Rod Dreher's Blog, page 455

Hope Amid The Ruins

Over the weekend I read Bruce Frohnen’s review in The University Bookman of The Benedict Option. I was deeply gratified, not only because it is, to my mind, the most accurate representation of what the book is about and what I’m trying to do with it, but also because I’ve known and respected Bruce’s thinking and his courage for years. To be understood is what every writer hopes for. To be understood and affirmed by a conservative thinker of Bruce Frohnen’s character and intellect is thrilling. Excerpts:

Rod Dreher has been calling for Christians to heal themselves, their churches, and their communities, for most of his adult life. One thing has changed in the ten years since publication of his first book, Crunchy Cons: He no longer holds that cultural renewal, to which he calls Christians in particular, can extend to society as a whole. As Dreher argues in his latest book, The Benedict Option, neither the United States, nor the Western Civilization of which it is a part, can be saved in the sense of returning to the norms of the Judeo-Christian tradition which produced and sustained lives of faith, family, and freedom. Our proper task, then, is to preserve and enrich cultural remnants for their own sakes—as embodiments of God’s love and as aids to those persons and communities who might yet walk in the ways of their Lord. Any resurgence or reclaiming of wider cultural influence is so far off in time that it cannot be allowed to guide our practical choices in the here and now.

Such arguments are dismissed as overwrought and defeatist by most people—whatever their party affiliation—with status and power in today’s society. The Benedict Option has not escaped such criticism. But this book is a sign and cause of hope. Dreher provides a penetrating diagnosis of our ills. As important, he outlines means by which we can follow our true nature and find joy in our lives together even as those around us lose sight of humanity and the goodness of life itself.

The Benedict Option is the product of years of thought, investigation, conversation, and at times argument. Not that Dreher himself is argumentative, far from it. But the position he has taken, like the norms he seeks to preserve, garners opposition on all sides. Why? Because it entails a refusal to either temporize with a culture that has become toxic to our real humanity or to declare even metaphorical war on those seeking to destroy the remnants of a civilization of which they know nothing, except that they have been taught to see it as “racist, sexist, and homophobic.” Dreher’s position is a delicate one in that it must balance the need to be “countercultural” with the necessity to engage with a now-dominant culture that is overtly hostile to Christians and their institutions, beliefs, and practices.

Yes, and that delicacy is not easy to communicate. We have to keep fighting as hard as we can, but we have to do so with the realization that we are probably going to lose. This is not despair; this is realism. The Benedict Option is Plan B, one that urges the “creative minority” of Christians to pioneer and implement ways of living that allow us to hold onto our faith in what is (to use a culture-war metaphor) occupied territory.

One of the most difficult things to get across is that the battle lines are not between the Church and the Post-Christian Culture. The battle lines are within the Church itself — and prospects for victory are bleak. Most of us American Christians have no idea how weak we have made ourselves by substituting Moralistic Therapeutic Deism for authentic Christianity. We cannot imagine how feeble we’ve rendered our ability to respond adequately to the challenge of post-Christianity — or even to survive it with our faith intact in this radically post-Christian culture. For example, this chocolate-and-marshmallow Christianity is doing nothing but preparing the next generation of Christian kids for capitulation and assimilation:

People mean well, they really do, but this is like trying to contain a forest fire with a garden hose. If you, Christian, think that continuing to do what we’ve been doing for the last 50 years is adequate to the crisis of our time, you are dreaming. Your false ideas will have consequences.

More Frohnen:

Government’s proper goal is to foster the more primary associations of family, church, and local association. Sadly, the best we can hope for today is to demilitarize the hostility toward our associations inherent to modern, social democratic secularism.

This realistic assessment is not cause for despair. Rather, it supports a call for a more fully Christian politics. Dreher points with approval to pro-life activists who have refused to limit their activities to the (hostile) legislative and judicial spheres. Wise pro-lifers open crisis centers and reach out to victims of abortion (including mothers recovering from abortion) and otherwise work to build communities dedicated to welcoming new life. In this vein, Dreher argues, all Christians must take positive action, rebuilding communities by starting church and school groups, joining the volunteer fire department, teaching kids music and scripture, playing games, feasting with neighbors, and more generally leading good lives in a myriad small communities centered on church, family, and neighborhood. “If we want to survive, we have to return to the roots of our faith, both in thought and in practice. We are going to have to learn habits of the heart forgotten by believers in the West. We are going to have to change our lives and our approach to life, in radical ways. In short, we are going to have to be the church, without compromise, no matter what it costs.” [Emphasis in original]

One more passage:

Obviously, the church should be the primary institution providing guidance and patterns of conduct in accord with our true nature. Unfortunately, as Dreher points out, too many in the pulpit know little of their own history or the grounds of their own faith. Instead of spiritual guidance, the faithful receive the bromides of self-esteem and reassurances that all truths are subject to “updating” to make them compatible with our wants and sins of the moment. Thus, churches, like schools and universities, have become nothing more than loci of ideology and the platitudes of the self-help group; they ignore their essential work of forming minds, characters, and souls in accordance with the truths of our nature and history. “Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a culture built on a cult of desire, one that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions, as we self-directed individuals choose.”

