Rod Dreher's Blog, page 32

American Christianity Is, Alas, Political

This is discouraging:

Or put another way:

In 2020, a white liberal is TEN TIMES more likely to be an atheist or agnostic than a white conservative.

33% vs 3%.

— Ryan Burge (@ryanburge) December 22, 2021

Follow the political scientist Ryan Burge (@ryanburge) on Twitter; he always has interesting data about religion in US political life.

This is really bad news, and not just spiritually — that is, for the souls of liberals, the eternal fate of which is incomparably more important than politics. It’s terrible politically because for the first time in US history, religion is becoming identified with one political party. This is very bad for the future of religious liberty. The Left will likely come to see “religious liberty” not as a fundamental American value, guaranteed by the Constitution, but as something conservatives use to exercise bigotry and privilege over liberals. Years ago, the pseudonymous Ivy League law professor Kingsfield told me that virtually nobody in elite law circles is a religious believer, and therefore lacks a natural understanding, inherent to believers, of why religion is important. Kingsfield said that the institutions that produce our federal judges are functionally atheistic — and this is going to have a profound impact on religious liberty jurisprudence down the road.

So too will the loss of religious believers in the voting population. Look at this other data from Prof. Burge:

There are more people in Gen Z who are atheist, agnostic, or None than there are Christians. The American coming into being is one in which God will be a stranger. What’s more, Gen Z is not only far more secular, it is also skews to the Left, especially on social issues, which is where political issues usually intersect with religious values. Mind you, religious liberals already side with political liberals on these issues, so the political effect of losing liberals to religion might be minimal. Nevertheless, the politicization of religion in America is a dangerous thing for religious liberty.

You are going to hear liberal commenters blame it on conservatives turning their churches into the Republican Party at prayer. I hate it when pastors do this, and yes, that must play a part in it, but the main driver is that liberals are simply leaving religion overall. There are plenty of liberal churches and temples that mix politics with religion; a Modern Orthodox Jewish friend told me recently that liberal Jewish families have been coming in greater numbers to his shul because they are sick and tired of progressive politics sermons at their Reformed synagogues. Liberals could be accommodated by liberal churches, but fewer and fewer of them believe. I expect we will hear many of them blame conservatives for driving them away from religion, despite the fact that liberal churches are everywhere. The fact that liberal churches are in steep decline gives lie to the self-serving belief that churches need to liberalize if they want to keep the young. Nevertheless, I anticipate that some liberals will loudly rationalize their loss of faith by projecting the guilt they feel onto those mean conservatives.

 

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Krampus Krashes Khristmas

Christmas in the small town of Leavenworth, Washington, is a bit different this year:

Santa and Mrs. Claus, the Grinch, snowmen and elves fill the streets of Leavenworth during the holiday season. Some are part of the city’s official holiday programming, while others are visitors simply eager to get into the holiday spirit.

During one weekend earlier this month, a group of horned half-goat, half-human creatures dressed in animal fur robes joined other holiday cosplayers in the streets of this Bavarian-themed town.

The bells around their waists marked their arrival, as they walked the streets of downtown Leavenworth. They were silent, letting their elaborate, dramatic wooden masks and costumes speak for themselves.

The members of Krampus Seattle have been introducing Washington holiday revelers to the tradition celebrated in Germany, Austria and several Eastern European countries for the past several years. According to the tradition, Krampus walks through the streets to terrify children into being good before St. Nicholas’ arrival the following day.

Krampus really is an Alpine tradition. But not everybody in Leavenworth is happy about it there. A local Catholic businessman and Knights of Columbus member says that the Chamber of Commerce told the Catholics to take a hike. Excerpt:

Benjamin Herreid, a Leavenworth, WA, restaurant owner and member of the Knights of Columbus, says the town’s Chamber of Commerce told the Knights their booth would not be included in this year’s public festivities. The exclusion of the Knights was itself disturbing, but the Chamber of Commerce had something much worse in store, Herreid reports.

“Our booth has been a feature of the Christmas lighting for the past 30+ years,” Herreid wrote in a Facebook post. After the Chamber inexplicably turned the Knights away, Herreid and his business partner “made space on our restaurant’s patio for the K of C sausage booth,” whose proceeds go toward the mentally and physically handicapped, as well as the “spiritually handicapped (all of us),” he wrote.

Herreid said that while the exclusion of the Knights could have been “unintentional,” it “seems to illustrate the priorities of those leading the charge in this town.” After a recent election and the introduction of COVID restrictions, officials “rebranded” the longstanding local custom of “Christmas Lighting,” axing the word “Christmas” from the title and renaming it “Village of Lights,” Herreid told CatholicVote Monday.

After that and the kerfuffle with the Knights of Columbus, Herreid began to see a pattern. But nothing prepared him for what happened next.

On the opening weekend of the town’s public holiday celebrations, “the Chamber had the audacity/naivety/stupidity to kick off this non-holiday by inviting Krampus Seattle,” a “group of demonic horned half-goat cosplayers,” to “give speeches at our pavilion and pub crawl throughout the downtown terrifying our children,” Herreid wrote on Facebook.

In this story, the Chamber of Commerce in the Bavarian-themed village responds. Excerpt:

For years, the Knights had a booth selling sausages at the Leavenworth Christmas festival. But this year, the chamber did not get access to Front Street’s right of way – this being the main drag through town – as it is now closed to traffic.

All of that boiled down to the Knights not getting a booth because it needed both electric power and water, and such a combination was not available, says the chamber. It’s complicated setting up everything from the winter market to the carolers to the live music.

And:

Regarding the name change for the festivities, the Leavenworth Chamber of Commerce said the “Christmas Lighting Festival” title had been used for years on the first three weekends in December. Then, each Saturday and Sunday there was a “flip the switch” to turn on the light displays.

The chamber said 20,000-plus people would visit, all “looking for parking spots that did not exist” and causing “traffic backups for miles.” Now the lights stay on every day to spread out the crowds, and the organization says “a rebranding was necessary.” So, the new name: “Village of Lights.”

What do you think? Krampus is an authentic Alpine tradition, and that includes Bavaria, so the town is not pulling this out of nowhere. On the other hand, I would not want to see that on the streets at Christmastime, and especially wouldn’t want my little children to see it. I don’t believe the Chamber of Commerce’s excuse for changing the name of the Christmas lights festival. It’s the same de-Christianization mentality that leads anxious schools and other institutions to rebrand it “Winter Festival” or “Holiday Festival”. I can easily see how welcoming Yuletide demons on the opening weekend of a festival that for the first time gets rid of the name “Christmas” would upset people.

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Can Politics Save Christianity?

Ross Douthat’s Sunday column took up the question of whether politics can save Christianity. He’s responding to fellow right-of-center Catholics who have become energized around the idea that some version of robust integralist politics can turn the country around before it goes off the cliff. These thinkers also claim that it would bolster the flagging faith. Douthat agrees, sort of, but mostly does not. Excerpts:

Part of their vision is correct. A more fully Christian politics would be a powerful witness for the faith. Political power can lay the social foundations for religious growth. And a healthy church inevitably generates a “cultural Christianity” that draws in cynical and halfhearted figures as well as true believers.

But when the church itself is unhealthy or poorly led, a plan to start its revitalization with secular political actors and cultural Christianity — with Donald Trump and Eric Zemmour, presumably — seems destined for disappointment.

True. Some of these guys are super-supportive of Pope Francis, but it’s hard to see how it makes sense to expect a revival led by a Church whose pontiff is rushing in most ways towards embracing progressivism. Francis has demonstrably more affection for pro-LGBT Catholics than for Latin massgoing Catholics. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on your point of view, but it seems silly to expect a traditionalist Catholic politics to emerge when the most vital right-of-center forces in the Catholic Church are deeply at odds with the Roman pontiff.Douthat continues:

And here I think the analogy to the new progressivism especially fails. What gets called “wokeness” is particularly powerful among elites, yes, but the shift in attitudes on, say, racism is broader than that; if similar numbers of previously secular Americans were suddenly endorsing Christian doctrine we would rightly call it a revival. Well before it began to impose itself on the doubtful and reluctant, the new progressivism ascended — first within the church-like structures of academia, and then in liberal culture more broadly — precisely because it had conviction on its side, as against the more careerist and soulless aspects of liberal meritocracy.

Social justice activists did not triumph, in other words, by first getting an opportunistically woke politician elected president and having her impose their doctrines by fiat. Their cultural advance has had political assistance, but it began with that most ancient power — the power of belief.

