Rod Dreher's Blog, page 31

Young Americans Returning To Smoking

The New York Times finds evidence that young people are returning to smoking. Excerpts:

Kat Frey, a 25-year-old copywriter who lives in Brooklyn, picked up the habit last year. “We’re having a very sexy and ethereal 1980s revival, and smoking is part of that,” she said. “A lot of people I know are posting pictures doing it. I’m doing it. It’s having its moment for sure.”

At the same time, cigarette smoking has been in a steady decline among adults in the United States for 30 years. David Hammond, a professor of public health at the University of Waterloo, said the drop has been fueled largely by young people.

“The decline in initiation among youth and young people is predominantly responsible for the overall decline in smoking in the population,” Dr. Hammond said. (Overall nicotine use has gone up, because of vaping.) Yet, in 2020, for the first time in two decades, cigarette sales increased.

Nigar Nargis, the scientific director of tobacco control research at the American Cancer Society, said that there was evidence of “a higher level of smoking.” “It’s probably not just young people, but there are higher sales, which indicates higher consumption,” Dr. Nargis said. While no one knows if young people also began smoking more, the logic goes like this: A high tide raises all boats.

More:

While some smokers attest to choosing cigs over vapes for health reasons, others say that the choice is a much more classic one, loath as they may be to admit it: It looks and feels cool.

“It’s just a cool thing,” Ms. Frey said. “It sounds lame to say that. I think of hot guys that I’m into, and they’re like, ‘I’m going to step out and have a cigarette.’ It’s kind of sophisticated. Grunge sophisticated.”

And of course, part of that is your online image. “People are posting outside of a cool place, smoking with their friend, outside of cool dive bars,” Ms. Frey said. For her, like many of her generation, this aspect sounds familiar: “Smoking is part of being seen, and I think people want to be seen right now.”

For Fernanda Amis, 25, a waitress and actress who took up smoking at N.Y.U., it’s also a family affair. Her father, the writer Martin Amis, a lifelong smoker often photographed with a cigarette, has said they are one of his favorite things.

“Beautiful people do it, really talented people do it,” said Ms. Amis, who lives on the Lower East Side. “It goes with things that I admire.” In fact, back in college, she wrote a little manifesto about smoking titled “Notes of a Neo-smoker,” which included missives like: “Smoking is the epitome of masochism,” and “It is a joy to be contemporarily atypical.”

Read it all. 

This is hard for me to see. The decline of smoking is one unambiguously good thing that has happened in my lifetime. I keep thinking of my sister’s struggle with lung cancer. She never smoked, but we both grew up in a household of heavy smokers. If you could see what lung cancer does to you — how it destroys your body, and makes you struggle to catch your breath even when you are just sitting down — you would never pick up a cigarette. Or would you? My mom and dad watched my sister die, and they kept smoking as much as ever. I guess by then they were old, and couldn’t imagine living without cigarettes. But my God, watching my once-healthy sister reduced to skin and bones, with an oxygen tank at her side, struggling to breathe — I struggle to grasp how one isn’t scared off of smoking if you see the agony lung cancer patients endure. A friend of mine smoked for forty years, but caught pneumonia one winter, and landed in the hospital, barely able to breathe. It shook her up so bad that she quit smoking, swearing that she was going to do everything she could to keep from being in that situation in the future (that is, bed-bound and fighting to catch her breath).

Beautiful people do it, really talented people do it. What an idiotic remark, but also a telling one about why people take up the habit despite knowing better. You know, I sometimes wonder what gets into people’s heads that make them want to take that first puff of crystal meth, or stick the heroin needle in their vein for the first time. Has that ever worked out well for anybody? Has anybody ever reached the end of their life grateful for having been a smoker? Well, maybe Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens… .

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The Untact Society

Sorry I’ve been quiet today. I’m sick as a dog. It might be omicron — I’m still waiting on the test results — or it might be an epic case of bronchitis. I’ve been in bed all day, my throat is raw, and I barely have a voice. I’m fairly crushed because I was supposed to go to Wichita tomorrow for the Eighth Day Institute conference, which is always a terrific time. I’m hoping that my Covid results come back in time, but they told me they’re delayed by volume. Anyway, if this is the flu or bronchitis, I can’t really travel, nor can I give a speech without a voice.

A reader sent me this story last month, and it’s been sitting on my desktop in an open tab all this time. It’s really freaky and dystopian (and you well know that this blog is where you turn for freaky, dystopian things). South Korea, whose fertility rate is in collapse, is preparing for a world with many fewer people. Read on:

Introduced in 2020, “Untact” is a South Korean government policy that aims to spur economic growth by removing layers of human interaction from society. It gathered pace during the pandemic and is expanding rapidly across sectors from healthcare, to business and entertainment.

The push to create contactless services is designed increase productivity and cut bureaucracy but has also fuelled concerns over the potential social consequences.

Choi‬ Jong-ryul, a sociology professor at Keimyung University, says while there are advantages to developing an untact society, it also threatens social solidarity and may end up isolating individuals.

“If more people lose the ‘feeling of contact’ due to lack of face-to-face interaction, society will encounter a fundamental crisis,” Choi says.

What does an untact society look like in practice? More:

In everyday life, small changes brought about by untact are becoming increasingly noticeable.

Robots brew coffee and bring beverages to tables in cafes. A robotic arm batters fries and chicken to perfection. At Yongin Severance Hospital, Keemi – a 5G-powered disinfection robot – sprays hand sanitiser, checks body temperature, polices social distancing, and even tells people off for not wearing masks.

Unmanned or hybrid shops are flourishing. Mobile carrier LG Uplus recently opened several untact phone shops, where customers can compare models, sign contracts and receive the latest smartphones without ever having to deal with a real person.

Civil services too are getting untact facelifts. Seoul City plans to build a “metaverse” – a virtual space where users can interact with digital representations of people and objects – and avatars of public officials will resolve complaints. Several local governments have launched AI call bots to monitor the health of those self-isolating. For Covid-19 patients receiving home treatment, a government app also monitors health and gives video access to a doctor.

The world of K-pop has also stepped into the metaverse. Fans create avatars where they can “meet” their favourites like Blackpink in a virtual space and receive virtual autographs.

Read it all. Remember that this nightmare is being tried in the name of economic growth, the planners say. Maybe it makes me a middle-aged horse’s ass (well, more of one), but I try to avoid self-serve check-outs whenever I can. I hate them. It’s a matter of principle with me. I like interacting with a human being, and besides, whenever I use on of the automated kiosks, I feel that the damn thing is taking someone’s job away.

It could be that South Korea has no choice but to embrace technology like this. It has the world’s lowest fertility rate. There won’t be people around to do many of those jobs in the future.

What I don’t get is why this doesn’t alarm people. Do you want to live in the Untact world? It’s a dystopia of cold, sleek loneliness. We are going to forget how to be human. Our devices are already training us in this path. I have been working at home for a decade now, and I have observed in myself a growing reticence to throw myself into social situations. The Guardian story talks about one benefit of the Untact society is that it spares people the “emotional labor” of having to talk to another person. But this is a basic part of being a human being! I don’t like how isolated and isolating technology has made me; it has exacerbated my latent anti-social tendencies.

This short clip explaining Untact notes that Covid has shown us what a socially distanced world is. Okay, but why on earth would you want to live like that if you didn’t have to?! I don’t get it.

What do you think about Untact? Do you think it represents a sensible acceptance of a future with far fewer people in it, or do you think it represents surrender in the (so far) losing battle to get South Koreans to have babies?

Our technology is un-humaning us. Digitized pornography is ubiquitous, and is destroying the ability of our young, especially young men, to mate. Most parents are aware to some degree that it’s dangerous to get their kid a smartphone, which for boys is a gateway to hardcore porn, and for girls is a gateway to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria — but they still buy the devices, somehow thinking that it won’t happen to their kid. We as a species are unlearning what it is to be male and female, mothers and fathers, creators of families. It’s diabolical.

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Hollywood’s Woke McCarthyism

Under a totalitarian system, everything that exists must be seen through the lens of the reigning ideology. From Live Not By Lies:

Infusing every aspect of life with ideology was a standard aspect of Soviet totalitarianism. Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”

Well, here’s news from the woke Scientific American:

A new organization called the Association for Mathematical Research (AMR) has ignited fierce debates in the math research and education communities since it was launched last October. Its stated mission is “to support mathematical research and scholarship”—a goal similar to that proclaimed by two long-standing groups: the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). In recent years the latter two have initiated projects to address racial, gender and other inequities within the field. The AMR claims to have no position on social justice issues, and critics see its silence on those topics as part of a backlash against inclusivity efforts. Some of the new group’s leaders have also spoken out in the past against certain endeavors to diversify mathematics. The controversy reflects a growing division between researchers who want to keep scientific and mathematical pursuits separate from social issues that they see as irrelevant to research and those who say even pure mathematics cannot be considered separately from the racism and sexism in its culture.

One mathematician quoted in the piece who is critical of the AMR says that its existence causes him harm, and hurt. This is how these villains depoliticize everything: you can’t argue with them about the merits of this or that proposal, because they claim to be personally hurt by it, thereby taking it out of the realm of rational discourse. Anyway, good for the mathematicians behind AMR. They are fighting for a good cause: to keep mathematics scholarship free from ideological garbage.

Meanwhile, here’s a terrific piece from Bari Weiss’s Substack, written by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik. The pair explores the chilling effect wokeness has had on creative work in Hollywood. Excerpts:

A few years ago, the editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter pitched a story to the newsroom. He had just come back from lunch with a well-known agent, who had suggested the paper take a look at the unintended consequences of Hollywood’s efforts to diversify. Those white men who had spent decades writing scripts—which had been turned into blockbuster movies and hit television shows—were no longer getting hired.

The newsroom blew up. The reporters, especially the younger ones, mocked the idea that white men were on the outs. The editor-in-chief, normally self-assured, immediately backtracked. He looked rattled.

It was a missed opportunity. The story wasn’t just about white guys not getting jobs. Nor was it really about the economics of Hollywood. It was about the stories Hollywood told and distributed and streamed on screens around the globe every day. It was about this massively lucrative industry that had been birthed by outsiders and emerged, out of lemon groves, into a glamorous, glitzy mosh pit teeming with chutzpah and broken hearts and unbelievable success stories that had made the American Dream a real, pulsating thing—for Americans and billions of other people who thought that if you could imagine something, anything, you could will it into being. It was a story about who we aspired to be.

After the meeting, a reporter approached another editor about pursuing it. The editor told the reporter to drop it. No one, he said, at The Hollywood Reporter—one of a handful of trade publications that covers the ins and outs of the entertainment industry—was going to risk blowing up their career over this.

Makes sense to me. I mean, it’s horrible, but this is what it means to have an ideology capture an industry and a community, and to maintain its death grip by rendering everybody afraid to question it. There are no gulags in Hollywood, but this is most definitely soft totalitarianism. They talk about how all the studios now mandate racial quotas, and how nobody dares to question this. More:

To help producers meet the new standards, the filmmaker Ava DuVernay—who was recently added to Forbes’ list of “The Most Powerful Women in Entertainment” along with Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift—last year created ARRAY Crew, a database of women, people of color, and others from underrepresented groups who work on day-to-day production: line producers, camera operators, art directors, sound mixers and so on. The Hollywood Reporter declared that ARRAY Crew has “fundamentally changed how Hollywood productions will be staffed going forward.”

More than 900 productions, including “Yellowstone” and “Mare of Easttown,” have used ARRAY Crew, said Jeffrey Tobler, the chief marketing officer of ARRAY, DuVernay’s production company. Privately, directors and writers voiced irritation with DuVernay, who, they said, had exploited the “post-George Floyd moment.” But no one dared to criticize her openly. “I’m not crazy,” one screenwriter said.

Of course, Hollywood, like many industries, does have a clubiness about it. And pretty much everyone on the inside insists it should open up to those who had, for decades, been kept out. But the heavy-handed mandates, the databases, the shifting culture—in which pretty much all white men were assumed to have gotten their jobs because they had the right tennis buddies or ZIP code or skin color—raised the possibility of a new kind of clubiness. When asked whether ARRAY Crew was just replacing one kind of exclusion with another, Tobler sidestepped the question, saying the organization had sought to “amplify underrepresented professionals.”

But the result has not just been a demographic change. It has been an ideological and cultural transformation. We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. This was the case not just among the high command at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, but at every level of production.

How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. “Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,” one writer said. Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this? 

And:

“Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama “The White Lotus.” “If you voice things in a certain way it can really have negative repercussions for you, and people can presume that you could be racist, or you could be seen as misogynist.”

Howard Koch, who has been involved in the production of more than 60 movies, including such classics as “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man,” and is the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, said: “I’m all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females, whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of content, whether it’s television or movies or whatever, but I think it’s gone too far. I know a lot of very talented people that can’t get work because they’re not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ.”

Another writer, who, like most of the writers we interviewed, was afraid to speak openly for fear of never working again, said: “I get so paranoid about even phone calls. It’s so scary. My close friends and my family are just like, ‘Don’t say anything.’ It is one of those things, ‘Will I be able to sleep at night if I say anything?’ Getting jobs in this town is so hard, and I’m very grateful to have a great job. If there’s any so-called ding on my record, that would just be an argument against hiring me.”

Kiefer and Savodnik muse about the great movies and TV shows of the past that could never get made now because everyone is so terrified of crossing an unseen line and blowing up their careers.

