Rod Dreher's Blog, page 46

Hard To Be A Tory Boy

I thoroughly enjoyed English journalist Ed West’s essay about growing up Tory, and how he settled into voting for the Conservative Party not because he loves it, but because it’s the only protection on offer from the monster raving loonies of Labour. His story is not my story, but it rhymes. I bet there are a lot of you who, like me, vote GOP with no enthusiasm; it’s only that the alternative is far worse. West says that even though the Tory party has won most of the elections in his lifetime, they have done little to nothing to stop Britain’s slide into progressivism — and in some cases even advanced it.

West says that the Tories face a generational wipeout:

The cohorts born after about 1975 and especially after 1990 tend to hold a range of views that will make it hard for the Tory Party to win their support, without abandoning their values to the point of meaninglessness. On most of the key identity issues, such as racial diversity, immigration, sexuality and gender, and (increasingly) our treatment of animals, there is a generational shift that dwarves anything seen before.

The causes are varied; the globalised digital economy and the rise of English has weakened nation-states; the decline of religion has made utilitarian arguments about bodily autonomy impossible to resist; increased urbanisation makes people more liberal; progressivism financially suits the ruling class in a way it never did previously, and because politics is much to do with status, others imitate them.

Such a generational shift has only happened twice before in European history; during the Reformation, and in the period when Christianity itself replaced polytheism. Just as with progressives in our own time, in the fourth century Christians had started off as a small, cranky minority, but had come to dominate the education system; they won because they were popular among the young, and especially young women, and were concentrated in cities where they could control institutions.

West says that the same thing is happening today: all of society’s institutions are controlled by the Left. More:

The problem is not just with institutional control; the most important comparison with the last days of Rome is in the control of taboos. Whoever owns society’s taboos comes to win, and Christians just believed with greater force that to blaspheme their God was an offence against public morals, while the polytheists had stopped caring to defend theirs. And the ancient world impiety was often viewed as a worse crime than murder.

Today it is progressives who own taboos, and those who offend the sacred ideas of race and sexual identity face the terror of being charged with impiety (or “cancelled”, to use the secular term). And if you don’t control society’s taboos, it doesn’t really matter how many elections you win — you won’t shape the future.

Read it all. 

Once again, let me urge readers interested in the historical comparison, and urge you in the strongest possible terms, to get a copy of historian Edward J. Watts’s The Final Pagan Generation. It’s the story of the last generation of Roman elites born before Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the year 315. It might as well be the story of the Baby Boomers in American life: the last generation born when America was still identifiably Christian, before the great 1960s shift. In Watts’s account, the pagan elites of the fourth century did not see the civilizational shift coming. Nearly everything remained in place — pagan temples remained open, for example — but everything changed, because Roman civilization had lost the old religion. People just didn’t believe anymore.

Granted, the shift of imperial government into Christian hands played a very significant role here. Still, a tectonic civilizational shift like that — a culture abandoning the religion it had held for many centuries — does not happen overnight, and it certainly doesn’t happen because the government said so. Christianity rushed into a void created by the breakdown of the old religion. Similarly, something is waiting to rush in to fill the void left by the breakdown of Christianity in the West. This accounts for wokeness. When God is dead in the hearts and minds of modern people, politics becomes deified.

The things Ed West points to in his column are why I wrote The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies. I have been seized by a sense of mission to prepare the Church in the West to continue its life under adverse conditions — even persecution. Watts points out that members of the final pagan generation in Rome suffered from a failure of imagination: they simply could not imagine that the religion that had served Rome from time out of mind could expire. Reading Watts’s book is to think of Christian leaders (and Christian followers) today who are still living as if the faith will be here forever.

It won’t. Some form of religion will be here — even if it’s deified politics, as in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia — because man is a religious creature who has to live with some connection to transcendence, even if he denies transcendence. But absent a miracle, it won’t be Christianity. The young have been raised in a world — and conditioned by institutions and popular culture — in which traditional Christianity at best makes little sense, and at worst seems bigoted. Here, from The Benedict Option, is what two prominent sociologists of religion found starting twenty years ago (!):

Even more troubling, many of the churches that do stay open will have been hollowed out by a sneaky kind of secularism to the point where the “Christianity” taught there is devoid of power and life. It has already happened in most of them. In 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton examined the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers from a wide variety of backgrounds. What they found was that in most cases, teenagers adhered to a mushy pseudo-religion the researchers deemed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). MTD has five basic tenets:

• A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
• God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
• The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
• God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
• Good people go to heaven when they die.

This creed, they found, is especially prominent among Catholic and Mainline Protestant teenagers. Evangelical teenagers fared measurably better, but were still far from historic Biblical orthodoxy. Smith and Denton claimed that MTD is colonizing existing Christian churches, destroying Biblical Christianity from within, and replacing it with a pseudo-Christianity that is “only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.”

MTD is not entirely wrong. After all, God does exist, and He does want us to be good. The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness, and getting along well with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering—the Way of the Cross—as the pathway to God. Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort.

As bleak as Christian Smith’s 2005 findings were, his follow-up research, published in 2009, was even grimmer. Surveying the moral beliefs of 18 to 23 year olds, Smith and his colleagues found that only forty percent of young Christians surveyed by Smith’s team said that their personal moral beliefs were grounded in the Bible. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the beliefs of even these faithful are Biblically coherent. Many of these “Christians” are actually committed moral individualists who neither know nor practice a coherent Bible-based morality.