Which is also how Christian renewal has usually proceeded in the past. The politically powerful play a part, the half-believing come along, but it was the Dominicans and Franciscans who made the High Middle Ages, the Jesuits who drove the Counter-Reformation, the apostles and martyrs who spread the faith before Roman emperors adopted it.

It’s been that way from the very start. Kings eventually bowed before the crucifix, but in the worlds of the wisest Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, “the most efficacious argument” for Christ’s divinity is that “without the support of the secular power he has changed the whole world.”

This is completely correct, in my view. If you’ve been reading me for long enough, you know that around 2005, when the newly re-elected Evangelical Republican president and the GOP majority in Congress could not get through the Senate and send to the states an amendment that would enshrine traditional marriage (that is, one man + one woman, exclusively) in the Constitution, even though the pro-trad marriage position was popular at the time (59 percent opposed same-sex marriage) — well, that’s when I knew that the cause was lost. Elite culture, even elite Republican culture, had already flipped to the pro-gay side, and the propaganda was unstoppable. It was around this time that I had a conversation with a young, churchgoing Republican colleague at the Dallas Morning News, who said that I was wrong to complain that our newspaper was biased in its coverage of the same-sex marriage issue. Of course we were, he said, and that’s a good thing.

“If we were in the Civil Rights era, would you expect us to give fair and balanced coverage to the KKK?” he asked. He wasn’t kidding. This was also a turning point for me, because I knew that the fix was completely in on the media side, and that it would not be possible for trads to get a fair hearing, or even to be treated as people who were wrong, but who had a point worth discussing.

Back then, I wrote a lot about how Christians should read the signs of the times, and forget winning this war, instead focusing all our time and resources on building strong religious liberty defenses around ourselves and our institutions. A lot of fellow conservatives called me a cheese-eating surrender monkey over that. Hadn’t I seen the polls? they would say. Our cause is popular! Yes, it was popular, but it didn’t take a prophet to recognize how shallow and weak that popularity was. Same-sex marriage became the law of the land in large part because its advocates correctly grasped that they were appealing to what Americans had already come to believe about marriage, about the human person, and sexuality. The battle for traditional marriage had been lost during the Sexual Revolution; it took fifty years, though, for the effect of that loss to shatter the glass barrier protecting traditional marriage from the revolutionaries. Now the revolutionaries were like my Millennial colleague: normie Republicans who go to church.

Today, 70 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, favor same-sex marriage. It’s not even a meaningful political issue anymore. I would not figure a politician’s position on same-sex marriage into whether or not I would vote for him, because that issue is settled. I am more interested in the politician’s view on transgender rights, and on their view of religious liberty when it conflicts with LGBT rights claims. Marriage is over. I wish it weren’t the case, but we have to deal with reality.

Same-sex marriage triumphed because America is a less Christian nation than it once was. Put another way, we get the politics we have now because the faith has been in decline for decades. Sociologist of religion Christian Smith, back in 2005, published his first book about the woebegone state of Biblical and traditional Christianity, which he argues had declined in favor of a pseudo-Christianity he christened “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”. MTD rejects dogmatic Christianity in favor of a touchy-feely, vague sentimentality that teaches that God wants us all to be happy, so whatever makes you happy is fine, as long as you are nice.

If you want to see a conservative version of MTD at work, listen to the rambling mess of a talk Donald Trump gave at First Baptist Dallas yesterday. They were thrilled to have him. He began by saying he wasn’t going to read the speech prepared for him, but that he preferred to speak “from the heart.” He went on to speak about how unfair the media was to him, and about MAGA. In other words, he spoke about his true god: himself. Then he made a stab at reading from the prepared text, which had a few words in it about Jesus. Watch for yourself; I’ve cued it to the beginning of Trump’s speech:

Now, I don’t have any problem with Christians voting for Trump as a matter of self-protection, given the alternative. But come on, can anybody really claim that Trump’s presidency brought more Americans to the faith, or to a stronger Christian commitment? If the next GOP standard-bearer is a saintly man or woman, I still don’t think that it will make a meaningful difference one way or the other to the faith. Who looks to politicians as examples of religious leadership?

Hungary’s Viktor Orban is a practicing Calvinist (20 percent of Hungarians are Calvinists), but he has a much more realistic concept of the relationship between politics and faith. I can’t find the source for the quote, but I read an interview with him in which he said that the best a political leader can do is to create the conditions under which faith might flourish — but he can’t make it happen. This seems wise. I believe Orban is doing as good a job as can be expected, trying to protect religious belief from the forces that undermine it, but this is not something that can be commanded or legislated. As Douthat points out in his column, wokeness triumphed because a sufficient number of people believed in it, or at least had lost real faith in the principles that would have given them the courage to stand up to it. The churches — all of them — have done a poor job catechizing and discipling their people over the last fifty years. Among US Catholics, for example, about 70 percent don’t believe that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist — which is staggering! If people have lost the faith, how can they be commanded, or even just nudged hard, by the state to believe again?

Don’t misunderstand me: I would vote, and will vote, for the anti-woke politician in any given election. But I don’t believe that will have much to do with whether or not the Christian faith flourishes, except in the narrow case of not persecuting churches and religious schools. That’s not nothing! But it’s not remotely enough to pull Christianity in the West out of its decline.

Leaving aside the situation Douthat observes with regard to the feeble state of the churches of the West, there is also the matter of a Western public that doesn’t want to hear what those churches have to say. I don’t believe this is entirely the fault of the churches, and probably not even mostly their fault. Most people today have an approach to faith that is highly individualistic and emotivist. This is how American culture is today. I’ve been reading Iain McGilchrist’s new book lately, and to use his conceptual framework, the idea that the state could command people to believe in Christianity, even indirectly, is a very left-brained mistake to make. With this new book I am now working on, I will explore right-brained ways to make the faith new — starting with Benedict XVI’s idea that the best arguments the Church has for the faith is the art it produces, and the saints it creates.

To recap: I believe that politics has to play a role in defending the faith, but I think it is folly to believe that that role could or should be primary. Religion doesn’t work that way, and neither does politics. I back the Benedict Option because I see the primary role of religious people now is to build strong communities of faith and practice, capable of riding out the disintegration of our society. Our society is not coming apart because we have bad politics; it is more the case that we have bad politics because our society is falling apart. The Benedict Option is a strategic retreat, like Ernst Junger’s “Forest Passage”, and its purpose is to keep the faith alive for a time when the world is open to it again. Chesterton once wrote that St. Benedict emerged in a time of great spiritual scattering, after Rome’s fall, and founded a way to slowly re-gather western Europe’s spiritual energy. St. Francis and St. Dominic emerged centuries later, to scatter what Benedict had saved, when the time came for it. This is how I see the Benedict Option. 

I will vote for political candidates who do the most to protect religious liberty, and who, in my view, do the most to promote the common good. But I do not have any expectation that politicians can or will solve the crisis of belief that is eviscerating American society.

By the way, the excellent Marion Maréchal, who, I hope, will become France’s president one day, agrees that culture precedes politics. Excerpt:

Change has to be made from the top down, but it will never succeed if we don’t create islands of resistance from below that persist even when the government changes. It is necessary to build islands of resistance in society; it is through them that we will win. I often quote Gramsci, but it was not only Gramsci who said this: political victory comes only after a cultural victory. There are no political victories without cultural victories.

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New York Celebrates A Lady Penis

A passionately Democratic friend of mine is socially liberal, but more focused on economic policy. He has been steaming with anger over how the leadership of his party and the Left in general prioritizes culture-war issues, at the expense of creating what he considers to be a more economically just society. He is not a cultural conservative at all, but he thinks that the Left is screwing up its opportunities to rebalance economic inequality by taking on and emphasizing divisive culture war issues that alienate many people who are otherwise open to the Democratic economic message.

With reference to the failure of Biden’s Build Back Better, he texted a link to this New York magazine cover story yesterday, saying:

The Democratic agenda, midterm possibilities and credibility for a generation took a massive hit over the weekend. Look at what New York Magazine thinks is important enough to be their featured story.

Naturally I had to read the thing. Here’s the first line of the personal essay:

On the day I heard that my penis would be huge, I sobbed.

