Rod Dreher's Blog, page 222
July 26, 2019
White Civil War
To say that white educated Democrats have moved left is true, but it’s not the essential truth. The bigger truth is that this segment is now more likely to see politics through a racial lens. Racial equity has become the prism through which many in this group see a range of other issues.
For example, immigration is now seen through the lens of race, in a way that simply wasn’t true two decades ago. As Zach Goldberg noted in an essay in Tablet Magazine, between 1965 and 2000, the percentage of white liberals who wanted higher immigration levels never deviated far from 10 percent. During the Obama administration, the number rose to the range of 20 to 30 percent. Now, more than 50 percent of white progressives want to see higher immigration levels.
Many progressives see barriers to immigration as akin to unjust racial barriers. Many want to dismantle the border enforcement agencies and eliminate criminal sanctions against undocumented crossings precisely because they are seen as structures of oppression that white people impose on brown people.
More:
In this new dispensation, the concept of white privilege is on everybody’s lips. As Goldberg points out, in 1996 and 2010 about a quarter of white liberals thought racial discrimination was a very serious problem. By 2016, 58 percent did. White liberals have warmer attitudes toward other races than they do toward their own.
In this dispensation, more white progressives view society as basically unjust. In last year’s Hidden Tribes survey, for example, 86 percent of progressive activists said that people’s life outcomes are outside their individual control.
This shift in outlook has yielded several paradoxes. As many researchers have pointed out, white progressives are now farther left on immigration and race and diversity issues than the typical Hispanic or African-American voter.
Second, two of the great marks of privilege in our society are skin color and education levels, and yet in the Democratic Party it’s the highly educated whites who express the greatest alienation with the system that benefits them so directly.
Third, the progressive framework is egalitarian, but the shift has opened up wider opinion and cultural gaps between this highly educated elite and less educated groups.
Don’t miss Times columnist Thomas Edsall’s long, meaty piece analyzing the Democratic Party as composed of three separate electorates, all of whom will be difficult to satisfy. Edsall is always a must read, because he does a deep dive into politics at a granular level.
These findings are no surprise at all to people like me, whose main sources of news include The New York Times and National Public Radio. The obsession with race and immigration — with only one side of the stories represented — is rivaled only by the obsessions with LGBT (again, only one perspective allowed). It explains too why the media are so out of touch with how ordinary Americans think about race and immigration: not just because the media ranks are overstuffed with liberals, but with white liberals.
Brooks ends like this:
For me, it’s a good idea to assume that people adopt their positions for honest, well-intentioned reasons. The crucial question then becomes: When is the racial lens (with its implied charge of racism against those who disagree) the right lens to use and when is it not? When does it illuminate an issue and when does it conceal?
This brings to mind something that happened when I was in an undergraduate opinion-writing class in the 1980s. In college, I was fairly liberal, and a volunteer for Amnesty International. In my Amnesty work, I noticed that we were writing a number of letters on behalf of prisoners of conscience in Africa — not just prisoners in apartheid South Africa, but in countries ruled by black Africans. Long story short: the more I dug, the more I realized that viewing Africa itself as a continent rife with tribal conflict — and that South Africa was a matter of the white tribes (mostly the Boers) dominating the black tribes, in a similar way that ruling black tribes dominated weaker black tribes in black-ruled countries. The wickedness and injustice of the South African example was clear to us on the outside, because it literally was a case of white vs. black (and, of course, it was connected to colonialism).
I wrote an op-ed piece for the class in which I applied this analysis to the apartheid issue. In no way did I defend apartheid, which I, of course, deplored. Rather, I simply suggested that examining the issue through the lens of general African tribal conflict could offer us a new and potentially more fruitful way to understand the apartheid phenomenon, and how the international community might move South Africa away from apartheid without the whole thing blowing up into a race war.
One of my classmates — a liberal black guy — was furious at that. I mean furious — he was physically repulsed, as I recall. He couldn’t even argue against my case. The idea that the apartheid issue could be examined in any way other than the lens provided by the Civil Rights struggle in the US was, to him, nothing more than a defense of apartheid. It was an extremely uncomfortable moment. Rather than argue what I proposed in my paper — an argument that might well have been wrong — I had to argue that I was not an ally of the Botha government. Everyone else in that small class was white, and in my recollection, nobody else wanted to speak up, because nobody wanted the black guy — who was a good guy, let me emphasize — to judge them as racist.
I remind you that I was at that time still a Democrat, one who volunteered for Amnesty International. But by violating the rigid code of how we talk about and understand race (in South Africa, at that!), I basically declared myself to be Sen. Jesse Helms’s valet. What happened in that classroom that day was that the racial lens — in particular, the lens of the US Civil Rights movement — was used that day in the classroom not to clarify the situation in South Africa, but to obscure our understanding of it.
I think something like that is happening now in our country regarding race and immigration. In the public square, the worst thing you can be is a racist (or more broadly, a bigot). Liberals — white liberals, in particular — control the discourse in media and academia, which is why it is common to see courses, articles, and reports damning “white privilege,” “white male privilege,” “whiteness,” and so forth. The other day, driving around listening to NPR, I heard a lengthy interview with a black man, conducted by a white liberal (a fact I know because I have been listening to this particular journalist for many years), that was full of the kinds of racially-charged statements that no NPR reporter would have allowed a white interview subject to get away with without challenge. The white liberal reporter had completely internalized the narrative that David Brooks discusses in his column.
I am sure that this reporter has absolutely no idea that she has done this. I would bet anything that she regards herself as a neutral arbiter. The racial double standard that she embodied — allowing a black interview subject to make racially loaded remarks about whites that she would never have allowed a white to make unchallenged — made me so angry I turned the radio off. In fact, I well remember the last time I did that: on a Sunday morning, driving to pick up my son from college for church. There was a series of NPR reports about immigration and the caravan. One allows for a certain liberal bias at NPR, but these reports were off the charts.
I know, I know: NPR and The New York Times are liberal. Dog bites man. Film at 11. I’m not interested in making the usual conservative claim about liberal media bias. What interests me is what seems to draw Brooks to the data about white liberals: that they have radicalized on racial issues (of which immigration is a subset here), even beyond where racial minorities are. One result of this: they see whites who don’t share their radical views as racist. No wonder so many in the media can’t see or understand anything complex about Americans’ racial views. It’s all Good vs. Evil.
I’m thinking about a situation I had a few years back, in which a group of white Evangelical college students, with whom I had had a good relationship, blackballed me when I wanted to interview them for a project I was working on, one that had nothing to do with race. I couldn’t understand what had happened. I had been with them once, and had a great time. Suddenly they wouldn’t talk to me. Someone involved with the group confided that I had written something critical of a pastor who had delivered a controversial sermon extolling Black Lives Matter (I had questioned whether the racialism in the sermon could be reconciled with the Gospel) — and that caused the white Evangelical college students to treat me as radioactive. I have no idea if these students were conservative or liberal, but it was striking to me that the issue of Black Lives Matter was so central to them that they construed even questioning the narrative as racist on its face. So racist, in fact, that they didn’t even want to talk about it.
Mind you, this was before Trump! Again, I don’t know if these educated young white adults counted themselves as liberals or conservatives, but in the sociological data Brooks cites, I see those kids. Brooks again:
The bigger truth is that this segment [white educated Democrats] is now more likely to see politics through a racial lens. Racial equity has become the prism through which many in this group see a range of other issues.
I’m going to repeat this so you don’t miss it: according to the data, white liberals think more highly of other races than they do their own people. That is extraordinary. It doesn’t take a political genius to see how that stance can distort one’s ability to see what is happening in this country. If everything is an example of racism, or an exercise of white privilege, then the kind of white people who don’t share the extreme racialized views of educated white liberals are likely to quit listening to allegations that they are racist — because they will come to read these allegations not as a description of the world as it is, or as it might be, but as nothing more than white liberal self-hatred projected onto the kind of white people they consider to be deplorables.
(Incidentally, sociologist Eric Kaufmann’s new book Whiteshift, which I haven’t yet read, seems to propose a framework for understanding racial conflict in the emerging majority-minority America in terms generally like I proposed in that apartheid op-ed — that is, according to a tribal conflict model — versus the familiar one.)
One last thing. Brooks writes:
in the Democratic Party it’s the highly educated whites who express the greatest alienation with the system that benefits them so directly.
You never see white people like this volunteering to give up their places within the meritocracy to people of color. What many of them are doing is finding a way to process the guilt they feel over their own place in the meritocracy, by affirming PC ideology, and by making sure other white people — not them, never them — have to pay the price. The class divide among whites in America — a divide that manifests itself primarily in cultural conflict — is under-explored.
