Rod Dreher's Blog, page 36

Are Trans Non-Binary Clergy The Church’s Future?

What’s going on at Virginia Theological Seminary, one of the country’s largest Episcopal seminaries? Well, there’s this advice on how to start with gender-inclusive children’s ministry:

Gender, like so many other aspects of human identity, exists on a spectrum. I’m a non-binary trans Episcopal clergy person, and thankfully, at this stage in my life, I’m not often told I need to do things like “sit boy-girl-boy-girl crisscross applesauce around the rug so class can get started.” Where would I go? The middle? Outside the circle entirely?

I’m old enough and secure enough in who I am to joke about this, but many of the children who we are blessed to have as a part of the Body of Christ, are not yet. Children who are questioning their own gender, or who already identify as something other than the sex they were assigned at birth, may have to smoosh an important part of themselves down into a little box and outwardly identify as someone they’re not or often (sadly) face ridicule and bullying for being brave enough to live their truths.

The author, Rowan Larson (they/them), goes on to explain how “the gender binary hurts all of us,” and then offers six ideas for starting “a more inclusive children’s ministry”:

 

Don’t ask children to sort themselves by gender, or worse, try to sort them that way yourself. Try asking children to self-sort by birthday month, grade, height, or whether they’re cat lovers or dog lovers.

Remind children that hobbies, interests, clothes, haircuts, names, and more can be for all of us, regardless of gender. One that comes up a lot for me is kids asking about why I have short hair. I remind them that anyone can have short hair; short hair doesn’t mean that someone is a boy, just as long hair doesn’t mean that someone is a girl. I usually give a non-gendered reason why I have short hair, for example, that I like it because it is very quick to wash and I don’t need to brush out tangles.

If you see teasing or bullying based on gender or gender presentation, don’t just stop the behavior, make sure to talk through the preconceived notions that drive it. For example, “Sky, I saw you teasing Bear because he likes unicorns. I wonder why you think that Bear can’t like unicorns, or that you should tease him for it?” Children likely picked up the attitudes they have from their families or peers in places outside of church without even realizing it.

For older kids, offer a basket of pronoun buttons next to the markers and stick-on name tags so they can self-identify as they are comfortable. For something like a confirmation class or Youth Group, consider using a “get to know you” questionnaire, like this one from Teaching Outside the Binary.

For younger children, respect what they or their parents tell you about how they identify. For children who are questioning their gender or know they don’t identify with the sex they were assigned at birth, that self-awareness can come as early as 3 or 4 years of age.

If your church building doesn’t have all gender restrooms, consider starting that conversation with your Vestry or clergy person. In some cases, all that’s needed is re-labeling single user restrooms with clear signs like these.

Read it all. Go ahead.

What kind of seminary teaches this stuff?! This is perverse poison. Rowan Larson is going to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts this Saturday. Things are going very badly for TEC in that diocese, as the church’s data show:

That is, a 36 percent decline in average Sunday attendance in just nine years — with a 15 percent decline in a single year, which might indicate Covid skewing the numbers.

In fact, Episcopal News Service reported last year that the Episcopal Church is no longer looking at decline, but oblivion. Excerpt:

“The overall picture is dire – not one of decline as much as demise within the next generation unless trends change significantly,” said the Rev. Dwight Zscheile, an expert in denominational decline and renewal. An Episcopal priest, Zscheile is vice president of innovation and associate professor of congregational mission and leadership at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.

“At this rate, there will be no one in worship by around 2050 in the entire denomination,” Zscheile told Episcopal News Service.

That’s only 28 years from now.

I genuinely don’t understand the mindset of the people who run institutions like Virginia Theological Seminary. Do they really think the future of Christianity lies with nonbinary transgendered priests who advise churches to confuse little children about their own sex? Obviously they must … but why? Or is it rather that they know they’re on a glide path to oblivion, and just want to enjoy the irreversible ride?

Picking on Episcopalian libs is the easiest thing in the world, and I want to resist that. I am not trolling here. I’m sure there are many good and faithful people at VTS. Still, I genuinely can’t understand the logic of any of this. Is there a substantial number of people who would be eager to look to someone like Rowan Larson as their spiritual leader, and willing to turn their children over to the pastoral care of a parish led by someone who thinks the clergy should undermine the psychological stability of little kids? Is this what VTS endorses? It must, at some level, because Larson’s piece appeared in an online VTS ministry.

Maybe there is a need for trans non-binary clergy in Massachusetts. You tell me.

I am wondering if there are signs that a church/denomination has gone into terminal decline. I’m talking about numerical signs (e.g., population drop below a certain number), but also cultural signs within the denomination. I’m thinking about Charles Featherstone, a white man who read and commented in this blog some years back, who was refused ordination in 2014 after graduating from a Lutheran (ELCA) seminary, because (he claimed) of something he revealed in his memoir. I never found out for sure what it was, but having read the book, I think I know — and it is something so completely banal from his teenage years that it could not possibly be the reason. Could it? Granted, I never got the other side of the story, so I can’t pass judgment on whether or not Charles was unfairly refused ordination.

I bring his case up here because he did tell me that though he wasn’t a conservative, he was the only seminarian there from the working class, and boy, did it show. Everything was about advanced cultural progressivism (what we now call wokeism), but nobody had the slightest interest in class, except to think of him as problematic for not speaking their language. If his description of his ELCA seminary is accurate, then a church that is producing seminary graduates that are radically alienated in their beliefs, language, and habits of mind from the people they will be ordained to serve is not a church with a future.

I would like to hear from seminarians and clergy personnel, to get your take on this. Help me understand what is going on. You don’t have to identify yourself or your seminary, but do give us an idea of the specific church or general tradition it’s part of. Or is there a theory of institutional decline that expands past the bounds of seminaries? I am thinking of something I learned in a political theory class as an undergraduate, some “law” saying that over time, the administrative class of any institution will come to regard its personal interests as synonymous with the interests of that institution.

The post Are Trans Non-Binary Clergy The Church’s Future? appeared first on The American Conservative.

From The Anti-Woke Military Mailbag

Getting lots of response to my New Woke Model Army post from military vets and at least one current active-duty officer. Take a look below.

This one comes from a veteran of several deployments. A friend of mine knows him personally, and vouches for his courage and experience:

Appreciate the column. Career military (just departed).

Some of your readers have lost the thread. The neocon boogeyman is not the primary threat to US national interests: a woke military is. Today’s military can’t fend off a small unorganized 13thCentury mob (see Kabul, Aug. 2021). We’re going to repel a Taiwan or Ukraine invasion? Credibly deter it? With this president? With this military? Please.

The military has been under attack from feminists (and LGBTQ & BLM & every other social leftist movement) since the days of Bush 41. The GOP has occasionally opposed various wrinkles of it (don’t ask, don’t tell, e.g.), but never reversed the downward trend. It’s barely attempted to.

The untold story of dereliction is of ostensibly conservative chairmen (Reps. Duncan Hunter, Sr., Buck McKeon, Mac Thornberry, Sen. McCain & most egregiously, Sen. Jim Inhofe) letting all these awful developments sail past them on annual authorization after authorization decade after decade (& nominations, in case of Senate). The great Jim Mattis (as SECDEF) allowed all these awful trends to continue unchecked (even opposed Trump’s trans ban). (Only lonely Elaine Donnelly by herself out in the Midwest has stood firm).

Actual hardened warriors rarely reach the top ranks (see Sen. Grassley’s ending a promotion of a SEAL for alleged middling discourteousness to a civilian, one of many examples).

So, the military will resemble the Brown faculty lounge: bloated, entitled, overcompensated, contemptuous of the common man, failing at basics, but well-versed in and subservient to every bad trend under the sun. And will continue to receive $700 bn/ yr. to persist.

Who has the steel, the ability, the will to reverse any of this? Apparently no one. Even noting it is barely done. Thank you for noting it.

Here’s one I have slightly altered to protect the writer’s identity:

I have been reading your articles in TAC on the current state of the US military and you are 100% correct.  I am [an active duty military officer] and it is safe to say that while we may not go to the range very often to hone our proficiency with a rifle, we all know which pronouns to use…As a USMA grad, the commissioning source of Spencer Rapone [the Communist graduate — RD], I saw more focus on a divisive ‘woke’ agenda rather than preparing us for battlefield leadership.  Your articles reminded me of my former Russian instructor at West Point, Dr. John Pendergast, a former intelligence officer.At USMA, we were supposedly trained to survive and thrive in difficult situations by understanding how others think and working to solve problems despite our differences. but spend more time listening to how white males are the worst people in the world.  The aim is to train us to work with other cultures, whether different US militaries, or our allies and partners around the world, and peer competitors, and understand them but without being scornful no matter how odd it may appear to us Americans.  Yet USMA has a Russian professor whose job is supposedly to teach empathy and understanding about another country and how that is reflected in its history, culture, religion, and literature, but can’t or does not want to understand how his fellow citizens from certain states see the world, and is full of scorn for them based on how they vote, or might vote, an act that happens once every four years.  The irony is lost on him that despite preaching empathy, understand, and tolerance, he doesn’t apply such actions to his fellow countrymen who are not like him politically.  This attitude from a professor at an institution which seeks to unite people of various backgrounds into one cohesive group is divisive and threatening to future army officers.https://www.facebook.com/john.pendergast.63/posts/3431321590290632I am from one of the states which Dr. Pendergast thinks ‘are dead to me’ based on how their citizens exercised their voting choice.  I would not want to be a cadet from one of those states that is ‘dead’ to him.   I would be concerned that he would discriminate against them and lower my score based on where they are from, or if we got into a classroom discussion over Putin, US-Russian relations etc.As an officer, my job is to take people of various backgrounds, experiences — which make them see the world differently — and create a cohesive team that is as well trained as possible to defend our nation. (Defend, not go and recreate ourselves half-way around the world or stoke tensions with Russia in their backyard).  I may disagree with my peers and subordinates, but the their state of origin or how they vote doesn’t dictate how I ensure their well-being, training, and performance reports.  Unfortunately, Dr. Pendergast seems to believe that a USMA cadet’s worth is based on whether they come from a state that isn’t dead to him based on voting choice.I am grateful for my experiences at West Point, but I will only do five years.  My father, a career Army officer, and I have advised my two younger siblings not to attend West Point and avoid military service.  I’ve had conversations with junior enlisted paratroopers about attending West Point, and I’ve told them not to go if they are the slightest bit Christian, conservative, or demonstrate traits which might be considered as ‘toxic masculinity’ or reinforcing ‘the patriarchy’.  And if they do go to USMA, not to take Russian as their foreign language.Another thing: on the annual day to remember violence against transgenders, Dr. Pendergast would send out an obnoxious email from his official work email about the day and an event on West Point.  As a member of the LGBT community, Dr. Pendergast was very keen to let us know about this day and push this agenda — despite the fact that most transgenders are killed due to the dangerous nature of their jobs (sex work, drugs etc) rather than for being transgender.  But we can’t let facts get in the way of the narrative.The US Army and West Point are more concerned with woke rather than fighting wars. We will not win wars, and it is going to take a lot of dead or badly maimed military personnel in the public view make that clear.  I have no wish to die over Taiwan or Ukraine, which is ever more likely given our push to police the world and the lack of warfighting training across the Army.I wish to remain anonymous, especially given the amount of West Point graduates at [my place of deployment]. Feel free to use the contents of my email as you see fit.  I hope this provides more anecdotal evidence of what has happened to West Point and the US Army.Also, I think it is likely that within a decade at West Point that Jefferson Library will be renamed, the statue of Patton will come down, and buildings named after Eisenhower will come down, given that he defended Robert E. Lee.Merry Christmas and thank you for articles on what has happened to our military.  You are doing fine work letting people know what is going on.