An astonishing 61 percent of the emerging adults had no moral problem at all with materialism and consumerism. An added 30 percent expressed some qualms, but figured it was not worth worrying about. In this view, say Smith and his team, “all that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”

How does Christianity thrive in a world in which people believe that the point of life is to enjoy it, and to keep yourself from being tied down so that you can’t enjoy it? It doesn’t — at least not without hollowing itself out to the point of denying its core.

There are young people who are not satisfied with this. We are seeing them showing up now at our little Orthodox mission parish in Baton Rouge. All of them say, in one way or another, that they are looking for a faith that is rock-solid, and that is not going to change with the times. These people may never have read any of my books, but they are my audience. To live for Christ in the world now coming into being is going to require a dying to self the likes of which relatively few people in the West have had to do in the entire Christian era. But this is where we are. We didn’t choose to be born into the world at this time, but we have to do the best we can to be faithful within it.

As West says, the future belongs to who controls the taboos. Biblical Christianity is increasingly taboo in the West. It’s just getting started. This morning some folks on Twitter are making fun of this ridiculous Vox essay in which a self-described “queer, genderqueer atheist” whines because a new horror movie is not sufficiently mean to Christians, making the Exvangelical author feel unsafe. It should be widely mocked, this stupid piece of writing, with its grotesque anti-Christian bigotry. But keep in mind that Vox is a voice of the liberal elites, especially the young liberal elites. Reading the essay, I thought of something that the pseudonymous Ivy League law professor “Kingsfield” told me years ago: that the future of religious liberty in the US is in grave doubt because fewer and fewer people in legal elite circles believes in God, and has any experience of what it is like to be a religious believer. It is alien to them. It makes no sense. Therefore, according to Kingsfield, we can expect in the future judicial rulings that are hostile to religious belief and practice, simply because it strikes judges that religion is irrational and even hostile to socially positive values. Kingsfield stressed that the institutions that produce the nation’s senior jurists are filled with people who think atheism is normative.

Most Americans disagree, but religious believers do not control elite institutions. Regarding the future of the American republic, 15 million fervent Southern Baptists (for example) have less influence than the combined faculties of the Ivy League law schools. If young people want to join the elites, they will need to internalize elite taboos. I would love to see the Republican Party fighting back effectively against woke taboos, but in the end, I fear that it will capitulate, because the culture in which young Americans have been formed is all about instilling woke taboos. This is why I keep saying that we are not going to vote ourselves out of this crisis. We Christians had better learn how to adapt. Millennials and Generation Z are leaving religion, and probably aren’t coming back. They’re not becoming atheists, but rather are adopting DIY religion — a bricolage of a little this, a little that. The idea that a person can make it up as they go along, and that truth is entirely subjective, means the death of normative Christianity, even if the bricolage people identify as Christian. 

As with the Tory party in the UK, the Republicans here might manage to hold onto power simply by positioning themselves as less crazy than the Democrats. But their move leftward on cultural issues will be unstoppable, absent a rebirth of orthodox Christianity, or some other unforeseen event that shatters the worldview of Americans born after 1975. We Christians can hope and pray for that to happen … but unless we’re fools, we had better plan for a Dark Age.

By the way, read Ed West’s excellent memoir, Tory Boy: Memoirs of the Last Conservative, about growing up conservative in Britain. Here’s how it starts. American conservatives of a certain age will relate:

I’ve been meaning for a while to interview Ed West about this book. Need to get on it.

The post Hard To Be A Tory Boy appeared first on The American Conservative.

Fat Leonard, Friend Of The Sailor

This story from the Wall Street Journal is … hard to describe. It starts like this:

On May 22, 2008, six U.S. Navy officers allegedly piled into the presidential suite of the Shangri-La hotel in a posh suburb of the Philippine capital of Manila. The men, among the most powerful military officers in the Pacific, were on shore leave from the U.S.S. Blue Ridge, the flagship of the Seventh Fleet, based in Japan. They were there to indulge in 36 straight hours of drinking, accompanied by a “carousel” of sex workers, according to U.S. federal court documents.

The organizer of this bacchanal was Leonard Glenn Francis, a Malaysian contractor for the Navy who would come to occupy the center of a sweeping criminal probe. The “Fat Leonard” scandal—known by the 350-pound Mr. Francis’s nickname—would lead to the investigation of hundreds of Navy personnel and the indictment of dozens on charges related to corruption and the endangerment of national security.

Mr. Francis, now in his mid-50s, has spent eight years in prison and home detention in San Diego. Having pleaded guilty to charges of bribery and conspiracy, he has yet to be sentenced and is now the star witness in the cases of seven Navy officers, some of whom allegedly attended the party in Manila. Their trials for bribery and obstruction of justice, among other charges, are set to begin in February in federal court in San Diego.

In recent months, in contravention of his plea deal, Mr. Francis has been talking to me for a podcast, disclosing new details of the events behind the scandal. He told me just how deeply he was embedded with the Navy, helping to protect the fleet after the attacks of Sept. 11 and going on secret missions to fight al Qaeda affiliates. He also claimed that he videotaped orgies involving Navy officers and was courted by Russian and Chinese spies—a serious national security risk.

“I played professional. I played sexual. Whatever you needed, anything,” Mr. Francis said.

During our 20 hours of recorded conversation, Mr. Francis indicated that he was eager to tell his story because he was sick with kidney cancer and furious with the Navy for what he saw as a coverup. He claimed that the Navy targeted only junior officers and failed to prosecute Navy admirals who he says took prostitutes and other gifts from him. “They didn’t want to charge any of their senior leadership,” Mr. Francis insisted. “That’s how the military is.”