Finally, I am reminded of an observation that Hannah Arendt made in her 1951 classic The Origins Of Totalitarianism. Here she’s talking about European elites (presumably Germans) between the wars, and how their behavior paved the way for totalitarianism. She writes that they were so disgusted by where respectable liberal, bourgeois society had done — that is, it had led to World War I — that they developed contempt for liberal norms. Arendt:
The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.
She’s talking here about elites who dallied with fascism and communism, delighting in the wreckage of norms. I read that recently, as part of my research for my next book, and thought about both the liberal elites today who have gone over to embrace extreme social justice ideology, which refutes liberal norms; and the white Trumpenproles, who have embraced him, and Trump’s destruction of liberal norms.
Put another way, it appears that the core drama of American politics in 2019 is an intra-tribal civil war between whites.
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July 25, 2019
Unfree At Liberty
Will E. Young, formerly the editor of Liberty University’s campus newspaper, writes a damning piece about the institutional cult of personality that Jerry Falwell Jr. has established at the Christian college. This is not a disgruntled-employee kind of reported essay. It’s a substantive look at the kind of corruption Falwell Jr. has introduced into the college.
Young writes about how Falwell and his eagerness to control crushed the college paper in hard-to-justify ways. Excerpt:
Instead, when my team took over that fall of 2017, we encountered an “oversight” system — read: a censorship regime — that required us to send every story to Falwell’s assistant for review. Any administrator or professor who appeared in an article had editing authority over any part of the article; they added and deleted whatever they wanted. Falwell called our newsroom on multiple occasions to direct our coverage personally, as he had a year earlier when, weeks before the 2016 election, he read a draft of my column defending mainstream news outlets and ordered me to say whom I planned to vote for. I refused on ethical grounds, so Falwell told me to insert “The author refused to reveal which candidate he is supporting for president” at the bottom of the column. I complied. (Huff and the police department declined to comment on the contents of this essay. Falwell and the university did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Eventually I quit, and the School of Communication decided not to replace me, turning the paper into a faculty-run, student-written organ and seizing complete control of its content. Student journalists must now sign a nondisclosure agreement that forbids them from talking publicly about “editorial or managerial direction, oversight decisions or information designated as privileged or confidential.” The form also states that the students understand they are “privileged” to receive “thoughts, opinions, and other statements” from university administrators.
Granted, college newspapers are not the same kind of publication as an independent newspaper. It is not unusual or even wrong for colleges to exercise some kind of oversight and discipline of a campus paper. This is actually a necessary part of student journalists learning how to be professionals. But an institution ought to exercise that authority wisely. Assuming that Young is telling the truth about what happened at the college, what Falwell and his leadership team have completely neutered the newspaper and the School of Communication. If their new policies are as Young says, then it’s fair to ask of what value is a degree from the Liberty University School of Communication, aside from training in public relations?
Anyway, Young says it’s not just the school’s relationship to its student newspaper:
What my team and I experienced at the Champion was not an isolated overreaction to embarrassing revelations. It was one example of an infrastructure of thought-control that Falwell and his lieutenants have introduced into every aspect of Liberty University life. Faculty, staff and students on the Lynchburg, Va., campus have learned that it’s a sin to challenge the sacrosanct status of the school or its leader, which mete out punishments for dissenting opinions (from stripping people of their positions to banning them from campus). This “culture of fear,” as it was described by several of the dozen Liberty denizens who talked to me for this story — most of them anonymously to protect their jobs or their standing — worsened during my four years on campus because of the 2016 presidential election.
Young has some people on the record talking about the abusive way Falwell runs the university, trampling over professional ethics and even plain old common decency in dealing with faculty. Because there’s no tenure at Liberty, faculty know that they could be fired from year to year if they run afoul of Falwell. Young says that the atmosphere of paranoia infuses everything at Liberty.
Read it all. That guy Falwell is killing the university. It’s one thing to run a university according to conservative Christian principles. I totally support that. But it doesn’t sound like that’s what’s happening here, at all. I’m reminded of the principle — I think that Joseph Schumpeter articulated it, but I can’t recall for sure — that over time, leaders of every institution will come to assume that what’s good for them is the same thing as what’s good for the institution. This is what partly what led to the Protestant Reformation. And it’s going to lead to Liberty’s downfall.
Liberty University has a Board of Trustees. Do they not recognize what is happening to the university’s reputation under Falwell’s leadership, and feel a responsibility to exercise oversight? Young writes in his Post piece that he’s not sure what to think of his Liberty University diploma now. He can’t possibly be the only Liberty grad to think that nowadays. Fair or not, the first thing that comes to many people’s minds when they hear the name “Liberty University” is some obnoxious thing Jerry Falwell Jr. has tweeted or said in defense of Donald Trump. A college that ought to be known for its moral and theological integrity, and the quality of its teaching, is instead developing a reputation for the Trumpish antics of its president. The difference between what the college says its mission is, and the way its president behaves, is growing. This is a real tragedy. Conservative Christians are a minority in this post-Christian culture, and will be an increasingly despised and dispossessed one. We need to be better than this. So much depends on it.
Young’s Post piece, especially the journalism angle, reminds me of a Catholic journalism conference I attended in the spring of 2002, in Washington. It had been scheduled before the scandal broke that winter out of Boston. I sat in the audience and heard the Catholic priest, a member of the hard-right conservative Legionaries of Christ order (which would later be shaken to its foundations by the sexual corruption of its founder), talk trash about mainstream journalists breaking news about priest sexual abuse. This priest, who was the publisher of National Catholic Register (which at that time was owned by the LC order), said that his newspaper did not go down into the gutter, but took the high road. He was construing his cowardice as a leader as a virtue, and in turn trying to justify doing public relations for the sake of maintaining the Church’s image, and calling it journalism.
In 2010, long after the LC founder, Marcial Maciel, had been exposed as a serial sexual predator and defrocked, that publisher apologized for having defended the creep for so long.
Back to Liberty. Conservatives rightly criticize left-wing colleges for giving a party line to students instead of imparting to them a real education. If it happens to come from the religious right, a party line is still a party line — and it’s not the same thing as an education. I have met some Liberty faculty over the years, and I believe them to be solid teachers and scholars. They must be completely miserable. I recall a time in my professional life when I worked in a situation like that. It took a real toll on me psychologically. How do you think it feels to be a professor there and to see this garbage going on around you, and to know that if you speak out, you’ll likely be fired. In this job market, it’s hard to find an academic job anywhere. But to be on the academic job market with Liberty University on your CV, given how toxic Jerry Falwell Jr.’s political activism has made the brand? It’s a trap.
You may not be aware of this if you don’t have your ear to the ground in particular circles, but these stories about Liberty under Falwell’s increasingly heavy-handed leadership have been going around for a while. Young’s piece is by no means the first time they’ve been aired. If anybody affiliated with Liberty wishes to counter his claims, by all means post your comments below. I will elevate the best comments to the text of this post. Or e-mail me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. I will assume that everything you send me is safe for publication (though not using your name) unless you tell me otherwise. I write a lot on this blog criticizing aspects of academic life at liberal and mainstream colleges. When Christian and/or conservative colleges fail to meet the standard, it’s important for Christian conservatives to say so.
As I was reading the piece, I received a text from an Evangelical journalist friend who had some news for me. I told him what I was reading, and said that I wouldn’t be surprised if this Young kid, having seen up close and personal how corrupt conservative institutions — especially churches — can be in protecting themselves, had run to the far left. Sure enough, when I went back to reading the article, I found this near the end:
I grew up in a politically conservative household and was active in my denomination; my values changed at Liberty as I embraced a more inclusive and open vision of the church. My views of Liberty, and of the values I saw Falwell profess on a daily basis, changed as well.
Well, there you go. Young ran to progressive Evangelicalism. I’d have to read the details of his migration leftward to judge it, but I’m not surprised. He was raised in a conservative home and a conservative church, and went to a conservative Protestant university … where he was on the receiving end of the hypocrisy of a powerful church leader who is corrupting an institution’s values for the sake of maintaining a false image.
I couldn’t help but recall a startling conversation I had last year in Nashville with some Evangelical campus ministers, who told me that they’re dealing with crises of faith in many students, related to Donald Trump. These kids had grown up in conservative Evangelical homes, and heard all their lives about how important it is to have leaders with moral integrity. Now their parents were all in for Trump, with no sense that there’s any problem there, and the kids were losing faith in their folks. One minister told me he was trying to help a kid whose parents were cutting him off financially because the boy did not support Trump.