The writers’ room is supposed to be smart, funny, nasty, a little bawdy, the kind of place where people can make jokes and riff and wonder aloud and vomit out ideas that might become an unforgettable scene. Another showrunner in his mid-fifties (white, male, unfortunately) said: “You’re not allowed to pick your staff anymore, and studios won’t let you interview anybody who isn’t a person of color.”

He added that the culture of documenting even the slightest of slights makes him anxious. “I’m sitting in a room trying to run a show with a collection of people I don’t totally trust.”

Read it all.  It’s such a good piece. You are reading about the creative death of an industry. The rigid political standards, the pervasive lack of trust, the fear — no creative person can do good work in that kind of environment. And wait till you read in the piece what this new anti-white climate has done to the Jews who founded Hollywood!

For as long as I’ve been writing about racialized progressivism, I’ve pointed out that those on the Left who abandon the classical liberal standard of judging individuals by the quality of their work and the content of their character, and who take up the cause of group rights as “social justice,” are unavoidably calling up white racial consciousness, and anger. The nice white liberals who run Hollywood and various industries can be pushed around with left-wing racialist rhetoric, but there are a few white people who are not ashamed of themselves for the color of their skin (rightly so: nobody should be ashamed of their race or ethnicity), and who resent the hell out of losing out on job prospects because of their race, and being preached at by woke Hollywood and woke Media. We don’t see Republican office holders speaking out against this stuff, in defense of America’s classical liberal principles, no doubt because they are afraid to be called racist. At some point, some very bad men are going to arise to give voice to those white people who hate this racism directed at them and their children, and who don’t care what the bien pensants think of them. When that happens, we will tear ourselves apart.

Read this Substack piece by the UK journalist Ed West, about whites moving into the minority in America. West talks about how “demographic instability” — the majority population fearing it will be turned into a minority — as major factors in several bloody civil conflicts. Bosnia in the 1990s, Lebanon in the 1970s, Northern Ireland in the 1960s — all are examples, he says. Excerpt:

Things can change very quickly. Northern Ireland in the 1960s may have been the most peaceful society in human history; in 1963 and 1964 its homicide rate was 0.07 per 100,000, about a quarter of that of today’s Japan or Singapore, the two least violent (non-micro) countries. By the end of that decade, it was in a state of near-civil war, showing how it only takes a small number of dedicated partisans to turn life into hell for everyone.

West goes on to express surprise that we know from history what can happen when a country undergoes demographic replacement of the majority by a former minority, but US elites don’t seem to take it seriously at all. Excerpt:

The New York Times quoted two academics, Maureen Craig at N.Y.U. and Jennifer Richeson at Yale, whose paper Majority No More? found that ‘White Americans considering a future in which the white population has declined to less than 50 percent of the national population are more likely to perceive that the societal status of their racial group — in terms of resources or as the “prototypical” American — is under threat, which in turn leads to stronger identification as white, the expression of more negative racial attitudes and emotions, greater opposition to diversity, and greater endorsement of conservative political ideology, political parties, and candidates.’

Similar papers have been quoted showing that, when presented with a future where they become a minority, white Americans become more nationalist, conservative and tribal – but what is surprising is that anyone finds this surprising.

… In multicultural democracies people tend to vote along ethnic and confessional lines, and as America has become more multicultural so have its voting patterns followed a similar trajectory, with the Democratic Party an alliance of minorities and the rich (who are, as Amy Chua put it, a sort of minority in themselves). In contrast, Republicans now enjoy a 40-point lead among white men without a college degree. Diversity is only one of 10 drivers of polarization cited by Jonathan Haidt, yet it is also the only one which is an article of faith among one party, and the country’s elite.

There is, of course, a strong counter argument to the ‘emerging Demographic majority’ theory in which demography is destiny. Hispanics in particular are moving to the Republican Party in large numbers, in part at least repulsed by the pro-crime, race-hysteria of the opposition. Donald Trump was, paradoxically, one of the least racially polarizing of modern US presidents, improving his vote share among all minorities in 2020.

The Republicans may evolve into a sort of multi-ethnic working-class alliance, as many American Catholic commentators hope; the downside of this would be a populism pushed towards self-conscious coarseness and stupidity of the ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ variety; as one sceptical conservative put it, soon Republican commentary will just be people making farting noises to own the libs. This new type of party may happen, but working-class solidarity is generally a feeble force in history, far less powerful than ethnicity and religion.

Read it all. If we had leaders in both the public and private sector who had the slightest bit of foresight, they would be working to make this transition go well, and would be suppressing racial triumphalism of the sort that Kiefer and Savodnik document in their piece. But we don’t. Most Republicans by and large avoid talking about it, and most Democrats embrace at some level anti-white racism (or at least stay silent in the face of it out of fear for their livelihoods). It’s hard to see a hopeful future for America, given that the ruling class has committed itself to a totalitarian ideology that teaches Americans to hate other Americans, especially along racial lines — and that makes people of good will afraid to speak out against it, for fear that their livelihoods will be destroyed.

If we are to avert this coming disaster for our country, we are going to need a lot more people with courage inside those industries and communities to start speaking out.

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Evangelicals & Post-Christianity

A few years back I touted an excellent analysis of Christianity in American culture by Aaron Renn, a very smart Evangelical writer and analyst who is now writing primarily on his Substack (you really should subscribe; everything Renn writes is challenging and important). Renn has recapitulated that critique, and updated it, for First Things. Here’s the core of his analysis:

Within the story of American secularization, there have been three distinct stages:

Positive World (Pre-1994): Society at large retains a mostly positive view of Christianity. To be known as a good, churchgoing man remains part of being an upstanding citizen. Publicly being a Christian is a status-enhancer. Christian moral norms are the basic moral norms of society and violating them can bring negative consequences.

Neutral World (1994–2014): Society takes a neutral stance toward Christianity. Christianity no longer has privileged status but is not disfavored. Being publicly known as a Christian has neither a positive nor a negative impact on one’s social status. Christianity is a valid option within a pluralistic public square. Christian moral norms retain some residual effect.

Negative World (2014–Present): Society has come to have a negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of ­society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences.

Renn talks about how American Evangelicalism responded to the cultural challenges of these three periods. If, like me, you only have a very general grasp of the world of Evangelicalism, Renn’s essay is a good who’s who and what’s what explainer.

My Benedict Option idea comes up in his piece. Excerpts:

The main strategy advocated for in the negative world is Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. Dreher is not an evangelical; he is Eastern Orthodox, and openly admits his limited understanding of the evangelical world. He may thus have underestimated Protestant suspicion of monastic imagery: The “Benedictine” framing undoubtedly contributed to his project’s poor reception in the evangelical world.

Nevertheless, the general evangelical rejection of the Benedict Option is disproportionate to these sensitivities. We see this primarily in the fact that evangelicals have not developed an evangelical-­friendly version of or alternative to it. Despite ample evidence that America has now entered the negative world, no evangelical strategic ­approaches to it have emerged. American evangelicals are still largely living in the lost positive and neutral worlds. Their rejection of Dreher’s Benedict Option was not about too much Catholic terminology or disagreements over strategic elements. It was ­rooted in a denial of reality. Evangelicals were, and to a great extent still are, unwilling to accept that they now live in the negative world.

That has certainly been my impression. It is very hard to convince American Christians in general, and Evangelicals in particular (given how overtly patriotic they are), that America is post-Christian. I have presented in my work lots of evidence for this dire conclusion, and I’m not going to revisit that now. I will just say that Renn’s claim that Evangelicals don’t understand the seriousness of our cultural moment strikes me as plausible. In October 2020, an Orthodox convert friend who still goes to Bible study with his Evangelical pals took them a copy of my just-published Live Not By Lies, and told them that it’s an interesting take on present and coming persecution. He told me that his Bible study partners told them they didn’t need to read it, because President Trump would be re-elected, and all would be well. Even if Trump had been re-elected, very little would be well for faithful Christians. For these older men, it’s always 1994.

We are coming up this March on the five-year anniversary of The Benedict Option. In the book, I said that implementing the basic critique would require creativity. The Benedict Option for urban Catholics will look somewhat different than it will for small-town Evangelicals, for example. The core claims of the Ben Op are that the only Christian churches that will come through this new Dark Age intact are those that are consciously countercultural, and that develop practices and institutions that impart robust discipleship to their members. Otherwise, the power of assimilation to secular norms in post-Christian America is too strong — especially given that some form of persecution of small-o orthodox Christians — meaning mostly those that do not accept the new LGBT consensus — is coming.

Did few if any Evangelicals take this seriously? Renn says yes, that is the case, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. (An interesting fact: from my own experience, the Benedict Option has been much more successfully received in Europe than in the US, which I attribute to the fact that Europe is farther along the secularization path than America.) But why didn’t they take it seriously, aside from the general fact that nobody likes to hear bad news? I’d like to hear from this blog’s Evangelical readers on that point.

Renn continues:

Negative-world strategies will have to grapple with the “rise of the nones,” people with no professed religion who may be unfamiliar with Christianity and find it quite odd or even offensive. One-third or more of Americans in the younger age cohorts fall into this category, portending a radically different cultural landscape in America. This means evangelicals must include a Benedict Option–style focus on building churches and Christian communities that rely less on support from secular institutions and are resilient to outside pressure. They should stop outsourcing their political thinking to movement conservatism and their sociocultural analysis to secular academics. They should remain prudentially engaged in politics based on their own traditions of Protestant political and social thought. They must be willing to accept a loss of social status, but they need not succumb to the very pessimistic mood that pervades Rod Dreher’s work. They must accept that ­realignment will be a reality, with a reconfiguring of alliances and cooperation based on today’s needs and different forms of shared values.

Read it all. You know, the main thing that makes me so pessimistic is that so few of my fellow Christians are willing to face dire realities. If I believed that Christian leaders (and Christian followers) were engaged in grappling with the present and future of the churches in what Renn calls “Negative World,” it would be easier to be optimistic. I’m not sure what it’s going to take to break the spell of wishful thinking. A Polish Catholic journalist interviewed me this week, and asked what role evangelization plays in the Benedict Option. I told him that Christians have no choice but to evangelize; it is Our Lord’s command. But we cannot give the world what we don’t have. Research makes it undeniable that most American Christians, especially the young, have a shallow and emotional idea of the Christian faith. If we do such a poor job of discipleship, our evangelical efforts are going to be weak.

While I’m on the Evangelical front, I want to mention David French’s most recent essay, “A Nation of Christians Is Not Necessarily A Christian Nation”. Excerpts:

But does the mere fact that a majority of a nation’s citizens identify as Christian render a nation a “Christian nation”?

I’d argue that a nation’s religious character is defined by the interaction between the individual faith of the citizens and the institutional expression of the nation’s values. A functioning “Christian nation” is going to combine both a robust private practice of faith with a government that is committed to basic elements of justice and mercy. In other words, when determining the identity of a people and nation, by their fruits you shall know them.

French contends that by many measures America has become more authentically Christian as Christian power has receded. Looking back to the past, when the US was unquestionably a Christian nation in terms of what its people professed:

Yet what else was happening in the United States during that era? Well, the entire southern United States (the Bible Belt, by the way) was essentially an apartheid sub-state within the larger United States. It brutally oppressed America’s black citizens, including its black Christian citizens. The Tulsa Race Massacre happened in 1921, at the peak of white Protestant power.

At the same time, white Protestants were also busy persecuting Catholics. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were the heyday of so-called Blaine Amendments—state constitutional amendments that were explicitly aimed at protecting Protestant political and cultural power against perceived Catholic political and cultural encroachment.

So do we want to claim America as a “Christian nation” in that period? Even though there were millions of American Christians who possessed and wielded power to an extent not seen before or since? Where was the justice? Instead a nation of Christian was proving that it could act in affirmatively un-Christian—even anti-Christian—ways.

There’s something disingenuous about French’s essay, though I struggle to put my finger on it. What he says here is undeniably true, regarding how un-Christian, even anti-Christian, American Christians were in the past. But if we are judging whether or not a nation is Christian based primarily on the behavior of its Christian citizens, it will be hard to find a nation anywhere, at any time, that was Christian. What French points to is a shameful, tragic paradox: that in some cases, Christian values triumphed as Christian authority waned. Yet we don’t dare forget that the Civil Rights movement was led by black pastors, who did so in explicitly Christian terms. They could do that because America of the 1950s and 1960s was still a Christian nation, in the sense that the ideals most Americans espoused were Christian ideals. Martin Luther King and the others based their campaign in large part on calling Americans to be more faithful to the religion they espoused.

I think a better measure of whether a nation is Christian is to ask whether or not most people of that nation look to the Bible and its stories as their story too. That is, does the religion of the Bible (Old and New Testaments) tell us who we are, and what we are supposed to do? If people really believe that, then however short they fall of righteousness, they ought to be considered a Christian nation (though perhaps a nation of bad Christians). My argument is that what makes us post-Christian is that we Americans overall don’t look to the Bible as our sacred story anymore. This will become clearer when the Boomer generation has died.

While it is certainly true that some Christian values — recognition that racism is evil, for example — are more in evidence in America today than they were in a time of Christian cultural hegemony, this is a very thin basis for hope. Again, the Civil Rights movement worked because America was still a Christian nation, with a Christian conscience. When we lose Christianity, we lose the ideals by which our conduct can be measured. King taught us to see the sinful gap between what we white American Christians said we believed, and the way we behaved. In a post-Christian nation, that strategy is not available to one. If only a minority are believers in Jesus Christ, what does it mean to say that life is sacred? As historian Tom Holland points out in his wonderful book Dominion, nearly all of the liberal human rights values we hold dear in the West today came to us through Christianity. Will they survive the demise of Christianity? It is difficult to see how.