 

More of Fat Leonard’s derring-do:

He also became a pimp for Navy officers. In return, they overlooked inflated bills and helped him win multimillion-dollar contracts, ensuring that U.S. ships docked at ports that Mr. Francis controlled, according to Justice Department indictments. In our conversations, he boasted of the power he came to wield over the Navy. “I’m nonmilitary, I’m just a civilian, I’m not a U.S. citizen, and all these senior naval officers would just snap on my command: ‘Do this,’ and they’ll move the ships for me,” Mr. Francis said.

The sex that Mr. Francis procured—and the constant flow of Michelin-starred dinners, paid vacations, Cohiba cigars and Dom Pérignon—became perks of the job for scores of Navy officers, according to 34 federal indictments, of which 26 led to guilty pleas. “Everybody has their needs,” Mr. Francis noted shrewdly, and he was there to provide for them: “And it was safe, and they could trust me, and I never let them down. I played professional. I played sexual. Whatever you needed, anything,” he said.

In fact, however, he wasn’t to be trusted. Mr. Francis told me that he regularly videotaped sex involving Navy officers. He said the hid cameras in karaoke machines, including that night in the Shangri-La hotel in Manila, and that he still has the tapes under lock and key. He claimed that he took the videos for fun and never handed over compromising material to U.S. adversaries. But he was a prized target for foreign intelligence services and said that the Chinese and Russian military attachés courted him as an informant.

Read it all. There’s going to be a Fat Leonard podcast series too, starting October 5.

Fat Leonard’s drinking and whoring buddies are the only things standing between China ruling the South China Sea? Xi Jinping must be wetting his pants.

UPDATE: By the way, remember Marine Lt. Col. Stu Sheller, who publicly criticized his superiors for the Afghanistan disaster? He’s in the brig now, awaiting charges.  Despite twenty years of failure, including failure to tell Congress the truth about conditions in the failed Afghan war, the only military officer who is paying a price for conduct related to that war’s failure is the one who called out the brass. Note well how things work.

The post Fat Leonard, Friend Of The Sailor appeared first on The American Conservative.

Church Collapse In Cincinnati

My home diocese announced a plan to restructure the diocese and eventually eliminate 70% of the parishes.

It’s a necessary move based on changing demographics and declining numbers, but I can’t help but ask, How’s that New Evangelization working out?https://t.co/MFyHTxNqSP

— Eric Sammons (@EricRSammons) October 1, 2021

The “New Evangelization” is a Vatican call from some years back to Catholics to re-dedicate themselves to evangelizing. From the Cincinnati newspaper’s report:

The Archdiocese of Cincinnati on Friday launched one of the most ambitious reorganizations in its 200-year history, potentially changing when and where almost a half-million Catholics attend Mass, school and other activities connected to their faith.

Known as Beacons of Light, the restructuring process will combine the archdiocese’s 208 parishes into 60 “families of parishes,” which will begin sharing priests and resources as early as next year.

“Beacons of Light” — gotta love the way the Archdiocese is trying to brand failure as hope. More from the story:

Nowhere has that point been made more clearly than in a 177-page report prepared earlier this year on the archdiocese’s population, finances and schools.

According to the report, Mass attendance in the archdiocese declined 22.5% between 2010 and 2019, Catholic school enrollment fell 14% over the same period, and the number of priests, which has been declining for decades, was projected to drop another 18% by 2031.

The report also found the archdiocese’s demographics continued to shift unfavorably. The Catholic population here is getting older – baptisms declined 19% in the past decade – and the Catholic share of the population fell from 14.2% to 11.9%.

Schnurr said he’s optimistic the archdiocese is turning things around. He said the seminary’s enrollment has doubled from 30 to 60 in the past decade and most parishes are on solid financial footing.

But the report concluded that much of the archdiocese today is built for a world that existed a century ago. To prepare for the next century, [Archbishop] Schnurr said, big changes are needed, even if they’re difficult.

“If we just want to stay in one place,” he said, “time will pass us.”

Read it all. I may be poking fun at the Archbishop for the branding, but I don’t doubt that he and other local church officials are dealing with a real crisis — the gravity of which ordinary Catholics don’t often appreciate. Twenty years ago, when I lived in New York City, I was talking with a local priest who told me that most of the city’s Catholics have no idea how radically things were going to change for them over the next thirty to forty years. He said that the shrinking numbers of priests and of practicing Catholics was going to compel the closure of many parishes. It’s not that the archdiocese wants to do this, but that there is not a pot of leprechaun gold under the main altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, so what choice do they have?

The disaffected Catholic traditionalist Steve Skojec commented on the Sammons tweet:

He’s right about that — and I say that as someone who broadly backs returning to tradition. Though not a Catholic, I strongly support the existence of Latin mass communities, but they are not the entire answer for the Church’s decline. The fact is, we live within a de-Christianizing culture, and it is not at all clear to me that there is a “killer app” that will turn this around for the Catholics or any other church. If people don’t want what you are selling, repackaging and rebranding it is not going to move the merchandise.

Why don’t people want what the Church offers? (And by “the Church,” I don’t mean the Catholic Church exclusively.) I don’t think it’s because people no longer need a sense of meaning, purpose, and community in their lives. My guess is that they don’t think they can get that at church. To be fair to us church folks: if people come to church thinking that it’s going to provide them with some kind of magic course of instruction that improves their lives without them having to do anything, they’re not going to find it. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. The sacristan in the opening scene of Tarkovsky’s great 1983 movie Nostalghia is right to tell the sophisticated Roman woman that if she wants something from God, she has to first kneel. “Casual onlookers” cannot hope to experience God.

