Rod Dreher's Blog, page 40

Don’t Tread On Thomas Sowell

Who’s guarding my Birra Nursia? The Golem of Prague had to call in reinforcements: Dr. Thomas Sowell.

I was given the Sowell figurine at the NatCon convention, by the folks at HeroesOfLiberty.com, who have produced a series of children’s books about people like Dr. Sowell, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, President Ronald Reagan, and others. They also made figurines to accompany them.

The Sowell book is beautiful. Look:

You’ll be able to order the Sowell storybook, the Barrett one, and all of them, in just a few days, via the Heroes of Liberty website. Girls in liberal families have the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg to admire, so parents of girls in conservative families ought to buy the Amy Coney Barrett storybook and figurine for their little ones. And, of course, you can always order Birra Nursia right here in America! For the Golem of Prague, well…

The post Don’t Tread On Thomas Sowell appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Shame Of The Nebraska Catholic Church

Today the Attorney General of Nebraska released a report on his three-year investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church of his state. This probe was sparked in part by the courageous 2018 testimony on this blog of Peter Mitchell, a former priest of the Diocese of Lincoln. I am so grateful to Peter for speaking up, and to the Nebraska Catholics who found the courage to raise their voices in subsequent conversations with me. If you follow the link above, you can download a copy of the report.

I’ve just gone over the report quickly. Here’s what stands out to me.

The most troubling finding from this report is the fact that on numerous occasions, when there was an opportunity to bring justice to the victims, those in authority chose to place the reputation of the church above the protection of the children who placed their spiritual care in the hands of those in church authority. The depth of physical and psychological harm caused by the perpetrators, and the decades of failure by the church to safeguard so
many child victims, is unfathomable. We can only hope that the victims have been able to find some sense of healing from a source higher than our justice system.

There it is, once again: the reputation of the Church mattered more to these men than the protection of children. This is damning.

More:

Perhaps the most concerning finding is that in many cases, church authorities, be it head or associate priests or other diocesan personnel, had knowledge of the abusive behavior of the offenders and did nothing to stop it. Numerous files document instances where high-ranking diocesan officials, up to and including the bishop or archbishop, were aware of the abusive behaviors of a priest but did nothing to remove him from ministry. Often, these offenders would be sent away for “counseling” but soon returned to ministry in situations where they had contact with children. Worse yet, some did not even receive counseling. They were summarily removed from their assignment, only to be immediately reassigned to a parish where more children were victimized.

More:

We also discovered instances where victims reported their abuse to a priest or other diocesan official, but no documentation of the report was found in the official file. Simply put, the dioceses did not create written records every time they were informed of incidents of sexual abuse. Then, when receiving an allegation of clergy abuse years later, that failure to document led the dioceses to claim it had never received a complaint. Past diocesan officials, however, were well aware of the abuse allegations. Also, that failure to document meant that current diocesan officials reviewing the allegation might not have been aware that it was not the first time the individual had been accused of sexual abuse.

They didn’t create records so they could claim that they didn’t know.

Though the AG’s report tries to downplay this fact, as others have done before, we see once again that this is overwhelmingly a crime of homosexual abuse:

And it is overwhelmingly a phenomenon not of pedophilia, but of priests going after sexually mature young males.

For many years, the now-retired Lincoln Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz had a reputation among American Catholics as a staunch and uncompromising upholder of Catholic orthodoxy. I was present in the room in Dallas, in 2002, when he told a group of lay Catholic supporters that his episcopal colleagues were a “hapless bench of bishops.” I thought that meant he believed they were failing to do what was necessary to bring justice to victims. Back then, I was a conservative Catholic and an admirer of Bruskewitz’s. In light of this report, I don’t know what he meant back then. This report shatters his reputation. He should never show his face in public again. For example:

Most recently, Victim #1’s sister contacted the Lincoln Police Department in 2018. The sister disclosed that Victim #1 told her Deonise provided him with alcohol and performed sexual acts upon him over a period of several years. Victim #1 was contacted and refused to give a statement. The sister alleged she reported the abuse to the diocese in 1994, but the diocese did not inform law enforcement. The 1994 report was likely the one referred to in the November 1994 note from the Bishop Bruskewitz. The sister also claimed a family member found love letters from Deonise to Victim #1, which were delivered to a priest in the diocese in 1994. There is no record of these letters in the file.

A. Nature of the abuse/misconduct: Unspecified sexual acts perpetrated on the victim

B. Date of incident: Mid-1980s

C. Reported to diocese: 1994; 1995

D. Gender/age of victim: Male – 11-13 years old

E. Abuse reported to diocese prior to incident described: No

F. Reported to law enforcement: 2018

Disposition: Deonise resigned as head priest of his parish in August 1994 and left the State of Nebraska. His priestly faculties were removed, and he was excommunicated in October 1994. In 2013, the bishop corresponded with Deonise, inquiring whether he desired to be removed from the clerical state. Deonise indicated he wished to remain a priest. The diocese never reported allegations of Deonise’s abuse to law enforcement. Deonise’s current whereabouts is not indicated in the file.

Look at these clerical liars, what they did:

The diocese became aware of Hrdlicka’s victimization of the minors from the camping trip in 1978. The file includes numerous reports which reveal that after the father of Victim #1 met with Monsignor Crowley, Hrdlicka was moved to a new parish. Ironically and unbeknownst to the father of Victim #1, Crowley was himself an abuser of multiple minor boys. The new parish was not informed of Hrdlicka’s molestation of the four victims from the camping trip. More troubling, Hrdlicka was given a state leadership role in a Catholic youth organization. [Emphasis mine — RD] He went on to victimize at least five (and possibly up to nine) other children. Law enforcement in Nebraska was notified about Hrdlicka’s sexual assaults in 2018.

After his 1993 military convictions, the father of Victim #1 reached out to the vicar general of the diocese to inform him about Hrdlicka’s sexual abuse of the four minors in 1978. Later that year, the diocese suspended Hrdlicka from ministry. In 2002, the victims from the 1978 camping trip contacted the diocese about their abuse at the hands of Hrdlicka. They said the national news of the sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese in 2002 motivated them to reach out to the diocese. They alleged the diocese never offered an apology for their abuse, nor did it offer any assistance when Hrdlicka’s military conviction became public.

Soon thereafter, the diocese issued a press release announcing the four victims from the camping trip had threatened to sue the diocese for $2 million. In essence, the diocese was accusing the victims of blackmail. The release stated that as of 1992, “there was no record of any complaints against Hrdlicka in the diocese.” While there may have been no written records of Hrdlicka’s abuse, his abusive behavior had been communicated to the highest levels of the diocese in 1978, including Bishop Flavin. There is no indication the victims ever sued the diocese.

Hrdlicka was released from military prison in 1999. He was permanently removed from the clerical state in 2005. Hrdlicka’s present whereabouts is unknown.

There’s a section on Monsignor Leonard Kalin (d. 2008), the longtime vocations director of the Lincoln diocese, and head of the University of Nebraska’s Newman Center. He was nothing but a dirty old man — and the diocese knew it. Excerpt:

It is evident from the accounts of Victim #5 and Victim #6 that church authorities were made aware of Kalin’s sexual advances towards seminarians in 1998. Victim #5 wrote he believed an investigation had been conducted about Kalin’s abuses, and he was surprised to learn the matter had only recently been publicly brought to light. The file summary recounts a 1998 meeting in which Bruskewitz asked Kalin to “list all sexual encounters he has had.” Kalin referred to one encounter which had occurred the previous month. Kalin then listed the names of 50 men he had “showered with in the gym” and had “kissed on the lips in a non-sexual way.” Bruskewitz issued a canonical warning and forbade him to be alone with any man under the age of 40, except for priests and family members. The summary later noted Kalin “does not strictly follow” the bishop’s precept. None of the source documents pertaining to the summary are in the file.

Here’s how pervy Monsignor Jerome Murray (d. 2016) was. This happened in the 1970s:

The file contains a summary of the sexual abuse of Victim #4. He was a student and in a boy scout troop led by Murray. He said Murray would undress completely in the presence of groups of boys. He recounted Murray would masturbate publicly and ask the boys to feel his penis. Victim #4 indicated that Murray would undress some of the boys personally. On one occasion, Murray used a floor mounted electric shoe buffer to masturbate in front of the boys. He claimed Murray’s inappropriate activities were “common knowledge among all of the boys.

The AG’s report said that parents on the Catholic school board had to threaten the diocese with going to the police in order to force the bishop to remove this freak from the schools. Even after all this time, it breaks my brain to contemplate how viciously adversarial bishops and church officials were to parents who wanted priests to stop molesting children.

The late Father John Fiala of the Archdiocese of Omaha was quit a piece of work:

A week after their conversation, the Ralston Police Department found Fiala in a parked car in a city park, with [13-year-old] Victim #3 sitting on Fiala’s lap. Fiala told the police he was teaching Victim #3 how to drive. The father related Fiala had been grooming Victim #3 for a while, and that Fiala “used a sick woman (Victim #3’s mother)” to gain information and access to Victim #3. After the incident in the park, Victim #3’s life began to fall apart. While he does not believe Fiala was responsible for all of Victim #3’s problems, the father believed Fiala added to his son’s decline. The father noted Victim #3 once told him, “That guy [Fiala] ruined my life.” There are no other details about the abuse suffered by Victim #3.

Shortly after the incident in the park, the father of Victim #3, along with the president of the parish council, and a priest met with Archbishop Sheehan to inform him about Fiala’s conduct. Archbishop Sheehan told them Fiala would not be assigned to a position which entailed working with children. Fiala was soon thereafter removed from his parish assignment. His personnel record reveals he had a leave of absence for a year before being assigned as an associate priest in 1989. There is no record of criminal charges being filed after the incident with Victim #3.