You can roll your eyes at this, and say that it’s stupid for a young person to make theological decisions based on politics, or on the flaws of their parents and other adult mentors. Logically speaking, you may be right. But pastorally and psychologically, you’re very wrong, and consequentially wrong. Falwell Jr. is wrecking more than the reputation of the university his father entrusted to his leadership. I would hope Will Young one day returns to a more orthodox form of Christianity, and I certainly hope he realizes that the kind of abuse of power that he saw at Liberty is not a function of conservatism alone, and that it can and does happen in many institutions. To paraphrase Solzhenitsyn, the line between good and evil doesn’t pass between liberals and conservatives, but down the middle of every human heart, and every human institution.
Still, Will Young is apparently a progressive Evangelical now, and he’s been strongly marked by the way he and others were treated at a powerful conservative Evangelical institution, and a powerful conservative Evangelical power broker. He’s a grown man, and the decisions he makes about his future in the Christian faith are primarily his own. I don’t know what he believes specifically these days, but if he now or in the future embraces heresy, or even one day apostatizes, that’s on him. But when we who have been given responsibility for stewarding young Christians, and institutions that form the young in the Christian faith, scandalize them with our words and our deeds, the fault for their falling away falls on our backs as well. And we will be judged for it, in this life and the next.
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July 24, 2019
Jesuits Rehabilitate Communism
This is indecent. This is obscene. This is unspeakable. The Jesuit magazine America has published what it titles “The Catholic Case For Communism.” Author Dean Dettloff begins by criticizing a piece that Dorothy Day published in that same magazine in 1933, in which she talked about people being drawn to Communism out of admirable idealism, but failing to grasp that Communism wants to destroy the Church. Dettloff writes:
But in her attempt to create sympathy for the people attracted to communism and to overcome a knee-jerk prejudice against them, Day needlessly perpetuated two other prejudices against communism. First, she said that under all the goodness that draws people to communism, the movement is, in the final analysis, a program “with the distinct view of tearing down the church.”
Then, talking about a young communist in her neighborhood who was killed after being struck by a brick thrown by a Trotskyite, she concluded that young people who follow the goodness in their hearts that may lead them to communism are not fully aware of what it is they are participating in—even at the risk of their lives. In other words, we should hate the communism but love the communist.
Though Day’s sympathetic criticism of communism is in many ways commendable, nearly a century of history shows there is much more to the story than these two judgments suggest. Communist political movements the world over have been full of unexpected characters, strange developments and more complicated motivations than a desire to undo the church; and even through the challenges of the 20th century, Catholics and communists have found natural reasons to offer one another a sign of peace.
He goes on:
Christianity and communism have obviously had a complicated relationship. That adjective “complicated” will surely cause some readers to roll their eyes.
Dettloff is a Catholic — America‘s Toronto correspondent — and a member of the Communist Party of Canada. From the CPC’s Facebook page:
Jesuit priest Matt Malone, the magazine’s editor in chief, writes a companion essay explaining America’s reason for publishing this unapologetically pro-communist piece. Excerpts:
So, you might ask, after 110 years of opposition to communism, why are we publishing an article in this issue that is sympathetic to it? Well, for one thing, you should not assume that America’s editorial position on communism has changed very much. It has not. What has also not changed is our willingness to hear views with which we may disagree but that we nonetheless think are worth hearing.
More:
For what it’s worth, my general view of economics begins with the fact that markets, for all their downsides, are the greatest force for economic empowerment that the world has ever seen. But that is just my opinion and, therefore, not the point. Mr. Dettloff’s piece is in this issue not because I agree with it but because I think it is worth reading, just as I did with Arthur Brooks’s article in defense of free markets that we published in February 2017 and just as we did when we published Dorothy Day in 1934.
America, in other words, is not a journal of Father Matt’s opinions. Not even I would want to read such a magazine. This is a journal of Catholic opinion, and Catholics have differing opinions about many things. Our job is to host a conversation among Catholics and our friends in which people can respectfully and intelligently disagree. Accordingly, we publish something in almost every issue with which I personally disagree. I hope we publish something you disagree with, too. If not, we are not doing our job.
Wait a minute. No fair-minded and intellectually curious person could object to an essay in a Catholic magazine criticizing the excesses of capitalism. It’s also easy to see the justification for publishing an essay defending democratic socialism from a Catholic point of view. And nobody could reasonably complain about an essay like Dorothy Day wrote in 1933, explaining why some idealists are drawn to Communism.
But an essay defending Communism? Really? What to make of this?
My own views are very strong. A couple of weeks ago, I knelt in Warsaw at the grave of the Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, the chaplain of the Solidarity labor union movement. He was beaten to death by agents of the Communist government for opposing them. This is what Communists did to Father Jerzy:
So yes, in Poland, Communism and the Catholic Church had a “complicated” relationship.
Earlier this summer in Slovakia, I stood in a hidden chamber in a basement, a room reached only by secret tunnel, and listened to a historian of the underground Catholic Church tell me what had happened in that room. For a decade or so, dedicated Catholics secretly published prayer books, catechisms, and devotional literature in that chamber. They could have all gone to prison had the Communist secret police found out about their samizdat. The historian, Jan Simulcik, was part of that underground as a college student. It all had to be kept so secret that the historian himself didn’t find out until the fall of Communism what was happening in the basement of the house where he and his comrades organized the papers for distribution. Here he is in the printing room, which was left exactly as it was when Catholics did not have to gather there in secret, out of fear of Communist persecution:
Yes, the relationship between Communism and Catholicism in Slovakia was indeed “complicated” — so complicated that Catholics had to hide in secret catacombs to print their prayer books.
I would love to watch the America editors sit down with Rudolf Dobias and tell him how Catholics need to consider that Communists are their friends. Dobias, a Catholic and a poet, spent 18 years in a Communist prison for being a dissenter, many of those years at hard labor. When he was released, he and his family endured persecution, until the end of Communism. When I met with him in his home, he told me that everything in his body hurts now. He was beaten and tortured by the Communists. His relationship with them was indeed complicated.
My Slovak Catholic friends gave me a stunning book by Silvester Krcmery, a Catholic physician who suffered terribly in Communist prisons for his faith. Dr. Krcmery recalled one horrific beating he suffered at the hands of Communist interrogators trying to pummel him into signing a false confession:
Even though this was my first experience with this level of violent physical assault, I actually did not feel anything. Perhaps I was in such a state of shock that I was not fully conscious of the pain.
I considered the whole thing a very valuable ordeal. For hours I repeated, “Lord you didn’t disappoint us. You always promised that you would be with us, that you would never abandon us. What could I now possibly bring you as a sacrifice? nothing hurt me. I really have nothing to offer you as a sacrifice.”
Despite everything, in a sense I cherished those wounds. This was after all the only tangible, although insignificant evidence I had that I had offered Christ something.
After this interrogation I found that I had two broken ribs. I was not allowed to see a doctor but in the course of three or four weeks they healed, apparently without consequences.
This didn’t happen just once, and it didn’t happen only to him. Dr. Krcmery’s memoir talks about the incredible hardship the Communists inflicted on Catholics, in an attempt to destroy the Church.
I visited the apartment of Cardinal Korec, who had been a persecuted bishop of the underground Slovak church under Communism, and was a hero, maybe even a saint. What would the America editors have to say to him, if he were alive? What would they say to other Catholics I met who suffered Communist persecution for their faith?
What would they say to the Christians forced to undergo torture at Pitesti, the special Romanian prison where the Communists experimented to attempt to create a new kind of man. Here’s what happened there:
Performances on religious subjects, black masses staged at Easter or Christmas, horrified the detainees. On such occasions, it was the theology students who were to suffer the most, dressed up as ‘Christs’, clothed in cassocks smeared with excrement. They were made to take ‘communion’ with urine and faeces, and instead of the Cross, a phallus was fashioned of soap, which all the others were made to kiss. Alongside them hymns were sung with scabrous words, in which the commonplaces were insults against Christ and the Virgin Mary. Sometimes the detainees would be stripped naked.