There is great wisdom in that. In my college years and immediately after, I wanted all the blessings of religious faith, but was unwilling to make any sacrifices. It was only when I had my back to the wall, and surrendered my liberty to God, that my relationship with Him became real. Latin mass, guitar mass, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, or any one of the forms of Protestant worship — none of it will make a difference in your life unless you are offering yourself sacrificially to God. Take a look at this horrible op-ed from The New York Times, by a law professor who describes her divorce as an act of “radical self-love”. She writes:

There was no emotional or physical abuse in our home. There was no absence of love. I was in love with my husband when we got divorced. Part of me is in love with him still. I suspect that will always be the case. Even now, after everything, when he walks into the room my stomach drops the same way it does before the roller coaster comes down. I divorced my husband not because I didn’t love him. I divorced him because I loved myself more.

… But deep inside, I knew that trying to force myself to subordinate my ambitions and always put our children first would have been impossible without lopping off a vital part of myself.

If you show up at church with that attitude, you will be immune to grace. Trust me on this — I have been that person! Even today, I am more of that person than I should be, and I struggle to surrender. This is what it means to be a Christian. The author of that piece, Lara Bazelon, wants control. She is an epitome of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) culture. WEIRD culture has evolved to the point where it is incompatible with authentic Christianity — so naturally the faith is in demise. Christianity tells you that your life is not your own. That there is a sacred order undergirding the cosmos — and you are not at the center of it. That you have free will, but that there is a right way to live and a wrong way to live, and that you will be held responsible for your choices. That the greatest good is to lay down your life for others. That worldly achievement is all empty vanity if you lose your soul.

On my Substack newsletter this week, I wrote about Harvard anthropologist Joe Henrich and his book about WEIRD psychology. I said:

Henrich writes that what sets WEIRD people (like us) apart from others around the world is that we are highly individualistic. We are not as willing to conform with authority figures when it conflicts with our own beliefs and preferences. “We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time,” he writes. “When acting, we prefer a sense of control and the feeling of making our own choices.”

Now, think about how that affects our spirituality. What does “the communion of the saints” mean to people who are culturally and even neurologically primed to diminish the meaning of community? You can see why the idea of authoritative tradition is a dog that increasingly won’t hunt in the West. You can also see why surrendering to something greater than ourselves goes very much against the grain of our psychology.

Lara Bazelon’s way of thinking makes sense in a totally WEIRD world. The way of thinking of a faithful Catholic woman like Federica Sermarini, who died this week of cancer (read her husband Marco’s amazing eulogy), is totally foreign to WEIRDness. Federica and her family, and her Catholic community, were and are blazing with joy and happiness. It’s because they don’t put their personal happiness first. This is the paradox of Christian living: those who wish to save their own lives will lose them, and those who surrender their own lives will find them.

What does this have to do with the decline of American churches today? For one, it means that the cultural psychology of Americans has changed so that a church that wants to appeal to the average American is going to have to water down the faith to an unrecognizable form. In fact, this has already happened; this is what the whole Moralistic Therapeutic Deism phenomenon is about. Therefore, churches that offer a thicker, more robust account of Christianity can expect to struggle to attract the faithful, at least in the short run. People want a quick fix. People want to be told that they can have whatever they want without having to surrender a thing. This is a lie.

Churches that are more faithful to the Gospel, though, and to traditional disciplines, will be more resilient over time, I believe. First, it’s because they are living in truth. Second, it’s because the kind of disciples these congregations produce will have what the fallen-away world realizes it actually wants. Once again, I offer to you what Father Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, predicted in 1969:

The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods; nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves. To put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality. Unselfishness, which makes men free, is attained only through the patience of small daily acts of self-denial. By this daily passion, which alone reveals to a man in how many ways he is enslaved by his own ego, by this daily passion and by it alone, a man’s eyes are slowly opened. He sees only to the extent that he has lived and suffered. If today we are scarcely able any longer to become aware of God, that is because we find it so easy to evade ourselves, to flee from the depths of our being by means of the narcotic of some pleasure or other. Thus our own interior depths remain closed to us. If it is true that a man can see only with his heart, then how blind we are!

How does all this affect the problem we are examining? It means that the big talk of those who prophesy a Church without God and without faith is all empty chatter. We have no need of a Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the priest who is no specialist, who does not stand on the [sidelines], watching the game, giving official advice, but in the name of God places himself at the disposal of man, who is beside them in their sorrows, in their joys, in their hope and in their fear, such a priest will certainly be needed in the future.

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

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

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

There you have it. This is why I believe that Benedict Option communities will be the most important ones for carrying the faith forward through this dark night of apostasy and persecution now upon us. They are purpose-driven, sacrificial communities dedicated to living counterculturally, preferring nothing to the search for God. These communities won’t all look alike, but they will share the understanding that to live as a follower of Jesus Christ in this Babylonian exile makes extraordinary demands — and they will be willing to live by those demands.

It is the only way. Father Cassian Folsom, the founding prior of the Norcia monastery, told me that only Christian families and communities who live like this — he brought up the Tipi Loschi, Federica Sermarini’s community — will make it through the trials to come.