Our time is one of fundamental disorder. And we cannot bring order to society until we bring it to ourselves and those around us. Order in society is an outgrowth of order in the soul, which comes from ordering ourselves according to the deeper, more fundamental order of being, of reality itself. In this light, the inevitable burdens of life on the periphery of a hostile, inhumane culture should hold less fear for us than it does. Already, many of us have had our life-chances severely limited by this culture, in which what is best in us is termed hateful bigotry. It is time, then, to cease pretending that we can make common cause with those who hate us, or that we can win some kind of war with them. We must treat them as our Christian forebears treated the powerful pagans of their time, with pity, love, and a healthy dose of caution. We must live among them, but we can no longer afford to believe that we are of them, lest we lose our own souls in the process. This is no message of despair, but a call to virtue we must heed in our daily lives, daring to be martyrs only when specifically called on to do so, and otherwise to build up the church by bringing God’s order to our own lives, and the lives of those we cherish.

We must live among them, but we can no longer afford to believe that we are of them… . Wisdom, let us attend!

Read the whole thing. Thank you, Bruce! This is the best and most thorough review I’ve seen yet. Readers, if you think The Benedict Option is about nothing more than culture-war surrender and a retreat into quietism, read Frohnen’s review and understand how wrong you are. At the Walker Percy Weekend festival, I met a number of people who said that they are reading the book in their church groups, as a spur to discussion on how they might respond individually and as a church to the challenges identified in the book. If you would like to do this with your church or other group, be aware that Sentinel, the publisher, will make bulk orders available at a steep discount. If this interests you, please drop me a note at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and I’ll forward your request to the publisher.

Walker Percy Weekend 2017 Wrap

Jason Kenney and Area Man, drinking bourbon on a back porch on Royal Street

At Walker Percy Weekend yesterday, we had an impromptu North American conservative summit on the back porch of Julie and Mitch Brashier’s grand Royal Street house Hillcroft. That’s Jason Kenney, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in Alberta. He came to the festival with Mark Cameron, former policy director for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Howard Anglin, executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation. A nicer bunch of Canadian drinkers of bourbon you could not hope to hang with.

Do you expect to run into distinguished international guests on the street in a small Southern river town on a steamy day in June? You do if it’s Walker Percy Weekend. This past year was our fourth annual festival, and it never ceases to amaze me how Percy admirers from all over the country, and even Canada, come down to spend a couple of days with us. I saw a lot of old friends, and met new ones, including a young lawyer from Queens and another young lawyer from Brooklyn, both of whom came by themselves, just because. A reader of this blog flew in from Orange County, California, just because.

It was steamy and it rained off and on, but we pulled through. From this blog’s commenter community, Franklin Evans and his pal Kevin Karg came once again from Philly. Leslie and Eric Fain were there. Jon F. flew in from Baltimore, and Bernie arose from her sickbed to come out for the crawfish boil on Saturday night. Old friends of the festival Ralph Wood, Jessica Hooten Wilson, and Patrick Connolly reprised their roles as speakers. We were grateful that Dr. Ralph Beaumont, whose family are big supporters of the Weekend, came down from Seattle to join us as a speaker. Many of us remembered the recently deceased Peter Augustine Lawler, who was a featured speaker at the first two Walker Percy Weekends.

Mary Pratt Lobdell Percy came back for the fourth year with her friends from Covington. I was talking to someone at the festival who said he really wanted to talk to her to ask her about growing up with Walker Percy as her father. “You should do it,” I said. He demurred, saying that he didn’t want to bother her. “Oh, you really should talk to her!” I said. “She’s a lot of fun.” She really is. The idea that you can actually share a drink and a laugh with Walker and Bunt’s daughter is, I think, one of the best things about the festival.

Harrison Scott Key brought down the house with his lecture on his memoir The World’s Largest Man. That man is funny, y’all. The last time I laughed as hard as I did hearing him talk was when I read the book. As Harrison pointed out to the audience, the book is about growing up in the South, but it’s mostly about fathers and sons. After his talk, he sold out every book that Conundrum bookstore owner Missy Couhig brought to the lecture. I’m telling you, if you don’t get your father a copy for Father’s Day, something is wrong with you.

I always get to the end of WPW filled with regret that I didn’t get to talk to more people, and didn’t get to speak for longer with those I did talk to. Can’t be helped, I guess. I realized only tonight that I had forgotten to take many photos! I think it had to do with my trying hard to stay focused on the event while managing the stupid disc problem in my neck, which manifested itself on Thursday, the day before the festival.

I ate my crawfish with Ken Wilgus, his son Alex, and a gentleman named J.R. I took this VFYT in the darkness and bumped it up using software, hence its fuzziness. That’s J.R. and Alex opposite me:

I heard from Mark Cameron tonight that he and his pals motored over from the not-so-fondly-named “Love In The Ruins Hotel” in St. Francisville to St. Joseph’s Abbey near Covington, where they went to mass with the Benedictines, and visited Walker and Bunt Percy’s graves to pay their respects. What a great way to end the weekend. May the memory of Walker Percy be eternal!

Here’s how most of us ended the weekend: it’s our festival Fearless Leader Missy Couhig behind Hillcroft, on the Bourbon Stroll, celebrating. I don’t know how we would do this without her and the hard-working Walker Percy Weekend committee, to whom all of us who enjoyed ourselves in St. Francisville this weekend owe a debt of gratitude.

