Rod Dreher's Blog, page 237

Law Of Merited Impossibility, California-Style

Michael Brendan Dougherty says this is an illustration of the Law of Merited Impossibility (“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”), in three tweets:

 

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Catholics And Evangelicals Apart

Michael Brendan Dougherty — a traditionalist Catholic — offers an intriguing insight onto the Sohrab Ahmari/David French dust-up. He wonders if the fact that Ahmari is Catholic and French is Evangelical has something to do with the Ahmari’s political pessimism and French’s political optimism. Evangelicals, says MBD, have grown greatly, and become more morally conservative since mid-century. But:

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church’s growth as it touches the United States is only by movement, into and around. Some dioceses are growing, particularly in the American South, due to internal migration. And then there is immigration into the country. But since the Second Vatican Council, the trend is toward a massive fall off in practice. There is the massive, humiliating, sex-abuse crisis, implicating every level of the hierarchy. It has experienced the dissolution of the ethnic communities that sustained the archipelago of parochial schools, which are closing faster than they are opening. Many major dioceses are set to close and combine parishes: Boston, New York, Chicago. On the political front, the Catholic Church’s massive network of institutions — its hospitals, colleges, charities, and adoption agencies — have a public-facing mission that makes them the recipients of state and federal dollars. They are operating in industries that hardly exist apart from state funding and heavy regulation, which makes them vulnerable. Barack Obama, a president whose political career began within the Catholic Church’s social movements, turned around and had his Secretary of Health and Human Services specifically put the Church’s unpopular doctrine against the use and provision of artificial birth control into a major public controversy. Catholic adoption agencies are still being closed due to the application of non-discrimination principles. The ACLU has started testing legal tactics against Catholic health-care facilities and their prohibition on abortion.

Theologically, Catholic conservatives and traditionalists are more cohesive than they were before, say, 2007. But clearly they are on the wrong side of the current papacy. The pope defeated them handily in a controversy over divorce and the sacraments. Catholics also expect that the leaders of their prized institutions are often not-so-secretly on the other side. See how the president of Notre Dame — a priest — could not even take his own institution’s side in the birth-control debate. And more recently rejected calls from students to ban access to pornography on campus Wi-Fi.

Read it all. 

To be clear, MBD doesn’t make an extended case. He offers it as just a passing insight. But I sense that there’s something substantive here. What we are seeing now is in part the result of the absence of Richard John Neuhaus from the scene, and the failure of the Neuhaus-Weigel-Novak project to reconcile orthodox Catholicism with liberal democracy and capitalism.

You can blame them for betting so heavily on the Iraq War and the Republican Party, and you would have some grounds for it. But my sense is that the greater fault lies with the fact that they bet even more heavily — and understandably! — on institutional Catholicism. They had no idea that the deeds of the Catholic bishops and the abusive priests for whom they covered up would destroy the moral authority of the Church.

But even if the abuse crisis had never happened, I strongly doubt that the Catholic Church would be in much different circumstances today. Boston broke the scandal wide open in 2002, but the decline lines were well established in US Catholicism, since the 1960s and the Council. When John Paul II was pope, it was possible to convince oneself that the Church was repairing itself after the disastrous 1970s, and that maybe even Father Neuhaus was right that America was headed towards a “Catholic moment.”

It was certainly true that the intellectual confidence of Catholics in the 1980s and 1990s was intoxicating. I was mesmerized by it, and converted. It surprised me to discover that the difference between on one side, the Catholic Church of John Paul II and the Church I was reading about in the pages of First Things magazine, and on the other side the actual real-life American parishes, was jarring. Still, a number of us took it for granted that things were going to get better and better once the John Paul II bishops cleaned things up.

There was also among some of us right-of-center Catholic egghead types a barely concealed condescension towards Evangelicalism. One admired their zeal, certainly, but bless their hearts, they just don’t have the intellectual deep bench that we do. I really did think like that, and I wasn’t the only one.

I have heard it said that some Arab Muslim students who come to the US struggle to reconcile the lush greenness of the lands of the infidels with the fact that Americans do not hold the true faith. Why does Allah bless the unbelievers, but compel His faithful to live in the deserts? This may not be true, but I can see that kind of logic possibly at work among American Catholics, versus Evangelicals. I was never an Evangelical, and did not take Christianity seriously at all until I converted to Catholicism as an adult in my mid-twenties. But I remember thinking at the time that Evangelicalism was doomed, ultimately, to fall prey to the forces of dissolution in American culture, because it lacked a Magisterium (the teaching authority of the Catholic Church), which was a solid rock. A few years into practicing Catholicism, I found myself struggling to reconcile that triumphalist belief with the fact that on certain matters of basic Christian morality, Evangelicals did a much better job of holding to Christian orthodoxy than we Catholics did.

In fact, today, white US Evangelicals hold more faithfully to magisterial Catholic teaching about abortion and homosexuality than US Catholics do:

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. That’s not how the script read. But that’s what happened. And, as MBD observes, the ascent of Pope Francis has been a series of gut punches for orthodox Catholics — trads and ordinary theological conservatives both — who had grown comfortable under JP2 and Benedict XVI. This wasn’t in the script either. But it has happened.

I think it’s hard for Evangelicals to appreciate how strange it is for conservative Catholics, who, unless they go to a Latin mass parish, are almost always going to be the minority in their parishes. The common Evangelical experience of knowing that just about everybody else with you in your congregation shares the same belief is alien to most Catholics. This gives individual Evangelical congregations more coherence, and, I think, confidence.

On the other hand, I wonder if there’s a grass-is-always-greener factor at work here. A decade ago, Michael Spencer, who has since died, published a widely commented-on essay called “The Coming Evangelical Collapse,” in which he predicted that within ten years, most Evangelical churches and institutions will have fallen apart.

Well, he pretty clearly got the timing wrong. But parts of his essay still seem relevant today. Such as this excerpt from Spencer’s analysis of what’s driving the collapse:

2) Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people the evangelical Christian faith in an orthodox form that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. In what must be the most ironic of all possible factors, an evangelical culture that has spent billions of youth ministers, Christian music, Christian publishing and Christian media has produced an entire burgeoning culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures that they will endure.

Do not be deceived by conferences or movements that are theological in nature. These are a tiny minority of evangelicalism. A strong core of evangelical beliefs is not present in most of our young people, and will be less present in the future. This loss of “the core” has been at work for some time, and the fruit of this vacancy is about to become obvious.

3) Evangelical churches have now passed into a three part chapter: 1) mega-churches that are consumer driven, 2) churches that are dying and 3) new churches that whose future is dependent on a large number of factors. I believe most of these new churches will fail, and the ones that do survive will not be able to continue evangelicalism at anything resembling its current influence. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.

Our numbers, our churches and our influence are going to dramatically decrease in the next 10-15 years. And they will be replaced by an evangelical landscape that will be chaotic and largely irrelevant.

4) Despite some very successful developments in the last 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can hold the line in the rising tide of secularism. The ingrown, self-evaluated ghetto of evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself. I believe Christian schools always have a mission in our culture, but I am skeptical that they can produce any sort of effect that will make any difference. Millions of Christian school graduates are going to walk away from the faith and the church.

There are many outstanding schools and outstanding graduates, but as I have said before, these are going to be the exceptions that won’t alter the coming reality. Christian schools are going to suffer greatly in this collapse.

I would like for readers who are Evangelical, and active within Evangelicalism, to tell me why Spencer’s prophecy of doom has not come to pass. Is it still valid, and he simply got the dates wrong? Because I’ll tell you, everything he says here is confirmed for me anecdotally by Evangelicals I meet in my travels, and with whom I’m in touch weekly. And the sociologist of religious Christian Smith found that emerging adult Evangelicals are very much on the same path of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as their Catholic counterparts, who are farther gone. One noted Evangelical leader I met in my travels a couple of years ago that he used to think Evangelicalism was going to hold to Biblical orthodoxy on LGBT matters, but now has given up that expectation. Just the other day, an Evangelical academic friend said to me:

American Christians, with a tiny handful of exceptions, have no means of self-defense, nothing, nil, nada. They are completely at the mercy of the culture, and completely in denial about it.

To sum up: maybe what looks to demoralized Catholics like justified Evangelical self-confidence is more of a false front than even many Evangelicals know.

I don’t know, gang. What do you think?

Here’s part of it too, I’m guessing (notice that I’m using these hedge words; a lot of this is just speculation). French tweeted recently:

It seems to me that many of the Christian opponents of classical liberalism not only believe the following words to be false but to be actually destructive, over time, to public virtue and religious orthodoxy: pic.twitter.com/vtq2lbHmpT

— David French (@DavidAFrench) June 4, 2019

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I’ve seen over the years that Evangelicals tend to be much more bullish on the American project than Catholics. I’m not saying that Evangelicals are more patriotic than Catholics. I’m saying that Evangelicals, in general, have nurtured an esteem for the Founding that is harder to find among Catholics — who, patriotic though they may be, may have philosophical doubts. It’s significant that French quoted from the Declaration of Independence as if to call into question the good faith of Christian (Catholic) critics of classical liberalism. Don’t misread me: I don’t think he was trying to be insulting, or was insulting. I think, actually, that his is an important point! Was America founded on a half-truth, a lie, or (less harshly), a philosophical mistake? 

The American political order is Protestant and Enlightenment, so it’s obvious why Evangelicals would be more at ease within it, and why Catholics would have philosophical problems with it. It was just over a century ago that the Vatican denounced the heresy of “Americanism,” which held in part that Church and State should be separate, and that the consciences of individual Catholics should have more liberty from Church teachings. Of course the Second Vatican Council revised many of these teachings; I only bring them up here to say that skepticism of classical liberalism is deep in the Catholic thought.

In my case, I share most of that skepticism, but the bone that gets stuck in my own throat is the question, “What’s a better system for us than classical liberalism?” Like most Americans (including, I would wager, American Catholics), I would not stand one second for integrating the US political order with the Catholic Church, or any church (if such a thing were possible). The problem with this is that liberalism itself behaves like a rival religion, one that doesn’t understand itself as a religion.

I have no good answer here. I’m still thinking through it. The Ahmari-French dispute, though it has had some regrettable manifestations, has been really helpful in spurring thought and conversation. Finally, everybody would benefit from reading Michael Hanby’s essay on “The Civic Project Of American Christianity” — which is about the meaning of politics for Christians in a post-Christian world. It might have been subtitled, “Father Neuhaus is dead, and I don’t feel so good myself.”