The father explained he reached out to the archdiocese again in 2010 after learning about Fiala’s arrest in Texas. In a 2010 correspondence with the chancellor, he stated “there is not a day that goes by that I don’t search for some reasonable explanation as to how my Catholic Church could have allowed such a horrible thing to continue after they knew what was going on.” He added, “How could the [archbishop] look me in the eye and tell me, promise me, that he would take immediate action to remove this man from any position that would put him in contact with children and then just transfer him into some other unsuspecting flock of Catholic children?” Victim #3 subsequently committed suicide.

Fiala’s monstrous deeds continued after he left Omaha:

 In 2008, Fiala was serving at a parish in Rocksprings, Texas. Early that year, Fiala began giving private catechism classes to Victim #4, a 16-year-old boy. In January, under the pretext of taking Victim #4 on an out-of-town trip to visit the boy’s girlfriend, Fiala took him to a hotel and raped him at gunpoint. He told Victim #4 he would hurt him and his family if he told anyone what happened.

He sexually assaulted Victim #4 two more times during 2008. Victim #4 later swallowed a bottle of pills and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. While at the hospital he told counselors about the sexual assaults. Fiala was arrested and charged with aggravated sexual assault.

While out on bail, Fiala talked to a man to see if he could arrange to have Victim #4 killed. The man contacted the police, who arranged for an undercover officer to meet with Fiala. Fiala’s offer to pay $5,000 to have Victim #4 killed was recorded. Fiala was charged and convicted of solicitation of capital murder in 2012 and sentenced to 60 years in prison. In 2014, he pled guilty to sexual assault of a child and received a sentence of 30 additional years in prison.

There are records indicating that the then-archbishop was aware of the magnitude of Father Fiala’s problems for a long time, and yet kept moving him around.

In a 1988 letter from Archbishop Sheehan to another priest, he recounted the numerous complaints he received about Fiala’s behavior around teenagers. He wrote that Fiala had “a history of doing some very strange things that worry me and also the pastors of the parishes in which he has been sent.” Sheehan continued, writing he believed that Fiala’s “actions indicate such a lack of maturity that it is very difficult to give him a pastoral assignment.”

Here’s something about Father Thomas Sellentin, an Omaha priest who got away with it for decades:

Reports of Sellentin’s sexual abuse date from the late 1960s through the 1990s. In over 35 years as a priest, he had 12 different parish assignments. Ten of these assignments lasted less than four years. The actual number of abuse cases is uncertain, but the file reveals there were close to 40 victims. In our determination, the file supports there were at least 36 victims. The cases fit the same general description of inappropriate touching and rubbing on the legs, buttocks, and genital area. Numerous church officials were aware of Sellentin’s behavior and attraction to pre-teen and teenage boys. [Emphasis mine — RD]

Yes, but who cares about laity? The Church exists for the pleasure of the clergy, right? What else could justify this behavior by church officials? The report says church officials started to learn about Sellentin’s abusive behavior in the late 1960s. And yet, on he went. More:

The file contains clips from numerous newspaper articles revealing the archdiocese knew of Sellentin’s proclivity for sexual abuse of boys. A World Herald article from April 2002 affirms reports of the abuse were made to Archbishop Sheehan in 1970, 1980, and 1985. The article states, “An inability to grasp the criminal nature of pedophilia and its long-term, tragic effects on victims could be one reason [the archbishop] transferred Sellentin from parish to parish even after being told Sellentin was sexually abusing children.”

I am told that during the press conference, the Attorney General became emotional several times.

I reached out this morning to ask Peter Mitchell, the laicized priest whose public statement on this blog in 2018 had a lot to do with prompting the probe, for his reaction. He wrote back:

When will faithful Catholics see through the smoke and mirrors of the institution they desperately want to defend as being “holy”?!?!

Today we have learned that the Diocese of Lincoln knew as early as 1998 that Vocation Director Kalin had over 50 male victims of inappropriate behavior, and yet its 2020 report merely said that Kalin had “on occasion” done inappropriate things. And yet we are expected to believe that the Diocese is committed to transparency.

The AG report tells an awful, sickening story. Nobody could believe that any basically decent human being could do these things to children, let alone priests entrusted with leading them to God. And yet the Diocese protected and enabled them, over and over and over.

The detail on page 49 that a letter of complaint about Monsignor Clarence Crowley was returned without any response from the Lincoln chancery in the early 2000s just says so much about how “wonderful” the Lincoln Diocese was and is.

The myth of the Diocese of Lincoln is completely shattered, despite the many lay people there who still don’t want to believe that it could have happened in “the Shire,” as Bishop Conley used to love to call the Diocese of Lincoln. The Catholic seminary system actually has far more in common with the Mines of Moria – a once beautiful place that is now overrun with demons and darkness.

It’s angering to think of how many young people – including me – were encouraged to go and listen to Monsignor Kalin because he would help them know how to follow Jesus and get to heaven. He was a fraud. Are devout Catholics in Lincoln still able to be in denial about this after reading the AG report? He was not a “saint.” He was a fraud.

It’s sad to think of how many good priests are harmed today by all of this news, because it’s not their fault that the system is so sick and corrupt.

It’s mind-boggling to realize that this pattern is undoubtedly repeated in diocese after diocese across this country. This report reveals the way the system works anywhere a Catholic chancery oversees clergy.

Is there any way to redeem and reform the “Catholic system”? I have yet to hear a reasonable proposal. I’m not talking about the Catechism and the Sacraments, which I fully believe in. I am talking about a system of control, exploitation, and homosexual power that has so intertwined itself with the “Church of Jesus” that it’s now impossible to accept the former without cooperating with the latter. What is a person of faith supposed to do???

This is not a problem that is all “in the past.” This is an ongoing effort to avoid talking or revealing even a small portion of the problem to lay people who still naively think that it couldn’t be as bad as people like me say it is.

I am not sorry that I felt had to blow the whistle on Lincoln in 2018. I only wish that more people would take the time to understand that the magnitude of the problem is far, far greater than what any of us are yet aware of. If today is a small step toward that happening, then some progress is being made. But there is still a long, long way to go.

Stan Schulte is another brave man whose name should be recognized and honored on this day. The priest who molested him was his uncle, Jim Benton, who is in the AG’s report. 

Schulte told me in the 2018 interview (linked in the previous sentence) that the Lincoln diocese was still at the time not being forthcoming with the public about why his uncle was no longer in ministry:

As a frustrated Stan Schulte said of his uncle, “He’s still actively friends with minors on Facebook.” Late Sunday, I captured these screenshots from Father Benton’s Facebook page.

He goes on:

I have been fighting all by myself for the past nine months. These unknowing parents are sitting there, with the children as Facebook friends with my uncle the priest. The diocese has not warned them about him. We have such blind trust for priests. He has access to their children. They don’t even know what’s going on because the diocese has hidden it under ‘health issues.’

One striking aspect of my intensely emotional interview with Stan Schulte, in which he broke down crying several times, is his repeated expression of love for priests, loyalty to the Catholic Church, and even love for the uncle he says molested him.

“I’ve lived my whole life loving my uncle,” Schulte says, sobbing. “I think he’s a good person, no matter how deep this problem goes. He hasn’t had anyone to help him. He just kept being moved from parish to parish.”

“I feel like my uncle is unable to even get support from fellow priests in regards to his problem because they too are left in the dark and are not able to show compassion or much-needed support. This, I am sure, makes him feel isolated and alone as well.”

Schulte continues, “There are a lot of amazing priests I respect and love, and I fear some of them don’t have a voice, knowing how much potential corruption there may be above them.”

Schulte told me then that he came forward in 2018 after reading Peter Mitchell’s piece on this blog. More:

“The thing that drove me to come forward to my family is that I didn’t want my nieces and nephews to suffer this,” he said. “How many other victims in this diocese have become alcoholics? How many have committed suicide? How many have not been able to have normal lives because of what was done to them? We the people of this diocese are the body of Christ. We deserve better.”

“I fear my uncle may have hurt more people,” he says. “How many priests like him are still in a position of power? How many other children are still vulnerable? How many priests who have allegations against them have moved up in the ranks, and stayed quiet to protect each other?”

He is also coming forward for the sake of Lincoln’s priests. “I think some of the most amazing priests in the country are in our diocese. They deserve to have honest, truly transparent leadership within the diocese that they love and serve.”

That said, Schulte feels that to this point, he has been abandoned by Lincoln’s clergy. Last week, he posted this on Facebook:

 

“I think it’s important to say that even having one priest come forward to support you is so important,” Schulte tells me. “I said on Facebook this week that I was a victim as well, and that this [problem] needs to be looked at. A priest put a heart sign on it. I cried for 30 minutes, because this was the first time in a long time that I felt love and support from the Church. I broke down and cried because as a victim, you start to feel like the whole church will hate you if you come forward and mess up the façade of perfection that the Church portrays itself to be.”

I hope today’s AG report brings some measure of piece to Stan Schulte, and all the other victims, and their families.

UPDATE: Just got this from Stan Schulte:

Your decades of inaction speak much louder than your blanket apologies.They have lost our trust and put tens of thousands of innocent children in harms way.If this was the public school system and the principal knew for decades that there were teachers abusing students and covered it up, that principal would be fired immediately. If the Catholic leadership doesn’t step down now, we are naive to think there will ever be any change.In an extreme case like this, I would ask that the state legislature temporarily lift the statute of limitations, as many other states have done. This would allow survivors to be heard and justice to be served.Instead of continuing to put tens of millions of dollars towards more extravagant churches, I think God would much rather have you devote that money to protecting our children and compensating your faithful laity who have been abused due to your gross negligence.