To go back to Steve Skojec’s question: “What would work?” I don’t think anybody has a clear, detailed answer. We are going to have to experiment. Benedict XVI called on Christians in the post-Christian parts of our world to be “creative minorities.” The people of the Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati have been living off the fruits of the last era of Christendom. Now times have changed. The future Benedict XVI saw it all coming, and illuminated the hopeful path forward. One of the most important truths about this new era is that the church, according to Ratzinger, “will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.” This is true, and not just in the sense of we are all going to have to show up more often to church functions. What he’s saying is that we cannot count on Christian culture to support our way of life. We are going to have to be active, not passive, just along for the ride.

You can do this in a Latin mass community. You can do this in a Novus Ordo community. You can do this in a variety of church communities. But what you can’t do is expect it all to be handed to you.

What’s happening to the Catholics of the Cincinnati archdiocese is going to happen to Christians everywhere in America, sooner or later. We had better be ready. I think once again of the German Catholic man who came up to me after a Benedict Option event in Rome three years ago. He told me that he and his Catholic friends believe that the institutional Catholic Church in Germany is going to collapse at some point soon, because of a lack of faith among the people. He told me that he and his friends — all of them married with big families — have been planning for how to keep the life of the Church going under these circumstances. That man has hope, but his hope is not that somehow, a miracle will happen, and everything will be restored. Rather, his is the kind of hope that teaches him to live sacrificially now, so that his children and grandchildren will have a Christian future. And that is why they are doing a version of the Benedict Option.

What the Catholics of the Cincinnati archdiocese have been doing doesn’t work anymore. That is obvious. They are going to have to do something different. And again, what’s true for them is true for all of us. But what?

One more thing. Father Andrew Stephen Damick, an Orthodox priest, posted this to his Facebook page (I don’t have Facebook; an Orthodox catechumen friend sent it to me):

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick 
September 29 at 1:50 PM  ·

THE SUDDEN INFLUX OF INQUIRERS AND CATECHUMENS INTO THE ORTHODOX CHURCH IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD

I recently asked in a couple of Orthodox clergy groups on Facebook about whether they have seen what I have seen and heard about anecdotally — an unusual number of inquirers and catechumens showing up to the parish within the past year.

Of the 31 who responded so far, 28 said yes, while 3 said no.  The “yes” responses don’t seem to have any particular commonality among them — geographically, jurisdictionally, etc.

A number said that they noticed that the newcomers skew younger.  Several said it’s more than they’ve ever had — in some cases, double.  In the case of the parish where I continue to serve as an attached priest, it’s almost more than all 11 years of my own pastorate combined.

I am not aware of any major new Orthodox outreach initiative happening during this past year that could account for this — clergy, lay, official, unofficial, etc.  Certainly one initiative, person or another might be the avenue by which someone became aware of the Orthodox faith, but there isn’t any new thing that has happened within the past year that would suddenly account for this kind of thing happening all over.

The only obvious “cause” that comes to mind is the pandemic, though we can only speculate as to exactly how that has affected people such that some subset decide to show up to the Orthodox Church for the first time.  I also don’t know if other Christian groups are seeing this same effect, nor do I know if this is happening outside the Anglophone world.
Whatever the cause, it seems clear that God is bringing people to Himself right now in greater numbers, at least in the circles I am aware of.

We have a responsibility to pray for these people, to encourage them in their repentance by our own repentance, to show them what it means to be like Jesus Christ, to love them with kindness and self-sacrifice, and to show them that the Church is their true home.  People coming in won’t be better off if they don’t get planted firmly in the garden and grow to be like Christ.

The world seems to be going insane around us (and in us!), and some people are even acting insane in the name of Jesus Christ, filled with hatred and mockery for fellow Christians based on all kinds of transient issues and grievances, so it is even more incumbent upon Christians to repent and be like Christ, to show ourselves to be the children of God.
Are our hearts and parishes ready to receive the people God is sending us?  I know that I’ve got some work to do myself.
—
(NB:  I am not making any statements here about overall growth (net or otherwise), the retention of converts or those raised in the Church, how long what is being observed anecdotally might last, etc.  This post is about seeing an unusual uptick over the past year in inquirers and catechumens, not anything else.)

We have seen this in our little mission parish in Baton Rouge too: more and more young people coming. They all say some version of what my catechumen friend said when he sent me this:

The influx is happening exactly because nothing new or major has happened in the Church and not just the past year but for the last 2,000 years.

My friend is a fallen-away Catholic who has found in Orthodoxy the stability that he did not find in contemporary Catholicism. I do not proselytize on this blog, so please don’t read me here as telling you to become Orthodox (though I do wish you would)! What I am saying, though, is that there is a lesson in this for all Christian churches. The Tipi Loschi, the Catholic community I profiled in The Benedict Option, are not a Latin mass community. They all attend local parishes. But they are rooted deeply in the traditions of the Catholic Church, and take their kids on pilgrimages. They see Catholic Christianity — all of it, not just the Church since 1965 — as something to be celebrated and lived. When you are with those folks, you really do see and feel the joy of the Gospel. For them, it’s because the faith is not part of their lives; the faith is their lives.

It’s like that in Orthodoxy too. Though you certainly have lackluster, worldly Orthodox Christians, the Orthodox faith is more than anything else a rooted way of life. Orthodoxy isn’t going to change itself to suit your preferences. It’s not a seeker-friendly church; it’s a finder-friendly church — and that’s what people who are eager to be more serious about their faith lives are responding to. They are responding to a church that proclaims a Way worth sacrificing for.

