Rod Dreher's Blog, page 36

A Speech For The American Zemmour

Here is my attempt at translating Eric Zemmour’s speech to an American political and cultural context. America does not have remotely the immigration and assimilation problems that France has — not even close. I don’t deny that we have immigration problems, but the situation in France is vastly more serious, which is why I have softened Zemmour’s anti-immigration rhetoric in my version. For those who don’t know, Zemmour is France’s equivalent of Tucker Carlson.

This is a speech that I would like to hear a Republican presidential candidate deliver:

My fellow Americans: For years, you’ve been carried along by the same feeling. It has oppressed you, shamed you: a strange and penetrating feeling of dispossession. You drive down the streets in your towns, and you don’t recognize them. Businesses have closed. Stores are vacant. Your adult children and grandchildren live far away.

You look at your screens and they speak to you in a language that is strange, and in the end foreign. You turn your eyes and ears to advertisements, TV series, football matches, films, live performances, songs, and the schoolbooks of your children. The same weird words and concepts keep coming up. What is this language they are speaking?

Everywhere it’s the same thing: that America is an evil country. That our history is nothing but a catalog of racism, sexism, and homophobia. That people who have a certain skin color are evil because of that. That boys can become girls, and girls can become men. That nothing ever changes for the better in this country. That the things that were normal just a few years ago are now hateful, and that anybody who says or believes these things deserves to lose their job and be driven out of polite society.

You see these things on TV, in the papers, online, and in the workplace, and you have the impression that you are no longer in a country that you know.

You remember the country of your childhood. You remember the country that your parents told you about. You remember the country found in films and books. The country of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The country of Daniel Boone and “Remember the Alamo!”

The country of pioneers and suffragettes. The country of Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway. The country of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington Carver. The country of the novels of Louis L’Amour, the characters of John Ford, and the verses of Walt Whitman.

The country of the Golden Gate Bridge and of the covered bridges of New England. The country of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The country of Civil Rights marches and Jefferson’s Monticello. The country of Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein — an immigrant, like so many great Americans.

The country of farmers and factory workers, of FDR and the Greatest Generation, of Eisenhower and Rosie the Riveter. The country of John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart; of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and Elvis, Dylan and Aretha, of Waylon and Willie; the films of Billy Wilder and Steven Spielberg. The country of “Amazing Grace,” “White Christmas,” and “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain.”

This America was real. Don’t try to tell us that it never existed. Many of us were there. We remember. We remember our failures as a nation, and we remember how we the people made America better, fairer, and more just. And because we remember, we have hope that we can write a new chapter of that old story of our country, in our own time. We will write new verses, but the song will remain the same, because it is the anthem of our people.

This country— at the same time light-hearted and illustrious. This country— at the same time literary and scientific. This country— truly intelligent and one-of-a-kind. The country of the Apollo program and Silicon Valley. The country that invented Hollywood and saved the world from Hitler. This country— that you search for everywhere, but cannot find. No, your children are homesick, without even having known this country that you cherish. And it is disappearing.

You haven’t left, and yet you have the feeling of no longer being at home. You have not left your country. Your country left you.

You feel like foreigners in your own country. You are internal exiles. For a long time, you believed you were the only one to see it, to hear it, to think it, to doubt it. You were afraid to say it. You were ashamed of your feelings. For a long time, you dared not say what you are seeing, and above all you dared not see what you were seeing.

And then you said it to your wife. To your husband. To your children. To your father. To your mother. To your friends. To your coworkers. To your neighbors. And then to strangers. And you understood that your feeling of dispossession was shared by everyone.

What did they do to our country? America is no longer America, and everyone sees it.

Of course, they despised you: the powerful, the élites, the conformists, the woke capitalists, the journalists, the politicians, the professors, the sociologists, the teachers’ unions, the religious authorities, the diversity officers at your company. They told you it’s all a ploy, it’s all fake, it’s all wrong. But you understood in time that it was them who were a ploy, them who had it all wrong, them who did you wrong.

The disappearance of our civilization is not the only question that harasses us, although it towers over everything. Uncontrolled immigration is not the cause of all our problems, although it aggravates everything. That old, good America was a country where everybody, from the corporate titans to the trash collectors, felt they had a stake in its success. The loss of that America, and its sense of solidarity, makes us poorer and tears us apart. It ruins as much as it torments.

It’s why you often have a hard time making ends meet. It’s why we must re-industrialize the United States. It’s why we must equalize the balance of trade. It’s why we must reduce our growing debt, bring back to America our companies that left, give jobs to our unemployed. It’s why we must support the free market, but make sure capitalism works for everybody, not just the favored few. We must convert our industrialists from globalists to patriots.

It’s why we must protect our technological marvels and stop selling them to foreigners. It’s why we must allow our small businesses to live, and to grow, and to pass from generation to generation. It’s why we must preserve our architectural, cultural, and natural heritage. It’s why we must restore our education system, its excellence and its belief in merit, and stop surrendering our children to the experiments of egalitarians and educational theorists and the Doctor Strangeloves of Critical Race Theory and transgenderism.

It’s why we must devolve powers to the people and away from Washington, and from unaccountable corporations, universities, and institutions that seek to control America’s destiny in the name of woke fantasies. Yes, we must give power to the people, take it back from the minority that unceasingly tyrannizes the majority and from judges who substitute their judicial rulings for government of the people, for the people, by the people.

For decades, our elected officials of the right and the left have led us down this dire path of decline and decadence. Right and left have lied and concealed the gravity of our diminishment. They have hidden from you the reality of the replacement of ordinary Americans with ideologues who hate you, your traditions, and your ancient liberties. “Bitter clingers,” they call you. And “deplorables.”

No politician has been willing or able to stop the decline. President Trump saw the problem, but he could not change the system. When he left office, the Democrats held both the White House and Congress, and the woke were more powerful than ever. He wanted to make America great again, but he did not know how, and his enemies cut him off at the knees. If you choose me as your president, I will learn from his mistakes, and will not repeat them.

We need to believe in America again. But we also need to pass real laws that take the bullets out of the guns that the elites have for too long held to the heads of the American people. There is no more time to reform America – but there is time to save her. That is why I have decided to run for President.

I have decided to ask your votes to become your President of the United States of America, so that our children and grandchildren do not know barbarism. So that our daughters are not taught that their only value is sexual and economic, and our sons are not condemned to live in the basement smoking pot, watching porn, and playing video games. So that we can bequeath to them the America we have known and that we received from our ancestors. So that we can still preserve our way of life, our traditions, our language, our conversations, our debates, our taste for sports and movies.

So that Americans remain American, proud of their past and confident in their future, and open to the world because we know who we are. So that Americans once again feel at home. So that the newest arrivals assimilate their culture, adapt their history, and are remade as Americans in America – not foreigners in an unknown land.

We Americans are a great nation. A great people. Our glorious past pleads for our future. We beat the Nazis, and won the Cold War. Our writers and artists have aroused universal admiration. Our scientific discoveries and industrial production made the 20th century. The romance of America, the land of promise and liberty, continues to draw men and women from around the world.

We have known great victories, and we have overcome cruel defeats. More than any other country, America has written the history of the modern world. We are worthy of our ancestors. We will not allow ourselves to be mastered, enslaved, neutered, conquered, colonized. From the cold harbors of New England, to the bayous of Louisiana, to the Great Lakes of the Midwest, to the Rio Grande and the Pacific Coast Highway, we will not allow ourselves to be replaced by people who despise what this country was and who its people are, and who want to teach our children to hate us and themselves.

In front of us, a cold and determined monster rises up, who wants to trash us. They will say that you are racist. They will say that you are motivated by contemptible passions, when in fact it is the most lovely passion that animates you – passion for America!

They will say the worst about me. But I will keep going amidst the insults, and I don’t care if they spit on me. I will never bow my head or bend my knee to them. For we have a mission to accomplish.

The American people have been intimidated, crippled, indoctrinated, blamed— but they lift up their heads, they drop the masks, they clear the air of lies, they hunt down these evil slanders.

We are going to restore America, and renew her promise for new generations. We are going to renew the vision of the frontier, and make it possible again for all Americans, not the elite few, to have a stake in our country’s future. We are going to make it possible again for plain people to make a good living, and raise a family without going into overwhelming debt. We are going to make America work again. We are going to pass the flame to the coming generations. Join with me. Rise up. We Americans have always triumphed over all.

May God bless America!

What do you think?

Below is a subtitled (in English) discourse that Zemmour gave at at cancel culture conference at the Danube Institute this past spring. It will give you a better idea of what he stands for:

The post A Speech For The American Zemmour appeared first on The American Conservative.

Eric Zemmour, Superstar

The French critic and pundit announced his candidacy for the French presidency yesterday in this video. It is in French, without English subtitles:

You may think: Why is Zemmour just sitting there reading his speech? Here is your answer: it’s De Gaulle speaking to the French from exile in London:

pic.twitter.com/OBBgY3cuL4

— ZeRoY (@TheRealZeRoY) November 30, 2021

A Twitter user called Malmesburyman translated the speech. Here is his translation of Zemmour’s words:

My dear Countrymen— For years, the same feeling has swept you along, oppressed you, shamed you: a strange and penetrating feeling of dispossession. You walk down the streets in your towns, and you don’t recognize them.

You look at your screens and they speak to you in a language that is strange, and in the end foreign. You turn your eyes and ears to advertisements, TV series, football matches, films, live performances, songs, and the schoolbooks of your children.

You take the subways and trains. You go to train stations and airports. You wait for your sons and your daughters outside their school. You take your mother to the emergency room. You stand in line at the post office or the employment agency. You wait at a police station or a courthouse. And you have the impression that you are no longer in a country that you know.

You remember the country of your childhood. You remember the country that your parents told you about. You remember the country found in films and books. The country of Joan of Arc and Louis XIV. The country of Bonaparte and General de Gaulle.

The country of knights and ladies. The country of Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand. The country of Pascal and Descartes. The country of the fables of La Fontaine, the characters of Molière, and the verses of Racine.

The country of Notre Dame de Paris and of village church towers. The country of Gavroche and Cosette. The country of barricades and Versailles. The country of Pasteur and Lavoisier.

The country of Voltaire and Rousseau,of Clemenceau and the soldiers of ’14, of de Gaulle and Jean Moulin. The country of Gabin and Delon; of Brigitte Bardot and Belmondo and Johnny and d’Aznavour and Brassens and Barbara; the films of Sautet and Verneuil.

This country— at the same time light-hearted and illustrious. This country— at the same time literary and scientific. This country— truly intelligent and one-of-a-kind. The country of the Concorde and nuclear power. The country that invented cinema and the automobile.This country— that you search for everywhere with dismay. No, your children are homesick, without even having known this country that you cherish. And it is disappearing.

You haven’t left, and yet you have the feeling of no longer being at home. You have not left your country. Your country left you.

You feel like foreigners in your own country. You are internal exiles. For a long time, you believed you were the only one to see, to hear, to think, to doubt. You were afraid to say it. You were ashamed of your feelings. For a long time, you dared not say what you are seeing, and above all you dared not see what you were seeing.

And then you said it to your wife. To your husband. To your children. To your father. To your mother. To your friends. To your coworkers. To your neighbors. And then to strangers. And you understood that your feeling of dispossession was shared by everyone.

France is no longer France, and everyone sees it.

Of course, they despised you: the powerful, the élites, the conformists, the journalists, the politicians, the professors, the sociologists, the union bosses, the religious authorities.They told you it’s all a ploy, it’s all fake, it’s all wrong. But you understood in time that it was them who were a ploy, them who had it all wrong, them who did you wrong.

The disappearance of our civilization is not the only question that harasses us, although it towers over everything. Immigration is not the cause of all our problems, although it aggravates everything. The third-worlding of our country and our people impoverishes as much as it disintegrates, ruins as much as it torments.

It’s why you often have a hard time making ends meet. It’s why we must re-industrialize France. It’s why we must equalize the balance of trade. It’s why we must reduce our growing debt, bring back to France our companies that left, give jobs to our unemployed.

It’s why we must protect our technological marvels and stop selling them to foreigners. It’s why we must allow our small businesses to live, and to grow, and to pass from generation to generation.It’s why we must preserve our architectural, cultural, and natural heritage. It’s why we must restore our republican education, its excellence and its belief in merit, and stop surrendering our children to the experiments of egalitarians and pedagogists and the Doctor Strangeloves of gender theory and Islamo-leftism.

It’s why we must take back our sovereignty, abandoned to European technocrats and judges, who rob the French people of the ability to control their destiny in the name of a fantasy – a Europe that will never be a nation. Yes, we must give power to the people, take it back from the minority that unceasingly tyrannizes the majority and from judges who substitute their judicial rulings for government of the people, for the people, by the people.

For decades, our elected officials of the right and the left have led us down this dire path of decline and decadence. Right and left have lied and concealed the gravity of our diminishment. They have hidden from you the reality of our replacement.

You have known me for many years. You know what I say, what I diagnose, what I proclaim. I have long been content with the role of journalist, writer, Cassandra, whistleblower. Back then, I believed that a politician would take up the flame that I had lit. I said to myself, to each his own job, to each his own role, to each his own fight.

I have lost this illusion. Like you, I have lost confidence. Like you, I have decided to take our destiny in hand.

I saw that no politician had the courage to save our country from the tragic fate that awaits it. I saw that all these supposed professionals were, above all, impotent.That President Macron, who had presented himself as an outsider, was in fact the synthesis of his two predecessors, or worse. That all the parties were contenting themselves with reforms, while time passes them by.

There is no more time to reform France – but there is time to save her. That is why I have decided to run for President.

I have decided to ask your votes to become your President of the Republic, so that our children and grandchildren do not know barbarism. So that our daughters are not veiled and our sons are not forced to submit. So that we can bequeath to them the France we have known and that we received from our ancestors. So that we can still preserve our way of life, our traditions, our language, our conversations, our debates about history and fashion, our taste for literature and food.

So that the French remain French, proud of their past and confident in their future. So that the French once again feel at home. So that the newest arrivals assimilate their culture, adapt their history, and are remade as French in France – not foreigners in an unknown land.

We, the French, are a great nation. A great people. Our glorious past pleads for our future. Our soldiers have conquered Europe and the world. Our writers and artists have aroused universal admiration. Our scientific discoveries and industrial production have stamped their epochs. The charm of our art de vivre excites longing and joy in all who taste it.

We have known great victories, and we have overcome cruel defeats. For a thousand years, we have been one of the powers who have written the history of the world. We are worthy of our ancestors. We will not allow ourselves to be mastered, vassalized, conquered, colonized. We will not allow ourselves to be replaced.

In front of us, a cold and determined monster rises up, who seeks to dishonor us. They will say that you are racist. They will say that you are motivated by contemptible passions, when in fact it is the most lovely passion that animates you – passion for France.

They will say the worst about me. But I will keep going amidst the jeers, and I don’t care if they spit on me. I will never bend the head. For we have a mission to accomplish.

The French people have been intimidated, crippled, indoctrinated, blamed— but they lift up their heads, they drop the masks, they clear the air of lies, they hunt down these evil perjuries.

We are going to carry France on. We are going to pursue the beautiful and noble French adventure. We are going to pass the flame to the coming generations. Join with me. Rise up. We, the French, have always triumphed over all.

Long live the Republic, and above all, long live France!

Hot damn! That is one of the greatest political speeches I have ever heard! Here is my reaction. It’s from the time Eric Zemmour hated the music in a bar, and made them change it:

It’s an incredible speech (and not the first time Zemmour has given one). The first American politician who can give an American version of this speech — because France’s problems are not America’s problems — and run a campaign on it, will become president.

UPDATE: I just corrected the translation. It had been “you smell foreigners in your own country”. I listened to the French, and the correct translation is “you feel like foreigners in your own country”.

UPDATE.2: A reader points out that the original video now has English subtitles. You have to click the CC button at the bottom of the YouTube screen.

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Think Tank Thomas Aquinas

Several of you readers have written to me in the past few days to note that Team Integralist seems to be trying to turn me into the new David French, and to ask if I’m okay. Um, yeah, why shouldn’t I be? The Internet is not real life. This is all tempest-in-a-teacup stuff, and somehow I think I’ll survive being off of Adrian Vermeule’s Christmas card list. I have to share with you, though, this e-mail I received this afternoon from an important GOP Congressional staffer, whose name and affiliation (meaning where he works) I’m going to withhold. I should point out, though, that this staffer is not an Establishment Republican who just wants to return to the pre-Trump status quo:

Just wanted to put in a word of appreciation for your recent writings on the future trajectory of conservatism, especially given all the blowback online from our “side.” Working in [GOP office], I’m pretty up-to-speed on current debates surrounding integralism and the direction things are headed. (I’ve read plenty of Vermeule, Ahmari, Waldstein, Crean & Fimister, and the rest.)

That crowd seems pretty far removed from the realities of the moment, so let me be very blunt here. Nobody with a day job in public policy—and I mean nobody—is going to wade through thousands of words of neo-scholasticism at The Josias in order to puzzle out how to wield political power. What the “realignment” movement really needs are practical solutions that can be translated into Overton-window-shifting legislation, and we need them right now. We need cover articles in American Affairs on topics like “A National Conservative Approach to Health Insurance.” (To his credit, Gladden Pappin at the University of Dallas has been really good about this.) This is the sort of thing that can get translated into actual legislative proposals, which “normal” people will at least discuss.

I totally get why nobody wants to do this work. This stuff is boring, and technical, and requires developing some subject-matter competence. It’s a lot more fun to take potshots at David French.

But the fascinating paradox here is that while much of the integralist crowd faults you for being unwilling to confront the challenges of the day, in practice that’s exactly what they themselves are doing! Spending endless hours building out an intricate model of the perfect Catholic regime, and the suitable conditions under which it can seize baptized children from their parents (and justifying all this time and attention by claiming they’re simply stressing the “primacy of the speculative”), is nothing more than Ph.D.-level daydreaming. It’s an air castle. But it’s an easy alternative to doing the grinding, boring, “technocratic” work of proposing and defending actual policies.

(By contrast, your Benedict Option writings offer concrete tactics for navigating current and future conditions. That’s what seems to be completely out of view in their arguments.)

If I sound annoyed, it’s because so much of the intellectual oxygen in the postliberal space is being sucked up by people who are basically just repeating the same set of high-level claims over and over and over again. Yes. We get it. We can all agree that liberal neutrality is a façade and that we need to reinvest in individual workers and defend the common good. But on the ground, we need people who can talk seriously about things like the child tax credit, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Else, we’ll be incapable of effectively wielding power when we get it.

Anyway, rant over. Just thought you might appreciate hearing from someone who’s in the trenches right now.

I do appreciate it. This echoes what I’ve been hearing privately since the National Conservatism conference from conservative Catholics and others who are in the public policy trenches: that integralism, and integralist-adjacent speculation might be an interesting intellectual activity, but it is massively disconnected from the realities we are now facing, and is at best a distraction from initiatives that might actually work.

The Republican Party is likely to retake Congress in the 2022 midterms. What is a realistic legislative agenda that could be accomplished in this actually existing country? I’m not a public policy thinker, and not really a political thinker at all. Religion and culture is my wheelhouse, which is why the Benedict Option is more about what we can do culturally — though I of course recognize that politics has to be part of the resistance (and say so in the book). But I don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the best-we-can-do-right-now. We do need a broader and deeper vision of the Good, but something tells me that in America, it’s not going to come out of Catholic integralism.

Malcolm Kyeyune has a provocative Twitter thread about this kind of thing. Excerpts:

Read the entire thread. 

The Right needs concrete, achievable policy proposals. But it also needs new stories, or rather, Stories. Most people think narratively. To be honest, despite all the doubts I have about late liberalism, I think the old-fashioned American story is still a pretty good one, or at least better than any competitors. I was listening earlier today to the English “reactionary feminist” commentator Mary Harrington talking about how liberalism isolates people and alienates them from each other, from their past, and from anything higher than the self — and how this is a dead end. I also listened to the Quillette podcast with Batya Ungar-Sargon in which she said that she used to be woke, and is still a socialist, but an anti-woke one. She said that she came to realize that woke progressivism is in fact class war against the poor and working Americans on behalf of the ruling elites. You don’t need to be against classical liberalism simpliciter to agree with them that the state of liberalism today is not working for the common good.

Both of these women were at the NatCon conference, though neither are conservatives. There’s some really interesting stuff going on, both intellectually and in terms of policy potential. What about new stories, though? It is incredible that the Right has allowed the toxic woke story of America to go largely unchallenged. True, the woke have almost all the media, but can’t we do better than we have been? Reheated Reaganism is not the answer, obviously, nor is an unreflective nostalgia. But it seems to me that there is still a lot to work with within the American tradition. Classical liberalism is deeply flawed, perhaps fatally, but it’s the only tradition we have in this country. Besides, we were once a country that had a lot more solidarity, even though we had classical liberalism. Unless we have a true revolution in America, our future will evolve out of classical liberalism, because that is what we know. My thought is that we should take Patrick Deneen’s excellent critique of liberalism (Why Liberalism Failed), and figure out what it has to teach us about ways that we can reform liberalism in a Burkean way — that is, building on what can be salvaged from our own native tradition.

Deneen himself (I think) believes that this can’t happen, and maybe he’s right. But if he is, then it seems to me we are much more likely to get some form of socialism in this country, or right-wing authoritarianism in a distinctly American key (e.g., the Protestant Generalissimo Michael Flynn) than anything that would satisfy the throne-and-altar integralists.

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Fertility And Humanity’s Failure

Check out this chart. Pay attention to the column on the far right of each block, the one that says “TFR fcast”. That is the Total Fertility Rate forecast for each country. TFR is the average number of children a woman will have if she survives her childbearing years. Obviously no one has 1.5 children; the number is an average of an entire national population. For a nation’s population to hold steady, its TFR has to be 2.1 (the one-tenth of one percent is needed to account for untimely deaths). Anything below that means that a nation’s population is shrinking.

With that it mind, take a look:

 

These are the only nations on the list that are not shrinking: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Egypt, and Israel. Keep in mind that sub-Saharan African nations are not on the list. Sub-Saharan African TFR is declining rapidly too, but started so high that at its current rate of 4.6, it is still far, far ahead of the rest of the world.

China is not on this list either, though its TFR is utterly catastrophic. Gordon Chang wrote about it earlier this year. Excerpt:

China this century is on track to experience history’s most dramatic demographic collapse in the absence of war or disease.

Today, the country has a population more than four times larger than America’s. By 2100, the U.S. will probably have more people than China.

India is not on the list above, but just last week, it was announced that India has fallen below population replacement for the first time ever. 

Notice on the right-hand block the jaw-dropping rates for Asian countries. Demographers consider a country that has fallen below 1.8 TFR to be in a death spiral, as we have no record of a country recovering below that threshold. Does this mean that South Korea (TFR: .82) will cease to exist? No. But it does mean that the country will be a far, far different place in the future than it is today.

The standard liberal response to this is: Good! The planet needs fewer people. And lower population means that women are more free to chart the course for their own lives. 

It might well be the case that fewer people will be better for Nature, and it is undeniable that childless women have more opportunities for self-expression and mobility.

But few people think of the down sides of depopulation. In 2100, reports Joel Kotkin, in Germany, today Europe’s economic powerhouse, the elderly will outnumber children by four to one. Similar scenarios are going to play out in every country with low TFR. Who will pay the taxes necessary to support the elderly, especially their health care needs? How will the taxed-to-death productive young people have enough money to form and support their own families, if they are having to hand over so much to support the non-productive elderly? Who will do the work in societies of the future? Technology will probably take over many jobs that require people today, but still, think about production: with fewer people around to buy things, where will the demand for products come from?

These are the material and economic aspects of depopulation. Who can foresee the spiritual and psychological consequences of growing up and living in dying societies? Ever read P.D. James’s dystopic novel The Children Of Men? You should (avoid the movie).

Religion will be far more important in this dystopia. As Eric Kaufmann and others have documented, conservative religious believers generally have higher fertility rates. I am thinking now of the famous “prophecy” that Father Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, made in 1969. Here is the conclusion:

Let us go a step farther. From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly it will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Along-side this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize the sacraments as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.

The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century. But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret. [Emphasis mine — RD]

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

We who hold on to the faith — and who have embraced a form of the faith that is resilient in the face of these powerful anti-natalist, anti-family, anti-religious forces — will be lighthouses to people who feel the whole horror of their poverty in this childless, dying world. That is my hope, anyway. We should be very aware that the spread of this insane, suicidal cult of gender fluidity will further damage the ability of our population to bear children.

There are a variety of explanations for why population is dropping. Most experts seem to agree that when female education and emancipation from male dominance occurs, TFR drops. It has been pointed out too that societies that make it more expensive for young people to form families will see fewer families form. I can imagine that, but how do you explain Europe, whose social welfare states have made it much easier for people to support families, still having among the world’s lowest TFRs?

Anecdotally, I find that when talking to non-religious Millennials and Gen Z’ers, many simply don’t have marriage and family on their minds, except as something they might do in the far future. I have noticed that they can be totally unrealistic about biology and fertility (“I have lots of time left to have children,” an unmarried 28-year-old told me), but more than that, many of them just don’t want to have families.

Last year, I wrote this blog post in which I quoted a Gen Z student at length about what he was seeing. Unfortunately his post has disappeared, but I will quote him in mine:

The Flaming Eyeball (henceforth TFE) has a lengthy response. This is from the first part:

I write this essay as a Zoomer university student. In many ways, I am one of the most successful of my generation. I got a near-perfect SAT score, and earned a BS in a STEM degree from a major university in only 3 years. Although I am not an incel, I have had to give a lot of thought to the question of my generation’s sexuality in the past several years, because a large fraction of the guys I have met in high school and college seldom or never went on dates, had sex, or had girlfriends. Many of them still hung out with girls, but a lot of them never connected romantically or sexually. All of it seemed very ominous to me: if one guy can’t get laid, people can write him off as a loser, but if a large percentage of young men are sexually frustrated to the extent that they rarely get any attention from women, there is something very odd going on. So I found myself forced to theorize about what exactly has befallen us, and what are the roots and implications of mass sexlessness in America.

Why, overall, do men and women desire one another less?

What follows is a long, heavily linked analysis in which TFE talks about the effects of being acculturated by social media, the large, measurable decline in testosterone, neuroticism, learned helplessness, and the collapse of religion. I find the last one the most interesting, because it’s in my wheelhouse. TFE discusses how his generation is filling the God-shaped hole in their souls with politics — but it’s not a positive politics, but rather a politics of negation. They are fanatically against what they hate, not in favor of what they love. And because they are hysterically intolerant, few who disagree will say anything about it, because as socially isolated as they already are, they don’t want to get even moreso by outing themselves as thought criminals.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing, and weight TFE’s argument. He concludes:

To sum this up, the relationship problems of my generation illustrate two far greater trends, which will intertwine and play out in various ways over the course of the next few decades. The first, which played out in the Mouse Utopia, is that Generation Z on balance is the weakest generation, having been raised by a micromanaging and decadent society to be soft and utterly dependent on the system. The second is that they are thoroughly spiritually bankrupt, atomized, and lonely, leading to corresponding longings, confusion, and rage which will at minimum unbalance the system. Rod Dreher is one of the few mainstream thinkers to ever touch on these issues, and for this is met with consistent mockery and denial by his commenters that these constitute problems at all. I have witnessed, in both statistics and personal experience, the widespread destructive trends of poor mental and physical health, inability to socialize or pair-bond, and loss of faith and spiritual values. They are very real, and they have caused and will continue to cause such tremendous suffering and destruction that unchecked, they threaten the US’s ability to continue as a nation.

… I hope you’ll consider his argument seriously. It seemed plausible to me, but I am a Gen Xer who has little interaction with Gen Z. What I thought about when I finished it is how I felt when I finished archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins’s 2005 book The Fall Of Rome. In it, Ward-Perkins, who teaches at Oxford, discusses the material collapse of Roman civilization when the state fell. He documents that the knowledge of how to do basic things required for the continuation of civilization disappeared; some of these things (like, say, how to build a roof) did not return for centuries. The things Ward-Perkins talks about are skills you wouldn’t think people would forget. But that’s not how it works, shockingly. I think it’s entirely possible that we are losing the skills for how to reproduce. I’m not talking about “how to have sex,” but I’m talking about the human skills needed to form families and perform the basic task of every human generation: produce the next one.

So, Gen Z readers: Is TFE’s post an accurate description of life as you know it among your generation? I put the question to my son Matt, who is a 21-year-old college student. He responded skeptically:

I fail to understand why these people have to blame some amorphous evil Marxist soyboy ray for all this when the explanation is simple: most peoples’ lives consist of being plugged into a screen, driving, and sleeping. Like my roommate last year — desperately trying to work out why no girls are interested in him when he has no life outside his computer. This is what it means to be alienated from the world by the horrible suburbanized existence we’ve made for ourselves. Amateur endocrinology doesn’t enter into it. We could all be chiseled muscle hunks and just as miserable as we were before.

Hmm. I think that he and TFE are actually closer than he realizes.

Wait, I just found TFE’s original post archived elsewhere, so you can read the whole thing. 

Between climate change and mass depopulation, the twenty-first century may turn out to be as eventful (and not in a good way) as the calamitous fourteenth century was for Europe. The future belongs to those who show up for it. Find a religious congregation that believes children are a blessing from God, and commit yourself to it. Build a Benedict Option. Pray. Be fruitful and multiply.

UPDATE: Here’s a really interesting podcast in which Benjamin Boyce interviews two self-described “reactionary feminists,” Mary Harrington and Alex Kaschuta. The whole thing is great, but if you can go to the 9:00 mark, you will hear Mary — who is on the political Left — talk about how having a baby destroyed her belief in liberalism, which valorizes individual autonomy and freedom. She believes that contemporary feminism is bad for women, and only actually helps economic elites. Mary will join Kale Zelden and me for our next podcast, by the way. Mary says in this podcast that evolutionarily speaking, if you don’t care for the next generation, you die. I will ask her tomorrow if the global birth dearth is a death wish, and what classical liberalism and modernity have to do with it.

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St. Vlad’s Should Move To Texas

The other day St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary announced that it will be selling its facilities and property in Yonkers, and relocating somewhere as yet to be decided. This is great news. Though the Northeast is the historical home of Orthodoxy in America, owing to historical immigration patterns, the Orthodox faith, like all forms of Christianity, has been in serious decline in that part of America. The tale of Orthodoxy’s future in America is told in these two maps. The first is from 2010; the second from 2017:

 

The future of American Orthodoxy lies primarily in the region of this country most open to the Gospel. To be clear for non-Orthodox readers, Orthodox Christians are very few compared to Christians in other churches in this country. And we have declined overall in the past decade. Here is research from 2020. Excerpts:

The Greek Orthodox are by far the biggest presence among US Orthodoxy. Yet they are suffering big losses because cradle Orthodox raised in the faith are falling away in adulthood. I am part of the OCA, which is slowly growing, as you can see (sorry, I misread the graph when I posted this morning). The thing about the OCA (whose roots are in the Russian tradition) and the Antiochians (whose roots are in the Arabic tradition) is that they are very convert-friendly. In my own mission parish here in Baton Rouge, nearly everybody is a convert, including our priest. I have observed that this makes visitors feel more at home, in part, I think, because almost everybody there knows what it’s like to show up to an Orthodox parish for the first time, and to feel dazzled but also disoriented.

It might also be because OCA parishes, like Antiochian ones, don’t emphasize ethnicity in the parish ethos. How could we, if so many among us are converts? When my wife and I were exploring Orthodoxy back in 2005, we first attended the big Greek church in Dallas. It was lovely, and people were welcoming to us. But then we attended the OCA cathedral, St. Seraphim, and were really struck by the difference. In the OCA cathedral, despite there being a significant number of Slavic immigrants, it did not feel like the tribe at prayer as it did in the Greek church. I hesitate to criticize the Greek church, because they were friendly and open to us, and I know non-Greeks who converted in a Greek parish, and are thriving in their faith. Had we become Orthodox at that parish, I am sure we would have thrived. But back then, we had the impression (false or not) that it would be more difficult for us to grow as Orthodox Christians there because we were not Greek. It makes sense that an Orthodox parish that focuses heavily on the universality (catholicity) of the Orthodox faith, as opposed to its ethnic particularity, would be more appealing to potential converts in the US.

Again, the numbers alone do not tell the story of Orthodoxy in America’s present and future. If you look at this chart, you will think that New York City is the capital of American Orthodoxy. It once made a lot of sense to found St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in suburban NYC:

Again, though, this is a snapshot of the past. The Orthodox in the legacy states are largely not reproducing themselves. Twenty years from now, when the Boomers have gone on to that great coffee hour in the sky, the chart will look very different.

This chart — another from Orthodox researcher Alexei Krindatch — gives a clue as to why:

Krindatch, who carries out his research on behalf of the US Orthodox bishops, found that the Orthodox parishes that are growing are those that are convert-friendly, diverse, and open to young families. Again, this stands to reason. In our case, it felt more fitting to attend a church where our ethnicity was not an issue, and in which there were plenty of converts who anticipated our questions and who could help us work through this or that issue. It’s a real challenge for more ethnically oriented churches (Greek, Russian, whatever), because in preserving ethnic roots and culture, they are doing important work … but it may also be work that undermines their ability to survive as Christian parishes. It can too often seem that the work of a particular parish is focused primarily on the ethnos, not the Logos.

What does this have to do with moving SVOTS? It’s plain to me that the premier pan-Orthodox seminary in America should relocate to where the long-term growth area of American Orthodoxy is. I believe the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area is the ideal place.

First, Texas is religiously active in a way I have not encountered anywhere else I’ve lived. Seriously, even here in next-door Louisiana, the enthusiasm for the Christian faith is not like in Texas. I lived in Dallas from 2003 until early 2010, and one of the things I loved most about it was how normative Christian faith was across traditions (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox). And, the sense of ecumenical brotherhood in north Texas is strong.

Second, there are strong Orthodox parishes there, of several jurisdictions. The Greeks have a big presence, with Holy Trinity church. The OCA cathedral, St. Seraphim, is just outside of downtown Dallas, and continues to grow (a friend there sent me a photo of the new crop of catechumens: twenty of them, and they all look to be young). Plus, inside the cathedral is the tomb of Archbishop Dmitri (Royster) of Dallas, the apostle of Orthodoxy to the South. Click on that link to read about this incredible man, and his missionary fervor. Born a Texas Baptist, converted as a teenager to Orthodoxy, a speaker of Spanish with a passion for Latino culture, Vladyka had a big heart for missionary work. My family and I were received into Orthodoxy in the final years of his life, and I can attest to his holiness and fatherly care. Plus, I believe he will be canonized one day. Vladyka Dmitri’s body was disinterred five years after his burial, so it could be transferred to the tomb built for him inside his cathedral. They discovered his body was incorrupt (see here; there’s a photo), which is taken by Orthodox and Catholics to be a sign of sainthood.

Plus, there is an Orthodox classical Christian school, St. Peter’s, in Fort Worth. And DFW has an international airport, which is important given how internationally oriented the seminary is. And the great Orthodox iconographer Vladimir Grygorenko lives in the DFW Metroplex.

Admittedly, I’m biased towards DFW because that’s where I found Orthodoxy, and I have such warm feelings about it. But I think objectively, the DFW Metroplex makes a lot of sense for the SVOTS relocation. Back in 2009, when my family and I were planning to relocate to Philadelphia for a job, I mentioned to a seminarian in our parish who was at St. Tikhon’s seminary in Pennsylvania at the time that we were thrilled to be moving to a city and a region that had lots of Orthodox parishes. He told me that we were naive. He said, “You will find that Orthodoxy in the Northeast is not the kind of Orthodoxy that you have here in Texas.” He was right, I’m sorry to say. There are exceptions, of course — I’m thinking about the great Antiochian parish St. Philip’s in Bucks County, but there are others — but mostly my experience with Orthodoxy in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic is of churches in decline, which again, is consistent with the decline of Christianity overall in that region.

For various theological and sociological reasons, I believe Orthodox Christianity is on the cusp of real growth in our country. As I’ve written here recently, Orthodox priests around the US are reporting surprising numbers of newcomers showing up during Covid. In our own mission parish in Baton Rouge, we have experienced the same thing, and most of them are young — in their twenties, and even a few teens. When asked why, they all give some version of the same reason: because Orthodox faith and life strikes them as real and solid, in ways they did not get in their previous tradition. To me, they are seeing the same thing I saw, and do see. They’re right! I sense that we Orthodox have a tremendous opportunity for evangelizing among the young, even in a time of overall religious decline. The young people at my mission parish all know that if Christianity is going to endure what’s happening now, and what is to come, it will have to be a deep and resilient form of the faith. That’s why they are discovering Orthodoxy.

I hope SVOTS can shake the dust off its sandals and head to Texas. Everybody else is these days, so why not?

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How To Talk Like An EU Baizuocrat

From Live Not By Lies:

It is difficult for people raised in the free world to grasp the breadth and the depth of lying required simply to exist under communism. All the lies, and lies about lies, that formed the communist order were built on the basis of this foundational lie: the communist state is the sole source of truth. Orwell expressed this truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Under the dictatorship of Big Brother, the Party understands that by changing language—Newspeak is the Party’s word for the jargon it imposes on society—it controls the categories in which people think. “Freedom” is slavery, “truth” is falsehood, and so forth. Doublethink—“holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”—is how people learn to submit their minds to the Party’s ideology. If the Party says 2 + 2 = 5, then 2 + 2 = 5. The goal is to convince the person that all truth exists within the mind, and the rightly ordered mind believes whatever the Party says is true.

Orwell writes:

It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

In our time, we do not have an all-powerful state forcing this on us. Under soft totalitarianism, the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in doublethink every day. Men have periods. The woman standing in front of you is to be called “he.” Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result.

To update an Orwell line to our own situation: “The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

To update an Orwell line to today’s news, “The European Commission tells you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It is their final, most essential command.” What am I talking about? A source at the EC sent to me a PDF of a new set of “inclusive communication” guidelines for employees of the baizuocracy (“baizuo” is the Chinese term of contempt for white leftists). It’s like a woke computer came up with it to replace how actual human beings speak. Here are some excerpts:

 

Here’s how one is to speak about racial minorities. Notice the first example, how one is never, ever, ever to suggest that minorities might bear responsibility for their situation. Maybe the African migrant has no language skills or other things  required for skilled labor in Europe. Well, it’s society’s fault! And notice the last one: you can’t talk about people as desperate, but you have to treat them as in need of special coddling:

Writing about the Alphabet People? Well, here’s how you gotta talk:

Oh, and even vexillologists have to be woke in the EC:

Oh, and DON’T SAY ‘CHRISTMAS’ and DON’T SAY ‘MARIA,’ or you might not be inclusive!

The pod people who come up with this garbage must be repudiated at every opportunity. They are trying to change the meaning of … well, of reality, by the use of language. The thing is, they really can do a hell of a lot of damage by requiring people to do this, and making mastering the jargon the sine qua non of working for the EU bureaucracy (and eventually for woke capitalist entities). If I were European, I would vote populist, simply to vote for common sense and basic reality. If I had to work for the EC, I would have to keep my code-switching skills up so that I didn’t lose touch with humanity.

Alarmingly, this might be impossible for younger Europeans. Again, from Live Not By Lies:

In Poland, Skibiński explains, the only long-lasting social institutions that existed were the church and the
family. In the twentieth century, the twin totalitarianisms tried to capture and destroy the Polish Catholic Church.

Communism attempted to break apart the family by maintaining a monopoly on education and teaching young
people to be dependent on the state. It also sought to lure the young away from the church by convincing them
that the state would be the guarantors of their sexual freedom.

“The thing is, now such tendencies come from the West, which we have always looked up to, and regarded
as a safe place,” he says. “But now many Poles start to develop the awareness that the West is no longer safe for
us.

“What we see now is an attempt to destroy the last surviving communities: the family, the church, and the nation. This is one connection between liberalism and communist theory.”

Skibiński focuses on language as a preserver of cultural memory. We know that communists forbade people
to talk about history in unapproved ways. This is a tactic today’s progressives use as well, especially within
universities.

What is harder for contemporary people to appreciate is how we are repeating the Marxist habit of falsifying
language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning. Propaganda
not only changes the way we think about politics and contemporary life but it also conditions what a culture judges worth remembering.

I mention the way liberals today deploy neutral-sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives. And they imbue other words and phrases—hierarchy, for example, or traditional family—with negative connotations.

Recalling life under communism, the professor continues, “The people who lived only within such a linguistic
sphere, who didn’t know any other way to speak, they could really start believing in this way of using of words.
If a word carries with it negative baggage, it becomes impossible to have a discussion about the phenomenon.”

Teaching current generations of college students who grew up in the postcommunist era is challenging because they do not have a natural immunity to the ideological abuse of language. “For me, it’s obvious. I remember this false use of language. But for our students, it’s impossible to understand.”

Soon enough, there won’t be any Europeans left who remember the old way of speaking and writing, only the falsified one that destroys the concepts of family, church, and nation.

UPDATE: A reader who asks not to be quoted directly writes to say that both this story and the previous one about the hiney-lickers of Princeton show how far the ruling class and its institutions are from the rest of us in terms of values. It’s not that these people exist, he says, but that they exist in such exalted and powerful positions, and use their privilege to dominate all culture and society. Make fun of the EU Newspeak all you want, says this reader, but if you don’t obey it, you will have a hell of a challenge staying employed in the middle-class to upper-class professional world.

Why is it, he asks, that the Left has built a powerful machine to make sure nobody can fire their favored constituents without taking massive hits on all kinds of channels, but the Right rarely stands up for its own? Why is it that Kyle Rittenhouse will never be employable in any middle or upper profession, but almost nobody who did anything violent or destructive in the 2020 BLM riots will ever have to worry? Considering the factors that make this true, and you will understand something about power in the United States. While we on the Right sat around making fun of all these grievance studies majors for not being able to make it in the real world, the Left went about creating employment guarantees for them, turning them all into commissars.

The reader says that the baizuocracy sees right-wingers like us as crazy and probably dangerous — but still “safe,” because we still operate within the rules that the Left controls.

My question: how can we begin to dismantle all this baizuo privilege? If the GOP ever gets unified control of Congress and the White House, what should they do?

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Hiney-Lickers Of Princeton

A non-faculty source at Princeton University — one of the crown jewels of American higher education — sent me these from flyers that RAs provided to students:

 

I know it makes me out to be an old coot, but so what: is this what the American elite has become? Do people send their kids to Princeton (tuition, room, board, fees: $74,190) to have the university’s agents encourage them to lick each other’s butts? Because that’s what’s happening.

This really is a tell. The US ruling class is increasingly degenerate, don’t you think? It’s not that butt-licking and other perversions were unknown prior to today. It’s that one of the most important universities in the world is now encouraging what one imagines are among the most intelligent students in the world to amuse themselves by licking each other’s butts, and offers to provide them with the set-ups to do so.

Once upon a time, people looked up to the Ivy League as representative of the best of America. And now? In Princeton’s case, they’re determined to carry out a campaign drive out impressive scholars for standing up to neoracist progressive initiatives, and they’re engaged in grooming behavior to encourage students to act out sexual scenarios they’ve seen on porn clips.

This is your American ruling class in 2021.

And yet, how many normie Americans would still send their kids to Princeton because they want their kid to be credentialed by an Ivy League school, and to be launched into the elite-of-elites social class? How many conservative Americans would do that? Most of them, I would wager.

We conservatives can be hypocritical about this stuff. We will read stuff in the conservative media about how rotten the elite universities are, and how nearly all of academia is ruining itself with wokeness, and we will nod along with suggestions that our kids might be better off with a trade school education than a college degree. But if you’re that kind of conservative, and your kid comes to you and suggests that trade school might be a better fit for him than college, you might well blow a gasket and say no, son, you have to go to college, because … reasons. The real reason is that trade school is considered a step down in social class.

This happened to me recently. My middle son is 17. He’s a smart kid, makes good grades. But he prefers working with his hands, and prefers to be outdoors. And he remembers the lecture my late father gave to him a decade ago: the one I heard a thousand times as a kid, in which my dad railed about how he really wanted to go to trade school, but his parents guilted him into going to college, and how he resented his desk job from day one until retirement. My son said he thinks he might be happier going to trade school and learning how to work on equipment. This brings him pleasure. He bought his first car recently, a pick-up truck, and he loves working on it.

It could be that he is mistaking enthusiasm for working on his truck for a sign of a vocation in the trades. We’ll see over the next year — he’s got a year and a half left in high school. But I told him that if he discerns that trade school is better for him, then I will support that path forward. I can’t be a hypocrite who chronicles the decline of American universities by day, but who would nevertheless insist that my son get a college degree when he doesn’t want to go to college, but instead wants to learn how to fix machines and build things.

If I had a child at Princeton and I found out that the university was handing out hiney-licking kits to them, I would be on the phone to the university president to raise hell.

Think about what a gift to the Chinese and the Russians something like this is. The American elites, at one of their premier institutions of higher learning, provide help and material assistance to turn the leadership class of tomorrow into a claque of butt-lickers and oral fetishists who are too fragile to hear arguments that make them anxious. This is what progressivism is doing to America. This is the baizuocracy in action.

UPDATE: Someone at Princeton sent me these photos of a text from mandatory training for Princeton freshmen. Notice how highly contentious cultural theory claims are presented by Princeton as fact.

And:

This is ideological indoctrination by the ruling class of its successors.

 

 

 

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Jesus & Elton John

What’s going on with the Anglican Church of Canada? Oh, this:

What else is going on in the Anglican Church of Canada? Catastrophic decline: according to the church’s own figures, it will cease to exist by 2040. 

As regular readers of my blog know, Christianity in the West is in trouble all over, but the liberal churches are declining the fastest. It is not generally the case that being theologically and morally conservative causes a church to grow, but it is true that standing counterculturally within Christian tradition at least stanches the bleeding. That’s why it is so important for Evangelicals to watch out for the wolves in sheep’s clothing among them, trying to smuggle in the poison pill of theological progressivism. My friend Denny Burk, who teaches at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, posed a question to Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the rock star Evangelical historian who teaches at Calvin University. Du Mez is the author of the bestseller Jesus And John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted A Faith And Fractured A Nation.She and Burk, who is a white conservative Evangelical, had been arguing.

Pretty straightforward question, right? Shouldn’t take long to answer. Well, Du Mez wrote a longish response that never actually answers the question. Here’s an excerpt:

Do I personally affirm “the church’s teaching that homosexuality is sinful?” Which church? My own church (local & denomination) is actively reexamining this issue in light of tradition, interpretation, history, & science. I’m participating, but as a historian, not a theologian.

I grew up holding the “traditional” view, that same-sex sexual relationships were sinful. As far back as I can remember, though, I never believed that a theological view on this matter should dictate government policy in a way that abridges fundamental civil rights.

This wasn’t because I was currying favor with progressives. I didn’t know many back then. My own strand of Reformed thinking comes w/ a deep respect for pluralism & rejection of Christian nationalism. (Esp among my Dutch profs who’d endured Nazi occupation.)

Since that time, I’ve encountered compelling theological & historical arguments that challenge or complicate traditional approaches to this issue. I’ve read several but have several more to read, and am doing so in conversation w/ “traditional” perspectives.

I’m doing this all in community, w/ scholars, pastors, theologians, & LGBTQ+ Chrs, as part of my local church, as part of an officially sanctioned denominational process, and in an official capacity as a representative of my university.

So, does Kristin Kobes Du Mez affirm the traditional Biblical standard, or not? Read the whole thing — she dodges the question entirely. I don’t for one second believe that KKDM doesn’t know where she stands on the moral and theological issue of homosexuality. I think this meme (starring KKDM) from the excellent Twitter account Woke Preacher Clips nails it:

 

Here’s the beginning of Denny Burk’s response to KKDM’s non-answer:

Thank you for the fulsome explanation. I do think that this confirms the profound nature of our disagreements.

For its entire 2,000-year history, the church has regarded homosexuality as sinful. This is not an “agree to disagree” issue among Christians. It is a watershed.

/1 https://t.co/VZLdXI4kWB

— Denny Burk (@DennyBurk) November 27, 2021

It really is. The Evangelical critic Neil Shenvi, in an essay criticizing the approach of progressive Evangelical scholars like Du Mez, explains why their heterodoxy matters. Excerpt:

First, in keeping with an intersectional framework, these books view white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, and nationalism as mutually reinforcing and interlocking systems of oppression that can’t easily be disentangled, leading to phrases like “white evangelical patriarchy” or “white Christian nationalism.” For example, Barr explicitly cites Tisby’s comments on racism to elucidate sexism: “Jemar Tisby writes ‘racism never goes away. It just adapts.’ The same is true of patriarchy. Like racism, patriarchy is a shapeshifter — conforming to each new era, looking as if it had always belonged” (Barr, MBW, p. 186). Whitehead and Perry write that Christian nationalism “glorifies the patriarchal, heterosexual family as not only God’s biblical standard, but the cornerstone of all thriving civilizations.”Jones asks: “What if . . . conceptions of marriage and family, of biblical inerrancy, or even the concept of having a personal relationship with Jesus developed as they did because they were useful tools for reinforcing white dominance?” And in an incredibly revealing passage, Du Mez writes:

Within this expanding [evangelical] network, differences . . . could be smoothed over in the interest of promoting ‘watershed issues’ like complementarianism, the prohibition of homosexuality, the existence of hell, and substitutionary atonement . . . . Evangelicals who offered competing visions of sexuality, gender, or the existence of hell found themselves excluded from conferences and associations, and their writings banned from popular evangelical bookstores and distribution channels.

In all these passages (and many more I could cite), we find that the authors view their concerns as one part of a larger and seamless liberatory project. They are not merely aiming to challenge racism or specific interpretations of gender roles, but our understanding of marriage, sexuality, hell, inerrancy, and the gospel itself.

Second, these authors’ “deconstructive” approach to theology is necessarily a universal acid. Even if they weren’t explicitly committed to challenging evangelical doctrine broadly, their methodological approach makes such an outcome inevitable. This erosion is, perhaps, one of my greatest fears. I worry that pastors will embrace these books thinking that their application can be confined to, say, race alone. But once a white pastor endorses the view that he — as a white male — is blinded by his own white supremacy, unable to properly understand relevant biblical principles due to his social location, and in need of the “lived experience” of oppressed minorities to guide him, how long before someone in his congregation applies the same reasoning to his beliefs about gender? Or sexuality? At some point, he will have to reverse course and (correctly) insist that although he, like all of us, has blind spots and biases that will distort his understanding of Scripture, nonetheless it is to Scripture — properly interpreted — that we must appeal as our final authority on these issues.

To be clear, the broader argument that Evangelicals like Burk and Shenvi are having with Du Mez and her allies is not something that I have a stake in. I read on Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature the first two chapters of Jesus and John Wayne, and while it is clear that Du Mez is arguing from a progressive position, the book seems like it could make some valid and important critical points about how much contemporary Evangelical orthodoxy is determined by culture, not Scripture. Judging by those chapters alone, Du Mez is not entirely wrong.

Yet unlike racism and nationalism (to cite two examples from Du Mez’s book), two issues on which the old-timey Evangelicals were either outright wrong (the former) or at least in highly contestable territory (the latter), the Christian teaching on homosexuality cannot be massaged to fit contemporary mores. The Bible and the Tradition could not be clearer. Perhaps Du Mez was being so cagey in her response to Burk because what she accuses conservative white Evangelicals of (namely, of corrupting the Gospel by imposing cultural judgments particular to their race and cultural class) is 100 percent true about her regarding homosexuality. Until the latter half of the twentieth century, virtually no Christians argued that homosexuality was either morally neutral or morally good, because there is nothing in Scripture or Tradition to support that claim. If almost no Christians prior to contemporary times, and exclusively in North America and Europe, believed that homosexuality was fine, then that’s a pretty good sign that the progressive position with which Du Mez may or may not share (she won’t answer Burk’s question, recall) is entirely a function of culture.

Maybe Denny Burk will write a book about white Evangelicals like KKDM, and call it Jesus And Elton John the Baptist. He better hurry up, lest more Evangelical churches open themselves up to high-profile progressive Evangelical teachers, and end up going the way of the Anglican Church of Canada, and every other church that sells their Gospel birthright for a pot of woke message.

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Jordan Peterson’s Triumphant Return

You will recall the disgraceful act of Cambridge University in 2019, when it withdrew an invitation for Jordan B. Peterson, one of the world’s most important public intellectuals, to lecture at the university because he had been photographed standing next to someone wearing a t-shirt with an anti-Islamic slogan. Well, the past two weeks, Peterson returned to Cambridge in triumph. This didn’t just happen by accident; in Cambridge, admirers of Peterson and lovers of free speech got busy fighting for him to be allowed to come back. Arif Ahmed, a devout atheist, was one of those brave fighters, and celebrates the victory in Spiked Online. Excerpts:

And so we began a long and at first lonely campaign to realign this ancient and great institution with freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of thought.

Our battle has borne fruit. In late 2020 Cambridge adopted a new, liberal free-speech policy that protected our right to invite speakers of our choosing, and prevented the university from cancelling an invitation that had been accepted. In May this year, the vice-chancellor took prompt and decisive action to remove a policy aimed at policing ‘microaggressions’. And then in the autumn, Jordan Peterson announced that he was planning to visit the university, at the invitation of Dr James Orr at the Faculty of Divinity.

That visit has now occurred. And thanks principally to the courage and energy of Dr Orr it has been a tremendous success.

I saw Peterson speak twice on his Cambridge visit. He spoke passionately, at length and without notes, to rapt audiences. He engaged the crowd with care and warmth. His seminars were a model of academic engagement. There was a lively, disputatious and often rigorous battle of ideas that ranged from the neuroscience of perception via William Empson and 17th-century counterpoint to Mesopotamian creation myths.

It seemed that everywhere Peterson went in Cambridge there were students who wanted to learn from him, to argue with him and sometimes to be photographed next to him (I advised him to check their t-shirts before posing). There were no protests, unless you count one silly but brave student popping up in a lecture wearing a lobster outfit.

Do read the whole thing. Prof. Ahmed, a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge, reports that Peterson spoke to a jam-packed hall of receptive students, and the university proctors rose to assert their traditional role in protecting the right of people to speak freely at the university. Amazing! It is a great and glorious occasion when the good guys win against the woke, for once. God bless James Orr and all the rest who made this possible.

Just this morning, the Cambridge Union has posted a video of JBP’s talk. I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but I wanted to get it to you as soon as possible:

Dr. Orr, who is a friend, sent me this photo he took of JBP with a recent book of note. This image delights me. I hope Peterson will read the book, and find something in it of value:

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The Complicated Conservative Future

Here’s a link to the first post of an interesting Twitter thread by Lyman Stone about the future of conservatism. 

He begins by talking about “fusionism,” the postwar version of American conservatism that brought together three factions on the Right: social/religious conservatives, national security hawks, and anti-statist free marketeers. Stone says this worked not because the Religious Right represented a majority, but because if America was basically Christian, the Religious Right was tolerable. I think of people like my parents: conservatives who weren’t engaged with churchgoing, and who weren’t keen on super-churchy people, but who nevertheless considered themselves to be Christian, and who were generally in favor of whatever the Religious Right wanted. Stone says those days are over:

 

So, fusionism is dead because we are a post-Christian nation (nota bene, Stone is a Christian). So what’s next? Stone says the future of the Right seems to be playing out among Neo-Reactionaries and National Conservatives.

One more:

 

Read the whole thing. It’s a long, meaty thread, and I’ve only quoted part of it (mostly the part that involves me and my ideas).

I think Lyman doesn’t quite get my position — which is admittedly an unsatisfying position, but it’s the best I can do right now. I am not now, nor have ever been, a “Benedictine quietist”. In The Benedict Option, I make it clear that Christians have to stay engaged in politics, if only to protect religious liberty (though there are more reasons to stay involved than that). My main point is that politics are not a solution to what threatens us the most; that politics are at best a partial solution. We are not going to vote our way out of this, nor are we going to empower authoritarian politicians who can accomplish this for us.

As I see it, the great crisis of our time is not the erosion of democracy. It’s the dissolution of Christianity in the West. None other than Viktor Orban himself once spoke about the limits of politics in this matter: he said that as a politician, he can provide people with things, but he can’t provide them with meaning. You can’t order people to believe in Christ. You can try, but it doesn’t work. Well, it “worked” in the medieval period, when the masses did what the sovereign ordered them to do, and over generations, people came to truly believe in Christianity. But it is impossible to imagine that working today.

My personal project, as laid out in The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies, is all about Christian faith withstanding the current and future era. There is no contradiction between being an Orban fanboy and also believing in the Benedict Option. Why? Because I don’t expect Orban or any other leader to be able to use politics to solve a religious and cultural problem; I only want politicians to protect the ability of churches and religious and cultural institutions to carry out our missions. In a pluralistic culture like America’s, to do much more than that would require something like tyranny, because as Lyman Stone recognizes, the kinds of policies that serious religious conservatives favor are losing popularity.

Contrary to what Stone suggests, I do not believe the system will “soon self-destruct”. I believe that it will eventually fall apart, but that could take a very long time, and it won’t do so without immense destruction. I could vote for any kind of conservative, and would probably be happier on balance in some sort of integralist order than the degraded liberalism we’re increasingly having to live with. But I also know that an integralist order would likely compel people to hate Christianity as a handmaiden to an unpopular state. It would likely make it easier to practice Christianity, but make it harder to win converts. I remind you of what I heard from some young Polish Catholics who support the Law & Justice government: that the government’s pushing hard on conservative Catholic principles, beyond the limits of where the Polish people are willing to go, is discrediting Christianity in the eyes of the younger generation.

Besides, Christianity is not declining in the West because of politics. It is declining for a variety of reasons, most of all because of material abundance, radical individualism, and the loss of a sense of sacred order. How are we going to legislate our way out of that hole? We need good laws, for sure, but more than that we need far more discipleship and far more evangelization. I would put discipleship ahead of evangelization, because you can’t give people what you don’t have. If evangelization means simply getting people to say the Sinner’s Prayer, and/or join a church, but leave their lives unreformed, then what is the point? Cultural Christianity is more important than most people think — Robert Louis Wilken explains why in this great 2004 First Things piece, which I cannot recommend often enough — but it’s important precisely because it makes it easier for people within such a culture to embrace the truth of Jesus Christ.

About building “little fortresses,” the Benedict Option is more about building little fortresses within oneself and one’s immediate community. I’m all for building external “fortresses,” but as the case of the Benda family of Prague shows, it is more important to build the unseen fortress within members of the community. It was all but impossible to build external fortresses capable of keeping the Communist government at bay, but Vaclav and Kamila Benda knew that they could build up the resistance within themselves and their children, and do their best to spread it to the community around them. The most important task they had was to keep the memory of what it meant to be Czech and Christian alive until such time as totalitarianism fell. They were all well aware that they were almost powerless in the face of totalitarianism, but they also knew about totalitarianism’s vulnerabilities. None of those dissidents expected Communism to collapse in their lifetimes. They built structures of resistance because it was the right thing to do.

People who think my work is about coming up with a new political configuration misunderstand it. If one is a neoreactionary or one is a National Conservative, or if one is Trumpist, or whatever one is, we still need the Benedict Option, defined as a way of life dedicated to fully living out traditional Christianity within one’s own sphere. Politics can only give us things; it can’t give us ultimate meaning. Only religion can do that. If you understand that the Benedict Option is primarily a religious and cultural project, and only secondarily a religious project, you’ll be on target.

To be clear: I’m not really antipolitical; I believe that politics does have a role to play in Christian survival, and it’s probably accurate to say that I’m more aware of that now than when I published The Benedict Option in 2017. But conservative Christians have been dealt a very weak hand, and I see no reason to believe that we have the skill to play it intelligently. And I don’t know what “playing it intelligently” would mean in this fast-moving culture. Adrian Vermeule, the Carl Schmitt of the neointegralists, is counting on the culture changing rapidly at some point to favor integralism. This is magical thinking. He is right to point to how rapidly the culture changed to accept and affirm the insanity of, say, transgenderism, but what he ignores is that transgenderism is a logical fulfillment of what people in our society had already come to believe about the meaning of marriage, of sex, and of identity. I don’t see the prep work being done to swing the culture back to (checks notes) 19th century ultramontanist reaction. Maybe it is, and I’m just too sinful to see it. 

Having said that, at this point, I will vote for whoever is more likely to protect the values, the liberties, and the institutions that mean the most to me, but I don’t expect deliverance from politics. If we conservative Christians were able to control politics completely, but the churches were empty, this would be defeat, straight up. The Benedict Option is not a strategy for political engagement; it is a strategy for the survival of Christianity under current conditions. It’s not fair to judge it for something it doesn’t try to be. I do, however, think that Stone is on the right track with his criticism of neoreaction as a political program. Their judgments on the failures of liberal democracy may be correct, but it is hard to see how they are going to persuade enough people to agree with them to make a difference. I think National Conservatism has a better shot, because it operates within the liberal democratic system, which almost everybody accepts. My heart is with the neoreactionary critique, but my head is hanging on by its cerebral fingertips to classical liberalism out of prudence. It’s the devil we know.

To conclude, I agree with Stone here:

Thoughts? Do make a point of reading the entire Stone thread, which has a lot more in it than what I have quoted here.

 

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