On his Substack, Ross Douthat answers French today. He points out that using racial justice as the main yardstick of progress over the past decades is rather flawed. What about all the bad things (from the viewpoint of Christian morality) that have happened? And yes, young people are having less premarital sex these days, but given that this is not because they are more virtuous, but the role that ubiquitous porn and high levels of anxiety play in this makes absurd the idea that it’s because of virtue.

Plus, there is this:

Third, you have the theological question of whether religious practice, regular prayer and honor to God, isn’t itself an important form of justice, whose decline matters to any assessment of the justice inherent in a given society. This obviously doesn’t matter to secular analysts, but from the Christian perspective a society where religious practice is declining steeply is a society where several major commandments are no longer being consistently upheld. I’m not sure how French weighs this issue on his scales, but given his own theological premises it has to have real weight.

Douthat puts his finger on something particular that bothered me about French’s essay. I wonder if it might be a Protestant thing. For Catholics and Orthodox, cloistered monks and nuns who do nothing but pray all day are doing something very important for the spiritual economy. Thomas Merton, in his 1940s memoir The Seven Storey Mountain, wondered about how much worse the world at war would be if not for the constant prayers of those unseen Christians. I wonder if French’s seeming lack of concern about this has anything to do with the early Protestant rejection of monasticism as useless. That is to say, I certainly know that Evangelicals believe prayer and worship is very, very important, but I am curious as to whether or not the point of criticism here has to do with deeper differences between Protestant spirituality and Catholic-Orthodox spirituality. I could be wrong, but the thought did occur to me.

Besides, judging the spiritual qualities of a nation solely or mostly by material standards is unreliable. The Middle Ages were absolutely saturated with religiosity, but they were also wretched and cruel. Who could possibly claim that medieval Europe wasn’t Christian? If your standards of what makes a society or a nation Christian would diminish the religiosity of medieval Europe because there was a lot of gross injustice there, then your standards are flawed. Furthermore, it would seem to make Christianity out to be a form of sanctified moralism. We have it on good authority that one can outwardly observe the moral law to a fine degree, but inwardly be a whitewashed sepulchre.

Douthat goes on:

But I also think it’s possible to say two things at once: First, that a certain amount of Christian reaction, maybe white evangelical Christian reaction especially, to Christianity’s decline has indeed been toxic, counterproductive, bad religion and the opposite of gospel witness, but also that the decline itself is something that Christians (and not only them) have good reasons to lament.

So by all means, tell your co-religionists that the church’s decline reflects God’s judgment on Christian sins and failures, and that Providence is calling them to purification and renewal and not just a truculent war footing behind the shield of Imperator Trump.

But if you tell them they can’t lament secularization or religious disaffiliation or the collapse of the old Protestant center on any grounds, that they can’t look at the ebbing of their own faith, the loss of American belief in what they consider the true story of the world, and see something regrettable and tragic and bad for the country in the long run, then that plays into the hands of the toxic avengers, because they’re the only ones saying the obvious: That for all our ample sins and failures, Christians are not obliged to celebrate our own decline.

That’s well said. Read it all.

As you know, readers, my sense of Christianity’s decline is in no way celebratory. I think it is a civilizational catastrophe. I believe that we Christians today had better wake up to the reality of our decline, and start right now building defenses that will enable us to make it through what could be a long exile without losing our faith. Far as I can see, the only thing that stands to reverse this decline is a rebirth of the faith, and that requires both evangelization and discipleship. Those are hard, unsexy things, but we are not going to vote ourselves out of this crisis. Aaron Renn is right to call me pessimistic, but I am also hopeful — hopeful, because no matter what happens, God is with us, and we have before us the opportunities to become saints. And who knows? Whittaker Chambers, when he left Communism after his Christian conversion, believed that he was leaving the losing side of the Cold War. He did it because he would rather lose with the truth than win with a lie. He was wrong.

One more thing. I quote frequently from church historian Robert Louis Wilken’s great 2004 essay “The Church As Culture” because it is so insightful and relevant to us. I don’t often quote this passage, though:

Last spring on a trip to Erfurt, the medieval university town in Germany famous for its Augustinian cloister in which Martin Luther was ordained to the priesthood, I learned that only twenty percent of its population professed adherence to Christianity. In fact, when the topic of religion came up in a conversation with a young woman in a hotel lounge, and I asked her whether she was a member of a church, she replied without hesitation: Ich bin Heide—“I am a heathen.”

It is hardly surprising to discover pagans in the heart of Western Europe where Christianity once flourished: a steep decline in the number of Christians has been underway for generations, even centuries. What surprised me was the absence of embarrassment in her use of the term “heathen.” She did not say that she no longer went to church or that she was not a believer. For her, Christianity, no doubt the religion of her grandparents if not her parents, was simply not on the horizon.

These days, I hear Christian friends — usually professors or high school teachers — talk about how often they run into young Americans just like that young German woman twenty years ago. We all know that Gen Z is the first one in US history where a majority profess no particular religious affiliation. This is not all that shocking. What I find harder to grapple with is how little they know about what they have rejected. It’s not like they are rejecting Christianity, as much as they have never had it presented to them. They don’t know what they don’t know, and don’t care. In my generation (I am 54), lots of people I know left the faith, but they consciously rejected it, even as they still carried in their heads all the Bible stories with which they were raised. Not these kids today. A truly post-Christian nation is one where even the memories of what it was to be Christian have gone away.

UPDATE: An Evangelical friend in New Orleans sent me this very helpful e-mail, and gives me permission to share it with you:

Since you asked, a few thoughts on why Evos might not love BenOp.

When I read BenOp, even in draft format, my thought was “Evangelicals are already doing a lot of this business of living differently from the masses.”  And we were.  But “we” was my church and the few others I’m intimately familiar with.  Those do regular Bible studies, children’s and teen groups, socialize together, and generally already accept countercultural status.  The expressed intent is to live separate and apart (i.e., “holy”) from the mainstream.  I remember recommending that you talk to my hipster-in-law, who was raised in Awana and whose peer group was almost exclusively Awana kids from her school and other schools.  She did mission work in the Philippines and Bangladesh, then returned to live in the Serious Hood that was walking distance from their church, so they could live the missionary life at home in New Orleans.  She’s a millennial without ANY social media accounts.  Counterculture much?

-I have little/no exposure to megachurches, so I overestimated how common my experience was.  This was also pre-Trump, before I understood how thin is the veneer of a lot of Bible Belt Christianity.  I assumed the Russell Moore faction was representative of evangelicalism as a whole, and that when push came to shove, the Republican-Party-at-Prayer would prioritize its faith over its politics.  I was largely wrong about that – it’s not a blowout*, but “my” group is not the majority.

(*I think there’s a large minority of evangelicals who oppose Trumpism but are afraid to speak of it, in the same way that a lot of liberals oppose progressivism but fear being shunned.)

-Orthodoxy clearly works for you and for a lot of converts.  I think that converts of all stripes think that their thing will work for everyone else just like it worked for them, just as I think my church works for me.  This is also why CrossFitters, vegans, and gluten-free types won’t shut up.  Your natural tendency is to think that your thing will work for everyone.  Orthodoxy can just as easily be Greeks-at-Prayer or Putin.  I come from a Catholic background, as do many/most local Evos.  There are reasons we left the Catholic churches we grew up in and reasons we stayed in the churches we’re in.  So we have the same home-team biases as you.

-Hence, the BenOp emphasizes traditional practices like formal fasts, repeated ancient prayers, singing ancient songs.  Which works for you.  But in the same way that every stick in Starhill looks like a rattlesnake to you, Evangelicals are programmed to see your proposals as signs of a faith based on works, which is a violation of the Prime Directive.  At a minimum, Evos see an emphasis on formal practices on a man-made schedule, even if that schedule dates to the second or third century.  And we who come from Catholicism have seen that emphasis on practices can make the practices seem like the goal.

I KNOW that’s not the case for you.  The practices work for you.  They might work for me.  In the hands of flawed man, religion can (will?) become a rulebook that obscures Christ instead of pointing to him.  You often note that Orthodoxy says “do the practices and eventually you will understand why.”  Perhaps that works when your goal ab initio is to know and love Christ.  Maybe it’s not so successful when you’re just told to do the things.

So if winter is coming and we need to hunker down, and you propose adopting traditional practices of your church as the solution, Evos throw out the BenOp with the bathwater.  Also, my people have a tendency to downplay future trials by saying things like “We read the end of the Book, and we win!” without recognizing that “we” might be a remnant in Impfondo and not a stadium in Fort Worth.

As to monasteries, I think the Evangelical critique is that we’re supposed to be out there making converts, not holed up in silence.  That’s a broad brush, of course, but I think it’s how many/most evangelicals think monasteries work: thick walls, vows of silence, and generally covering the lamps.  I didn’t know that many monks have always interacted with the general public and only Head for the Hills at night or on Sundays.

Evangelicals see the Pauline ideal as 24/7 classic evangelism, ideally abroad, based on the Great Commission.  There’s less of an appreciation for the life’s work of the Christian accountant or construction worker who never goes on a mission trip and is not great at talking about his faith, but who spends his life funding and praying for foreign missionaries.  (You know who really appreciates that accountant and construction worker?  The foreign missionary.)

Among Catholics and Orthodox, it seems that the modern heroes of the faith are the monks.  Among evangelicals, it’s the foreign missionaries.  You’ve got lots of monks and not enough missionaries; we’ve got missionaries and no monks at all.  If evangelicals saw monks as the wielders of the weapon of prayer, there’ be more appreciation.  But “we” tend to see them as people who lock themselves away and call themselves missionaries.  So when you say “monasteries!” and put a walled island mountaintop on the cover of your book, the evangelical makes his judgment, rolls his eyes, and moves on.

FWIW, I’ve been theologically an evangelical since the mid-90’s, but I hated the E-word even then, and I associated it with the same things that you and the NPR crowd do.  This is not a new thing.  I’m still looking for a better label.  I’ve also started an intensive (for me at least) study of the Torah.

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DARPA Covid Whistleblower’s Blockbuster Claim

A potential blockbuster revelation today from Project Veritas:

According to alleged leaked documents prepared for the Pentagon’s Inspector General, DARPA rejected a 2018 proposal by the EcoHealth Alliance to do research on bat-borne coronavirus, in conjunction with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because in DARPA’s judgment, it was too close to forbidden “gain of function” research. But Dr. Anthony Fauci later green-lighted the research, despite later denying under oath that he did.

Here’s a link to the leaked documents. 

Project Veritas contacted the Marine Corps major who prepared the report to ask him to verify it. He declined to talk about the documents, but he did say this:

The documents also appear to confirm that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments for Covid infection. If this is true, and these documents are authentic, it raises the obvious question: why did the US Government work to suppress this knowledge and these treatments?

Dr. Fauci will be questioned today at a Congressional hearing. It will be interesting to hear what he has to say about all this. If these documents are fake, then Maj. Joseph Murphy will have destroyed his military career for the sake of a hoax. How likely is that? If their allegations prove true, though, then the senior US public health scientist signed off on the project that, mismanaged by the Wuhan lab, infected the world with a virus bioengineered by the Americans and the Chinese — and then lied about it.

The post DARPA Covid Whistleblower’s Blockbuster Claim appeared first on The American Conservative.

Church As Where You Take Your Stand

A Catholic reader writes about my “Pope Francis Is Queering The Catholic Church” post from the other day:

I think your commentary in your recent post is largely correct, but your knowledge of American Catholicism is becoming slightly dated.  My wife and I had similar experiences of an intellectually coherent faith mired in bland homilies, terrible music, and emotionally checked-out parishioners.  Of course there are exceptions, but it’s safe to say that most parishioners in most American parishes do not even know, much less actually follow, Church teaching on any subject at odds with the popular culture.The Latin Mass crowd has exploded recent years, but if your only experience is based on the Very Online, you might think it was mainly a gathering of academic Latinists and nostalgic monarchists.  Trad Twitter is not an accurate representation of the Latin Mass crowd.  I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone who cares about what is said on Trad Twitter, or who advocates for Integralism.At this point, the Latin Mass has become a condensed symbol for resistance to the broader culture, both within and outside the Church.  Most parishioners know little Latin, but with a little practice, one can follow along easily enough with a bilingual missal.  The major attraction is being in a community of priests and laity who believe and strive to follow the full magisterial teaching of the Church.  Francis has been cracking down on the Latin Mass precisely because it is the segment of the Church most openly opposed to his project to turn the Church into a secular NGO.  Few things make a priest less popular in a typical chancery than saying the Latin Mass.  Given the state of typical chanceries (as stated in your second update), that’s a good endorsement.  Diocesan priests are usually constrained in what they can say publicly due to political pressures from their bishops, and that pressure does not entirely disappear entirely with the Latin Mass.  SSPX priests are in many ways far freer to preach the entirety of the faith because they do not need to curry favor with the bureaucracy of the Church.Traditionalist priests are still capable of serious sin, like all of us.  Even then, it is generally a matter of secret sins being exposed, and not the denial of the very concept of sin, or sin defined down to exclude everything less than the Holocaust.  We have never needed a post-homily “what Father meant to say” clarification with our kids after a Latin Mass.It’s pretty much the only place we’ve found where not giving your children smartphones is considered prudent instead of bizarre.  Modern obligatory Catholic fasting has been reduced to the equivalent of missing two meals per year, and moving dinner from Outback to Red Lobster for a few Fridays.  The traditional calendar has over seventy days of fasting, abstinence, or partial abstinence.  Much more time is spent kneeling.  Parishioners are quiet and prayerful before and after Mass.  Confession is offered regularly and the lines are long, not just a few people during the half hour on Saturday afternoons.After we started going to the Latin Mass, my wife said it was like finding the Church we thought we were joining when we converted.  In a lot of ways, I think traditional Catholicism resembles your descriptions of convert-heavy Orthodox parishes more than the dreary beige Catholicism of your time in the Catholic Church.