I wonder if that, generally speaking, is the answer for all churches in this post-Christian era: become a finder-friendly church. I’m curious to hear from you readers in different Christian traditions (and even in non-Christian traditions) what you think a finder-friendly congregation would be like. Please answer in the comments — and identify your faith tradition.

UPDATE: A Catholic priest e-mails:

We’ve corresponded before, and I’ve been following the blog for a while now, enthusiastically. In addition to offering my praise for the blog and recent books, I also wanted to mention something that came to mind while reading your article on the coming consolidation of parishes in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. As you mention, the New Evangelization has been a focus in the church for a while now. But it’s often difficult for church leaders to define what it is in theological or pastoral terms. The general agreement seems to be that it’s important, but then it usually devolves into a description of the speaker’s interests or priorities: liturgical embellishment and correction; renewed catechesis; a more welcoming atmosphere and so forth. Not all are bad suggestions and they’re each important.

Something struck me the other day, though, while reading Frederic van der Meer’s Augustine the Bishop. Augustine’s approach to evangelizing the (dwindling) pagan population of Hippo Regius also involves a fairly bold attack on their idolatry. Put simply, for Augustine and for many of his brother bishops, the denunciation of the idols of the surrounding society was a major component of their whole evangelizing program. For them to truly accept Christ, they would have to leave that other world behind. And I don’t know that that’s always made as clear today.

You know far better than most how far the modern world has gone in its pursuit of idols. A recent book by Eugene McCarraher, the Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity further emphasizes that point. Any attempts at consolidating churches, proclaiming Christ in the culture, or even establishing the kind of communities in which the BenOp you describe could fall on rocky soil if the idols of the surrounding culture aren’t named as such and firmly rejected.

Another reader writes (I’ve slightly edited to protect his privacy):

I attend a Greek Orthodox church because I married a woman of Greek heritage. When you talk about the Orthodox church not changing, I don’t recognize the Greek orthodox church in America. It is VERY politically left wing, particularly on racial issues. I’m sure you have seen the Twitter account of the head of the church in America

https://mobile.twitter.com/Elpidophoros

And you probably saw him ban any priests from giving people religious exemptions from vaccine mandates.

But have you also seen the Greek orthodox church’s YouTube account where they praise BLM and recite every evil Woke buzzword?

https://youtu.be/3e0gfKFR9HQ

This is my problem. The idea of Orthodoxy is so great and actually my church here locally is not woke. But I know the institution of the Greek church in America is completely rotten. The only thing they haven’t caved on is the LGBTQ agenda.

Am I overreacting? Do I need to just switch to a ROCOR church? Hope we get a new patriarch? I grew up in the United Methodist Church which barely exists anymore.

I know very little about the Greek Orthodox church, so I don’t know how to answer the reader’s questions. I’m told that it’s generally the case that Slavic and Arabic churches are more conservative than Greek ones. Then again, I think it was a fairly ecumenical group of Orthodox from across jurisdictions who tried to get me cancelled from the Schmemann Lecture at St. Vladimir’s Seminary. The Greeks counterprogrammed it too. But again, I don’t really know. I have made it my business to stay out of Church politics.

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Federica’s Victory

Federica Sermarini, wife of Marco and mother to five wonderful children, died this week of pancreatic cancer. Her funeral was on September 29, in San Benedetto del Tronto. Readers of The Benedict Option will know all about the Sermarinis. I have told anyone who will listen that their little community of Catholic faithful, the Tipi Loschi (cheekily, “the Usual Suspects”), are the best example of the Benedict Option I ever found. They are joyfully countercultural, and rooted deeply in their faith. Anybody who thinks that the Benedict Option is about running to the hills and hiding out fearfully and joylessly should visit the Tipi Loschi, who refute all those claims.

In the book, you meet Marco and Federica — but mostly you meet Marco, because Federica’s English wasn’t great. In Marco you see an Italian man of irrepressible joy, which comes from his boundless faith and love of life. It tells you everything that he is the head of Italy’s G.K. Chesterton Society. Once on French TV I was asked who my hero is, and I said, “Marco Sermarini,” explaining that this Italian lawyer, who lives in a small city far off the beaten track, has shown me what kind of joyful life of creativity and love is possible with great faith.

This morning someone sent me the eulogy Marco gave for Federica at her funeral. I translated it through DeepL, and present it below. This is a powerful testimony of faith, hope, and love. I just read it, and am sitting in my armchair in tears. I offer it to you, and pray that it blesses you as it has me. This is what it means to be a true Christian:

First of all I want to thank everyone for a number of reasons, your presence here brings us a lot.

I speak on behalf of the Sermarini clan, it comforts us a lot, it gives us great pleasure. I should make a huge list of people from the five continents who have prayed for us during this period, and the prayers have had their fruit, without a doubt.

I should make a very long list of people who have helped us in so many ways during these six months of illness and hardship, which you can surely understand.

I do not do any of these, however, I say thank you. Because our Chesterton said that gratitude is the basis of happiness, a happy man is always a grateful man, only a grateful man can be happy.

And we are very grateful for Federica, so we say thank you.

We say thank you to the Lord for giving her to us, for letting her stay with us for these years and this is already a lot, we can only say thank you. Also because my wife has left us a great delivery.

Between yesterday and today I have heard from many people who wanted to express their participation in our pain and many of them have told me that my wife was a person who was good at welcoming, and I thought I knew this, but maybe now I understand it well. Many have told me that my wife was a person capable of surprise, and I knew that.

I remember a joke made by a friend of ours, a Lebanese man who was very nice. Since my wife always asked so many questions, she asked them like this, as they came to her, and at a certain moment this friend said to her: “But Federica, you look like a child!”, and her being like this has always remained, until the last second. And for this I am very grateful.

