Rod Dreher's Blog, page 239

DNA Database Surprise

Here’s a neat story. David Magee, a writer for Newsweek, knew he had been adopted, but had never been able to locate his birth father. Here’s how the column starts:

My daughter had befriended a kind family physician four summers ago at a boy’s camp in the hills of North Alabama. He was the camp doctor, and she was a staff member, working as a college student during the break to keep the director’s children. They had grown close when she got quite sick. He had visited her in the infirmary, kneeling his tall frame down and gently holding her long hair back as she vomited.

She invited him to her wedding in Oxford, Mississippi, last year, as a gesture. He surprised us and came, as a gesture, driving five hours from Louisiana with his wife and six children along. Walking my daughter down the aisle that wedding day I saw the doctor and his family filling half a pew in the church, all smiling broadly. His youngest daughter, Lucy, eagerly watched every step. With a bow in her hair and a precious face that reminded me of my daughter from years before, she was so close that I could have touched her with my right hand when passing by.

Had I known that day what I know now, I might have clutched her hand and pulled her along into the wedding party, where she belonged.

Magee didn’t realize it, but that doctor’s family was his family! The big reveal happened when he took a DNA test … which led him to the family of Dr. Tim Lindsey of St. Francisville, La. — the famed Dr. Tim of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, and brother of popular social media star Ruthie Lindsey. (Ruthie had taken the same Ancestry.com DNA test, and the algorithms matched her and Magee.) Turns out the Lindsey siblings, being wonderful people — welcomed their new half-brother, who was conceived before their late father married their mother. Read the whole thing — it’s a beautiful, amazing story.

I have to say, though, that this story shakes me up a bit. What if it had not ended well? What if the Lindseys weren’t such kind, welcoming people, but a clan that reacted badly to the news that their beloved patriarch had fathered a child before he met their mother? I did one of those DNA tests a few years ago — and now that I’ve learned more about what can be done with those tests, I deeply regret having done so, and allowing a large corporation to have my DNA information. Anyway, if I got the news that a stranger took the test, and was identified by the 23AndMe algorithm as a half-brother to me, how would I feel learning in this way that either my dad or my mom had a secret child before marriage? Given my temperament, I feel pretty confident that I would react as the Lindseys did … but not everybody is like this. DNA databases open up all kinds of doors that would never before have been opened — for better and for worse.

I’m curious to know, readers, if you’ve had good experiences from interacting with DNA databases, or bad experiences.

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Agony & Hope Is Born

Anna Hitchings, blogger at Agony and Hope, a site about single Christians and courtship in the secular world

Two of the more popular posts in this space over the past week have been about the Sydney-based journalist Anna Hitchings and her writing about the courtship crisis among traditional Christian women. I met Anna when I was in Australia; she was part of the Campion College team that accompanied me to all my speaking engagements. I found her to be smart, charismatic, and a lot of fun. Everywhere we went, young people were talking about a piece she had just published in Catholic Weekly, about how hard it is to find a partner who shares one’s faith. Though she wrote the piece as a Christian woman, for Christian women, there were no small number of Christian men who wrote in to say it was not easy for them either.

The response was so intense that Anna was convinced to start a blog to discuss these issues. She named it Agony and Hope, after Capt. Wentworth’s line in Jane Austen’s Persuasion: “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.” Here’s the site’s main landing page, where you can read her first two newspaper essays, and subscribe to the blog.

And here is a link to her first original post — one clarifying basic questions readers had, including what she meant by saying she was looking for a man who is “worldly-wise”. Excerpt:

These two little words have undoubtedly been the most misinterpreted, misunderstood and maligned by readers. When I wrote about men who were not “worldly-wise” or who were “socially awkward”, please allow me to clarify my meaning:

What I did NOT mean:

Shy or introverted
Secular (unchristian) moral and social views
Or that “worldly-wise” = the face and physique of Chris Hemsworth, the salary of an investment banker, a sensitive and attentive listener and slavish lapdog ready to attend to my every want and need – and a masseur to boot (or any combination thereof)!

What I DID mean:

Men who have serious problems interacting socially (including those who are on the spectrum or have an intellectual disability)
An inability to have a mature, intelligent, normal conversation
Just plain weirdos
In other words, all women like me want is someone with shared values and a mutual attraction. That’s it! That’s all. I don’t think this is setting a high bar.