I suspect he is right. My direct knowledge of Catholicism ended in 2006, when I became Orthodox. As you may recall, when I was a Catholic, I wasn’t part of a Latin mass community (I tried, but didn’t care for it), but if I were Catholic today, I would be likely to join one for the reasons the reader above said. Veteran Catholic journalist Phil Lawler, a conservative but never a trad, wrote the other day that he has started attending a Latin mass parish for more or less these reasons.It makes sense. We live in revolutionary times. The Benedict Option concept, in its most general sense, is about finding (or creating) a community and a way of life that allows you and your family to remain faithful and resilient through this new Dark Age. As we see in the case of this reader, and Phil Lawler, the reality of the situation facing American Catholics is driving some of them to Latin mass parishes, simply because they want to live as faithful Catholics, in a time when the papacy appears to have a different agenda.I’ve mentioned in this space that in our small Orthodox mission parish in Baton Rouge, we have welcomed over the past two years inquirers coming from Protestantism and, lately, Catholicism. One of the big reasons some of them say they turned up at an Orthodox parish was the conviction that persecution is coming (either soft or hard), and they want to be anchored in a Christian church that will be able and willing to stand its ground in the face of that persecution, which includes attempts from within ecclesial structures to change the faith to suit the world’s priorities. While I warn potential converts that there really is no entirely safe space to escape this revolution, and that they should not assume that all American Orthodox are morally and theologically conservative, they are generally correct that Orthodoxy has deep resources that they might not find in other churches.(Of course I’m bracketing out the question of Truth here. Should you go to an Orthodox parish even if you don’t believe that Orthodoxy’s claims are all true? About twenty years ago, when we were still Catholic, my wife and I, with our then-baby, traveled from New York to suburban Baltimore to visit our friends the Mathewes-Greens. Father Gregory M-G was at the time the founding priest of Holy Cross, an Antiochian Orthodox parish in Linthicum. We were able to go to the first half hour of Orthodox liturgy there before we had to slip out to go up the street to the Catholic parish, to fulfill our Sunday obligation. The difference was stark. No, “stark” doesn’t begin to describe it. We Catholics walked out of an Orthodox parish where the liturgy was so rich, and entered a 1970s-style modernist church that looked like Our Lady of Pizza Hut, and were present for a totally dispirited and dispiriting mass. Altar girls, the Gather hymnal, all of it. The priest was retiring, and that day happened to be his last sermon. He preached about how much he was going to enjoy living in Florida. That was his farewell to his congregation.I was both sad and angry, so much so that I asked my wife if we could leave, because I was in no condition to take communion. We walked out to the parking lot to go back to the Orthodox parish for coffee hour. We couldn’t even look at each other. My wife said, “Don’t say it.” I didn’t have to say anything. Five years later, we were Orthodox.I bring this up not to proselytize here — I don’t use this blog for that — but to open a discussion up on the nature of religious truth in this liquid-modern moment. When I was walking out of Our Lady of Pizza Hut, carrying my baby boy, I wondered how on earth we were going to be able to raise him to be Catholic in a church (I’m speaking broadly of the US Catholic church) that didn’t seem to care about catechism or discipleship. It was easy for me to see why a kid raised in Holy Cross down the road would come to love Orthodoxy, and choose to live the faith as an adult. But the situation at OLOPH was just an exaggerated version of what I had seen in many ordinary Catholic parishes, which felt like sacrament factories. At the time, my wife and I believed that what the Catholic Church taught was true, and that meant that we should be Catholic, despite everything else. Eventually, as regular readers know, the situation in our own lives reached a breaking point, and we no longer had it within us to believe that Catholicism’s claims were true, at least not true in a way that had any binding effect on us.For us — well, for me — a key moment was when my wife came to me one day after mass, in tears. She said that for the first time in her life, she felt that she was “losing Jesus.” She had converted to Catholicism from Evangelicalism of her own volition just before we married. Though I didn’t ask her to convert, she had done so because she met me, a Catholic, and afterward read herself into the Catholic Church. And now she was telling me, her husband, that because of that decision and all that followed, she was afraid that she was going to lose her faith entirely.What would you have done if you were me, and your spouse said that? I understood well what she meant, too; my faith was in big trouble too. It compelled me to start thinking about the nature of Truth, and to understand for the first time the limits of propositional thinking. That is, I began thinking that it did not matter much if the Catholic Church [or any church] professed to believe a series of truthful propositions if the real-world experience within that church makes it difficult to know those truths in a concrete way. This eventually led us to Orthodoxy.As I was working on this post, my Orthodox friend Frederica Mathewes-Green responded to the Pope Francis post, and the speculation about which churches and traditions will be able to stand firm, by e-mailing this to me:

Rod, I think there are a few reasons we can trust Orthodoxy will stand firm under the coming onslaught.

1. The first has to do with theology. My family left our mainline denomination when bishops started preaching strange things, like denying the Resurrection. We found in Orthodoxy a church where theology can’t be changed. I’ll explain why that’s so below.

But I want to be clear I’m not claiming it’s the perfect Church. The Orthodox Church is as susceptible as any other church to temptations of power. Our leaders aren’t infallible. But the main thing my husband and I were seeking was theology that won’t change, and we found it.

In the West, we think of theology as something that comes from theologians, kind of like milk comes from cows. They’re the experts who can rephrase an ancient faith for a new generation. The Catholic Church holds a vast treasury of stable, unchangeable written doctrine—but theologians are expected to ponder it, explore it, discover new ways of looking at things, and come up with the language to reconcile the old with the new.

As a Catholic child in the 1950s, for example, I was taught that no one could go to heaven without a Catholic baptism. It was a scary thought, and one that probably caused my Catholic ancestors some heartbreak over the centuries. But if the Church said it, it was true.

Today, if you pursue this question in the Catholic Church, you’re more likely to hear that wanting to know God is what’s important. That should be seen as faith like a mustard seed. It might be sufficient for salvation, even without faith in Jesus, even in a faith that explicitly rejects Jesus.

That idea will definitely go down more smoothly in modern times. But it’s not what small-o orthodox Christians have believed for the last couple of millennia. How could one thing be true then, but not true now?

This indicates a built-in problem with the system. Theologians, like all academics, have to keep coming up with original things to say. If you just kept repeating the words you received from your old professors, it would get you nowhere. What you need is fresh, even daring, new material. And that means theology will always be in flux.

A venerable Catholic theologian once told me, with great irritation, “Lay people don’t understand what theology is!” They think it’s set in stone, he said, but it’s always evolving and progressing. He seemed to think that theology was something lay people could never hope to keep up with. Their meddling was annoying. They should get out of the way, and wait for the professionals to tell them what the new thinking is.

Theology has a completely different basis in Orthodoxy. It doesn’t change, because it is the faith taught by the Apostles themselves; Orthodoxy is the unbroken continuation of the Church founded by Christ, and carried by the Apostles into the world. We do keep repeating the words we received from our teachers and elders in Christ. Orthodoxy doesn’t need updating, because it provides everything a person needs to be saturated with the presence of God (a process called “theosis”). It fits the needs of every human being like water and air do, no matter what culture or time.

And we have proof: there are men and women alive today, as in every age, who are so filled with the presence of Christ that they are wonder-workers. Those who persevere on this challenging road will do the works that Jesus did (John 14:12). Since we recognize these living saints in every time and place, we know that the theology of the Orthodox Church works.

(BTW, the various jurisdictions, like Greek or Antiochian Orthodox, practice the same faith and are in communion with each other. The different terms come from a century ago, with immigration from different homelands. Today most churches worship in English, and most congregations are an American-style mix of backgrounds.)

I think this idea, that theology “works,” just doesn’t occur in the West. We don’t think of theology as having practical, visible result; it’s a purely intellectual pursuit. But what we believe shapes us and guides us, whether we realize it or not. I asked a man who’d been Orthodox all his life what one word he would use to describe it. He said “Organic.” It’s a good one.

This different understanding of what “theology” is reveals the difficulty of reuniting the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. For Catholics, “unity” means that the Orthodox would acknowledge the headship of the pope, and would otherwise be allowed to follow their own worship and theology. But for Orthodox, “unity” means unity of belief; there can be no unity apart from coming into the unbroken stream of faith from the time of the Apostles.

The noted sociologist of religion Peter Berger observed that Orthodox and Catholic theologians had met and come up with statements both sides could accept—but it wouldn’t make any difference to church members. “The little old babushka who kisses the icon knows that what she does is different from the Catholics down the road.” He said, “In a nasty moment, I called many such negotiations ‘border negotiations between nonexistent countries.’”

2. Orthodox theology is taught through worship. Many of the early Christians were poor and illiterate, so the services are packed with Scripture, and go deep into history and theology. It’s all set to music, and important verses may be repeated two or three times. The whole interior of a church (ideally) serves as a picture bible, the walls and ceiling covered with paintings of the events and people of the Bible and church history. If you want to learn the Orthodox understanding of something, Christ’s Ascension maybe, you would wouldn’t consult a contemporary writer; you’d look up the prayers, hymns, and icons of the day.

This worship can’t be changed. Nobody has the authority to change it. Over the centuries this unchanging worship was carried everywhere by missionaries, and always translated into the local language (in 4th century Rome, translated into Latin). As a result, Orthodoxy is astonishingly consistent everywhere it is practiced. (I do mean practiced). It’s the same, no matter where you drop in, circling the world or spanning the centuries.

No Western church has such unity. In fact, nearly every Western church changed its worship in recent decades, shifting the focus from God to the needs of the worshiper. With that, authority disappeared.

3. What holds Orthodox people together is community memory—a memory of the faith continuous from the time of the Apostles. No one can go back in time and change that memory. Someone who tried would only demonstrate that he had left the community.

There’s a story that illustrates this. There was an Orthodox pastor in Brooklyn who, in 1893, went to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. While there he shared his opinion that all religions are equal, and it doesn’t matter which one you believe. When he got home, he put his key in the church door and it wouldn’t turn. His parishioners had already changed the locks on him.

In the West, theology is something lay people receive from the experts. But in Orthodoxy, preserving the common faith is everybody’s job. St. Basil (d. 379) told of Orthodox laity gathering for worship in snowy fields, when all the churches were pastored by heretics. That’s the spirit.

Of course, there are Orthodox people who write in support of one change or another (perhaps that of revised sexual morality—more on that below). It occurred to me recently that there was something that the authors of such pieces almost always have in common: they’re associated with a college or university. That’s a setting where new ideas chase each other down the halls.

Anyone’s free to write whatever he wants, of course, but the influence of such people doesn’t extend very far. You’re not going to convince Orthodox lay people that the Church has been wrong about something for 2000 years. We don’t need to defend the Church; the stability of the Church, in fact, surrounds and supports us. Those who want to argue can be treated with love, patiently answered, or (my favorite) ignored.

My husband and I, some 30 years ago, were looking for a church that would stand by the ancient faith. (“Have a Nicene day!” a friend’s t-shirt said.) We found what we were seeking. We can be confident that Orthodox theology will never change.

4. But the main controversy today regards sexual morality. The Orthodox Church always has, and always will, teach that everyone is called to chastity. That term means, in the case of the unmarried, celibacy; for the married (heterosexual only), chastity means being faithful, and treating each other with love and respect.

No matter what sexual desires are new topics of conversation, they are not new desires. Humans have always felt a variety of sexual desires, and the Orthodox Church has always guided them in one-to-one spiritual direction that is both private and personal. The Church’s teaching on sexuality is not mere theory, but practical wisdom gained from many centuries of experience in seeing what helps or hinders union with Christ.

The Catholic Church has some large organizations promoting the LGBT cause, like Dignity and New Ways Ministry. Pope Francis has written admiringly of New Ways. Orthodoxy has no such prospering, media-friendly organizations. The websites of Orthodox jurisdictions offer support for traditional morality, including clear statements from our bishops. (You might not hear about them; the media takes no notice.)

But a young person dealing with unwanted desires, and wondering how he should live as a faithful Christian, is not likely to look up the bishops’ official statements. The amount of time any of us spend in the Church’s teaching, or in worship, Scripture, and prayer, is far outweighed by the time we spend soaking in liquid modernity. We’re constantly being nudged toward seeing anything old-fashioned as narrow-minded and absurd. This persona is most likely to take his questions to his parish priest.

It’s a huge responsibility for a priest to bear. He may know clearly what he believes, but not know how to express it, not in terms that the world could understand. But if he can regularly communicate the principle of chastity to his flock in general, all the more-personal matters can be discussed in confession.

We all go to confession. We all sin and struggle. We fall and we get up, we fall and we get up, over and over. In Orthodoxy, awareness of yourself as a sinner is the key to gratitude and joy, because God forgives us freely, and loved us so much that he gave his Son.

What someone tells the priest in confession is nobody else’s business. As we say about fasting, “Keep your eyes on your own plate.” A priest can make his own job easier by preaching and teaching what the Church knows by experience: that chastity is beautiful, and charged with spiritual power. Chastity is worth struggling for.

5. Orthodoxy in America is enjoying an advantage that’s simply a feature of the times. While there are some Orthodox parishes where the congregation is shrinking (and aging), in others it is growing, due to an influx of converts. And there are a lot of them. These statistics aren’t recent, but they roughly hold true: converts make up around 50% of the membership in the Greek Orthodox and Orthodox Church in America (Russian roots) jurisdictions, and in the Antiochian jurisdiction, 73% of the clergy are converts.