The late Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand survived Pitesti, and after he went into exile, testified in 1966 to the US Senate as follows:
[Richard Wurmbrand:] A Westerner can’t understand God is here and knows that I will not tell you the while truth because if I will tell you the while truth, you will faint and rush out of this room, not bearing to hear what things have happened. But I will tell you that in a prison they crucified a cat before ourselves. They beat nails in the feet of the cat and the cat was hanging with the head down, and can you imagine how this cat screamed and the prisoners, mad, bead on the door, “Free the cat, free the cat, free the cat,” and the Communists very polite, “Oh, surely we will free the cat, but give the statements which we ask from you and then the cat will be freed,” and I have known men who have given statements against their wives, against their children, against their parents to free the cat. They did it out of madness, and then the parents and the wives have been tortured like the cat. Such things have happened with us.
[Sen. Thomas Dodd:] Did you have any fellow Christians like you imprisoned?
We had hundreds of bishops, priests, monks in prisons; my wife who is near me, she has been with Catholic nuns. My wife tells that they were angels; such have been put in prisons. Nearly all Catholic bishops died in prison. Innumerable Orthodox and Protestants have been in prison, too.
The point I was getting at – and I guess I did not make it clear – where the Christians treated any differently or mistreated any differently?
Everybody in prison was very badly treated. And I cannot be contradicted on this question, because I have been with physicians, I have much more broken bones than anybody, so either I broke my bones or somebody else broke them. And if I would not have been a clergyman but a murderer – it is a crime to torture a murderer, too. The Christian prisoners were tortured in a form which should mock their religion. I tell you again in the prison of Pitesti one scene I will describe you about torturing and mocking Christians, and believe me I would renounce to eternal life to paradise after which I long, if I tell you one word of exaggeration. God is here and knows that I do not say everything. It cannot be said. There are ladies here. There are other people hearing it.
One Sunday morning in the prison of Pitesti a young Christian was already the fourth day, day and night, tied to the cross. Twice a day the cross was put on the floor and 100 other cell inmates by beating, by tortures, were obliged to fulfill their necessities upon his face and upon his body. Then the cross was erected again and the Communists swearing and mocking “Look your Christ, look your Christ, how beautiful he is, adore him, kneel before him, how fine he smells, your Christ.” And then the Sunday morning came and a Catholic priest, an acquaintance of mine, has been put to the belt, in the dirt of a cell with 100 prisoners, a plate with excrements, and one with urine was given to him and he was obliged to say the holy mass upon these elements, and he did it. And I asked him afterward, “Father, but how could you make this?” He was half mad. He answered to me: “Brother, I have suffered more than Christ. Don’t reproach to me what I have done.” And the other prisoners beaten to take holy communion in this form, and the Communists around, “Look, your sacraments, look, your church, what a holy church you have, what fine is your church, what holy ordinance God has given you.”
I am very insignificant and a very little man. I have been in prison among the weak ones and the little ones, but I speak for a suffering country and for a suffering church and for the heroes and the saints of the 20th century; we have had such saints in our prison to which I did not dare to lift my eyes.
I am a Protestant, but we have had near us Catholic bishops and monks and nuns about whom we felt that the touching of their garments heals. We were not worthy to untie their shoelaces. Such men have been mocked and tortured in our country. And even if it would mean to go back to a Rumanian prison, to be kidnaped by the Communists and going back and tortured again, I cannot be quiet. I owe it to those who have suffered there.
Indeed, Communism and Catholicism had a “complicated” relationship, as Comrade Dettloff writes in a magazine that, by publishing this essay, defecates on the memory of all those Catholics and others who suffered and died under Communism. What would America‘s editors say to the millions of Ukrainians who starved to death in the 1932-33 famine engineered by Stalin?
In the 1997 Black Book Of Communism, historians estimate that the worldwide death toll from Communism’s crimes was 94 million. That number has been criticized as exaggerated, but even the lower estimate is around 60 million. I’m not sure where the overall death toll stands now, with more recent scholarship finding that Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward (1958-62) perhaps resulted in the deaths of 45 million Chinese.
Historian Frank Dikötter has written:
Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant people’s communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party’s every dictate. As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected.
A catastrophe of gargantuan proportions ensued. Extrapolating from published population statistics, historians have speculated that tens of millions of people died of starvation. But the true dimensions of what happened are only now coming to light thanks to the meticulous reports the party itself compiled during the famine….
What comes out of this massive and detailed dossier is a tale of horror in which Mao emerges as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962. It is not merely the extent of the catastrophe that dwarfs earlier estimates, but also the manner in which many people died: between two and three million victims were tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction. When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later. The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: one of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied with iron wire, a ten kilogram stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a sizzling tool – punishment for digging up a potato.
Forty-five million. In one country alone.
It will not do to say that the persecution of the Church under Communist regimes was an aberration. Destroying religion has always been at the core of Communist theory and practice. To claim otherwise is sheer mendacity, and worse: it whitewashes history, degrades the memory of the martyrs and confessors executed by Communist butchers, and opens the door for a return of the most bloodthirsty ideology that ever existed.
Last year, one of the Jesuit pope’s top officials praised the Communist Party of China for being the world leaders who are “best implementing the social doctrine of the Church.” Pope Francis sold out the underground Church in China by reaching a deal to allow the Communists to appoint Catholic bishops there. Earlier this month, Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired archbishop of Hong Kong, warned once again that Beijing wants to destroy the faith, and that the Vatican is playing into the Communists’ hands.
America would never run an essay on “The Catholic Case For Fascism,” even though you could make a stronger case for it than you could for reconciling Catholicism with an ideology that explicitly hates religion. Whatever criticisms you might have of the authoritarian Franco regime in Spain — and there are many — Franco did not persecute the Church. Is there any Communist regime anywhere that has failed to persecute the Church?
In Nicaragua, in the 1980s, the Sandinista government tried a standard Communist move: attempting to create a breakaway “popular” church. It didn’t work. Today, the Sandinista strongman Daniel Ortega is turning up the heat on the Catholic Church. From the Washington Post:
Ortega has responded to Nicaragua’s worst political unrest since the 1980s by banning protests and smothering dissent. As conflict still simmers, the Catholic Church, one of the country’s last venues for protest, finds itself besieged.
Ortega supporters try to infiltrate parishes. Security forces surround churches during Mass. Priests suffer harassment and death threats. Police ring the Jesuit university when students dare to wave Nicaraguan flags and chant anti-government slogans.
There are echoes of the 1980s, when Nicaragua’s pro-Marxist government clashed with conservative bishops in a Cold War standoff. As it was then, Ortega’s Sandinista party is in power. Now, though, the dispute is over democracy, at a time of rising populism and authoritarianism.
Ortega, 73, has accused church leaders of being “committed to the coup plotters,” as he calls the young activists who organized mass demonstrations last year
The clergy deny they’re trying to undermine Ortega. But as Nicaragua has become one of the most repressive countries in Latin America, the church has become a refuge for dissenters.
Students in Nicaragua hide out in a Jesuit university for protection from a corrupt Communist authoritarian leader, while a Jesuit magazine in the US publishes an essay talking about how Communists are good friends to Catholics. How about that.
Maybe it’s for the best that America is publishing “The Catholic Case For Communism.” It is better to know where the battle lines are, and to assess the stakes, than to remain in the dark. Five years from now, when America publishes “The Catholic Case For Atheism,” it will mark another Jesuit triumph.
This essay appeared on the same day as the orthodox Catholic journalist Phil Lawler’s confession that decades of writing about scandal and corruption in the Church has worn him down. Lawler says, in part:
For more than 25 years now, I have been reporting and writing about scandal within the Catholic Church. Yesterday, as I wearily wrote one more article about episcopal corruption, I realized how much the topic has come to nauseate me. I can’t do it anymore.
Since the 1990s I have been digging in the muck, uncovering more and more of what Pope Benedict XVI aptly termed the “filth” in the Church—the filth that obscures the image of Christ. It hasn’t been pleasant work. It isn’t the work I would have chosen. It isn’t edifying. The daily dealing with appalling ugliness—week after week, month after month—has taken a heavy toll: on my health, on my family, on my spiritual life. In warfare, good commanders know that even the toughest troops need a break after weeks in battle. And believe me, this is—always has been—a spiritual battle.
I’m not going to walk away from that battle. Far from it. I’ve devoted my life to the cause of reform in the Catholic Church, and I fully intend to continue speaking and writing on that topic. But I need to step back, to take a new approach, to fight this war on a different front. I can’t continue plowing through the documents, chasing down the leads, dredging up the facts. Fortunately, in the past few years many other reporters have joined the hunt for the truth. I’ll comment on the facts they unearth; I’ll provide my perspective. But in order to have a healthy perspective, I have to escape the miasma, to raise my sights.
He goes on to say that his 1990s prediction that the sexual abuse scandal would bring the Catholic Church to its worst crisis since the Reformation has been vindicated. The rot has only been partly exposed; there is much yet to come. The corruption is not just sexual and financial. How is it possible that only five years after the canonization of a pontiff who was an indisputably central figure in the defeat of Communism, one of the Catholic Church’s leading journals publishes an essay praising the most murderous creed in human history, one that specifically targeted Christian churches for destruction?
It’s a sign of the times. It really is.
You want to know what Communism is? Look once again into the eyes of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, and see for yourself. It’s all there — but the Jesuits who edit America magazine are too blind to see it:
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A Note About Comments
Readers, for years I’ve received compliments from people about the quality of this blog’s comments section. The responsibility for that is primarily with the intelligent readers who comment here, but I have something to do with it too. For as long as I’ve run this blog, I’ve weeded the comments to keep trolls out, and to make it a place where something like a discussion can take place.
I have not been a perfect moderator. There have been times when I’ve approved comments I shouldn’t have, either by accident or because of an error in judgment, and I’m sure there have been times when I have spiked comments that I ought to have approved. From time to time, when people have appealed to me to reconsider, I’ve done that, and rescued their comments.
I have tried to allow a wide range of viewpoints in the comments section. I’ve worked to suppress comments that attack me or other commenters here personally, comments that cross the line into direct bigotry, and comments that stray too far from the topic, or that in some way amount to bomb-throwing. Again, I don’t always get this right, but the fact that I make the attempt is partly responsible for the quality of the comments section here.
Since TAC moved to the Disqus format (which we had to do, as the old one was not a stable platform), I’ve received a number of complaints from readers that the comments section isn’t as good as it used to be. I’m not sure why it is, but I think the Disqus format makes it much harder to have a sustained conversation. It encourages readers to offer short, one-line comments that just end up as more noise, making it hard to follow actual substantive points. I too have noticed the quality of the comments section dropping off.
I’m going to try something different, in an attempt to regain the quality of the old section. Going forward, I’m going to spike most comments that are short and without substance, even if they don’t break any of the other rules. If you don’t have anything meaningful to add to a discussion, withhold your urge to comment.
And I’m going to be less tolerant of readers who say the same thing over and over. This is not about silencing people who disagree with me. It’s about trying to bring some order to the room by muzzling people who don’t show any real interest in engaging with the topics raised here, but only want to ride their hobbyhorses. If you really don’t have anything new or different or nuanced to say, but only want to state for the 5,322nd time that Trump Is Bad And The Republicans Are Racist, or whatever, then maybe you should find another blog to comment on. I’m not a fan of Trump or the Republican Party, and still less a fan of the Democrats, but if you were at a party at my house, and you stood there in the living room being a boor who just talked at people rather than to people, I’d find a way to steer others away from you, and eventually ask you to leave.
This is not about politics. Some of the commenters I hold dearest in this little community are people who strongly disagree with me about many things — politics, morality, religion, and so forth. They all know how to have an actual conversation. Learn from them. You’re going to have to, because I’m going to try, within the limits of the Disqus format, to bring back the spirit and substance of the old comments section. I could use your help.
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A Coonass In Moscow
At the Chaliapin Bar at Hotel Metropol, Moscow (Hotel video screengrab)
As many of you know, I’m working on a book about the experience of life under Communism. I’ve done, and will continue to do, travel in the former Soviet bloc countries, interviewing people. The final interview trip I’ll make is to Moscow and St. Petersburg, in late October and early November. This will be my first time to Russia. I’m really excited about it. To worship God in Moscow’s St. Basil’s Cathedral is an incredible privilege. I actually got a little teary today thinking about my childhood, when we all were terrified of the Russians, and feared dying in a nuclear war. And now I’ll be in Moscow as a friend, indeed worshipping as an Orthodox Christian. Crazy old world.
I struggled today online, trying to book a flight to Moscow, and home from St. Petersburg, with getting a decent flight at a decent price. The flight home was the problem. It was crazy, really. Prices were out of control, unless I wanted to have a 10-hour layover somewhere. It finally occurred to me that the problem was trying to fly into Baton Rouge, instead of New Orleans (which is an hour away). The airlines were having trouble getting me back into the US in time to catch a flight to BTR. When I put New Orleans into the algorithm, it was a whole different world. Not only were there lots of flight options, they were much cheaper. The flight inbound to Russia will take me through Chicago, and then on a Finnair flight to Helsinki. Anybody here ever flown Finnair? I’m curious.
Though my wife will be teaching when I need to get down to the airport, I saved so much money on the ticket that I can afford to take an Uber to the New Orleans airport from Baton Rouge, and still pay significantly less than I would have were I flying out of BTR. So, yay.
I also saved so much money, and the dollar is so strong against the ruble, that I could afford to book a room at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow for that part of my journey. If, like me, you read and loved the novel A Gentleman In Moscow, you’ll understand why I’m thrilled by this. I’ll be staying at that classic hotel for much less than I would pay for an ordinary hotel room in New York, and about what I would pay for a boutique hotel in Washington. In fact, the most expensive hotel by far in Moscow is the Ritz-Carlton, where you can get a room for as little as $465 a night when I’m there. That’s much more than the Metropol costs, but it does give you an idea of how far the dollar can go in Russia right now. Of course late autumn is the off season, but still.
I had a decision to make about getting to St. Petersburg. There I will be staying with a friend, so don’t have to spring for a hotel. It’s an eight-hour ride by standard train, or three and a half hours by bullet train. I figured I’d take the bullet train, but it turns out that I had the option of booking the nicest solo sleeping compartment on the Grand Express, a luxury overnight train (departs 11:30 pm, arrives 8:30ish) for more or less the cost of one more night at the Metropol + the bullet train ticket. I opted for the overnight train, which is not something I’ve ever done, or am likely ever to do in the US. There might be spies afoot, and intrigue! There is never much intrigue on a bullet train.
Anyway, I’m pretty excited about it all. I will be working during the days, doing interviews, but I also hope to do some sightseeing. Ever stayed at the Metropol, or taken the Grand Express? Let me know what to expect. Also, please give me your other advice — especially for places to eat, and for places I might go to learn more about the experience of Soviet communism.
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Ilhan Omar’s Racism
There are any number of reasonable ways she could have answered this question posed to her in 2018 on Al Jazeera, during her race for Congress. She chose to do it by blaming white men. But see, it’s Trump who is dividing us by race, and with racist statements:
Ilhan Omar contends that Americans “should be more fearful of white men.” pic.twitter.com/ot7PBF96P1
— Molly Prince (@mollyfprince) July 24, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The next time a reporter gets her on TV, they should ask her to defend the racism of this comment.
I wonder what the Democratic presidential candidates think of Omar’s racially bigoted remarks. I wonder if journalists will ask them. My guess is that the media are going to try to ignore it. But there it is: blatant racism, from one of the fresh new faces of the Democratic Party.
UPDATE: Man, some of you liberal commenters just do not get this, at all.
Of course violent radicalized white males are a threat to public safety. Nobody denies that, or at least nobody can plausibly deny that. But you know what other radicalized whites are a threat to public safety? Antifa, which is a white thing.
You know what else is a much bigger threat to public safety than either Antifa or other radical whites? Black male crime. But if Donald Trump had told Americans that “black males” were a greater threat to America than jihadists, he would have been in a world of trouble — and should have been, because even though it might technically be true, given the wildly disproportionate black male crime rate, for a politician to say that is nakedly pandering to racial fear and loathing.
That’s what Omar did with her white male comment. It’s perfectly rational to ask a Muslim woman who was making a bid for Congress to answer a question about jihadism — because it is perfectly rational for Americans to be concerned about Islamic terror. She could have answered the question any number of ways. But she chose to demonize white males. She did this, most likely, because in progressive circles, it’s normal to speak of white males as monsters. Most people in the progressive Congressional district she represents wouldn’t hold that against her.
Donald Trump didn’t go as far as Ilhan Omar did with the racialized rhetoric, and I hope he doesn’t. But listen, so many on the left are so accustomed to this kind of talk — it’s all over the media, and in academia — that they can’t imagine how it sounds to people not like themselves.
This is where many in the Democratic Party are today. Hey, I get people being alarmed and angered by Trump’s racialized rhetoric. I am too! But if you think that Trump’s use of this kind of language, and these tropes, is the only thing of its kind, and the only racist political talk people can hear, you are deluding yourself.
A far-left Muslim Democrat was asked about jihadism, and answered by telling people that what they should really be afraid of is white males. That, liberals, is a problem. As you will discover.