If you were on Royal Street in St. Francisville on Saturday evening, you know the feeling

By the way, if you want to buy Walker Percy Weekend swag (t-shirts, umbrellas, posters), you can order it here. Unfortunately, you can’t get these great t-shirts, which are one of a kind, created by their wearers:

War On London Bridge

Six dead, 30 injured in London tonight. From the NYT:

“I saw a man in red with quite a large blade — I don’t know the measurement, I guess maybe 10 inches,” Ben said. “He was stabbing a man. He stabbed him about three times fairly calmly.”

Ben added, “He was being stabbed quite coldly and he slumped to the ground.”

He then said someone threw a table and a bottle at the man with the knife, but “then we heard three gunshots and we ran.”

A man named Gerard told the BBC that he saw men stabbing everyone they could and shouting “this is for Allah.”

He saw three men with knives “and they stabbed a girl,” he said. “So I follow them, toward Borough Market, they were running into the pubs and bars and stabbing everyone. They were running up, saying this is for Allah, and they run up and stabbed this girl 10, maybe 15 times.”

The Guardian reports:

A 25-year-old man, who wishes to remain anonymous, told the Guardian he was driving across the bridge when he saw a man and a pregnant woman unconscious on the road.

“We thought it was a car accident but as we got closer we could see a lot of blood and bodies. There was a pregnant woman on the right who was severely injured and on the left there was a man being resuscitated, but he started breathing. We don’t know whether the woman survived,” he said.

More:

Gerard Vowls, 47, had been watching the Champions League final at the Ship pub in Borough. He was at the start of the south side of London Bridge and saw a woman being stabbed by three men 10 or 15 times.

“She was going, ‘Help me, help me’ and I couldn’t do nothing,” he said. “I want to know if this girl is still alive. I’ve been walking around for an hour and a half crying my eyes out. I don’t know what to do.”

Savages. Absolute cowardly savages. Three men stabbing a woman.

I hope the British find some way to imprison, expel, or otherwise smash all Islamic militants and their sympathizers. These people are no better than Nazi supporters in World War II. This is war.

UPDATE: Sumantra Maitra levels with Britain. Excerpts:

I was born in India. I have seen Islamist terrorism far more than any average Westerner. Let me tell you something, which your media will avoid mentioning. The I word. There’s a difference between terrorism and insurgency. Forget all the predictable response. Forget suited apologists on TV blaming these outrages on colonialism, poverty, racism, rise of Islamophobia, Katie Hopkins, Alt Right, anything under the Sun, except the obvious. Forget Hijab wearing head bobbing Feminists blaming it on Israel and Palestine problem. Forget scripted responses, of political leaders who talk about the goodness of human nature or the evil of “international terrorism”, or ready-made laminated placards with I Heart *current city under attack*, forget the FB profile flags, hipsters “sending love and good vibes”, tea lights, candle marches, empty platitudes.

And:

As someone, who originates from a country, at war with Islamist terrorism since the mid ’80s, let me tell you something which I have seen and which might come to the West soon. The primary duty of a state is to protect its citizens. Nothing else. Not policing alleged hate speech, not giving moral support to drug addicts, not investigating idiotic microaggressions. But to provide security to those who pay taxes. If and when a state fails to do that, the citizens take up arms themselves. And you can take it from me, you don’t want to see that in your country.

Dressing For Walker Percy Weekend

Jeanne and Ron, four time Walker Percy Weekend visitors, always make t-shirts for the occasion.

On Not Heading For The Hills

I had a number of conversations yesterday at the Walker Percy Weekend festival with people who have read The Benedict Option. I kid you not, every single one of them began with my interlocutor expressing bewilderment that so many reviewers and commenters write as if the book urged Christians to withdraw completely from society and head for the hills.

Said one man, “I’ve been arguing with four of my Christian friends about it. They read one guy who said you were calling for total withdrawal, and they decided they wouldn’t read your book. I keep telling them, ‘Guys, you’re wrong. Read the book!'”

A woman told me that a pastor she knows reviewed the book on his website. When she confronted him about it, he admitted that he had just skimmed it. Sounds to me like he was just looking for enough to justify his prejudices.

I asked that woman how she would account for this phenomenon, which is common. She said that it’s because what The Benedict Option asks of Christians is difficult. She said the diagnosis is dire, and the prescription is hard. People are desperate not to face these realities, she said, because if what I write is true, then we Christians are going to have to change our lives in ways that we may not like.

I thanked her for that observation. It’s my theory too. Again, I welcome critical engagement with the book, but only so long as it’s honest. Here’s a mixed review from Michael Allen, a Presbyterian theologian. I recommend it as an example of thoughtful critical engagement with The Benedict Option. Excerpts:

The Benedict Option does identify severe threats to orthodox Christian faith, though it is worth noting that they lie almost entirely within the walls of the city of God. It is true that Dreher does observe the broad advance of sexual freedom and of the recalibration of thought regarding gender and sexuality (2-3, 9, 179-186). And he does identity religious liberty, the attack upon which is so often tied to matters LGBT, as one of two great cultural challenges today (80, 84). But these are marginal notes by comparison to his overarching concern to address malformation within the body of Christ.

More:

Nonetheless, suggestions that The Benedict Option calls for abandonment of the world are misperceptions. We should attend to his specific strategies which are particular and then consider how they fit together in a broader framework. The book includes a genealogy and governing images, but it really functions more as a set of protocols meant to invite further imagination regarding Christian formation and cultural engagement than as a programmatic manifesto.

And:

How does Dreher tie together these protocols and strategies? He began the book with a warning of the “great flood” and, unsurprisingly, turns to the image of the church as ark at its conclusion. Some might suggest that this inherently involves an unchristian failure of nerve. But two observations should caution us at this point. First, ark imagery has remarkable pedigree in the Christian tradition, precisely because it has biblical warrant (1 Pet. 3:20-21). Second, Dreher explicitly contextualizes the ark imagery with that of the wellspring.

“The church, then, is both Ark and Wellspring—and Christians must live in both realities. God gave us the Ark of the church to keep us from drowning in the raging flood. But he also gave us the church as a place to drown our old selves symbolically in the water of baptism, and to grow in new life, nourished by the never-ending torrent of his grace. You cannot live the Benedict Option without seeing both visions simultaneously” (238).

Being guarded from external threats must be matched by being revived internally by Christ’s own life-giving presence. “The way of Saint Benedict is not an escape from the real world but a way to see that world and dwell in it as it truly is. Benedictine spirituality teaches us to bear with the world in love and to transform it as the Holy Spirit transforms us” (77). Repeatedly, he calls us to take these kinds of thick practices “out of the monastery” for the sake of the church and her surrounding culture (77, 93-94, 98, 125, 236). He suggests certain ways of doing so, that we might then take our witness faithfully to the world as well.

Finally:

Third, Dreher’s book rightly points to the significance of attending not only to individual formation but also to the pivotal role played by institutions, especially those which might be termed mediating institutions between the individual/family and the larger government/nation. He attends to the church and the neighborhood/city, and he reflects on the claim that it takes a village to raise a Christian (122-123). His comments are especially insightful in noting that we need to support the integrity of family structure amidst the challenges brought by the sexual revolution (not only the LGBT and transgender movements of late but, much earlier, the revolution wrought by no-fault divorce) without lapsing into idolizing the family and reminding ourselves of the theological and moral importance of other mediating structures, especially the ekklesia (128-129). Dreher also commends sacrificial giving (of time, treasure, and talent) that these kinds of mediating institutions (churches, schools, and so forth) are available for Christian men, women, and children in places of plenty and of plight. For instance, his call toward Christian classical education is not merely a suggestion that parents ought to commit to it, but that Christians ought to philanthropically support it for others as well. Even if we have noted ways in which this should be tempered as but one strategic option, we must also appreciate that he is calling for a churchly mindset that views one’s own resources as stewarded for the greater good rather than just the privilege of the upper classes. Dreher summons us to sacrificially investing in institutions that will shape the good neighborhood and the faithful church.

Read the whole thing. Prof. Allen does have some pointed criticisms, from a Reformed point of view. All of it is fair. I thank him for his careful attention to my book.

Readers, if you’ve not read The Benedict Option because you’ve heard certain things about it, I invite you to consider that you have been misled. As Prof. Allen says, the book “ought to be viewed as a conversation starter and a prompt for further analysis regarding culture, the church, and Christian formation.” That is, the book is meant to seed a series of conversations within the church, and to guide Christians who don’t want to keep their heads in the sand towards serious discussions, leading to action. If you reject the book and its thesis, that’s fine — but know what it is you’re rejecting, and why you are rejecting it.

It’s gratifying to hear from folks that their pastors are reading the book, and encouraging their congregations to do the same.

View From Your Table

Premia, Antigorio Valley, Italy

James C. is in the Italian Alps:

That’s a rösti with a blue cheese from the adjoining Formazza Valley and walnuts. The panino is made of speck, greens, mountain cheese (maybe tomo?) and chopped apples soaked in balsamic. The beer is a Belgian white. Bellissimi piatti…

Once Again, It’s Walker Percy Weekend

(L to R) Area Man, Harrison Scott Key

Hello from St. Francisville. Above, it’s Noted Arthur™ Harrison Scott Key, moments after I delivered him and his lovely wife to their cabin in town. Harrison is speaking on Saturday at the Walker Percy Weekend about his terrific Southern memoir The World’s Largest Man. I picked the Keys up at the Baton Rouge airport this afternoon and drove them up to the ‘ville, which is doubling as a sauna this weekend. You can’t get out of your car without your glasses fogging up. Welcome to south Louisiana, folks.

People came into register at The Conundrum, our town bookstore, which is the festival headquarters. Owner Missy Couhig, who is also the festival chairwoman, greeted everyone with wine and conviviality. It was so wonderful to see old friends as well as to meet new ones. That distinguished looking gentleman in the seersucker blazer? That’s Bill Wilson, the legendary University of Virginia religious studies professor. Ever heard of the band Sons Of Bill? That’s Bill.

Mark Cameron, a Canadian Catholic with whom I have been corresponding for years, came in from Ottawa with a couple of friends. We met for the first time. My pal Tom Sullivan, whom I haven’t seen since I left Brooklyn, and who now lives in Houston, drove in. Friends of this blog Franklin Evans, Leslie Fain, and JonF are here, but poor Bernie fell ill at the last minute and couldn’t make it. My mom came this year for the first time. Mary Pratt Percy Lobdell is back for the fourth year, with other friends from Covington. Alex Wilgus and his dad are here. Maha Hussein flew in from New York City. TAC’s Johnny Burtka, his wife, and his parents are in town too. I could go on. It’s such a joy to see folks. I’ll be introducing Ralph Wood in the morning, for his talk about Walker Percy and the Benedict Option.

Unfortunately I had to bug out early tonight. You might recall that I was in a fender bender last December. The whiplash from that event caused a bulging disc in my neck. I’ve been in physical therapy for it all year, and was getting better. On Thursday morning, I picked up the coffee pot to pour my first cup, felt something slip in my neck, and was suddenly in a lot of pain. “Oh yeah, that’s a big knot,” said the physical therapist when I saw him an hour later.

Through the magic of pain meds I’m able to be here this weekend, but man, it’s amazing how much something like this takes out of you. I needed to go back to the hotel and get prone. Headed to get a steroid injection right into the neck on Monday afternoon. Middle age, baby: it stinks. So I will not be consuming much bourbon this weekend, unfortunately. But it’s so great to be with the kind of people who come to Walker Percy Weekend. Wish you were here.

A big shout-out to Dr. Lee Burnett, who was here last year, and who treated Franklin when he broke his leg at the courthouse. Lee and his wife couldn’t make it this year because she’s having a baby any day now. We miss y’all, and are thinking of you.

I’ll post again tomorrow night, with pictures.

Protecting LSMSA Tradition

Here in Louisiana, members of the state legislature are pushing through an effort to change the name of the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts, a public boarding school for gifted and talented kids that’s been around since 1983. They want to call it the Jimmy D. Long Sr. Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts, after the deceased state legislator who was instrumental in creating the school back in the early 1980s.

The school’s alumni, both in the state and nationwide, have been raising a ruckus in fighting this proposal. The hearings have been emotional. Legislators have been quoted in the Baton Rouge paper as saying they’ve never seen a lobbying effort like this one. So far it has been unsuccessful. State Sen. Francis Thompson, who originated the legislation, has called alumni ingrates for opposing it. A reader of this blog, knowing that I am an alumnus of LSMSA (I was in the Class of ’85, the first graduating class), wrote to ask why on earth we alumni are so upset about this issue.

I haven’t talked to any other alumni about the issue, but here is my answer.

Most people love their alma mater, I suppose, or at least feel some affection for it. The relationship between LSMSA and its alumni is more intense than most, because the Louisiana School is not just a school to the people who studied there. It surely has something to do with the fact that the school’s students — high school juniors and seniors, and some sophomores — live on campus in dorms. It’s a relatively small community, fewer than 300 kids, and they have unusually close relationships with their teachers. All of this tends to form tight bonds. But it doesn’t fully explain the passion Louisiana School alumni feel towards the place.

I suspect that most of them had some version of the experience I had there in the 1980s. I came from a public school in a small town. I had been bullied there. Besides which, it was not a school where a nerdy kid who liked to read was suited to thrive. I wasn’t getting along at all with my father, who was distressed over what he correctly saw as my depression. His way of dealing with it was to bark at me to “be normal.”

When I heard that the state was opening a new school for people like me, I applied with a certain desperation in mind, as if I were a hard-pressed political dissident seeking an exit visa to a country of exile. That analogy might seem emotionally overwrought to you, but even today, over three decades later, it accurately describes my state of mind.

One late spring day in 1983, I drove my old blue Chevy pickup by the post office to check the mail. There was in our box a letter from the school, addressed to me. Breathless, I hurried out to the truck to open it, and to see if I had been accepted.

I had. Sitting here this morning recalling that moment, all the details are crystal clear in my mind. It was an overwhelming feeling. I’m saved, I thought. I’m saved. My father didn’t want me to go, but my mother, God bless her, prevailed, and I moved to Natchitoches that fall to take my place in the first class of the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts.

I noticed something interesting that first month. Some of my classmates came from big-city magnet schools. They seemed happy to be there, but only that. We kids who came from small town and rural schools were different. For us, the school was a haven. I can’t speak for all my classmates, but for me and for others like me, we were the walking wounded. This was the first time we had gone to school and been in a school community in which we didn’t have to keep our heads down, or suppress in some way our love of books and learning so as not to attract the attention of the cool kids and the bullies. At LSMSA, it was okay to be a nerd, a square peg, an outcast, a weirdo. People loved you anyway, in part because they too had been nerds, square pegs, outcasts, weirdos.

We had found our tribe. It is impossible to overstate how powerful an experience that is for a teenager who has had to deal with outsiderness and rejection as a normal condition of life in school, and sometimes outside of it. Before Louisiana School, I was constantly on the defensive, both at school and at home, with my father. That sense of siege marked me deeply, and still does. But at LSMSA, I saw that life could be different, that it could be so much better. That one could be accepted and loved and cherished by one’s community of teachers and students.

Yes, the classes at LSMSA were advanced in content, but that’s not what was most distinctive about them, not to my young eyes. I saw that teachers did not have to fight every day to keep their classes quiet and attentive. What a revelation it was to be in a classroom where everybody wanted to learn, where one’s teachers didn’t have to fight a constant battle with knuckleheads who didn’t want to be in school in the first place. The idea of school as a cooperative community of learning, a place where everybody shared a commitment to the same mission, was new to me. The idea that academic excellence was a goal everybody shared, and not an invitation to be mocked and derided by one’s peers — this too was novel. My God, did I love it.

In 1985, I graduated from Louisiana School a different person than the downcast 16-year-old who showed up that fall of ’83. Where I had been depressed and lonely, I was now joyful, mostly because I had made the best friends I would ever know (this is still true, by the way). I learned at LSMSA to have confidence in myself, my ideas, and my future. I came out of that school with a powerful sense of belonging and mission, and with the sure knowledge that life was beautiful. I had not been sure of that before.

It is scarcely overstating it to say that Louisiana School gave me my life. I don’t know where I would be today, personally or professionally, if not for that place. Its memory is sacred to me, and to many, many of the students who followed in the path of the first class.

The late Rep. Jimmy Long was one of the handful of men responsible for the extraordinary blessing of LSMSA. His memory must be honored and cherished by every student who benefited from his vision. The greater the gift, the more grateful we must be to the giver.

 

If the Louisiana legislature goes through with renaming the school after Rep. Long, his name, through no fault of his own, will never again be spoken of with respect by the school’s alumni. It will be regarded as a sign of the legislature’s disrespect for tradition and an institution that has become hallowed to those whose hearts and minds were formed by it. The name of Jimmy Long ought to be revered in the LSMSA community, but if the legislature has its way, it will achieve the opposite effect.

It’s like this. Gov. Huey P. Long played a central role in helping build up LSU back in the 1930s. If the state legislature renamed the flagship university “The Huey P. Long Louisiana State University,” how well would that be received?

Tradition matters. Sen. Francis Thompson believes sincerely that he is honoring his late friend by forcing this name change on a community that does not want it. So does State Sen. Gerald Long, Jimmy Long’s brother. They are wrong. The reason so many LSMSA alumni are so upset about this is because the school is so precious to us — far more precious than it could ever be to a state senator and his legislative colleagues. It’s not their fault, but they don’t love the school. How could they, not having gone there? But they ought to love tradition, and they ought to respect the Louisiana men and women who studied there, and taught there, or otherwise served in that extraordinary and beloved community of learning.

The Louisiana School itself is Jimmy Long’s monument. It should stand on its own, with the name it has always had. To force this name change onto the school would be to bring the visionary Jimmy Long’s name into permanent disrepute among the community that ought to love and honor him as a benefactor. And it will have deeply antagonized thousands of Louisianians — including voters like me — who will not forget this act of disrespect for our alma mater, its traditions, and its people.

Louisiana legislators should reflect on what they are doing here. Passing this law does not honor Jimmy Long, but rather bring his good name into dishonor. Is that what the legislature really wants? Is that what Jimmy Long’s family would have happen? Because this is exactly what is going to happen.

Plus, there’s not a single legislator who will benefit politically from it; in fact, just the opposite will happen. Some things are sacred, and should not be trifled with, or treated as the playthings of politicians who want to pat each other on the back instead of be faithful to the institutions and traditions that they have been elected to steward.

Much ink has been spilled over the last few months on the state of our democracy — how political discourse is dead, how the people are no longer represented, how the system is broken. Unfortunately for all of us, I’m here to spill just a bit more.

I’ve had the opportunity to watch our democracy in action over the last few weeks in the Louisiana Legislature. I’ve taken part in the process, lobbying with hundreds of others in the fight over Senate Bill 1, a bill that would rename the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts — my alma mater.

At this point, I’m not going to litigate the merits of the bill — the alumni are united in opposition to it for good reasons. What’s important now is to illuminate how this process played out.

Democracy is supposed to be for the people. It’s our government, organized according to our wishes, and enacted by our representatives. They are there to serve us, to carry out our agenda. That is far from what I experienced.

SB 1 passed swimmingly through both the Senate and House against the express wishes of the people. The constituents it affects — namely, the students, parents, faculty, staff and alumni of LSMSA — have made it clear we don’t want this bill. We have collectively spent hours testifying in committee, have sent thousands of emails, and called hundreds of times.

Through all of that action, how many votes did we sway? Just four — two senators on the floor and two representatives in committee.

Of the entire Legislature, are there really only four principled among you?

Watching this unfold has been stunning. It should be the easiest vote in the world. It’s left me disillusioned, frustrated and disconcerted. Two senators used their position to push a bill upon the people — people who don’t want it. And everyone — all but four — ignored their constituents in order to gratify the ego of their colleagues.

I’m deeply perturbed by how this process has played out. It’s a gross abuse of power by the authors and a callous, willful disregard of constituent wishes by everyone else. The system broke for SB 1, but there’s one vote left. Will anyone join these four brave men and women? Sen. Dan Claitor, Sen. Fred Mills Jr., Rep. Beryl Amedee and Rep. Polly Thomas.

Logan Leger

Baton Rouge

I agree. The memory of Rep. Jimmy Long deserves respect. But even moreso does the Louisiana School’s tradition, and the will of the large LSMSA community. I’m not asking legislators to share the alumni’s passion for this cause. I am asking them to honor it, even if they don’t understand it.

Besides which, I remind legislators that not a single person will vote for or work for your re-election because you changed the name of this school. Outside of the LSMSA community, nobody cares about this. (Maybe the Long family does, but it seems to me that they would not want the name of their kin regarded with anger and disdain.) You go through with this, though, and you will have a small army of angry alumni who will be more than happy to donate money to, work for, and vote for your future opponents who promise to reverse your move and restore tradition. I am one of them.

My niece just graduated from LSMSA, making two generations of my family that have gone through the Louisiana School. You legislators are messing with all of us. This is personal. This is family. You have nothing to gain from antagonizing the Louisiana School community, and much to lose. Think about it before you vote.

Newly Woke Artist Agrees To Burn Own Work

In Minnesota, the Walker Art Center is taking down an outdoor art installation because a Native American tribe was offended by it. It’s not only taking it down, it’s going to burn the thing, which has been exhibited in the US and Europe since its creation in 2013:

“Scaffold” was to be one of the new pieces added to the Walker’s Minneapolis Sculpture Garden during its multimillion-dollar renovation. Conceived as a commentary on capital punishment by the artist Sam Durant, the sculpture comprises elements of seven different hangings in U.S. history.

But one of those events — the execution of 38 Dakota men following the U.S.-Dakota war in 1862 — remains a subject of special pain in Minnesota. It was the largest mass execution in U.S. history. The large, boxlike frame of “Scaffold” recalls the gallows erected in Mankato, Minn., for the hangings a century and a half ago.

More:

“The wood will be removed and taken to the Fort Snelling area, because of the historical significance of this site to the Dakota Oyate, where they will ceremonially burn the wood,” the center added.

The statement also noted that Durrant, the “Scaffold” artist, has “committed to never create the Dakota gallows again. He commits to transferring the intellectual property rights of this work to the Dakota Oyate.”

Unbelievable. It’s hard for me to see the artistic merit in the thing — it’s nothing more than a scaffolding for a hanging, erected here as a political statement — but that is beside the point. The artist’s intent was to protest capital punishment by memorializing seven different hangings. The action by the Dakota protesters goes beyond simply objecting to a work of art that they find offensive. What they’ve done here is to successfully intimidated a major museum and an artist into taking down and destroying a work of art that was created in sympathy with the Dakotas’ suffering.

This is reminiscent of the current controversy at New York’s Whitney Museum, in which a white artist painted a portrait of Emmitt Till’s open casket at his funeral. Black protesters have demanded that the museum take down the painting because the artist is white. Fortunately, the Whitney’s directors and the artist in question have more fortitude than their Minnesota counterparts. Here’s a New York Times story comparing the two incidents. Excerpts:

Both works, made by artists who are white, recall historical acts of racial violence and have been viewed by many as painful and insensitive to communities that have suffered directly from those injustices.

Central to both cases are issues of cultural appropriation and artistic freedom. Should white artists, no matter how well intentioned, represent harrowing stories that are not their own to tell? Conversely, should any subject matter be off-limits to artists because of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or other life experiences?

What does it mean to say that any story is not an artist’s to tell? Says who? How would art be possible if woke hecklers had a veto?

What the Walker and artist Sam Durant have done sets a dangerous precedent for artistic freedom. It is particularly sad, even infuriating, to see an artist agree to have his own work ritually burned because it offended some people. Reminds me of the old wisecrack about a liberal being somebody too open-minded to take his own side in a fight.

Seriously, what kind of artist agrees to let other people tell him what he can and cannot create?

UPDATE: Thanks to reader Dennis Sanders for tipping me off to this story.

Rowan Williams On The Ben Op

Rowan Williams reviews The Benedict Option in New Statesman. Link to the review is here. He is ambivalent about the book. He does, however, do a great job of summing up the book’s message succinctly:

Its argument is simple. For conservative religious believers, the battle on the political field has largely been lost; there is no point in wasting energy on forming coalitions to challenge or change legislation. What is needed, instead, is to develop a more densely textured religious life, in which regular patterns of communal prayer and intellectual and spiritual development will keep alive the possibility of inhabiting a nourishing, morally rich tradition. Christians ought to be more like Orthodox Jews or conscientious Muslims: living visibly at an angle to the practices of contemporary society.

Yes, that’s it in a nutshell. He expands on that thought:

This will demand a distancing from the assumptions of capitalism and the all-powerful market, and it will indeed entail the risk that Christians will find themselves de facto excluded from some professions. Dreher – an Eastern Orthodox Christian and a prominent conservative blogger in the United States – is sharply critical of a Christian rhetoric that ignores the evils of public acquisitiveness and selfishness while castigating personal delinquencies. He points to the tradition of monasticism as a model for developing alternative community patterns – hence the reference to Benedict – and invites a close reading of the saint’s precepts for monks as a guide to the practical challenges of living in close quarters with others. What lies in the more distant social or political future is not for us to see; but for now, what we need is a community life that seeks to live and worship with integrity and hopes to attract and persuade by the quality of its mutual care and the fulfilment of its members.

Williams says:

Dreher’s strategy is ultimately the only one possible for a traditionalist believer who does not want a revolution or a theocracy.

That’s true, and I wish conservative American Christians would realize this.

Williams criticizes the book, however, for focusing too much on sexuality (especially LGBT) and not enough on race and war, which are also of concern to Christian believers. I have several responses to that.

1) Gay rights are precisely the point on which court battles over religious liberty are playing out. Nobody proposes to restrict the rights of religious believers and religious charities and schools over their views on race and war. Liberals love to accuse conservative Christians of being “obsessed” with sex and sexuality, but it is impossible not to focus heavily on these things, precisely because the wider culture is obsessed with it, and legal attacks on our liberties are coming from those who wish to expand gay rights.

2) It is remarkably disingenuous for the former Archbishop of Canterbury to downplay the importance of the sexuality debate within the churches. His own global communion is coming apart over it! American churches of all kinds are splitting over it. And why not? This is an enormously important issue, having to do with Christian anthropology and the authority and meaning of Scripture. Again, whenever I hear liberals complaining that we conservative Christians are overly concerned with this stuff, what I really hear is their frustration that we aren’t abdicating to their position.

3) The debate within the church and Western society broadly over the meaning of sex and marriage is more important for the long-term future of both than any current arguments over race or war (though those two are certainly important). The family is disintegrating, in large part because marriage has come to be seen as merely a contractual construct that can be voided easily, if it needs to be taken up at all. It hinges on foundational questions like Who is man? What is sex for? The Bible and the Church formed by its authority has clear answers to those questions, though fewer and fewer people today want to hear them (and fewer and fewer priests and pastors want to answer them). Ideas have consequences, and, as Philip Rieff has said, the Sexual Revolution is the most radical and consequential in modern times. Christians and others who think the sex and sexuality issue is relatively unimportant are not thinking this through. We are seeing the Christian churches — including Rowan Williams’s church — abandoning clear and consistent Biblical teaching for the sake of assimilating into the post-Christian world.

One more clip from Williams’s review:

The Benedict Option is unsettling. It confronts the prevailing consensus about how far the majority is willing to make room for principled dissent and public argument – yet at the same time shows a rather dispiriting lack of confidence in public argument.

I can see why he would conclude that, but I would respond that it’s perfectly reasonable to lack confidence in public argument. Reason matters far less to public debate than it once did. Generally speaking, people these days don’t think; they emote. Alasdair MacIntyre explains why “emotivism” dominates discourse in the West today. I’m not sure how the debate goes in the UK, where Williams lives, but here in the US, it is becoming increasingly impossible to discuss issues of race, sex, and gender without running into a buzzsaw of “bigotry” accusations. Besides which, our politics on both sides have become so tribal that people are not willing to critically examine their own positions in light of the other side’s arguments. This is how emotivism works.

Rowan Williams should ask Yale’s Nicholas Christakis and Evergreen State’s Bret Weinstein how much confidence they have in the viability of public argument. Here’s a clip of protesting students from Evergreen State demanding that the marshmallowy progressive college president order his faculty to exempt them all from doing homework that was due during their recent mindless spasm of protest:

Naturally, Marshmallow Man capitulated.

Father Dwight Longenecker explained how emotivism has made public reasoning difficult to impossible. Excerpt:

Once the enemy goes to defend the wounded, weeping victim smells blood and is on the attack. The petitions are circulated. The lawyers are contacted. The lawsuits are launched. Apologies are demanded and resignations are forced. The emotivist army marches forth bristling with righteous indignation. They are no longer the wounded victims. They are the rampaging and righteous champions of the underdogs, the mistreated, and the misunderstood. They do not care about the majority vote for they are the brave pioneers who are destined to overturn the oppressive majority. They do not care for the process of law or democracy. Their cause is greater than all that. The surge in their hearts tells them so.

Why has the moral debate in America descended to emotivism? Because where there is no objective truth there can be no intelligent debate. If there is no such thing as right and wrong, then it is pointless trying to have a discussion on what is right and wrong. All that remains is your opinion against my opinion and therefore the one who best uses the tools of emotional blackmail and bullying will prevail.

I would say that Rowan Williams, a brilliant and cultured man, has too much confidence in the power of public argument. Anyway, read the whole review. He concludes:

The book is worth reading because it poses some helpfully tough questions to a socially liberal majority, as well as to believers of a more traditional colour.

UPDATE: Alex Wilgus reviews Rowan Williams reviewing The Benedict Option. He’s not a fan of Williams calling the book “unsettling”.  Excerpt:

This sort of disingenuous wordplay isn’t unique to Williams–who supposes himself a moderate on these matters–it’s just a good example of a broader attitude toward conservatives that pretends to charity and an even-minded tolerance but cannot stomach going through with it. Williams suggests that the upside of the book is that it challenges a predominantly liberal order to learn to allow religious conservatives to “dissent.” Well, The Benedict Option is such a dissent; it proceeds from an attitude of dissent and an intention to show conservative Christians about how best to dissent. But for Williams and other falsely moderate critics, the substance of that dissent is “worrying” and “unsettling.” Whatever Williams concedes may be admirable on the one hand is negated by all sorts of worrying, unsettling things on the other. This is how it has been for those of us who have not been swept away by the gender revolution. Those who would style themselves as moderates may condescend to allow religious conservatives the honor of tending the flame of some romantic thing called “dissent,” but one finds in their startled tone that they have no stomach for anyone actually dissenting from the order of progressive sexual ethics.

If “the salient political challenge is whether the liberal consensus can live with a diversity of cultures and their convictions” then the salient critical challenge is whether moderates like Williams can allow those convictions to be expressed plainly and vociferously without tagging them with cheap labels like “worrying” and “unsettling.” God forbid any of them “sound a note of angry anxiety and contempt”–even though meanwhile in the social justice camp, anger, anxiety, and contempt are all laudable passions with which to #resist the forces of oppression.