What used to be the regular, run-of-the-mill, everyday state of affairs is becoming less and less common. All I’m advocating for is what used to be the social norm, back when your average Aussie went to church on Sunday.

Now, I’m well aware that the above description of social awkwardness applies to both men and women in the Church. However, in my experience, the majority do seem to be men.

Read the whole thing. 

Anna has allowed commenting on the site, and also provided a means by which you can write her. I know from talking to her about the blog that she really wants to involve readers in the blog’s production. She’s eager to hear what Christian women and men both have to say — your struggles, your triumphs, your advice for others, your request for advice, all of it. She wants Agony And Hope to be a place of conversation, inquiry, and even support.

She’s a first-time blogger, and she’s entering the public square to talk about something quite personal. That takes courage, especially because she will surely draw the ire of some pretty nasty people. But, I told her, you would not have had the kind of viral response you did to your original column if you weren’t speaking to people who really in need, and who want to talk about this cross they carry. So, good luck to Anna Hitchings of Agony and Hope, and may the discussions that emerge from the site be a blessing to all who participate. Who knows? Some of you might even find each other through it, and marry.

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Smoking In The ’70s

Office receptionist (Helen Stenborg) smoking in 1975’s ‘Three Days Of The Condor’

The other night we watched the 1975 thriller Three Days Of The Condor, starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. (What was the big deal about Robert Redford? I’ve never understood it.) It was an okay movie, but it was more than a little fun to savor the Very Seventies aesthetic. Almost everybody is smoking in the movie, and huge ashtrays are everywhere — on desks in offices, on coffee tables, everywhere. I told the kids that this was how life was in the Seventies. It’s really hard to express to people today who didn’t live through it how smoky everywhere was back then.

Both of my parents were heavy smokers, and many of their friends smoked. Our living room looked like a fog bank rolled in some nights when people were over. There was nothing odd about that, at all, back then. I really and truly hated it as a kid. I frequently had headaches from all the smoke, but complaining about cigarette smoke in those days was seen as rude and dilettantish. I imagine my clothes smelled like I had been in a bar, but nobody noticed because every kid who grew up with parents who were smokers smelled like that — and most of us kids had parents who were smokers.

One of my first-ever flights was going transatlantic to Europe in 1984. I was seated in the non-smoking section — the last six rows in the plane. Imagine how absurd it was to have a non-smoking section on an airplane. There was one real advantage: you didn’t have to worry about the person sitting next to you smoking. My seat on the way back was in the smoking section, and I recall being pretty miserable (headachy, nauseated) on the eight-hour flight home. Again, this was normal.

It’s amazing to think back to how much of that we accommodated. Restaurants? Filled with smoke. Restaurants that banned pipes and cigars were thought to be progressive. Remember what it was like to wake up on Saturday or Sunday morning, having been out in a bar or disco the night before, and smelling your pile of clothes on the floor, reeking of stale smoke? And the same in your hair?

Man, I hated that so much. It’s so, so much better now. I think about bartenders, waiters, flight attendants, and other service personnel, having to put up with that to make a living.

A month or so ago, I was stopped at a red light, and glanced over at the car next to mine. The driver was a young mother with kids in the back. She was smoking, and the windows were all rolled up. I thought, man, those poor kids, I know what that’s like.

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Woke Bishop Boots Faithful Vicar

The Rev. John Parker is living out the future of Christians under wokeness:

A vicar has resigned following a bitter dispute with his bishop over the way a Church of England school handled an eight-year-old pupil’s plan to change gender.

The Reverend John Parker, a governor at the school, supported the boy’s wish to become a girl [I’m told by an unofficial C. of E. clerical source that this is not true — RD] but said he was silenced when he raised concerns that parents and pupils would be kept in the dark.

He also feared that staff and governors had been misled by the transgender lobby group Mermaids, which had been invited in to advise the school.

After his worries were dismissed by the bishop, Mr Parker quit the church where he had been a vicar for 14 years, and also the school after seven years as governor.

In an emotive resignation letter to his bishop, Mr Parker wrote of his fear that children were being ‘sacrificed on the altar of trans ideology’, even in Church schools.

Mr Parker said last night: ‘I was basically told by my bishop that if I wished to faithfully follow the teachings of the Bible then I was no longer welcome in the Church. It felt very much like I was being silenced by the Church and the school.’

Read the whole story.  It includes a recording the Rev. Parker made of a school training session by transgender advocate group Mermaids, in which he, as an Oxford-trained biologist, politely tried to question the scientific claims the presenter was making, and was aggressively shut down.

Oh, there’s this:

Mr Parker said this upsetting incident was the final straw and followed his increasing disillusionment with the Church of England’s ‘unquestioning acceptance of a particular kind of politically correct transgender ideology’.

Last December, the Church issued new pastoral guidance encouraging ministers to create new baptism-style ceremonies for transgender people.

‘I have felt growing disquiet about the intolerance to holding different views within the Church,’ he said. ‘But when I raised my worries with bishops about the direction the Church was moving, I was told that if I didn’t accept their approach, I could leave.’

At the end of April, Mr Parker informed the primary school that he would be resigning as governor with immediate effect.

Shortly after this, he informed the Bishop of Chelmsford by letter of his decision to resign as a vicar, concluding ‘there is no longer a place for me in the Church of England’.

Please understand that this Church of England school did not want parents to know what their children were being taught and exposed to there. When the vicar tried to stand up for Christian principles, and even to pose skeptical scientific questions, he was shot down, and invited to leave the Church itself by his bishop. These revolutionaries want to operate in the dark. Why do you suppose that is?

My C. of E. source said:

For American readers, who may not understand the British schools system, this is a “state” school, in that it is funded by the government, and subject to government inspection and control. The governing body for schools is the a board of maybe 12 or 15 governors, who are responsible for managing the school, including hiring staff. They would include the head teacher, an elected member of staff, elected representatives of the parents, and representatives of the local community. In this case, it is also a Church of England school, so the local vicar (parish minister) would be a governor, and the school is expected to maintain a “Christian ethos”. Typically, the vicar would visit the school once a week to lead worship for the children. I did this [once, and] it was the best part of my job, and a wonderful evangelistic and pastoral opportunity.

The Mermaids organisation has issued a press release in response to the Mail’s story: https://www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/press-enquiry-from-the-mail-on-sunday-25th-may-2019.html, and there is a response to the press release here: https://www.transgendertrend.com/analysis-mermaids-press-statement/?unapproved=8719&moderation-hash=1fc04065fb1174ff108d14ff79460ed9&fbclid=IwAR1zY0fvghpOhSDd9lRPGhVX895olIyySwT48LhsXYT6FnpFfGC0j7upGho#comment-8719

Also, your Reformed readers will be very interested to know that the village in question is Fordham in Essex, where the great Puritan theologian John Owen was vicar four hundred years ago.  John Parker is his successor.

The line between good and evil doesn’t pass between the church and the world. These days in particular, it passes right down the middle of churches.

Watch this short clip to hear parts of the training claims, and reflections by the Rev. Parker, who emphasizes that this gender ideology is being imposed on everyone, without the right to question any of it. Says Parker, “We are being told what to think.” He’s right. In cases like this, the institutional church is the enemy of faithful Christians.

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Left-Liberalism Vs. Ordinary Religious

Andrew West of Australian Broadcasting is one of the country’s smartest commentators on religion and public life. Here is his analysis on the role religion played in the recent shock election in Australia, which against all predictions returned the conservative-led Coalition to power. Excerpts:

A week before the federal election, one of most senior figures in the conservative leadership of the Sydney Anglican church made a revealing ― some might even say prophetic ― comment. Canon Bruce Morrison of St. John’s Anglican Cathedral in Parramatta told the Sydney Morning Herald that he supported Labor’s economic policies, but he could not vote Labor because of its apparent lack of commitment to religious freedom.

His comments highlight the extraordinary opportunity Labor had, but missed, to build relationships with religious communities ― relationships that have been neglected ever since Kevin Rudd won the 2007 federal election.

Here was an out and proud Christian conservative willing to support what was arguably the most redistributionist policy in the ALP’s recent history. But because the party was vague, even slippery, on the rights of faith-based schools to teach their doctrine and ask their staff to embody the school’s values, Labor lost the vote of Bruce Morrison and, quite possibly, tens of thousands like him.

In the same article Lyndal and Chris Parfoot said their local member, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, was “not generous enough towards refugees.” But the couple still voted for Dutton because the Liberals [that is, the conservative party — RD] were closer to them on “family values.”

Only a mug would claim religious freedom was the defining or decisive factor in the surprise re-election of the Coalition government. Only the naïve would say it had nothing to do with the swing to the Coalition in key marginal seats.

West goes on to ask how the Labor Party could repair its fractured relationship with religious voters (some of whom, like Canon Morrison, lean left on economics)? West says:

At very least, with sincerity, accepting the right of religious Australians to maintain their values, no matter how unfashionable they may seem to the cultural left that influences modern Labor. They must not present conservative Christians with false moral choices. They mustn’t confuse conservative Christians with political conservatives. Above all, they must not make faith communities choose between Labor and the God they worship.

Regardless of the merits of the issue, Labor’s political position on same-sex marriage ― all in favour, no open dissent from any MPs ― sent the wrong message to many Australians who voted “No.” It told the roughly 20 percent of people who lean left on economics, workers’ rights and public services, but hew to traditional values on the family and sexuality, that there was no longer a place for them in Labor’s fold.

I know of eight to ten Labor MPs and senators who wanted to vote against same-sex marriage in the parliament ― that is, to use Labor’s long-standing rule and vote according to their consciences on moral issues ― but were silenced and pressured by the leadership, warning they would be “on the wrong side of history.” That may be so, but they would have been on the side of many Labor voters.

Great line. Read the whole thing. 

The Democratic Party’s entire House contingency voted for the Equality Act. It won’t get through the GOP-controlled Senate, but if the Senate were in Democratic hands, and if we had a Democratic president, this is what it would do to liberty, religious and otherwise.  As Andrew West points out, in Australia there were a significant number of economically progressive voters who simply could not trust a Labor government to respect religious liberty. This is true in the US as well.

In his column yesterday, Ross Douthat points out that Pete Buttigieg is correct to say that the American public broadly agrees with Democrats on a wide range of issues. The problem, says Douthat, is that only 18 percent agree with the Democrats on all those issues. The game is won or lost based on which issues people feel most passionately about. Trying to please all left-liberal constituencies won’t work. If you cut loose one, you need to have something in place to goose turnout for another. Douthat writes:

Alternatively, if you want to make crushing religious conservatives your mission, then you need to woo secular populists on guns or immigration, or peel off more of the tax-sensitive upper middle class by not going full socialist.

But the liberal impulse at the moment, Buttigiegian as well as Ocasio-Cortezan, is to insist that liberalism is a seamless garment, an indivisible agenda that need not be compromised on any front. And instead of recognizing populism as a motley coalition united primarily by opposition to liberalism’s rule, liberals want to believe they’re facing a unitary enemy — a revanchist patriarchal white supremacy, infecting every branch and tributary of the right.

In this view it’s not enough to see racial resentment as one important form of anti-liberalism (which it surely is); all anti-liberalism must fall under the canopy. Libertarianism is white supremacy, the N.R.A. is white supremacy, immigration skepticism is white supremacy, tax-sensitive suburbia is white supremacy, the pro-life movement is white supremacy, anxiety about terrorism is white supremacy … and you can’t compromise with white supremacists, you can only crush them.

In his most recent piece, Times columnist Bret Stephens — a strongly anti-Trump moderate conservative — predicts that the left is going to hand this next election to Trump. Why? Looking at the Australian and Indian election results, as well as those in Brazil, the Phillippines, and Israel, Stephens writes:

The common thread here isn’t just right-wing populism. It’s contempt for the ideology of them before us: of the immigrant before the native-born; of the global or transnational interest before the national or local one; of racial or ethnic or sexual minorities before the majority; of the transgressive before the normal. It’s a revolt against the people who say: Pay an immediate and visible price for a long-term and invisible good. It’s hatred of those who think they can define that good, while expecting someone else to pay for it.

When protests erupted last year in France over Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to raise gas prices for the sake of the climate, one gilets jaunes slogan captured the core complaint: “Macron is concerned with the end of the world,” it went, while “we are concerned with the end of the month.”

Favoring “the transgressive before the normal.” Yep. A major UK bank tweeted this out the other day, but took it down after social media pushback:

We know exactly where left-liberal parties and politicians stand on religious liberty: they think it is nothing but an excuse for bigotry — and there is nothing more important to the left than forcibly creating conditions of equality (“equality”), even at the expense of basic liberties. Maybe, just maybe, ordinary people who pretty much carry on their lives by a live-and-let-live standard, are sick and tired of having their noses rubbed in Drag Queen Story Hour, and rightly fear for their churches, businesses, religious schools and other institutions should left-liberal politicians like this come to power, and wield the crowbar of the state against them:

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#MeToo Comes For Martin Luther King

Historians have known for many years that civil rights icon Martin Luther King had been unfaithful to his wife. But now, David Garrow, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his biography of King, has unearthed previously classified FBI documents showing that King was genuinely sexually depraved. From the Times of London (behind subscriber paywall):

A huge archive of documents recently released from Federal Bureau of Investigation files exposes in detail King’s sexual activities with dozens of women as he travelled the country campaigning against racial inequality.

In one memo written after the FBI bugged King’s room at a Washington hotel, there is a startling foreshadowing of the videotape that came to haunt Donald Trump at the lowest moment of his presidential campaign in 2016. That tape caught Trump boasting about meeting beautiful women and being able to “grab ’em by the pussy”.

William Sullivan, assistant director of the FBI, wrote in the 1964 memo that King joked to his friends “he had started the ‘International Association for the Advancement of Pussy-Eaters’.”

In another incident said to have been recorded by FBI agents, King is alleged to have “looked on, laughed and offered advice” while a friend who was also a Baptist minister raped a woman described as one of his “parishioners”.

Details of the assault are believed to have been captured on tapes that are currently being held in a vault under court seal at the US National Archives.

More:

King was accompanied by a friend, Logan Kearse, the pastor of Baltimore’s Cornerstone Baptist church, who had arrived in Washington with what an FBI summary describes as “several women ‘parishioners’ of his church”. Kearse invited King to meet the women in his room, where they “discussed which women among the parishioners would be suitable for natural and unnatural sex acts”.

The FBI document adds: “When one of the women protested that she did not approve, the Baptist minister immediately and forcibly raped her” as King watched.

At the same hotel the following evening, King and a dozen other individuals “participated in a sex orgy” including what one FBI official described as “acts of degeneracy and depravity.

When one of the women shied away from engaging in an unnatural act, King and several of the men discussed how she was to be taught and initiated in this respect. King told her that to perform such an act would ‘help your soul’.”

And:

In his earlier biography, Garrow discussed what he then knew of King’s reckless sexual adventuring, but he treated his subject as a broadly inspirational figure. King was 39 when he was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968. Hundreds of American streets are named in his honour and a national memorial in his name was dedicated in Washington in 2011. “I’ve always been very positive about his selflessness, humility and spiritual gravity,” Garrow said.

Yet the author admitted last week he had no idea of the scale or the ugliness of King’s philandering until he saw the FBI files. “I always thought there were 10-12 other women,” he said. “Not 40-45.” He now believes that in the #MeToo age of revulsion for sexual harassment and assault, evidence of King’s indifference to rape “poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible”.

Read it all if you have a subscription. It is also available behind a subscriber paywall of The Australian. 

Garrow’s report will be published on Thursday in the UK magazine Standpoint. Its acting editor, Michael Mosbacher, released on Twitter the editorial explaining why they chose to publish Garrow, who had been refused by The Guardian and others. Mosbacher says that the Guardian paid Garrow — who is, by the way, a man of the left, in fact a member of Democratic Socialists of America — for his work, but then declined to run it. The Atlantic and the Washington Post also refused to run it, the editorial alleges, as did unnamed conservative US magazines. Mosbacher writes:

When the sexual mores of cardinals, presidents, writers, film directors and producers have all been exposed, why is it that questioning the behaviour of a civil rights icon is still beyond the pale? Is not the whole point of the #MeToo movement that no one, regardless of their stature or position, should be above examination of their personal behaviour? Dr. King is the closest the US has to a saint in this secular age, a figure of universal — at least publicly-professed — reverence. Is that not all the more reason for subjecting him to scrutiny, however great his contribution to the creation of a more tolerant society?