Oh boy. It’s popcorn on the aisle at the Prytania time. Let’s read on:

Phalloplasty in general, it was clear, was hard for people to accept. “Well, I will love you no matter what, sweetie,” a cis female best friend of mine said when I told her I was transitioning, years before — “as long as you don’t get a dick.” One flatly demanded, “Don’t get a dick.” It was, another transmasculine person I used to know said, disgusting, insane to want and to have a surgeon make a sensate phallus out of your arm or leg or somewhere and Frankenstitch it to your body, to go so far out of your way to opt in to a tool, perhaps the tool, of so much suffering. Most transmasculine people didn’t get one. The seminal print transmasc magazine was named after not getting one: Original Plumbing. I saw transmasculine support groups shut down and go silent more than once when someone brought up the procedure, and later, when I was that someone, I was twice invited to leave “with other people who might want to talk about that.” Whatever magical spectrum of unicorn gender expression was otherwise being embraced, it ended firmly before needing a socially, culturally, politically, historically, personally, emotionally, medically complicated dick.

But I did. And I couldn’t outrun it any longer. Literally: The day I gave in and admitted that for me it was penis or death came after a last-ditch bout of denial in which I drove 1,400 miles in three days only to have to acknowledge, devastated, at my destination that I couldn’t avoid it anymore.

Give me a lady penis, or give me death! It’s the cry of a revolutionary — a revolutionary whose cause has been taken up by the elites of American society. Did you know that the US military will pay for its troops to get lady penises? 

More:

It has happened at least once that someone did die. I was fully ready to, by which I mean I’d just spent nearly the last of my savings, which I’d burned navigating the emotional-mental-social-medical-legal-extreme-marginalization mindfuck shitshow of transitioning, on a burial plot just in case. One of the nodding heads in the group belonged to a nonbinary white person who was still horizontal in recovery from having had, a week prior, the worst happen, which was that after their procedure, in which all the fat and skin had been stripped from their left forearm from wrist to nearly elbow, along with major nerves, an artery, and veins, and then shaped into a tube and connected, in careful layers, to skin and blood vessels and nerves in their pelvis, their new penis had failed.

It died. On them.

But here they were, already getting ready for their surgeons to harvest a whole other part of their body within the month with zero hesitation. Because those three days they’d had their penis, they said, before being rushed into an eight-hour surgery that couldn’t save it — the feeling of it, even just for one moment, even still bloody and painful and packed with stitches: worth it. And I understood that immediately when, after a yearlong surgery waiting list and a deep quarantine and an anguished prerequisite COVID test I would either pass or lose my date over, I woke up last December in a hospital bed and before even glancing toward my lap, the room spinning from anesthesia and my lungs partially collapsed from four and a half hours on surgical ventilation and hundreds — plural — of stitches and a 40-square-inch hole in my thigh where I’d been skinned down to the muscle, I could suddenly feel, in a way I could never have fathomed, that this was what being alive was.

Life itself is having a Frankenpenis? This is worshiping a phallic god. This is mental illness. But see, Gabriel Mac, the author of this piece, is the emblematic figure of our time: we are committed to conquering Nature through technology, defying its limits, no matter what. When the philosopher of science Michael Hanby said that the Sexual Revolution is just the technological revolution applied to the human body, I wonder if even he imagined that he would live to see such a vindication of his insight as Gabriel Mac.

I’m not going to quote much more from the piece, which you should read for yourself. What is astonishing to me about it is how utterly obsessed this woman is with her pseudo-penis. She writes:

After my discharge, which included a grueling car ride wearing mesh hospital underwear packed full of gauze to keep my penis propped as close to perpendicular to my body as possible, I spent the first hour in bed singing top-volume falsetto Alicia Keys to my penis.

Over and over, Gabriel Mac keeps talking about how she either had to have a penis, or she was going to die. I believe her, in that I believe she was so obsessed, so mentally ill, that she fixated on mutilating her body to create a Frankenpenis, to the extent that life was not worth living without it. She described her body, pre-penis, as “a body that feels simultaneously dead and like an eternal wellspring of agony”. Again, I believe her. She is mentally ill, and in real pain. Later, she writes about a friend telling her how much nicer she is, post-op:

But when penis is self, as penis is a gift to self, it’s a gift, too, to others.

Penis is self. There is the core of identity politics: the idea that the human being, in all her complexity, can be reduced to an organ. The penis. The vagina. The skin and its shades.

Gabriel Mac decided to keep her vagina as well as her new penis. She calls herself a transmasculine gay man with a vagina and a penis. She construes this as her rebellion against, well, everything in our society. She writes:

If there was anything I had learned in transitioning, it was that what was right for me was rarely what, according to my patriarchal, heterosexist, racist, capitalist acculturation, “made sense” — which, obviously, could only be to live as a sexually available cute-lady vessel capable of carrying white babies.

Read the whole thing. It is important to understand that Gabriel Mac (meaning a person like her) is a hero to the cultural Left in our country, which, having gained control of the institutions of American society — including, as you have been reading on this blog, the US military — is setting out to compel all of America to accept that Gabriel Mac, a suicidal, phallus-obsessed, mentally ill woman who now has both a Frankenpenis and a vagina, is, in fact, a man.

We are mad. We are decadent. And we are going to fall hard. Once again, MacIntyre:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.  What they set themselves to achieve instead–often not recognizing fully what they were doing–was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.  If my account of our moral condition, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point.

How will you and your people get through the coming fall? This is why I wrote The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies. The day is coming for all of us — and is already here for many Americans — where you will not be allowed to deny in any way that Gabriel Mac is truly a man. What will you do then? American children are now being taught in many schools that Gabriel Mac — a bespoke hermaphroditic woman who, in a blasphemous parody of the Genesis creation story, had flesh and fat removed from her thigh to make a “man” of herself —  is a man because she identifies as one. These same children are being propagandized by schools, by social media, and by popular culture that they can be whatever gender they want to be, no matter what Mom and Dad say.

You might wish to believe that you can get away by ignoring this phenomenon, ascribing it to the cultural fringes. You could not possibly be more wrong. The ideology that celebrates what Gabriel Mac has done to herself is normative among American elites, and that means that it controls the future of our society. This ideology is coming for you and your kids. You had better wake up now.

The New York cover story is not just freakery. (Nor, we should say, is Gabriel Mac’s pre-op dysphoria a phantom illness; anybody driven to contemplate suicide deserves compassion.) What we have to face is that this kind of phenomenon in the media intends to destroy the gender binary. To my knowledge, there has never been a civilization that destroys the gender binary. If we keep going down this insane, suicidal path, this one will not last, nor will it deserve to. There are civilizations in this world that want to live. We, increasingly, are not one of them.

UPDATE: A reader who is also a professor follows the logic to its insane conclusion:

Read your post about Lady Penis.  But given the unassailability of identity claims in the culture, why believe there’s any such thing as a penis qua penis to begin with?  If male and female are reducible to subjective identity beliefs and nothing more without remainder, why not extend the same analysis to penises and vaginas? The gender bending non-binary woke tell us that men can have vaginas and women penises, but does not that assume that vaginas and penises are particular things, each of which shares a universal form, e.g., penisness and vaginaness?  But doesn’t this just smuggle in the very gender essentialism that we are told is false?  Consequently, why could not someone say that her conventional penis is really a vagina? If a pre-op transgender woman is a woman with a penis, why can’t a post-op transgender woman say that her conventional looking surgically constructed vagina is a penis? And why not vice versa?  The fact that Gabriel Mac thinks of “his” phalloplasty-made “penis” as a penis is nice for “him” now.  But suppose a year from now Mac says, “Yea know what, I can’t help but think of my phalloplasty-made `penis’ as a vagina that merely has the appearance of a conventional penis. So, I am a transgender man with a vagina.”  Now suppose there’s another person, Mac2, who goes through all the same procedures as Mac and is otherwise identical to Mac but, unlike Mac, continues to think of “his” phalloplasty-made “penis” as a penis.  Whose right Mac or Mac2?  Under all the premises of gender bending non-binary wokism, both are right.  But in that case, penises and vaginas, as objectively real human parts with their own universal forms, are as obsolete as men and women.

UPDATE.2: “Gabriel Mac” is the nom de trans of a woman who went by the name “Mac McLellan” when earlier in her journalistic career, and who claimed to have been so traumatized by doing a story on gang rape in Haiti that she staged her own violent rape to help her deal with it. This woman is very, very disturbed.

