Rod Dreher's Blog, page 229

Crushing Medical Conscience Rights

Got this in the mail from a friend who is a well-known activist involved in fighting assisted suicide. I publish it with his permission, with his name redacted:

I sense such exhaustion among pro-lifers and religious conservatives. When I speak, I tell them that people are saying, “Fine, do what you want. Just leave me alone.” And I tell them the problem with that is they WON’T leave you alone.

The same dynamic about which you write regarding LGBT issues is playing out in bioethics with regard to medical conscience. It isn’t enough that abortion is legal and euthanasia. It isn’t enough that children are being mutilated who are gender dysphoric or their normal puberties blocked-with unknown consequences later in life. Doctors MUST do it when asked-even if it violates their religious beliefs or professional consciences.

In Canada, the Charter has stronger protections in this regard than our First Amendment, explicitly protecting “freedom of conscience and religion.” That didn’t help the Catholic doctors who sued to keep from having to participate in euthanasia as required by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons (!!!). These MDS must either kill or provide an “effective referral,” which is procuring the doctor willing to commit homicide. An idea used in other provinces for the government to publish a public list of willing MDs was rejected because it would create stigma around MAID (medical aid in dying, the euphemism of choice for mercy homicide).

A court of appeals has now ruled that all doctors must perform all legal medical procedures when asked-known as assuring “equal equitable access to healthcare”-or find an area of practice in which they won’t be asked, or get out of medicine.

I have long written they want to drive pro-lifers out of health care. (I talk with pro-life students who are rejected from nursing and medical schools mysteriously.) It’s clear.

And they don’t care if there is a brain drain or that good doctors retire instead of bend the knee.

That crap is coming here once Trump is gone. The explosive reaction to his conscience rule at HHS proves it.

So, what choice do we have?

When people say they can’t understand how any Christian can vote for Trump, they need to think hard about this. Abortion and assisted suicide might seem like relatively minor things to you. Most assuredly they are not to us. We are talking about a regime under which physicians and other medical personnel are compelled to participate in what they regard as suicide, and/or a form of murder. This has never been the case before, but now it is in some places, and is coming here quickly.

Those who say that Christians have no business voting for Trump need to explain why it is morally preferable to vote for a president who would support these anti-life policies.

My feeling is that at best the Trump presidency buys us time. Maybe this means time to prepare the resistance. Maybe this means time for Christian and other dissident medical personnel to prepare for other careers. Maybe this means time for conservative political leadership to get its act together and fight hard to protect conscience rights of doctors and nurses. It ought to mean all three, at least. In The Benedict Option, I quoted someone who is very high up in the US medical profession:

Christian students and their parents must take this into careful consideration when deciding on a field of study in college and professional school. A nationally prominent physician who is also a devout Christian tells me he discourages his children from following in his footsteps. Doctors now and in the near future will be dealing with issues related to sex, sexuality, and gender identity but also to abortion and euthanasia. “Patient autonomy” and nondiscrimination are the principles that trump all conscience considerations, and physicians are expected to fall in line.

“If they make compliance a matter of licensure, there will be nowhere to hide,” said this physician. “And then what do you do if you’re three hundred thousand dollars in debt from medical school, and have a family with three kids and a sick parent? Tough call, because there aren’t too many parishes or church communities who would jump in and help.”

More:

Does this mean that no Christian should go to medical school or law school or enroll in professional training to enter other fields? Not necessarily. It does mean, however, that Christians must not take for granted that within a given field, there will be no challenges to their faith so great that they will have to choose between their Christianity and their careers. Many Christians will be compelled to make their living in ways that do not compromise their religious consciences. This calls for prudence, boldness, vocational creativity, and social solidarity among believers.

I’m telling you: it’s coming, and it’s coming hard and fast.

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Chesterton Conference 2019

So, I’m going to be doing a bit of traveling for the rest of the summer. I’m leaving for Warsaw on Thursday, and will be there and in Krakow doing research through July 14. In early August, I’ll be in Kansas City, Kansas, from August 1-3 for the 38th Annual G.K. Chesterton Conference, where I’ll be speaking about The Benedict Option.

Here’s a link to the conference website, where you can find out who else is going to be speaking, and sign up to come yourself. Having met the Grand Mystic Royal Panjandrum of the Chesterton Society, Dale Ahlquist, I can guarantee that you will have a heck of a lot of fun. Plus — let’s not forget this — greater Kansas City (on the Missouri side) is home to one of America’s great beermakers, Boulevard. 

I did an interview with Dale about the conference — I mean, Dale interviewed me about it — and I post it here with his permission:

DALE AHLQUIST: You have told me that you don’t really know Chesterton, so do you have any idea why I invited you to speak at our conference?

Because you want to evangelize me for the Gospel of GKC? Because you feel sorry for me? Because you want to stick me with the beer tab? I wasn’t going to come, but when you promised me that I could wear my fez and a caftan all weekend, I felt that I had no choice but to come.

In spite of your disclaimers, you are obviously familiar with Chesterton’s philosophy, as is evident in your books Crunchy Cons and The Benedict Option, and your direct experience with Marco Sermarini of the Italian Chesterton Society, so what GKC books HAVE you read?

Orthodoxy, and his biography of St. Francis. I swear, I don’t know why I struggle so much with Chesterton. Everything I know about him, and read about him, I think, “Ah ha! I want to be like him!” But there’s something about the cleverness of his prose that I find difficult to stay with for long. It seems a bit too aware of its artifice. He’s a fabulous crafter of sentences, don’t get me wrong. But I just haven’t been able to devote myself to him, even though many of the Christians I most admire are diehard Chestertonians. Perhaps this is the thorn in my flesh that the Lord has given me.

What are your other Chesterton sources besides his books?

Journalism about Chesterton, especially in Touchstone magazine. And, of course, the life and wisdom of Marco Sermarini, the Doge of the Benedict Option. He really is the greatest Christian I know, and I’m not even kidding. He would whack me on the head if he heard me say so, but it’s true. I have never met a believer who was as serious about his faith, and as merry and full of life.

Sermarini, in his natural habitat

You’ve called Marco Sermarini one of your heroes. Tell us why, please. And who are some of your other inspirations?

Since I first met Marco in 2016, I’ve read Chesterton, or more frequently about Chesterton, with fresh eyes. He’s a true disciple who embodies what I think GKC was, and stood for. And I think: if that man, Marco, is what it means to be a Christian, then I want to be a Christian. The community he helps lead, the Tipi Loschi, and their school, the Scuola G.K. Chesterton, are, to my mind, the best embodiment of the Benedict Option I have yet seen. It’s just a joy to be with him, and that community. One feels so much hope among them. Another hero is Pope Benedict XVI. Though I am no longer a Catholic, I admire Benedict as a true prophet of our time. He sees so deeply into the abyss of our post-Christian age, and does not deny the crisis, but also gives us reason to hope right through it. I have also been inspired by the writings of the Kentucky agrarian Wendell Berry, and my fellow Southerner Flannery O’Connor. I first encountered her short stories in high school, and it was the first time I had ever seen my people in literature. Her letters are a treasure.

Finally, I must say that the believers I’ve met as I’ve traveled around the US and Europe giving talks about the Benedict Option really do inspire me. I’m thinking in particular about young Catholics I’ve met in Europe. What’s so uplifting about them and their lives is that to be a believing Christian in Europe today, under the age of 50, requires real commitment. So often I see among us American Christians a lack of awareness of the seriousness of the crisis. We somehow believe, because we want to believe, that things aren’t as bad as they really are. European Catholics of the Millennial generation — and perhaps Protestants and Orthodox too, though I haven’t met any yet — are undeceived about the radical challenges we all face as Christians in a post-Christian civilization, but they have not given up hope. There is a realism about them that I find deeply inspiring.

A small group of young Catholic families, in their twenties and early thirties, living around Milan, have just started a formal attempt to build a Ben Op community of families. They call it Cascina San Benedetto. They’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and my book articulated more clearly what they wanted, and why they wanted it. They’ve just started. I admire them so much, and find real hope in their prayer, labor and witness.

There are lots of reasons to be discouraged about our society, but what is something going on right now that is a cause for hope?

Well, the Cascina San Benedetto, for one! The Tipi Loschi, Marco’s community, for another. And the Bruderhof, an international fellowship of Mennonites, whose communities are so welcoming. And the community around the great Eighth Day Books in Wichita. And the Journées Paysannes, a national fellowship of Catholic agrarians in France. You know, if you read the media — and I spend all day doing that, for my job — it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the bad news. In all honesty, I don’t look to the institutional churches as sources of renewal either. It’s nice if they act that way, but I don’t expect it. But when you find yourself around a table — in Wichita, in Prague, on Italy’s Adriatic coast, in rural France — with people who really love Christ, and who are opening their hearts and their homes to you in true hospitality, it’s hard to be gloomy.

I’m working on a new book about the lessons that people today can learn from those who resisted Soviet communism, about how we might resist this soft totalitarianism emerging around us. The most surprising thing I’ve learned so far from my interviews in Eastern Europe is the critical importance of small group fellowship. There is really no substitute for it. I stood in a hidden basement in suburban Bratislava in May, interviewing a historian who, as a college student in the 1980s, worked with the underground Catholic Church in Slovakia to distribute samizdat — catechisms, Christian literature, and so forth, secretly produced in that hidden basement chamber. He told me that what got him through all the fear of persecution and imprisonment was the tight brotherhood of four other young Catholic men, who were equally sold out to Christ, and willing to risk prison to resist. He said that that fellowship was the most crucial source of courage and hope for him. Of course he meant that God was the ultimate source, but the Holy Spirit mediated to him through the fellowship of believers was the chief fount of blessing for him.

This is something that we Americans simply have to rediscover. I think this is a truth that Chesterton would have embodied, and endorsed.

Dale Ahlquist: guilty of SOMETHING, you can tell!

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Gay, But Not In The ‘Correct’ Way

Woke Diversity: Five different flavors of vanilla (pathdoc/Shutterstock)

(Quick note to readers: as we get used to working with the new Disqus system, I want to share with you that some of you are having your comments shunted to the spam folder, even after I have approved them. It’s crazy, and I don’t know why it’s happening. Please e-mail me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com if you think your comment has slipped into spam. It’s also the case, I’ve found, that a few people simply aren’t seeing their comments pop up at all. I don’t know why. Point is, please don’t assume that I’m suddenly spiking your comments. We are actually seeing far fewer acceptable comments being shunted by the software into spam than under the old system. As ever, personal attacks on me or others, as well as calls for violence, profanity, racist or bigoted slurs, and things like that will get your comment spiked — and possibly get you banned. Also, comments appear under the main post, as usual, but you have to scroll down a bit farther to see them.)

I have received two really interesting e-mails from gay or same-sex attracted Christians, based on the Seminary Confidential post. I appended the first one to original post as an update, but now that I’ve received a second one (and permission to publish it), I’m going to post them both here.

Here’s the first one:

I saw your article “Seminary Confidential” and I had to send you an email in response. I know that you come from a conservative Catholic/Orthodox perspective. I definitely don’t agree with you on a lot, but I have observed the same Christo-Marxism taking over religious institutions, and it is very concerning to me. To give you an idea of who I am – I was ordained by a progressive Christian network, but now I serve as a priest within Independent Sacramental communities. I am also openly gay, and the progressive Christian network that originally ordained me dismissed me for showing a “lack of support for the LGBT community” because I would say things such as – “you should wait until marriage to have sex” and “the church’s standard should be monogamy”. Stuff like that. I have also seen these same issues play out in seminaries just as you described. It is very concerning.

I am not sure if you realize this, but a great many female and LGBT clergy lean orthodox and/or evangelical. There are also many LGBT people who believe in celibacy. A small poll was done recently with LGBT seminarians in the Episcopal Church, and they found that most of them support a more traditional Anglican theology and liturgy. (I happen to be a huge fan of the King James Bible and 1928 Book of Common Prayer myself.) I understand that you probably consider something like women’s ordination to be already “liberal” or “progressive”, and I would disagree with you there. (I would see it as firmly Biblical.) But I don’t want this to be about our disagreements on theology. I want to show that many of us “minorities” are being steamrolled by the Marxist-leaning “allies”.

In fact, Pew Research found that the liberal leadership who push social justice tend to be overwhelmingly white, straight, university-educated, and wealthy. They are the people with the privilege and yet they come after everyone else. In the independent churches I work with, I know many, many LGBT conservatives who went to the liberal mainline churches and were expelled for wrong-think (i.e. orthodoxy). This is a problem that doesn’t just affect conservatives or traditionalists within these religious institutions. It also affects those of us on the other side who pushed for inclusion and got Marxism and/or Unitarian Deism. I appreciated how in your update to the article, one of the responses involved a female pastor who leaned more traditional, and the issues she has been going through. I have been going through them too, and honestly, at this point I am scared to be more open about what I actually think about the issues because I am concerned about more false accusations or the loss of my ministry. I cannot imagine what some of my colleagues would do if they found out I am a Republican and don’t consider Donald Trump to be the next Hitler.

If you happen to read this email, feel free to share some of my comments, but I would appreciate it if my name and contact information weren’t shared. Once again, I really don’t want to deal with another suspension because I “lacked support” for the community I am a part of.

Here’s the second e-mail. In both cases, the writers asked me not to use their names or identifying information:

Rod, reading your last post (“Seminary Confidential”), I wondered how aware you are of the celibate gay Christian movement (also called Side B Christianity, or Side B theology). The best public face of this movement is the Revoice Conference, which only just put on their second annual conference (https://revoice.us/). The other best resource is the Spiritual Friendship blog. The movement overall is decidedly evangelical (and leans Reformed), but Catholics and even a few Orthodox are involved. As far as I know, the only mainliner who is with us in a really public way is Wesley Hill.

All that to say: I’m increasingly convinced that people like me and my friends are the best weapon against the Sexual Revolution, if for no other reason than liberal mainliners like the ones you’re describing in that post simply don’t know what to do with us, and the option they seem to be taking is pretending we don’t exist, or being patronizing and condescending when they’re forced to say something. Though I’ve experienced full-on hostility. I’m a recent college grad, and I went to an uber-progressive liberal arts college. Three years ago, my Christian campus ministry was anonymously reported for being “homophobic” after my campus minister preached a sermon on homosexuality in which he said that he believes gay Christians are called to be celibate, or enter into opposite-sex marriages. After being reported, we (my campus minister, another campus ministry staffer, and me as a student rep) were called into a meeting with the Dean of Diversity and Inclusion. The chaplain, a liberal mainline Protestant woman (who knew that I am gay), was clearly more upset even than the student who reported us. After a lot of pleasantries and talking around the obvious elephant in the room, she point blank said, “I need you to tell me where you all stand on homosexuality. And I DON’T want to hear it from you!” She looked directly at me. I was not confident enough at the time to argue back (I was scared of my favorite student group getting kicked off campus), but I later realized how utterly absurd her statement was by her own standards. She’s a straight woman, telling one of two actual gay people in the room that I am not allowed to share my opinion on homosexuality! Experience and feelings are the only source of truth, until they’re not, I guess. All that to say, the commenter who wrote about “being incorrectly gay” resonated with my experience deeply. In my experience, most mainliners seem hostile to Side B Christians (a group of local affirming clergy in St. Louis wrote a letter condemning the Revoice conference in its inaugural year; mostly from the mainline), and within the evangelical world, the small wing of progressive evangelicals just ignore us (I’m thinking of the Jen Hatmakers and Sarah Besseys of the world). It makes me angry, because all of their stories of becoming affirming always appeal to an emotional situation in which “they finally started listening to their gay friends.” But again, it seems that only the correctly gay friends are worth listening to. See Sarah Bessey’s latest blog post for an example of this.

Your comments welcome.

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View From Your Table

Granada, Spain

The reader writes:

G&T and olives on the terrace overlooking the Alhambra Palace in Granada. The square-ish Renaissance style building contrasting with the surrounding Moorish architecture in marking European religious wars between Christianity and Islam. Interesting contrast with the contemporary conflict between anti-religious forces of liberal secularism and faith.

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View From Your Table

Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, England

James C. is out and about again:

I think Herefordshire is the most English county of England, in all the best, most pastoral, most traditional ways. Hills. Dales. Deep river valleys. Half-timbered market towns. Inns, not motels. Intricately quilted countryside. Old-growth forests. Walking trails as far as the eye can see and beyond. It’s also England’s apple country, and I couldn’t come here without having one of their renowned ciders.

Fifteen years ago on this very day, I was here for the first and only time. I had just arrived from sizzling, suburban Florida on my first UK trip. I can still remember the feeling of joy and awe that I had.

I’ve got my hiking boots on, my rucksack is full of maps, and I’m retracing my steps in one of my favourite places.

If any of you readers are out Cornwall way, I would love to put you in touch with James. Maybe you could hire him to guide you to the best pubs and country walks. He knows everything.

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The Orwellian Sexual Revolution

Yesterday in our podcast interview, Ezra Klein asked me to explain why it is that when he looks at this blog, he sees lots of anxious material about LGBT stuff, when that kind of thing doesn’t appear in the actual life he lives as a New York liberal. It’s a fair question.

Here’s what I told him — or rather, the overall message you will have received from listening to the entire interview.

The Sexual Revolution is the most important social event of our era. It has overturned many of the structures, practices, and ways of thinking that ordered human life for ages and ages. It has radically changed the meaning of family, marriage, male, female, even what it means to be human. It is changing the way we use language, which itself changes the way we frame our experiences of the world. And its principles negate the Christian religion, which I passionately believe to be true. You cannot reconcile the Sexual Revolution to orthodox Christianity. You just can’t.

You can think this is a great thing, a terrible thing, or some of both, but what you cannot deny is that it is a momentous thing. Writing in the 1960s, sociologist Philip Rieff said it was a more radical revolution than the Bolshevik one.

The LGBT — especially the T — experience is the ultimate manifestation of the Sexual Revolution, because it stands as the total negation of normativity and nature. As I write in The Benedict Option:

Americans accepted gay marriage so quickly because it resonated so deeply with what they had already come to believe about the meaning of heterosexual sex and marriage.

We have gay marriage because the straight majority came to see sexuality as something primarily for personal pleasure and self-expression and only secondarily for procreation. We have gay marriage because the straight majority, in turn, came to see marriage in the same way—and two generations of Americans have grown up with these nominalist values on sex and marriage as normative.

To be modern, as we have seen, is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self- definition. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).”

Gay marriage and gender ideology signify the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because they deny Christian anthropology at its core and shatter the authority of the Bible. Rightly ordered sexuality is not at the core of Christianity, but as Rieff saw, it’s so near to the center that to lose the Bible’s clear teaching on this matter is to risk losing the fundamental integrity of the faith. This is why Christians who begin by rejecting sexual orthodoxy end either by rejecting Christianity themselves or by laying the groundwork for their children to do so.

“The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling,” Rieff writes. By that standard, Christianity in America is in mortal danger.

In short, there is a clear connection between the decline of the Christian religion and the disintegration of marriage and family, and the Sexual Revolution. This was happening before LGBT became the cultic religion of American elites, especially the Manhattan parish newsletter (as Father Neuhaus called The New York Times). But it has greatly accelerated in the past decade or two. If Ezra Klein can’t see it, this is perhaps because he has become so acclimated to it, because of where he lives, his social circles, and his beliefs as a secular person, that it all strikes him as normal.

All of that is background to this piece in today’s NYT. You thought that the end of June meant the end of the pro-LGBT advocacy journalism at the Times, maybe? Wrong! Today we have short profiles celebrating sexual diversity among contemporary New Yorkers. This is a classic example of the re-norming of society around queer categories. I’ll explain more in a second. First, these quotes. The first one is from Katie Bishop, whose photo and self-description lead this blog post:

“Queer has become lacking in punch lately,” she said. “It feels safe.”

Bishop feels there’s a growing danger, particularly as a member of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, in getting too safe and too innocuous.

But dyke? Pervert? “There’s power in stigma,” she said.

To understand the words Bishop employs to describe herself is to understand Bishop herself. “I exist very politically,” she said.

She considers her use of ‘femme,’ for example, strategically chosen for etymological focus on the feminine. “There’s something powerful in the erasure of the masculine,” she said.

Here’s a passage from the item about Jacob “Jayne” Gervich, who describes himself as “nonbinary trans femme”:

For Jacob “Jayne” Gervich, an assistant film editor from South Slope, Brooklyn — who uses the pronouns they, them, and theirs — identity felt like an elusive concept. Gervich, who was assigned male at birth, went from small-town Midwest boy to a self-proclaimed nonbinary trans-femme film editor and homemaking spouse. And one description they hope to attain in the future: a loving parent.

“My wife and I are trying to start a family in the next few years, and we’re trying to do it the old-fashioned way,” said Gervich, whose wife, Allison, was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman. The two have been together for about a decade and were married two years ago at a farm in Hillsdale, N.Y.

“My wife would be ‘Mom,’” they said. “And I think what we settled on is that our child would call me ‘Baba.’”

More:

They are considering female hormone therapy, but they put the idea on hold in an effort to start a family.

“Times are different but the journey is still hard, and you never really figure yourself out and you can still have doubts,” Gervich said. “Especially for nonbinary people, the doubts aren’t just, ‘Do I really want this thing?’ But it could even feel like a question of ‘Am I real? Am I really feeling this?’”

Gervich thought of the adversity their child might face, but took comfort in the idea of being able to console them through experience and insight.

“For my own child’s journey,” Gervich said, “I would tell them: ‘Listen to yourself. Trust yourself. And really listen to what your heart says because the world is filled with these competing voices telling you to doubt yourself.”

Great, Daddy is a nonbinary trans femme whose philosophy of life is taken from the films of Walt Disney. What a life that kid is going to have!

Read more of these stories here.

Why is this important to pay attention to? I’m not pointing to them like Ignatius at the Prytania; I’m trying to get my readers to see that something radically, and radically important, is happening. People who aren’t media professionals probably don’t recognize the importance of The New York Times in setting the agenda for the rest of the media, especially the New York-based broadcast media. In NYC itself, the Times is seen as stodgy and behind the curve, but see, that’s why it’s so important when the Times decides something is normal, and to be promoted. That the Times sees people like Katie Bishop and Jacob “Jayne” Gervich and the way they choose to live as something to be celebrated tells us a lot about how the Overton window has shifted towards disintegration of old norms.

To me, the most sinister aspect of all this is the way the Times is normalizing, in that Orwellian way, changing the language. Gervich was born male, but the Times writers, adopting the ideological framing of the LGBT movement, says he was “assigned male at birth.” Of course the Times writers, as is policy at the paper, use preferred pronouns. This is what Orwell, in 1984, calls Newspeak. He defines it like this:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism, the ruling ideology of Oceania — RD], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

If you change the language at this deep level, you change the way speakers of that language conceive of reality. This is the essence of totalitarianism, in Orwell: the idea that reality itself is mutable, has no objective existence, and can be made to be whatever the Party says it is. More Orwell:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

That there is male and there is female — two of the most basic biological facts — that is now heresy. You are to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears, or you are a bigot. You are, to use another Orwell term, a thought criminal.

Reality is being “queered,” in the broad sense of the term used by queer scholars. “To queer” means not only to apply queer categories to cultural analysis, but also, according to this from Wikipedia:

In a more current context, methods of queering extend beyond critiquing literature to examine topics from popular culture to more abstract topics like theology and time. In her essay about the benefits of queering theology, Thelathia “Nikki” Young, says that queering is a way to “[deconstruct] the logics and frameworks operating within old and new theological and ethical concepts.” In addition to these deconstructions, she argues that queering “dismantles the dynamics of power and privilege persisting among diverse subjectivities.”

In other words, “queering” is about dis-integration, and in fact politically motivated dis-integration. The basic belief here is that there is no objective truth to be learned and discovered, only interpretation. That being the case, revolutionaries should use their power to re-norm society according to queer categories.

More from 1984:

Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.

We are living through a version of this, in real time. This is what I mean by “soft totalitarianism.” It’s not about learning to be more compassionate towards sexual minorities. It’s about re-ordering reality. Already they — academia, media, Woke Capital, and others — are breaking down the habits of thought which survived from before the Sexual Revolution. They are abolishing man.

It’s funny, but if Pat Robertson’s CBN had broadcast the same material as in the Times piece today, it would have been denounced as engaging in homophobia, for drawing negative attention to people the network regarded as freaks. You see here an example of what I call the Law Of Motivated Noticing: You may only take note of sexual perversity if you are prepared to affirm it as progressive.

For example, Katie Bishop describes herself as “perverted,” which she certainly is. You can only use that word if you are doing so to approve of Katie Bishop’s perversity, or perversity in general. If you call her, or people like her, “perverse,” but mean it pejoratively, well, then you are a thought criminal.

Another example: if you read the Times story, and say, “How wonderful it is that society is changing to notice and to affirm all these gender identities and sexualities, and how marvelous that the Times is finally paying attention,” you have not committed crimethink. But if you read it and say, “How terrible it is that society is deconstructing itself, and embracing a form of madness, and how bizarre it is that mainstream media like The New York Times writes about this stuff constantly, in total advocacy mode” — well, then you must be a bigoted right-wing obsessive.

One of the most totalitarian aspects of this stage in the Revolution is that it demands that you not notice how radical it is. This is what Orwell meant by doublethink, which he said is a form of “reality control.” More:

Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.

What’s happening is not happening. Perversity Is Progress. Male Is Female. Truth Is Lies. Freedom Is Slavery. War Is Peace. As Sir Roger Scruton has written:

This is how the Revolution institutionalizes itself. Winston Smith began by believing that “nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” But the Party would show him that if it wanted to, it could invade and tame his mind as well, and make him love Big Brother.

Maybe it will come to that. But we should give these bastards a fight. We shouldn’t concede territory to them, inside our heads or anywhere else. You begin to see why Solzhenitsyn’s fundamental counsel to the anti-Soviet resistance was: “Live not by lies.” In this recent clip, a faceless Scottish student named Murray, punished for crimethink, shows us one way of resistance:

 

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Woke Capitalism Comes For Betsy Ross

There is no limit to corporate wokeness and asininity. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Nike is yanking a U.S.A.-themed sneaker featuring an early American flag after NFL star-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick told the company it shouldn’t sell a shoe with a symbol that he and others consider offensive, according to people familiar with the matter.

The sneaker giant created the Air Max 1 USA in celebration of the July Fourth holiday, and it was slated to go on sale this week. The heel of the shoe featured a U.S. flag with 13 white stars in a circle, a design created during the American Revolution and commonly referred to as the Betsy Ross flag.

After shipping the shoes to retailers, Nike asked for them to be returned without explaining why, the people said. The shoes aren’t available on Nike’s own apps and websites.

“Nike has chosen not to release the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July as it featured the old version of the American flag,” a Nike spokeswoman said.

After images of the shoe were posted online, Mr. Kaepernick, a Nike endorser, reached out to company officials saying that he and others felt the Betsy Ross flag is an offensive symbol because of its connection to an era of slavery, the people said. Some users on social media responded to posts about the shoe with similar concerns. Mr. Kaepernick declined to comment.

The design was created in the 1770s to represent the 13 original colonies, though there were many early versions of the America flag, according to the Smithsonian. In 1795, stars were added to reflect the addition of Vermont and Kentucky as states.

Wow. Just, wow. So now the Colonial-era US flag is the equivalent of the Confederate flag for failed NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, whose eccentric preferences allow him to decide what kind of shoes Nike can sell.

This is the stupidest thing. Now we have to despise Colonial America to be in good graces with the Woke Police. I hope Nike loses a ton of money on this. They deserve to. Despicable people, capitulating to this crap. I respected Kaepernick’s right to protest on the field, and honestly, I’m not even mad at him for this, however childish it may be. It’s the fault of the woke executives at Nike, who are so afraid of being unwoke that they are embarrassed by their own country’s historic flag. I would walk barefoot over broken glass before I would buy another pair of Nike shoes.

Trump is going to win again. You know that, right?

UPDATE: In other Woke Capitalism news, Oreos have gone trans. Hydrox for the win!

We’re proud to celebrate inclusivity for all gender identities and expressions. In partnership with NCTE, we’re giving away special edition Pronoun Packs and encouraging everybody to share their pronouns with #Pride today and every day. pic.twitter.com/z91M2ubQ3k

— OREO Cookie (@Oreo) June 30, 2019

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Ducare Conference

A note to the classical school folks in my readership — homeschoolers and everybody else. Next week, here in Baton Rouge, from July 8-12, there will be a meeting called the Ducare Conference, which will feature some of the top names in classical Christian schooling, including the incomparable Andrew Pudewa. Teachers from Sequitur Classical Academy — including my wife Julie, who is really good at teaching writing — will also be speaking and presenting.

If you’re a classical Christian educator, the parent of classical Christian students, or just someone who is curious about the phenomenon and would like to know more, please consider coming to this conference. According to the schedule, there will be lots of practical teaching and workshops there. I’m told it’s a great opportunity for classical Christian schools and home educators to receive hands-on training. It’s for Evangelicals, Catholics, Orthodox, and everybody else. And there’s nothing like being around other teachers and parents who are committed to this movement to give you confidence. Here’s the website for registration. 

 

 

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Post-Graduation Fall From Christian Orthodoxy

A reader reached out to me this afternoon to thank me for the “Seminary Confidential” post, saying that it completely resonates with his experiences. He is an Evangelical and a veteran of college ministry. We ended up having a conversation about what it’s like to minister to college students today. He told me a lot — and I can’t identify the man or his university — but one thing stood out in particular. He said that in his experience, most of the students he works with graduate holding orthodox Christian beliefs on sexuality, but quickly capitulate. I asked him why. He replied:

You could probably guess it all:

visceral aversion to being thought a bigot;
not wanting to sacrifice professional success;
not wanting to be hated by elite institutions;
not knowing how to hope the best for a neighbor/friend without shifting moral norms (not understanding how to differentiate a pastoral mode from a legislative one);
being sick of the church;
deriving very little joy and peace from worship;
a complete lack of appreciation for traditional civic and family structures;
a failure to see the end game of identity-politics liberalism (to reduce all mediating institutions to naught, leaving us as a plain of individuals linked to the mother state where super-powered minority identities bring life to all as they self-achieve)

The minister told me that he doesn’t have any formal studies to back up his observations; these are simply things that he has seen over the past few years in his work. I’d like to start a conversation about these observations. Let me say clearly at the start: if you have nothing to say other than “the church is full of haters, and college graduates are right to reject haters,” then don’t bother. I want to hear from thoughtful theological conservatives and liberals, especially those who were theologically conservative, but then changed.

From this list the campus minister shared with me, several stood out.

First, I believe that the first three items in his list cannot be overemphasized. Most Christianity in this country is deeply middle class and conformist. People who are really engaged with theology, on either the traditionalist or progressive side, are very few. Most people just go along to get along. Perhaps it has always been this way. When the broader culture was conservative on sexual morality, so were the people in the pews (at least publicly). When it shifted, so did the views of the people in the pews. Now that same-sex marriage is totally bourgeois, we will see most churches accept it, because it’s the easiest thing to do. A big reason same-sex marriage was accepted so quickly, and so thoroughly, is because many people realized they were only against it out of uninformed prejudice.

I recall a professor at a conservative Evangelical college telling me that the students at his institution are all products of youth ministry culture, which is entirely relational. When they graduate and get outside the Christian college bubble, he said, and they find their views challenged in a serious way, they often collapse. “They are terrified of being seen as mean,” he said.

Anyway, if a Christian young person is going to stand firm on Biblical truth on these issues, he is going to have to be deeply grounded and formed in the faith, and have a sure sense of himself. Otherwise, the ordinary pressure of social conformity is going to overwhelm them.

I also think that “being sick of the church” and “deriving very little joy and peace from worship” are underappreciated reasons. A couple of years ago, when I was in Nashville, I met with some thoughtful conservative Evangelical pastors, some of whom were doing campus ministry. I heard an earful about Donald Trump, and the effect of Trumpism on the Christian students. I happened to meet with them a day or two after the Nashville Statement came out. I voiced qualified support for the statement, which reaffirmed orthodoxy on sexual issues, but some of these Evangelicals who spoke up criticized it as a pastoral disaster. This part from my post at the time really stuck with me:

That last one — the Trump factor — deserves some commentary. A couple of people in college ministry were at the table. They said that it is impossible to overstate how alienating the enthusiastic support their parents gave to Donald Trump was to their students. A number of college students have left the church entirely over it.

“How is that possible?” I asked one of the campus ministers. “How do you decide to leave Christianity altogether over who your parents voted for? That makes no sense to me.”

He said that in Evangelical circles, it’s common for college students to be skeptical at best of their parents’ theological views. For a lot of them, their parents’ backing of Donald Trump made everything they had been taught as kids about Christianity a lie. Their parents were the primary face of Evangelical Christianity to them, and to see this happen was shattering. They concluded that Christianity must be all about the economy, or tribalism, and so forth. One pastor said that a young man he ministers to in college posted a criticism of Trump on Facebook, and was cut off financially by his parents because of it.

Listening to these pastors and laypeople talking about the Trump effect on younger Christians was quite sobering to me. An older pastor said that it is impossible to separate the Nashville Statement from the massive support white Evangelicals gave to Trump. Impossible to separate, I mean, in the mind of the young.

“But Russell Moore signed it, and other Trump critics among Evangelicals,” I said.

“I know, and I’ve tried to tell people that,” said this pastor, a conservative Evangelical. “It doesn’t matter to them. All they see is a bunch of leaders of a movement who voted for a sexually corrupt man like Donald Trump are now trying to take a public stand on sexual morality for gays. It’s totally hypocritical to them. I don’t know how the Nashville Statement drafters and signers didn’t see this coming.”

I’m sure this has something to do with recent college graduates being “sick of church.” But I do wonder why so many fail to derive joy and peace from worship. Note well, I’m not asking in a critical way; I genuinely want to know. My correspondent listed that in a series of reasons why recent college graduates fall away from orthodox Christian teaching on homosexuality. I think he must have meant that the experience of church for them is empty or otherwise troubling, and that fact compels them to reject aspects of church teaching that are hard to affirm in the current cultural climate.