 

Here’s another one:

I read your article. I attended one of the service academies for one year before being expelled. I was repeatedly told that they did not need geniuses; which is not much of a problem for them. I say that for full disclosure and to give perspective.In my company we had the #1 in the class and one who was in the top five. The #1 was out of the military in the minimum 5 years (like Pompeo). The #5 made it just a little longer.Also in my company was a martinet of marginal college ability. He’s now a 4-star. The academics at the academies are watered down and spoon fed to the degree that people like him can make it through. I’ve heard this guy talk in the news many times and he is still a total moron who speaks in platitudes. He was recently in the new playing political correctness game.I suspect that, if one were to look how long the top academy graduates now stay in the military, the average now is close to the minimum.* * *Congressmen must love hearings where generals and admirals appear. It is the only time they are smarter than the witnesses.One of Trump’s problems was his trust of generals. Hopefully, he has learned from that mistake for 2025.Gen. Milley is a CYA weasel. He may have graduated from Princeton but he was a jock and majored in politics. I wouldn’t trust a guy like him to manage the night shift at a gas station.I put to you that the problem of generals/admirals is one that the U.S. has endured for a long time. We managed to overcome the problem during WWII but since then we have seen a total failure in military leadership. Failure at the general/admiral level is not punished, unless it involves some politically-incorrect offense. Admiral Halsey’s serial failures were never punished because he was politically connected. Admiral Fletcher’s success were downplayed because he was not as connected.After the admirals got rid of training for deck officers (who you can be sure are fully up-to-date on their diversity and inclusion training) and we get a ship collision, the O-5 captain gets nailed; not the admirals.* * * *I saw a show on public television earlier this year about NORAD. They were interviewing a general. I was shocked at how smart he was. It completely undermined my conception of generals. That is until he turned his shoulder and I saw he was Canadian.The only way to clean things up would be for a president to do like Teddy Roosevelt and promote 04 and 05 to general/admiral.Another need is to cut back on the number of generals and admirals. Not too long ago, there were more admirals than ships in the navy (I think now there are slightly more ships than admirals).The way to get ahead is today’s military is to promote the woke agenda. Non-stop war without victory provides medals for advancement.The honor codes at the academies (which have always been a joke) now mean nothing when it’s the football team doing the cheating.The woke army recruiting ads (two of which point out you don’t have to be a genius) illustrate the problem.

Another:

There has to be accountability for flag officers, admirals and generals, who lose wars and botch weapons system developments. Right now there isn’t any. That’s why we keep losing.In 1757, British Admiral John Byng was famously executed for not fighting a battle hard enough. Voltaire wrote at the time that the execution was to “encourage the others,” the other admirals. Although Voltaire meant it as a sick joke, it actually worked like that. Britannia ruled the waves from 1757 until 1939.While we don’t need to go that far, there is something the Senate can do to bring accoutability to flag officers who fail. They can refuse to allow them to retire at 3 and 4 star rank. Technically, any promotion beyond 2 stars is temporary. The Senate has to confirm the rank for the flag officer to retire at 3 or 4 stars. They can refuse to do so.General John Lavelle was suspected of ordering unauthorized bombing in Cambodia. After his death, it was shown he was following secret orders from President Nixon. However, at the time, the Senate was very angry at Lavelle. They refused to confirm his 4 star rank. Lavelle retired as a 2 star Major General.The Senate can force any flag officer who fails to retire at reduced rank. I think the Senate should take their responsibility seriously and impose at least this much accountability on flag officers who run losing wars with no complaints, or manage weapons system developments that fail. If nothing else, it will reduce these failed officer’s marketability with defense contractors.

Another:

I retired from the Army in 2014.  Not surprised at what I read in your post this morning.

 

Would tend to agree with your reader, Richard, that the leaders are parroting whatever nonsense they think will advance their careers and avoid the possibility of being the most recent person to be “cancelled”.  Remember that the military is almost entirely segregated from society at large.  These leaders may believe that a large segment of our society is “woke” and are trying to ride the tide.  If you watched television for more than a few minutes, you’d think the whole country was woke.  These leaders have no idea what is going on within our society at large.  They spend no time among average Americans and would not have the foggiest idea what is on the mind of the average person.

Since they are employed by the government and all their needs are taken care of, they have no notion of how our economy works, or how utterly incompetent and corrupt government is at nearly every level in the country.

The thing these guys are worried about is how to get promoted and how to get the billets that will lead to the next promotion.  The US military is now just another bloated and incompetent bureaucracy in the federal government.

Anything that advances the interests of the bureaucracy is good, and anything that threatens it is regarded as an existential threat.

We need a different kind of Republican president to get in there and clean house, making enemies in the Pentagon if he has to.

The post From The Anti-Woke Military Mailbag appeared first on The American Conservative.

Christianity Declines — But Not ‘Spirituality’

Christianity continues to decline in the US, as does all organized religion. Results from the new Pew Research poll:

The secularizing shifts evident in American society so far in the 21st century show no signs of slowing. The latest Pew Research Center survey of the religious composition of the United States finds the religiously unaffiliated share of the public is 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago and 10 points higher than a decade ago.

Christians continue to make up a majority of the U.S. populace, but their share of the adult population is 12 points lower in 2021 than it was in 2011. In addition, the share of U.S. adults who say they pray on a daily basis has been trending downward, as has the share who say religion is “very important” in their lives.

Currently, about three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) are religious “nones” – people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religious identity. Self-identified Christians of all varieties (including Protestants, Catholics, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Orthodox Christians) make up 63% of the adult population. Christians now outnumber religious “nones” by a ratio of a little more than two-to-one. In 2007, when the Center began asking its current question about religious identity, Christians outnumbered “nones” by almost five-to-one (78% vs. 16%).

The recent declines within Christianity are concentrated among Protestants. Today, 40% of U.S. adults are Protestants, a group that is broadly defined to include nondenominational Christians and people who describe themselves as “just Christian” along with Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and members of many other denominational families. The Protestant share of the population is down 4 percentage points over the last five years and has dropped 10 points in 10 years.

By comparison, the Catholic share of the population, which had ticked downward between 2007 and 2014, has held relatively steady in recent years. As of 2021, 21% of U.S. adults describe themselves as Catholic, identical to the Catholic share of the population in 2014.

Here’s the same news, delivered in charts:

Note that the decline in Protestantism is equal between Mainliners and Evangelicals. The final chart isn’t precise, but notice that the big decline in Evangelicals does not appear to have started with Trump, but just before him, around 2015, which is thought by many to be the beginning of the Great Awokening. There’s no doubt that the Trump phenomenon accelerated it, but my sense is that something was going on in the culture just before Trump emerged. Notice too that Mainliners bottomed out around the same year.

It would be interesting to see the Catholic numbers, to determine to what extent their holding firm has to do with immigration from Latin America. Back in 2010, in Putnam and Campbell’s book American Grace, the authors’ analysis of the data showed that if you separated out Catholic migrants from Latin America, the US Catholic Church would be declining at the same rate as the Protestant Mainline. I wonder if that is still true.

Anyway, America continues to transition to its post-Christian reality. I have found that more and more, I have people coming up to me telling me that they used to think that The Benedict Option was alarmist, but over the past almost-five years since its publication in March 2017, they have come to see that its claim that America is losing its Christian faith is true. We in the churches still don’t know what to do about it. We have never before faced a crisis like this. Many believers want to console themselves by thinking that if we just double down on what we have been doing, all will be well. Many of those people, and others, think that if we can just gain political power and implement the program we want, that will turn things around. As I’ve said here before, I believe politics has to be part of any effective response, but it won’t solve the problem, or even come close. You cannot order people to believe in God. Despite what some fringe intellectual fantasists like to believe, the Grand Inquisitor Option is not a thing.

People want a silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t hope, and that we are powerless. It does mean, though, that we are going to have to be highly creative and motivated minorities.

One of the most interesting, and unexpected, developments is that in the US, relatively few of these people who are falling away from Christianity are becoming atheists. Rather, they are cobbling together a bespoke bricolage religion, one designed just for them. QAnon is a politicized pseudo-religion. There’s all kinds of lunatic syncretism going on. Here’s a report from Vox. It begins with quotes from Evelyn Juarez, a Dallas-based TikTokker with 1.4 million followers, and a conspiratorial, Christian-ish worldview that she spreads via her channel. Excerpts:

“It just doesn’t sit right with me,” begins a TikTok by a user named Evelyn Juarez. It’s a breakdown of the tragedy at Astroworld, the Travis Scott concert in early November where eight people died and more than 300 were injured. But the video isn’t about what actually happened there. It’s about the supposed satanic symbolism of the set: “They tryna tell us something, we just keep ignoring all the signs,” reads its caption, followed by the hashtags #wakeup, #witchcraft, and #illuminati.

Juarez, a 25-year-old in Dallas, is a typical TikToker, albeit a quite popular one, with 1.4 million followers. Many of her videos reveal an interest in true crime and conspiracy theories — the Gabby Petito case, for instance, or Lil Nas X’s “devil shoes,” or the theory that multiple world governments are hiding information about Antarctica. One of her videos from November suggests that a survey sent to Texas residents about the use of electricity for critical health care could signify that “something is coming and [the state government] knows it.”

More:

The same could be said for the internet, where spiritual trends proliferate much like cultural and political ones. In fact, the latest iteration of New Thought’s founding principles is inseparable from the internet: Russo, the anthropology professor, notes that as social media has become the dominant cultural force in our society, ideologies are spreading between people who may have vastly different beliefs and backgrounds, but who show up on each other’s feeds and relate in new ways.

“It’s a mishmash of different Christian and non-Western beliefs and aesthetics, but this stuff — good and evil, prosperity — are present in all religious systems worldwide, and always have been,” he says. “Even our most fervent atheists or agnostics are still interested in morality. It’s the same idea, different packaging.”

These binaries espoused by internet spirituality — good and evil, demonic and angelic, abundance and poverty — are reinforced everywhere in culture, and not only in the context of religion. “‘The demonic’ is one of those very superficial distinctions that really has a lot to do with, ‘who’s your customer? Who are you trying to frighten?’ It can stand in the kind of generalized force of evil in a very effective way, regardless of what the specifics are,” explains Russo. “It works on people not necessarily because they’ve read the Bible, but because they watch Harry Potter or read Tolkien or play Dungeons and Dragons.”

Juarez, the popular TikToker, joined the platform during a particularly difficult period in early 2019. She was forced to drop out of college, then began suffering from depression. After that, her husband was in a bad car accident. “I needed somebody to vent to,” she says. Though she was raised in a religious household, her beliefs differ from her parents in that she feels less connected to the ideas taught by the church, and more to Jesus himself. “I’ve noticed a lot of the younger generation looking for God in a different way,” she says, “They move away from their religious background and have an actual relationship with God.”

Juarez’s TikTok comment section is proof in itself. “People have been like, ‘Yo, I can relate to this more than what I’ve been taught.’” Her approach to spirituality echoes many beliefs common in certain sects of Christianity — that occult practices shouldn’t be messed with, for instance (she doesn’t engage in manifestation because, she says, humans don’t always know what’s good for us: “I’ve dated a bunch of guys that now I know I shouldn’t have, but at the time thought they were the man of my dreams.”)

Abbie Richards is a 25-year-old disinformation researcher who creates TikToks about how conspiracy theories spread online and who regularly works with scholars to debunk and contextualize harmful myths. She’s watched how chaotic current events — the Astroworld tragedy, Covid-19, the confusing, broken job market — have driven louder conversations around spirituality from TikTokers, no matter where they fall on the ideological or political spectrum. “There’s a collective sense that the world is ending, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s the rapture, the return of Jesus, wealth inequality, Satanic worship, or whether people’s ‘vibrations are too low,’” she says. “It’s the only nonpartisan issue.”