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Iain McGilchrist’s Great New Book

(Over on my subscription-only Substack (“Rod Dreher’s Diary”), which focuses more on spiritual matters, I’ve been writing about the new book by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. I’m going to repost one of the diary entries here, because it’s an important book that I want more people to know about — RD)

I am deep into Iain McGilchrist’s massive tome The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, and I could not possibly be more delighted with it. Mind you, this book is about 1,500 pages in all, and comes in two volumes. If you want the hardback, you have to pay $157, but I got the Kindle version for $40. Not only is Kindle far easier for me to deal with as a researcher (it has a notes function that allows you to highlight passages you like, and export them via e-mail to your laptop), but with a book this big, it’s easier on the wrists. At the end of this post, you will know if someone you know would like to get this book for Christmas; it appeals to a certain kind of person, and boy oh boy, am I ever that kind of person. It might be too late to get the hardback, but not the Kindle version.

The first part of the book is a fairly technical discussion of neuroscience, and what it has to tell us about perception. As you know if you read Dr. McGilchrist’s previous work, The Master And His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, the psychiatrist focuses on the different ways of processing information in the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. I don’t want to go into explaining his basic hypothesis here, so if you are just coming to his work, check out the basics on Channel McGilchrist.

This new book seems to be more focused on the philosophical and metaphysical implications of his thesis. It’s hard to say for sure, because this is a massive book, and I’m only about a third of the way through it. The first part of the book is fairly technical, presenting a massive amount of neuroscience research about the two hemispheres, and how deficits in one affects a person’s perception. The core idea is that the left brain is logical and analytical, while the right brain is more intuitive. Rather than try so summarize the new book myself, let me post this from Channel McGilchrist:

In this landmark new book, Iain McGilchrist addresses some of the oldest and hardest questions humanity faces – ones that, however, have a practical urgency for all of us today:

Who are we?What is the world?How can we understand consciousness, matter, space and time?Is the cosmos without purpose or value?Can we really neglect the sacred and divine?

In doing so, he argues that we have become enslaved to an account of things dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, one that blinds us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us, had we but eyes to see it. He suggests that in order to understand ourselves and the world we need science and intuition, reason and imagination, not just one or two; that they are in any case far from being in conflict; and that the brain’s right hemisphere plays the most important part in each. And he shows us how to recognise the ‘signature’ of the left hemisphere in our thinking, so as to avoid making decisions that bring disaster in their wake.

Following the paths of cutting-edge neurology, philosophy and physics, he reveals how each leads us to a similar vision of the world, one that is both profound and beautiful – and happens to be in line with the deepest traditions of human wisdom.

It is a vision that returns the world to life, and us to a better way of living in it: one we must embrace if we are to survive.

You can see why I am intensely interested in this book as research for my own project.

Here are some of the passages that really jumped out at me:

And the whole is shot through with purpose (a notion, by the way, that has nothing to do with some sort of engineering God), and endlessly creative, not pointless and passive. This cosmos is one from which we are never separate, but out of which we arise, in which we dwell, and to which, finally, we return.

More:

The world we know cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent. Once again, this leaves no room for a philosophy of ‘anything goes’. What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it–if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.

More:

Once again, the whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts can illuminate the whole. To the left hemisphere, you find the truth about something by building it up from bits. But, as the right hemisphere is aware, to understand it you need to experience it as a whole, since the whole reveals as much about the nature of the parts as the parts do about the nature of the whole.

And:

This clarification was necessary, because I will be explaining that the world we experience–which is the only one we can know–is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it. This implies that there is no simple and single, wholly mind-independent, truth. What I did not want to appear to be saying, at any cost, was that there is no such thing as truth; or that reality is simply made up at our whim. Absolutely not.

This is important to understand. He is not a relativist! But he is trying to help his readers to see that we, the observing subjects, have a role to play in determining our own sense of reality. Reading McGilchrist’s new book, I understand more deeply the meaning of the St. Galgano image, “The Temptation of St. Galgano,” which a Genoese artist gave me under mysterious circumstances:

The temptation of St. Galgano is to take his eyes off of God, to divide his attention.

The most exciting thing I’ve learned so far from the new book is how Orthodox Christianity works. I have lacked the conceptual vocabulary to explain it, even to myself. Well, now I get it. McGilchrist’s thesis is that we in the West have allowed our collective mind to be unhealthily dominated by the left brain, which prioritizes propositional thinking, and mistrusts intuition and other noetic ways of knowledge. He writes in this rich passage:

We now tend to think of truth as a matter of propositions. The word ‘truth’ in its origin indicates not a proposition, but a disposition. ‘True’ (cf German treu, faithful) is related to ‘trust,’ and is fundamentally a matter of what one believes to be the case. Truth and trust (belief) go together. One cannot have trust in a society where there is no truth; and one cannot be true to a society in which there is no trust. That is of fundamental importance, since, as Confucius told his disciple Tzu-kung, for a stable society a ruler needs three things: weapons, food and trust. If he cannot hold all three, he should forgo weapons first, and food next; for ‘without trust we cannot stand’.

Belief too is about fidelity (Latin fides, faith). The word ‘belief’ has nowhere buried in it the idea of signing up to a proposition, certain or uncertain. It is not a matter of cognition, but of recognition. The word belief comes from the same root as the word ‘love’, a sense preserved in the now archaic word ‘lief’, familiar to us from Shakespeare, with which one once described one’s friend, sweetheart, or lord–someone in whom one believed.

Belief is about relationship, in which by definition, more than one party is involved. The believer needs to be disposed to love, but the believed-in needs to inspire another’s belief or trust. Whether this amounts to being worthy of that belief cannot be fully determined in advance. It emerges only through commitment and experience.

Be that as it may, I think it possible that some of the disagreements in the debate about truth start with these broad differences in whether we see ‘truth-as-correctness’, a thing that can be determined, and into which nothing of us enters; or ‘truth-as-unconcealing’, a process of something revealing itself to us only through our experience. (Heidegger often used the Greek word for truth, aletheia, which literally means ‘un-forgetting’, allowing something to emerge from oblivion.)

How do we decide which way of conceiving truth is truer? First, notice that a process, unlike a thing, suggests the importance of not just the whatness, but the howness. There are no deep truths that are separate from the manner in which they are expressed. As the philosopher Friedrich Waismann puts it:

If you ever try to put some rare and subtle experience, or a half forgotten impression, into words, you’ll find that truth is intrinsically tied up with the style of your expression: it needs no less than a poet to render fully and faithfully such fragile states of mind.

Which is why we honour poetry as a path to truth. As I will argue, the most fundamental truths, of both a physical and psychical nature, can ultimately be expressed only in terms of poetry. And Waismann points out that the meaning of the word truth differs with context, so that it has ‘a systematic ambiguity’, as have deceptively simple sounding words such as fact, statement, knowledge, law and many others.

And:

Very little that we take for granted as most essential to life–love, energy, matter, consciousness–can be convincingly argued about, or even described, without becoming ultimately self-referential. You have to experience it to know it: all we can do is point.

This is why you hear Orthodox Christians telling those interested in Orthodoxy to “come and see”. This sounds dubious from the outside, but once you’ve been in Orthodoxy, you understand it. McGilchrist explains this pretty clearly. Orthodoxy has propositional truths within it, of course, but the emphasis is on truth-as-process. That is to say, all Truth is in Jesus Christ; the Orthodox way of life is a constant, lifelong process of surrender to that Truth, and becoming divinized through it. Orthodox Christianity is knowing-as-poetry, not as syllogism. This is why people who grew up in a left-brained culture view this with suspicion. My experience as an Orthodox Christian is why this line from McGilchrist rings in me like a struck bell: “Whether this amounts to being worthy of that belief cannot be fully determined in advance. It emerges only through commitment and experience.”

You can read a review of a film, but it’s not the same thing as experiencing the film. You can even read a summary of the film, scene-by-scene, and it will only be a pale approximation of the experience. That’s how Orthodoxy is. Mind you, McGilchrist does not call for abandoning the left-brain mode of analysis, but rather says that we must rebalance the relationship, because we in the West are choosing to blind ourselves to a valid way to experience reality, and Truth.

A few years ago, I corresponded with Dr. McGilchrist. He told me that he is not a religious believer, but if he were, he would convert to Orthodoxy, because in his experience, it is the form of Christianity that best balances the hemispheric ways of knowing.

—

By the way, there’s a great documentary about McGilchrist’s previous book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and The Making of the Western World. You can rent it here on Vimeo. Highly recommended!