And then the undeniable educational talent of Federica, which could not be explained only at school, also because she did not teach at our school, but she was a constant presence and she was around you until you did not give up. And so this talent was not only expressed in her family, a demanding woman, a general of the army corps from this point of view, but it was expressed wherever she was.

I use the past tense but I can safely use the present tense, and this is another gift that we have cultivated in our 27 years and 12 days of marriage, which is the gift of the Catholic Faith.

The Catholic Faith tells us that we must believe in the Communion of Saints, so here is the Ecclesia Militans [Church Militant] that is the church that fights, and over there is the Ecclesia Triumphans [Church Triumphant]. We are the same army, but for now we are in two different departments, but absolutely nothing changes.

Speaking of wars and battles, with regard to the reading we read a moment ago, it is taken from the epistle that tells us of a battle, indeed of a war. A war that is a vision, but that is a war that has been there, that is really there and that is there every day. It is the war between good and evil, between God and evil, and this war is fought in front of everyone by St. Michael, leader of the angelic militia.

When I saw that the funeral was going to take place today [September 29, Feast of the Archangels], I was happy for this occasion, because the battle that Federica fought was a battle, the last one we fought, but a war that we started all along, and in this battle the great dragon wanted to prevail over her, but he didn’t succeed.

“The great dragon, the ancient serpent, the one we call the devil and Satan, and who seduces the whole earth, was hurled down to the earth, and with him his angels were also hurled down.” (Revelation 12,9)

And it fulfilled what we understood from the beginning: that it was going to be a battle, and we sensed from the beginning that we might have to give a testimony, and it says it here, but I didn’t know six months ago. I didn’t know how it was going to turn out and I didn’t know it was going to turn out today.

“Now the salvation, the strength and the kingdom of our God – because we are here fighting for our King, who is God — and the power of his Christ has been fulfilled, for the accuser of our brothers has been precipitated, — that is, the one who tells us “you are worthless, your life is worthless, your life is nothing, everything ends up in a black hole” — the one who accused them before our God day and night.

But they — that is, we, Federica — overcame him through the blood of the Lamb — where Federica washed her clothes for six months — and thanks to the testimony of their martyrdom”.

That is, we poor little frightened soldiers, that is, when they tell you “your wife has a tumor, and not a pimple, that is one of the worst, it is not that you want to jump for joy, but then courage comes and courage gives you the strength to give testimony, that is, to do as the ancient Christians, where the first thing to which they gave testimony was the resurrection of Christ, and we give testimony to the fact that life does not end here, Christ is risen and gave his life for us and defeated death. We didn’t understand that we had to give this testimony, but we tried it along the way.

Our Frassati [Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, to whom the community is devoted] reminded us, and yesterday it came back to me, that we are not made for this earth, but for our True Homeland.

So the battle has been won. Someone will say “But how? Federica is gone”, the battle has been won.

Federica wanted to die at home she always told me that. She died with us, with our family and friends around and with the comfort of the priest, who was never missing in these months.

And then she didn’t die in despair, she died serene, fighting to the last because even death is a battle to be fought, and I must say that she was very brave, she never shirked. I tried to give her strength as much as I could, or rather we tried because our children have never pulled back, they have never been afraid to face this thing, or rather they faced it with courage, because courage follows fear.

And in these months what has accompanied us are some lines from a poem by our Chesterton, which is entitled “The Ballad of the White Horse”. It’s the story of King Alfred who has to fight against the Vikings, and the Vikings were cruel pagans and he had to defend his people and at a certain point he has a dialogue, a kind of vision, with Our Lady who says to him:

“But you and all the lineage of Christ are ignorant and brave, and you have wars that you hardly win and souls that you hardly save. I say nothing for your comfort, nor for your desire, I only say: the sky is already getting darker and the sea is getting bigger. The night will be three times darker over you, and the sky will become a mantle of steel. Can you feel joy without a reason, tell me, do you have faith without a hope?”

Humanly we had no great hope, we kept Faith, which was the real battle to win.

I can only give you this testimony, I could talk for four consecutive days about how great my wife was in life, how simple, humble, good, a good mother, a good wife, full of strength, indomitable, never bent, never sat down, never satisfied, but this is another story and a bit long, but many of you have brought me this testimony and I am calm and serene.

I invite you to be just as calm and serene, just as happy and I would even say cheerful, and I can say that. Because in any case this is part of our being Christians, we have this hope, this is the true hope, in the end this is what counts my friends.

So be cheerful and pray for the soul of my wife, because something will always be missing, pray for us who are and the battle continues, and we do not want to back down in the least.

And with this I also say thank you to the priests who came, to the monks, to all the dear friends and let’s go on, with courage.

A friend who was at the funeral sent me this photo of Marco and his oldest, Pier Giorgio (in the white shirt):

My friend said:

Look at the faces of Marco and his son Pier Giorgio at the end of the funeral. They were even more smiling than usual, testifying to all of us present the certainty of eternal life.

These men were at the bedside of their wife and mother as she breathed her very last two days earlier. And now look at them. These are Christian men who know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will see her again one day. As Marco would say, Grande! 

I was not able to get to Italy in time for the funeral, but I wanted to do something in Federica’s memory. I gave a donation to the building fund for the Scuola Chesterton, the classical Christian school that Marco and Federica started. If you were moved by Marco’s words, and the testimony of the life and death of Federica Sermarini, please consider making a gift to continue her work at the school. 