When enormous swaths of people feel as though they have no power against evildoing, she argues, they tend to opt into narratives that provide a simple answer as to why the world is so terrifying. “With the case of Astroworld, the [organizers] didn’t do their due diligence, and they prioritized profit over the health and safety of humans. And that is a lonelier, grimmer thought to sit with than Travis Scott being a demonic villain.” It also lets us off the hook: “I totally empathize with why you would want to believe that you can fix capitalism by just wishing for money,” she says. “That’s so much easier than trying to implement taxes for the rich.”

I keep thinking of what a schoolteacher in Poland told me, in a conversation about how the youth in that country are abandoning Catholicism in huge numbers: that there is no institution there — not family, not church, not the state, nothing — that is more influential in shaping the worldview of the youth than TikTok and other forms of social media.

Like I said, we have never faced a crisis like this. Virtually overnight, a global mode of communication has come into being, one that is radically democratic, in the sense that anybody can say virtually anything, and the system has no way of privileging one voice over any other. I hope you will read this powerful 2016 essay by the Evangelical Anglican theologian Alastair Roberts, who talks about the collapse of unified religious authority in the Internet age. He published this at the beginning of the Trump era, and it holds up exceptionally well. Excerpts:

People’s hunger for truth is easily mistaken for a pure rational desire for accuracy and certitude. Yet our hunger for truth is, at a deeper level, our desperate need for something or, more typically, someone to trust. Where radical distrust in the ordinary organs of knowledge and thought in society prevails, most don’t cut themselves off from everyone else in unrelenting suspicion. Rather, in such situations we typically see a dangerous expansion of credulity, of unattached trust, just waiting for something to latch onto, for someone or something—anything!—to believe in. Alongside this expansion of credulity, we also see a shrinking of the circle of trust. Hence, wild and fanciful conspiracy theories gain traction, and new dissident and tribal communities form around them.

More:

The Internet has occasioned a dramatic diversification and expansion of our sources of information, while decreasing the power of traditional gatekeepers. We are surrounded by a bewildering excess of information of dubious quality, but the social processes by which we would formerly have dealt with such information, distilling meaning from it, have been weakened. Information is no longer largely pre-digested, pre-selected, and tested for us by the work of responsible gatekeepers, who help us to make sense of it. We are now deluged in senseless information and faced with armies of competing gatekeepers, producing a sense of disorientation and anxiety.

Where we are overwhelmed by senseless information, it is unsurprising that we will often retreat to the reassuring, yet highly partisan, echo chambers of social media, where we can find clear signals that pierce through the white noise of information that faces us online. Information is increasingly socially mediated in the current Internet: our social networks are the nets of trust with which we trawl the vast oceans of information online. As trust in traditional gatekeepers and authorities has weakened, we increasingly place our trust in less hierarchical social groups and filter our information through them.

None of this is new, exactly. What’s gripping is the effect this is having on religion. Here is why it is very hard to take institutional pronouncements seriously, given that some of our institutions have become sophisticated left-wing versions of what they decry on the Right:

This populism is encouraged, not only by the lack of structural and institutional differences between voices online, but also by various breaches that have been created between people and traditional gatekeepers, breaches that make it increasingly difficult to see them as being for and with us. These breaches take many different forms. The breach between cosmopolitans and provincials is one such breach: more than just a difference in wealth, this is a deep and fundamental difference in identity, values, and loyalties. The breach between locals and experts is another breach: the sort of abstract knowledge of experts has been valued over local, particular, and situated knowledge. There is a geographical breach in the US between the ‘coastal elites’ and the people in ‘flyover country’. The growing racial, religious, and cultural diversity of the country introduces further breaches. The collapse of mediating institutions between those in power and the rest of the population, such as the mainline Protestant churches is another breach. Alongside these breaches has occurred a far more fundamental breach in affection, resulting in mistrust and often antipathy.

The quality controls of the institutions that we once trusted have also become suspect. The university, for instance, is increasingly regarded as a highly politicized and tribal institution, to the point of excluding challenging, though rigorously formed, views from the conversation. Critical theory and various ‘studies’ courses are associated with an extreme hermeneutic of suspicion and various notions (e.g. the ‘Patriarchy’) that often function much like conspiracy theories, while holding considerable authority and being immune from most direct challenge. The extreme confirmation bias, closure to opposing or questioning voices, political partisanship, shutting down of debate, enforcement of politically correct codes of speech, action, and even thought, and the seeming detachment from reality on issues such as sexual difference have all profoundly harmed the credibility of the university as a public and open institution in the eyes of many.

Here is the core point:

The egalitarian online environment also makes it difficult to discern the difference between those who hold ordained pastoral office and responsibility and people who are simply self-appointed online ‘influencers’ (in case you need a reminder, I am just a blogger: I am not your pastor). It makes it difficult to discern the difference between trained and orthodox theologians and untrained people who are simply regurgitating error. Everyone appears to be a peer online, which dulls our awareness of the fact that some people have authority over us and others have other forms of authority resulting from privileged knowledge, training, or experience. Everyone is expected to make up their own opinion in such a world, but very few people have the means to make up their minds well.

Read it all — it’s important. 

Roberts goes on to say that the future of Evangelicalism will be determined not by official institutional authorities, but by the networks of trust, including online influencers. He does not think that is a good thing, but he believes (as do I) that this is a massive challenge for the churches. This phenomenon is moving so fast that we are blowing right past the idea of people finding a niche within Christianity, to people leaving Christianity altogether for a do-it-yourself spirituality.

To be sure, this didn’t happen overnight. A generation ago, the influential religion scholar Robert Bellah was writing about “Sheila-ism,” his term for people who believe that it was fine for people to come to their own ideas about religious truth, picking and choosing from various traditions to find something that “works” for them. With the advent of the Internet, this degenerative process has been strapped to a rocketship.

As Alastair Roberts observes in that essay and in other ones, this is not wholly a bad thing. Some authority figures and institutions were coasting on their reputations, and did not deserve the deference they received. The problem, though, is that nobody can live without some authority. In the absence of traditional authorities, they will seek out authorities of their own — which inevitably devolves down to themselves.

Which is how we get TikTok religions. This is not a genie that will be put back into a bottle. Somehow, the churches will have to navigate through this period of massive disintegration, including epistemic disintegration. The idea that the mere assertion of religious authority, especially reinforced by government fiat, can bring us out of this crisis is naive. This crisis accelerated spectacularly in the generation raised on the Internet, but it this process began long, long ago.

I am wondering today how all this should affect my new book project, on restoring Christian “enchantment” to the world. If I were dealing only with materialists, that would make the task straightforward. But I am also dealing with people — and in fact, am primarily dealing with people — who are open to the concept of enchantment, but are completely undiscriminating. Plus, they live and move and have their being in a popular culture that condemns Christian tradition and extols counter-Christian ones. I was in a Barnes & Noble the other day, and was shocked to see a big shelf full of tarot cards and all kinds of other occult things geared towards teenagers and young adults. These people want enchantment, just not the Christian version.

Well, my belief is that very few Americans, especially young Americans, understand how profoundly mystical traditional, pre-modern Christianity is. Western theology of the past five or six centuries has slowly been scrubbing the tradition free of the wonder that is intrinsic to it. But the desire for enchantment, and the power of Christianity to enchant, hasn’t gone away. What I hope to do with this book is to awaken readers — lukewarm Christians, as well as young people who think they have figured out that Christianity is dull and moralistic — to these concealed truths about the Christian faith. I want them to know that what many of them go searching for in false religions, or even in the dangerous world of the occult, exists in Christianity, though you have to look for it. Ultimately this book will be about metaphysics, but it is mostly going to tell stories of the inbreaking of the numinous, of God and the heavenly host, into the material world in unusual ways.

The question is, are we capable of receiving these signs? Or do we resist them because they direct us to a place we don’t want to go?

Once again, the Pew numbers are today what they have been for a couple of decades, at least: a five-alarm wake-up call to the Christian churches. I have stayed pretty much on top of this stuff for thirty years, and even I am surprised by some things. I struggle to see the world as my own children do, meaning that I am starting to try to understand how it looks to them to be in a world where they cannot count on many of the things I took for granted, regarding religious authority and stability. Even though it was all falling apart from my youth, it was not like this.

Happy-clappy youth group spirituality is going to evaporate in the crosswinds of this post-Christian culture. So will a Christianity politicized to the Left or the Right. So will Middle-Class-At-Prayer Christianity. So will a Christianity that understands itself primarily as following the moral law. We are beginning to reap the harvest of having encouraged two generations of young Americans to embrace spiritual emotivism.

 

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The New Woke Model Army

The reader who sent in this story says “there’s no question the U.S. military is now the armed wing of the Democratic Party.” Read on:

President Joe Biden’s nominee for the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Senate “gender advisers” for combat troops are critical to the United States’ success, a position some veterans say is nothing more than a left-wing initiative that distracts from the military’s core duties.

The revelation came during a Dec. 8 exchange with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.), who asked how Adm. Christopher Grady intends to implement “women, peace, and security” legislation within the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“The role of a gender adviser is a way to attack a very significant issue, and if confirmed, I look forward to leveraging those advisers who can make me think better and smarter about the issues that you raise,” Grady said. “So I look forward to, if confirmed, understanding that ecosystem and helping advance that cause going forward again.”

More:

The Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 required the Department of Defense to require training in “security initiatives that specifically addresses the importance of meaningful participation by women” and to develop “effective strategies and best practices for ensuring meaningful participation by women.”

Grady’s answer drew outrage from veterans such as Jason Church, who earned a Purple Heart when serving in Afghanistan. Church told the Washington Free Beacon that “gender advisers” are nothing more than “liberal pet projects” to score points with Democratic lawmakers.

“When someone nominated to be the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says something like this, it tells me top brass is aligned with radical political elements in the country,” he said. “You have people’s lives on the line. These positions aren’t about how to communicate with Afghan women, we have a diplomatic corps for that.”

Read it all. 

Here’s an academic paper from 2016 examining what gender advisers do in NATO armies, and suggesting that the US military add them to its ranks. The paper cites several examples of overseas deployments in which gender advisers were useful in helping soldiers understand complex gender standards, and how respecting them helped the mission. That said, are you confident that in the current highly politicized environment in the US, that gender advisers will be of practical help, versus being de facto political commissars? I’m not — but I could be wrong.

Ms. magazine recently cited a Georgetown report about the need to further feminize the US military. Excerpts:

Changing military culture to improve women’s integration and equality, and increase compliance with international law obligations, the report argues, will require fundamental strategic and operational alterations to the military status quo, including measures to eliminate the “entrenched culture of militarized masculinities” throughout the armed forces.

To ensure women’s meaningful participation, the report suggests that women must be promoted to leadership positions and their input must be valued. To do so, the military must adopt better and more complete childcare and parental leave policies and decouple physical fitness standards from advancement. Only by incorporating women into senior ranks—thereby giving them influence throughout the chain of command—will the culture shift.

To address gender participation gaps, the report suggests that the Department of Defense should also conduct a comprehensive review of physical fitness requirements and occupational standards. De-emphasizing physical fitness would help address the “culture of toxic masculinity rooted in beliefs of physical superiority.”

This is infuriating. The military has to offer childcare, and disregard physical fitness standards — for soldiers, sailors, and airmen?! Are we still about fighting wars, or are we instead about fighting culture wars? There is no question that on average, men are physically superior to women. Now we have to pretend that that isn’t true, for the sake of equity?

More:

As part of the report launch, women with military experience offered comments on how best to ensure meaningful participation of women. Kyleanne Hunter, a U.S. Marine combat veteran, highlighted the need for new metrics for leadership success, such as social acumen and empathy. By not forcing women to adhere to traditional notions of masculinity, women will advance more quickly and their new perspectives will increase the U.S.’s overall security.

How, exactly, will America’s war-fighting capabilities be improved by having commanders who are more empathetic? How in the world do empathetic officers “increase the US’s overall security”? It’s mind-boggling.

You will not be surprised to learn that the article ends with a call for more gender advisers to feminize the US military.

Also in today’s mailbag, from another reader:

I might be the only person to ever think you’re insufficiently alarmist, but your recent article about conservatives leaving the Army should have made everyone’s eyes widen.  A military that’s been politicized, especially along racial/ethnic lines, in a politically polarized country is a disaster.  For much of the country to have voluntarily (if understandably) contributed to this polarization is a bad, bad development.To see why, here’s a link to the BBC Documentary “The Death of Yugoslavia.”  It starts at 9:25 of episode 4.  A crony of Slobodan Milosevic boasts about how, in anticipation of Bosnia declaring independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, he and Milosevic re-jiggered the Yugoslavian army within the borders of Bosnia to only contain Bosnian Serbs.  That way, when Bosnia declared independence, the Bosnian Army would have already essentially chosen sides in the resulting ethnic war between Serbs, Muslims, and Croats.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY7BwM952ZY&t=565sThe Army’s corruption apparently caught Bosnian Muslims off-guard.  Their president, as the following article makes clear, had expected the Army to be a neutral force protecting civilians from Milosevic’s paramilitary chetnik units that had already been tearing up Croatia. He found out the very hard way that the Army had different ideas.https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/10/world/serb-backed-guerrillas-take-second-bosnia-town.html

UPDATE: Reader Richard York comments:

I’m not sure I buy that the military right now is a serious threat to American conservatives.

For those of us who have served in recent years, nothing in this post is especially surprising. American elites genuinely cannot conceive of personal violence. It’s totally beyond their comprehension, so they’ve turned the military into a massive organization dedicated to social work, grifting, and rent seeking. Assigning gender advisers to the military and changing its culture to make it more female-friendly are aspects of the elite’s broader strategy of parceling out American society into tiny groups, then paying off 51% of these groups to stay in power. It doesn’t make for competence, but it’s been fairly effective so far as it goes.

Meanwhile, the American general officer class has no real values outside of promotion and getting a job at Raytheon after retirement, so they parrot anything in the zeitgeist that will guarantee them continued funding. Back in the Reagan-Clinton-Bush years, it was aping evangelical Christianity. I vividly remember the evangelical Christianity in the water in the late 1990s and early 2000s at the army bases where I grew up. Nowadays, it’s blabbering nonsense about gender ideology at senatorial confirmation hearings. Admiral Grady doesn’t believe in any of this dreck. Just look at his face. He’s saying what he gets paid to say. Every general officer briefing I ever sat through in my decade in the service went exactly the same way. I never once got the impression that any of them were really dedicated to defending our country or to aggressively killing our enemies. They’re totally bought and sold, hence the catastrophe that took place a few months ago in Kabul and the horrendous outcome of our other campaigns in the War on Terror.

What should terrify your readers isn’t the fact that Admiral Grady is explicitly committed to doing all of these crazy things. It should terrify you that America’s military leaders really are that galactically stupid. They really are dumbshit f**king retards, to use the French expression. They know absolutely nothing about war, economics, policy, or anything else. And, as we speak, we have made a series of absolute military commitments to Taiwan and Ukraine that we cannot possibly fulfill. When Putin and Xi do call our bluff and come to collect, these people will be in charge of our nation’s response.

I feel strongly, in my bones, that defeat in a major war is in the offing for our people. Things do not look good. Nothing feels right at the top. Our elite believes its own propaganda, especially the blood libels they sowed about Russia in the 2016 presidential election. They really are framing our rivalries with Russia and China in messianic, apocalyptic terms. Things are ripe for a miscalculation. Perhaps that will be the culmination of God’s judgment on our nation, begun on 9/11 and gathering momentum with every humiliation our country has endured in this century.

UPDATE.2: A reader e-mails:

I wanted to address the concern the reader had about parallels between the U.S. situation and that of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. I fully understand the concern and there’s no shortage of lessons for us all to learn. However, I find the comparison ultimately lacking and is more a “doomer” fantasy than anything substantive.

First, the Balkans, for centuries, had been divided along ethnic lines in a way that the U.S. has no parallel. Yes, race/ethnic relations were once very bad in the U.S. But we’ve actually lived among each other more than we’ve lived apart in the sense we didn’t have distinct nations for every ethnic group like the Balkans did. Yugoslavia was really the first attempt at getting all these distinct nations to live together, whereas the United States was always the United States for the most part – we were formed from colonies, but not distinct English, German, Spanish, or Black nations that were ultimately forced to live together.

Second, imagine a civil war broke out today: how would the dividing lines break down? One of the things that facilitates a hot civil war like that of the Balkans is geography. The region’s various ethnicities occupied more or less distinct areas of territory and you can clearly see it on the maps all through the years. The U.S. has no real parallel to this. Voting patterns are distinct by region, yes, but there’s always plenty of people on the other side of the political divide living in the same area. Segregation tends to occur at the local level, with White-majority neighborhoods, Latino-majority neighborhoods, and Black-majority neighborhoods, but this also tracks with class and culture. If a race/ethnic war erupts in the U.S., it’ll probably take place between communities and ‘hoods (in line with American historical experience), but these aren’t the same things as nations.

Following on the last question, let’s say someone in the U.S. military decided to do something similar to what Slobodan Milosevic’s crony did with the Yugoslav military in Bosnia – how would that work, anyway? Would they make it so the military would only have women and people of color? Bearing in mind the often-repeated point about how the sharp end of the military is male and White, not only would they have to start training women and people of color to close and engage with the enemy like they’ve never done before, but they’d probably have to face a resisting force comprised of an led by those very same males and Whites they kicked out from the military (assuming they didn’t exterminate them ahead of time).

 

This is just me talking, but a female and PoC-majority military, one that’d spend more time on political indoctrination and staying on a Woke message would be a wholly ineffective fighting force to begin with. A military like that would probably just crumble in confusion.

 

To avoid getting long-winded, I’ll just say the lines don’t break down as neatly here in the U.S. Regardless of what the Left says, America isn’t anywhere near as race-conscious a country as they think (probably why raising race consciousness is in such high demand, at least for the Left). Likewise, regardless of what the Right thinks, our divisions are often blurrier than they seem. In some ways, the uniqueness of race and ethnicity in the U.S. makes a hot civil war unlikely here, meaning this failing experiment was, in one respect, quite successful in avoiding a horrific outcome.

 

That’s not to say racial/ethnic violence couldn’t occur in the U.S. As times get rough, people will use those divisions as an excuse for exacting violence on others and we’re seeing the early stages of that now. But a Yugoslav War in America? As Jussie Smollett and his supporters at CNN and MSNBC found out the hard way last week, America just might be made of tougher stuff than that.

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Francis Embraces Once-Exiled LGBT Ministry

The Age of Francis keeps bearing strange fruit. From Catholic News Agency:

In a reversal of an earlier decision, the Synod of Bishops has restored a link to a video by New Ways Ministry on its resources webpage. An employee at the General Secretariat also apologized to the LGBT outreach group after the link was removed last week.

According to a Dec. 13 statement on the New Ways Ministry website, Thierry Bonaventura, communications manager of the General Secretariat, had apologized “for removing from their website a link to our video encouraging LGBTQ people to participate in synod consultations.”

Bonaventura told CNA on Dec. 7 that the link had been taken down after he was made aware that the U.S. bishops’ conference expressed its disapproval of the LGBT outreach ministry in 2010.

As of Dec. 13, the link is again visible on the synodresources.org website.

New Ways Ministry is pro-LGBT, meaning it advocates things contrary to Catholic teaching. This meant that in the Before Times, the Church did not approve of them:

New Ways Ministry was founded in 1977 in the Archdiocese of Washington by Sister Jeannine Gramick and Father Robert Nugent, who were the subject of a notification by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1999.

The notification, signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, said that their positions “regarding the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts and the objective disorder of the homosexual inclination are doctrinally unacceptable because they do not faithfully convey the clear and constant teaching of the Catholic Church in this area.”

In 2010, Cardinal Francis George, then president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement emphasizing that New Ways Ministry “has no approval or recognition from the Catholic Church and that they cannot speak on behalf of the Catholic faithful in the United States.”

But the Synod restored the New Ways video after it was revealed that earlier in 2021, Pope Francis had corresponded warmly with the ministry’s founders, and wrote approvingly of its work. 

Here is a link to the New Ways webinar from October. 

Notice this graphic from the presentation showing how the Church was run in the Bad Old Days (according to New Ways), versus how it is run now under Pope Francis:

 

This is radical stuff! It’s totally democratizing Catholic Church policymaking. How is this even Catholic?! Mind you, this is something that is claimed by a Fordham theologian, in his address to fellow LGBT Catholics. I don’t know to what extent it reflects reality within the Catholic institution. But the video where this appeared was restored to the resources page of the Synod. Make of that what you will.

I saw this news story on Twitter. This was one of the first comments:

That rang true to me. I recall the early 1990s, when I was getting serious about God, one of the biggest draws for me to Catholicism was the total confidence I had that Rome would not budge, and surrender to the Zeitgeist. I literally could not have imagined a figure like Pope Francis. I would like to hear in the comments from you readers who have become Catholic under this pontificate, or are interested in it. How do you deal with the fact that under Francis, so much that looked to have been set in stone is turning to Jell-O? I’m not trolling here; I genuinely want to know. To my Orthodox eyes, it looks like the Rome of Pope Bergoglio is throwing away one of the most attractive things about Catholicism, for the sake of embracing the modern world.

A sign of the times, for sure. Don’t think that your church will be able to avoid this conflict. It is here now, and will ultimately come for us all.

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Amazon’s Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

This is unspeakable:

Horrifying details are emerging about the tornado disaster at Amazon’s warehouse in Illinois, where at least 6 workers were killed on the job.

Before he died, Larry Virden reportedly texted his

girlfriend: “Amazon won’t let us leave.” He leaves behind four children. pic.twitter.com/3ZRLik9VIs

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) December 13, 2021

The disaster calls into question some of Amazon’s key business practices.

Only 7 of 190 people working at the facility were full-time staff.

Amazon’s dependence on contractors allows them to avoid liability for accidents and undercut union organizing.https://t.co/BHSMIa9SCQ

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) December 13, 2021

Amazon workers are also decrying the company’s ban on people carrying their phones on the job, leaving them unable to get updates or contact people during emergencies.

“After these deaths, there is no way in hell I am relying on Amazon to keep me safe.”https://t.co/3QcWvmyzFH

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) December 13, 2021

You have heard of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, have you not? It was the 1911 disaster at a Manhattan garment factory that killed over 120 people — most of them women — when fire broke out at a factory in which the exit doors had been locked to keep workers from taking too many breaks, and stealing things.

From NBC News:

“We have never had any tornado drills, nor had we sheltered in place for any of the warnings we’ve had in the past,” said a woman who has worked for the past two years at STL8, another Amazon facility about 66 miles west of Edwardsville, and is not authorized to speak publicly. She added that during two previous tornado warnings during her overnight shift, she was expected to continue working even when the company sounded alarms.

Workers across Amazon facilities also pushed back against a policy that Amazon is bringing back barring phones at work. For years, Amazon has banned workers from carrying their phones in warehouse facilities. The company relaxed the policy during the coronavirus pandemic and then started to reinstate it at warehouses across the country, Bloomberg reported.

Asked about Bloomberg’s reporting and an understanding among workers that the ban would be reinstated Jan. 1, Alisa Carroll, a company spokeswoman, declined to answer directly.

“Employees and drivers are allowed to have their cell phones with them,” she said by email.

A second worker, who also was not authorized to speak publicly and who works at STL4, the building diagonally across the street from the damaged facility, said in a written message that one of her closest co-workers was grateful that she had a phone with her. If she had not had her phone, she would not have known to run to shelter.

“We live in the midwest. Tornado watches and warnings happen ALL THE TIME. Most days we barely bat an eye at storm watches, and we are accustomed to taking shelter in a moment’s notice at warnings,” she wrote. “But you can’t take shelter if you don’t get the warning.”

At this stage, the Kentucky tornado catastrophe might be Amazon’s Triangle Shirtwaist event (note well: the Amazon facility was in Illinois, but most of the damage caused by this storm was in Kentucky, which is why I’m calling it the Kentucky catastrophe). If those poor souls were indeed forced to stay in the factory, and were not allowed access to their phones, aside from the casualty numbers, what is the difference?

Amazon says the six workers killed did not shelter in the designated safe place. It is possible that Amazon has a good defense for its conduct here. But I would like to see Congressional hearings into this, and into Amazon’s business practices. Enough is enough!

UPDATE: The candle factory was worse, according to reports. I focused on Amazon in this blog post because they have had labor complaints lodged against them for years.

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The Woke Man’s Burden

The other day I mentioned in this space a five-year-old post in which I quoted a recipient of a Fulbright fellowship complaining that the State Department briefing of that year’s Fulbright winners urged them to go abroad and advocate for LGBT rights. He sent photos of some of the handouts they were given. A reader who is on a Fulbright to a socially and culturally conservative country wrote the letter below to me. I have slightly altered it to protect the reader’s anonymity, and received the reader’s permission to publish this version:

Your observations on the Fulbright program are dead-on. I am a Fulbright awardee to [conservative country]. I went through the Fulbright orientation recently, and there was zero sensitivity to local cultures per State Department training. American awardees were told they could attend local protests, and merely told how to avoid violence or arrest while attending local protests. There was no discussion whatsoever on ensuring that one’s attire and dress was appropriate and tailored to the situation. There were a disproportionate number of awardees on sexual vanguard topics to go and convert other cultures to view things from a hyper-sexualized American angle, and all of this was actively encouraged and pushed by the State Department. I was conversing with other Fulbright awardees during the orientation, and those of us who have professional backgrounds with meaningful topics were embarrassed by the visible young cohort of Fulbright awardees who were there for no apparent reason other than to promote a sexual agenda. It was resented and opposed by local countries. Keep in mind – the Biden administration is struggling to find a coherent strategy in the Middle East, but every professional American who can play a role in building organic ties between the US and the Middle East region has to be screened thru an ideological filter that guarantees that the US Government will never be able to compete with the Chinese.

I will also tell you that during the transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration, the State Department began censoring Fulbright awardees since apparently there was targeting of conservatives and/or conservative-oriented topics that were no longer supported. So not only has the Fulbright program become sexualized, it is now thoroughly politicized, too.

I am writing for your personal knowledge only. I typically do not reach out to writers and reporters, and it would not be a good idea for my name to be in the papers right now. The State Department views things strictly thru ideological lenses, which is why they no longer understand the countries in which they are posted. There are certainly still many good career Foreign Service officers who correctly understand our true position and how weak we are, but most likely their diverging viewpoints are disregarded, ignored and dismissed, and it would be career suicide to overly oppose the agenda. If Fulbright awardees were permitted to do their work without interference, at least this would be something, but that is no longer the case.

Our scholar-diplomats have to take up the Woke Man’s Burden, I guess, and bring the barbarians of the world to being allies of the genderfluid.

In other News Of The Woke, here’s more evidence for J.D. Vance’s theory that the Left is waging class war as culture war:

Meet UC Berkeley’s new Vice Chancellor of Equity & Inclusion. “[Her] identity is Latina, first born, raised by a single mom,” and she deals with the “emotional toll” of doing DEI-BJ work and “dismantling systems of oppression” through “mindfulness breathing.”

Salary: $325,000. pic.twitter.com/ucSAnyPFAC

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) December 13, 2021

“BJ” is “belonging and justice.” The more b.s. terms you add to these jobs, the more money you have to pay people, I guess. Here’s the interview in which Dania Matos said these things. In this press release, Dania Matos recalls the oppression she felt at Brown, an Ivy League university. UC Berkeley spends $25 million annually to fund its diversity bureaucracy, which employs 400.

Moving on, Fordham University has fired a white English department instructor because he confused the names of two black students. More:

A former lecturer in the English Department, Christopher Trogan, was terminated by Fordham on Oct. 25 after a series of communications with students that stemmed from an incident where he confused the names of two Black students.

The name mix-up occurred on Sept. 24 in a Composition II class taught by Trogan.

The two students whose names were mixed up sent Trogan an email after class expressing that they felt disheartened and disrespected, and believed the mistake occurred because they were both Black.

Later that day, Trogan sent an email addressing the situation to all of his students in both sections of his Composition II course.

He referred to the name mix-up as an “innocent mistake” and said he had a “confused brain” because the two students arrived late while he was reading the work of another student at the lecturer podium.

“The offended student assumed my mistake was because I confused that student with another Black student,” Trogan said in his email to students. “I have done my best to validate and reassure the offended student that I made a simple, human, error. It has nothing to do with race.”

Wrong! Everything has to do with race, ya dope! If you read on in the story, you see that Trogan fell all over himself to assure his students that he’s not racist, which just stirred the pot.

I should never be a professor, then. I have always had a hard time connecting names and faces. It must be hereditary, because one of my kids has the condition too. It turns out that I learned how to read at age three. My son who has the same condition learned how to read at two. I could easily end up in poor Trogan’s place through no moral fault of my own, but it wouldn’t matter. To be accused by Sacred Victims is the same as being guilty under our soft totalitarianism.

I wish, though, that somebody on the Left would point out that all this garbage is making friendship between races impossible. How can you become friends if you have to be afraid that one tiny slip-up of the sort that all humans make from time to time could cost you your livelihood?

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David Brooks’ Farewell To Conservatism

The only thing more tedious on the online Right than ritual denunciations of David French is ritual denunciations of David Brooks. I had intended to bypass the temptation following Brooks’s recent Atlantic essay about how he ceased to be a conservative (at least according to what passes for conservatism today), because a) it is not news that David Brooks is no longer a conservative, and b) why join the piling-on? David is an old friend, and though we no longer share many of the same political views, I am loyal to my friends, because friendship, for me, does not depend on sharing political beliefs. I despise the contemporary habit — on both the Left and the Right — of turning on one’s friends because they disappoint you politically. The truth is that David Brooks is a very kind, very thoughtful and compassionate man who has simply lost his faith in the Right. I think he is mostly (but not completely) wrong on that, but he remains my friend, and those who don’t like it can go to Hell (or worse, to San Francisco).

But reading Ross Douthat’s weekend column on “what the New Right sees” that the rest of the political class does not made me reconsider. Ross cites David Brooks’s take on the Nat Con conference, and an essay by Sam Adler-Bell in The New Republic. Excerpt from Douthat’s column:

The essays emphasize the ways in which the newer, younger right is ill at ease in contemporary America, its psychology defined more by alienation than the basic patriotic comfort (however threatened by Communists and liberals) that Ronald Reagan successfully embodied.

This emphasis is understandable, but there’s another way of looking at the new right’s place in American politics. Its vibe is alienated and radical, certainly — but at the same time its analysis of our situation feels more timely, more of this moment, than many alternative programs on the right or left or center.

Suppose you made a list of what each tendency in American politics considers our biggest challenges right now. For the new right, the list might look something like this.

Abroad, the double failure of our post-9/11 nation-building efforts and our open door to China, which requires either a recalibration to contain the Chinese regime or else a general pullback from an overextended empire.

At home, the threat to liberty from Silicon Valley monopolies enforcing progressive orthodoxy and the threat to human happiness from the addictive nature of social media, online pornography and online life in general. The collapse of birthrates, the dissolution of institutional religion and the decline of bourgeois normalcy, manifest in the younger generation’s failure to mate, to marry, raise families. The post-1960s “great stagnation” in both living standards and technological innovation. The costs of cultural libertarianism, the increase in unhappiness and high rates of depression and addiction in a more individualistic society.

Then finally, the way in which the technocratic response to the pandemic, the retreat to a virtual life suited only to a “laptop class” (and maybe not even to them), may make these problems worse.

Now, you can critique this list and doubt its diagnoses. But still, if you look at reality through the new right’s alienated vision, you may see the strange world of 2021 more clearly than through other eyes.

Douthat goes on:

But still, if you asked which worldview has organized itself primarily around things that have changed in the world since 1999, I don’t think you’d pick progressivism.

So, to Brooks’s essay. To be clear, he doesn’t distance himself from conservatism per se, only from the contemporary American Right. He begins by talking about how as a young man, he read himself out of the Left:

I started reading any writer on conservatism whose book I could get my hands on—Willmoore Kendall, Peter Viereck, Shirley Robin Letwin. I can only describe what happened next as a love affair. I was enchanted by their way of looking at the world. In conservatism I found not a mere alternative policy agenda, but a deeper and more resonant account of human nature, a more comprehensive understanding of wisdom, an inspiring description of the highest ethical life and the nurturing community.

What passes for “conservatism” now, however, is nearly the opposite of the Burkean conservatism I encountered then. Today, what passes for the worldview of “the right” is a set of resentful animosities, a partisan attachment to Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson, a sort of mental brutalism. The rich philosophical perspective that dazzled me then has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression.

I recently went back and reread the yellowing conservatism books that I have lugged around with me over the decades. I wondered whether I’d be embarrassed or ashamed of them, knowing what conservatism has devolved into. I have to tell you that I wasn’t embarrassed; I was enthralled all over again, and I came away thinking that conservatism is truer and more profound than ever—and that to be a conservative today, you have to oppose much of what the Republican Party has come to stand for.

More:

Another camp, which we associate with the Scottish or British Enlightenment of David Hume and Adam Smith, did not believe that human reason is powerful enough to control human selfishness; most of the time our reason merely rationalizes our selfishness. They did not believe that individual reason is powerful enough even to comprehend the world around us, let alone enable leaders to engineer society from the top down. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small,” Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

This is one of the core conservative principles: epistemological modesty, or humility in the face of what we don’t know about a complex world, and a conviction that social change should be steady but cautious and incremental. Down the centuries, conservatives have always stood against the arrogance of those who believe they have the ability to plan history: the French revolutionaries who thought they could destroy a society and rebuild it from scratch, but who ended up with the guillotine; the Russian and Chinese Communists who tried to create a centrally controlled society, but who ended up with the gulag and the Cultural Revolution; the Western government planners who thought they could fine-tune an economy from the top, but who ended up with stagflation and sclerosis; the European elites who thought they could unify their continent by administrative fiat and arrogate power to unelected technocrats in Brussels, but who ended up with a monetary crisis and populist backlash.

And:

Burkean conservatism inspired me because its social vision was not just about laws, budgets, and technocratic plans; its vision was about soulcraft, about how we build institutions that produce good citizens—people who are moderate in their zeal, sympathetic to the marginalized, reliable in their diligence, and willing to sacrifice the private interest for public good. Conservatism resonated with me because it recognized that culture is more important than the state in driving history.

Well, so far I agree with most of this, which is why I think of myself as more or less a Burkean conservative. To the extent that I hate this or that manifestation of the contemporary Right, it’s because I am either a traditional Christian or a Burkean conservative. This passage is really insightful about the particular nature of American conservatism:

American conservatism descends from Burkean conservatism, but is hopped up on steroids and adrenaline. Three features set our conservatism apart from the British and continental kinds. First, the American Revolution. Because that war was fought partly on behalf of abstract liberal ideals and universal principles, the tradition that American conservatism seeks to preserve is liberal. Second, while Burkean conservatism puts a lot of emphasis on stable communities, America, as a nation of immigrants and pioneers, has always emphasized freedom, social mobility, the Horatio Alger myth—the idea that it is possible to transform your condition through hard work. Finally, American conservatives have been more unabashedly devoted to capitalism—and to entrepreneurialism and to business generally—than conservatives almost anywhere else. Perpetual dynamism and creative destruction are big parts of the American tradition that conservatism defends.

If you look at the American conservative tradition—which I would say begins with the capitalist part of Hamilton and the localist part of Jefferson; extends through the Whig Party and Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt; continues with Eisenhower, Goldwater, and Reagan; and ends with Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign—you don’t see people trying to revert to some past glory. Rather, they are attracted to innovation and novelty, smitten with the excitement of new technologies—from Hamilton’s pro-growth industrial policy to Lincoln’s railroad legislation to Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense system.

A painful truth that conservatives of my ilk have to face: the American conservative tradition is fundamentally liberal, in the sense Brooks discusses here. The nation itself was born in a rejection of Throne-and-Altar conservatism, in favor of classical liberalism. We Americans are a lot like what post-Vatican II Catholics are coming to be: a people whose cultural memories are of a “tradition” that is anti-traditional.

How did Brooks-approved conservatism turn into Trumpism? According to David Brooks:

The reasons conservatism devolved into Trumpism are many. First, race. Conservatism makes sense only when it is trying to preserve social conditions that are basically healthy. America’s racial arrangements are fundamentally unjust. To be conservative on racial matters is a moral crime. American conservatives never wrapped their mind around this.

Stop right there. If Brooks was writing this in the 1960s or 1970s, it would make sense. Today, though, “to be conservative on racial matters” is to defend the Martin Luther King vision of people judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The people calling for heightened racial consciousness and animosity, and for institutions that judge people by the color of their skin, are liberals and progressives.

Brooks devotes a single paragraph to the role economics played in the transformation — an astonishing oversight for so careful a thinker. David and I are roughly the same age. Over our lifetimes, we have seen dramatic changes in the American landscape because of trade liberalization and globalization — a process that has been blessed by both the mainstream Right and the mainstream Left. Our children face a world of far more economic and personal insecurity because of these changes. When you are considering why young people are more radically Left or radically Right, we can’t ignore what economics has done here.

(But we old people have to also point out, firmly, that the world that produced Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was totally unsustainable. I sent my college-student son the other day a chart showing that in 1980s, US inflation was 14 percent. I reminded him that the country had been macerating in economic misery for years. It was far worse in Britain. If you want to know how Reagan and Thatcher emerged, economics played a big part in it.)

More Brooks:

But perhaps the biggest reason for conservatism’s decay into Trumpism was spiritual. The British and American strains of conservatism were built on a foundation of national confidence. If Britain was a tiny island nation that once bestrode the world, “nothing in all history had ever succeeded like America, and every American knew it,” as the historian Henry Steele Commager put it in 1950. For centuries, American and British conservatives were grateful to have inherited such glorious legacies, knew that there were sacred things to be preserved in each national tradition, and understood that social change had to unfold within the existing guardrails of what already was.

By 2016, that confidence was in tatters. Communities were falling apart, families were breaking up, America was fragmenting. Whole regions had been left behind, and many elite institutions had shifted sharply left and driven conservatives from their ranks. Social media had instigated a brutal war of all against all, social trust was cratering, and the leadership class was growing more isolated, imperious, and condescending. “Morning in America” had given way to “American carnage” and a sense of perpetual threat.

I wish I could say that what Trump represents has nothing to do with conservatism, rightly understood. But as we saw with Enoch Powell, a pessimistic shadow conservatism has always lurked in the darkness, haunting the more optimistic, confident one. The message this shadow conservatism conveys is the one that Trump successfully embraced in 2016: Evil outsiders are coming to get us. But in at least one way, Trumpism is truly anti-conservative. Both Burkean conservatism and Lockean liberalism were trying to find ways to gentle the human condition, to help society settle differences without resort to authoritarianism and violence. Trumpism is pre-Enlightenment. Trumpian authoritarianism doesn’t renounce holy war; it embraces holy war, assumes it is permanent, in fact seeks to make it so. In the Trumpian world, disputes are settled by raw power and intimidation. The Trumpian epistemology is to be anti-epistemology, to call into question the whole idea of truth, to utter whatever lie will help you get attention and power. Trumpism looks at the tender sentiments of sympathy as weakness. Might makes right.

Look, my hostility to Trumpism is well known. I don’t need to recapitulate it here. I think he is a disgraceful character, and in no way a conservative. The one thing he got right, though — and I think he stumbled into it — is that the system was rotten, and had to change. Brooks characterizes the contemporary Right like this:

On the right, especially among the young, the populist and nationalist forces are rising. All of life is seen as an incessant class struggle between oligarchic elites and the common volk. History is a culture-war death match. Today’s mass-market, pre-Enlightenment authoritarianism is not grateful for the inherited order but sees menace pervading it: You’ve been cheated. The system is rigged against you. Good people are dupes. Conspiracists are trying to screw you. Expertise is bogus. Doom is just around the corner. I alone can save us.

I share some of his anger at the worst aspects of the New Right. QAnon is a cancer. Too many of us are satisfied with the emotional pleasure of  owning the libs — that is, we are satisfied to indulge our hatreds instead of building something new and better. And we are too quick to blame others for all our problems than to look inside ourselves.

That said, I think my friend is blind to a lot of what is happening in our country, and what has happened.

All those experts, especially on the Right, who said that we had to go to war against Iraq? They were wrong. They were catastrophically wrong, in ways that really, really mattered. All the experts in the 1990s — the Republicans, and the Clinton Democrats — who said that Wall Street should be unchained to make us all rich? They were catastrophically wrong, as the 2008 crash revealed. All the great generals we had that kept telling us that we were turning the corner in Afghanistan? We now know, via the Afghanistan Papers, that they lied their asses off, and spent American blood and American treasure in a war they knew we could not win.

And now the experts are telling us that our sons may be daughters, and our daughters sons — and if we disagree we are bigots who are driving our children to suicide. They are telling us that our country was built on racism, and that there is nothing good in its history that negates the taint. Better pull down those statues now. Woke ideology has now conquered all the high ground in American institutional life, such that if you dissent from any of it, you are putting your livelihood in danger. They really are out to disempower and to punish dissenters. This is the world that the experts of our ruling class have brought to us. And we are pre-Enlightenment savages for thinking ill of this arrangement? No, I don’t believe that at all. David says he accepts the Burkean view that our institutions matter in terms of “soulcraft”. How on earth can he believe that our aggressively woke institutions, the ones that make dissent impossible, are making America and its people better?

David comes out as a Democrat here:

I’m content, as my hero Isaiah Berlin put it, to plant myself instead on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. If its progressive wing sometimes seems to have learned nothing from the failures of government and to promote cultural stances that divide Americans, at least the party as a whole knows what year it is. In 1980, the core problem of the age was statism, in the form of communism abroad and sclerotic, dynamism-sapping bureaucracies at home. In 2021, the core threat is social decay. The danger we should be most concerned with lies in family and community breakdown, which leaves teenagers adrift and depressed, adults addicted and isolated. It lies in poisonous levels of social distrust, in deepening economic and persisting racial disparities that undermine the very goodness of America—in political tribalism that makes government impossible.

I strongly disagree that the Democratic Party “as a whole knows what year it is.” As Douthat avers, the Democrats today behave as if they are the feisty underdogs facing down a racist, bigoted behemoth that controls all of American life — when in fact the cultural Left is thoroughly dominant. Brooks published this essay in a magazine that is the voice of the Establishment, and which regularly publishes the ideological expectorations of that racist midwit Ibram X. Kendi, but where not even the anti-Trump libertarian Kevin D. Williamson could find a place, because the oh-so-tolerant Atlantic newsroom refused to have him.

Furthermore, these same progressive elites control the most important gatekeeping institutions of our society. At Princeton, the mob is trying to force out Prof. Joshua Katz, a classical liberal, because he objects to the racist overhaul of the university’s pedagogy, and to left-wing, race-based intimidation on campus. The stories like that are legion. The message could not possibly be clearer: that if you aspire to join the establishment in the United States, you must sign off on ideological progressivism.

This same establishment is busy both destroying the US Armed Forces with this poisonous woke ideology, which demonizes the kinds of Americans who are the most likely to go into the military, and seeming eager to get the US into another war, this time with Russia over Ukraine.

Finally, our Silicon Valley overlords are busy working to surveil us and use the power of technology to drive people on the Right out of the marketplace of ideas and of goods.

All of this is happening right now — but it all escapes the notice of David Brooks. These are not invented bogeymen. They are real. But if you don’t see them as negative phenomena, you will naturally think that the Right is concerned about nothing.

I’m not trying to be a Whataboutist here. Brooks is not entirely wrong about the state of the Right today. Do I think Donald Trump, and what he represents, is the answer to this crisis? I do not. But you cannot blame people for reaching out to somebody, anybody, who seems to understand their fear and anxiety. As I’ve said in this space many times, I hope to see a Republican politician who understands the validity of what Trump tapped into, but who can direct it to constructive ends.

That figure may or may not come, and in any case, I believe that our crisis in America cannot be solved politically, though politics are part of the answer. One more time: I do not blame my friend David Brooks for losing faith in the most influential iteration of American conservatism of our moment. I do, however, fault him for not seeing the whole picture. If he says that Donald Trump and Trumpism are not the answer to our problems, I agree with him. If he believes centrist managerial liberalism is the answer, then I strongly disagree with him, and in fact say that many of our problems were caused by the managerial class. How wokeness can be reconciled with even the 1980s version of conservatism that first captured the affections of young David Brooks is a total mystery to me.

Think of it like this: if you are a working-class white teenage boy, living in a trailer park in rural Alabama with your single mom, struggling to make it through school, and to break out of the the dysfunction and drug use you see all around you, what hope does the outside world give you? It has decided that you are what’s wrong with the world, because of your race and your sex. That little Baptist church you sometimes attend, the only one that gives you a sense that somebody loves you — it too is what’s wrong with the world, according to the people who run our society, because it promotes bigotry against LGBTs. You are pretty confident that if you go to college, you are going to find yourself in a milieu in which you are going to be expected to despise your people. The people who administer the college speak in a strange argot that you can neither understand nor master, but which you are pretty confident is meant to separate out people like you.

You have thought about going into the military, like J.D. Vance did, to get a leg up on the world. But now you’re reading and hearing that the same ideology that construes you as problematic has taken over the military. Besides, you know people in your town, and even in your family, who came back from the war in Afghanistan damaged. You know that the top generals knew a long time ago that the war was unwinnable, but they kept lying about it, to keep sending back men and women from your own community there. Why would you want to put your own life into the hands of these elites, who were never held accountable for their failure?

The poor Latino immigrant kids down the road that you go to school with, they have a lot stacked against them, but at least the power-holders in our society are on their side. The poor Asian immigrant kids at your school might think they have the power-holders on their side, but if they rise and, through their own hard work and self-discipline, qualify for places in the best universities, then these Asians will discover the truth: they too are disfavored by the power elites.

And if you think that the fix is in against you, well, there will be power elites who are prepared to tell you that you are paranoid. But you aren’t, not really. A movement that has more affection for the Acela corridor than Rust Belt is barren ground for a movement trying to plant hedges against populist radicalism.

Attentive readers of the Brooks essay will get the reference in the previous line. In his piece, Brooks writes:

A movement that has more affection for Viktor Orbán’s Hungary than for New York’s Central Park is neither conservative nor American. This is barren ground for anyone trying to plant Burkean seedlings.

Well, hold on. That’s a strange comparison — Hungary to Central Park. Nobody on the Right hates Central Park. Who can hate Central Park? The more apt comparison is to Manhattan, meaning NYC as a cultural and political entity. New York City and San Francisco are considered to be the epitome of urban liberalism. Leaving aside the basket case that is San Francisco, let’s consider New York. The city has been declining back into the Bad Old Pre-Rudy Days, as we well know. Crime is on the rise. Back in 2019, the liberal writer George Packer wrote for The Atlantic (!) a piece about how wokeness enforced from the top is ruining the city’s public schools. We could go on. Now, what is it about Viktor Orban’s Hungary that should make the Right less admiring of it than of Bill DiBlasio’s New York? I would genuinely like to know.

What is Orban trying to conserve? For one thing, he’s trying to protect his country’s sovereignty, and to defend the right of the Hungarian people to decide how to govern themselves, and not to be compelled to yield to Brussels. He’s also trying to put the state on the side of parents who would like some help in protecting their children from gender ideology. And he’s tried, with limited success, to prevent the toxic ideology of wokeness, which is destroying American higher education, from infiltrating Hungary’s universities. Finally, he understands that his people are an embattled minority in the world, with their unique language and particular culture — and is attempting to keep the sentimental humanitarianism of the EU elites from dispossessing Hungarians in their own land, as the French and the Germans are being dispossessed in their own. And he’s doing all this in a democracy, in which the people can throw him and his party out of office at the next election (and just might).

What, exactly, is un-Burkean about that? Do words mean anything?

Al Mohler writes in criticism of the Brooks essay:

David Brooks wants a conservatism of manners, not a conservatism based in eternal truths. He actually fears any movement that claims to base its principles on truth rather than manners and tradition. That includes his former colleagues at National Review. “I didn’t quite have their firm conviction that there is a transcendent, eternal moral order to the universe and that society should strive to be as consistent with it as possible,” Brooks wrote in 2007.

That explains just about everything about the strange tale of David Brooks. A lack of belief in “a transcendent, eternal moral order” as a basis for his worldview explains why Brooks thinks it quite reasonable that a man should be able to marry a man and that same-sex marriage represents “a victory for the good life.” It explains why he ignores the natural family and decries the nuclear family as a mistake, arguing for “forged families” as a communitarian alternative. His disavowal of a transcendent moral order is what explains his concerns about abortion. What caused his reconsideration of the pro-choice position? In his own words, “experience and moral sentiments.” But he ends up proposing that abortion be freely available for the first trimester. Moral sentiments aren’t enough to defend the unborn in the period when most abortions are performed.

If there is no transcendent, eternal moral order, then morality is just a process of civic negotiation and everything is up for grabs. David Brooks can affirm same-sex marriage and early-term abortion and indict the nuclear family as a mistake—and yet remain comfortable within his worldview of manners and moral sentiments. Conservatism lives or dies on the belief that we are conserving created reality and serving eternal truths. Otherwise, all that remains is custom, manners, and moral sentiment—and they are no match for the forces of progressive morality.

I conspicuously lack the pugilistic sentiment that many of my friends and colleagues on the Right have towards David Brooks, of whom I am very fond, and whom I trust would have my back if I was in a personal crisis while many people who share my views would walk away. I feel the same way about him. That said, I think Mohler is mostly correct here. Brooks, by his own admission, is not a social conservative, nor, despite his move towards religious faith in recent years, would he qualify as a religious conservative. I think that if David still lacks belief in a transcendent moral order in the cosmos, that would explain a lot about why he believes the things he does, and why he doesn’t understand why people like me believe the things that we do.

So what? Unlike so many on the Left and the Right today, David retains the ability to be able to talk to all kinds of people. In his Atlantic dispatch from Nat Con, he wrote about how he had a good time talking with conservatives around the bar there. I find that ability to be civil and open-minded as admirable as it is rare today. The man is simply wrong about some important things; he is not evil. All of us, on all sides, live to some extent within a bubble, and don’t know what we don’t know. I have more respect for people who are wrong about politics, religion, and culture, but who treat others with respect and humanity, than those who get the abstract principles right, but mistreat others.

Brooks quotes Burke here:

“Manners are of more importance than laws,” Burke wrote. “Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”

David and I are both writers who place a lot of stock in manners. Any well-raised Southerner, no matter what their race or social class, understands in his bones why manners are important. That said, it is all too easy to find oneself willing to tolerate the intolerable because those who object to it have rotten manners. Among we who place a high premium on manners, it is not at all difficult to judge people based on their vulgarity or lack thereof, rather than what they believe and advocate. Some of the best-mannered people in the Old South held barbarous opinions about black people, for example. Some of the best-mannered people in the contemporary North hold contemptible views of working-class white people and traditionally religious people. There is nothing about Donald Trump that I admire, or would want to see in my children’s character. I don’t want to have Donald Trump over to dinner. I would rather go over to the Brooks’s and have dinner with Barack and Michelle Obama, not because I share their politics, but because I think we could have a really good political discussion without hating on each other. But I would prefer Trump as a politician to a well-mannered liberal like Joe Biden who believes in and pushes for policies that I believe are profoundly destructive to the common good. Life is complicated.

Liberalism in 2021 is not the same as liberalism in 1991; nor is conservatism. As Burke himself wrote, states without the means to change are also without the means of their own conservation. The conservative party — the GOP — has failed to conserve much of anything. It is now changing into a party that seems at least willing to try to conserve some things. It was inevitable that right-liberals like David Brooks would move to the Democratic Party, just as it is inevitable that some Latinos will move to the GOP. This is what realignment means. I don’t know why it has upset so many people on the Right to discover that David Brooks no longer considers himself allied in any way with American conservatism. I don’t think I have ever had a conversation with him about it, but then, I didn’t have to. I read his stuff.

One more thing. I know this is going to fall on deaf ears, but I strongly encourage my fellow conservatives to be more focused in their criticism of David Brooks, and to abandon personal smears. A lot of people love to say things about his marriage that I know for a fact aren’t true, and are therefore unjust and cruel. And though I think he is way off base on his views about race in America, I also know for a fact that David has quietly done far more work in the real world to help poor minority youth than I have, or that most conservative friends of mine have (I can think of two exceptions, but only two). That doesn’t make Brooks correct in his political judgments, but it does earn him a hell of a lot of credit, I’d say. Characteristically, he is too modest to talk much about any of that, much less brag about it. But it’s real. If you want to criticize Brooks in the comments of this blog entry, stick to his ideas. I’m not going to publish personal insults against him. He’s wrong about this stuff, but he’s my friend, and I’m not going to put up with people trashing his character.

The post David Brooks’ Farewell To Conservatism appeared first on The American Conservative.

She Saved Her Daughter From The Transcult

Here is a terrific piece from Daily Signal by a mom who lost her daughter to the transgender cult, and how she fought to get her girl back. The mom, who writes under the pseudonym “Charlie Jacobs,” shares the lessons she has learned along the way. Here is the core of it. After a childhood in which the daughter was a girly-girl, the kid hit adolescence, and started wearing big sweatshirts, seemingly to minimize her breasts. Mom didn’t think much of it, because she had done the same thing as she was navigating puberty:

Then, my daughter immersed herself into anime art and cosplaying, the hobby of dressing like fantastical characters. I supported her creative side.

I didn’t know that anime and cosplaying can overwhelm a young mind. I didn’t know that anime and cosplaying involved gender-bending themes and that the community crosses into pedophilic and sexual themes.

I also didn’t know that the older cosplay community groomed the younger cohorts.

During that same time period, my daughter went through Teen Talk—a Manitoba, Canada-based program that says it provides “youth with accurate, [nonjudgmental] information” on “sexuality, reproductive health, body image, substance use awareness, mental health, issues of diversity, and anti-violence issues”—at her public school.

She came home with a whole new language. She and all her girlfriends discussed their labels—polyamorous, lesbian, pansexual. None of the five girls chose “basic,” their term for a straight girl.

Now, I was worried.

She distanced herself from her old friends and spent more time online. I checked her phone, but I was not astute enough to know that she had set up “appropriate” fake social media accounts for my viewing.

An older girl showed romantic interest in her. I barred that girl from our home.  I learned later that she had molested my daughter.

When my daughter was in the eighth grade, as a Christmas gift, I took her to SacAnime, an anime convention in Sacramento, California. There, she met a girl three years her senior, but light years more mature. That girl mesmerized my daughter with her edginess or magnanimous personality.

The older girl went by “they.” After their meeting, my daughter got a boy’s haircut, stopped shaving, and asked for boys’ underwear. My daughter parroted everything about the older teen.

She started making gross TikTok videos, her language became vulgar, and she redecorated her room to look like a cave. She self-pierced her nose with one of those bull rings. She broke every family rule. She was morphing into an emo-Goth-vampirelike creature.  She was unrecognizable. Her personality descended into anger and rudeness.

The summer before ninth grade, she announced that she was transgender. Post-announcement, she began to threaten suicide. She sunk into deep depression.

I managed to get all of her passwords to all of her social media accounts. What I saw was jaw-dropping.

Almost everyone that she was conversing with was a stranger, except for the SacAnime friend, who sent her a self-made masturbation video. The discussions on the Discord platform online involved fetishistic sexual conversations. Kids were sending each other erotica, including involving incest and pedophilia.

Older girls were instructing younger girls how to sell nude photos of themselves to men for money.

Girls bragged about their different mental illnesses. They talked about which drugs do what. They talked about how they are really boys, not girls. They discussed “top surgery” (that is, having their breasts removed) and “packers” that create a bulge in one’s pants to imply the presence of a penis.

My daughter’s electronic devices were filled with TikTok videos and YouTubers talking about how great they feel now that they had “transitioned.”

There were messages in which strangers told her to kick my head in because I was a “transphobe” for refusing to call her a male name.

I went nuclear. I took the phone and stripped it of all social media—YouTube, Instagram, Discord, Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter. I even blocked her ability to get to the internet. I deleted all of her contacts and changed her phone number.

I sat next to her while she “attended” school online via Zoom. I deleted YouTube from the smart TVs and locked up the remotes. I took every anime book from her room. I threw away all of her costumes. I banned any friend who was even the slightest bit unsavory.

I involved the police about the porn. I printed out the law and informed her that if anyone sent her porn, I would not hesitate to prosecute.

She hated me like an addict hates the person preventing her drug fix. I held my ground, despite the constant verbal abuse.

After going through seven mental health professionals, I found an out-of-state psychiatrist who was willing to examine the causality for my daughter’s sudden trans identity.

I immersed myself in reading everything on the issue, talking to other parents and other professionals. I worked unceasingly to re-create the bond she and I used to share.

After a year and half of utter hell, my daughter is finally returning to her authentic self—a beautiful, artsy, kind and loving daughter.

Read the whole thing to discover what Charlie Jacobs did to get her daughter back. Seriously, do — and share it with other parents you know.

This piece had special resonance with me because of a story a churchgoing Christian friend told me last year, about how she stumbled onto her adolescent daughter’s initial forays into this world. The girl was being led there by a classmate at her Christian school was was charismatic, highly intelligent, and, according to my friend, pretty clearly queer. My friend, the girl’s mom, said that she accidentally discovered the ruse her daughter had set up to keep her online activity secret from her mom. She took all her 13-year-old’s online access away, forced the classmate friend out of the girl’s life, and plunged in to get to the bottom of it. As she told me, the girl said that she was feeling ill at ease in her body and rebellious, and this classmate was charismatic and persuasive. Now her daughter is doing fine, she says.

What got to me about my friend’s account was that she and her husband have their daughter attending a conservative Christian school, and their family is really vigilant about online access for their kid. Still, the girl figured out a way around it, and would have succeeded had it not been for a single slip-up she (the daughter) made. My friend said their daughter maintained a perfectly normal and obedient outside persona during all this, but was living a secret online life that was undermining her psychological stability.

Don’t think that this is something that happens to other people only. Trust me, this family of whom I speak is as middle-American and normal as you could imagine. And, as I’ve written before, this past summer in Slovenia I met a Catholic father who told me that he and his wife are suffering through something similar with their 13-year-old daughter. He and his wife made the mistake of getting her a smartphone when she was 11. She made contact with some older teenagers in Oregon who began grooming her for the genderqueer world, telling her that she had to decide on her gender identity NOW. The Slovenian child became paralyzed with anxiety over what was happening to her body, and this self-imposed compulsion to choose a gender identity. The kid does not want to eat, and does not want to go to school, her dad said; all she thinks about is this pseudo-problem.

I recall when I was that age (13 to 15), I could hardly have been more miserable. Puberty alienated me from my body, and I was part of the despised nerd clique at school. I found respite playing Dungeons & Dragons. I am not one of those people who demonize D&D. I am grateful that I had it at the time, and for the friendships I made through it. But I recall one night as I was falling asleep, becoming aware that I was living a lot of time in that imaginary world. I was far more interested in what was happening to my character than in the real life I was living. The D&D world was pure build-your-own-adventure escapism, and it was a godsend to anxious, nerdy adolescents like me, whose “real” lives were so unhappy. I remember lying in bed that night — I can remember the quality of light in the bedroom, and where my bed was situated — thinking that there is something really dangerous about this. I didn’t stop playing D&D, but it did slack off after that.

Again, I’m not an anti-D&D person, but I take my own mostly positive experience with that role-playing game as a glimpse of the tormented world of many adolescents, and why they are so susceptible to escapism. I thank God that I grew up in a more stable culture, and certainly not one in which schools push this evil ideology on teenagers, and even children (in Colorado recently, a community leader said that his fairly conservative county has a school district that requires even elementary school teachers to discuss gender identity). The forces arrayed against your kids and your family in this decadent culture are incomparably worse than anything my parents had to deal with. This is not alarmism; it’s the truth.

Take a look at this very short PragerU video about the phenomenon. Pass it on.

The post She Saved Her Daughter From The Transcult appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Phony Threat Of Orthodixie

A friend at coffee hour after church today asked me if I had seen a recent piece published by the libs at the Orthodox Studies Center at Fordham: “Orthodox America Has A Lost Cause Problem”.

I had not. The website that center runs, Public Orthodoxy, is the parish newsletter of that faction of American Orthodoxy that wants to turn us all into Byzantine Episcopalians. I did take a look at the essay after church, and it made me smile. Looks like those ol’ boys are scared to death of all the converts in the South. Author Arim Sarkisian makes a hilariously circumstantial case that the growth of Orthodoxy in the South is advancing the cause of, no kidding, “white supremacy.” He cites three fairly well-known Orthodox bloggers in the South who have espoused Confederate sympathies. While no one can deny that there are people within Orthodoxy who do hold strongly right-wing opinions on politics and history, the idea that these views are normative within Orthodoxy in the South is simply bizarre. In my own fast-growing parish, I know for a fact that there are people who vote Democrat (including a black member), others who vote Republican, and others who consider themselves independent. The one thing we don’t have in our parish is people bringing politics into church. Our pastor keeps a lid on that, God bless him. Besides, my sense is that people are just so happy to have a place where we can be together worshipping God without politics intruding.

I have no idea how common that is in Orthodox parishes in the South, but I bet it’s far more common than the portrait the Chicago-based Sarkisian paints of Southern Orthodox parishes crawling with neo-Confederates.

Sarkisian is on a tear:

It’s possible to trace these developments in other, more established corners of Orthodox America. In November, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary announced its intentions to relocate from suburban New York City after more than eight decades in the metropolitan area. This unexpected announcement has garnered calls for the seminary to re-establish itself in the South. American Conservative blogger and Orthodox Christian Rod Dreher maintains that the only future for the institution is in Texas. As Dreher argues, “The future of American Orthodoxy lies primarily in the region of this country most open to the Gospel.”

Observers like Dreher see such moves as essential to the survival of Orthodoxy itself, suggesting that “blue states” are bound to legislate and regulate the Orthodox Church out of existence and drive its adherents into the catacombs. Echoing a common conservative trope, Dreher portends the systemic persecution of “traditional” American Christians by what he calls the “soft totalitarianism” of a “woke left.” He outlined some of these ideas in January when he delivered the seminary’s annual Fr. Alexander Schmemann Memorial Lecture, a controversial talk which began with Dreher’s defiant acknowledgment of “my Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters who tried to get me deplatformed.” Many of these arguments are also deftly implied in the seminary’s press release, which notes that a primary rationale for relocation is “the legal and regulatory environment in the New York area.”

For proponents of an “Orthodox Dixie,” the reality is clear: Orthodoxy is best, or perhaps only suited to “red states” thought more aligned with conservative views on Culture Wars issues like abortion and LGBTQIA rights. These proponents point to late-twentieth transformations in the national economy which shifted industries, jobs, and people from the Northern “Rust Belt” into the South and Southwest. In voicing this claim, adherents like Dreher demand that the historical strongholds of Orthodox Christianity in the continental United States—dwindling parishes in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, many established by working-class immigrants in the shadows of factories, foundries, and mines more than a century ago—must now give way to emerging communities elsewhere. Found in this one-dimensional, monolithic South is what they boast as a more orthodox Orthodoxy, a traditionalist expression driven by the conversions of conservative Christians from the Bible Belt.

Golly. The smear artist Sarkisian is attempting to liken more mainstream political and theological conservatives with neo-Confederacy. It’s not true, but it serves his, and his editors’, childish progressive alarmism.

Where to even start with this? It cannot be denied that Orthodox Christianity, like Christianity overall, is dying in the Northeast. Why it is happening is a complex issue, but nobody can deny that it is happening. Take a look at these results from Gallup from four years ago:

 

The historic regions where Orthodoxy was first planted in the United States are turning away from God. Nobody can deny that. You might want to make an argument that a seminary should be in a place where the need for proclaiming the Gospel is greatest, but that fails to address the concern that St. Vladimir’s board has over “the legal and regulatory environment in the New York area.”

It is a very, very serious concern for any faithfully Orthodox Christian institution, particularly when it comes to LGBT-focused legislation and cultural norms. For now, the First Amendment protects the rights of seminaries to teach according to religious orthodoxy, even if it contradicts the law governing homosexuality and transgenderism (of which New York is one of the most progressive states). But that says nothing about rules for academic accreditation. It is entirely possible that if SVOTS remains in New York, or another deep blue state, that it could face uphill accreditation battles that could put the very existence of the seminary in jeopardy. Relocating to a red state would mean going to a place that is both more culturally conservative, and, being more religious, better understands the importance of religious liberty.

Naturally this upsets the people at Public Orthodoxy, who are eager to liberalize — including to queer — the Orthodox churches in our country. It appears that these theological progressives fear that they are losing influence over the direction of Orthodoxy in America, and are resorting to neo-Confederate smears to justify their anxiety. The Fordham Orthodox guys helped lead the charge to get my Schmemann lecture at SVOTS cancelled, but they failed. I talked about Live Not By Lies, and the crisis all small-o orthodox Christians — and especially Orthodox Christians — are facing in this post-Christian culture. I know exactly why they hated having me speak there: because I have their number. You rarely if ever hear progressive Orthodox voices complain about the rising soft totalitarianism against moral and theological conservatives because they themselves think oppression of the orthodox Orthodox by the state and by other institutions is a good thing. What these people can’t do within the institution — move it leftward — they are hoping that the state will do for them.

That’s my guess. I am happy to be corrected if I am wrong.

I don’t “demand” that the older Orthodox communities of the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and the Rust Belt “give way to emerging communities” in the South. I am only pointing out a demographic reality. It is not the fault of Southern Orthodox believers that the parishes down here are expanding while the old-line parishes decline, any more than it’s the fault of Nigerian Anglicans that their ranks are booming while the Church of England and its North American sister churches are drying up. Do not make us the scapegoats for your local failure.

Sarkisian goes on to tie the shifting demography of American Orthodoxy to threats to democracy itself. He writes:

Data shows us that Orthodox America is both shrinking in size and shifting in its geographical reach. The lived experiences of that process lay bare that Orthodox America has a Lost Cause problem, one which distorts both United States history and the tenets of the Orthodox Church in order to marginalize, exclude, and even to endanger members of its own flock.

Ah-ha! Even to endanger! There is the voice of a left-wing academic hysteric, who deploys the language of safety to troll and intimidate his opponents. According to Dr. Sarkisian, if we have parishes that want to practice actual orthodox Orthodoxy, we will have blood on our hands, or something. The “danger” and “safety” reflex is always the last refuge of progressive scoundrels who mistake their anxiety and anger for an actual physical threat.

Again: do not scapegoat Southern Orthodox for the failures of Orthodox parishes in the historical Orthodox settlements to spread the faith or pass it on to their children. Nobody in the South does (or should) look down on our brothers and sisters in the more spiritually dessicated parts of the country. There are good and faithful believers — believers who are orthodox in their Orthodoxy — there who are doing their best despite facing cultural pressures that have not (yet) hit the South in full force. My guess is that many of those people would not be sorry to see SVOTS move to a safer locale in a region where the cultural and legal climate is less persecutorial.

Like any church or religious confession, we Orthodox in America have a diversity of political beliefs among us. I don’t read widely, and scarcely at all, on the Orthodox precincts of the Internet, so I have no idea to what extent Sarkisian’s criticism of those three Christians he cites by name is valid, or not. But I can say that the idea that Orthodixie has a “Lost Cause” problem is Yankee pants-wetting at its most amusing. We do have problems, like everybody else, but the Lost Cause is not one of them. If folks like Dr. Sarkisian are so worried about what the South is going to do to Orthodoxy, maybe they should first examine their collection “Lost Faith” problem.

If you’re interested to know more about Orthodoxy in the contemporary South,

UPDATE: A reader comments:

Hi Rod, fellow Orthodox and SVOTS alum here.

You write: “You might want to make an argument that a seminary should be in a place where the need for proclaiming the Gospel is greatest, but that fails to address the concern that St. Vladimir’s board has over ‘the legal and regulatory environment in the New York area.’”

You then imply in the next paragraph that “legal and regulatory environment” is a reference to legal dangers arising from social or LGBT causes.

You should have quoted with ellipses. The quote from the SVOTS board, available here (https://www.svots.edu/headl… reads in full:

“The legal and regulatory environment in the New York area makes significant alterations to campus infrastructure or growth extremely difficult, even if expansion of the current campus were possible.”

The reference to “legal and regulatory environment” in the board statement is clearly to the metro NYC area’s land and building permitting and construction difficulties that have, for several decades now, made physical expansion of the SVOTS campus–which, as you know, is tucked into an odd corner lot in Yonkers hemmed in by a lake–difficult.

Your readers should also know that the campus builders are extremely antiquated and yes, dilapidated, and in need of major and highly expensive overhauls. The land is probably more valuable with the buildings as tear-downs.

Can you please clarify that for your readers?

Happily. I apologize for the error. I have been having an ongoing conversation with Orthodox friends (and others) about the changing legal and cultural landscape regarding accreditation of institutions that do not conform to LGBT orthodoxy, and assumed that that’s what SVOTS was concerned about. I appreciate the correction — but SVOTS had better start worrying about that too!

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