UPDATE: A reader in the comments section recommends this lecture by Dr. McGilchrist to an audience at Ralston College. In it, he talks about themes in the new book. I’ve just approved several comments by readers who condemn McGilchrist’s work without understanding what he’s saying. If you disapprove of his actual argument, that’s fine — but y’all are condemning him based on a misunderstanding of his argument. Maybe this will help:

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A Letter From The Lion’s Den

A reader with whom I have corresponded in the past sent this letter to me. He gave me permission to publish it as long as I withheld his name:

I am a long time reader of your blog who has commented once or twice.  I am a preacher at two small theologically conservative (you would use the term “evangelical”) churches, but my day job is as an 8th grade teacher.  We live in a very red town in a very red county in a very blue state.  We deal with this issue all the time, and it’s pretty frustrating.  The problem, as far as I’m concerned, is that these students are inundated with LGBTQ ideology through social media, and they are using social media that is for the most part unknown to adults.  Meanwhile, our middle schoolers are at an age where they are legitimately trying to figure out their relationships with the opposite sex and throwing this ideology in the mix is toxic.  Add to that the huge number of broken homes where they have no positive example of what a dad and mom look like.  I agree with the commenter you published who spoke about how there is bullying against LGBT students and that is behind what motivates many teachers, but they are misguided, fighting a battle that is last generations’s battle in that regard.Recently we had our first ever training on gender identity at the school.  Previous to this, I was at a union meeting where the issue was brought up by one of our well meaning staff members, because of the problems we were having at the middle school over this issue.  Students, as junior high kids are wont to do, are using the issue for their own ends.  They bring the issue up as a joke, or they accuse people they don’t like of being homophobic and there is no answer to it.  We have one teacher that the students are absolutely convinced is homophobic, simply because he will not permit any discussion of sexuality in his class.  We have students that will then shout at him that he is homophobic, racist (for many of them, these two terms are equal), etc.  They change their mind on a day to day basis as to what their name or pronouns are.  I have students who will put different names on their paper from day to day as they change identities and several who, when they wrote their beginning of the year essay to introduce themselves, talked about their pronouns without prompting.  Because of all the chaos this issue is causing, she brought it up at the meeting and really only got responses in support of the kids.  She brought up, though, that kids who did not agree or had different beliefs were not being treated well by their peers, but her concerns were not addressed.  She is a Christian woman and afterward we had a private discussion in which she told me she had asked admin for some training on how to deal with this issue.  I told her that if they brought someone in, only the pro LGBT view would be presented and we would be told we must comply.  It had never occurred to her that this would be the case.Well the training did happen.  They did not tell us ahead of time what the training was, but just that someone from the Regional Office of Education would be presenting in the auditorium.  The lady who presented was a Ph.D. counselor of some kind and immediately began by introducing herself and her pronouns, and then told us she had a child that identified as non-binary and changed pronouns on an almost daily basis.  She then walked us through a very mediocre presentation meant to focus on affirming student identity, and reducing the harm from bullying and child abuse.  She did mention the danger of outing students before they outed themselves.  More than once she tried to solicit discussion, but very little was forthcoming.  Most of her recommendations were copied and pasted from State Board of Education guidance.  Finally, she showed a video on diversity and when I saw women wearing the Muslim hijab on the video juxtaposed with transgender individuals (with no apparent awareness of contradiction), I decided to speak up.I raised my hand and said:  “In light of the State board’s materials and this video, it has gotten me to thinking that this is really hard.  In a perfect world we would be able to discuss this issue open and honestly with our students, but middle schoolers only want to have those kind of discussions when they are in the mood.  In the meantime, what is presented here intersects with so many other aspects of life:  political beliefs, religious beliefs, and other things.  And we have a lot of students and a lot of staff who have deeply held religious beliefs that seem to contradict the values that are being presented here, so I just wish we knew how to handle that because it doesn’t seem like there is really a way to do it.”

The presenter looked at me and said, “You are absolutely right.  I wish I had an answer for you.”  Afterward, a couple of other teachers spoke up in a way that affirmed the LGBTQ agenda.  One was a lady in tears who thanked the presenter for her presentation because she had a pansexual child and people didn’t know what all they had gone through.  However, after the presentation, I had three different staff members come to me privately and thanked me for speaking out.  One of them was the admin who had invited the presenter.The ideology of the presentation was horrible, but also bad was the fact that no practical solutions to the problems we face were presented.  Suing teachers and schools, as you have suggested, will have some effect.  But you can’t sue an idea.  The ideas are coming from our universities and our media, and they’ve been coming from them long enough that they’re coming from all kinds of other places now too.  If I could do one thing to work toward solving the problem, it would be to figure out away to turn of the fire hydrant of sexuality (including heterosexuality) inundating our children, and schools, from my experience, are only a small part of that.

I also, think Christian philanthropists need to work to build an alternate education system.  The Irish Americans and others used to have this with Catholic parochial system (and protestant German immigrants built the many Lutheran schools) but these schools are now, for the most part, clones of the public schools meant for people with enough money to get out of the local public school when it is subpar.  We need schools that the average person can afford that are taught by Christian teachers who are on a mission to win the hearts and minds of the next generation to Christ.  Easier said than done, but it must be done if our way of life is to survive.Thank you again for the work you do in exposing and informing.

I strongly agree that Christians with money to give should start pouring it into building a system of classical Christian schools, and making it more possible for those without money to attend. I see classical Christian schools as a version of the early Benedictine monastery networks: places where cultural memory is practiced and preserved in a time of barbarism.

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USAF’s Culture War Strafing

As the Biden administration weighs the insane option of arming Ukrainian insurgents to wage civil war in a country on the border of Russia — think about how the US would feel if Russians armed pro-Moscow contras in Mexico — the US military continues making strides in winning the culture war against conservatives and normies in its ranks.

The US Air Force has now authorized, but not required, the disclosure of personal pronouns in the signature block of official correspondence. Here’s a link to the full memo. This, of course, is a trial balloon. Give permission for this for internal communications, and after people get used to it, make it mandatory for all communications.

The memo designates three pronouns — he/him, she/hers, and they/them — but of course this bigotry will not long be tolerated. Give it a year or two, and zirs will have their way. At least this practice will prepare senior officers for their post-retirement life working for Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, and other woke defense contractors. I guess you can drop bombs by drones on innocent Third World people with a clean conscience, as long as you use people’s preferred pronouns.

This might seem like a small thing, but it’s a condensed symbol of the US military’s capitulation to wokeness, including the madness of gender ideology. We are losing awareness of the gender binary, one of the most fundamental principles of life on earth. We are tearing our society apart, and the US military is joining the attack by institutionalizing the lie that maleness and femaleness are arbitrary categories that have nothing to do with biology.

Of course this insanity is spreading wide in our society, but the fact that it is now taken up by the armed forces is a sign of how deeply entrenched this ideology is.

What about sailors, soldiers, and airmen who refuse to live by these lies? Who refuse to say that a biological male who presents as a female is truly a woman? Too bad for them, I guess. Our military has no use for bigots like that.

What is this regime that rules us? The governmental part of the regime commits our country to ruinous wars of choice, and now it’s speculating, via a leak to the CIA’s favorite Washington journalist, about starting a proxy war with Russia on Russia’s border. It is ruining the US military. The non-governmental part of the regime is forcing a racist and gender-crazy ideology on everybody else, and nobody in the Republican Party troubles themselves to commit to stopping it.

What has captured our country and its people? What madness? What demoralization?

Live Not By Lies — now, more than ever. We might not be able to turn back the insanity — though God knows we should try, and hope that the GOP stops lying prostrate before Big Business and the Pentagon — but whatever comes, we have to be prepared to live through this soft totalitarianism until reality finally intervenes, and it collapses of its own stupidity.

 

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Pope Francis, Ever The Iconoclast

I am not a Catholic, but I cannot fathom why Pope Francis is working so hard to tear the Catholic Church apart, and suppress one of its most vital communities. The Vatican today released even more restrictions on the Latin mass and the communities around it. From Edward Pentin in National Catholic Register:

In summary, Archbishop Roche has ruled the following:

If traditional faithful are unable to find a church, oratory or chapel to exclusively celebrate the older rite, a bishop can ask the Congregation for Divine Worship for a dispensation to use a parish church, but if allowed, such a celebration should not be advertised in a parish Mass schedule (this is not to marginalize the faithful who prefer the traditional form, he insisted, but to “remind them that this is a concession to provide for their good … and not an opportunity to promote the previous rite”).

The traditional sacraments in the Rituale Romanum (e.g. baptisms, nuptial Masses, extreme unction, confession) need a bishop’s permission and can only be celebrated in “canonically erected personal parishes” [Editors’ note: This applies to those already in existence, as the erection of future such parishes is not allowed in Traditionis Custodes]. A bishop is not authorized to grant permission to use the Pontificale Romanum, that is sacraments celebrated by bishops, i.e. traditional ordinations and confirmations.

A priest cannot continue to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass if he “does not recognize the validity and legitimacy of concelebration,” especially at the Chrism Mass. A bishop should “take care to establish a fraternal dialogue” with the priest before revoking this concession.

A reassertion that readings must be proclaimed in the vernacular language and a stipulation that no new vernacular lectionaries may be published that use the old cycle of readings.

Bishops must obtain authorization from the Holy See to allow priests ordained after the publication of Traditionis Custodes to celebrate the traditional Mass.

It is “recommended” that the traditional Mass be celebrated for a defined period of time set by the bishop who can assess at the end of that time whether or not there are grounds for prolonging or suspending the permission, depending on how much “everything is in harmony” with the direction of Traditionis Custodes. 

A bishop can only grant permission to celebrate the traditional Mass in his own diocese.

If a priest authorized to celebrate the older rite is unavailable or absent, his replacement must also be given formal authorization.

Deacons and instituted ministers taking part in a traditional celebration must also have their bishop’s permission.

A parish priest or chaplain who is authorized to celebrate the traditional Mass but must also celebrate the ordinary form of the Mass during the week cannot then also celebrate the traditional Mass on the same day (binate).

A priest who is authorized to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass cannot celebrate it for another group of faithful on the same day, even if that group has received authorization.

More:

In his introductory note, Archbishop Roche reiterated that Traditionis Custodes and Pope Francis’ accompanying letter “clearly express the reasons” for the apostolic letter, and that the Mass of Paul VI is the “unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.”

“This is the direction in which we wish to move, and this is the meaning of the responses we publish here,” Archbishop Roche said. “Every prescribed norm has always the sole purpose of preserving the gift of ecclesial communion by walking together, with conviction of mind and heart, in the direction indicated by the Holy Father.”

And here is the pure voice of 1960s-era utopian fundamentalism:

The English archbishop said that the Second Vatican Council Fathers sought the reforms so that the liturgy would appear “ever more in all its beauty and the People of God might grow in full, active, conscious participation in the liturgical celebration.”

“As pastors, we must not lend ourselves to sterile polemics, capable only of creating division, in which the ritual itself is often exploited by ideological viewpoints,” Archbishop Roche said. “Rather, we are all called to rediscover the value of the liturgical reform by preserving the truth and beauty of the Rite that it has given us. For this to happen, we are aware that a renewed and continuous liturgical formation is necessary both for priests and for the lay faithful.”

They will never, ever, ever admit that there was a problem with the Council, or that there is anything worthwhile in what it displaced. As a former Catholic who has been Orthodox for sixteen years, the scandal of the ruling class of the Catholic Church sacking its own precious heritage, liturgical and otherwise, is both astonishing and painful. Painful, not only because I have friends and acquaintances who are not hotheads, and who have been deeply enriched in their faith by the Latin mass. Yes, of course there are some Latin mass fanatics who are a source of division — but they by no means characterize the mainstream of the Old Rite community, and besides, you can find far more anti-Tridentine fanatics, especially in power. In general, and in my experience, Latin massgoers are among the most faithful Catholics I know. And the leadership of the Church, from Pope Francis on down, spits on them.

Read all of Pentin’s report.

Just so non-Catholics understand what is going on here, Pope Francis wishes to crush observance of the Tridentine Rite mass, popularly called the “Latin mass,” because it is celebrated in what had been the Catholic Church’s liturgical language from ancient times, until the Second Vatican Council. From a Times story highlighting LGBT-friendly parishes in New York City, here is the kind of thing the Pope not only tolerates, but encourages through his embrace of pro-gay figures (e.g., Father James Martin) and organizations (e.g., New Ways Ministry) in the Catholic Church:

Gay-friendly parishes are something that many Catholics, and many L.G.B.T.Q. people, do not know exist. They are scattered in cities and large towns across the country, with roughly a dozen concentrated in New York City. Here, parishes have drawn worshipers from across the region by starting L.G.B.T.Q. ministries; organizing events like spiritual retreats, hikes and happy hours at local gay bars; celebrating Masses and other events during Pride Month; and by speaking up for the gay community.

Francis encourages parishes that have happy hours at gay bars, and Pride masses. But the Latin mass people must be suppressed. More from that story:

Father James Martin, a Jesuit writer and well-known proponent of outreach to L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, said liberal parishes like these had long played an important role as “safety valves” for the church by providing a space for Catholics who might chafe at its prevailing dogmas.

“They are places, as the saying goes, for people who are on their way into the church or who may be tempted to go on their way out of the church,” he said. “They can go to these parishes and feel at home.”

Not Latin mass Catholics. Not under the rule of Francis the Merciful. More from that Times story:

One day he knelt in a confessional there and shared his inner struggle with a priest, who told him that “you have no sin in this, there is nothing to feel shame for,” he said. After that, he began taking communion for the first time in years.

“I think St. Paul’s probably accepts me right now more than I accept myself sometimes,” Mr. Browner said.

“Because the catechism of the church is so omnipresent, it is ingrained in us — or at least in me — that those are the rules,” he added. “I am still grappling with what the rule is versus what the message of St. Paul’s is. It is a process.”

This parish and its priests are leading people away from faithful observance of the Catholic faith. Francis loves this kind of thing, though, and has made that very clear. Just a few days ago, it emerged that Francis had written encouragingly to the leadership of New Ways Ministry, a pro-LGBT Catholic activist group pushing for the normalization of homosexuality within the Catholic Church. Some years ago, when he was head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office under John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger ruled that New Ways could not be considered authentically Catholic. Francis has brought them in out of the cold.

But the Latin mass community, he sends to the margins.

I think of Francis and those around him with the same puzzlement I have with regard to the senior members of the ruling class in the US. I wrote something about this last night. 

I understand them being concerned about extreme elements of the Right, but these people — particularly in the military — are going all-out to confirm the claims of hardliners, and both antagonize and alienate those who are not unfaithful to Catholic doctrine, and who only want to be left alone.

Why would you do this? Does Francis want to drive these people to the SSPX, or to Orthodoxy, or perhaps even to abandon Christianity entirely? If they were obstinate deniers of authoritative Catholic teaching, I could understand this or any pope saying, in effect, “Being Catholic requires affirming certain things, rejecting other things, and living in certain ways; if you refuse to repent, and are leading others astray, then you should leave the Church.” But this is not what he’s doing. Again, the Latin mass people are not demanding that everybody go to Latin mass, and while some of them may deny the validity of the Novus Ordo mass (the one that came out of the 1960s Council), they are not demanding that the Vatican suppress that mass, nor are they in any position to do so. They are tiny!

Yet Francis, in his pontifical wisdom, is attempting to strangle those faithful communities, while encouraging LGBT-positive priests, parishes, and organizations that openly defy Catholic teaching to flourish.

Why? What sense does this make? Why the contempt for Catholics who abide by the Magisterium (the teaching authority of the Catholic Church), and who only want to pray liturgically in the same language that was the Church’s since the earliest days of Latin Christianity, and in the rite that was common to all Catholics from the Counter-Reformation until the mid-1960s?

Let me be clear here: when I was a Catholic, I was a Novus Ordo Catholic. I didn’t love the new rite, but I never did learn to love the old rite either. I considered them both sacramentally valid, though, and I was glad that the Latin rite existed for those who were nourished by it. I don’t know that I ever met an ordinary Novus Ordo Catholic who felt threatened by the Latin mass’s existence, if they even knew about it. But professional liberal Catholics truly despise the Latin mass. And now one of them is the Pope — a Pope who knows that of all the billion Catholics over whom he presides, the Latin massgoers are the least likely to defy a licit papal order.

This is spiritual warfare, you know. May God strengthen those faithful Catholics persecuted by their own leaders. What Francis doesn’t understand, it appears, is that his actions undermine the authority of the Church itself. Look:

I see people sharing this today like it means anything. But if the current pope can so utterly contradict previous popes, who are we to believe? In a pope fight, who wins? And if they can all cancel each other out, what good are any of them? pic.twitter.com/vmT6L3yhRB

— Steve Skojec (@SteveSkojec) December 19, 2021

Traditionalist Peter Kwasniewski writes of today’s document:

It was not difficult to see, even before today, that the Vatican opponents of the traditional liturgical rites of the Church of Rome are animated by an animosity toward tradition that is totally incompatible with the Catholic Faith and an animosity toward the faithful who adhere to tradition that is totally contrary to charity and the much-vaunted desire for “unity” and “communion” (lip service for “diversity” and “peripheries” and “minorities” etc. notwithstanding—that’s the typical modus operandi of hypocrites).

However, by releasing a document like this—so full of malice, pettiness, hatred, and cruelty, and so abundant in its lies—exactly one week before the great feast of Christ’s Nativity shows, more eloquently than any other gesture possibly could, that we are dealing with mafia thugs who have set themselves against our spiritual good, our vocations, our families, in such a way that their attack on the Church’s common good could not possibly be more apparent.

Let’s remind ourselves of what our forefathers in the Faith said about such a situation.

Thomas Cardinal Cajetan (1469–1534): “You must resist, to his face, a pope who is openly tearing the Church apart.”

Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546): “If the Pope by his orders and his acts destroys the Church, one can resist him and impede the execution of his commands.”

St. Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621): “As it is lawful to resist the pope, if he assaulted a man’s person, so it is lawful to resist him, if he assaulted souls, or troubled the state, and much more if he strove to destroy the Church. It is lawful, I say, to resist him, by not doing what he commands, and hindering the execution of his will.”

Sylvester Prierias (1456–1523): “He [the pope] does not have the power to destroy; therefore, if there is evidence that he is doing it, it is licit to resist him. The result of all this is that if the pope destroys the Church by his orders and acts, he can be resisted and the execution of his mandate prevented. The right of open resistance to prelates’ abuse of authority stems also from natural law.”

Francisco Suárez (1548–1617): “If the Pope lays down an order contrary to right customs one does not have to obey him; if he tries to do something manifestly opposed to justice and to the common good, it would be licit to resist him; if he attacks by force, he could be repelled by force, with the moderation characteristic of a good defense.”

God’s Providence is therefore clear, and I consider this instruction to be a Christmas gift. By showing that its authors hate Catholic tradition, hate continuity with the past, hate the faithful, they make it easy for us to see that they are acting against the common good and therefore deserve to be resisted. We are not only permitted to resist; we are obliged to do so, if we would avoid sinning against what we know to be right, holy, true, and good.

More:

In its abundance of charity, the CDW [Congregation for Divine Worship, the Vatican agency that issued today’s ruling — RD] explains that the liturgies of such Catholics are not part of the ordinary life of the parish; the activities of this group should never coincide with those of the parish; the group should be jettisoned from a parish as soon as may be; their Masses may not be advertised in the schedule; and presumably no new members are to be invited, since the group is hermetically sealed off to prevent cross-contamination. All this, and yet Roche has the gall to say: “There is no intention in these provisions to marginalise the faithful”?

The response of a healthy Catholic to such offensive impertinence and worse-than-racist prejudice is to say: “To hell with you” (for that is where such ideas came from and belong). “We will announce our Masses far and wide. We will keep publishing our books, brochures, missals, and every sort of paraphernalia. We will advertise our activities and invite new attendees. We will promote tradition actively among friends, family, strangers, and potential converts. We will channel our donations to its support. We will, in short, do everything in our power to ensure that your unjust war against tradition meets with the embarrassing and inglorious defeat it richly deserves. Deus vult. You will never, ever win.”

Read it all. Straight fire.

 

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Glad I’m Not A Conspiracy Theorist

Scrolling around before bed, I saw that the Washington Post, the Imperial Capital’s hometown newspaper, is going all out to signal who the State believes to be its enemies, and what things should be done to them. These two pieces caught my eye, because they reminded me of things I read in the Washington Post in 2002 and 2003, explaining why we had no choice but to go to war with Iraq to defend and advance democracy.

See, I cannot stand the January 6 rioters, and think they all deserve strong punishment. I’ve even taken the unpopular position on the Right that Ashli Babbitt is responsible for her own tragic death by her foolish actions committed in the process of sacking the Capitol. I think we on the Right have some pretty crazy people, as I wrote last year, and I don’t want them getting anywhere near power. If genuinely bad people — neo-Nazis, for example — are in the ranks of the US military, they need to be expelled.

But.

Having allowed myself to be spun once before into supporting an unjust war that the Washington Establishment wanted, I hope I have learned a little something about how war propaganda works, and how the Establishment manufactures consent for what it wants to achieve. And that’s what I saw tonight in the Washington Post.

First, here’s liberal columnist Dana Milbank quoting from a CIA adviser’s new book warning that America is closer to civil war than people think. Excerpts:

She lays out the argument in detail in her must-read book, “How Civil Wars Start,” out in January. “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she writes. But, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”

Oh no! Who is responsible for the threat? As if you had to ask!

Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set — the one the CIA task force has found to be most helpful in predicting instability and violence — Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.

An “anocracy.” Not even a democracy anymore. Sounds real bad. What now?

The enemies of democracy must not be allowed to prevail. We are on the doorstep of the “open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once countries cross that threshold, the CIA predicts, “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes.”

It is no exaggeration to say the survival of our country is at stake.

So a CIA academic adviser is telling a liberal columnist from the Imperial City’s hometown newspaper that the Trumpkins are lying in wait, ready to fire on Fort Sumter all over again.

I suspect we will be hearing this kind of thing a lot in the national media in the months to come. And we who say, “Hey, wait a minute — ” will be denounced as defenders of the January 6 riot, and soft on threats to Our Democracy.

The Post prepares us for the banquet of b.s. to come with a second amuse-bouche in the same day.  Here’s an op-ed by three retired generals warning that the military must prepare itself to put down a Trumpist insurrection in 2024. Excerpts:

In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.

To their very bones. This paragraph is big:

One of our military’s strengths is that it draws from our diverse population. It is a collection of individuals, all with different beliefs and backgrounds. But without constant maintenance, the potential for a military breakdown mirroring societal or political breakdown is very real.

Diversity is our strength, as they say. The “constant maintenance” term is code for the Great Awokening the senior military brass are pushing through the ranks. What these retired generals — who almost certainly did not write a word of this op-ed, but only agreed to put their names on it — are saying is that the Awokening must be done to keep right-wing elements from starting a civil war.

More:

All service members take an oath to protect the U.S. Constitution. But in a contested election, with loyalties split, some might follow orders from the rightful commander in chief, while others might follow the Trumpian loser. Arms might not be secured depending on who was overseeing them. Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.

In this context, with our military hobbled and divided, U.S. security would be crippled. Any one of our enemies could take advantage by launching an all-out assault on our assets or our allies.

This is starting to sound like a 1990s Hollywood movie. “In a world where…”. But they are serious. Three retired generals are sounding the alarm that white conservatives “Trumpians” in the military might betray the country and start a civil war that could turn into World War III.

I’m not kidding! Read it yourself. They are actually saying that. And then, in their to-do list for the military, to try to head off possible insurrection:

In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.

If you are white and under arms at present, and this all goes down like the generals ask, you had better not let people know that you are a conservative. Better keep your political and religious views to yourself. Your fellow soldiers will have been incentivized to rat you out. And you’d better be careful about the websites you read. Anything to the right of Vox.com could trip the algorithms.

I read this Post op-ed as a trial balloon by the Washington establishment to see how successful they might be in instigating a national media freakout over the Enemy Within — a bona fide Red (State) Scare. They could eliminate all internal dissenters from the new left-wing ideological orthodoxy enforced on soldiers, sailors, and airmen by kicking them out, and convincing sympathizers to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. And all those former brothers and sisters under arms who will have been expelled? The military would have framed them as (implicit or explicit) racists and traitors — just like the Confederate scum who fired on Fort Sumter. 

Do you see what they’re doing (“they” being the Washington establishment)? Having introduced into the military, and disseminated through its capillaries, the twin poisons of Critical Race Theory and gender ideology, which cannot do other than make troops hostile towards each other, or at least mutually suspicious of each other, along racial, sexual, and political lines, now the Establishment seems to be blaming those in the military who don’t bend the knee before this ideology as bigots and traitors who just might launch World War III. Insofar as those three generals represent the views of the senior military leadership, then that bench of generals reminds me of the killer who murdered his parents then threw himself on the mercy of the court, saying he was an orphan.

Disturbed by this transparent attempt by the Post, on behalf of official Washington, to stir up hatred against dissent from the ruling ideology, I decided to check Twitter to see if there was something funny by Libs of Tik Tok, or something else diverting there. I saw this short thread by the political scientist Zach Goldberg:

1/n 53% of white liberals (48% of white Dems) think that white people should feel guilty about racial inequality pic.twitter.com/amPvoo0VJL

— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) December 17, 2021

And I thought: huh.

It’s almost like the senior military and civilian leadership is forcing woke indoctrination on the armed forces as a way to force out any member who refused to comply. This culling of the potential troublemakers would show the military that those remaining either agree with the ruling ideology, or are so morally weak that they care more about living by lies than jeopardizing their careers. The indoctrination can continue, and perhaps the white conservatives who loved their career more than the truth can be persuaded in time that not only are the expelled rebels evil and need killing, but also that they, the ones who stayed behind, can join the liberal white soldiers in recognizing that as carriers of racial guilt and shame, they have a special duty to take the lead in using violence to neutralize these potential right-wing guerrillas. Even if those alleged enemies of the state are their own neighbors, or even their own brothers. How can love ever win if bigots, especially religious bigots, are not crushed?

The kind of education that could create that kind of change of mind would be readings by prophetic radicals who say that the only way America can ever really be free of the legacy of the Civil War is through violence that takes care of the ideological heirs to the slavers, once and for all, making those Red States crimson with the blood of traitors.

See, this is why I’m glad I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I trust my country and its leading institutions, which almost always make the right decisions, and even if they don’t, well, they had our best interests at heart, so it would be unfair to hold them accountable. If I weren’t an upright citizen, I might think that the Deep State, especially the intelligence services, was up to something very nasty. My mind being serenely untroubled by such dyspeptic rumination, I can retire to bed now.

Meanwhile, the really based conspiracy theorists will be up all night wondering who in Washington benefits by turning Americans against each other on the basis of race. One good way to keep the heat off the backsides of generals who lost the war in Afghanistan and lied for years about it is to distract everybody with a new crusade, especially the enlisted and junior officer ranks, who had to put their lives on the line because of the Pentagon’s lies, and who might like to see Congress hold them accountable. As that one active duty service member told me earlier this year, having lost the other wars, the military is now undertaking a fight in which it believes it can prevail: the culture war.

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Why He Is Still Episcopalian

Because I’ve bombarded y’all with bad news over the last few posts, here’s something hopeful. After publishing the thing the other day about Virginia Theological Seminary, I had an e-mail exchange with a young, conservative Episcopal priest friend of mine who said that things are very bad, but by no means hopeless. I asked him if he would write something for this blog that explained why he still has hope, serving in TEC as a theologically and morally conservative cleric. He sent me this, and I am pleased to publish it:

 

The demise of the Episcopal Church is just a statistical model — projecting the current rate of decline till the y-axis gets to zero. Of course it won’t actually cease to exist by 2050. That’s not how such models work in the real world. Which isn’t to say that TEC’s decline isn’t catastrophic (it is), or that our leaders aren’t whistling dixie as things fall apart (they are). That’s partly due to the fact that no one knows what to do, and partly to the fact that many of them are totally bought-in to the fashionable heresies that exacerbate (if not cause) the decline, and that those who aren’t are scared of those who are. It’s sort of like the Democratic Party in that respect.What I expect will happen is that TEC will become increasingly like the New England heirs of the Puritans — the Unitarians and Congregationalists. They barely exist, but still occupy buildings in New England, still maintain some institutions, and still even hold some sway in and around other important institutions (like Harvard). As an example, the (Episcopal) Church Pension Fund is one of the richest private entities in the US — on a par with some of the bigger university endowment funds. On the strength of that alone, Episcopalianism will continue to be a “thing” for the foreseeable future. That kind of Episcopalian legacy influence will continue among the cloud people (i.e. the elites), for better or worse (and it’s a mix), even if all the parishioners were to dry up totally. Think of the National Cathedral. It isn’t going away soon, even if it ceases (has ceased?) to be a worshiping community in any meaningful sense.

But at the same time, there are signs of hope. The Bishop Spong types are dying out. The younger generation of clergy tends to be credally orthodox, albeit socially liberal: they don’t cross their fingers when they recite the creed, as did previous generations of clergy, but they believe in gay marriage and read Ta-Nehesi Coates. On the other hand, the most dynamic intellectual movement in the Episcopal Church, and maybe in all of Anglicanism (which, NB, remains the third largest Christian body in the world, after the Catholic the Orthodox Churches) is probably the one centered around The Living Church Foundation. The writers for their blog and magazine are all conservative on matters of sexuality, and they have more PhD’s per capita than any other grouping of Anglican theological types of which I am aware. The group is also to some extent international and ecumenical (there are a few Roman Catholics in their ranks). They formed in “loyal opposition,” as they have said, to the Episcopal Church as concerning TEC’s revisions to its teaching on sexuality. These are some of the smartest clergy and academics in and around TEC. They skew young, and there are quite a few of them.Also, the few remaining conservative bishops have some of the most sterling theological credentials in the room — Dallas, and Tennessee, for example. Sumner in Dallas has a PhD in theology from Yale (from back when Yale was actually an important center of anglophone theology, with George Linbeck and the post-liberals etc.), and Bauerschmidt of TN has a D.Phil from Oxford, supervised by Oliver O’Donovan. Another glimmer of hope: the diocese of Springfield (Illinois) just elected a solidly traditionalist priest to be their bishop. We will see if his election gets the requisite consents from the larger Church. That will be something of a test as to whether big-tent liberalism still holds sway in TEC, or whether the Maoist types have gained the upper hand. Georgia recently elected a credally orthodox, big-tent liberal committed to welcoming conservative clergy. A small thing perhaps, but worth noting.

And there remain scores of variously sound parishes throughout the land, including some of the largest and most financially stable. One thinks of Incarnation (Dallas), St. Martin’s (Houston), St. George’s (Nashville), St. John’s (Savannah), All Souls (OKC), Church of the Advent (Boston), inter alia.Then there are the shiftings in the broader Anglican Communion to take into account. They bear upon the status of TEC and its future, as well as the status and future of the ACNA (formed by conservative emigrants from TEC over the past couple of decades, though now with a rising generation of “native born” clergy and lay leaders, as well as converts from other [non-Anglican] traditions, who did not live through the bitter ruptures of former years), and the relationship between the two bodies. The Anglican Communion continues to be overwhelmingly small-o orthodox and centered demographically in the global south. God knows how all of these siftings and maneuverings will shake out in the end, but it will certainly have ramifications for Anglicanism in North America. Those wheels grind very slowly — the Lambeth Conference meets only every ten years, for example.So there are solid reasons for hope with respect to the future, even while the catastrophic demographic decline of TEC is very real. I tend to regard it all as the fulfillment, in our little quadrant of Christ’s body, of the oft-quoted Ratzinger prophecy from the 60s. The wheat is being sifted, the flock culled, the gold purified in fire, etc. etc. It isn’t fun, but nothing in sacred scripture or the history of the Church, and certainly nothing about our Lord’s earthly life and teaching, should lead us to expect that those who seek his face will have an easy time of it.But in sum, I remain an Episcopalian because:(1) I learned to follow Jesus in this communion, having been baptized and brought up in the Episcopal Church, and educated in Episcopal institutions. If it pleases God to grant me an entrance into his kingdom at the end of my earthly pilgrimage, it will be in no small part because of my formation in the Episcopal Church. Even if I eventually wind up becoming Orthodox, or Roman Catholic, or joining the ACNA, I will have done so because of my formation as an Episcopalian. It was here that I encountered and learned to love Our Lord and Our Lady, Augustine, Maximus, JH Newman, Silouan the Athonite, et al.

(2) Therefore I can say sincerely of the Episcopal Church, as the Psalmist said of Jerusalem: I love her very rubble, and am moved to pity even for her dust.(3) It is still possible for me to preach and teach small-o orthodox and small-c catholic things in the Episcopal Church, and I can still worship with traditional liturgical forms. No one hinders me. That may not be true in some dioceses, but it remains true in many. Hence I still feel sort of bound by St. Benedict’s warnings against gyrovaguery — i.e. bound by the principle of stability. I didn’t bring myself to this spiritual place – the providence of God did. So I am loath to abandon it.(4) I still find life and ministry as an Episcopalian to be rich and rewarding — spiritually and intellectually. That’s certainly true in my local (parochial) context, and even more broadly via various intra mural associations. One thinks of things like the Communion Partners, as well as the the various traditionalist (or traditionalist-friendly) devotional societies that are still active – Society of the Holy Cross, the Guild of All Souls, the Society of King Charles the Martyr, the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, the Guild of All Souls, etc. etc.The days are evil to be sure, but there are non-delusory reasons to be hopeful.

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