And if you can, someday, go to San Benedetto del Tronto and visit the Tipi Loschi community. There they have faith. There they have hope. There, above all, they have love. This is how life is supposed to be.

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Illegal Immigration Is Our Strength™

The Biden administration is surrendering the borders:

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday said immigration officers can no longer detain and deport people from the U.S. solely because they are undocumented.

In a memo to immigration and border agency officials, Mayorkas outlined new guidelines that direct Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to focus on the arrest and deportation of immigrants who pose a threat to both national and border security, as well as public safety.

This includes people suspected of terrorism or espionage, those who have committed serious crimes and migrants who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border after Nov. 1, 2020.

The guidelines require a case-by-case assessment of individuals to determine if they fall under these priority categories, according to a Homeland Security press release.

ICE officers will no longer be permitted to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants who have long been “contributing members” of the U.S. community, including faith leaders, farmworkers and frontline health workers. The new guidelines also prohibit officers from detaining immigrants whose status is revealed by “unscrupulous employers,” as long as they don’t commit a major crime.

This is amnesty-lite: no citizenship, but no reason to fear arrest and deportation.

What kind of country is this, anyway? Why have a border at all? What is the value of citizenship if anybody can walk across the border and, unless they’re a terrorist or a criminal, stay in the country?

We couldn’t win in Afghanistan. We can’t even control our own borders. What can we do?

Another Mayorkas quote from the Homeland Security press release:

“As we strive to provide them with a path to status, we will not work in conflict by spending resources seeking to remove those who do not pose a threat and, in fact, make our Nation stronger.”

Yes, of course: Like diversity, Illegal Immigration Is Our Strength. This is how the Democrats manufacture consent to give up on America for Americans and for immigrants who come in by the rules.

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Learning From The Radical Right

I have been meaning for a while to write about one of the best books I’ve read this year: Matthew Rose’s A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right. Rose is not on the radical right; he’s a Catholic and the director of the Berkeley Institute, and a contributor to First Things magazine. In fact, a superb 2019 essay he wrote for First Things about the far-right journalist and essayist Samuel Francis forms the basis for his new book.

Rose’s new book profiles some of the leading contemporary thinkers of the radical right, showcasing why they appeal to some people today. He neither lionizes them nor demonizes them, though he certainly does not whitewash their beliefs. What’s so valuable about this book — you’ll get this if you read the Sam Francis essay linked above — is that Rose looks at these figures squarely and fairly, and explains why they matter today. You don’t have to like any of them, but you need to know who they are and what they thought.

Henry George, writing in Front Porch Republic, says:

Rose’s book is not a sociological survey but a series of intellectual portraits of five thinkers of (loosely) the post-war radical right: Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain Benoist, and Samuel Francis. As Rose says in the book’s introduction, we tend to view history as before and during liberalism. We know (or assume) the time before liberalism was one of darkness and cruelty, intellectually closed and socially brutal. But it still had the allure of familiarity and cultural connection however faint. What is truly disturbing, according to Rose, is to attempt to imagine a world after liberalism, one that does not correspond to what we know or what we think we knew. If liberalism is no longer the baseline, then our most basic presuppositions must be up for grabs, and who knows what could replace them?

The five thinkers under discussion are not presented through the argument of “abandon liberalism and this is your destiny,” but there is a warning implicit through the book that their ideas are serious and deep enough to take on their own terms, offering a potent alternative that has resonance with our current condition. Should we lack prudence, we could indeed follow the ideas of these thinkers down the dark paths they lay out. As Rose writes, “I do not claim we are fated to repeat their arguments, and certainly not to admire their character. But they can serve as guides to some of the lurking political possibilities of our time, helping us to better understand what some radicals have already discovered, and what more will likely find.”

Rose argues that these figures went further than others in looking beyond the present and past into a reactive future. None of these thinkers is conventionally conservative; they see little worth retaining in their own time and look forward to what could arise and how thinkers like themselves could or should work to shape it. For these thinkers who wrote with words of dynamite, what ails liberalism went down to its roots. For them, liberalism was both false and evil, denying our collective, racial nature and heritage, unmooring us from our place in the ethno-cultural social order.

This is exactly right (about Rose’s book), and why I found the book so riveting. Rose is emphatically not on the side of these radical right thinkers, but he is smart enough to realize that they are deep, and they speak about things that liberalism (meaning classical liberalism) prefers to ignore. We on the Right tend to be dismissive of far-left claims and arguments, when really we shouldn’t. Some conservative on Twitter wrote not long ago about a report that the Millennials and Gen Z have far less savings and wealth at their age than the Boomers did. The Twitter commentator said something to the effect of: Is there any wonder that people who can’t accumulate anything under capitalism don’t like capitalism?

Similarly, people on the Left ought to pay attention to what these radical right people are saying. They are speaking to people who have not prospered in the liberal order. You can call these people “losers” and “haters,” and maybe they are. But reading Rose’s book, you understand that those facile dismissals are dangerous. George points out that all the thinkers profiled by Rose hated Christianity, and blamed it for introducing liberalism to the world. He goes on:

This speaks to a problem keenly felt by those on the radical right: how does one live, and find meaning in the world, when Christian faith seems impossible? There is a particular urgency to this question in the work of Spengler and Evola, writing in the wake of the catastrophe of World War One.

The attempts of each to find a way towards meaning is telling. It speaks to the spiritual dissatisfaction that sits at the base of so many forms of extremism, from Islamism to the far-left and radical right. