception into the Catholic Church:

Father Vincent Gilmore — the young, intellectually sharp priest teaching the class — spoke about the sex scandal and warned us Catholics-to-be not to be poisoned by a relatively few bad clerics. Otherwise, we’d be committing “spiritual suicide.”

As I began my reporting, I kept that in mind. I also thought that the victims — people usually in their 30s, 40s and up — should have just gotten over what had happened to them decades before. To me, many of them were needlessly stuck in the past.

But then I began going over the documents. And interviewing the victims, scores of them. I discovered that the term “sexual abuse” is a euphemism. Most of these children were raped and sodomized by someone they and their family believed was Christ’s representative on Earth. That’s not something an 8-year-old’s mind can process; it forever warps a person’s sexuality and spirituality.

Many of these victims were molested by priests with a history of abusing children. But the bishops routinely sent these clerics to another parish, and bullied or conned the victims and their families into silence. The police were almost never called. In at least a few instances, bishops encouraged molesting priests to flee the country to escape prosecution.

I couldn’t get the victims’ stories or the bishops’ lies — many of them right there on their own stationery — out of my head. I had been in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes, other violent crimes and tragedies. But this was different — the children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so sick and bishops so corrupt.

The lifeline Father Vincent had tried to give me began to slip from my hands.

I sought solace in another belief: that a church’s heart is in the pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God’s house. Instead, I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often to their faces.

On a Sunday morning at a parish in Rancho Santa Margarita, I watched congregants lobby to name their new parish hall after their longtime pastor, who had admitted to molesting a boy and who had been barred that day from the ministry. I felt sick to my stomach that the people of God wanted to honor an admitted child molester. Only one person in the crowd, an Orange County sheriff’s deputy, spoke out for the victim.

On Good Friday 2002, I decided I couldn’t belong to the Catholic Church. Though I had spent a year preparing for it, I didn’t go through with the rite of conversion.

I understood that I was witnessing the failure of humans, not God. But in a way, that was the point. I didn’t see these institutions drenched in God’s spirit. Shouldn’t religious organizations, if they were God-inspired and -driven, reflect higher standards than government, corporations and other groups in society?

I found an excuse to skip services that Easter. For the next few months, I attended church only sporadically. Then I stopped going altogether.

He kept reporting on the religion beat, covering scandal after scandal. Until finally he couldn’t take it anymore. He had lost his ability to believe in God altogether.

Read the whole thing. Unless you do, and unless you enter into William Lobdell’s story, and imagine yourself having to see and hear the things he saw and heard, nothing you have to say about him matters. Near the end, he interviewed a Catholic Eskimo who kept the faith, despite having been molested by priests as a boy (and going in and out of prison all his life, because of his alcoholism and violent temper). All the boys who had been victims of those priests lost their faith by adulthood — except this one man. Not long after that, covering a case in the Pacific Northwest (a priest impregnated a woman, who sued for child support; she was too poor to afford a lawyer, and lost the case), Lobdell hit the wall:

My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. It can’t be willed into existence. And there’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.

Sitting in a park across the street from the courthouse, I called my wife on a cellphone. I told her I was putting in for a new beat at the paper.

Yes, faith is a gift. It is a gift that is much stronger with some than with others. Those who have the gift in abundance should work to encourage those who haven’t been so gifted to be stronger with what they have. When I was younger, I assumed that many people who didn’t believe failed to do so in, well, bad faith. That was most of my own agnosticism: I wanted to believe, but I also didn’t want to, because if God exists (the Christian God), then I can’t do anything I want to with my life. I didn’t want to give up that freedom. I told myself that I was just being intellectually honest by withholding commitment to the faith, but the truth was that I didn’t want to be responsible. Eventually my resistance collapsed.

I still believe that many people who are halfway Christians are the kind of people I once was: people who construe all kinds of fake intellectual rationales to hide their own cowardice from themselves.

But I now know what I did not know back then: that there are people who try really hard to believe, but who, for whatever reason, just can’t. I used to react with knee-jerk condemnation of those who say the hypocrisy of religious leaders keeps them away from the faith. I hear the voice of college boys like I once was, looking to Jimmy Swaggart (who was a big deal back in the 1980s, when I was at LSU) as an excuse to justify our agnosticism or atheism. It was cheap, cowardly, and self-serving. I was that guy once upon a time. I imagine that more than a few young Evangelicals who are walking away from the faith, or at least into a form of the faith (progressive Evangelicalism) that is more acceptable to the secular culture, are just as cowardly and self-serving, and hiding this fact from themselves as I once did.

But I also imagine that there are more than a few who have fought hard for their faith in the face of the failure of their leaders and their institutions, and who just can’t do it anymore.

Surrounded by children one day, Jesus said:

“If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

That verse has been cited by Catholics to describe the fate of molester priests. I think it should also be understood to refer to we mature Christians, with regard to our responsibility to those who are young in the faith (though they might well be chronologically older). If a young Christian adult walks into heresy, or even apostasy, that is ultimately their responsibility. But do we who are more mature in the faith have to make it so freaking easy for them to do so? 

Over the weekend, I received an e-mail from a young man who was raised conservative Evangelical, but who has walked away from that form of Christian faith. He is now attending one of the older churches, but isn’t sure if he still believes in God. I wrote to ask him if I could post this; he has just said yes. So here it is. In it, he shared with me his theory of what’s going on with Evangelicalism, and at Liberty University:

Underneath all the singing and the chest-thumping among Evangelicals, there is a tremendous amount of existential dread. Unlike Catholicism or Orthodoxy, there’s no liturgy, hardly even any traditional Protestant hymns anymore (thanks Hillsong.) It’s purely the culture around it, with some ideas about the Bible borrowed from Baptists who are themselves being transformed by the culture. Therefore, what Evangelicalism is preserving, much more than a religion, is yesteryear’s way of life.

This is why Evangelicals can’t fight battles very well. They seek to defend not only a code of rules and rituals but an intrinsically transient status quo. Because they lack historical consciousness, the older ones confuse midcentury revivalist America with Christianity as a whole. The younger ones, trying with no transcendent values to assimilate to a decadent and nihilistic culture, adopt many of the secular values themselves.

Now here’s what I think happened at Liberty. Jerry Falwell being who he was, the donors from the aforementioned group 2 [the reader earlier described these people as “the Jesus Is A Republican crowd” — RD] flocked to him in greater numbers than anywhere else, except maybe Oral Roberts or Bob Jones. Liberty’s cashflow is therefore more dependent on the old people than almost anywhere else. Because this is a generational issue with the old seeking to preserve a dead society, it is impossible to find leaders under the age of 65 or so that have the right cultural memories. This is why they are Trump’s biggest supporters, and they support Falwell Jr. for similar reasons; he will keep Liberty in line, no matter the cost.

I shared that with an Evangelical who is familiar with the Liberty situation, and who replied that this is a very astute observation. I don’t know Evangelicalism; I leave it to you Evangelicals to decide how well that describes you all, and what’s going on within you.

One last thought: I wonder if things would be different with younger Evangelicals and the church, regarding Trump, if their leaders did not embrace Donald Trump as Falwell Jr. has done — without qualification or reservation — and instead supported him as a kind of tragic choice. What if they explained that in their judgment, the situation facing Christians in America is such that they feel compelled to throw their support behind the kind of man they admit they would have rejected in the past? What if they said to the young that life is complicated and tragic, and that we aren’t always offered clear choices between good and evil? To me, that’s a more comprehensible and understandable rationale for supporting Trump than the rah-rah cheerleading that many in the conservative Evangelical leadership have been giving. It wouldn’t convince some of the young tempted to leave in disgust, but who knows? It might. It would take much of the sting out of the charge of hypocrisy.

In 1998, when so many religious conservative leaders thundered against Bill Clinton, nobody imagined a situation in which Donald Trump — of all people! — could conceivably be thought of as the better choice for religious conservatives, because the Democrats would have become so extreme on abortion and LGBT (which is to say, on religious liberty issues)? But that’s where we are as a country. Me, I understand Christians who plan to vote for Trump as the lesser of two evils, and I understand Christians who plan to vote for the Democratic nominee as the lesser of two evils. Who I don’t understand are Christians on either side who offer their votes with unmixed emotion, without any sense of tragedy.

To finish: yes, there are plenty of people who want to leave the faith, or orthodox versions of it, because they want to do whatever they want to do, and believe whatever they want to believe, and want to refuse full responsibility for that choice by blaming it on the corruption of religious leaders and institutions. But there are also people within the conservative churches who tell themselves that people who walk away are only doing it in bad faith. In cases like that, the bad faith rests on the heads of the remainers, whose self-serving rationalizations cause the little ones to stumble.

UPDATE: A Protestant, formerly Evangelical, reader writes (I’ve fudged a bit to protect his identity):

This is pretty big news in a certain wing of the Evangelical movement. Had it happened in the late 90s or early 00s, it would have been absolutely earth-shattering.

https://www.christianpost.com/news/joshua-harris-falling-away-from-faith-i-am-not-a-christian.html

You may not be familiar with Harris, but his book about (not) dating was sort of the youth group phenomenon of the 90s. It was like the Macarena. Everyone and their grandma was in to this. My youth group in [a Southwestern city] was all in to his book as were other youth groups we encountered all over the Southwest. It was as ubiquitous as Veggie Tales. As I became an adult, that (well-intentioned) silly book was something that Evangelicals of my generation from Tennessee to California remembered. Our worlds would have been shaken to the foundations if he had apostasized in the 90s–even if we thought his book was silly.

At any rate, to see now that Harris has apostasized is no big deal. I virtually expect it from 40-something Evangelicals whom I have not heard from in awhile. Millennial Evangelicals are apostasizing right and left.

More:

I think the hour of testing for Evangelicals has arrived. I can’t say I understand Catholicism or Orthodoxy well enough to know if their moment has come and past, is now, or is still in the future. But for low-church non-denominationals and Baptists, the moment is now. If the congregation is in an urban/suburban area in the South, or if the congregation is primarily made up of university-credentialed professionals, then read the “now” as this very year of our Lord two thousand and nineteen. Sheep and goats are separating as we speak.

(I attend a confessional and liturgical church [deleted] and I think that our moment has passed and we have survived this test.)

But in my Texas city, the “moderate” Baptists are all leaping into sexual confusion. I see progressive churches as basically clearinghouses for future atheists. I also see plenty of bearded young men who were in seminary ten or so years ago who are now some form of post-Christian spiritual activist who haunts the coffee houses/pubs. One acquaintance was a young pastor ten years ago and I recently found out he secretly lost his faith and continued pastoring for a number of years. He moved to a liberal church before giving up altogether.

There is one particular weak spot that the Evangelicalism of the last sixty or so years suffers from that makes it an especially easy conquest for the culture. I think confessional and liturgical churches that have a sacramental perspective on the world have an advantage here, though whether they know how to put it to use is a different matter.

I think most generally, there is a modern blindspot here. Baptists and Evangelicals implicitly buy into a very Modern way of carving up the world. What I am about to describe is philosophical but please understand I am not accusing Evangelicals and Baptists of engaging in overt philosophizing. Rather, I think there is an implicit philosophical frame organizing their thought.

I think for many Evangelicals and Baptists, it is very easy to interpret the world through a series of related dualisms: the “natural” and the “supernatural” and “secular” and the “spiritual” or “supernatural”. Politically this is translated into “public” and “private”. Now this is not an antagonistic dualism, more of a negotiated power-sharing agreement. That is, the secular order presides over the natural world in public Mon-Sat and then hands it off to the church on Sunday to attend to the spiritual and give the supernatural its due in private religious associations.

Much more can be said about the philosophy undergirding this division of the world. It would be okay at some level to blame Descartes for this, but really without a much more complete explanation that would be an oversimplification. We can simply acknowledge that Descartes found dualism a solution to a conflict between the materialism and mechanism of the emerging scientific view of the world and the more enchanted and sacramental view of the world of Christianity.

You can see how on this view, Science could be the authority that tells us how the natural world operates and see how its knowledge is publicly available. But as Christianity is thought to depend upon private revelation, ministering to Man’s spirit and bringing him into contact with the supernatural can only be done privately. So Mon-Sat, you operate in the secular world according to the wisdom of science/business and other secular authorities. Then on Sunday, you remember your immortal soul which is not of the natural and you give the “supernatural” its due.

This is how I was taught in a moderate SBC church in the 80s and 90s and the Christian elders were sincere, not cynical. They viewed the world as so-divided into natural and supernatural, secular and sacred: Church and Science/business belonged to two separate realms. There was a division of labor. And even though the kind and gentle folk at [these churches] never articulate this dualism as a thought, this is implicitly how they operate. In Waco, it was very common for [members of a particular Evangelical church where we have mutual friends] to be extremely accomplished in the business world or secular world in some profession and to sort of see it as unconnected with their spiritual life except as a vehicle for sharing the gospel. That is, the gospel is still only for the immortal soul and so the secular and spiritual never truly mix for [members of this chuch], they just tend to work side-by-side a lot. Now, [this church] as a semi-denomination is in no danger of apostasizing, but its membership has a very high attrition rate and the individual members who leave the church often do drift into “spiritual but not religious” or progressive moralistic therapeutic deism.