In the churches they join, converts will meet the other 50%, who have been practicing the Orthodox faith all their lives. These experienced ones can pass on the things converts can’t get out of books, and show them how to put their new faith into practice.

What converts bring is passion and dedication, which revitalizes any church. There’s also a curious phenomenon, that the majority of inquirers are men (with a surge during covid, pastors say), and they’re looking for structure, deep tradition, and a challenge. Converts are likely to be well-read, and have a good understanding of the Church’s theology and history. They’re an asset to any church.

Orthodoxy in America is in revival, and that makes it a lively place to be. In other times and places revival has been a temporary state, so it can’t be expected to last forever. At the moment, though, it’s a great time to become Orthodox.

Again, I’m not trying to proselytize here. Since writing The Benedict Option , I have aimed my work at “small-o orthodox Christians” — what Touchstone magazine calls “mere Christians” — because I genuinely care about them, and because the survival of us Orthodox Christians, a tiny minority in America, depends on the health of Catholicism and Protestantism. This might sound paradoxical, given that we are receiving inquirers and converts from the weaknesses of Catholicism and Protestantism, but overall, small-o orthodox Christians sink or swim together in this country. The days of triumphalism are over.I would like to hear from readers of any Christian church, and from Jewish and Islamic readers, about whether 1) you think it is necessary now to find a “safe place of worship” to make your and your family’s stand as believers, and if so, 2) what have you done about it?  Have events of the past few years changed your mind? If so, how? What would you tell a seeker who turned up at your church, seeking a safe place, in the sense that I mean (that is, a place that is a dynamic community committed to steadfast orthodoxy)? Would you welcome them, or would you tell them to find another place?

UPDATE: Hoo boy, in the coming Integralist state, the Catholic bishops sure are going to be harsh taskmasters:

Here are seven attitudes we can all adopt as we continue our synodal journey together. Which one inspires you the most? Let us know in the comments below. @Synod_va

Learn more about how you can participate in the synod at https://t.co/oyYWZvuaVI. #ListeningChurch #Synod pic.twitter.com/SaGcJptgQO

— U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (@USCCB) January 10, 2022

Go to the tweet and read the responses. Those Catholics are not having this Moralistic Therapeutic Deism stuff from the bishops.

UPDATE.2: A Catholic friend wrote earlier tonight with a rather sensible response to all this. I don’t have permission to quote him directly (I’m writing this in the middle of the night, and like all sensible people, he’s probably asleep), so I’ll paraphrase.

He says the key to any form of Christianity, or any traditional religion, standing against the tide of modern culture has less to do with theology and more to do with whether or not a group of believers are able to carve out distinct religious identities, such that religion is a countercultural way of life, not a hobby. It’s not that theology is unimportant, but that’s not the deciding factor, he says. The deciding factor is whether or not you believe in the faith strong enough to bear the costs of living it in a hostile culture. It’s not coincidence, he says, that Catholics were able to preserve their faith when they were struggling against a majority Protestant culture, only to watch is crumble shortly after they were fully assimilated. Today, he warns, if you seek to be assimilated into the elite class in American society, you are going to have to abandon traditional Christianity, or tie yourself up in knots with ketman [camouflage strategies] and rationalizations.

The post Church As Where You Take Your Stand appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture War Forever?

The left-liberal writer Shadi Hamid speculates that the culture war might be with us forever. Excerpts:

Various right-wing intellectuals have long fantasized about an electoral holy grail of economic populism and social conservatism. In Britain, they were known as “red Tories,” but such grand projects of realignment tended to fizzle out. They were compelling in theory but not necessarily in practice—perhaps until now. As the conservative writer and podcaster Saagar Enjeti argued in 2020: “The whole reason that the GOP has been able to even compete for so long is that despite their horrible economics, they do hold the cultural positions of so much of the American people. But they keep thinking they’re winning because of their economic policy and losing because of their cultural policy, when really it’s the opposite.”

As Democrats hemorrhage working-class support—not only among white people but also among communities of color whom the party was counting on—the new right sees an opportunity.

Yes, as a Red Tory, I hope so! But look at what the top House Republican is talking about. I agree with Rachel Bovard’s snarky line:

2008 called and wants its talking points back. https://t.co/I0qTB7FPs5

— Rachel Bovard (@rachelbovard) January 10, 2022

Shadi Hamid says that as Republican voters move farther from free-market orthodoxy, cultural conflicts are the most important way the two parties can distinguish themselves from the other. As J.D. Vance has said, “Culture war is class war.” More Hamid:

As the political scientists Adam Przeworski and John Sprague note, “class is salient in any society, if, when, and only to the extent to which it is important to political parties which mobilize workers.” But neither Democrats nor Republicans are likely to become workers’ parties anytime soon. Conservatives’ rhetorical interest in the working class remains largely electoral and opportunistic. Meanwhile, the left is preoccupied with language policing, elite manners, and a kind of cultural progressivism far more popular among hypereducated white liberals than working-class Latino, Black, Asian, and Arab Americans.

Republicans and Democrats may simply converge around a diffuse and vague economic populism and call it a day. To distinguish themselves from each other in a two-party system, they will have to underscore what makes them different rather than what makes them similar. And what makes them different—unmistakably different—is culture. This isn’t just instrumental, though, a way to rally the base and mobilize turnout. If one listens to what politicians and intellectuals in these two warring tribes actually say, it seems clear enough: They believe that civilization is at stake, and who am I to not take them at their word? If the end of America as we know it is indeed looming, then the culture war is the one worth fighting—perhaps forever, if that’s what it takes.

There is a common fallacy one observes on the Left, which holds that in instances of culture war, conservatives are always and everywhere the aggressors, whereas the Left just wants to live in peace and rationality. This is absurd, of course, but unless you live and work in heavily liberal environments, you might not appreciate how sincerely so many people on the Left believe this self-serving myth.

For the contemporary Left, the most important culture war battle is that over transgenderism, and gender ideology more generally. Here is a young TikTok berserker to give you an idea of how fanatically passionate these people can be:

Gender binary is propaganda now pic.twitter.com/whAAKGO0DX

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) January 10, 2022

I will be delivering a lecture later this week at a conference, on the five most important lies we must face today. One of them is that if you keep your head down, this battle will pass you by. It won’t. These left-wing activists who have conquered American institutions won’t let it happen. Take a look at this short video about what Amazon did to Ryan T. Anderson and his book about the transgender moment:

Last February, Amazon delisted EPPC President @RyanTAnd’s “When Harry Became Sally” after having sold the book for three years. Learn more about this story, and the dangers of Big Tech censorship, in this video from the @DailySignal: pic.twitter.com/WpAAS5VtPt

— Ethics and Public Policy Center (@EPPCdc) January 10, 2022

I’ve read the book, and it’s very, very good. You can still buy it on Barnes & Noble’s website, and at other outlets. But Amazon has so much power over the retail book market that if Amazon won’t sell books like Anderson’s, then books like Anderson’s won’t be published.

The reader MichaelGC had this to say about the war over Truth that we all have to wage with transgenderism advocates:

[Rod:] We ought to emphasize that we don’t wish to persecute trans people, and of course nobody should ever bully trans people. But this madness has to be stopped. We can and we should point out the utter hypocrisy of the new trans “live and let live” approach: that the trans movement and its allies want to force their radical view on everybody else!

I came to much the same decision you did. We must bring war to this virulently destructive cult; we must engage them and defeat them to make the world safe for sanity. Of course, when I say “bring war” to them I mean figuratively. We fight them with words of truth, It won’t be hard. Their whole side is shot through with such magnitudes of error it should be a breeze.

For example, we keep getting this outdated phrase “assigned (male || female) at birth” although such a thing has never happened and in fact cannot happen. In the first place, no one in the delivery room has the power to “assign sex.” Sex happens at conception, not birth, and depends on whether the always-X female haploid gamete was fertilized by an X or Y male haploid gamete to form a cell that will become a girl (an XX zygote) or a boy (XY zygote). Sex is decided at the moment of conception. before you can even be aware, being but a single cell without so much as a vestigial brain. At birth or (increasingly lately) ultrasound, sex is merely observed. By that time your cell has divided again and again to form the cells, tissues organs, and systems that work together as a boy or a girl. You can’t do a thing to change that regardless of how much you don’t like them apples.

Our deranged, derelict elites do not want us to know these simple facts of human conception, they want us ignorant and confused. In fact, if they do nothing more than manage to get some people confused, they consider that progress. Recently “Rachel” Levine, a man who dresses as a woman but looks nothing like one, was promoted by Biden to “4 star female admiral.” But he’s male, a father of 2 and words mean things. Two Congress people pointed out the fact and were promptly suspended. See what’s going on? “From now on, we’ll tell you what a woman is or is not. You had best agree with us or we will punish you.” Shortly after that breakdown on Twitter’s part I abandoned their platform in deep disgust.

No Twitter, no FaceBook, no any other entity. You are dead wrong and deserve to be isolated. and there are going to be some changes as sane, rational people intervene and clean up the thoughtless, sizable mess you have made. Get in there, people. Fight the good fight that is now upon you. Now is your time. Dante’s Inferno has a special place for those who cling to neutrality at a dire time like this. Not fighting is not an option. The grotesque falsehood that is “gender identity” must be kicked back to the Abyss of oblivion where it belongs.

Like I said, I came independently to the same conclusion you did just by reading and observing. I read Gabriel Mac’s [2019] essay, “The End of Straight”.Correction: I read as much as I could stomach of it. It is a Gender Identity/Transgender Manifesto as much as any other that is out there these days. As you might expect, it is based on a worldview and view of humanity that is as dark, dreary, depressing, and unhealthy as any other you would hope to avoid having to read.

Towards the end of “The End of Straight” is where it really starts to break down. For example:

I don’t need to illuminate The End of Straight with investigative reporting. By arranging, just so, scenes and quotes from experts into that argument. Heteronormativity is so dead that ringing that knell is already belated, regardless of whether the people participating in its backlashing death throes can admit it yet.

What you call “heteronormativity” is just nature running its course as it has been observed doing for thousands of years (and yes, human nature is Nature) and is going nowhere despite all the efforts of you and your ilk to kill it. Men and women still find each other and will continue to do so long after you are gone. They will participate in the cycle of life using the procreative power of their bodies. You are so far removed from reality and are so wrong, Gabriel Mac. Andrea Long Chu is another one out there who considers himself an intellectual powerhouse, though he does little but produce a lot of bad writing like this.

There’s also this:

Even homonormativity is dying, now that establishment gays are finally campaigning for poor and trans and POC queer rights. Transnormativity has forever been challenged by the nonbinary and genderqueer and genderfluid, who have more platforms than ever, and who increase the permissions for every one of us by pointing out the colonialist absurdity that the number of genders encompassing all complex humanity could be two.

“Colonialist absurdity?” Rather, reality since the most ancient of times, reality now and always, forever. It is observed that there are 2 sexes (or genders, if you will) that exist in Nature. “Gender fluid” and “non-binary” have not been observed at all, but their existence is falsely asserted, nonetheless.

Here’s something else. Nothing happens in a vacuum in this world. Lies allowed to flourish unchecked cause harm, start mocking us for our cowardice, continue to damage and undermine truth, and replace order with chaos, being inimical to the common good.

Lia Thomas, a male swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania switched from competing with males to competing with females, and is ruining girl’s sports by crushing girls’ times with his male physique. A USA Swimming official quit, saying simply ‘I can’t support this.’ Coach David Salo supported the move, saying of the NCAA “They are destroying women’s sports.” The girls who had been cheated considered boycotting final meet in protest, but decided not to lest the NCAA respond with vindictiveness and retaliate against the girls by banning them from Ivy League championships going forward. Fear and intimidation works.

That’s not the worst of what is going on. In California, State Senator Scott Wiener wants anyone who uses conventional pronouns with self-identified transgenders thrown in jail according to his hideous piece of legislation, SB 219. Shot down unanimously and emphatically last year for being unconstitutional, Wiener and the State attorney general appealed and secured a hearing before the CA Supreme Court.

Another piece of mischief Wiener is responsible for is SB132, about the transfer of men purporting to be women to female prisons. Wiener wants wildly violent felons to be housed with women who will have no choice but to have their intimate privacy and security invaded and will have no escape.

Even worse, certain senators want this rolled out nationwide without further delay. Read the document to see how twisted it is. Excerpt:

The most egregious change made to the revision was to import the novel and undefined term “biological sex” into the policy as the initial consideration when making housing and programming assignments. But the term “biological sex” is an imprecise term that is often used to redefine “sex” to exclude transgender people from legal protections and considerations.

One’s sex is not valid, only their stated “gender identity” is, and it doesn’t have to mean anything. This is the doings of cruel, ill-intentioned people, and it is going to get very ugly. Getting rid of this is our test and our challenge.

Is this aspect of the culture war civilizational? You might not think so, but I was present at a private meeting seven years ago, shortly after Obergefell, in which a political scientist said that the true civilizational challenge was not from homosexuality, but rather from transgenderism. He said that “if we lose the gender binary,” we are finished as a civilization. Someone asked him why, and he said that the binary is present in so very many of our civilization’s structures, but we have never had to think about it. Should it disappear, he said, we are going to find things collapsing around us that we never imagined were vulnerable. Since then, I have tried several times to get him to talk to me about it, even on background, but he won’t answer my e-mails. My guess is that he is too frightened within his institution to say more about the subject.