UPDATE.2: A Catholic priest friend e-mails:

Judging motivations is always dicey.  I would, however, be cautious about the claim that offending bishops were trying to protect the Church or the priesthood. I mean, really, think about it.  If you were trying to do either of those things, you might through misjudgment send a guy for “treatment” and then reassign him, but then you would do exactly what was directed for follow up (and that follow up often never happened, as we now know).  And once he reoffended, you’d have to know that treatment and reassignment does not work so you’d stop assigning him.  No, the good of the Church or the priesthood is not the motive.  Something closer is a motive of not wanting to have to actually deal with victims or perpetrators, perhaps a wish to avoid problems, conflicts, and taking responsibility for the results. In short, we’re looking at a self-centered, weak-spirited approach that seeks to minimize problems and make them go away. They were protecting themselves, no one else.Every other excuse is a self-serving fabrication that allows offending bishops to hide from the disorders within themselves that led them to fail to rise up to protect the innocent from violation and to protect the perpetrators from causing further harm to others and themselves.

UPDATE.3: Leon Podles, a Catholic whose book Sacrilege is by far the most searing account of the crisis, comments:

The hardest thing to understand is the willful blindness of popes and bishops to the diabolical harm that was being done when children were molested by priests. John Paul II called the drug addict, incestuous homosexual molester Maciel “an infallible guide to youth” despite being warned about Maciel’s behavior. So much for the reliability of papal judgments!

Why this refusal to face reality? A refusal to face the hard, bitter work of repentance and reform? A clericalism so ingrained that it confuses clerics with God? Or what? Despite having studied this morass of evil for twenty years, I am no closer to understanding.

Reader Alcuin, who attended the University of Nebraska when Monsignor Kalin ruled the Newman Center, comments:

Just went through the report. I met three of the accused priests; attended their parishes. Know the sister of a fourth well. I’ll limit my comments to worst of that crew, Msgr Kalin and the 51 college men/seminarians/priests he made unwelcome advances / molesting actions towards.

Kalin came across in his sermons as pastor of the on-campus student parish as a bitter old man. Many in-coming Catholic students each year attended once or twice and then never again or switched to Old St Mary’s, a lengthy walk south of campus. I figured this was part of the typical ‘college falling away’, rather accelerated by his sour nature.

Yet his vinegar attracted a surprising number of flies. Those who stuck around tended to become very devout; some seemed to spend a lot discretionary time at the Catholic center, studying there evenings before the 10 PM weekday Mass, doing janitorial work, etc. I recall some of my immediately repelled Catholic friends describing the place as ‘cult-like’. Kalin certainly seemed to have a core of devoted students. Some almost fanatical. It was a turn-off.

I assumed his bitterness stemmed from a disappointment with the state of the Church and the nation and the weariness of an old man who longer saw reflected the world he knew in his youth. He was fond of noting the the only place the word ‘convenient’ appeared was St Paul’s instruction to preach when convenient and inconvenient. His Masses were reverent with a fussy adherence to rubrics. I recall him pausing during his distribution of Communion to correct a college student server on proper placement of the Communion paten under the chin of the communicant. Seems farsical today that he was worried about *that* being wrong while himself doing much worse.

While I did not witness any of the untoward items mentioned by e.g. Peter Mitchell (other than some drinking during occasional parties in the social hall – forbidden by university rules), I generally kept myself at arms length from from Kalin’s student parish, so I was rather out of the loop and wouldn’t know the insider details. I picked and choose my moments to drop by, usually because of interest in some young woman or particularly interesting event.

As to the latter, I have to indirectly credit this unhappy priest of public piety and private crimes with having done me a spiritual boon. Some years Kalin would put together an out of town student retreat, invite rather impressive guest priests to run it and quietly fade into the background. These retreats were great precisely because he made himself invisible. Conversations with these guest priests and a couple books they recommended changed my life for the better, down to the present day.

Kalin did evil things; others found him an unlikely benefactor (I knew students who traded promiscuity and drunkeness for Christ because of him.) In my case, a retreat he helped plan sparked a spiritual light in me because he was smart enough not to try to run it himself. I attended because of the ‘big names’ invited – and they delivered.

I’m sure I’ll be misunderstood here, so let me state that I’m not defending Kalin, or trying to weigh his crimes against whatever good he may have done. I’m simply telling my college experience as I lived it.

I should point out to readers that when I call some of these abuse victims “sexually mature,” I’m not commenting on their mental state, but rather on the fact that they have gone through puberty. That’s all. Technically speaking, pedophilia is sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. It’s all illegal, and horrible, but the distinction is significant.

The post The Shame Of The Nebraska Catholic Church appeared first on The American Conservative.

Republicans Vs. The Baizuocracy

A conservative reader writes to say that he is agnostic on whether or not the GOP victories this week are meaningful. I have edited this somewhat for clarity and concision:

The Left has won all the cultural fights because the backlash against progressive lunacy usually amounts to nothing more than voting Republican, and then letting a grifter class within the GOP run the government to satisfy the donor class. Think about how serious libertarians and hardcore neocons are only a small minority of the conservative coalition, but are heavily represented among the party’s elites. They get to decide who gets what.

You talk about “apocalypse” in the sense of “unveiling.” Well, one of the great unveilings of recent years for conservatives has been the mass defection of the consultant class Republicans to things like The Bulwark and the Lincoln Project, where not only their contempt for Trump is clear, but also for the ideological positions they used to claim to uphold. They have always thought of social and religious conservatives as rubes who can be manipulated as electoral cannon fodder. Conservatives might have won big this week, but unless they can understand and put into effect the truth that personnel is policy, then they are going to watch the Left end up winning in the long run.

Keep in mind that the educated young whites who aspire to being part of the ruling class elite in our society are still fully behind wokeness. The further away from the ruling class you are, the more freedom you have to hold “forbidden” opinions — but you also cut yourself out of power. The people who want to hold power and guarantee that it will be held only by them are more than willing to cut everybody else out. They claim to be doing it to help the oppressed, but they don’t give a damn about changing the economic situation in ways that stand to help, say, poor black people, in material ways. Who is going to be hurt the most economically by vaccine mandates and firing those who refuse to comply? Working-class black people.

He adds:

One more thing: you compared DEI officers in the military to Soviet commissars. That’s not quite it. The Soviets installed commissars into Red Army units because they wanted to make sure that officers and soldiers were loyal to the regime. These DEI officers don’t care about whether or not the troops are loyal to America. They are focused entirely on hunting down and casting out bigots, haters, and any enlisted personnel who hold to conservative beliefs. The more accurate analogy is the Red Guards of China’s Cultural Revolution. They were fanatically inspired by Mao, but clashed with the People’s Liberation Army, and had to be suppressed by them.

I have such interesting readers.

He’s right: if the political victories are going to mean anything, the winners are going to have to hit the woke within the baizuocracy — my term for the woke ruling class apparatchiks, based on the Chinese insult for “white leftists” — very hard in terms of policy and legislation. The time for words alone is long over. But there is also a role for the bully pulpit here. Youngkin’s victory shows that Republicans can run against wokeness — specifically Critical Race Theory — get smeared falsely as racist by the media, and still win. They can still win because for now in America, there remain enough voters of all races who still believe in basic color-blind fairness as an American political virtue. One of them is a black woman, Winsome Sears, who was just elected Virginia’s lieutenant governor. My sense is that Republican elites have been silent on this garbage for so long because they dwell in social circles where fear of being called a bigot is greatest. Maybe, just maybe, Tuesday’s results struck a blow against that groundless fear.

The liberal media and all elements of the baizuocracy are going to call us bigots no matter what — and we can still win power by appealing to the common sense and common decency of the American people. Might as well use that power to push back as hard against the baizuocracy as it has pushed against us. And that includes purging the baizuocracy from Republican ranks. If the baizuocracy, especially in its corporate branch, imposes a social credit system, it will be too late to fight them. We may be facing our last chance to use politics to stop them. Politics will not be sufficient — it won’t even be close to sufficient — but it is necessary.

The post Republicans Vs. The Baizuocracy appeared first on The American Conservative.

Revenge Of The Normals

I can’t remember the last time I felt optimistic about politics. What a day!

I think the meaning of yesterday is that normal people are sick of progressive bullying, and took revenge. Look:

The highly educated chattering class has indulged in so much sneering and smearing of parents who can’t define critical race theory but sense their kids are imbibing something that makes them uncomfortable. This isn’t about politics or race or even culture wars. It’s about class. https://t.co/pcd0XbRFto

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) November 3, 2021

Let’s be careful not to overinterpret this. Remember that despite the mendacity and flat-out racism of the McAuliffe campaign, Youngkin only barely beat him. There are still plenty of voters satisfied with the Democratic Party’s direction. And, it’s one thing to win an election, but another to actually do something meaningful about the problems that you were elected to solve. Is Gov. Youngkin, a wealthy Mitt Romney-style Republican, willing and able to go hard against progressive racism in the schools, and other manifestations of wokeness? We will see. He is a rich suburban Republican who is going to have to be a traitor to his class to get this stuff done. Godspeed to him.

That said … what a night! It is delicious to watch and read all the media leftists squawking and screaming about RACISM having won. They all live in such airtight bubbles that they can’t see how alienating their radicalism is to normal Americans. It turns out a lot of voters don’t appreciate their kids being propagandized with progressive race hatred and gender insanity. Batya Ungar-Sargon is right: this is class warfare, though it manifests as culture war.

At last night’s conclusion of the National Conservatism conference, Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance gave a rousing speech on the theme that universities are the enemy. Not too long ago, I would have thought that was a crazy idea. The past four years, and the mainstreaming of once-fringe academic theories, changed my mind. In his 1953 book The Captive Mind, Polish anti-communist dissident Czeslaw Milosz warned that people should pay attention to seemingly obscure intellectual debates. The people of Eastern Europe, he said, woke up one morning to find that those once-fringe ideas were ruling their lives, having come to power via Soviet military might. In the same way, wokeness, a softer form of totalitarianism, is doing the same thing to us — even as people like Terry McAuliffe and his media allies deny it.