He’s right. I wish none of this were true, and perhaps we will learn when the recordings are eventually released that these claims are not true, but I very much doubt it. David Garrow’s reputation as a civil rights movement historian is beyond reproach, and as a Democratic Socialist, Garrow cannot be said to have political motives for trying to discredit King. Given his professional background and political convictions, one imagines that it must have been excruciating for Garrow to have written this. But Garrow is a historian, not a hagiographer. Besides, it’s better to face the painful truth and to deal with it than to remain sheltered by a canopy of lovely lies.

It’s impossible to predict how this news is going to be received in America. We will need to read the entire Garrow essay to understand the scope and detail of what he has found in the archives. I’ll write more about it once the Garrow piece is published, and we can know exactly what we’re dealing with. What a tragedy, though, and an occasion of profound sadness. The greatness of what King achieved in American history cannot be gainsaid. But like so many other great men, he was profoundly flawed. It is immoral to overlook or dismiss the women King exploited and possibly even abused (watching with lascivious relish as a pastor colleague raped a church lady) for the sake of protecting an idol. As Standpoint‘s editor wrote, if we are going to tell the ugly truth about sexually abusive churchmen, then we have no good reason to lie when one of them is named the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.

Note to readers: if you want to make a racist remark in the comments section, save yourself the trouble. I’m not going to publish it.

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The Agony & Hope Of Christian Courtship

Last week I posted about Australian Catholic writer Anna Hitchings’s much-discussed-in-Oz column about how hard it is to find committed Christian men to date. Today, after hearing from all kinds of people, she publishes a somewhat different version of it in The Australian. It’s behind a subscriber paywall, but maybe some of you Aussie readers can see the whole thing. Excerpts:

I can talk to any young woman in my social circle and they will all say the same thing: there just aren’t any men.

What we mean by this is there is a frightening scarcity of men aged 25 to 35 who are churchgoing, single and worldly wise. Most men I meet have two out of three of these qualities, with the last often lacking. If they’re single churchgoers, they’re often in want of basic social awareness (a big turn-off for most women); if they’re more socially adjusted, they’re generally not single or not religious. Even if they’re not religious, most young Australian men hold views and values that are utterly opposed to our own. As a Christian, trying to find a normal Aussie bloke who is willing to enter a chaste relationship can feel like looking for gold dust.

Some have taken issue with my assessment of the situation, but this is the view held by virtually every female friend I have — not to mentions dozens more, male and female, who reached out to me after my article was published. What we’re asking for really boils down to two things: shared values and mutual attraction.

Yet this reality — what was once the social norm — is becoming less and less common.

When I posted earlier on her initial column (which appeared in the Catholic press), some of you readers questioned what she meant by “worldly-wise”. So I asked her. All she was saying is that she’s looking for a male partner who is both serious about his faith, but also socially normal. I think she makes that pretty clear above. More from her Australian column:

Yet for someone like me — a 32-year-old single Catholic — the situation looks bleak indeed.

This is not just the case for women of faith, either. A young agnostic mum told me the issues I raised “transcend faith altogether and speak to a wider problem of good-valued men largely disappearing from society”.

I’m not denying there are good single guys out there. Of course there are. Several of my closest friends have been fortunate enough to meet and marry some wonderful, intelligent, principled men — but many more haven’t been so lucky. I meet them constantly at parties and social events — beautiful, smart, single women who just want to find a good man to love and honour. Yet this pool of women seems to keep getting bigger while the number of marriageable men is swiftly dropping.

In the early 1960s, 87 per cent of Australian men identified as Christian. That figure now has dropped to 49 per cent, with regular churchgoers in even further decline. Just 14 per cent of all Christians in Australia attend church weekly. In Sydney churches, women outnumber men nearly two to one, according to the latest National Church Life Survey data, with the average parishioner in her 50s.

Across the globe, men increasingly are less likely than women to believe in God, pray daily or count religion as an important part of their lives. This should come as no real surprise; the writing has been on the wall for some time.

Anna sees radical feminism’s demonization of traditional masculinity, and the decline of families with fathers in the home, as two sources of dysfunction and despair. Guess who she sees as a sign of hope:

So many men seemingly do not understand what it is to be a man any more, which I believe is why figures such as Jordan Peterson have soared in popularity during the past few years.