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Courtship & Republicans

Scene from Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan” (‘Metropolitan’ trailer screengrab)

I had a conversation recently with a high school teacher, about the question of dating, and male-female relations. She’s in her early 30s, and was talking at length about the difficulties of finding a partner to settle down with. She was really insightful.

One of the things she mentioned is observing the destructive way high school girls talk about boys. She said that they use the words “humiliation” and “assault” to describe normal social interaction. She indicated that these girls are intentionally fragilizing themselves, and whether they know it or not, making themselves unattractive to males because they turn ordinary male teenage awkwardness into a pathology.

The teacher also said — speaking of her own generation — that there is something about men of her generation that is strikingly immature. She doesn’t know why. But she also said that her generation is so self-sabotaging in that everybody wants to be happy, but nobody wants any commitments that would constrain their choices. They can’t understand that in order to get the things that will make them happy, she said, they have to surrender a significant amount of their autonomy — and that’s a thing that they will not do. She faulted herself somewhat for this.

Listening to her talk, I realized that trends that began with my generation (1980s) had hardened in subsequent generations. A lot of us were terrified of commitment, even though we wanted goods that could only come through commitment. The famous Generation X irony was a strategy to protect oneself in a social environment in which commitment was seen as making oneself vulnerable to disaster. This is what you get from a culture of divorce.

But I was like that in my teens and twenties, and my parents had not divorced, nor had most of the parents of my friends. I recall a sense of near-paralysis in the face of all the choices one could make about how to live one’s life. You could get so afraid of making the wrong choice that you passed up the opportunity to choose at all. The teacher told me that among her circles in college and right out of college, everybody was really, really anxious about making choices that would hamper their ability to rise. But rise to what, exactly? This is the number that Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity does on male-female relationships.

Anyway, all that came to mind when I read this e-mail from a reader, which I post with his permission. He’s commenting on the Apocalypse GOP thread:

In my view, there’s nothing unique about the inability of the Republican Party to attract young people. Color me somewhat cynical, but the politics of the young come down to the following:

– Free stuff;

– I can do whatever the f*ck I want.

As a proud Gen. Yer, I don’t speak for everyone, certainly, but the above are the two most commonly-heard refrains with regards to how young people relate with both state and society here in the West. Because we’ve lived in such luxury compared to the rest of the world, it’s become easier (and more fashionable) to focus on the things we don’t have. It’s the difference between being given something as opposed to earning it – what’s given possesses less value than something that’s been earned.

The second point both complements and contradicts the first. Because they’re young, it’s not that they lack the mental capacity nor the life experience, but rather that they haven’t thought these things through all that well. If they did, they’d see the paradox of demanding the government giving you free stuff while insisting on your freedom to whatever you please – if you rely solely on the state to satisfy your every need and desire, then how on Earth are you able to do “whatever the f*ck you want?” Where it complements the first point is that because the young in the West haven’t had to pay much a price for a lot of what we enjoy here, they honestly believe adding a few more items to that shopping list won’t break the bank. The appreciation for what it takes to build and sustain a society simply isn’t there.

There’s one more thing – a lack of meaning in life. My best friend currently is a guy who shares nothing in common with me politically, but he trusts me enough to reveal that he feels his life ought to serve a grander, more meaningful purpose and this has an effect on how satisfied he feels. What’s interesting is that young people in general feel this way – that they want their lives to have more meaning, but they seem to think they’re the first generation to feel this way. I think every generation has sought more meaning in their lives, it’s just that older generations have discovered that meaning for themselves on an individual basis. Young people, on the other hand, want two things that aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but aren’t always inclusive, either – meaning on their terms, while still belonging to something greater than themselves.

How does this translate into the future of the GOP? Keep in mind – Gen. Y and Z will become old one day. And my friend is wrong when he says history follows a straight line in one direction – this is impossible, because we get old and die. Not only do some ideas die with us, but some ideas change as well. The history of society and the world is one of cycles and while the GOP may be in for some choppy waters, I don’t think any of this spells our death-knell.

And if it does? I suggest we do what we always should do – take it for granted that things will work out and keep our wheels turning. What other option is there?

I don’t think we should take it for granted that things will work out. I think we should maintain hope that if we trust God and live for Him, all things will work out for the best, even if that means suffering for us. But we shouldn’t be fatalistic.

Why am I putting these two ideas together? Because my conversation with the teacher began with her saying that her generation (Millennials) has a collective sense that things ought to be shared in common, but at the same time they think and live as hyper-individualists. She can’t understand it.  Seems to me like the reader who wrote has a pretty good sense of it.

Thoughts? Please do your best to restrain yourself from whataboutist griping about the GOP and Wall Street, foreign wars, and so forth. I’m going to police the thread more closely, solely to keep the discussion focused on whether or not there are connections between the socialization of generations as atomized consumers, and their much greater interest in a party and political orientation that valorizes greater personal autonomy and personal subsidies.

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Mx. Steel, Male Penetration, & The New Normal

Mx. Steel (they, them, their) introduces themself to their elementary school class (

The Maimonides Option

Reader Yehoshua Kahan writes:

As an Orthodox Jew (an ultra-Orthodox Jew, even), I follow these intra-Christian debates with some interest. You see, my community has been for many centuries a small and embattled minority, struggling to survive in the midst of a triumphant and hostile majority. Whether in pre-Christian Rome, in Christendom, in the Islamic lands, in Enlightenment Europe and now the post-Christian West, we are and have been a minority. So I find the transition of the Christian majority to minority status interesting, and I wonder if you will learn the lessons of our history?

We fought the Romans. Not once, but twice. We bloodied them in battle, we destroyed Roman armies. And we lost our country, and our city, and our Temple. Our dead littered the land, our young were led off in chains to be torn apart in amphitheatres, or to labor in Roman mines, or to serve in Roman pleasure-houses.

We did not get our country back for a very long time.

Under the Church, we kept our heads down, we understood that we were a minority. We suffered from you–oh, how we suffered!–but we survived. We’re still here. We’re growing, and thriving.

Immediately after the Holocaust, religious Jewry was virtually dead. There were certainly not as many as a hundred thousand religious Jews in the world. Today there are probably over a million. In a hundred years there will be many millions.

We survived because we acknowledged our weakness, we bore children, and we built schools and communities where we could pass our beliefs and our values on to our children.

Do you want to survive in a post-Christian world? Learn the lessons of our history. Accept that you are no longer the rulers, have children, and labor mightily to pass on your beliefs and values to your children. Or you could follow our earlier example and “fight the Romans.” In which case, may G-d have mercy on you, and spare you the suffering which we so long endured.

In The Benedict Option, I have a passage saying that we Christians must now learn from the practices of Orthodox Jews. I planned an entire chapter on that, but I had to edit a lot out. (You should have seen the response my editor sent when I transmitted the first draft of Chapter Two at over 18,000 words, and told her that I wasn’t sure about it, because it seemed sketchy.)

Anyway, I wish some Christian writer would do an entire book on learning cultural and religious survival skills from Orthodox Jews.

Along these lines, a Jewish friend e-mails:

The “Incels and Socialism” author turned my mind toward my own religious world — the “modern” end of Modern Orthodox Judaism. I point that out because it’s not a world where everyone is married by 22 or so — but it is a world where there’s enormous pressure to be married by 24-28 (once graduate degrees are complete or in motion). And … overwhelmingly, this happens. I have single-male-30-something friends out here — and while it’s a different game in the midwest than in, say, NYC, DC, LA, Chicago, or Miami — they don’t despair in the same way. (Are there moments of frustration and sadness — yes — but, I think, in a way that seems perfectly run-of-the-mill).

So what’s different? The shadchen, I think — the matchmaker, whether we’re talking digital versions (online dating services used exclusively by the religious) or the living, breathing 21st-century update of Yente. I’ll admit — fresh from college, on course to be married by 25, I thought the idea of a matchmaker was weird. But it’s not. They’re good at what they do: set up dates that won’t end disastrously between two people with shared religious commitments. If you’ve finished college and not on the Upper West Side or in Silver Spring, MD, I’ve learned, it’s hard to find single people your age you might date. There’s no more shame, within my shul of PhDs, attorneys, and physicians, in having been set up by a shadchen than having met online.

So the matchmaker continues on — and provides an important service. If nothing else, the existence of matchmaking services helps to alleviate the sense of despair that the author of the letter you posted feels, at least among many. He’d say, I suspect, that he’s isolated: from a Jewish perspective, so is my shul. We don’t have a matchmaker among us, but members do connect with those in nearby major cities, or out of NY. It might be worth thinking about this role — as both a profession and a community service — within the context of orthodox Christian communities — both BenOp and not.

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Apocalypse GOP

David Brooks says that the Republican Party is headed off a cliff. He points out statistics showing that Millennials and Generation Z are very, very alienated from conservatism and the GOP. Excerpt:

These days the Republican Party looks like a direct reaction against this ethos — against immigration, against diversity, against pluralism. Moreover, conservative thought seems to be getting less relevant to the America that is coming into being.

Matthew Continetti recently identified the key blocs on the new right in an essay in The Washington Free Beacon. These included the Jacksonians (pugilistic populists), the Paleos (Tucker Carlson-style economic nationalists), the Post-Liberals (people who oppose pluralism and seek a return to pre-Enlightenment orthodoxy). To most young adults, these tendencies will look like cloud cuckooland.

The most burning question for conservatives should be: What do we have to say to young adults and about the diverse world they are living in? Instead, conservative intellectuals seem hellbent on taking their 12 percent share among the young and turning it to 3.

Well, Continetti identified me with the Post-Liberal bloc because of the Benedict Option, though it’s kind of a catch-all category for people who doubt the liberal project. I don’t oppose pluralism; I see it as a social fact. I support immigration restrictions now, not because I oppose pluralism, but because we are in a cultural period in which figuring out how to stop, even reverse, social fragmentation is one of the most important political challenges facing the nation — and maintaining or increasing immigration is only going to make that worse.

It is true that the GOP, and the conservative movement more generally, has massive problems figuring out how to pass on its politics to the younger generations. The Millennials and Generation Z are much to the left of Gen Xers and Boomers — and are starting to vote in big numbers. I wonder, though, just how successful the Democratic Party, and the Left in general, is going to be once the Social Justice Warriors are in charge. The militant illiberalism, misandry, and racism of the emergent Left is going to send a lot of people over to the Right. When liberal intellectual Mark Lilla wrote a book saying that the Democratic Party — his party — needs to get away from identity politics and find a way to reach the white working class that broke for Trump, he was denounced as a white supremacist.