Logically speaking, the fact that your church’s services are dull, depressing, or troubling in some way should not cause you to reject the church’s teachings. But that’s not how most people are. Last Sunday, my pastor said to our congregation that when people come to visit our church, they should look for Christ in the faces of the congregation. If they don’t see Him there, then they should go find a church where they can meet Him in the people. I think that comment showed a lot of pastoral wisdom. Our pastor can tell you why, from a theological point of view, that all Christians should be in communion with the Orthodox Church. His remark was a call to all of us who are Orthodox to deepen our conversion, so that when visitors come, they can know that ours is a meeting place of true believers. If knowing and worshiping Jesus does not bring us joy and peace, then there is a problem somewhere — maybe in the church community, maybe within ourselves, maybe both.

Joy and peace are fruits of the Spirit. If a young adult is struggling with certain doctrines of the faith, and their experience of church is unhappy, then they will find it easier to rationalize rejecting those doctrines. This is just a human reality. Intellectuals love to stand firm on logic and law, but that’s not how most people are. We are not disembodied brains; we have hearts too.

One more thing: at another conservative Evangelical college I visited a few years ago, I was startled to hear professors around a dinner table tell me that they didn’t believe that most of their undergraduates — most! — would be able to form stable families. That astonished me. Why not? I asked. “Because they have never seen one,” said one professor.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to put yourself in the perspective of a 22-year-old Christian student who has seen lots of sexual dysfunction and familial instability all around her growing up, and who wonders why her church makes such a big deal about homosexuality when its straight members can’t form stable marriages. The failure of straights to live out Christian truth on marriage does not logically negate Christian teaching on the meaning of marriage and sexuality. But from a human perspective, it does make it harder to receive and affirm.

What do you think? Which of the minister’s list strike you in a particularly strong way? Are there others? Did this happen to you? Did you regain orthodoxy? Why or why not? What made a difference? What might have made a difference? What might have made a difference to Christian friends who abandoned orthodoxy on sexual issues?

Again, I’m happy to publish comments critical, from the Left, of church belief and practice, but if all you want to do is spit venom about churchy hypocrites, save it, because I’m not going to approve your comment. I’m not really interested in having people argue about this stuff; I’d rather this be a thread in which we try to understand what’s happening, and why.

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Was Andy Ngo Asking For It?

The progressive journalist Jesse Singal is rightly outraged over the Andy Ngo situation. Excerpt:

It’s insane that in this, the Year of Our Lord 2019, there is any controversy over whether or not it is acceptable to physically assault a journalist, sending him to the emergency room. But that’s where we are!

More:

The reaction online from a disturbingly big subset of the left was glee, rationalization, or both. Endless memes, endless jokes. Plus a lot of silence from those too scared to weigh in on the apparently controversial question of how one should react to masked vigilantes assaulting a journalist.

This extended pretty high up the progressive hierarchy.

And:

Ngo is a conservative journalist whose goal is to document what he claims are the violent excesses of antifa — an argument progressives tend to reject. In the course of filming antifa, which he does regularly, some members of antifa physically assaulted him, and not for the first time, which would certainly seem to lend credence to his claim.

To respond to this with “He was asking for it,” which is what a lot of fairly big-name progressives and leftists did, is insane. Insane!

Read the whole thing. Singal identifies other journalists who have been physically assaulted by Antifa. He’s completely right that it’s crazy that wrongness of this is even an issue. Singal is a leftist journalist who is scrupulously fair, so I take him at his word that “a lot of fairly big-name progressives and leftists” said that Ngo was asking for it. What jumps out at me about the situation are the dogs that haven’t yet barked: many in the mainstream media, who were quick to make a national issue out of demonizing the Covington Catholic boys, even before the full story was in. In the Ngo case, not only was there video that day (captured by a reporter from the Oregonian) showing Antifa attacking Ngo, there was also the undisputed fact that Ngo was taken to the hospital, and kept there overnight because doctors detected bleeding in his brain.

And yet, this hasn’t become a national news story, except on Fox, and on conservative outlets. Why not?

Do you really have to ask?

Reza Aslan infamously posted this:

I just checked his Twitter account, and he has said nothing about Antifa’s attack on Andy Ngo. Mind you, Reza Aslan is not obliged to comment on everything that happens. Still, it’s interesting to compare the reaction of individual progressive writers and commenters, as well as media organizations, to the undeniably true Ngo beating, versus the fake allegations lodged against these high school boys.

This morning I spent a genuinely enjoyable 90 minutes recording a podcast with Ezra Klein. He asked hard questions of me about my own religious and cultural views, and said to his listeners more than once that he was asking not so much to argue with me, but to understand why people like me believe the things we do, and feel so besieged in this culture. We talked a bit about the Covington Catholic thing, versus the Andy Ngo incident. Through my eyes, this is a crystal-clear manifestation of the double standards at work in our media culture.

It’s important to state at this point that as much as I believe the news media are unfair in how they report on social and cultural issues, nothing justifies the way the president and some of his supporters talk about journalists, in a way that comes very close to justifying violence against them. For the record, I have criticized Donald Trump for potentially inciting violence against the media. Here I slammed him for using the phrase “enemy of the people” to describe journalists, and here, back in 2016, I criticized Trump for encouraging his supporters to use violence to eject anti-Trump protesters from his rallies. But so far — correct me if I’m wrong here — the only actual assaults on journalists have come from Antifa.

Anyway, whataboutism isn’t the point, or shouldn’t be the point. It should be true that ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE IT IS WRONG TO COMMIT ACTS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST JOURNALISTS OR PEACEFUL PROTESTERS.

This is not negotiable. It is a norm of civilized life that cannot be abrogated.

For Whataboutists of the Left and the Right, I invite you to consider this passage from Orwell’s 1984. In it, the interrogator O’Brien is breaking down Winston Smith. Earlier in the novel, when Winston thought O’Brien was a secret recruiter for the anti-Party resistance, Winston and Julia swore that they would do any number of vile things to fight Big Brother and the Party. Later:

“If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are nonexistent.” His manner changed and he said more harshly: “And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?”

“Yes, I consider myself superior.”

O’Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment Winston recognized one of them as his own. It was a sound track of the conversation he had had with O’Brien, on the night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug taking and prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child’s face. O’Brien made a small impatient gesture, as though to say that the demonstration was hardly worth making. Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped.

I know, I know. That makes me a Vichy Frenchman. So be it. It is dangerous for us to say that the Enemy is so wicked that they must be stopped by any means necessary.

On the podcast interview, Ezra said he has a theory that both the Left and the Right depend on each other to turn the other side into their worst nightmare. He pointed to my recent post about The Guardian‘s valorizing of some disgusting Brazilian pervs who pee on each other in public to protest Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right Brazilian president. Ezra observed that I wrote about it after the Guardian elevated those creeps into valiant anti-fascist resisters. I think it’s important to write about because The Guardian is a certifier of progressive bien-pensant opinion (it is the UK version of the NYT in that sense). This is an example of what I’ve called the Law Of Motivated Noticing, which is this: “You may only take note of public acts of deviant sexuality if you are prepared to praise them as progressive.”

Ezra proposed that all of us should not be so quick to highlight the craziest stuff, in part because it propels a dynamic that makes all of us worse. I think he has a point, and told him after the show that he has made me think more critically about the work I do here in that respect.

Part of the problem, though, is knowing when a thing is worth tweeting or writing about. I initially wrote in this space about Bolsonaro tweeting a video of these guys urinating on each other publicly during Carnival because the Brazilian president’s actions stirred up a hornet’s nest of indignation from progressives who blamed him for promoting “homophobia” — this, for forwarding real-life footage of pornographic, degrading public behavior.

I concede that it might have been better if I had left that issue alone. For me, though, progressive rage at Bolsonaro — who really is a right-wing extremist — was quite familiar. There is seemingly nothing that LGBTs or sexual progressives do that we can criticize at all without being called bigots. Desmond Is Amazing, the pre-pubescent drag queen who dances for dollars at gay bars — can’t criticize that. Drag Queen Story Hour — can’t criticize that. Teen Vogue‘s promotion of vibrators and anal sex for teenage girls, and promoting instrumentalizing masturbation for witchcraft purposes — hey, it’s progressive!

What The Guardian did was just push the line of what we are required to affirm to be decent people that much farther toward the fringes. I think this is news.

But I see Ezra’s point too. This is a knotty problem, one that entails this question: When is whataboutism legitimate, and when it is nothing but trolling?

I can think of examples I have personal knowledge of, in which news organizations have deliberately chosen to suppress meaningful news for the sake of keeping readers and viewers from reacting in a political way (including merely reaching conclusions) that the editors and producers did not want them to do. In one case, both a newspaper and local TV refused to disclose the race of a violent crime suspect who was still at large. Police were warning residents of that area to be cautious, because this suspected assailant was on the loose … but the local media would not tell them that the man was black, even though that was as relevant to the public interest as the suspect’s sex, height, and build.

I also know of one case in which that was justified. It was an instance related to me by an Indian journalist, who said that if his newspaper had reported a factual story in a particular context — I believe it was a case of a Muslim committing a violent crime against a Hindu — it would have almost certainly resulted in mass rioting targeting local Muslims, a religious minority in that journalist’s town, and many deaths.

Obviously our problem in the US is far more that media suppress meaningful news for political reasons than that they withhold it for defensible public safety reasons. But it is undoubtedly true that journalists (including me) report on things that are better left unremarked on. That said, remaining silent in the face of non-stop stories from the mainstream media raising deviants like child drag queens and anti-fascist sadomasochists to cultural heroes contributes to the normalization of this trash. Are we not supposed to notice that that’s what the mainstream media are doing? I’m serious.

What is not a problem — or should not be a problem — is condemning without hesitation or qualification physical assaults on journalists and peaceful protesters. (And yes, I defended the odious white supremacist Richard Spencer when Antifa attacked him, and I condemned CBS when they staged a version of this assault and framed it in a justifying way.) It would have been wrong had this happened to Spencer, but what’s especially galling about the Left’s response (including the silence of the major media) is that Andy Ngo isn’t any kind of white supremacist, or white anything: he’s a gay Vietnamese-American journalist and editor at Quillette who has made a habit of filming Antifa’s violence, and publicizing it in a critical way.

He’s in a Portland hospital with his brain bleeding now, but certain well-known progressives — with Jesse Singal an honorable exception — are saying he deserved it, and other mainstream media figures who were very quick to report on the Covington Catholic non-story remaining restrained, even silent, on the Ngo beating.

For the record, at this writing (4:40pm CDT on Monday), the only Democratic presidential candidate to utter a word in defense of Andy Ngo, and in condemnation of the domestic terrorists who attacked him, is Andrew Yang:

I hope @MrAndyNgo is okay. Journalists should be safe to report on a protest without being targeted.

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) July 1, 2019

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I think this tweet is unanswerable:

Imagine the response if a swarm of Trump supporters in MAGA hats assaulted a CNN reporter and put him in the hospital with a brain injury. Imagine how the media would be reacting today. Imagine the fiery statements from all of the Democratic candidates.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 30, 2019

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UPDATE: This. This is the double standard:

How is it possible that a person can be permanently banned from @Twitter for saying that men aren’t women, but suggesting that journalist @MrAndyNgo deserved a beating that caused him to be admitted to the hospital doesn’t even get a blue check mark removed? pic.twitter.com/KzS4mM4e0c

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) June 30, 2019

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