Peterson is challenging the narrative of toxic masculinity, so-called rape culture and the notion that the patriarchy is responsible for all the world’s ills.

More important, he is actively promoting qualities that are sorely lacking in our society, such as personal responsibility, honesty and integrity.

I’m deeply grateful for the influence people such as Peterson are having on so many men, young and old. We should be doing all we can to help steer men in the right direction and find truth and meaning in their lives. Men who are guided by good principles, who have purpose and direction in life, are not only deeply attractive to women, they are also invaluable assets to society.

Read it all, if you have access.

Anna was overwhelmed by the reaction to her first column, which really hit a nerve. She’s starting a blog as a place of discussion and story-sharing about courtship among other single Christians, both male and female. The blog’s theme comes from this quote by Capt. Wentworth in Jane Austen’s Persuasion: “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.” She’s given me permission to share her e-mail address with single Christian readers interested in sharing their thoughts, experiences, agonies, and hopes: anna – at – agonyandhope — dot — com. 

UPDATE: Look, I am certainly willing to publish critical comments, but I am not going to publish personal attacks on Anna Hitchings, and unkind assumptions about her character. What she’s writing about is a real problem, and not just a problem for women in the church. If you have something substantive to say in response, even critical, then by all means say it. But don’t take out your own personal resentments on this writer. It takes courage to put yourself out there like she has done, and I’m not willing to allow people hiding behind pseudonyms to take nasty shots at her on my blog.

I am sympathetic to her plight because I struggled in the same way when I was in my twenties, practicing my religion, and unhappily single. One of the least helpful things anybody said was, “You’re too picky.” As unhappy as I was as a single, it was better to be lonely as a single than lonely in a marriage with someone I couldn’t see spending the rest of my life with. There are all kinds of reasons why it’s so difficult for faithful Christian men and women to meet each other these days. I see in the comments that some men are bitterly resentful of Anna Hitchings for her views. I am reminded of some things I’ve heard from older male Christian academics, about how strikingly immature the men in their classes are, compared to the women. This is a new thing, they say. Something has changed among males in our culture. I don’t have a lot of interaction with young singles, so I don’t know firsthand if this is true. But I trust my male academic friends, all conservatives, who are seeing this year in and year out. They are concerned.

UPDATE.2: This is a helpful and insightful comment, from reader Steven:

As a 27-year-old Christian dude, I would 100% marry a 32-year-old Christian woman. The only problem I foresee is how soon we’d want to have kids, since I’d possibly want to wait two years or so.

In any event, it’s really disappointing to see people’s comments toward her, specifically her criteria and preferences for a spouse. They’re not unrealistic and I sure has heck wouldn’t date someone who’s socially awkward. I definitely see and recognize the hardships Christian women because there are a lack of men, even in my own congregation.

However, my male friends and I have a similar problem with dating but in a different way. Too many of the single Christian women in our church and lives are so independent that dating them is like convincing them you’re needed in the relationship. And if you have a complimentary view of relationships, a traditional Christian view, then it’s even harder. So many women in Los Angeles, where I live, are unwilling or repulsed by the idea of a man leading in the home. Not a totalitarian leadership, but someone stewarding the family with mature and Christ-focused headship. A woman asked my friend, an awesome, 40-year-old man of God who wants kids and a wife, if he believed in egalitarianism vs complementarianism, and when he said the latter, she wished him a happy life. That’s the culture now and that mentality has seeped into the church. So it’s no wonder why women in my congregation complain the men aren’t asking them out — we’re not interested in having to argue our worth and leadership in a relationship.

It sucks for both men and women, and I wish there was a place where like-minded Christian singles could meet and interact because churches seem less and less like that place.

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Woke Capitalism In A Nutshell

“One thing I want you to know is that you are never too much.” We couldn’t be prouder to share this story

Painful Military Service Memories

Hear from Pfc. Nathan Spencer, a scout with @FightingFirst who shares how the #USArmy has influenced his life.

Video by @FortBenning #WhyIServe #KnowYourMil #ArmyValues pic.twitter.com/yvkHAbFhUK

— U.S. Army (@USArmy) May 23, 2019

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You have to read the responses to this. They’re a knife in the gut. This is how most of them go:

Like I said, they’re mostly like that. This is about as good as it gets, at least from as far down in the thread as I’ve read:

Pros: Serving made me realized that I had the strength & courage all along. It made me realize if I can make it in the USMC, I can make it anywhere.