Before J.D. spoke last night, I reconnected with an old friend who is a tenured professor at a major American university. He used to be happy there. Now he is thinking hard about his escape. What happened? Radical activists on faculty and staff have de facto seized control of the university. I can’t tell you precisely what he said they’re doing, because I don’t want to risk outing him. But trust me, it is straight-up Soviet stuff designed to drive any dissenters from the hard progressive line out of the university. I hear stories like this constantly, but there was something about the audacity of this move, and seeing how badly it has shaken up my friend, that got to me. This was literally a few minutes before J.D. Vance spoke — and it really put his talk in perspective.

(Also, after the event, I met an active duty member of the armed services — I’m deliberately being vague here — who said that units in his branch now have DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] officers assigned to them. This is an exact parallel to the political commissars the Soviets assigned to Red Army units, to make sure they were politically reliable. I texted a friend in another branch of the armed services, and he said it’s true for them too — and worse, they are constantly being forced to sit through lectures about things like pronoun use, sexual diversity, etc. It’s killing morale. In one Q&A session at NatCon, someone stood and identified themselves as active-duty military, and said aloud, “What am I even fighting for?” Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, are you listening?)

In his talk, J.D. talked about how American universities are the origin of this poison that is killing our country. Where do you think Critical Race Theory, which is teaching our children to hate themselves and each other on the basis of race, comes from? Where does gender ideology come from? J.D. told me later, “When you realize that progressive politics is cover for elite dispossession of people, it’s really liberating.”

This morning, before I left for the airport, I passed on to another academic friend what the man told me about the ideological purification of his university. The second friend, a prominent professor, told me that the truth is, American academia is a cartel. You can’t exist within it without the tacit approval of all the others. If the professoriat has become radicalized to the point where they will not tolerate anyone who deviates from progressivism, then they corrupt the entire system. That is what is happening now, he said — and the only way around it is to found independent universities that strive to do what universities are supposed to do. There is no viable alternative.

This is going to be the work of a generation, I told him. This is the calling of America’s superrich, who have the money to found new universities. If I were Elon Musk, I would pour my fortune into just such a project, as a gift to America. There are so many professors who want to do real scholarship, and real teaching, but they are being crushed in these corrupt institutions. If we don’t figure out how to build alternative institutions to keep the life of the mind alive through this ideological dark age, the decline of our nation is guaranteed. You cannot have an intellectual elite that’s corrupt without going into decline. Look at Arab Islamic scholarship in the medieval period. The Arabs were the most advanced intellectuals around, but when a certain strand of religious ideology took over the Muslim world, it killed intellectual inquiry. We are living through that now in our civilization, with woke ideology.

We don’t have to accept this! But we do need to understand that we are constantly being gaslighted by the media and leaders of nearly all American institutions. For example:

First we were told “that’s not REALLY CRT”.

Then we were told “CRT is not in the k-12 curriculum”.

Now the ACLU is suing Oklahoma to keep Critical Race Theory in the k-12 classrooms.

Are you paying attention yet? pic.twitter.com/qJl8LqwDju

— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) November 3, 2021

It is great to turf out Democrats to protest their poisoning the well with their crackpot progressive ideas, but again, it won’t mean anything if the Republicans don’t move fast and hard against these people and their institutions. J.D. Vance is right: the universities are the enemy — and so are woke corporations, the media, the woke military, and every other institution that has accepted this evil ideology. As I explained in my NatCon talk, I would not have said things like this just a few years ago, but the evidence is overwhelming now that our country is being torn up and torn down by what these people believe, and what they are doing to us. My talk was about what American conservatives can learn from Viktor Orban’s Hungary. We are not Hungary, of course, but the big lessons we can learn from him are

1) to realize that we are fighting a civilizational war here with woke globalists, and

2) we have to be willing to go hard against these elites, using state power to drive back these ideologues, and

3) we have to give up being satisfied with lib-owning, and elect conservative leaders who have the political skill to use power strategically and systematically to work reform

The Republicans have every reason to look forward to the 2022 election. If they run as defenders of normality, they stand to make serious gains. The Democratic elites can’t separate themselves from the radicals, because they have painted themselves into a corner: if you question any of this, you are a racist, a homophobe, a bigot, and so forth. I imagine James Carville’s head is exploding today. If the Republicans can manage to keep Donald Trump sidelined, 2022 is going to be a big year for them.

Now, though, let’s see these incoming Republican leaders deliver with real change. People are sick of the crime, the ideological insanity, and the inability of the Democratic Party leadership to say no to the radicals. Good. Now, Republicans, get to work.

UPDATE: The Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira, on the “Fox News Fallacy.” Excerpts:

The Fox News Fallacy is having a dire effect on many Democrats. This is the idea that if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often. The problem is that an issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it. That depends on the issue. If there is something to the issue and persuadable voters have real concerns, you will not allay those concerns by embracing the Fox News Fallacy. In fact, you’ll probably intensify them by giving such voters the impression that Democrats simply don’t care about their concerns and will do nothing to address them. That will undermine the Democrats’ ability to respond to predictable attacks against their candidates in 2022 and raise the likelihood of a midterm debacle.

Crime is a great example of this. Initially dismissed as simply an artifact of the Covid shutdown that was being vastly exaggerated by Fox News and the like for their nefarious purposes, it is now apparent that the spike in violent crime is quite real and that voters are very, very concerned about it. According to recent data from the Democratic-oriented Navigator Research, more Americans overall, including among independents and Hispanics, now believe violent crime is a “major crisis” than believe that about the coronavirus pandemic or any other area of concern. Moreover, majorities of even Democrats now believe violent crime is a major crisis and concerns are sky-high among black voters (70 percent say it’s a major crisis). Similarly, the latest USA Today/Ipsos poll (June 29-July 6) finds crime and gun violence topping the list of issues that worry Americans.

Critical Race Theory is another issue on which Democrats have blinded themselves, says Teixeira, who points out that there really is something to the concern. More:

Democrats who embrace the Fox News Fallacy are inclined to believe there is no real issue here other than voters, whipped up by Fox News, who are simply opposed to teaching students about slavery and the like. That is a mistake and blinds Democrats to a real problem that is emerging.

UPDATE.2: Matt Taibbi:

McAuliffe’s collapse, and the corresponding underdog win by private equity titan Glenn Youngkin, is already being caricatured nationally using the language of 1980s politics. We’re meant to understand that the Loudoun County story — which is too complex to summarize easily but involves furious disputes between local parents and the school board over a variety of issues, including a pair of sexual assaults — was cooked up by Republicans as a cynical dog-whistle campaign.

“The GOP ran a master class on race-based identity politics,” wrote CNN’s Bakari Sellers. “The return of the Lee Atwater playbook. Pretty grim,” is how former Harry Reid chief of staff Adam Jentleson put it. “Hats off to the depraved cynicism and villainy and race baiting. It worked in Virginia,” seethed Wajahat Ali of The Daily Beast. Van Jones last night called Youngkin the “Delta variant of Trumpism.”

Just as McAuliffe had no message apart from trying to tie Youngkin to Trump, these commentators seem helpless to do anything but fall back on a cookie-cutter formula for responding to Republican electoral victories in the Trump era. This drive-by commentary misses the weedsy, multi-layered nature of the Loudoun County mess.

Taibbi gets into the weeds, and explains how people who are reliable Democratic votes were so freaked out by the woke shenanigans that they went for the normie Republican. More:

The significance of Youngkin’s win is that it signals Republican competitiveness in those districts again, something that would have been unthinkable even a year ago. These white-collar, highly educated voters, the kind of people who get their shots, don’t watch wrestling, and send their kids to Harvard and Princeton, are the Democratic Party’s base. It took something pretty weird and intense to drive them to defection, and don’t trust anyone who tries to explain it in a tweet. This one really is a long story, and a wild one at that.

Read it all.

UPDATE.3: The newly elected lieutenant governor of Virginia, y’all!

"Instead of trying to elevate all of our students they want quotas and so that means we're going to sacrifice the Asians for the black kids. Now who's going to benefit from that? That's not living in harmony." – Winsome Sears campaigning against racial preferences in education. pic.twitter.com/amS5BCgI0W

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) November 3, 2021

The post Revenge Of The Normals appeared first on The American Conservative.

Integralism Redux

I know that some readers of this blog don’t read other things at the TAC website — alas! — so they might miss today’s column by Sohrab Ahmari, in which he addresses the argument that he and I had last week on a TAC podcast. Here’s the heart of Sohrab’s piece:

But as he would likely be the first to admit, Rod is not a systematic thinker. This is a fact that makes it difficult to argue with him once he decides to disagree with a fellow writer—and as readers may have noticed, the latest disagreement has centered on me. There is an ocean of words, flowing into a thousand crisscrossing streams, rivers, rivulets, and tributaries. You try to follow one of these waterways to its logical conclusion but are soon swept by the dramatic surge of another.

Does Rod believe that the wokeness he decries is an outgrowth of classical liberalism? Or is it, rather, a distortion or aberration? Does Rod suspect that “liberalism is dead”? Or is it the best we can do in a “pluralist” society, which presumably means it can be resurrected? If we can return to some gentler stage of liberalism, what would prevent us from ending right back where we are, given that that gentler stage contained the conditions that brought us here?

Should we mourn the passing of an “authentic liberalism” and “liberal principles,” lost to “an aggressive and punitive politics that resembles Bolshevism,” as Rod has written? Or was this Bolshevik tendency lying dormant in old-school liberalism all along, as he also argued? Is the Good “the basis of a postliberal political order,” an order that Rod claims to strive after? Or is the Good so indeterminate that any authoritative assertion of it would be a terrible imposition?

Should American conservatives pursue Viktor Orban-style policies against LGBT ideology in schools, as Rod has recommended? If so, then how does he square that with his recent assertion that only “porny” books should be banned from school libraries (gender ideology can be promoted in non-“porny” books, after all)? Should we aim to forge institutions in truth (“live not by lies!”), or merely to enshrine a right to disagree (i.e., free speech as a high good)?

Yes.

This is all very confusing. The source of the confusion (and attendant anxiety), I suspect, is a refusal to relinquish some fundamental liberal commitments. Rod is prepared to admit this. The trouble is that some of those commitments rest on the deceptions liberal ideology spins about itself and the world. Such as the notion that it’s possible to run a society without moral coercion (whatever the morality). Or that liberals invented procedural norms and rule of law just a few centuries ago, and, therefore, to imagine a world without liberalism necessarily means imagining a lawless barbarism. Or that because there is a range of opinions about the good, it would be a grave crime to authoritatively guide a society (relatedly, that such a decision can be forestalled forever). Or finally that “liberalism” itself is so indeterminate a concept that we can’t draw definite conclusions about it.

Read it all.

It is certainly true that I’m not a systematic thinker, but so what? I dispute that my objection to integralism, and my unwillingness to let go fully of liberalism, is not as confusing as Sohrab says it is. Let me speak as plainly as I can.

I do believe that liberalism is “dead” in the sense that the cultural conditions that made classical liberalism possible for the most part no longer exist. I accept Patrick Deneen’s critique, which says that liberalism has failed because it succeeded so brilliantly in liberating individuals from any unchosen commitments. But I also accept the unsatisfying ending of Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed, which says that we can’t really anticipate what is coming next, and prescribes (if memory serves) localist experiments. I don’t know if Patrick still believes that, or if he has been converted to integralism.

My unwillingness to fully surrender liberalism is in large part because we still live in a highly pluralistic and diverse society, one in which social and religious conservatives are a minority, and becoming a despised minority. You can gripe about the flaws of David French’s worldview all day — and mostly I agree with the critique — but French is correct that without the First Amendment to that classically liberal document, the US Constitution, people like Sohrab and me have nowhere to hide from those who would persecute us. Something the woke Left doesn’t understand either is that they are happy to roll over liberal principles like free speech in order to punish the unvirtuous, but should they find themselves in the minority, where would they hide to protect themselves from those who despise them?

I freely admit, and have long admitted, that I stand on uncertain ground here, neither believing that liberalism is sustainable (for MacIntyrean reasons, which is to say that the demise of Christianity has removed a basis for cultural unity), but also seeing that any non-liberal alternative would probably be tyrannical. That’s what we are dealing with now: the emerging tyranny of soft totalitarianism, coming into existence because the Left has abandoned liberalism.

But I tell you, I would rather be on this uncertain ground, trying to figure out a workable compromise that would allow us to live in peace than to sign on to the logically coherent but utterly unworkable and, to my way of thinking, repugnant fantasy of Catholic integralism. If you want a logical system, well, it certainly fills that need. But if you think that the United States of America — a majority Protestant nation that is rapidly de-Christianizing — is open to a revived throne-and-altar Catholicism, you’re deluded. Most American Catholics have never heard of integralism, and wouldn’t accept it if they had. Imagine accepting a system of government that would privilege people like Ted McCarrick! I would be shocked if there’s a single majority-Catholic country in the world that would accept integralism.

Sohrab writes:

Is the Good “the basis of a postliberal political order,” an order that Rod claims to strive after? Or is the Good so indeterminate that any authoritative assertion of it would be a terrible imposition?

It is true that we have to base a postliberal political order on the idea of the Good — but I do not want Catholic integralists in charge of defining the Good, and imposing it on the rest of us. It’s very hard to pin them down on what they actually think, possibly because the System is pristine, until you try to instantiate it. For example, I think the reason they get so upset when people bring up things like the Edgardo Mortara case from the 19th century is because it uses a real-life example of Catholic integralism acting on its idea of the good — namely, that a baptized Catholic child has the right to a Catholic upbringing — and using it to justify a monstrous deed (taking a Jewish child who had been secretly baptized by the Catholic maid away from his parents). Nobody thinks we are going to live in the Papal States again, but the fact that you can’t get today’s integralists to condemn what Pius IX did is because Pius’s seizing the Mortara boy was not an aberration of integralist principles, but a fulfillment of them.

People aren’t wrong to want to know if an American integralism would justify doing things like that — and if not, why not? I am supremely confident that a philosemite like Sohrab would never want to do that to a Jewish family — but what limiting principle would prevent a future integralist regime from doing so? What would integralism mean in power in this century? I doubt they all agree. Integralist godfather Adrian Vermeule has written that the southern US borders should be opened to Catholic migrants, and that the United States should be subsumed within an integralist Catholic empire. Logically consistent with prior integralist principles? Probably so. But something that Americans should desire? Uh, not in a million years. Sohrab appears to be a fan of Viktor Orban’s Hungary, but one thing Orban — a Calvinist — certainly is not is a fan of empire. The core of his political vision is defending Hungarian sovereignty over and against the secularist empire of the European Union.

In the recent NYT story about American intellectuals and Hungary, Sohrab appeared here:

He urged conservatives in a 2019 essay to approach the culture war “with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square reordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good,” a phrase that has enjoyed a long half-life. “I don’t want to turn this into a Catholic country,” Ahmari told me when I met him earlier this year. But he counts himself among those who believe conservatism has failed because it insists that the only kind of tyranny “comes from the public square and therefore what you should do is check government power.”

Well, what is the “common good and ultimately the Highest Good”? For Sohrab, that is defined by the Catholic Church. I don’t understand why he believes the Highest Good is to be found in Catholicism, but at the same time say he doesn’t want to turn America Catholic. The problem he has — and I have too — is that we believe in the Good, but when that concept becomes concrete, we run into problems. The integralists, it seems to me, have no room in their conception of the Good for liberty. It’s all command. I, on the other hand, believe that within limits, people have a right to be wrong.

Sohrab writes:

Should American conservatives pursue Viktor Orban-style policies against LGBT ideology in schools, as Rod has recommended? If so, then how does he square that with his recent assertion that only “porny” books should be banned from school libraries (gender ideology can be promoted in non-“porny” books, after all)? Should we aim to forge institutions in truth (“live not by lies!”), or merely to enshrine a right to disagree (i.e., free speech as a high good)?

Actually, I wouldn’t object to all books about gender ideology being removed from schools. My tweeted line about the “porny” books was a response to a Texas Republican legislator who made a list of over 800 books he thought should be removed from school libraries. This is nuts. We ought to at least be able to agree that books with unambiguously pornographic content, like Gender Queer, should not be in school libraries. We don’t have to return to the Catholic Index (of prohibited books) to accomplish that — and that is something that could actually be accomplished in a pluralistic society. I am not willing to give the Catholic Church the right to determine what can and cannot be read in schools, though — nor is the Catholic Church asking for it.

If, however, a Catholic polity wanted to grant this power to the Church, that should be its right. Ours is not a Catholic polity. If the integralists would like it to be one, then they should get busy evangelizing. The idea that taking over the institutions of government and using them to impose minority principles on an unwilling majority is generally unappealing. It seems to me far more likely to invite resentment of the Church, not acceptance of the Church’s wisdom. Which makes me wonder: are these folks more interested in saving souls, or in exercising power? Is the Christian faith about setting us free from sin, or subjecting us to a modified form of ecclesial rule? Given the way even classically liberal America treated Catholics in the heyday of Protestantism, it is difficult for me to understand why American Catholics would be eager to impose their beliefs on others.

In the end, we can’t get beyond liberalism — though if liberalism really is dead, then Something is going to come our way to replace it. What will that something be? I would hope that the transition to a postliberal society will be as painless and as gradual as possible. One of the reasons I’m here at the National Conservatism conference (as is Sohrab) is because I believe that we on the Right need to come up with a workable, practical program that can appeal to a majority of American voters. I’m not looking to create a Christian utopia in the USA; I would be satisfied with a “good enough” regime that fought for a strong localism, helped family formation, strengthened national sovereignty, defended (yes) liberal principles of individual equality before the law (read: kicked CRT to the curb), strongly defended religious liberty and religious institutions, and opposed wokeness in all its forms. There are many other things I would love for the state to do, but I think that’s a program that a wide variety of people, religious and non-religious, could get behind. It is also a program that can be accomplished within a classically liberal framework — which, at this time, and in this place, is the only thing we have.

I missed the event last night in which Sohrab and Yoram Hazony squared off on stage with gay conservatives Dave Rubin and Douglas Murray. I heard that Murray posed an interesting question. I hesitate to say precisely what it was, because I didn’t hear it myself, but it was something to do with the difficulty of reconciling religious conservatism with a social order that is not oppressive to gay people. This is a hugely important question, because even though gays and lesbians are a small minority, their cause is widely supported, especially among the young. We are going to have to find a modus vivendi. There are gay conservatives who value religion, even if they are not religious themselves, and who do not go along with the progressive crusade to stamp out religious conservatism. We religious conservatives need to see if there is some way to make common cause with those gay and lesbian conservatives. It is not the case that Western societies are going to return anytime soon to the point where gays are back in the closet. Woke Capitalism and other woke institutions are doing their dead-level best to make sure religious conservatives have to live in the closet. I believe there are gay men and women of good faith who don’t want religious conservatives to have to live that way. Despite my own Orthodox Christian conservatism on gay issues, I am eager to see if a compromise is possible.

Again, I am not willing to make the perfect the enemy of the good enough.

It is also the case that I have a weakness: I like people, and am inclined to respect them, even if I think they’re wrong. I sometimes fail to live up to that standard, but I try. I was talking with a friend here over lunch about the blows life has given us (since I saw her last, she suffered a serious illness). She brought up something Rabbi Heschel once said: “When I was young, I admired those who are clever; now that I am old, I admire those who are kind.” My friend and I reflected on how that’s hard-won wisdom. You don’t get to middle age without life beating you up. Having been kicked hard by a few things over the last couple of decades, I want to find a way to defend what I believe to be true and important, but without being disdainful of others, and unconcerned about their own struggles.

It is true that we cannot live in a world where everybody can have his way. Sohrab is right: at some point, coercion is unavoidable. Perhaps the best thing about liberalism is that it makes persuasion an ideal. This is not one I want to let go of so quickly. We are living through the coercive Left ramrodding its ideology through, with no regard to how this affects others — because, having decided that dissenters are wicked, the Left absolves itself from having to treat them with respect. One big reason the integralists give me the hives is because the ones most prominent in our public life seem to take pleasure in treating their interlocutors with contempt. Since I wrote about the integralists the other day, I have been hearing from Catholic conservative academics — people whose names you would know — who tell me that they don’t agree with the integralists, but won’t speak out because they are afraid of being monstered on social media, and turned into the next David French.

Fear is not the same thing as respect.

Anyway, Sohrab said in his piece that he doesn’t want to continue this back-and-forth. Fair enough. It’s not pleasant. A Catholic public intellectual who knows us both messaged me the other day to say it’s a damn shame that we Christian conservatives are facing down powerful enemies who control the high ground in our culture, and who want to dissolve the nation and the natural family — and we can’t get past intramural squabbling over sectarian concerns. He’s not wrong.

P.S. Just before I was set to publish, I saw an e-mail from Dr. William Tighe, sending me an essay that appears in the right-of-center Catholic website New Oxford Review, in which the writer Will Hoyt calls integralism a form of totalitarianism. I only gave the essay a quick read, because I have to run to another meeting here at the National Conservatism conference. I’m not endorsing or rejecting its argument — I’m simply putting it up because it might be interesting to consider.

The post Integralism Redux appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Battle Of Virginia In The Wokeness War

I spent the weekend in the Sacramento area, leading a retreat about The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies. I heard lots of stories from people talking about what wokeness has done to their workplaces, their universities, their kids’ schools, and so forth. As crazy as you think it is, there is always something even more insane. Several people mentioned to me that they wouldn’t risk going into San Francisco anymore. Too dangerous, with “smash and grab” robberies overwhelming the city, and an idiotic progressive DA allowing criminals to overrun the place. One person at the event told me that her kid’s elementary school held a formal ceremony marking the transition of a female child, now called “Charlie” — and no parents had been warned or consulted. An active-duty military person told me that wokeness forced on everyone by the all-woke officer corps is destroying the military. “It’s not the same force it was even two years ago,” the person said.

On that point, I related the quote to two friends I know who are — how to put this? — close to the military. Both emphatically agreed. One of them, someone with a lot of experience, said that it is a scandal that none of the military brass are being held to account by Congress for losing Afghanistan. His view is that commanders are going all-out for wokeness because they are looking forward to going to work for woke defense contractors and other Woke Capitalists. In California, my military interlocutor bitterly complained that the senior officer class doesn’t care about winning wars, only beating down the enlisted ranks with wokeness. Another source told me that his family is filled with men who served in the armed forces across the generations, but now none of them want their kids going anywhere near the military as it is today.

It was that kind of weekend. There were some Silicon Valley folks there, who assured me that everything I said in Live Not By Lies about surveillance capabilities was true, but outdated. One man said, “Basically, you should assume that privacy anywhere is impossible.” Another techie listening in nodded his head. I said to him, “You’re not surprised by that?”

“Nope,” he said. He went on to say that he is deeply closeted as a Christian in his major Silicon Valley firm (a name you would certainly know), and that one of the most important things to understand about the tech industry is that it is an ideological monoculture. “They all think alike, and they are all totally, 100 percent certain that the way they see the world is correct, and that everybody should agree with them,” he said, adding that they are willing to coerce people into living virtuously (by their standards).

On and on like this it went. Yet it was an encouraging event, because it’s so good to be around people who understand how insane the world has gone. You know that you’re not crazy, that other people — good people, normal people — see it too. But boy, what a corrupt country we have become. Decline is inevitable. We talked a bit about how in the USSR, one was not able to tell the truth about things out of fear. Consequently, things quit working. It’s going to happen here too.

I keep wondering when the backlash is going to come, and hoping that it will. Maybe it will start on Tuesday, in the Virginia governor’s race. Virginia is a blue state, but if Republican Glenn Youngkin beats Terry McAuliffe, it will be because normies — including liberal voters — are sick and tired of the woke crap that the Democrats and their allies keep forcing on people. Look at this:

Loudoun County mother: “My six year old somberly came to me and asked if she was born evil because she was a white person, something she learned in a history lesson at school.”pic.twitter.com/0NJL5YCoHG

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) October 29, 2021

How clear does it have to be to you? What needs to happen to make you see how the woke totalitarians are busy destroying this country, and turning its people against each other?

It is getting more and more absurd. Look at this insanity from the pampered puss Colin Kaepernick, who really believes that NFL training camps is the equivalent of slavery. Watch this clip:

Colin Kaepernick is equating playing in the NFL with slavery.

Yes. You read that correctly.
pic.twitter.com/Q996zDnpCK

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) October 30, 2021

And here is the nitwit chief woke commissar Ibram X. Kendi, who is not smart enough to realize that here he denies that systemic racism is a thing:

Um, this is a straightforward assertion that “structural racism” doesn’t exist. pic.twitter.com/p4vxZ5ES2f

— David Freddoso (@freddoso) November 1, 2021

This ought to discredit him permanently, but of course it won’t. As Arendt said in The Origins of Totalitarianism, facts don’t matter to a pre-totalitarian polity.

Every institution the woke control, they poison — and they lie about it. Look:

Virginia education department boosts critical race theory — despite claim by Terry McAuliffe https://t.co/4kLMSeQsHN pic.twitter.com/LkV48VonAf

— New York Post (@nypost) October 30, 2021

It is impossible to overstate how significant it is that the woke totalitarians control institutions. Take a look at this new document from the American Medical Association, advising doctors and health care personnel on how to speak. Excerpt:

Do you see what’s happening here? They are jamming up plain language with ideological concepts. They are trying to make clear thinking impossible. This is not the Gender Studies department at NYU. This is the American Medical Association! One of the most fundamental concepts to grasp with totalitarianism is that the control of language is vital to the achievement and maintenance of power. The woke totalitarians keep going from strength to strength because having achieved the high ground of institutional authority, they make everyone else fear for their livelihood if they speak out.

The problem is, if we don’t speak out, we will lose our freedom, and we will deserve to. I am hoping that a Youngkin victory tomorrow will be the start of backlash. It won’t be nearly enough, but it would be a sign of hope. If McAuliffe loses a blue state like Virginia, it will be over education, and over parents — including liberal parents — getting sick and tired of the lies, the race-hatred, the manipulation, and the abuse of institutional power to propagandize and indoctrinate the next generation. It will show the way for Republicans to run in 2022 against wokeness.

But — and this is a big “but” — it will do no good if conservatives are given political power by voters and fail to use it to dismantle soft totalitarianism. The Right needs to use the power of government — the only institution we might control — to fight back, and fight back hard. Rhetoric is not enough. Look around you: our military is in decline because of ideologization; our universities have been captured by bigots and fanatics; Big Business is taking advantage of the liberties that our capitalist nation grants them to politicize the culture and institutionalize racism and mediocrity within corporate culture — and so on. We can no longer simply denounce this stuff. We are in a fight for the soul of our nation. To have been with the crowds out in northern California, and to have heard testimonies from flesh-and-blood people about the things they are seeing with their own eyes, and suffering — it all becomes very real then. It’s not just something you read about on the Internet.

Let’s hope and pray that tomorrow’s vote in Virginia will be the beginning of the turning point in this war. We don’t have forever, you know. I’m at the National Conservatism conference in Orlando now, and will be giving a talk in the morning about what American conservatives can learn from Viktor Orban in Hungary. I’ll post that talk here tomorrow after I deliver it.

 

The post The Battle Of Virginia In The Wokeness War appeared first on The American Conservative.

Human Resources As Grand Inquisitor

I thought I was done here for the week, but I just got something from a reader, and it’s powerful. He writes:

I’ll get straight to the point, because I hardly know where to begin.  My sister-in-law works for Vail Resorts, which is imposing a vaccine mandate on its employees.  Her coworker, whose name I am protecting because I don’t want to jeopardize her job any more than it already is, applied for a religious exemption.  The co-worker received this very odd and intrusive reply, a screenshot of which I’ve attached.

The reader continues:

Questioning someone’s religious sincerity, especially someone you have very little or no personal relationship with, is a delicate matter that should be treated as such, to say the least.  This response is clearly in bad faith and is emblematic of a tendency under this vaccine mandate to treat all religious objectors as guilty until proven innocent.

If this precedent is allowed to go unchallenged, imagine how it can be expanded and used for other attacks on religious freedom, with the force of law behind them to coerce a “choice” between compliance and eradication:If you, Christian school, object to hiring this openly homosexual teacher because it violates Christian teaching on sexuality, have you ever or will you ever hire a divorcee or someone who has had premarital or extramarital sex?  If you, Hobby Lobby, refuse to fund health care plans that pay for abortions on the grounds that all human life is sacred, have you ever voiced or will you voice equal opposition to the death penalty? The point is not whether or not these are good questions to wrestle with from a moral perspective, and indeed, all believers should.  The point is, who the hell is some corporate HR lackey to arbitrate the nature of one’s belief based on the answers?  Are they going to drug test this poor woman going forward, to make sure she doesn’t take any over-the-counter medications on penalty of being fired?  This disingenuous assault on faith is what is being done to individuals around the country both in the federal government and private businesses; we cannot allow ourselves to be divided by vaccination status in how we respond to this hostile attack on religious belief.  First they came for the unvaccinated, but I already had my vaccine, so I didn’t speak out…You tell me: does this line of questioning look like that of an organization fairly and neutrally evaluating religious exemptions, or does it look like they are designed to be traps with which to imply insincerity and hypocrisy, and so deny exemptions?  Keep in mind the law solely speaks to sincerity of belief, not logical consistency.  Logical consistency in nearly all faith-based systems is almost impossible to prove, and the less familiar one is with the system, the less likely one is to recognize the nuances that allow seeming contradictions to coexist.  Again, is this something the government or HR is qualified to assess, especially with these types of questions?We extend accommodations to certain other protected groups with almost no validation of belief whatsoever, despite glaring logical inconsistencies; this is a uniquely religious persecution.  Don’t believe me?  Identify as a woman and demand access to any role or physical space reserved for that gender, and see if any HR bureaucrat asks whether you’re on hormone treatments and how long you’ve been on them, or if you intend to keep your penis.This is truly alarming, and what so much of our country is tolerating in the name of fear and safety comes as a punch to the gut.  What legal recourse is there to this kind of abuse of power?  How can we band together?

This sneering, condescending letter from the Human Resources department — which, as the reader observes, would never address a transgendered person this way — is an indication of where religious believers stand in America today.Indeed, how can we band together? Thoughts?UPDATE: I blacked out the name of the HR person.UPDATE.2: A reader comments:

I’m struck by the cross-purposes these HR departments are working at. My company, as with many others, are threatening termination to those who wont get the vaccine, even for people who work 100% remote. Yet I am also a manager (IT & analysis stuff) having a hell of a time trying to hire right now since there is so much competition for talent. We are forced to substantially raise offers. Plus we are getting a lot of people poached by other firms. Then all over in the service sector like restaurants and hospitality there are help wanted signs and terrible service because they cant stay staffed up, at least where I live.

So honestly, I feel like if you can financially handle it, call their bluff and let them try to terminate you. The companies are already losing talent like crazy in the “great resignation”. Someone is going to find some clever way to hire unvaccinated despite Biden’s order because frankly there aren’t enough workers to go around (unless the feds really change visa policy)

Seriously, companies really cant afford to lose good people now. The workers have a strong hand, play it! If one of my best people refused the vaccine I would be fighting HR with all my might to get an exception for them. It’s easy for HR to act like this, but actual operational managers aren’t going to be so ideological when someone good is getting axed over something so dumb.

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Mircea Eliade On The Meaning Of Temples

(Readers, I didn’t want to end this week on a sour note. Below is an adapted piece from my Substack blog: further thoughts on Mircea Eliade’s great book “The Sacred and the Profane”.)

Eliade says that temples exist symbolically “at the center of the world” because they are where man establishes communication with the transcendent realm. It’s not that man can’t talk to God in other places and in other ways, but the temple is a special place set apart. The temple often represents a sacred mountain where the initial meeting with God happened. For traditional Christians, churches are a representation of Golgotha, and therefore “the pre-eminent ‘link’ between earth and heaven.” Obviously there are countless churches in the world, so understand that they all exist at the center of the world in a symbolic, mythic sense.

This jumped out at me because it is easy to see how the older, sacramental forms of Christianity conform to this global pattern. The death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the core of the religion, and is re-enacted every time there is a liturgy at the altar. The altar is Golgotha, which is part of Mount Moriah, on which the city of Jerusalem is built. When you take the sacramentality out of the religion, as many forms of Protestantism have, it wrecks the symbolism. How can a church that looks like a theatrical space do the symbolic work it is supposed to do? Does it matter? I think it surely must.

You’ll remember, maybe, the lovely line from an older black lady running the dry cleaners in my hometown, St. Francisville, when my then-priest brought Orthodox liturgical vestments to her for the first time: “Ooooh-weee, those look like they got God all over them!” Yes, exactly! (Father Matthew, from Washington state, was amazed and delighted to go on to discuss the Old Testament in detail with this same woman, who had only a high school education.) Physical space, visual imagery, sounds, smells — these things matter. They aren’t the same thing as God, but they prepare us, consciously and subconsciously, to enter into communion with Him. The fact that traditional religions of all kinds, around the world, build temples that don’t look the same, but which symbolically perform the same function, is anthropologically meaningful, don’t you think?

Let me be clear: it’s not that God is not with people who worship in low-church Protestant temples; it’s that the structures perhaps make it harder for the worshipers to feel God’s presence. This matters for my book project, because I am trying to figure out how we can re-enchant the world, and live more like “religious man” (Eliade’s term) lived in the premodern era. The Protestantization of worship spaces, and the de-sacramentalization of some forms of Christianity, likely contributed to the disenchantment of the world. It wasn’t on purpose — nobody can accuse the Puritans, for example, of wanting to push God out of the world — but their theology, and horror at things that smacked of papistry, might have led them to throw out too much.

(Notice I qualify all these conclusions with “might,” etc., because I don’t want to make firm statements without more research. This newsletter, re: Eliade, is basically a notebook.)

Eliade discusses how for religious man, even his home must be configured religiously, that is to say, to bring it closer to the Center Of The World by making it a place that looks like where God dwells. In Orthodoxy, it is customary for an Orthodox home to have an icon corner, which functions as a kind of home altar. This is where the family gathers to pray. Eliade talks about how the modernist architect Le Corbusier described the home as “a machine to live in,” and goes on to say that the desacralization of the home is part of the greater desacralization of the cosmos by industrial, Enlightenment, scientific thought. He wonders if “this secularization of nature is really final, if no possibility remains for nonreligious man to rediscover the sacred dimension of existence in the world.” My task in this book is to discover what nonreligious man needs to do to rediscover it — and what religious man needs to do both to ground himself more deeply in the religious sense, and to make true religion more inviting to nonreligious man.

We know that a religion that accommodates itself to a desacralized, profane world is not attractive to non-religious people … but at the same time, very many of them don’t want to do what it takes to be authentically religious. This is a challenge for us. Intuitively, it seems to me that we have to make our habitation — not just our houses, but the world we live in — seem more sacred. At the Touchstone conference, a Catholic man from Chicago told me that his parish did a formal procession through a downtown neighborhood, and everybody was staring — not in a hostile way, but in a “what is that?” sense. Most had never seen such a thing, I would wager.

Church historian Robert Louis Wilken, in his great 2004 essay “The Church As Culture,” writes:

If Christian culture is to be renewed, habits are more vital than revivals, rituals more edifying than spiritual highs, the creed more penetrating than theological insight, and the celebration of saints’ days more uplifting than the observance of Mother’s Day. There is great wisdom in the maligned phrase ex opere operato, the effect is in the doing. Intention is like a reed blowing in the wind. It is the doing that counts, and if we do something for God, in the doing God does something for us.

The poet Dana Gioia, the current director of the National Endowment for the Arts, puts it nicely in the poem “Autumn Inaugural”:

There will always be those who reject ceremony,
who claim that resolution requires no fanfare,
those who demand the spirit stay fixed
like a desert saint, fed only on faith,
to worship in no temple but the weather.

Gioia acknowledges the point:

Symbols betray us.
They are always more or less than what
is really meant.

Then:

But shall there be no
processions by torchlight because we are weak?

Praise to the rituals that celebrate change,
old robes worn for new beginnings,
solemn protocol where the mutable soul,
surrounded by ancient experience,
grows young in the imagination’s white dress.

Because it is not the rituals we honor
but our trust in what they signify, these rites
that honor us as witnesses—whether to watch
lovers swear loyalty in a careless world
or a newborn washed with water and oil.

If Christ is culture, let the sidewalks be lit with fire on Easter Eve, let traffic stop for a column of Christians waving palm branches on a spring morning, let streets be blocked off as the faithful gather for a Corpus Christi procession. Then will others know that there is another city in their midst, another commonwealth, one that has its face, like the faces of angels, turned toward the face of God.

Beautifully said!

Eliade writes (emphasis in the original):

In the last analysis, it is by virtue of the temple that the world is resanctified in every part. However impure it may have become, the world is continually purified by the sanctity of sanctuaries.

I believe that the presence of God wherever He is worshipped — a fine Gothic cathedral or a storefront Pentecostal church — resanctifies the world. But churches that look like churches, and are thereby set apart visually from all other buildings, convey to everyone, even nonbelievers, that God is present. Consider these two Lutheran churches in Oslo, Norway:

Which one sanctifies the city? From a purely spiritual point of view, none of us can say. But from a symbolic point of view, the answer is obviously the one on top. It looks like a temple. In fact, Eliade explains that in traditional religious cultures, temples usually have a symbolic opening to the sky, to convey the sense that there is a passage between the building and heaven. The architect of the church on the bottom (and those who hired him to do that work) have lost a sense of the symbolic world and why it matters. It’s not just that the church on the bottom is ugly. It’s that it does not do what a church is supposed to do in terms of directing the thoughts of those inside and outside of it to the sacred. The church on the bottom is a modern church because its architects (and those who hired them) have discarded the grammar of sacred architecture. They’re speaking symbolic gobbledygook.

Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us.” Eliade goes on to talk about how traditionally, the church building represents the cosmos. It’s not simply a building in which believers worship. The traditional church “both incarnates and sanctifies the world,” he writes.

“[T]he experience of sacred space makes possible the ‘founding of the world’: where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence,” Eliade writes. In case you’ve forgotten since the last newsletter, by “the real,” Eliade means the belief of religious man that ultimate reality is part of the unseen realm undergirding all visible reality. By “the founding of the world,” he means giving form and stable meaning to the world in which the religious man dwells.

Eliade (emphases in original):

Every world is the work of the gods, for it was either created directly by the gods or was consecrated, hence cosmicized, by men ritually reactualizing the paradigmatic act of Creation. This is as much as to say that religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence. This religious need expresses an unquenchable ontological thirst. Religious man thirsts for being. His terror of the chaos that surrounds his inhabited world corresponds to his terror of nothingness. The unknown space that extends beyond his world — an uncosmicized because unconsecrated space, a mere amorphous extent into which no orientation has yet been projected, and hence in which no structure has yet arisen — for religious man, this profane space represents absolute nonbeing. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it, he feels emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were dissolving in Chaos, and he finally dies.

This passage made me wonder about something. I believe that man is naturally religious. I believe that on both theological and anthropological grounds. We cannot entirely dispel the religious instinct. Wokeness, for example, cannot fully be understood unless you admit its pseudoreligious elements; the craving for a sense of ultimate justice, meaning, and moral structure runs too deep. Wokeness is not a religion, but it mimics one. I am wondering if the disintegration of the West is happening because we have slowly bled out our “ontic substance” as we have grown assimilated into a world built physically, and interiorly, on profane assumptions, and as Christianity has declined both in numbers and in belief.

In simpler language, are we disintegrating as a civilization because we have lost our relationship with God? It has been widely observed that primitive tribes often do not survive their encounter with modernity. If they live on biologically, it is often in a state of chaos, misery, and sometimes substance addiction. The shattering of their cosmos was spiritually unsurvivable. I read not long ago an account of this happening to a traditional Eskimo village, I believe it was. Everybody there just kind of gave up. Even though their lives became materially easier thanks to technology and money, the sudden loss of their traditional way of life was devastating. Maybe we Westerners did not fall apart because it did not come upon us suddenly … but it has eventually caught up with us. Now we live in metaphysical, spiritual, and moral chaos, the seriousness of which is somewhat concealed by our wealth. We cannot reverse the unwinding without recovering the sacred. If we can.

This, by the way, is the view of the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, who is not a religious believer. Yet he believes as a matter of anthropological and sociological truth that human societies must be religious, or they die. Louis Betty is an American scholar of French literature who wrote a very good book on Houellebecq as a pessimistic novelist of post-Christian culture. I interviewed him here. This is what Betty said when I asked him about Houllebecq’s conviction that irreligious societies eventually wind down:

Here it’s important, I think, to distinguish between religion as a human phenomenon and the specific case of Christianity in Europe. I don’t think such a thing as a “society without religion,” in the sense of having a metaphysical framework, really exists; to me, that’s akin to imagining a society without a language, or some notion of kinship, or ways of preparing food. I’m not an anthropologist, but it seems clear that any human society worthy of the adjective “human” is going to articulate some metaphysical system that makes sense of reality and offers consolation and a sense of meaning in the midst of natural vicissitude.

In the case of Christianity in Europe, I think the question to ask is something like this: can a civilization maintain its identity if it sheds its native religion? Houellebecq doesn’t think so, and neither do I. This isn’t a political or polemical point. Imagine taking as an anthropological platitude the claim that human beings will be religious and, moreover, that civilizations are built upon the metaphysical systems they create (or which are revealed to them, to give credit to the metaphysical on its own terms). It’s obvious from such an assumption that the collapse of the metaphysics entails the eventual collapse of everything else. This should be deeply alarming to anyone who cares about the West’s tradition of humanitarianism, which emerges—and it would be wonderful if we could all agree on this—out of the original Judaic notion of imago Dei and later from Christian humanism. Secular humanism has been running for quite some time on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian religious inheritance, but it’s not clear how much longer that can go on.

Honestly, it’s frightening to think what a truly post-Christian West would mean for our basic institutions. I’m not stumping for Christianity here; I just happen to have the intellectual conviction that the analysis of human society begins with religion. If you incline toward Marxian thinking, which looks at things in the diametrically opposed way, you’re going to hate what I’m saying. But that’s how I see it.

In this passage from a 2003 TED talk (21 minutes), the anthropologist and popular writer Wade Davis explains inadvertently Eliade’s point about how for traditional religious man, the world in which we live bears cosmic meaning, and trains us to live by the sacred:

Now, of all the peoples that I’ve ever been with, the most extraordinary are the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia, in the wake of the conquest, these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain. In a bloodstained continent, these people alone were never conquered by the Spanish. To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary. The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years: two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spend in their natural mother’s womb; now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. And for this entire time, they are inculturated into the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic — or we might say the ecological — balance. And at the end of this amazing initiation, one day they’re suddenly taken out and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18, they see a sunrise. And in that crystal moment of awareness of first light as the Sun begins to bathe the slopes of the stunningly beautiful landscape, suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory. And the priest steps back and says, “You see? It’s really as I’ve told you. It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect.” They call themselves the “elder brothers” and they say we, who are the younger brothers, are the ones responsible for destroying the world.

Now, this level of intuition becomes very important. Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape, we either invoke Rousseau and the old canard of the “noble savage,” which is an idea racist in its simplicity, or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are. Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia. There’s not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the Asmat or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it, but on a far subtler intuition: the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness.

Now, what does that mean? It means that a young kid from the Andes who’s raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined. Whether it’s the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant. What’s interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world. I was raised in the forests of British Columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut. That made me a different human being than my friends amongst the Kwagiulth who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world, spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation.

Obviously I don’t believe in these pagan religions, but I believe that Davis’s account teaches us something about my own religion. If I really believed, as the Orthodox prayer teaches, that God is “everywhere present and fills all things,” I can’t look at the mountain in the same way that the young kid from Montana does, even if the young kid is a Christian. That kid might be a Protestant, or a modern Catholic or modern Orthodox — untrained theologically in their own tradition, and therefore regarding the world through nominalist eyes. Then again, let’s not be unfair to Protestants. It is hard to find an American who treasures the natural world more than Wendell Berry, who is a low-church Protestant. And I don’t think most American Catholics or American Orthodox would think substantially different about the mountain than any Protestant or non-Christian would. We WEIRDoes are all practical nominalists.

What I’m after is the recovery of a vision that sees the world as sacred, really sacred, which means that we cannot make use of it mindlessly, or without limits. To see it as sacred doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but you can’t use it without a sense of reverence. We’ve all heard stories about native hunters who thank the slain deer for giving its life to support the tribe. That’s the kind of reverence I’m talking about. I don’t have much of it myself, but I would like to acquire more. Working on this book is going to be a real journey for me — and for you readers.

—

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The post Mircea Eliade On The Meaning Of Temples appeared first on The American Conservative.

Francis Collins: A Cautionary Tale

Oh man, what a powerful essay about Francis Collins by Justin Lee:

On June 8, 2019, Francis Collins finger-picked his guitar and sang Andy Grammer’s song “Don’t Give Up On Me” at the memorial service for a young man who had died after a four-year battle with a rare kidney cancer. The man had enjoyed the song, and Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, cared dearly for him. He concluded his performance with an emotional benediction, promising that he would see the young man again and that he and his staff would not give up searching for a cure. This is the kind of man Francis Collins is.

One month earlier, Collins’s NIH had approved a research grant requested by University of Pittsburgh scientists who desired to graft the scalps of aborted fetuses onto rats and mice. Their research findings were published by Nature in September 2020 and include photos showing patches of soft, wispy baby hair growing amid coarse rodent fur. This, too, is the kind of man Francis Collins is.

More:

Collins offered an explanation for why he resigned the directorship: He believes “that no single person should serve in the position too long.” One suspects it also has to do with the firestorm of controversies he’s been embroiled in this year. While it may be possible for reasonable people to disagree about the ethics of embryonic stem cell research, some fruits of the Magician’s worldview—such as human-animal chimeras—are, for almost everyone, beyond the pale.

The University of Pittsburgh’s experiment in “humanizing” rodents with fetal tissue harvested from elective abortions was just one of many such projects funded by the NIH. While this particular study was approved for funding by Anthony Fauci’s NIAID, the buck ultimately stops with Collins. Lest one assume out of charity that these grant approvals were made without Collins’s knowledge, in 2019 Collins opposed the Trump administration’s decision to ban NIH intramural research using fetal tissue and to require grants for extramural research with fetal tissue to be reviewed by an ethics advisory board. Last spring, these restrictions were rescinded with Collins’s full support.

In the year prior to the ban, Collins’s NIH spent $115 million on fetal experimentation, a record for the institute. And since 2016, nearly three million dollars have gone toward establishing the Tissue Hub and Collection Site at the University of Pittsburgh, which traffics fetal organs—including organs from viable and full-term fetuses—from abortion clinics to research facilities. Earlier in Collins’s tenure, the NIH funded the research of Pittsburgh’s Dr. Jörg Gerlach, who pioneered a method of harvesting fresh livers from babies delivered alive at 18 to 22 weeks’ gestation, which he has used in both Italy and the United States. As David Daleiden explains, “these babies either died when they were ‘submerged’ in bags for transport, or after their bodies were cut open to harvest their livers.” The University of Pittsburgh’s house of horrors may seem like an outlier, but the callous treatment of human fetuses is also a consequence of federal regulations. As the human-rodent chimera study notes under the sub-heading “Ethical approval,” “The use of de-identified human fetal tissues did not constitute human subjects research as defined under federal regulations” (emphasis mine). In the same section one learns that greater propriety is shown to rats than to the remains of human children. This is the research culture Francis Collins has been immersed in for much of his career, and it’s the culture he reinforced at the NIH. It is the Magician’s worldview enacted—call it the “Magician’s Praxis.”

 

Read it all. Lee says that even these horrors are not the worst thing Collins has done — and explains why he thinks so.

Lee calls the outspokenly Evangelical Collins “a brother in Christ,” but also says  he is “a tragic figure” and “a cautionary tale.” All of this true. How many of us are Francis Collins, compartmentalizing our professional lives from our religious commitments? As others have said, what is the point of having a faithful Christian rise to positions of great authority if they use it to underwrite abominations like this?

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Amanda, Enemy Of The People

The Woke Temple is a Twitter account run by a liberal who hates wokeness. In a post today, he highlighted this monstrous example of Critical Race Theory. Today he writes:

Here’s what he linked to; the original peer-reviewed paper from which this is taken can be read here. One of the authors, of course, is Robin DiAngelo:

 

 

Critical Race Theory is a racist ideology of totalitarianism. Everywhere you see it, oppose it. Our liberty depends on it, as does justice, and the peace of our country.

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