Why might one think of the challenge as civilizational? Well, look at population collapse around the world. Global fertility decline is a massive problem. If you don’t understand why this is something Americans should care about, read this. Excerpt:

[R]apidly declining population causes all sorts of social problems. We’ve already seen it in many American cities victimized by de-industrialization — Detroit became a byword for economic disaster in large part because its population fell by two thirds between 1950 and 2010.

Population collapse means services and infrastructure designed for a large population have to be downsized or (more realistically) left to rot. It means a strain on the tax base and intergenerational tension as a smaller proportion of workers has to shoulder the tax and work burden of caring for a larger population of retired people. The way America loads a terrific financial burden on families compounds this problem by forcing people to delay having kids until well into their 30s or even 40s. Where young parents can usually tap grandparents for free child care, middle-aged parents often have to care for both babies and declining parents at the same time. Is it any wonder so many millennials just don’t feel like procreating?

The thing is, European countries have generous welfare state benefits for families, but they haven’t really been able to arrest population decline either. The decision to have or not to have children is not simply a matter of economics. Even in times of poverty, people have chosen to have families, because having children is just what one does. But that is no longer the case. We are forgetting why family matters, and how to form and sustain families. Radically individualist and hedonist modern culture is as anti-family as it can possibly be. If a people comes to believe that not even the sex binary is stable, it will become even more difficult, psychologically, to couple and form families.

Richard Dawkins — yes, that Richard Dawkins — says that it is nuts to deny the reality of the sex binary in nature. Dawkins writes sympathetically about people with gender dysphoria, and makes sure to get a crack in at the expense of Christians. But he also says:

Sex transition is an arduous revolution—physiological, anatomical, social, personal and familial—not to be undertaken lightly. I doubt that Jan Morris would have had much time for a man who simply flings on a frock and announces, “I am now a woman.” For Dr Morris, it was a ten-year odyssey. Prolonged hormone treatment, drastic surgery, readjustment of social conventions and personal relationships—those who take this plunge earn our deep respect for that very reason. And why is it so onerous and drastic, courageously worthy of such respect? Precisely because sex is so damn binary! Changing sex is a big deal. Changing the race by which you identify is a doddle in comparison, precisely because race is already a continuous spectrum, rendered so by widespread intermarriage over many generations.

Changing your “race” should be even easier if you adopt the fashionable doctrine that race is a “social construct” with no biological reality. It’s less easy with sex, to say the least. Even the most right-on sociologist might struggle to argue that a penis is a social construct. Gender theorists bypass the annoying problem of reality by decreeing that you are what you feel, regardless of biology. If you feel you are a woman, you are a woman even if you have a penis. It would seem to follow that, if feelings really are all that matter, Rachel Dolezal’s claim to feel black, regardless of biology, should merit at least a tiny modicum of sympathetic discussion, if not outright acceptance.

Changing the subject to something much more interesting, the binary nature of sex very nearly handed Charles Darwin the key to discovering the genetic laws now correctly attributed to Gregor Mendel. What we call “Neo-Darwinism” (see below) would not have had to wait till the twentieth century, and would indeed be just plain “Darwinism”—the great naturalist came that close. And it was the binary nature of sex that brought him there.

The sex binary is a biological fact, one that cannot be gotten around. The trans revolution is trying to deny that our nature as humans is inextricably tied to our biology. Nobody can deny that some people are genuinely distressed by gender dysphoria. They should be treated compassionately, but we are fools to deny a fundamental truth of biology for political reasons. And, as Andrew T. Walker points out, to require people to affirm something they know is a lie is profoundly corrupting. Excerpt:

The psychologization and politicization of gender are not just at odds with our biology, they have disastrous social consequences. For one thing, women are simply erased. The New York Times engaged in an act of female erasure by noting that Schneider was the first “woman” to amass that sum on Jeopardy!. Or, take the recent example of the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who is biologically male but identifies as a female and is smashing female competitors? In both examples, we see men robbing women of things that are owed to women. To deny something to someone who is owed it has a definition: injustice. That is what today’s leftist conspiracy theories concerning gender are doing under the self-serving guise of the left’s own unchecked power.

The hypocrisy of our ruling class reaches no higher zenith than on occasions like this. The champions of social justice, equality, fairness, and feminism contradict each with the self-deluded lies they peddle to those who they believe will listen with supple attention. Denouncing conspiracies, they traffic in their own. The only difference between the conspiracy theories of the left from the right is that the ones from the left are buoyed by political correctness and often entertained by the media. The conspirators in this instance are a powerful confluence of media, academic, legal, and entertainment forces that mutually reinforce one another’s narrative in service to progressive power structures. Power at the expense of truth is a notorious play of ideologues.

In terms of creation knowledge, everyone knows the transgender narrative is false. As one of my friends often says, “If you can get society to believe a man can become a woman, you can get society to believe anything.”

But never go along with the madness of crowds. Not only are we encountering Orwellian power grabs, but we are also undermining the dignity of womanhood and threatening the common good of society. We cannot be a society organized around lies.

Gender ideology is a lie, but it is built on a deeper lie, which is the lie that made the Sexual Revolution possible: that we are what we desire, and that to deny sexual freedom is to deny full personhood. A reader e-mailed over the weekend to ask if I had heard of the work of J.D. Unwin. I had not. Unwin was an Oxbridge social anthropologist who in 1934 published a book called Sex And Culture, the thesis of which is that cultures that control and channel sexual desire flourish, while those that allow it to be freely expressed waste their energies and decline within generations. The reader sent me this interesting blog post by Kirk Durston, explaining the basics of Unwin’s book. Excerpts:

Here are a few of [Unwin’s] most significant findings:

Effect of sexual constraints: Increased sexual constraints, either pre or post-nuptial, always led to increased flourishing of a culture. Conversely, increased sexual freedom always led to the collapse of a culture three generations later.

Single most influential factor: Surprisingly, the data revealed that the single most important correlation with the flourishing of a culture was whether pre-nuptial chastity was required or not. It had a very significant effect either way.

Highest flourishing of culture: The most powerful combination was pre-nuptial chastity coupled with “absolute monogamy”. Rationalist cultures that retained this combination for at least three generations exceeded all other cultures in every area, including literature, art, science, furniture, architecture, engineering, and agriculture. Only three out of the eighty-six cultures studied ever attained this level.

Effect of abandoning prenuptial chastity: When strict prenuptial chastity was no longer the norm, absolute monogamy, deism, and rational thinking also disappeared within three generations.

Total sexual freedom: If total sexual freedom was embraced by a culture, that culture collapsed within three generations to the lowest state of flourishing — which Unwin describes as “inert” and at a “dead level of conception” and is characterized by people who have little interest in much else other than their own wants and needs. At this level, the culture is usually conquered or taken over by another culture with greater social energy.

Time lag: If there is a change in sexual constraints, either increased or decreased restraints, the full effect of that change is not realized until the third generation.

Have Unwin’s predictions panned out? Pretty well, Durston says. Read it all. 

As Philip Rieff observed half a century ago, sexual individualism is at the center of our therapeutic culture. We should not be surprised by the multifarious collapses we are living through now. Transgenderism is simply the next logical stage of the Sexual Revolution. We will have the culture war forever because the Sexual Revolution is ideological, and will not accept that its ideals destroy community and disintegrate the human personality.

UPDATE: Reader Jonah R.:

UPenn has a biologically male swimmer competing on its women’s swim team—a mediocre male swimmer, but one who can break records against other women. The actual women on the women’s team are reportedly despondent. Then Yale steps in with another dude on the women’s team who crushes the dude on the UPenn team. (All of this has happened in accordance with conservative prophecies and despite progressive denials that it would ever happen.)

But something interesting is happening: Neither the New York Times nor NPR, the two major information sources for a certain kind of professional progressive elite, has reported one word about this. Instead of heralding transgender victories, they’re utterly, conspicuously silent. They know this is wrong, and so it doesn’t fit the narrative. If you rely on the NYT and NPR for your news, it’s possible you’ve never even heard this was going on.

And then today, in response, Harvard’s athletics department tweets out a denunciation of “hate” and support of transgender athletes….and virtually every reply is negative.

Rod, this is the exposed scale on the underbelly of Smaug the dragon. If conservatives can’t fire a deeply injurious arrow on this issue here and now, when most people think having dudes in women’s sports is ludicrous, wrong, and anti-woman, then conservatives will lose, and will deserve to lose for not being able to read and respond to the screamingly obvious in the culture.

 

 

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Down With CRT! Jill Su’s Life Mattered

In 2014, a wealthy south Florida woman, Jill Halliburton Su, was murdered:

The wife of a prominent professor and a relative of the founders of the billion-dollar Halliburton oil empire, Su lived in an upscale mansion in a gated Florida community. In her spare time, she read to the blind and raised money for various charities.

But everything changed Monday when Su, 59, was found dead in a bizarre murder mystery that is raising more questions than answers.

“She was always involved in helping others. She was the first person to volunteer for anything,” says her friend Theresa Randolph, who she has known for more than a decade. “Just a very sweet, kind, giving woman.”

On Monday morning, Dr. Nan Yao Su, a professor of entomology at the University of Florida’s Research and Education Center in Fort Lauderdale, tried to watch the live feed of his home’s security cameras. When he was unable to see the feed, he called home. Receiving no answer, he called his adult son and asked him to check on the house.

When the son arrived at the waterfront mansion, he found a chilling scene. A glass door had been broken; shards of glass covered the ground. At least one room had been ransacked. And worst of all, his mother was lying dead in a bathtub.

Jill Su, white murder victim (Source)

Police eventually arrested Dayonte Resiles for the murder. His DNA was found on the murder weapon. He went on trial late last year. He is black; his victim was white. The result:

Dayonte Resiles killed Jill Halliburton Su by stabbing her to death and leaving her lifeless body in a bathtub in her Davie home — on that much, jurors could agree.

But they couldn’t agree on a murder charge, according to the jury forewoman, because three members refused to sign off on a verdict that would send a young Black man to prison for the rest of his life. For a short time, the nine who wanted a first-degree murder conviction were willing to budge. A manslaughter conviction would send Resiles to prison for 15 years, not for life. All 12 jurors signed off on manslaughter late Tuesday.

But that, according to the forewoman, would not have been justice. Not for her. Not for the defendant. Not for the victim. “What have I done?” she thought.

In an interview Thursday night, the forewoman, who asked not to be identified by name, shed light on what happened in the deliberation room in the days leading up to the hung jury and mistrial, describing a cauldron of anger, mistrust, betrayal and, underscoring it all, accusations of racial and anti-police bias.

It came to a head Tuesday night, when the manslaughter verdict was read, and the forewoman was faced with the usually-routine question of whether she agreed with the group’s decision.

Only a few seconds passed, but the forewoman’s mind was racing. She thought of the victim and the family left behind. She felt the eyes of the judge and the prosecutor and the victim’s husband boring into her. She was torn between her agreement with her fellow jurors and her firm belief that the prosecution proved Resiles guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt.

“I just got a knot in the pit of my stomach. I looked at the defense table. They were just cheering and patting him on the back, like he graduated high school or made the winning touchdown at a football game,” she said. “I thought, what have I done? Is this the world I am creating for my children, a world where someone can get away with murder because of the color of their skin?”

Finally, she recalled the advice her husband gave her before the trial started: “Follow the law. Don’t cave.”

She was convinced Resiles did not commit manslaughter on Sept. 8, 2014 — he committed murder. Manslaughter was not her verdict.

“No,” she told the judge. She didn’t agree.

Her answer prompted the judge to send the jury back to the deliberation room. Her fellow jurors were incensed, she recalled.

“If I do leave here with friends, that would be great,” she recalled saying. “But at the end of the day, I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to give justice to Jill. This was about her.”

The holdout juror, who is a mixed-race Puerto Rican, said that some black jurors accused her of not caring about the life of a black man, who would go to prison for life if he were convicted of murder (versus manslaughter). Her refusal at the last minute to affirm the manslaughter charge made it possible to retry Resiles. Jury selection for the retrial began this month. (Another juror, this one a white man, later claimed that there was no racial animosity among jurors, though he did not explain why he believes that Resiles was guilty of murder, but he agreed to the manslaughter verdict.)

Richard Hanania observes:

Exactly. And this is why the further along we get in mainstreaming CRT, the closer we will come to civil war. You cannot expect people to sit back and accept that the murderer of their loved one should get a lesser sentence because of the color of his skin. Black people in this country had to live with that for many years. It was monstrously unjust. It always will be unjust to dole out justice on the basis of race, wealth, or anything else other than individual guilt or innocence. Our legal system cannot survive jurors who are willing to send people to prison, and keep them out of prison, on the basis of the defendant’s race. While we will never be able to achieve a system capable of producing perfect justice, we can get closer to that ideal. The Florida jury’s verdict is a huge step backward. It would be possible to look at this as an aberration, except for the fact that as Hanania points out, that immoral verdict is what you would expect under Critical Race Theory.

CRT and its implementation by institutional elites is tearing this country apart. While the media obsess over the MAGA yahoos of January 6, the real destruction of the American project is advancing through the law, through medicine, through business, and through the education system. And it is a project of the illiberal Left.

 

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What Is Hungarian Conservatism?

Last night my son Matt and I had dinner with my favorite teacher from high school, a historian. We got to talking about war and nations, and I mentioned that Matt and I were startled to learn last summer in Hungary about how the decisive fact in Hungarian political thinking of the past century is the Trianon Treaty. “Trianon,” as they call it, was the treaty that dealt with Hungary after World War I. It reduced Greater Hungary to a rump state, taking away two-thirds of its territory. The Hungarians regard it as a national catastrophe, as I explained, though I pointed out to my teacher that the Slovaks, Romanians, and other minorities who were at the time living under Hungarian rule in those territories, and who were given by Trianon their own land, do not think it was a catastrophe at all. Matt, showing that he has mastered one of the basic principles of historical analysis, then said, “You don’t have to agree with the Hungarian point of view to recognize how important this issue is to them, and to factor that in when you are trying to understand why they think the way they do.”

I went on to explain to my teacher that spending that time in Hungary was eye-opening because it revealed how willfully ignorant American governmental, policy, and media elites are about why the Hungarian government does the things it does — and why replacing Viktor Orban with some EU-friendly liberal would probably make less of a difference than many Westerners think. Hungary, I explained, has been at the mercy of Great Powers for most of the previous century. Trianon was imposed by the victors, and divided the country. Then, after World War II, the Soviets colonized Hungary, and kept it prisoner for forty years. Every Hungarian, no matter what his politics, feels deeply in his bones the sense of humiliation at having no national agency. Even many liberal Hungarians eager to cooperate with the European Union have within them a sense of the precarity of their freedom and self-determination.

Matt added that it didn’t start at Trianon. In 1848, Hungarian patriots cast off the Habsburg crown, and fought for Hungarian independence. Their initial victory was reversed when the Russians invaded at the Kaiser’s request, and restored Habsburg rule, though in modified form. The Habsburgs executed thirteen Hungarian generals who led the rebellion; they are remembered today in Hungary as the Thirteen Martyrs of Arad. 

The point is that if you want to understand why Hungarians think the way they do — about the EU, about immigration, and about many other things — you have to be aware of this history: the history of a distinct Central European people, with their own unique language, having to battle constantly against being conquered and having their identity and agency subsumed by the invaders. This does not make the Hungarians right about this or that issue, but it does help you understand their perspective.

With that history in mind, take a look at this YouTube clip of a speech young Viktor Orban, sporting a mullet, delivered in 1989 at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the 1950s Communist leader of Hungary executed by the invading Soviets for resisting them in 1956. Orban was a staunch anti-communist, but in this speech — delivered courageously in a ceremony attended by the Communist rulers of Hungary, who were still at that time in power — he praises Nagy for being a Hungarian patriot, defending the sovereignty of the nation despite his communism. Turn on the subtitles to understand the entire speech:

Now, I’d like to draw your attention to this new essay by Balazs Orban (no relation to the prime minister), the head of Matthias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest, and a top adviser to the Prime Minister. In it, he discusses the differences between Hungarian conservative thought and Anglo-Saxon conservative thought. Consider this:

Anglo-Saxon countries, as a rule, have long coastlines. For this reason, throughout their history they have been naval and trading powers, and frequently established overseas colonies. One consequence of this was that they encountered foreign cultures more frequently, and, as a result, regularly had to define the relationship of foreign cultures to their own. Continental powers fundamentally fear the emergence of nomadic peoples, while maritime powers are themselves nomadic.

In addition, Anglo-Saxon countries have at times pursued an expansionary foreign policy. This was, in part, to establish their values, including some form of their own social, political, and economic arrangements, in a given territory. There were economic and political reasons for this, since it enabled them to create a ‘familiar’ environment, a semi-domestic environment within their area of influence. At the same time, these processes led politicians and thinkers in these countries to ideologize, to a certain extent, the particular merits of the British or American way of life, as well as their political and economic systems, and to argue that they should replace the customs and traditions of indigenous peoples.

This is why Anglo-Saxon traditions and values have increasingly lost their pragmatic character, becoming instead a kind of political ideology with expansive political aspirations. These ideologizing processes were present during the heyday of the British Empire, during the Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, and after the emergence of the post-1990 neoliberal world order, and all have left their mark on Anglo-Saxon conservative thinking.

Look at this map of Central Europe, and where Hungary is located. “Continental powers fundamentally fear the emergence of nomadic peoples,” Balazs Orban writes (the Hungarians were themselves such a people when they first arrived in the Carpathian Basin that they settled). Geography goes a long way to explaining mindset:

This is crucial:

The guiding thread of Hungarian conservative thinking has always been to represent the Hungarian national interest, and thus the preservation of the country’s sovereignty and freedom—this is understood to supersede any theoretical concepts.11 The Hungarian conservative tradition is in this sense pragmatic, in that it makes flexible use of the means at its disposal to attain its ends. One might remark that there is nothing surprising in this, since conservative thought is taken to be pragmatic in principle. But how does this attitude manifest itself in Hungarian conservative thinking? In the fact that Hungarian conservative thinking is essentially defensive in character. If the central problem has always been the protection of Hungarian sovereignty, national and individual freedom, and the attainment of the national interest, then the economic and cultural expansion which has come to seem natural and self-evident in Anglo-Saxon countries has here taken a back seat. Indeed, Hungary’s experience has rather been one of being conquered by foreign powers, and of alien ideas and social phenomena entering the country despite having no organic roots within the local culture, meaning that the defence of Hungarian values and the attainment of the national interest became the guiding motives of Hungarian conservatism. As in the Anglo- Saxon example, it is also possible in the case of Hungarian conservatism to outline in four regards why Hungarian conservative thinking has become essentially defensive in nature.

One of the most obnoxious tendencies of American mainstream foreign policy elites, of both the Left and the Right, is the assumption that American values are universal, and should be accepted as such. I had no direct experience of foreign peoples who viewed the US as a culturally imperialist country until I started going to the countries of Central Europe. Once you start seeing things through their eyes, it’s remarkable (or was to this American) how much of a bully we Americans can be. It’s not that they reject all our values; in fact, they agree with most of them. What they resent is American arrogance in using our soft power and hard power to turn all foreign people into Americans. I used to think that this was pretty much a vacant leftie complaint, but when you experience it on your own, you realize that it really is true. Viktor Orban is the bête noire of the European Union, but it is crucially important to grasp that he does not demand that other EU countries follow Hungary’s values and example; he only wants Hungary to be left alone to govern itself as it sees fit, within general limits. He is defending Hungarian sovereignty. If Hungarian voters turn the Fidesz Party out of office later this spring and overturn the law banning LGBT material aimed at minors, then fine: that is a decision that will have been made by the Hungarian people, through their duly elected representatives. It will not have been imposed on them by Brussels.

B. Orban explains that in the 19th century, Hungary’s ruling class wanted to modernize the nation, but to do so on terms that suited Hungary. That is, they accepted the need to modernize, but wanted to do so in ways that preserved Hungarian sovereignty and traditions. The emphases are mine in this passage below:

 In the first half of the 1870s, the threat of state bankruptcy was a daily topic of conversation. It was in this situation that János Asbóth, a former government official and Member of Parliament, published a book entitled Hungarian Conservative Politics, which— as the name suggests—emphasized the need for a conservative change in political direction.19 The significance of Asbóth and his work cannot be overemphasized, as his ideas are, in a sense, echoed in Hungarian conservative thinking to this day. The essence of Asbóth’s critique is that the bankruptcy of liberal politics stems from the fact that liberals consider theory more important than practice.20 In other words, they are more interested in whether liberal principles prevail in a political decision than in whether the decision is truly to the benefit or detriment of the nation, or in line with Hungarian interests.

It is worth noting that Asbóth’s criticism is directed against the excessive liberalism of the governing elite. He criticizes the rapidly alternating liberal administrations for adopting Western patterns in the belief that these will bring automatic benefits, without considering their long-term effects on the life of the nation. For example, Asbóth cites the regulation of economic conditions. Governments expected so much from free competition that they introduced all the elements of a laissez-faire economic system almost at once. According to Asbóth, this was a mistake: at that time Hungarian economic actors were not yet ready to compete with better-funded Austrian and Czech industries, and the domestic economy, far from flourishing, entered a period of recession. This is a painfully familiar phenomenon—we need only consider the missteps of the Hungarian liberal administrations in the post-1989 period.

Think of what happened to Russia in the aftermath of the USSR’s collapse. Following American advice, the successor administration of Boris Yeltsin tried shock therapy to establish a free market economy. It caused chaos and widespread despair, and led to the popular election of Vladimir Putin. Similarly, in Hungary, many of the state-owned industries were sold at fire sale prices to Westerners, leaving Hungary at the mercy of foreigners. When I first arrived in Hungary back in 2018, I think it was, my Hungarian friend showing me around told me that a big reason Viktor Orban became popular after his election in 2010 was that he repatriated many of those industries. She said that you could say that he put them in the hands of his political cronies, which might be true, but beside the point: Hungarians have the power to deal with that kind of thing through their elected representatives, but they were powerless when ownership was foreign.

B. Orban says that what we now call “national conservatism” is an Anglo-Americanization of Hungarian conservatism:

This movement calls itself national conservatism, and, curiously, the views it espouses reflect— presumably unintentionally—the principles of national Hungarian conservative thought. The movement is critical of globalization, encourages opposition to the unconditional enforcement of free trade, criticizes liberal politics for its lack of interest in practical results, and sees the pursuit of national interests and the preservation of national traditions as the primary task of politics. So what was new in the West in the 2010s is essentially the natural state of conservative thinking and politics in Hungary. It is not difficult to see why it has turned out this way. We Hungarians already had to deal with the problems currently faced by the West—and especially in the Anglo-Saxon world—in the nineteenth century. We were among those compelled to adapt to a changing world, rather than the other way around. We had to learn how to preserve our independence and how to assert our interests in a world where conditions did not depend so much on our will as on the limitations of our strategic thinking and room for manoeuvre.

Read the whole thing. It’s really interesting. You don’t have to agree with or support Viktor Orban to learn from this essay. One gets so weary of the mantras repeated by American establishment talking heads of the Left and the Right, about how Hungary is one step away from fascism, blah blah blah. It is demonstrably untrue, and reflects not only ignorance of the facts, but also the knee-jerk substitute of ideology for reality. I recall Peter Kreko, one of the foremost liberal critics of the Orban government, saying last summer at the Esztergom festival, when he and I were onstage together, that his allies in the West do the anti-Orban forces no favors by talking about Hungary as fascist, or near-fascist. It’s simply not true, and as I see it, it is yet another example of arrogant Western do-gooders trying to impose their own ideological view of the world on peoples whose histories and values are different.

Last summer, I wrote an essay in The Spectator defending Orban from Western criticism. I said, in part, with reference to the new, highly controversial law prohibiting the dissemination of pro-LGBT information to minors and preserving parental authority when it comes to the sex education of their children:

Thanks to the new Orbán-backed law, Hungarian parents won’t have to deal with their kids coming home from school asking them what gender they are, really. They won’t have to worry, like many American parents do, that their children’s school is conspiring to keep their child’s gender identity secret from them. They won’t have to worry, like British parents, about a 4,000 percent increase in youth referrals for gender treatment in just a decade.

I imagine that most Hungarian parents will support this, and if not, Hungary remains a democracy; on July 21, Orbán announced an upcoming national referendum on the law. In the meantime, Hungary retains a free press, which is at liberty to criticize the supposed homophobia and transphobia of the government, and to call on voters to reject the law in the referendum and throw the bigots out in 2022. Hungarians remain free to protest the state’s policies, as thousands of Pride protesters did in Budapest in late July. Of course, everything came off peacefully; some ‘Viktator’, that Orbán.

This is how things are supposed to work in a democracy. But now a coalition of democratic European leaders are ganging up on Hungary, threatening to smash it for daring to assert its own cultural sovereignty. They are vowing to withdraw EU funding over Hungary’s moves to keep NGOs and broadcasters from indoctrinating Hungarian children with cheerful songs featuring sexually mutilated beavers, in an effort to destroy what religious tradition, their mothers and fathers and common sense says is true about gender.

At the European summit earlier this summer, French president Emmanuel Macron, furious at Hungary’s new law, lashed out at conservative central European for undermining ‘what has built the core of our western liberal democracy for centuries’. Macron called it ‘a cultural, civilizational battle that we must fight’.

The idea that the Blues Clues Pride Parade aimed at pre-kindergarten children is rooted in centuries of Western democratic thought is about as absurd and ideological a claim as is possible to make. This shows you how fanatical Western elites are when it comes to Hungary. Even if you don’t agree with the Fidesz Party’s policies, read Balazs Orban’s essay to understand its roots. And if you are a conservative, read the essay to understand why some of us see Hungarian conservatism as a model on which to draw to create a new kind of American conservatism, one faithful to our own values and traditions.

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Pope Francis Is Queering The Catholic Church

The hits just keep coming from the Vatican:

In another sign of support for L.G.B.T. Catholics and those who advocate on their behalf, Pope Francis sent a handwritten letter on Dec. 10 to Jeannine Gramick, S.L., the co-founder of the Catholic apostolate New Ways Ministry.

Sister Gramick is celebrating 50 years of working with and advocating for L.G.B.T. people. Noting her anniversary as the reason for his letter, the pope congratulated her in Spanish on “50 years of closeness, of compassion and of tenderness” in a ministry that he described as being in “‘the style’ of God.”

Pope Francis’ letter to Sister Gramick is the latest in a series of letters from the pope written to gay Catholics and others who are serving and advocating for L.G.B.T. people.

In his letter, the pope praised Sister Gramick for her willingness to suffer for love’s sake. “You have not been afraid of ‘closeness,’” he wrote, “and in getting close you did it ‘feeling the pain’ and without condemning anyone, but with the ‘tenderness’ of a sister and a mother.”

[Interview: Sister Jeannine Gramick on being censured by the Vatican, 50 years of ministry and her hopes for LGBT Catholics]

“Thank you, Sister Jeannine,” the letter concluded, “for all your closeness, compassion and tenderness.”

Here is the full text of the letter:

December 10, 2021
Sister Jeannine Gramick, SL

Dear sister,

Many thanks for your letter. It made me happy to receive the news about your 50th anniversary.

Your letter reminded me of “the style” of God… God has his own style to communicate with us. And we could summarize that style in three words: closeness, compassion, tenderness.

And I am thinking of your 50 years of ministry, which were 50 years with this “style of God,” 50 years of closeness, of compassion and of tenderness.

You have not been afraid of “closeness,” and in getting close you did it “suffering with” [compassion] and without condemning anyone, but with the “tenderness” of a sister and a mother.

Thank you, Sister Jeannine, for all your closeness, compassion and tenderness.

I pray for you. Please do not forget to pray for me. Greetings to Yayo (Obdulio).

May Jesus bless you and the Holy Virgin protect you.

Fraternally,
Francisco

All this therapeutic language (“closeness, compassion, tenderness”) conceals the fact that Sr. Jeannine and her ministry has been leading people away from clear, authoritative Catholic teaching about sexuality, and homosexuality. In 1999, the Vatican’s chief doctrinal office, led then by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, ruled that New Ways Ministry fundamentally opposes Catholic teaching, and confuses the faithful, and that Sr. Jeannine and a priest colleague are forbidden from ministering to LGBT Catholics. Now, Pope Francis has brought the pro-gay, anti-Catholic ministry in from the cold.

Legalistic conservative Catholics, perhaps desperate to preserve their position, can say that with this Francis is not changing doctrine. And they are right — for now, at least. But that is an awfully thin reed on which to hang one’s hopes. All that doctrine written down on paper doesn’t mean much if the Church and its pastors don’t live by it. Francis is teaching as much by what he doesn’t say as by what he does. I just don’t see how one can get around the fact that the Roman pontiff is praising the defiance of church teaching by a progressive ministry — a ministry that just over twenty years ago was suppressed by the Vatican for that very defiance. I would not be surprised if Francis attempts to overturn Catholic teaching about homosexuality, thus provoking a schism.

Last week I was talking to a Protestant man who told me he and his family have reached the end of the line with Protestantism, and believe there is no realistic hope that it will be able to resist permissive modernism. He approached me to ask me about Orthodoxy and Catholicism. I told him that there is no institutional escape from these challenges, that we have within Orthodoxy in this country a contingent of liberal intellectuals who want to queer our churches too, as well as make other theological innovations to make Orthodoxy conform more to the spirit of the age. The best any of us can do is to find a place where we stand a better chance of weathering the storm.

He told me that he is attracted to the Catholic catechism, and the solid, coherent teaching of the Catholic Church, but sees things like what Pope Francis does (this was last week, before today’s announcement) and worries that if he and his family go Catholic, they will have signed up for something that is not what it appears to be. I told him that yes, that was my experience too: I read myself into the Catholic Church, but was shocked to discover that the Church of John Paul II and Richard John Neuhaus was not what I found in most parishes where I worshipped. Of course it was the same church as a matter of communion; what I meant was that it was a shock to me to become a Catholic in 1993 and to find that it was no escape at all from the divisions within Protestantism, but that all these same arguments took place under a canopy of unity that functioned more like a Potemkin façade.

For the time being, American Orthodoxy is not as vulnerable as American Catholicism is to liberalizing, but Orthodox would be fools to think we are somehow protected. I brought this up to an Orthodox priest once, who said that it doesn’t surprise him that Catholics are going this way, but he wasn’t worried about us Orthodox. I think that is whistling past the graveyard. One of the painful lessons I learned from my 13 years as a Catholic is how futile it is to rely on written texts and institutional practices to preserve the faith when the people don’t care to live out the faith’s teachings, and the clerical leadership doesn’t show that it believes orthodoxy and orthopraxy are important. I told the Protestant who contacted me asking my opinion that I thought he should become Orthodox, not only because I think Orthodoxy is a more accurate account of who God is and what He wants from us, but also because after 16 years of practicing the Orthodox faith, I have come to appreciate much more how important practice is to sedimenting doctrinal teachings into one’s bones.

This matters for a reason I could not have seen when I read myself into the Catholic Church as a young man. Three years after my Catholic conversion, an older friend who was leading his family out of the Episcopal Church was trying to figure out whether or not he should go Catholic or Orthodox. I made to him an argument for Catholicism. He said what made him balk was the question of whether or not the Catholic Church in this country was a safe place to raise his children. He wasn’t talking about abuse; he was talking about whether or not it was a safe bet that his children would remain Christian if they were raised in the contemporary US Catholic Church. I got my back up, and told him that that didn’t matter, that the only thing he should be concerned about is whether or not the Catholic claims were true. 

The family became Orthodox. Years later, when I married and had a family of my own, I understood my older friend’s point in a way I could not have when I was young and living wholly inside my head. He agreed with me back then that we had a good pope (John Paul II), but said he wasn’t worried about the pope; rather, he was concerned with the local bishops, the local pastors, and the local Catholic schools. What good is the Catechism if nobody where you are living and raising your family wants to live by it?

I’m sorry to say that Orthodoxy is not an escape from it. When I was living and working Philadelphia, a Greek Orthodox turned Evangelical colleague asked me one day in the break room why I was eating such a puny lunch. I told him that today was a fast day in the Orthodox calendar. He was genuinely surprised. He said he grew up in the cathedral parish in Manhattan, and went to the Greek cathedral school for his entire education, and never once heard about fasting. This, even though fasting is a core part of Orthodox Christian spirituality. I thought: no wonder he became Evangelical. This is what happened to Eric Metaxas too.

The point is this: there is no religious system perfect enough to relieve individuals of their responsibility to be seriously engaged with their faith. You can leave Catholicism or Protestantism for Orthodoxy, but if you don’t put your faith into practice diligently, you will be no better off. We are in such a sorry state in American Christianity broadly that if you can find a church that doesn’t actively work against your attempts to live faithfully and raise faithful children in the religion, you are ahead of the game. One reason so many of us American converts to Orthodoxy are so sensitive about this “compassion” talk is because we are refugees from churches that lost their way when they began to succumb to appeals to “compassion” and “tenderness” as a justification for bending on Scriptural teaching. I knew that my family’s days in Catholicism were numbered when I began having conversations with my oldest child, then seven years old and starting to pay attention to the sermons, explaining to him that what Father preached that day is not what the Church teaches. I finally told my wife that I was having to teach our son to distrust our church’s authority figures before he has learned to trust them. I can only imagine how hard it is for faithful Catholic parents to have to teach their children today that what the Pope says and does is not what the Church teaches.

To be clear, I make a point of not using this space for proselytizing. Even if I wanted to do that, I don’t have it in me. It has been 16 years since I left Catholicism, and though I healed many years ago from the specific wounds left by the loss of my Catholic faith, I recognize now that I will probably never fully heal from my inability to fully trust religious hierarchy. That might be to the best. When people ask me privately to tell them about Orthodoxy, I am always excited to talk about what Jesus Christ has done for me in the Orthodox Church. If they want to know more, I am happy to direct them to the resources they need. But I have also counseled Catholics in crisis in ways that helped them decide to continue on with the Catholic faith. I don’t think I’ve ever had a Protestant who talked to me about this but decided to stay Protestant, but I would not consider it a failure if that happened. I would like for everybody to become Orthodox, but more than that, I want everybody to have a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. Maybe I should care more about prompting people to convert to Orthodoxy, but at this stage in my life, I’m more interested in helping them to be better Christians. In the Orthodox Church, we have a number of good apologists whose mission is different than mine. On the front line of apologetics, you need soldiers who, unlike me, don’t carry unhealed battle wounds.

So, to sum up: I don’t believe that one church is just as good as any other, nor do I believe that all churches in America are in the same woebegone condition. If you come to Orthodoxy from another Christian church, you will probably find resources you didn’t even know were available. I could not imagine being anything other than Orthodox now. But what you will not be able to do in Orthodoxy is hide securely from the challenges of the post-Christian world. They are coming for all of us. And though it might benefit Orthodox membership to see the other churches crumbling (doctrinally and otherwise), no Orthodox has the right to feel triumphalistic. On the American scene, Orthodoxy is very, very small. The future of American Christianity will not likely be decided by what happens to the Orthodox Church, but by what happens to the Catholic and Evangelical churches. The future of Western Christianity, likewise. When the Catholics have a strong, good pope, we Orthodox should rejoice, because that stands to make our lives as Christian in post-Christian America easier. When Evangelicals have strong pastoral leadership, bearing witness to Christ in a courageous, admirable way, we Orthodox should thank God for their service. I am not a universalist, but I really do mean that.

I just never imagined that I would live to see the day when a Roman pontiff would do some of the things Francis is doing. In 2013, not long after he was elected Pope, Francis made his famous “who am I to judge?” comment about gays. It’s true that the statement was taken somewhat out of context by progressive advocates, but Jorge Bergoglio did not fall off the turnip truck on his way to St. Peter’s Square. He had to know how his remarks would be reported. I received an email shortly after that from a teacher at a Catholic high school in Tennessee. He was devastated. He said that he had been working for years to explain the Church’s teaching on sexuality to students, and in a single stroke, Francis had obliterated his labor. The teacher told me that his students had all taken to saying some version of, “But the Pope says who are we to judge?” Three years on, the Catholic bishops of Eastern Canada issued a pastoral letter embracing euthanasia under certain circumstances, citing Francis’s “who am I to judge?” as a guiding principle. I wrote about it here at the time. In the hands of those bishops, the tenderness and compassion of Pope Francis led to the euthanist’s needle.

When the Roman pope, the historic Patriarch of the West and the spiritual leader of the world’s largest Christian communion, starts saying and doing the things that Francis does, it is not a time for Orthodox or Protestant triumphalism. It is a sign of big trouble for all faithful Christians. In 2018, commenting on a matter of intercommunion with Protestants, Cardinal Wim Eijk of Utrecht criticized the liberalizing initiative of the German bishops and Pope Francis, and said, in part:

Observing that the bishops and, above all, the Successor of Peter fail to maintain and transmit faithfully and in unity the deposit of faith contained in Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, I cannot help but think of Article 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“The Church’s ultimate trial

Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.”

Whatever your church or communion, you must pray, and you must prepare. There is no escaping this trial.

UPDATE: Here’s upcoming fun with Pope Francis’s beloved New Ways Ministry:

 

UPDATE.2: A reader comments:

Rod, I’m a Catholic priest whose primary apostolate has been with young adults and seminarians for the last sixteen years. You are correct to point out the grave damage that Pope Francis has done to the Church, as well as the iconoclastic narcissists (those ordained between 1965-1980), have done to the Church. I can only see the election of Pope Francis and his horrific reign as a purification upon the Church, one that clarifies the papal-olatry that creeped in as a result of having two amazing (albeit imperfect like all of us) popes in JPII and BXVI.

In all my years of work with young adults and seminarians, I have NEVER met one who says that they are Catholic or are in the seminary because of Pope Francis. Bishops, seminary rectors, and other priests can affirm this as their experience as well. Meanwhile, I know hundreds who were inspired, and continue to be inspired by Pope St John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

I’d like to offer three insights – two hopeful, one not so much.

First the less hopeful. The iconoclastic narcissists who were ordained between 1965 and 1980 make up the great majority of bishops today. Unfortunately they are going to be replaced by what is probably the gayest generation of priests in the history of the US (1980-1995). In those years, seminaries became places where it was safe and even encouraged to be gay, and even act out sexually. That generation is now taking leadership. It will be another 15 years before they go on their way. The queering of the episcopacy will continue in the US.

Now, to the more hopeful. Pope Francis has not only lost the orthodox Catholic faithful, he’s also lost most of the liberals as well. His pattern of bringing in associates who are morally compromised, which gives him the power to control them, and then discarding them when he is done with them, has run its course. One gets the sense that this along with his psychological problems (anger management) and Latin American dictatorial style, that this papacy is in the last stages. I am certain that after his death, the stories of his unjust anger, his deceptions, and his evil acts will come out. Right now, they are only spoken of quietly. But much of it will be revealed.

The most hopeful comes from my earlier comment. I am not aware of any faithful Catholic under the age of 40 and most under the age of 50 who isn’t completely against this nonsense that Pope Francis proclaims. I think most diocesan priests (and most religious) in the same age group would be the same way.

I would tell those people who are thinking about becoming Catholic, don’t let popes or bishops destroy your faith. It isn’t an easy time, it isn’t a warm and welcoming Church, but it is the Church and Jesus promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. The Church is not a cruise ship, it is a battleship. Unfortunately our human captain today is incompetent, a little unstable, and unqualified. Rough waters, difficulties, and even bad leadership should neve tempt us to leave the ship (that is not a comment directed against you, Rod).

I’m not saying that it will be easier after Pope Francis dies. The most narcissistic generation of priests/bishops is being replaced by the gayest generation of bishops. it will be a difficult time for faithful orthodox Catholics for another 20 years.

Many years ago, I came to realize that my vocation as a priest was to clean up the mess of the previous generation. The only correction that I had to make was that I thought that would have been done a decade ago. Now, I realize my entire priesthood will be spent cleaning up after the iconoclastic narcissists who cannot believe anything good happened before 1965 or after 1980. I wish this wasn’t my vocation. I wish I could go out and be a part of what PJP called the “New Evangelization,” but it is my task to clean up the messes and take care of the remnant that remain.

 

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