I felt I belong, got a 2nd family, & did something greater than myself

Cons: Lifetime of aches and pains, mentally & physically.

— Sara Samora (@SaraESamora) May 24, 2019

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And now the Trump Administration is talking about starting a war with Iran. He does that, and he will destroy the Republican Party.

How about you, readers of this blog? How has the US military (not just the Army) influenced your life — for better or for worse? I’m seriously asking for all kinds of stories.

I’m thinking right now of the guy I know who won a medal in Iraq, but who called the war there “a waste.” I’m thinking of the other guy I know who came home and couldn’t bring himself to go into a church, because he said God couldn’t forgive him for what he had done. His wife still doesn’t know what it was. It is, for him, unspeakable. I’m also thinking about the veteran friend who told me he wishes civilians would quit thanking him for his service. He knows they mean well, and he always thanks them, but he said that after a while it starts to feel like virtue signaling — that is, like civilians want to hear themselves thanking a soldier for his service, so they can regard themselves as the kind of people who thank soldiers for their service.

On the other hand, I am sure I have friends who served who remember it positively, but I just haven’t heard them talk that way about it. Anyway, I want to hear from you readers.

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How To Roast Naomi Wolf

I can’t say that I mind too much watching a crusading lefty being hoisted on her own progressive petard, as has happened to the writer Naomi Wolf. In her brand-new book, she claims that Victorians were executing men for sodomy for longer than previously believed. She bases this claim on having discovered in court records the phrase “death recorded” listed with sodomy convictions. But in this terrifying (for authors!) clip from BBC radio, she learns from an actual scholar that “death recorded” is a 19th century legal term that means “death sentence commuted”:

Everyone listen to Naomi Wolf realize on live radio that the historical thesis of the book she’s there to promote is based on her misunderstanding a legal term pic.twitter.com/a3tB77g3c1

— Edmund Hochreiter (@thymetikon) May 23, 2019

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I gotta be honest: as a writer, when I first heard about this, my first thought was, There but for the grace of God go I. That was Alan Jacobs’s too. He writes:

Wouldn’t you — wouldn’t anyone — assume that the phrase “death recorded”means “death sentence carried out”? I know that’s what I would assume. Now, someone might say, “Well, she should have looked it up.” But we only look words or phrases up when we have reason to think that we have misunderstood them.

But Jacobs backtracked a bit when he learned that Wolf had faulted professional historians for missing this “fact” — when actually, they were right and she was wrong. Jacobs:

As I say above, it’s reasonable that the term “death recorded” would raise no alarms; but it’s far less reasonable to blithely assume that all previous professional historians simply missed information that was there to be read.

Sounds life confirmation bias got the best of Naomi Wolf (and, one assumes, her editor). I’m just now starting my next book, and you’d better believe that I’m taking this self-immolation as a sign to be even more careful.

UPDATE: Libby Emmons, on the Wolf affair:

In the new literary marketplace, where departments are stripped down, writers are out there on their own, trying to make sure everything is clear, well told, and accurate. But accuracy, for historical books like this, needs to be a team effort. That’s why there were editors, fact checkers, and people who looked into this stuff. With all the cuts, those people barely exist.

Writers find the idea for the story, come up with the hook, do the research, then write it, with a focus on story and narrative, making it readable and interesting, consideration for clicks or sales, wanting readers to be engaged. The risk of messing up is high, and when writers make mistakes, it’s not the outlet or the publisher that takes the heat, but the writers themselves.

Wolf was, in part, done a disservice by her editors, publisher, and their staff for no one having done the due diligence to check this thing out. More importantly, she was done in by her impulse to believe her theory with the support of only the most basic research, which was handily discounted by a BBC reporter in preparation of a 15-minute interview.

Right. But see, if I were Wolf’s editor, I probably would have assumed that “death recorded” meant that the inmate had been put to death. Doesn’t it seem reasonable? Then again, if Wolf indeed faults previous scholars for overlooking what was staring them right in the face, there in court records, it seems that a diligent editor would have questioned her on that. Maybe the editor too was all too willing to believe that the Victorians were more of a pack of starched-collar homo-haters than we previously thought.

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