It’s true that the demographic shift, and the ethnic diversification of America, benefits the Democratic Party, but it is doubtful that white males will have a future in that party unless they are prepared to accept conditions of woke dhimmitude. The radical, identity-politics egalitarianism that began on campuses and has now spread more generally through the media and the culture of the Left fragments people along racial, gender, and sexual lines, and sets them at each other’s throats, in a way that the economic solidarity proposed by, say, a Mark Lilla would not. But then, he’s “making white supremacy respectable again.”

If any disillusioned Millennials or Gen Zers make their way to the right, what kind of Right will they find? I don’t understand what David would have the Right do, except be not-crazy leftists. Better a sane leftist than an ideological monster! But we need an actual Right-wing party in this country, though it must be conceded that simple demographic and ideological reality will push the GOP further to the Left in some ways, for the same reason Reaganism ended up pushing the Democrats out of their New Deal-Great Society paradigm, into Clintonism.

Still, it’s impossible to see what the GOP Establishment class has to offer anybody. Brooks’s frustration is born of the failures of that class. The fact that Trump does little but shout and lie doesn’t make the fusionist establishment (that is, national security hawks + free marketers + social conservatives) that Trump displaced any more credible or attractive. Matthew Walther says that the whole Ahmari-French fight is a tempest in a think-tanky teapot. Excerpt:

Consider what the fusionists have done so far. At the height of their influence under George W. Bush, the old fusionist conservatives managed to cut taxes once before the Iraq War cost Republicans their majority in the House of Representatives in 2006. It would be another decade before the GOP once again controlled the executive branch, the House, and the Senate. What did they do with their all-too-brief stranglehold on Washington? Cut taxes again.

On its face, this more or less accurate summary of the Republican Party’s thin résumé while in power reads more like an indictment of fusionism and its ambitions than anything else. It certainly is that. But it is also a reminder of how little regard national politicians have had for anything that does not enrich the wealthy. How many leaders of the GOP have come forward to celebrate the pro-life victories of their counterparts in state legislatures and governors’ mansions throughout the country? How many of them will say that they think Obergefell should be overturned? Wall Street and Hollywood have made their positions clear on everything from trade to abortion to China: It’s dollars all the way down.

This is not to suggest that the post-fusionist right cease all of its present activities and disengage from American public life. Politics is inevitable. So too for the foreseeable future are political defeats.

That’s true, but that was always going to be true as the country stumbles towards political realignment. The post-Clintonite Left may yet lose the 2020 presidential election, but that will only be one stumble on the road to a very different party.

As you know, the single issue that matters most to me is building a strong shield around religious liberty. I will never, ever forget learning in October 2015 that the House and Senate Republican leadership had no plans for post-Obergefell religious liberty legislation. None. They did not care. They didn’t want to be portrayed as bigots in the media, and heaven knows the donor class doesn’t care about us bigoted church people. Donald Trump, as bad as he is in so many ways, has been more pro-active on religious liberty protections than most any Congressional Republican would have been absent his presidency. Conservative religious believers can’t afford to forget that.

Ross Douthat has written the most important piece yet to help you understand the stakes of the Ahmari-French battle. He wouldn’t agree that it’s a minor skirmish among conservative intellectuals and writers. There’s something big being hashed out here. He says that it’s a fight between the old-school Right of the fusionists (represented by David French), and the rebellious Right sick of the old settlement; they are represented in this debate by Sohrab Ahmari.

(I should add that I joined Ahmari in putting my signature on a manifesto published a short time ago in First Things, saying that whatever the differences among the signatories, we all agree that after Trump, things cannot go back to where they were on the Right. My sympathies are firmly on Ahmari’s side in what you might call his philosophical diagnosis of the crisis. I don’t get the point of attacking David French, and I think French-ism — as Ahmari calls it — can’t be dismissed so easily. I’ve written about this in several earlier posts this week.)

Douthat’s contribution to understanding this dispute is in identifying what the Ahmarists want that separates them from the French fusionists:

A more assertive role for social conservatives within conservative coalition politics
A more active role for the state in the economy, to serve socially conservative ends
A philosophical consideration of where the liberal order has ended up

Douthat expands on that last point:

How radical that reconsideration ought to be varies with the thinker. Maybe it just means restoring some kind of lost conservative understanding of American institutions, as Yoram Hazony has argued in essays for First Things and the similarly post-fusionist journal American Affairs. Maybe it means questioning the philosophical underpinnings of the American founding itself, as Patrick Deneen argued in 2018’s big-think book “Why Liberalism Failed.” Maybe it means reinventing the Catholic anti-liberalism of the 19th century, and embracing the “integralism” championed by, among others, Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School.

The further this reconsideration goes, the more fanciful, utopian or revolutionary it might seem. (The integralists would cop to the last designation.) But the basic concept of a right rooted more in cultural conservatism and economic populism than in libertarianism and individualism isn’t fanciful; it describes the emergent right-of-center ideological formations all across the Western world. The American pendulum may swing back to fusionism after Trump — French is hardly alone in championing the old regime, and most Republican politicians remain instinctive fusionists — but some version of Ahmari’s turn is one that the right is making almost everywhere, for now.

Whole thing here.

Douthat points out the painfully obvious: that none of the dissident conservatives have figured out how to build any kind of coherent movement around the person of Donald Trump. Love him or hate him, Trump is such a polarizing figure that his person will determine our politics until he leaves the stage. Keep your eye on figures like Sen. Josh Hawley, who seems to be trying to figure out a philosophically coherent new conservatism from the fusionist ruins.

The most interesting aspect of the new conservatism is its skeptical attitude toward the Enlightenment. It’s not true to say that all the so-called Post-Liberals reject the Enlightenment entirely. Some may, but it’s more accurate to say that we are to various degrees Enlightenment-skeptical. It’s telling that the Fusionists treat this as heresy:

It seems to me that many of the Christian opponents of classical liberalism not only believe the following words to be false but to be actually destructive, over time, to public virtue and religious orthodoxy: pic.twitter.com/vtq2lbHmpT

— David French (@DavidAFrench) June 4, 2019

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It’s a robust claim … but there’s truth in it. The argument is not settled by saying “how dare you?!” What if it turns out not only can liberal democracy not endure without grounding in stronger claims than “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” but also the particular features of liberal democracy — especially its project of emancipating the individual — serve over time to alienate citizens from the religious and social commitments they need to make liberal democracy work? We need to be able to talk about that without treating the Constitution like it is Holy Writ.

Though I was a signatory to the First Things statement, and though Continetti identifies me as a Post-Liberal, politics is only a secondary interest to my Benedict Option project. I see our entire political and social order disintegrating, much as the Western Roman Empire did in the 5th century. I’m not going to drag the argument out for you here, not after all this time, but basically the widespread decline of the Christian faith — both in terms of numbers, and in terms of elementary orthodoxy — is the greatest crisis of our civilization. The Benedict Option intends to address that. There is a political component to it, but the main thrust of the idea is not political. Whether the US is ruled by Republicans or Democrats is not ultimately important. That choice likely determines the rate of decline and fall, but not the fact thereof.

Bottom line: I’m interested in the survival of the Church, and in building resilient communities of traditional faith capable of resisting the disorders of the age, and bearing witness to a dark and chaotic time. Maybe even these communities will serve as the early Benedictine monasteries did: as strongholds of light, order, and channels of divine grace to a world in desperate need of same.

If we in the churches are going to build these communities, we need at some level to understand how the social, political, moral, and economic order we live under works against us. We also can’t be under the illusion that changing political leadership is sufficient to address the crisis. It may be necessary, but it is not remotely sufficient.

It should be said that it’s not only the Right that’s questioning the Enlightenment and its fruits in the classical liberal political order. The hatred with which many progressives regard First Amendment protections of free speech and religious liberty reveals that they believe equality (as they define it) is more important than liberty. Here is what I wish the Left understood about why so many of us Christians do not trust them with power. Alan Jacobs summarizes it well in this theoretical conversation on his blog:

Me: I’m concerned about the erosion of support on the left for religious liberty.

They: That’s a disgraceful calumny, we are passionately devoted to religious liberty.

Me: Only when you agree with, or at least are not offended by, the religious beliefs involved.

They: Another disgusting lie!

Me: So what do you think about that Masterpiece Cakeshop guy?

They: What a bigot! I hope the law comes down on him like a ton of bricks.

Me: But he says he’s acting out of his long-held religious convictions.

They: I despise it when people use religion to cover for their bigotry.

Me: So it’s like I said, you only support religious liberty when you agree with, or at least are not offended by, the beliefs involved — the ones you think are not bigoted.

They: Bigotry and religion are not the same thing! Religion is about a person’s relationship with whatever God they happen to believe in, it’s not about passing judgment on their neighbors.

Me: So having claimed the right to define what bigotry is, you’re now defining what religion is?

They: Look, you can go ahead and defend bigotry if you want to, but thank goodness there are laws against that in this country.

And with that, Your Faithful Correspondent, who has a wicked bronchial infection post-Walker Percy Weekend, is going back to bed. Y’all be good.

UPDATE: Reader BG writes:

Let me first say how much I appreciate this blog and all your efforts Rod. I want to add some thoughts here that explain why I think it’s so valuable, related to this issue:

I strongly agree with Matthew Walther’s take that this “storm” of controversy just DOES NOT MATTER, and that the Conservatism being fought over, in any of the described sects, is dead on the ground. Conservative thinkers and public figures are suffering from the same navel-gazing they so often accuse liberal journalists of. They may think they are out of the bubble, but they are still in it. All the issues and tactics they are giving so much thought and prose to matter almost nothing to most millenial (and Gen-X) voters. The Blue Wave isn’t just coming. It’s already here, having tsunami’d over the younger generation; the older generation just doesn’t realize it yet.

When I watched Trump pull off his surprise election victory in 2016, I remember two distinct thoughts coming to me, seemingly reflexively:

1) Wow, that was unexpected.

2) This is the dying gasp of an America that doesn’t exist anymore.

Conservative thinkers like to talk about Trump as though he’s a new direction for the movement. But there’s no new direction, because the moving volume has no mass. Statistically speaking, almost no one under 35 has a strong affinity for any of these brands of conservatism. And this is what makes the Benedict Option so critical to those of us still trying to raise families.