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Young Women Who Want To Be Nuns
Everybody has been telling me to read the story about Millennial women becoming Catholic nuns. So I did, and yes, it’s really good, and encouraging. Excerpts:
These young women have one last surprise: They tend to be far more doctrinally conservative than their predecessors. If you go deeper into their social media feeds, past the wacky photos of habited nuns making the hang-loose sign, you’ll find a firm devotion to the most traditional of Catholic beliefs. They fervently protest abortion. They celebrate virginity not as a necessity to free up time to serve God—how some “liberal” sisters see it—but as something in itself holy. It’s a severity that overlaps neatly, actually, with the OMG maximalism that dominates social media.
Patrice Tuohy, the publisher of guides for people considering the religious life, including VocationMatch.com, told me that not long ago she used to get only about 350 queries a year by phone and online. Last year, she got 2,600. And 60 percent of those women, Tuohy said, explicitly asked if they could join an order that would force them to wear a habit. (Currently, only about 20 percent of sisters in America wear one.) Amid all their freedoms, Tuohy deduced, these young women wanted to be led. Even constrained. She said she wished I wouldn’t emphasize that point, however. Something about it seemed to make her uncomfortable.
I wonder how old Tuohy is. Maybe she can’t see why young adults raised in this anything-goes society would see freedom in certain kinds of constraint. The constraints that come with a religious vocation, as with a vocation to marriage (rightly received), make the individual free for something. Constraint, in the sense that these young nuns experience, is not the absence of liberty, but a means toward ordered liberty.
It’s not at all surprising that the kind of young women seeking a nun’s life these days would be doctrinally orthodox. How many liberal Millennials and Gen Z’ers are seeking out service in the life of a vowed religious? Why would they? I’m asking seriously.
More:
Two years ago, Meg, the “hobo for Christ,” introduced me on Facebook to a friend of hers named Tori. Tori was both discerning to become a nun and serving in the Army. As a first lieutenant, she commanded men older than she was, but when she spoke to me over Skype from a base in South Korea, she looked younger than her 23 years. The green military fatigues were baggy on her lean frame, her pale brown hair—dyed blonde on the bottom—pulled away from her sunburned face into a wispy ponytail. She said “wicked” a lot, cursed occasionally and referred to herself as “a super-duper paratrooper!” with a wink and a mocking thumbs-up. It didn’t take me more than a few minutes talking with her to think: This woman wants to become a nun?
In high school, she said, she “had an automatic seat at the cool kids’ table.” She was known for her crazy, uninhibited dancing at parties. She hiked, she kayaked and she was good enough at soccer to earn a spot on a professional-development team. On her Facebook page, she can be seen photobombing group shots on snowboarding trips by sticking her tongue out at the camera. She always assumed she’d marry, have kids and work as a nutritionist.
When I asked Tori what made her stray from this path to become a nun, her whole demeanor changed. Her face got pinker, and she looked almost shy. She asked if she could read the full story to me from her prayer journal. This was too important to discuss extemporaneously.
One afternoon when she was a senior at her all-girls high school, Tori found herself drawn to the chapel. She wasn’t deeply religious growing up, and the chapel was a space she usually avoided: small and dark and silent, with uncomfortable knee-high prayer stools. But on that day, as she sat to pray, a thought occurred to her that was so unbidden and forceful “that I stood up from my seat and physically ran. I mean, I ran out of the chapel. I was so filled with fear.” The thought: What would it be like to wear a nun’s habit?
She didn’t want to be a nun, she explained. But in the ensuing years, she just couldn’t get the vision out of her head. In the goalie box, putting on strapless dresses for dances—she kept seeing herself in a black veil.
And then one day, at a chapel on her college campus, she heard His voice.
“What does it sound like?” I asked her.
“It doesn’t sound like anything. I just knew it was Him,” she said. And His message was clear: “Evangelize.”
Tori put down her prayer journal, looked up and started to laugh. She said she expected this story must sound “crazy” to me. She didn’t seem to mind. Discerning the religious life, she explained, is “a process of falling in love.”
The author of the piece, Eve Fairbanks, says that reporting the story affected her in a way she couldn’t have anticipated:
Several other young women I spoke to who hoped to become nuns recommended a book to me called “And You Are Christ’s.” Written by an American priest named Thomas Dubay, its subtitle is “The Charism of Virginity and the Celibate Life.” I am Jewish, and I am not celibate by any stretch of the imagination. I also wasn’t sure what “charism” meant (basically, it’s a special gift conferred on a person by God). But almost immediately upon opening the book, I experienced a strange sensation. It was as if Dubay were speaking straight to me.
“Nothing is ever enough,” Dubay writes of how it feels to live in the modern world. You are expected to give yourselves entirely, 24/7, without wavering, to careers, to hobbies, to lovers, to children. Ideally, you are supposed to spend zero time not loving your job in a dying industry or your husband who fails to absorb the concept of emotional labor. But this is impossible.
And yet, Dubay explains, there is one being who reliably rewards our efforts: Christ. The woman who loves Him, the religious sister, has a calling worthy of her complete devotion and that honors her sacrifices “many times over,” as the Book of Luke says. She has found her “passion.” She has “rest,” “fulfillment,” “enthrallment,” “completion”—precisely the things that I, exhausted, have often wanted.
There are a lot of recent books—and Twitter accounts, and blogs—written for women discerning to become nuns. They, too, sounded uncannily like the voice in my own head that whispers to me late at night all the things I wished my parents or partners or colleagues would say. Words of quiet affirmation and acceptance I had, in fact, almost never dared to ask for.
Later, in talking to a Catholic high school teacher, the answer to the the question implicitly raised by Tuohy became clear:
The more Olon thought about his students’ enthusiastic response to the hardcore priest, the more it made sense to him. Millennials and Generation Z kids report much higher levels of social anxiety, pessimism and depression than previous generations. He’d seen it firsthand in his own classroom. “When I ask kids what they want to do in their lives, they’ll say, ‘I guess I’ll get a job,’” Olon told me. They would explain that they had already done everything. They had destroyed worlds, fallen in love, built communities, made art. Then he’d realize that they meant they’d done this all online.
In real life, they were much more fearful. Everything they said—every youthful, experimental pose they struck—became a part of their permanent record on social media. The stakes seemed so high for even tiny choices. Sometimes, after class, they would ask him mournful questions like, “What have I ever really done that has any depth?” They reminded him of people having midlife crises. Yet Olon noticed that the more cornered they seemed, the more pressured they felt to do something truly wholehearted and unique. To be like Steve Jobs and take a huge risk that changed the whole world. Hemmed in on all sides, they also yearned for a tabula rasa, to tear everything down and start over from scratch.
“The level of anxiety and sadness these kids have, I don’t think we can even understand it at this point,” Olon said. “I think there are things these kids are experiencing now that we don’t even have names for.”
A Protestant campus minister told me a few weeks back that he sees college students having serious panic attacks all the time. This is something that almost never happened when I was in college in the 1980s. I don’t know why it’s happening now, but I believe it when people who work with young people today say so.
One more excerpt:
Overall, organized religions in America are still leaching members. But it appears that young people who do seek religion are drawn to a stricter, more old-fashioned form of it. Orthodox Judaism is becoming more popular with young Americans today than other, more liberal Jewish sects. The majority of Jewish Americans who are reform or conservative are over 50, while the majority of Orthodox Jews here are under 40. This isn’t only because Orthodox Jewish families have more children. Orthodox Judaism’s retention and conversion rates are much higher than they were two decades ago. The memberships of “liberal” Protestant sects like Lutheranism are rapidly aging while more doctrinaire Christian denominations—Baptists, Orthodox Christians—have younger adherents. A fascinating study showed that millennials—even Protestants and atheists—are attracted to churches with old-fashioned gilded altars and “classic” worship styles over modern ones. Young Americans are often more likely than their elders to believe in core elements of traditional religious belief like heaven and hell, miracles, and angels, and young religious people are more likely than older ones to assert that their faith is the “one true path to eternal life.”
Pollsters have also observed that young people in America seem more open than their parents or grandparents were to authoritarianism, as if we possess a hidden desire to be ruled—that it would be a relief. In 2016, nearly one-quarter of young Americans told Harvard researchers that democracy was “bad” for the country—in 1995, only around 10 percent of young people said that—and they are consistently more likely than their elders to say technocrats or a strong leader should run America, even if that means doing away with elections. My friend Josh, a convert to Catholicism, told me he was drawn to the church specifically because it “doesn’t hold a vote to determine the truth.”
Several people to whom I suggested, recently, that Americans might become more religious said that couldn’t be true. They pointed to surveys saying Generation Z is the most undogmatic and atheist generation ever. But the truth is that it’s incredibly hard to read American young people. You can find surveys and news stories indicating they’re more genderfluid, more committed to traditional gender roles, more rebellious, more uptight and moralistic about drugs and sex, better with money, lazier. This may reflect internal contradictions, the kind that compelled some of the young women I met to seek a much more streamlined answer.
Read the whole thing. It’s long and deeply interesting.
When I read Thomas Merton’s autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain in my late teens, the idea of the monastic life seized me. That wasn’t my calling, as it turned out, but that encounter as an anxious, idealistic young man with the prospect of living a life of spiritual discipline as a monk marked me. I am sure that I would not have written The Benedict Option at 50 if I hadn’t read Merton at 19. Come to think of it, there’s probably a connection between the young people journalist Eve Fairbanks profiles in this story, and the fact that, in my admittedly anecdotal experience, most of the people drawn to the Benedict Option are aged 40 and under.
One more thing: in Poland recently, I saw more than a few younger Catholic nuns wearing traditional habits. And I saw a couple of young Catholic priests wearing traditional cassocks. I’m not even Catholic, but I wanted to thank them for it, because as open signs of contradiction to the modern age, they encourage me.
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Minds Destroyed By The Internet
A reader who is also a college professor in a STEM field e-mails to say:
My students are unable to analyze, follow and understand written text. To be more specific, they are unable to decipher compound sentences, understand relationship between subordinate and main clauses. They can’t grasp the logical relationship between sentences, let alone paragraphs, which are totally opaque to them.
When I started to teach (only 2 years ago), I prepared material written in normal, rational, technical prose — for adults, or as I understood they would be. Immediately, it became apparent that there was zero comprehension. Well, thought I, let’s make it a bit simpler. So I reduced the paragraphs to bullet point lists.
Still nothing? Hmm.
I started to write step by step, basically cut-and-paste instructions, highlighted the important points, wrote in notes and cross references (like NOTE: you did this in step #2 please refer to #2). Abject failure.
So, especially in the exams, I started to write in answers in the follow up questions, like so: “If you correctly answered #1 as ABC what is the cause of …?”. Basically I give them the answers in followup questions, plus cut and paste documents. My exams are open book, open notes, Internet access.
95% of them fail.
This is what I attribute this phenomenon to: I don’t think that they are able to concentrate for more that a few seconds. Hence compound sentences become an enigma. Their brains are ’trained’ to hold information for the minimum time possible and to move on the next soundbite or tweet. They are unable to hold a thought in their minds long enough to abstract it, analyze it, and form required relationships. As a result they lack the fundamental building blocks for inductive and deductive reasoning. They want to be spoon-fed without ever having to resort to a single abstract thought. They have been ‘educated’ by quick turnaround, expensive and largely incorrect multiple choice question textbooks.
Imagine how this would (and soon will) affect the medical profession. “When you treat appendicitis you will remove a) spleen, b) heart, c) appendix, d) none of the above. “Well, done!” Here is your first patient … (or, in Dr. Zoidberg’s context: Scalpel!, Blood bucket! Priest!).
Their problem is that they are unable to formulate questions. It’s difficult to come up with answers if you don’t know what to ask. So I tell them that my ambition is to teach them how to ask questions. They love my classes but I am told repeatedly: “This was the best class we have had but by far the most difficult.”
Good grief. We have totally destroyed this generation.
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Josh Hawley: Tomorrow’s Conservative Today
Did you see or read Sen. Josh Hawley’s address to the National Conservatism conference? You can read it here, and I urge you to do so. Only a senior Republican office holder who is in the Millennial generation (Hawley is 39), and who was politically formed after Reagan, could have given this kind of talk. Check out these excerpts:
The great divide of our time is not between Trump supporters and Trump opponents, or between suburban voters and rural ones, or between Red America and Blue America.
No, the great divide of our time is between the political agenda of the leadership elite and the great and broad middle of our society. And to answer the discontent of our time, we must end that divide. We must forge a new consensus.
We must recover and renew the dream of the republic.
Whoa. This Republican Senator is going to talk about class. More:
For years the politics of both Left and Right have been informed by a political consensus that reflects the interests not of the American middle, but of a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities.
This class lives in the United States, but they identify as “citizens of the world.” They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community.
And they subscribe to a set of values held by similar elites in other places: things like the importance of global integration and the danger of national loyalties; the priority of social change over tradition, career over community, and achievement and merit and progress.
Call it the cosmopolitan consensus.
On economics, this consensus favors globalization—closer & closer economic union, more immigration, more movement of capital, more trade on whatever terms. The boundaries between America and the rest of the world should fade and eventually vanish.
More:
And where has this left middle America?
With flat wages, with lost jobs, with declining investment and declining opportunity. We don’t make things here anymore—at least, not the kinds of things a normal person without a fancy degree can build with his hands.
And small towns like the one where I grew up in middle Missouri struggle and disappear—and a way of life is lost.
And it’s not just the small towns that struggle.
Just about any American worker without a four-year college degree will have a hard time in the cosmopolitan economy.
Maybe that’s one reason why marriage rates among working class Americans are falling, why birth rates are falling, why life expectancy is falling.
All the while an epidemic of suicide and drug addiction ravages every sector, every age group, every geography of the working class.
Theodore Roosevelt once wrote that “the Roman Republic fell” when “the sturdy Roman plebeian, who lived by his own labor, [and] who voted without reward according to his own convictions” ceased to exist. Our present-day leaders seem determined to repeat the experiment.
Is it any surprise that in the last half century, as our leaders have pursued a program the American middle does not espouse, does not support, and does not benefit from, that public confidence in American government has collapsed?
Is it any wonder that American voters regularly tells pollsters they feel unheard, disempowered and disrespected?
Because who now listens to the American middle? The cosmopolitan agenda has driven both Left and Right.
The Left champions multiculturalism and degrades our common identity. The Right celebrates hyper-globalization and promises that the market will make everything right in the end, eventually … perhaps.
In truth, neither political party has seemed much interested in the American middle for quite a long time. And neither has seemed much interested in the republic the middle sustains.
But the old political platforms have grown stale. And the old political truisms now ring hollow. The American people are demanding something different, and something better.
Read the whole thing. Marvel that these words were spoken by a Republican US Senator! I’ve been part of a number of private conversations these past three years in which conservatives speculate about who is going to lead conservatism after Trump. Nobody could come up with any names. Well, now we have one.
The liberal columnist Damon Linker is excited. He says that those on the left who picked out Hawley’s use of the word “cosmopolitan” as an anti-Semitic dog whistle are being silly — Hawley is identifying the same thing the left calls “neoliberalism” — and ignoring what is truly remarkable about the speech. Excerpts from Linker’s column:
If Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren delivered those lines, no one would have thought twice. But coming from a Republican, it signals a remarkable — and heartening — shift of assumptions and priorities in a small-r republican direction.
Since Reagan, the Republican Party has been ideologically committed to advancing the interests of big business — even as, post-2008, public opinion across the spectrum has shifted in a more populist direction. One reason Trump gained traction in 2016 was that he seemed eager to prioritize the interests of working people, with his defense of entitlements and talk of providing health-care coverage for all, along with his promises to negotiate better trade deals. That turned out to be nonsense, as the clueless, floundering new president ceded control of the administration’s policy agenda to Paul Ryan, who first tried to gut people’s health insurance and then, when that failed, opted to pass a massive corporate tax cut. Once again, plutocrats were calling the shots — and they continue to do so with the administration’s current push to get the Affordable Care Act overturned in the courts.
By contrast, Hawley’s speech points to a post-Trump future in which the economic realignment Trump seemed poised to undertake actually gets going. It is fueled not by anti-Semitism or Trumpian racism and xenophobia but by a series of arguments grounded in the republican tradition going back to Aristotle. This tradition emphasizes the importance of fostering a strong, prosperous, independent, public-spirited middle class — and the danger of allowing a corrupt, oligarchic elite to grab too much political power.