I think the lie that moderns, whether Baptists or [members of that church], accept is that the natural world is something that is publicly knowable and that we can all agree upon as a lowest common denominator for living together as opposed to the supernatural which requires private revelation. And so they think they can operate Mon-Sat in the secular world as though the knowledge and values ordering the secular world are somehow neutral. (Note, I don’t think the Evangelicals would admit this, and they would point to secular values they don’t share as far as sexuality is concerned, but deep down, they think that whatever the values informing their professions as bankers, salesmen, attorneys, doctors are, they are neutral with respect to the Gospel and that is where the blindspot is.)

I am starting to ramble so I’ll bring this to a close: I think what is happening is that there are implicit values and narratives about who we are and where we are going that the post-Christian secular world must rely upon to get through the day so to speak. And as Christians participate more and more in these professional contexts where secularism is strongest, they are adopting these values and narratives Mon-Fri as frameworks through which to interpret and act in the world. And as these frames rub up against Christian faith and practice, it leads to internal conflict.

How does that conflict resolve? I think Jordan Peterson does a good job of emphasizing that our cognitive beliefs and commitments are stronger the more they are integrated with our motivation. That is, if a belief helps guide you through your life, you will hold on to it even if it has all sorts of defects from a purely abstract detached and cognitive perspective. For what its worth, N.T. Wright has done a good job saying basically the same thing about the importance of praxis and belief–they must go hand-in-hand.

Evangelicals are not necessarily all intellectual slouches. But so long as that scripture knowledge and theology is at the academic level and is not engaging any motivational frame, it ain’t going to win against a counternarrative that does. I have seen plenty of very sharp and knowledgeable Evangelicals all the sudden fall away. Not because their impressive theological architecture was found to have a logical contradiction, but because it was not integrated with the frames they needed to live their lives well. When push came to shove, they went with what helped them to live their lives.

All of us need to work on expounding a Gospel that integrates us motivationally–a story that makes sense out of all our stories so to speak. But if you view the world sacramentally, it is much easier to do this. I worry that the implicit dualism of today’s evangelicals will constrain their attempts and their narrative will never be fully integrated but top out in a dualism of secular and sacred: what is good for the getting on in this life and what is good for the immortal soul in the afterlife. And since that is in fact a false dichotomy, the two frames will not coexist peacefully, but will be in conflict. Except that the secular one has been given the lion’s share of frames with which to integrate. So, we should not be surprised that when push comes to shove, Evangelicals are leaving the faith or reinterpreting it according to secular wisdom as the progressive Christians do.

This is all new to me. I’m eager to hear what you Evangelical readers have to say about this. I have a post about Joshua Harris already written; it will go up Monday morning.

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Wokeness Drives Latino Student To Trump

A reader sent me this today. I know his real name and the institution where he studies. I agreed to very slightly fudge this text to protect his identity:

I know that you occasionally collect (or at least like reading) stories about how excessive wokeness red-pills otherwise normal people. As an aside, doesn’t it capture our culture perfectly that the right and the left describe the same phenomenon–waking up to what is really going on–with different words? I want to share something that happened to me a couple of weeks ago.

I am a college student at a land grant university. I used to like and talk about politics, but now I run away as quickly as possible when the subject comes up lest I let slip some wrongspeak. Nowadays, I focus almost exclusively on economics, which I hope to study in graduate school next year. As of now, nobody is calling me a fascist for talking about monetary policy.

Allow me to give a bit more context. I am a libertarian with traditional leanings who is most comfortable reading econ blogs. But I read yours frequently for new ideas even if I often disagree with you and other AmCon writers about economics. I’m just not that radical anymore.

This summer, I received a grant to research monetary policy. The only catch is that one can only get the money if he (she/zhe/whatever) is multicultural (I’m part Mexican), so there was bound to be some issues with that if it came up. But money grants to multicultural students are a lot bigger and easier to get than standard research grants for undergraduates, so naturally I went with that. Sure, there’s a bit of gaming the system if I’m only part Mexican and culturally assimilated, but wouldn’t you rather have me get that money than some quack?

(The other people who got money really are quacks–one girl is doing research on how we should replace writing classes with learning how to tell stories through knitting because apparently indigenous people can’t express themselves through writing. No joke. In other words, the research is a propaganda program.)

One of the conditions for receiving the money is I have to occasionally meet with the other people who received funding and go to seminars on ridiculous crap. I usually don’t pay attention. But a couple of weeks ago we had to have a discussion circle about how students deal with mental health and what that might be like in graduate school. Sounds fairly innocuous and perhaps even useful, right? Wrong.

The moderator of my circle looks exactly like a model SJW. Not quite Trigglypuff, but pretty damn close. Sort of overweight woman, hairy arms (and face), a PhD candidate in some grievance studies field. Afflicted with all sorts of mental disorders and sure proud of it. That’s a bizarre thing, isn’t it? The people there went on and on about their various mental health issues as if they were badges to be put on girl scout sashes. One after the other, they one-upped each other. “You have depression and it sometimes affects your day? Well I have depression and I can’t even do my homework!” “Oh yeah, well I have to stay in bed for two weeks sometimes!” “Well I tried to kill myself once!” These are not trivial things and should be taken as seriously as physical injuries and treated as such. I used to have severe depression and anxiety issues, but I got through it because I realized it wasn’t a necessary condition of my existence.

Anyway, there were a few standard questions about what we do to take care of ourselves and I was feeling fine about everything. Then, on the fourth question, the moderator asked, “How do your intersecting identities affect your mental health?” A parade of rather predictable responses followed. “I’m black, so nobody expects me to succeed, which is why I fail so often.” “I’m a woman, so I often feel as if I am supposed to be in the kitchen instead of the study.” And so on. I was the last one.

I thought about it for a second and decided to take a stand (paraphrasing): “I don’t think about my intersecting identities. It simply isn’t useful. It’s more useful to think of myself as an individual and not subject myself to imaginary group pressures because that leads to pathology. I prefer to grant myself agency and allow that I have the power to determine my course regardless of these happenstance characteristics.”

The circle became visibly tense and the people next to me were physically repulsed. The moderator looked at me and sneered, “White male.” Seriously, she said that.

I was a bit taken aback. I smirked a bit (it is rather funny) and said something to the effect of, “There are words to describe people who make assumptions on the basis of skin color and gender, and they aren’t particularly nice. And I’m actually Mexican–” She interrupted me, saying, “Well, you have very light skin.” Can you imagine the nerve of this woman? Seriously, she said that.

Of course, I’m paraphrasing my own words here because I don’t remember exactly what I said. I responded, “That’s quite the observation. What you can’t tell by my skin color and gender [she assumed my gender! The nerve of some people] is that I am on the autism spectrum. What you can’t tell is that my parents divorced when I was very young, that my family lost everything in the Great Recession, that my grandparents grew up in boxcars, that my parents never finished college, that my parents were abused as children, that I have had many personal struggles. These aren’t the things you can get out of melanin and genitalia…” I went on for some time like that and we went back and forth a few more times, with other students jumping in to tell me how insensitive I was being.

The experience has stuck in my mind for quite some time. This thing really matters. When I was growing up, it was absolutely not okay to talk to people like that in any setting. Now, in a conversation about mental health, it’s suddenly okay to condemn white males simply for being white males? One of my friends, a traditional Muslim from Somalia, told me he self-censored throughout the discussion simply because he didn’t want to be condemned. Needless to say, I’m the black sheep of the group now. And that’s basically fine with me. But there is something horribly wrong if it has become okay to behave like this.

The Left is insane. The Right has its issues, but at least I’m certain they don’t want me dead. When the Revolution comes, I don’t doubt for a second that my head will be on a pike next to yours and my capitalist father’s. I’m scared to death of these people. I have God and monetary policy, but all I can really talk about is the latter. I’m no fan of Donald Trump’s, but I will be voting for him without a moment’s hesitation in 2020. In no time at all, I went from a cosmopolitan libertarian who was in the good graces of the Left to one of the deplorables because of an instance of wrongthink.

It is very, very difficult for those who have not had to face Trigglypuffery in action to understand what it is, and why it’s so unnerving to be within institutions where people like her set the norms. What can this guy possibly do? He has already made himself a pariah in that group. One thing he can do is … vote for Trump, solely as a matter of self-defense. He’s a self-described Latino cosmopolitan libertarian, but because he doesn’t accept SJW ideology, he has been radically Othered. This academic is less afraid of Donald Trump than he is of SJWs in power.

I’m interested in more stories like this, from people who don’t care for Donald Trump, but feel that they have to vote for him out of self-defense. Tell me how and why you came to believe that.

Below, a funny remix someone made of Trigglypuff’s raging. She drops an f-bomb, so it’s NSFW:

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How Woke Capitalism Made A Trump Voter

I received this e-mail last night, and have been corresponding with its author. He is who he says he is — I looked him up online. He gave me permission to publish this as long as I took out his name and identifying details. You’ll see below where I did this.

I read your most recent column about how white liberals are on the forefront of the racial grievance bandwagon, and I cannot tell you how spot on you are.

I’m a senior executive at [multinational], one of the largest [businesses of its kind] in the world. I’m a military veteran but have been rubbing elbows with these white elites for some time. I attended a top-ranked MBA program, and for a time was going over to their side. You helped bring me back.

For a time at [my company], I worked [very closely with a number of senior executives] at one of our largest divisions, meaning that I reported directly to the senior executive who ran the operation. He was exactly the type of person you reference in the article — white, wealthy, and knee deep in the wacko left.

He wasn’t shy about criticizing Donald Trump in public. In a private moment, he could be counted on to denigrate Trump and his voters. A few times, he wished a speedy death to 45. This appalled me, but being a father of three, I couldn’t risk opening my mouth to tell him that his beliefs were appalling. It was cowardly, but I didn’t have a choice.

He was also a racist, flat out. He truly believed that white people who didn’t agree with him were evil and needed to be stamped out at our company. He told me this a number of times. He instituted racial hiring quotes for senior leaders, insisted on holding managers accountable for fostering “inclusive” environments (which meant encouraging and proselytizing for racial, LGBT, and gender grievances), and even went so far to say that he would never hire another white male [for my position]. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t very good, but considering my background and performance reports, this seems unlikely. But perhaps not.

But what really struck me is that, for someone who benefitted from this so-called systemic racial inequity, he never once had any skin in the game. Every policy he put into place made it more difficult for white men like me to advance, but he and his cohort of white executives continued to sit fat and happy on their thrones. It’s so easy to throw straight white men under the bus of diversity and inclusion polices when the throwers don’t have to live with the consequences. How odd. If I believed I was the beneficiary of a corporate culture that systematically discriminated against blacks, women, LGBT, etc., I don’t think I’d be able to sleep at night. I’d rather resign than perpetuate the inequity.

But alas, so long as he’s on the right side of this fight, he probably sleeps just fine. If we deplorable have to suffer, so be it. We probably deserve it.

Corporate culture is death to people like me — white, straight, male, religious. I’ve decided to go out on my own and start a company. It’s the only chance I have to escape what’s coming, and have the financial wherewithal to support my family during the coming storm. I also want to provide employment opportunities to others like me. Call it the corporate version of the BenOp.

I wasn’t a Trump voter in 2016 (I was in Evan McMullen’s camp), but my sense of self-preservation has driven me to Trump’s camp. I don’t have any other choice.

I think this man ought to speak to an employment lawyer. If he can document these things, it sounds like he has a hell of a lawsuit against this multinational corporation. And if so, I hope he sues them down to the foundations, on behalf of all the people who are being treated like this within that particular company, and every company, and on behalf of all those who will graduate from college and walk into these bigoted lion’s dens.

If I’m reading this guy correctly, he is not particularly a fan of Trump’s, but he knows that what the other side represents is the institutionalization of progressive bigotries, and their advancement in law. And he’s right about that. Anecdotally, every conservative in my inner circle is thinking the exact same thing: they don’t like Trump, agree with a lot of the criticism of him, and look forward to the day when we have a normal president again. But they are probably going to vote for him in 2020, even if they didn’t in 2016, because they fear the Democrats in power more than they loathe Trump.

This is not abstract fear. It’s fear of things like what this man in the letter is undergoing. My personal circles being what they are, most of the people in them work in institutions or environments where what this man talks about in this letter exists, at least in principle. There are no internal restraints with corporate and institutional culture to pushing it further, either. Stand up against it, and you identify yourself as a bigot.

I received another e-mail from a reader, a Christian who has been able to get along in his large, woke-ish institution by keeping his head down. He said he has recently been invited by the bosses to participate in a discussion group convened to talk about how to foster a respectful, inclusive, etc., environment in the workplace.

He’s torn. On one hand, he wants to be open about what it’s like to be a faithful Christian working in that professional environment, having to fear that you will be found out and punished; he sees this as an opportunity to make things better for people like him in the organization. On the other hand, he knows there’s a certain risk in outing himself as a religious believer within that organization’s culture. (He told me which organization it is, and yes, there’s definitely reason to fear.) There would be no going back if he came out as a Christian in that workplace, and if the climate within the organization changed, even just a little bit, he would be targeted.

There are liberals who deny that things like this happen, or that they are common, or that when they do happen, that it’s a big deal. Don’t you believe them. It’s real. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Woke Capitalism is a force for bigotry, but you can’t see that if you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid absorbed the doublethink required to thrive in these organizations.Some left-wing reader of this blog yesterday left a comment saying, presumably with a straight face, that progressives only want a more just, equitable world, and that’s what they work for. Right. Tell it to the man who wrote the letter at the top. There are a lot of us who have seen up close and personal what “progressive justice” means in the workplace. We know it’s a lie.

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Jessica Yaniv: Democratic Party Poster Gal

Andrew Sullivan on Jessica Yaniv (second item in his column):

In Ricky Gervais’s words: “How did we get to the point where women are having to fight for the right to choose whether they wax some big old hairy cock and balls or not? It is not a human right to have your meat and 2 veg polished.” But, according to British Columbia’s definition of human rights, it is, if you are a woman. Female-only salons have to accept every woman, including those with balls. And according to the proposed Equality Act, the gay lobby’s chief legislative goal, backed by every Democratic candidate, it would be a human right in America as well. Yaniv has described the beauticians’ refusals as “hate crimes.” And technically, they might be.

He goes on to say that Yaniv is a “troll” and an “extreme outlier” — but he’s honest enough to say:

The trouble is, the way this issue is currently being understood, it’s hard to think of how you prevent trolls or fanatics like Yaniv from gaming the system. If your gender is determined entirely by self-definition, needs no further support or evidence, and always trumps genital biology, it’s a legal regime ripe for abuse. The current insistence that a trans woman is a woman in every single respect also ends in the absurdity of talking about a woman’s scrotum. It should be possible to defend trans women and trans men from discrimination without being forced into a surreal world, where a penis is a female organ and a vagina is a male one.

Read it all. Sullivan proposes a way to protect transgender people without giving people like Yaniv the legal means to compel people to service creeps like Yaniv.

Note well: “And according to the proposed Equality Act, the gay lobby’s chief legislative goal, backed by every Democratic candidate, it would be a human right in America as well.” In May, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the Equality Act. Every single Democrat present voted for it — and so did eight House Republicans.

If the Democrats controlled the US Senate, and the White House, the Equality Act would have become law, and salon owners across America would have had to wax the testicles of Yankee Doodle Yanivs.(And this week, more allegations, including extremely disturbing screenshots of Yaniv’s behavior online towards underaged girls, emerged.)

It’s not actually a joke. This is what is required if you believe that a person with male genitals and male DNA is a woman just because he says he is (and similarly with a woman claiming to be a man). This is what the Democratic Party supports. Really, it does. It could use common sense to modify this stance, but doing so would require Democrats to say that a core principle of gender ideology is wrong, and that maleness and femaleness does have something ineradicable to do with the body.

Brendan O’Neill explains why the mainstream media are ignoring this story — and why we cannot afford to follow their lead. Jessica Yaniv is not the product of religious conservatives’ collective imagination. Jessica Yaniv is real, and is the living embodiment of gender ideologues’ logic — a logic that has conquered the Democratic Party and the mainstream media. Liberals will accuse conservatives like me of “nutpicking” — using extreme examples of a group to discredit the entire group — because most male-to-female transgenders will not go to a women’s salon demanding a wax job on their privates. That is completely beside the point. Under laws like the Equality Act, the Jessica Yanivs of the world, however rare, would indeed have the right to that service, and those who deny them would be guilty of a civil rights violation.

This is how insane the Democrats have become because of their uncritical embrace of gender ideology. The Law of Merited Impossibility, as embodied by Jessica Yaniv: “You will never have to wax the balls of a man who presents as a woman, and when you do, bigots like you will deserve to.” This is not a what-if situation; it’s actually being decided now by a Human Rights tribunal in British Columbia. In the recent hearing, Yaniv called the Sikh woman who has been charged with a human rights violation a “neo-Nazi.”

 

 

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