I’m a 30-year-old Christian conservative with a young family. I attended a private Christian college, in one of the reddest states in the country one with an emphasis on Apologetics and the Western Cultural Tradition. I would say more than 80% of its student body were what you would call “serious Christians”, and probably more than half would call themselves conservative. I graduated 8 years ago. In that time, among my peers from school, I’ve noticed:

-roughly half have stopped attending Church altogether

-more than half half are fully-affirming LGBTQetc “allies”

-more than half openly despise Trump and the GOP

-maybe 20% are already divorced

-more than ~25% had a child (or children) before they were married

-at least half believe the Green New Deal is the only hope for humanity’s future

-almost all of them are completely dependent on social media for their intellectual formation

Earlier this week, a close friend of mine from school came out to me as Transgendered. He (she?) was a leader on multiple mission efforts during our time as students. Another good friend of mine, who graduated as a Divinity student, is now an open advocate for more acceptance of human-animal relationships.

Now, keep all this in mind, and remember that this is a representative sample of what should be the MOST CHRISTIAN/CONSERVATIVE portion of the electorate. Religious/political affiliations with the “movement” decline logarithmically from there.

All this is to say that I very much appreciate the intellectual stimulation that the conservative thinkers provide. But they are playing a game with themselves. As Michael Anton said in his “Flight 93 Election”, “we are headed off a cliff”. I’m no saint, but I do feel very, very alone as a conservative Christian man trying to raise a faithful, thoughtful family in 2019. Our church is devout and fervent, but shrinking. Many of my friends would disown me if they knew the extent of my political beliefs. My wife, an extremely social person, found herself to be the only woman among her many peers that was skeptical of the Kavanaugh accusations. Thank God, we found a good classical Christian school nearby that we can save up for for our kids. The Benedict Option shouldn’t even be a debate anymore; the great deluge of secular Leftism isn’t coming in 2020 or 2024, it’s here NOW.

UPDATE.2: Reader PW:

I am a millenial. Let’s get down to brass tacks. Here are my top concerns in my day-to-day life:

1) The endless spiraling costs of healthcare. This is CRITICAL to young families, and something the SoCons seem constitutionally incapable of even talking about honestly.

2) Student loans. I spend as much on student loans as I do for food for a family of four. This expense cripples my family.

3) Housing costs. For those of us not in flyover country this has hit a critical point.

4) Childcare / education. As a family, this actually *exceeds* my housing costs.

5) Wages. Wages in my industry have been flat for 20 years, and I work in a “good” job!

Republicans have nothing – in fact, less than nothing, to offer me. All the SoCons seem constitutionally capable of doing is screaming about a flag somewhere. I cannot express how little that matters to me.

In my bones, I’m not really in line with the current Democrat party. I’m fiscally to the *right* of the Republican party (talk about irresponsible, modern Republicans never met a budget they couldn’t blow out). I’m socially close to Dreher.

And every year, the Republicans push me further and further into the Democrat coalition. The utter corruption of the Republican Party is breathtaking in it’s thoroughness. That corruption makes it utterly unable to respond to the concerns of anyone who isn’t a billionaire or a farmer in a narrow swing district.

The fact of the matter is, Republicans have made it clear: they have no interest in me, and they are not getting my vote.

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Ahmari-French 4-Ever

Lots of takes on Ahmari-versus-French to think about. I appreciate this discussion, because it’s forcing me to think harder about my own position, or positions. And it’s rather revealing about where others stand.

Stephanie Slade, writing in Reason, says that Team Ahmari is neither conservative nor Christian. Excerpt:

Classical liberal values and institutions offer a robust bulwark against the worst excesses of the illiberal left. Do Ahmari et al. actually think the system that gave us the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling is so broken as to justify setting the whole thing ablaze? More to the point, do they really believe that what follows after the smoke clears will be better for religious traditionalists?

Yes, exactly. But then Slade goes off the deep end:

But the First Thingsian rejection of the liberal order isn’t merely strategically imprudent. It’s morally reprehensible from a Catholic perspective. The dignity of the human person, which follows from our being created by God in His image and likeness, demands that we be given expansive freedom to make choices for ourselves.

That’s not libertarian propaganda. It comes straight out of the Catechism (“God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions”), which in turn quotes the Bible (“God willed that man should be ‘left in the hand of his own counsel,’ so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him”). As the economist Eric Schansberg once wrote of Adam and Eve, “It was not God’s plan that they should sin, but it was God’s will that they should have the choice.” To exercise coercive control over a person is to treat him as undeserving of a gift bestowed by his creator. It’s to place yourself above your creator.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. You cannot say that the apex of Roman Catholic political thought was reached in Mill and Locke, and that it is “morally reprehensible from a Catholic perspective” to reject it. Where does one even begin with that? Just like that, the entire non-liberal conservative tradition is dismissed as not only unconservative, but un-Christian! That’s so silly it scarcely rises to the level of offensive. This is well into the “God is love, so therefore Christians have to approve of gay marriage” territory. I expect libertarians to strongly oppose anything Team Ahmari says, but calling it “unconservative” and even “un-Christian”? No.

Where I doubt Team Ahmari is that the kind of political order they desire is even possible in pluralistic, post-Christian America, in a way that it is not in, say, Hungary and Poland. Whether it’s desirable is, to me, a secondary question, or at least merely a theoretical one. But the claim that secular liberalism is the only political order consonant with Christianity — and Catholic Christianity at that! — is risible.

Matthew Continetti offers a taxonomy of the various positions and people on the contemporary American Right. He pus my TAC boss Johnny Burtka in the Paleo category, but I end up in a different slot. Continetti writes, in part, about the Post-Liberals:

Here is a group that I did not see coming. The Trump era has coincided with the formation of a coterie of writers who say that liberal modernity has become (or perhaps always was) inimical to human flourishing. One way to tell if you are reading a post-liberal is to see what they say about John Locke. If Locke is treated as an important and positive influence on the American founding, then you are dealing with just another American conservative. If Locke is identified as the font of the trans movement and same-sex marriage, then you may have encountered a post-liberal.

The post-liberals say that freedom has become a destructive end-in-itself. Economic freedom has brought about a global system of trade and finance that has outsourced jobs, shifted resources to the metropolitan coasts, and obscured its self-seeking under the veneer of social justice. Personal freedom has ended up in the mainstreaming of pornography, alcohol, drug, and gambling addiction, abortion, single-parent families, and the repression of orthodox religious practice and conscience. “When an ideological liberalism seeks to dictate our foreign policy and dominate our religious and charitable institutions, tyranny is the result, at home and abroad,” wrote the signatories to “Against the Dead Consensus,” a post-liberal manifesto of sorts published in First Things in March.

“The ambition of neoliberalism,” wrote the editor of First Things in the spring of 2017, “is to weaken and eventually dissolve the strong elements of traditional society that impede the free flow of commerce (the focus of nineteenth-century liberalism), as well as identity and desire (the focus of postmodern liberalism). This may work well for the global elite, but ordinary people increasingly doubt it works for them.” The result, he said, has been populist calls for the “strong gods” of familial, national, and religious authority.

The post-liberals are mainly but not exclusively traditionalist Catholics. Their most prominent spokesman is Patrick J. Deneen, whose Why Liberalism Failed (2018) was recommended by that ultimate progressive, Barack Obama. Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony’s Virtue of Nationalism (2018) is another important entry in the post-liberal canon. Hazony has contributed essays to both First Things (“Conservative Democracy”) and American Affairs (“What Is Conservatism?”) making the case for conservatism without Locke, Jefferson, and Paine.

The post-liberals have put forward two contradictory political strategies. The first, advanced by Rod Dreher, who is Eastern Orthodox, is the Benedict Option of turning away from the secular world and shielding, as best you can, spiritual life. The second, as put by Sohrab Ahmari also in First Things, is “to use these values [of civility and decency] to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral.”

I would tweak this slightly. Sohrab’s strategy is explicitly political. My strategy is only incidentally political; it is pre-political, in that it is primarily spiritual and cultural. I’ve explained at length why I strongly sympathize with Sohrab — it’s fair to call us both Post-Liberal — but can’t agree with his political strategy. (In part because I’m more pessimistic than he is.) Along these lines, the Thomist philosopher Edward Feser has some interesting words about the Ahmari-French debate.  Excerpts:

If anything, Continetti understates the grounds for pessimism about the prospects for a post-liberal conservative politics. For contemporary Western society is radically out of step with the basic premises to which the post-liberal conservative is committed. Indeed, I would say that liberalism is a Christian heresy and one that seems now to be approaching its full metastasization. I would say that it is the moral and political component of the broader heresy of modernism, which is at high tide and sweeping all before it, the flood now having penetrated deeply into even the innermost parts of the Church. It is like Arianism both in its breathtaking reach and in its longevity. It is worse than Arianism in its depravity. Its god is the self – the sovereign individual of the liberal, and the subjective religious consciousness of the theological modernist – and in seeking to conform reality to the self rather than the self to reality, it tends toward subjectivism, relativism, fideism, voluntarism, and other forms of irrationalism. And there is no limit to the further errors that might follow upon such tendencies. That is why, as Pope Pius X said, modernism is the “synthesis of all heresies.”

Because of this irrationalism, the liberal and modernist personality tends to be dominated by appetite, and by sexual appetite in particular, since the pleasures associated with it are the most intense. But he also has a special hostility to the natural purpose of sex – marital commitment, children, and family – because that imposes the most stringent obligations on the self. The family is also the fundamental social unit, and thus the model for all other social obligations, such as those entailed by ties of nationality. Hence it is inevitable that the liberal and modernist personality will seek to reshape the family, and through it all social order, to conform to his desires. Woke socialism is the last stop on the train ride that begins with radical individualism.

Some readers will no doubt find all of that overwrought, to say the least. The point, however, is that it is a diagnosis that is hard to avoid if one begins with the sorts of premises to which post-liberal conservatives are typically committed. And it entails that an ambitious near-future post-liberal conservative political program is probably not feasible, precisely because, as Continetti says, there simply are not enough voters who still sympathize with that view of the world. In the short term, it seems to me, the post-liberal conservative will have to settle for rearguard actions, piecemeal and often only temporary victories, uneasy alliances with other conservatives, and in general a strategy of muddling through that can hope at best to take the edge off the worst excesses of late stage liberalism.

Where he must be ambitious is in working for the long term revival of Western civilization. For the average person, that means committing oneself firmly to a countercultural way of life – to religious orthodoxy, to having large families, and to preserving the social and cultural inheritance of the past the best one can at the local level, Benedict Option style. For the intellectual, it means working to revive the classical (Platonic, Aristotelian, Scholastic) tradition in Western thought, and showing how it is not only in no way incompatible with, but provides a surer foundation for, the good things that modernity has produced (such as modern science, limited constitutional government, and the market economy).

The good news the post-liberal conservative can give the fusionist is that rejecting liberal philosophical foundations does not entail rejecting these good things, even if it does mean interpreting or modifying them in ways that the fusionist might not like. The bad news is that philosophical liberalism has so eaten away at the moral foundations of Western society that these good things too are threatened along with everything else.

Strongly suggest reading the whole thing. Feser is onto something important. A smart Christian cultural observer told me today, “American Christians, with a tiny handful of exceptions, have no means of self-defense, nothing, nil, nada. They are completely at the mercy of the culture, and completely in denial about it.” This friend is not a Trumpist, nor a Never Trumper. His comment is about the dissolute state of Christian culture in late liberalism.

David French (MTP screenshot)

Jake Meador criticizes Team Ahmari harshly in this post. He goes too far, I think, but here’s the part I liked:

“What, then, of political power?” you might ask. Does not the above represent little more than yet another twist on Anabaptist style quietism, a refusal to get one’s hands dirty in the necessary and inevitably messy work of politics?

It does not. Rather, it recognizes that a genuinely Christian political witness is not merely about a certain political content in our ideas, but a particular mode of existing as political beings. To become intelligible to those whose only political standard is the acquisition of power is to give up any political good other than power. It is, then, to give up our quiet confidence that God is at work in the world and that his work will not be advanced by those of us who would eat the king’s food and bow to his idols.

It is only candor that our foes do not understand, Berry reminds us, an inner clarity that comes from knowing that there are goods in this world grander than political power and fates in this world more dark than martyrdom.

I found myself wondering what stance Jake would take if he were a Spanish Catholic of the 1930s, when there was no middle ground, and you had either to stand on the side of the Nationalists (that is, with Franco) or with the Republicans, violent anti-clericals who burned down churches and the like. I hope to God that none of us American Christians every have to make a choice like that. But we might. We are not Spain in 1931, but I am much less put off than Jake is by Ahmari’s alarmist rhetoric (though to be fair, Jake grew up in a fundamentalist church, and was traumatized by it; Sohrab’s rhetoric sets off his anti-fundamentalist spidey sense). In my experience, you can shout at most conservative American Christians that the river is rising, and they had better get out before the flood takes them, and they will do their very best to deny the radical nature of the threat. They are so bought into the idea of Christian America, and the American project, that they have no choice but to live in denial. If maintaining one’s commitment to shoring up the Empire requires lying to oneself about the realities in which we all live, then they’re prepared to do that, because the alternative is too hard, too scary.

I get that. I really do. It is hard, and it is scary. But what are the realistic alternatives? Last summer, I wrote a post about re-reading The Final Pagan Generation, historian Edward Watts’s account of the intellectual and cultural world of learned Romans born at the beginning of the 4th century, during which the Roman Empire became officially Christian, and pagan religion withered. (As did the Roman Empire, nearly concurrently.) From that post:

Interestingly enough, despite all this, most pagan temples in the Empire remained open, and images of the pagan gods were still ubiquitous in Roman cities. Pagan festivals continued to be observed. Writes Watts, despite the anti-pagan laws, “traditional religion remained very much alive throughout the empire.”

We now know from history that the fourth century was when the Roman world changed fundamentally, and became Christian. But that’s not how it appeared to members of the final pagan generation, at the end of that century, and their lives. Here’s how Watts’s book ends:

The fourth century has come to be seen as the age when Christianity eclipsed paganism, and Christian authority structures undermined the traditional institutions of the Roman state. Modern historians have highlighted the rising influence of bishops, the emergence of Christian ascetics, the explosion of pagan-Christian conflict, and the destruction of temples. This is one fourth-century story, but it is neither the story that the final pagan generation would have told nor the one that later generations told about them. Their fourth century was the age of storehouses full of gold coins, elaborate dinner parties honoring letter carriers, public orations before emperors, and ceremonies commemorating office-holders. These things occurred in cities filled with thousands of temples, watched over by myriads of divine images, and perfumed by the smells of millions of sacrifices. This fourth century was real, and the men who lived through it told its story in ways that mesmerized later Byzantine and Latin audiences.

What are the lessons I draw from all this for Christians in our own time? Let’s stipulate that the world of 21st century Europe and North America is very different, in obvious ways, from that of fourth-century Rome. But there are parallels.

Christianity today is like traditional religion of the fourth century. We are at the end of the Christian age, not at its beginning. Christianity back then had muscle. It is now decrepit, as a social force. The fact that we Christians believe that our faith is true can blind us to the fact that what is obvious to us is by no means obvious to others.
It is not clear what the Roman pagans could have done to have slowed or stopped Christianity, but it is quite clear, in retrospect, that they did not take it seriously enough as a threat. This was a failure of imagination on their part. They assumed that the world would always be as it was, because it always had been.
Worldly power matters. If Constantine had not converted, the future of Christianity in the West would have looked different.
Yet worldly power is limited. Julian the Apostate failed miserably. You cannot legislate belief.
Talented elites who form, and who are formed by, a counterculture, can have an outsized effect. Bishops and priests who saw their function as to serve the imperial system were not as inspiring to the young as those who rejected it, and its promises.
The old ways of resisting anti-religious forces — fighting within the system — don’t work. This makes me doubtful about the strategy that people like me have generally adopted: fighting within liberalism for liberal goals, like religious liberty. The asymmetrical strategies of opponents, like LGBT rights groups, overwhelm us. But what can we do?

In the main, the story of the final pagan generation ought to be a severe warning to us complacent 21st century Christians. Ours is also a time of “storehouses full of gold coins, elaborate dinner parties honoring letter carriers, public orations before emperors, and ceremonies commemorating office-holders.” Christians are complicit in all of these. But the deeper shifts in the culture are clear for those with eyes to see. The old religion — Christianity — is fast fading. The young believe in a new religion of self-worship, hedonism, and materialism. The laws are not yet anti-Christian, but the broader culture is moving to push Christianity to the margins quickly. This is not likely to change. Christians need to prepare for this.

By “prepare for this,” I mean several things, all of which can be summed up with: Stop the complacency. Details:

Stop thinking that it’s always going to be this way, and that anything short of radical action is sufficient. The mindset of older Christians may actually be a hindrance, because they don’t understand how radically different the world today is.

Do not mistake the presence of Christian churches and symbols in public life for the true condition of Christianity in the hearts and minds of people. Remember, the pagan temples and statues of the gods remained long after paganism was a dead letter.

Clean up our own churches. Stop tolerating corruption within the church — especially corruption that benefits the leadership class, at the expense of the church’s authority and integrity. Watts presents no evidence that pagan temples were corrupt. I bring this up simply to point out that Christians are in an existential fight, and cannot afford to have our own positions weakened by internal corruption.

Train ourselves and our children to stand aside from the promises of the world, and to cultivate asceticism, like the elite Christians of the mid-fourth century did. Only then will we develop the heart and the mind to resist.

Understand that we, like the final pagan generation, might think we are fighting for tolerance, but our opponents are fighting for victory. We have to change our tactics. We are bad at asymmetrical warfare. Frankly, like an old pagan of the fourth century, I would prefer to fight for tolerance — but that is not the fight that’s upon us.

Neither abandon politics entirely, nor put too much faith in princes. Elites cultivated relationships within the imperial power structure, and served that power structure. But the real work of conversion happened among the people, through the labors and examples of saintly ascetics and charismatics.

Read the whole post, which summarizes the Watts book. Look at point 5. Is that not Ahmarist? Did I see things more clearly when I wrote that? I wonder: if we’re not fighting for tolerance, what are we fighting for? Is it an achievable goal? Or: which goals are achievable, and which ones not? Do I need to read The Final Pagan Generation a third time to re-learn?

 

 

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Incels & Socialism

A comment from a reader:

As a millenial male whose conservative Catholic identity is currently breaking away piece by piece, I take interest in this issue. For an involuntarily celibate humanities casualty in the economic wasteland of the California interior, making below minimum wage online and being driven to mass by his parents, the entire Benedict Option debate seems like the luxury of those who can afford to form families to protect.

I became Catholic three years ago. I quickly gravitated to the Latin mass because I love the exotic beauty of the language and the sacredness of the music. But over time I realized that in both pre- and post-VII Catholic communities, the entire culture of the faith is oriented around three groups: priests, religious, and married parents. I don’t have a vocation to be a priest (and in any case take antidepressants), I can’t join a monastery because of my student loan debt, and I lack the sexual-economic marketability to become a parent. The plight of the involuntarily single male is overlooked in the Catholic discourse; it’s viewed as an unnatural state, a peculiarity. The church spends tremendous energy advocating the unborn and extolling family life, but does little to actually promote family formation.

Where is the church helping me find a job and a mate? I sympathize with gainfully employed family men such as Ahmari and French and their desire to preserve Christian family values, but what do Christian family values mean to me if I am shut out from family life, perhaps permanently? Traditionalist conservatives only seem to care about people with families. I know this isn’t actually the case, but it is true that their discourse is heavily accented on those with the economic fortuity of having a family.

I haven’t gone to church in three weeks. The underlying cause of my disillusionment was the frustration described above, but it was precipitated by my disgust with the church’s position on abortion in case of maternal life endangerment, which I could no longer accept after Alabama included this exception in its law. I was also embittered by the plight of a friend whose wife divorced him against his will; if he had had a Catholic wedding, the church would say tough luck, he can’t remarry.

No longer keeping the faith, I am tempted to affiliate myself with socialism. The techno-plutocracy isn’t going to get any more humane as the march of automation concentrates the wealth and the jobs in the hands of ever fewer people. I am a default conservative on marriage, abortion, and immigration, but I am willing to overlook these issues if the Sanderses and Ocasio-Cortezes of Congress are truly prepared to make life more dignified for unemployed and underemployed young people.

Rod, I have great respect for you and enjoy your blog, so please don’t simply dismiss this comment as incel raving. You recently wrote a very respectful and compassionate post about a young conservative who embraced Islam. Please show the same compassion for young conservatives tempted by socialism.

I’m not going to make fun of this guy. He’s desperate, and his desperation is not something to mock. When I was researching the Sovietization of Eastern Europe earlier this year, I discovered that the mass loneliness, displacement, and aimlessness of young men in postwar Eastern Europe played a significant role in the establishment of Communism there. Of course the Red Army played the largest role, but there were people who were hungry for what Communism had to offer, because everything was broken, and they longed for solidarity and stability.

If you have something serious to say to this young man, let’s hear it. If you’re only going to make fun of him, don’t bother, because I won’t publish it. I have been hearing from too many unhappy single people lately, and have been frustrated by my inability to help them, to tolerate poking fun at what they’re suffering. All they’re asking for is the kind of things that most people have always taken for granted: a spouse and a family. Neither the Church nor the State can find him a spouse, but that longing is sooner or later going to make a connection with something.

UPDATE: This e-mail came from a reader who is an observant Catholic in his 30s, married with children. I’ve taken out other identifying details. I think he’s 100 percent correct here:

I find myself in agreement with almost everything you post; I think the Benedict Option is a no-brainer; I believe religious liberty is already significantly curtailed in the public sphere; I have no doubt that a person like me is anathema to cultural elites; and I am strongly skeptical that there is a legislative or political path towards a more friendly, plural, tolerant equilibrium.

So, let me try to put in words what I felt the urge to share. Basically, I’m increasingly worried about what comes next for masculinity given the current state of affairs, but it isn’t socialism that is concerning me. It’s fascism.

In the particular case of your young millennial incel correspondent, his interest in socialism is either going to be stable and anodyne — great, another boring white ally to the left who reliably votes Democrat, big whoop — or dramatic and short lived: I can’t see any actual socialist organizations, or far left groups, being a friendly home to a dude like this. I’m not going to make fun either, because there but for the grace of God go I, but he’s not their target demographic and will be unlikely to form meaningful bonds with any of those communities.

But you know what is a really friendly home to a dude like this? The white nationalist far right, online and offline. Based on a cursory review of photos and videos from the Charlottesville marches and similar events, the current movement strongly over-indexes on incels and their ilk. If the primary draw to Catholicism was the exotic beauty of the Latin and the sacredness of the music, then I can’t help but think the pomp, regalia, and tradition of national socialism will also resonate.

This is a single case, but I think there’s a broader truth to this. Young men (like me) have come of age in an environment where the dominant view is that straight white maleness is the problem, and where their economic prospects and likelihood of being able to develop a stable and loving family in a community oriented towards that family’s success are both worse than they ever should be. Your correspondent self-identifies with a label that comprises overwhelmingly white, virulently racist and misogynist young men who are already glorifying radical violence. This isn’t a good set of identifiers for what could be a very large constituency.

SJWs and the far left aren’t capitalizing on this growing disaffection: in fact, they are making it worse. I’m not sure the far right is capitalizing on it yet either, at least to an extent that we should be worried, but it’s only a matter of time before someone is able to effectively communicate to this group and say you know what, you’re right to feel aggrieved and you’re right to hate the people who’ve taken your prospects from you. You’ve been told that your identity is the problem, but really it’s the thing that we can build a movement on. SJWs and libs have prevented you from having what is dutifully yours: respect, a meaningful role in society, a family. Sorry, let me rephrase that. The far right is already implicitly and explicitly doing this; I just don’t think they’ve been able to do it to the scale they could yet.

So while I agree with 99% of your writing, to think about this as an issue of Incels and Socialism is to miss the forest for the tree. There’s a whole lot of disaffected young white men out there just like your correspondent, and they aren’t going to become SJWs in service of a radical left agenda. They are perfect recruits for a radical right, hate-based movement that will tell them to embrace their grievances, and give them a way to get back at the institutions and individuals that held them down for so long.

More broadly, I guess what motivated me to write is the tension I feel as a young white male who also tries to be an orthodox Christian. On one hand, I know that if I were to clearly and unequivocally state my beliefs about gender ideology I would lose my job. On the other, I know that the disaffection that got Trump elected is putting people like me on a path to nowhere good.

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More Ahmari-French Fighting Words

Let’s get back to the Ahmari vs. French argument, shall we? My first set of comments about it are here.  I do not agree at all with the conservatives who have said it’s bad for conservatives to argue in public. To the contrary, we need to have this argument. It should not be policed by other conservatives. I do object to how needlessly personal Ahmari made it with his initial post, but there is genuine substance to their dispute.

Commenter Rob G. says:

From Jeff Bilbro at FPR:

“To my mind, this dispute reinforces the merits of Deneen’s conclusion in Why Liberalism Failed: rather than lay out some grand post-liberal politics, Deneen recommends communal, counter-liberal forms of life. The intelligentsia tends to invest too much energy in imagining what the ideal political order would look like; the New Testament is much more concerned with how we should live faithfully in the midst of the unjust political orders in which we find ourselves.”

I noted this same sort of thing going on in some of the criticisms of The Benedict Option, as if these critics couldn’t move forward on it without some sort of program or other to guide them. In many cases it seemed to be simply an excuse for not doing anything at all.

Yes, it’s as if they would only accept a diagnosis that led them to a particular set of go-and-do conclusions. I was talking yesterday with a Christian friend, who observed that the Christian world is full of people who have given no substantive moral and spiritual foundation to their children because they don’t have any themselves. They have been part of feelgood churches, however conservative (and yes, conservatives can have feelgood churches too), and perhaps have trusted in the fact that in their family, they hold correct opinions, therefore all will be well. Then their kids drift away from faith, caught in the inexorable currents of liquid modernity. They can’t figure out why.

I completely share Ahmari’s rage at the sheer destructiveness of left-progressive culture, but I don’t believe there is a political solution for it. Some on the Christian Right call me a “defeatist” for holding this view. I think they are at best naive idealists, and at worst grifters.

Jim Geraghty at National Review has a piece up today detailing how certain right-wing people and groups — he names names — support their lifestyles by ripping off grassroots conservative donors, telling the rubes that they (the grifters) are the only thing standing between the liberal mob and the marks. Decent people at the grassroots give their money, and … nothing happens. As Geraghty shows, a lot of these grifters and their PACs pocket the money, and then keep exploiting the deterioration of the culture to separate conservatives from their cash.

But Grifter Cons are not the main problem. The main problem is that there is no political solution because most Americans simply no longer are on the side of social and religious conservatives. I was just up in my hometown over the weekend. It’s Mayberry, RFD. Trump won the parish in 2016 with nearly 60 percent of the vote (if the black vote had been discounted, I imagine Trump would have won 90 percent of the vote). I learned over the weekend that they also have gay couples going to high school prom together, and transgender kids in the local school. You can say this is progress, you can lament this as decline, but what you can’t do is pretend that it’s not here, and it’s everywhere. 

Here’s a reminder from The Benedict Option about the state of the culture among people who identify as Christians:

As bleak as Christian Smith’s 2005 findings were, his follow-up research, a third installment of which was published in 2011, was even grimmer. Surveying the moral beliefs of 18-to-23-year-olds, Smith and his colleagues found that only 40 percent of young Christians sampled said that their personal moral beliefs were grounded in the Bible or some other religious sensibility. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the beliefs of even these faithful are biblically coherent. Many of these “Christians” are actually committed moral individualists who neither know nor practice a coherent Bible-based morality.

An astonishing 61 percent of the emerging adults had no moral problem at all with materialism and consumerism. An added 30 percent expressed some qualms but figured it was not worth worrying about. In this view, say Smith and his team, “all that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”

These are not bad people. Rather, they are young adults who have been terribly failed by family, church, and the other institutions that formed—or rather, failed to form—their consciences and their imaginations.

MTD [Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — RD] is the de facto religion not simply of American teenagers but also of American adults. To a remarkable degree, teenagers have adopted the religious attitudes of their parents. We have been an MTD nation for some time now, though that may have been disguised.

“America has lived a long time off its thin Christian veneer, partly necessitated by the Cold War,” Smith told me in an interview. “That is all finally being stripped away by the combination of mass consumer capitalism and liberal individualism.”

The data from Smith and other researchers make clear what so many of us are desperate to deny: the flood is rising to the rafters in the American church. Every single congregation in America must ask itself if it has compromised so much with the world that it has been compromised in its faithfulness. Is the Christianity we have been living out in our families, congregations, and communities a means of deeper conversion, or does it function as a vaccination against taking faith with the seriousness the Gospel demands?

Nobody but the most deluded of the old-school Religious Right believes that this cultural revolution can be turned back. The wave cannot be stopped, only ridden. With a few exceptions, conservative Christian political activists are as ineffective as White Russian exiles, drinking tea from samovars in their Paris drawing rooms, plotting the restoration of the monarchy. One wishes them well but knows deep down that they are not the future.

Americans cannot stand to contemplate defeat or to accept limits of any kind. But American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.

Could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to . . . stop fighting the flood? That is, to quit piling up sandbags and to build an ark in which to shelter until the water recedes and we can put our feet on dry land again? Rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, we should instead work on building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.

My bare-bones view is this:

Sohrab Ahmari is correct about the decadence of the liberal order and its incompatibility with traditional Christianity.

There are far too few traditional Christians left to mount a successful political defense, much less offense.

Where are the soldiers for this culture-war offense? Secular, largely de-Christianized France turned out a million people in Paris for the Manif Pour Tous, the demonstration for traditional marriage. Nothing like that happened in America. Why not?
I think that most conservative Christians can’t conceive of resistance as much more than voting and attitudinizing

As a religious minority, it is likely that the best we can hope for is First Amendment protection under the liberal order. This is where David French comes in. It is not the case that one has to believe that the liberal order is ideal, or permanent, or even good for Christianity … but right here, right now what else is there?

In a post-Christian nation, what is likely to happen to orthodox Christians if we lose the First Amendment, which is a bedrock of classical liberalism? We will be crushed, that’s what.

It may be the case that progressives devise a way to crush us and our institutions even within the liberal order. But damned if I can figure out a better defensive strategy than within classical liberalism.

This is why I’ve been dragged unwillingly towards a de facto libertarianism, though I’m actually a conservative. I can’t figure out how people like me can run our institutions in actual, existing America absent a strong libertarianism.

Bottom line: I can’t dismiss either Ahmari or French, and I live within the tension between their views. I assume that the culture is already lost, is already Babylon; my goal is to create and sustain the small institutions and ways of life in which traditional Christians can live counterculturally, in contradiction to the culture of our time. This can be done under liberalism; this can be done under certain illiberal regimes. My own thinking is not settled, so I’m enjoying reading commentary supporting either thinker.

There’s more to say about all this, of course. Writing in The Atlantic today, Alan Jacobs says that he agrees with Ahmari about the condition of the culture, and speculates that if Richard John Neuhaus were alive today, he would also agree. Jacobs recalls a Stanley Fish piece First Things published a long time ago, in which Fish (who is secular) argued that religious believers ought not be liberal. Fish wrote, 23 years ago:

If you persuade liberalism that its dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at liberalism’s table where before you were denied an invitation; but it will still be liberalism’s table that you are sitting at, and the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers. That is, someone will now turn and ask, “Well, what does religion have to say about this question?” And when, as often will be the case, religion’s answer is doctrinaire (what else could it be?), the moderator (a title deeply revealing) will nod politely and turn to someone who is presumed to be more reasonable. To put the matter baldly, a person of religious conviction should not want to enter the marketplace of ideas but to shut it down, at least insofar as it presumes to determine matters that he believes have been determined by God and faith. The religious person should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout it from the field, to extirpate it, root and branch.

Jacobs says that’s Sohrab Ahmari’s argument too. Neuhaus wrote a response to that, arguing for “good liberalism” — a classical liberalism that accommodates Christianity, and is informed by it. (Jacobs associates that argument with David French today.) Today, though, subsequent events have clarified matters, such that it is very hard, even impossible, to take the 1990s-era Neuhaus argument seriously. Again, Jacobs suspects Neuhaus would incline more to the Ahmari side were he with us today.

Jacobs parts company with Ahmari on the question of civility. He writes:

Ahmari thinks that “civility and decency are secondary values,” but even if that is true, they remain values, and Ahmari is not warranted in discarding them so flagrantly. Yet I am not sure that that statement is true. And here again, Neuhaus’s response to Fish is relevant: “The Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious freedom is titled Dignitatis Humanae. Respect for the dignity of the other person created in the image of God requires that we not silence or exclude him but try to persuade him.” Even when people are wrong, he says, “we must put up with them or tolerate them or, much better, respect and love them”—not because that is a politically effective strategy, which it may or may not be, but because we are so instructed by God.

This respect and love require a commitment to conversation, and “conversation requires civility”—even when people do not reciprocate that civility. After all, it is Jesus himself who tells us that when we are struck on one cheek, we should turn the other toward our attacker. Civility should not be our religion, but “there are religiously imperative reasons for being civil that do not entail turning civility into a religion.”

Even if Ahmari and others now associated with First Things are right to say that the old-fashioned commitment to liberal proceduralism is a “dead consensus”—even if we Christians are facing a genuine crisis—charity, and the civility and decency that accompany charity and have so consistently been manifested by “Pastor French,” are what we are commanded to do. And charity begins at home.

Jacobs continues on his personal blog, again asserting that he shares Ahmari’s diagnosis of the rotten liberal culture, and how the game is rigged against orthodox Christians, but questions his prescription. Here he is quoting Ahmari:

Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.

Jacobs adds, summarizing Ahmari:

And when you recognize your moral duty, you will realize that your job is “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”

Nothing about this is clear.

Who are the “we” implied in “our order and our orthodoxy”? Social conservatives? Religious social conservatives? Christian social conservatives? Catholic social conservatives? What about Muslim social conservatives? What about faithful Catholics who aren’t social conservatives? Who, in short, gets access to the control room?
Who is “the enemy”? This would be determined, I guess, by how you answer the questions above, but I wonder if David French — and any other Christian who defends the liberal social order — belongs to the enemy. (Probably not? Probably French is just an unreliable ally, like Mussolini to Hitler?)

How, specifically, would “we” “enforce our orthodoxy”? Would atheists be denied citizenship, or have their civil rights abridged in some way? And by what means would this enforcement be achieved?
“Weakening or destroying their institutions” presumably means, for instance, something more dramatic than, say, removing federal funding from Planned Parenthood — so, maybe, finding legal means to punish systemically left-wing companies like those in Hollywood and Silicon Valley? But even that doesn’t seem nearly enough….

Unpacking that last bullet point: I’m going to assume that Ahmari is not counting on an angelic army to descend and impose the reordering of the public square to the Highest Good; I’m also going to assume that he’s not advocating a coup by the American armed forces. I think that leaves winning a great many elections and winning them by large majorities. (I mean, reordering the public square to the Highest Good is not something that could possibly be accomplished without amendments to the Constitution.)

This is something I think about a lot. If we had a silent Christian majority, this might be feasible. But we don’t; we can’t even hold on to our own children in many cases. I don’t think that Ahmari is a Catholic integralist (though he might have been converted since last we talked), but I think integralism is hopelessly romantic. You can’t even get most American Catholics to agree with the Church’s teaching on, say, abortion and homosexuality; how are you going to get not only Catholics, but non-Catholics, to agree to live under an integralist order?

The political reality is that religious and social conservatives are playing a weak hand. A religious conservative friend of mine who works in politics e-mailed to say that “it’s mathematically impossible in a democracy to be a social conservative maximalist in a society in which social conservatives to not have political hegemony.” He adds that the greatest losses in state religious liberty battles have come when conservative hardliners have bulldozed incrementalists, on the grounds that they lack fortitude. That’s just not how politics work in a country that is no longer religiously or culturally conservative. This is very hard for many conservatives to grasp — just as it is very hard for many progressives to understand that the country is liberalizing, but is not as liberal as Cambridge, San Francisco, Portland, and Brooklyn.

I find Ben Domenech’s pro-Ahmari piece also to be challenging. He writes that it would be nice to think that we could work this all out with liberal proceduralism:

But the truth is the culture has long ago passed the point of consensus where it is possible for a peaceable navigation of the conflict.

Politics today is for the rough, the confrontational, and the unapologetic. It is not comfortable unless we lie to ourselves about where it is and where it is going. Instead, American Christians inhabit the position where their foes are animated by beliefs consistent with an apocryphal quote from Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune: “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.”

And it could get worse: it’s possible both the perspectives of these Christian conservative thinkers are too optimistic. Social conservatives should be most concerned that both French and Ahmari are wrong about what the enemies of freedom believe possible, that the harshest voices in the American left won’t be satisfied just driving traditional American values from the oped pages or the universities or the local boards. Instead, the left may be turning into the culture war white walkers, bent on utter and total destruction of everything American Christians hold dear – including the liberty to hold beliefs at odds with the consensus of the elite – and that they will root for that belief, even when it is hidden in their hearts.

You know that I agree with this diagnosis! I think the people who believe that if only we make better arguments, we’ll win, are wrong! I also think that the winsomeness-is-next-to-godliness people are hopeless!

And: I may yet vote for Donald Trump, someone who I believe is a bad man, solely because he doesn’t despise social and religious conservatives, or want to destroy, in the name of equality, our right to run our institutions according to our faith. Every single Democratic member of the House of Representatives does (this is why they voted for the Equality Act). As Alan Jacobs describes the logic of contemporary liberalism:

I part ways with French et alia because I believe that voting for Trump is acceptable under these conditions, as a desperate defensive measure. I part with Ahmari et alia because I don’t have any hope that politics in this culture can be anything more than protecting Us from Them — and I do not want to become the kind of hard-hearted man who withholds mercy, and even charity, from my enemies. As Alan Jacobs says, we are Christians; Our Lord gave us no alternative. So, Ahmari looks forward to restoring the “Highest Good” to the public square, but what kind of people would we have to be to make that happen — that is, to impose it on an unwilling public? As a religious conservative friend said to me at Walker Percy Weekend, Ahmari-ism sounds an awful lot like the Boromir Strategy: that if we get the Ring of Power ourselves, we will use it for the Good.

And then there was this entirely disedifying spectacle over the weekend. It began with this bog-standard Catholic moral teaching in a tweet by the Bishop of Providence, RI:

BOOM! went the culture. He’s deleted the tweet, but I saw some of the comments, and, well, the Catholic reader who tipped me off to it on Saturday is right in this comment:

The comments scare me. The LGBTQ crowd are going to kill us or our kids and scream at us about how Jesus is love at the same time. I know what you are thinking — the priests have lost their moral authority because of the bad priests and bishops. This kind of thing makes me very sympathetic to Sohrab. It’s almost like the plot line to The Mission. You feel like Jeremy Irons’s character is right, but you sure can identify with Robert De Niro’s.

It’s true that Catholic bishops have lost their moral authority, but good lord, the viciousness of that Twitter mob (which is unfazeable by the irony that over 80 percent of the minor victims of sexually predatory priests were male). Blood is in the water. And of course Bishop Tobin backtracked and issued a groveling apology:

I regret that my comments yesterday about Pride Month have turned out to be so controversial in our community, and offensive to some, especially the gay community. That certainly was not my intention, but I understand why a good number of individuals have taken offense. I also acknowledge and appreciate the widespread support I have received on this matter.

The Catholic Church has respect and love for members of the gay community, as do I. Individuals with same-sex attraction are beloved children of God and our brothers and sisters.

As a Catholic Bishop, however, my obligation before God is to lead the faithful entrusted to my care and to teach the faith, clearly and compassionately, even on very difficult and sensitive issues. That is what I have always tried to do – on a variety of issues – and I will continue doing so as contemporary issues arise.

As the gay community gathers for a rally this evening, I hope that the event will be a safe, positive and productive experience for all. As they gather I will be praying for a rebirth of mutual understanding and respect in our very diverse community.

This is the kind of thing you’d expect from a bishop who was arrested by the secret police, violently interrogated, and forced to sign with a gun at his head. Bishop Tobin capitulated after tens of thousands of angry tweets, and protests. Let this be a lesson to Catholics about how useful their shepherds are likely to be when the actual persecution starts.

Bishop Tobin ran for his life to a bland, conciliatory statement in an attempt to get the progressive mob off his back. It will do no good. They will never, ever forgive him for what he tweeted. He’s been neutered now, and is no longer a threat to them. It’s stuff like that that makes me pro-Ahmari. Peace isn’t possible with this mob. I mean, look, when Budweiser, a massive brand symbolizing masscult blandness, takes up the standard of the cultural revolution, you should understand that things aren’t as they were:

Black is for asexuals who don’t feel sexual attraction to anyone. Grey is for grey-asexuals, who sometimes feel sexual attraction, and demi-sexuals who only feel it if they know someone well. White nods to non-asexual allies, and purple represents the whole community. pic.twitter.com/CfAExuxb99

— Budweiser UK (@BudweiserUK) May 31, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

OK, look, I’m going on too long here. I am in the unsatisfying position of believing that both Ahmari and French are partially correct, and that we need both men, and the strategies they represent. I have no long-term faith in liberalism, but all the other realistic alternatives seem worse, and tradcons are politically and culturally quite weak. But I also think that most of us Christians are not at all preparing in a deep sense for what’s coming, or are even ready for what’s already here. I think of all the Trumpy Christians who believe that the war is Out There, while they are unwittingly aiding and abetting their own children defecting to the other side. To return to Jeff Bilbro’s useful distinction, with which I started this long post: I am less interested in creating the ideal political order than in figuring out how to live faithfully in the unjust political order in which we dwell today.

We are going to need the Benedict Option whether we live under a Trumpian integralist dynasty, or rule by Buttigiegian Directory. On my recent trip to Eastern Europe, a conservative Hungarian Catholic — who lives under a regime that many Americans admire — told me how much it weighs on her heart that so few of her friends take the faith seriously anymore. They’re all being drawn towards Western-style lifestyle liberalism.

A Russian Orthodox traveler visiting Slovakia told me that “we need the Benedict Option in Russia,” because despite the fact that the Russian government is doing a lot of things that our American Christian statists would support (and that I would too!), the perception of believers on the ground is that the institutional Orthodox Church is far too preoccupied with gaining, maintaining, and exercising political power, such that its spiritual mission is badly compromised. (I’ve not been to Russia myself; I’m just reporting what this churchgoing Orthodox Christian told me.)

I heard from Catholics there that Poland — which, again, is an ideal for a lot of us US conservative Christians — is now at the outset of dealing with its own sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, and that by the time the fever passes through the body politic, the faith will be in a substantially weaker position. Maybe so. Poland may well need its own version of the Benedict Option, which is about traditional Christians pioneering ways to build thick, strong communities of faith, memory, and commitment under local circumstances. The Ahmari-French controversy is massively important, but it’s not the most important thing, if you ask me.

UPDATE: Reader Francis:

Rod, your quote “The political reality is that religious and social conservatives are playing a weak hand” is somewhat correct but missing the fundamental point. Real religious conservatives are not playing ANY hand, regardless of their numbers. Whatever you think of Bishop Tobin, if he can’t tell the basic truth about Pride Month without a groveling apology, then we are unable to play any hand at all.

This is not a function just of numbers or a lack of a silent majority. It’s an unwillingness to face ostracism. The LGBT community faced it for years and was hardened under it. We are complacent and not used to the fighting.

The key is not numbers. It’s being willing to take some hits. The political solution, which requires numbers, will not arise until a dedicated group of real disciples is willing to make those sacrifices. Hopefully the BenOp is what gets us there.

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Walker Percy Weekend 2019 Wrap

Look at that. Michelle and Dewey Scandurro of New Orleans, the hippest couple at Walker Percy Weekend 2019.

I’m officially wo’ slap out. I started this post last night in my room at The Myrtles, which is an awesome place to stay; so many people have praised it to me, and have raved about the restaurant here. I’m telling you, my cousin Daniel Dreher is the chef here, and yes, he’s my cousin, but man, can this guy ever cook. Please come stay here at this plantation hotel, and eat at Restaurant 1796. I heard so many people this weekend raving about it, and they’re right.

People were so grateful for this year’s line-up of speakers. I like this shot, which shows David Brooks speaking, with J.D. Vance, in red t-shirt, listening. This year’s venue was Grace Episcopal Church, a real jewel in West Feliciana Parish’s architectural crown, for the use of which we cannot thank Father Roman Roldan and his congregation enough.

During David’s talk, I received a text from a pastor friend in the back, who told me he was in tears. Later, I heard from a number of others that they too had been moved to tears by David’s account of his spiritual journey. There has been some criticism of this spiritual journey, as detailed in part of his new bestseller The Second Mountain, because it’s … messy. As David, raised a secular Jew, has grown out of agnosticism into a greater awareness of God’s existence, and his own status as a child of God, he has become simultaneously more Jewish and Christian. It’s impossible to reconcile these two things, I think, but to hear David talk about this pilgrimage in deeply personal terms is to be drawn into the sheer humanness of the story … which is still a journey in progress. It takes a lot of courage for David to be so vulnerable about the most personal aspects of one’s life. It was one of the great Walker Percy Weekend talks of the festival’s history, because it was an account of the quintessential Percy character: in the doctor’s own words, “man the wayfarer, man the pilgrim, man in transit, on a journey.”

Later in the day, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards showed up, and announced that the state had appropriated $4 million for the rehabilitation of Julius Freyhan High School.

Gov. John Bel Edwards and David Brooks, outside Grace Episcopal Church

None of us were expecting this. The Julius Freyhan Foundation is a non-profit organization devoted to restoring Temple Sinai and Julius Freyhan High School. (Here’s a brief video describing the mission.) In the 19th and early 20th century, my hometown, St. Francisville, had a sizable Jewish merchant community. One of the leading merchants, Julius Freyhan, built the local high school, where both my grandfather and father studied. The Jewish community left after the 1927 flood wiped many businesses out, and the school outgrew the building in the 1950s. The Freyhan School fell into disrepair.

A couple of decades ago, local folks who had studied in that building started a foundation to restore it, and make it into a cultural center. The project also included restoring the neighboring Temple Sinai, built by the town’s once-vibrant Jewish community, which eventually moved away after the 1927 flood. Nancy Vinci became a leader of this effort. How could I possibly do justice to what this woman has done, and what she has meant to our town? Here’s a photo of Nancy and me from a few years back, with Anne Percy Moores, a daughter of Walker and Bunt Percy.

We all joke about how Nancy is the Dowager Countess of West Feliciana Parish. She is certainly not waspish like Violet, but she is absolutely a force of nature. She came to me and a few other people back in 2012, and told us the town needed a new festival. We came up with an idea to celebrate Walker Percy, but didn’t push it. Nancy pushed it. She was and has been the guiding force behind this festival, which was established to raise money to restore Freyhan and make it into a community arts and cultural center, and a museum of Southern Jewish history. (Temple Sinai’s restoration has already been accomplished; it is now a secular space, where we’ve had Walker Percy lectures in the past.)

We have been making progress with the festival, but because our town is so small — specifically, because we don’t have enough hotel space for crowds — we can’t scale the event up. We sell only a limited number of tickets. This works to keep the festival intimate, but that’s not great for fundraising. So the Freyhan folks use other means too, including talking to state legislators (like our former state rep Kenny Havard, now the parish president) and the governor, asking for historical preservation funds. Nancy has led this effort for years. I used to joke with my friend and WPW colleague James Fox-Smith about how hard it must be for the lawmakers to tell Miss Nancy no. Here is the WPW weekend promo video, cued to the point where Nancy speaks about the festival’s origins:

I imagine that God, the governor, and the Louisiana legislature finally realized that the cosmos cannot dwell in harmony if Nancy ain’t happy. And so, the Freyhan Foundation will finally have the money to complete the renovation, and the Walker Percy Weekend will have a permanent home in the heart of St. Francisville. Nancy’s hard and persistent work made this possible. This may well be her greatest legacy to our town, and to Walker Percy Weekends from here till kingdom come. We are all deeply in the debt of this great lady.

I missed Walter Isaacson’s morning talk, because I was running around trying to take care of some administrative issues, but people raved about it. In his at times moving interview with me at Grace about Hillbilly Elegy and community, J.D. Vance mentioned that he will be soon be received into the Catholic Church. He also said that filming on the Ron Howard movie version of Hillbilly Elegy begins this week. Glenn Close will play his pistol-packing Mamaw. Amy Adams will play J.D.’s mom. Gabriel Basso will portray J.D. I’ve gotten to know J.D. over the past three years, since the book hit big, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that he is genuinely as kind and as admirable in person as you think when you read the book.

Tom Key, a theatrical director, actor, and playwright from Atlanta, ended the day with a rousing talk and reading from his stage version of Percy’s Lost In The Cosmos. Someone told me afterward that we should try to stage Key’s play at the Freyhan Center when it’s finally ready. Wonderful idea! We need donors, though, to give us a budget.

Then, of course, came the bourbon stroll on Royal Street. Where I saw a lot of old friends, and made new ones. Party pics!

Look, it’s our Franklin Evans (third from left), with David McDonald, a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, and Rachel Alexander, a political theory Ph.D. student from Baylor (who agrees with me that Patrick Deneen needs to get down to Walker Percy Weekend).

Jessica Hooten Wilson with Area Nut.

Mary Pratt Percy Lobdell with Dewey Scandurro, creator of the Walker Percy Weekend Again cap

After the crawfish boil, I ended up at the capacious bar at Restaurant 1796 with a good crowd. Here’s a selfie with writer Tara Isabella Burton and her fiancé Michael, who spelled his last name for me at the bar, but as is obvious from my bad aim, I was too deep into my vodka sodas to remember. Sorry, friend!

We broke up out on the red brick courtyard at some wee hour, and said our goodbyes. As far as I know, none of us were set upon by the ghosts at the Myrtles. 

I did speak today with one festivalgoer who awoke at 6 a.m. in his room at a plantation house out in the country, in a lot of pain. A wasp had somehow found its way into his bed, and stung him smack on his Binx Bolling. I’m not making that up. He had to go to the West Feliciana hospital to be checked out (he’s fine). Audubon lived in West Feliciana for a bit when he was creating his Birds Of America series; I wonder if he ever had to deal with this problem? Well, I have reported this unfortunate contact with the natural world to the festival committee, and have suggested memorializing this event in a new cocktail for next year’s bourbon stroll: the Percy Pecker Popper. Needs habañero bitters, methinks.

I am so very grateful to all our speakers, all our guests, and the extremely hardworking local volunteers who made it all possible. If I told you the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating the festival, you’d never believe that people do this for free, because they love their community. But they do, every year. Nancy is training her brood well. This festival is the legacy of the younger generation who is taking up the mantle of community cultural leadership from the best there is.

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