Linker points to Hawley’s raving about Chris Arnade’s new book:
Finished Chris Arnade’s new book today. This is a very important, really excellent book. Hope every member of Congress will read it pic.twitter.com/bMaCrIBCFl
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 20, 2019
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Arnade is a political leftist who has endorsed Elizabeth Warren for president. His book is terrific, though. It’s a travelogue through poor and working class America, in which he spends time with people not like himself, and asks them about their troubles, and their hopes. Arnade finds the thing they all have in common — white, black, and Hispanic alike — is a craving for dignity. What makes the book such a powerful challenge to the way we think of politics in this country is that you don’t get to the end of it and think of a ten-point program that will restore what has been lost. Again, Arnade is a leftist, and he supports government intervention to better the lot of the poor. But Arnade is also experienced enough in talking to actual poor people to know that merely redistributing wealth is not going to restore families, communities, and dignity. You can’t buy the caritas that does that. The book is an intense challenge to the American leadership class of both left and right. Arnade doesn’t divide the world into left and right. He divides it into the haves and the have-nots, the “front row kids” and the “back row kids” from high school.
You can see why this left-wing book has captured the imagination of Sen. Hawley. And get this: Dignity was acquired and edited by Bria Sandford, the same Millennial editor who acquired and published The Benedict Option and my forthcoming book about soft totalitarianism for the conservative imprint she runs (n.b., my book will discuss big business, big tech, and elite institutions as being as much of a threat to liberty than big government). She’s got a vision for the next conservatism. Linker thinks this might have something to do with the strange fact that a book about class and poverty written by an Elizabeth Warren supporter has received relatively little attention in the liberal media:
Dignityhas received most of its initial review attention and praise from conservatives. That’s in part because it was published by Sentinel, the conservative imprint of Penguin Books. But to dismiss the laudatory response, including Hawley’s, as an expression of partisanship is to miss what’s most important about it. A conservative publisher, a wide range of conservative writers, and the conservative Republican senator from Missouri are all supporting a book that powerfully indicts economic policies pursued and defended by a long line of Republican presidents and lawmakers. (That many of those policies were also endorsed by Democrats doesn’t soften the point.)
That’s a big deal — and a dramatic shift that could upend the political spectrum as we know it.
Yes, please. And there’s this: Hawley is a social conservative, and that means he understands something that Democratic Party liberals do not and cannot: that a strong republic depends also on strong families and social bonds, not the radical individualism preached by today’s left. It has taken a long time — I wrote a book about this in 2006 — to get a Republican politician who grasped that economic liberalism (that is, free-market fundamentalism) and social liberalism (radical individualism) are two sides of the same coin. But now we have one. And Tucker Carlson, and J.D. Vance.
It’s a great time to be a conservative. Whatever else you can say about Donald Trump, he did his party and his country a service by clearing out all the Reaganite deadwood. As Daniel McCarthy wrote about the Nationalist Conservatism conference:
The point of the conference was not just publicity, and it was not to concoct a manifesto or some bullshit policy agenda — like the fraudulent balanced-budgets plans that movement conservative wonks habitually generate, and which the media pretend to take seriously when they’re fronted by a person like Paul Ryan, even though everyone knows they have no chance at all of being enacted — and that no voter could care less about. The mystique of policy is a religion in Washington, but real policies are not the result of blueprints or manifestos, they are the product of talent (or lack thereof) applied to circumstance. The achievement of this three-day event was to help the nationalist talent of the future coalesce. It’s only a beginning, but that in itself is remarkable at a time when conventional politics is at an end. And if there are no impossibly precise policy demands coming from these National Conservatives, they have made it quite clear what they are going to do in general: they are going to strike at the laws and cultural assumptions that permit the tech companies to amass excessive wealth and power; they are going to strike at the bastions of liberal ideology in higher education; they are going to support American industry for the sake of workers as well as national security; they are even going to adopt a more restrained foreign policy than the US has seen since the end of the Cold War.
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The old, post-Cold War order of weak borders, straitjacketed free-trade ideology, and endless war for utopian ideological objectives is rapidly failing, and what will replace it has already begun to arise. This week’s National Conservatism gathering was both a sign of that and a catalyst for the further transformation of the American right. Pundits who spent the last three days parsing the president’s tweets for racism are living in a bygone age when all the right could beg from the authorities that command our culture was acceptance. National Conservatives are not asking for acceptance, they are marshaling power.
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July 23, 2019
‘Hiding In Plain Sight Will Not Be An Option’
A reader writes:
This is an anecdote about what I’ll call “unwoke intersectionality”, and how eerily timely your writing often is. Your call for alternative libraries was literally the same thought I was having over a cup of coffee this morning a few hours before you posted. I’ll share.
He goes on to tell me who he is. I am redacting this part severely to protect him. He and his wife, and their large family, are Catholics who live in a blue state, and send their kids to Catholic school. They are conservative, but don’t consider themselves to be culture warriors. They are aware of the crazy culture-war things going on in the world, but have never felt called to get involved with any of this, as it doesn’t threaten them locally.
Until now. More:
Pride Month 2019 was a watershed moment for me. It was when I realized that for me and my wife and my children, very soon, hiding in plain sight will not be an option. As you already know, but as I am only beginning to appreciate, small town America is losing its mind as fast as anywhere else. Our institutions (schools, churches, libraries, etc.) have either been appropriated as primary instruments of a totalitarian progressive movement, or are swiftly veering towards capitulation. People with jobs in my community (white or blue collar) mostly work in large, recently-woke corporations or in smaller companies that are in the same cultural orbit.
Our first Pride Parade was this year, and the community turned out jubilantly for it. People who go to church with us, people who educate our kids’ peers, people who serve on boards with us, my clients, my wife’s coworkers, and even some of my own family members who are retired (beholden to no one for a paycheck) and who would have chortled at the idea of going to a Pride Parade only a few years ago. The night before the parade, as “part of the celebration”, a trans-friendly exploratory seminar was held at the public library, for pre-teens and teens.
So in Pride Month I realized that the howling lunatics who celebrate the mutilation of confused children (whose howling I’ve always been too busy to get very excited about) are now after my own children’s minds and hearts. And the minds and hearts of all the children in my community. I’ve been very secure in the knowledge that nobody can fool me or force me into believing lunacy, no matter what. But that is no longer what matters. As my children are heading into adolescence, the brain-eating amoeba of progressive totalitarian ideology is down the street and heading for my front door. I am realizing that somehow I have to not only protect them, but arm them, and fight with them against this evil. The alternative seems to be to let the amoeba eat. It is a stark moral choice.
What this means for us is something we’re starting to grapple with. It seems obvious to us that we can’t put our kids in the public high school when they reach that age, which means homeschooling will be the only option. What it will mean for me professionally, I wonder. The identity of a small town [person in my profession], and the identify of a man at war with the culture on behalf of his family, are generally impossible to reconcile.
The library really was a flashpoint for me. If the brain-eating amoeba is going to live at the public library from now on, I can’t just waltz in with my kids like I always have and let them roam. Now it’s hostile territory. The playing field is fundamentally different from what it was for dissenters like me. Your thought that it could be time for a new library for the unwoke, funded and staffed by the unwoke, is the same thought I was having a few hours ago. I am going to start exploring this concept in my community. It’s time to start actually working to build new institutions, having lost the old ones. Which is my fault as much as anyone else’s – we weren’t paying attention. So it is our problem to do something about it.
The other thing my wife and I say to each other is that we need a “mafia”. Not in a sinister sense. In a sense of building ties among people locally who will stand athwart the degradation of the culture with one another, come what may. We have friends around the world who theoretically make up such a mafia – we’re plugged in with conservative institutions and religious conservatives and we visit each other quite a bit – but that won’t cut it locally. We need to identify people willing to stand athwart the culture in our community. The Catholic Church isn’t populated by many of those people locally. The evangelical churches are more fertile ground for the counter-cultural, but whether they are interested in building institutions that are non-sectarian is something I have my doubts about. They’re pretty possessive of their adherents’ time and resources. Power to them, but as a Catholic I’m not able to be part of their parallel universe in any real way. Part of our project will be to see whether we can culturally intersect with evangelicals, Trump voters, etc. to the extent of making real progress in taking back space in the community for sanity and spiritual integrity.
Thank you for helping us through your writing to recognize what’s going on around us. Although we have somewhat suddenly realized that our culture has not just abandoned our value system (we’ve known that forever) but is now aligning toward its elimination, we still want to respond constructively. Benedict option type institution building seems to be the only way to respond constructively and with hope. It’s going to be very interesting to see what the next decade holds for our family and our community.
Thanks for this letter. You’re seeing reality — the same reality that many, many Christians do not want to see.
I so wish I had the financial resources to start a website whose purpose was simply to connect people like you with others who share your vision and commitment.
One of the things I’m learning from the work I’m doing now on anti-communist dissidents is how important it is to a) be willing to be hated for what’s true and right, and b) find others who share both your beliefs and your willingness to suffer.
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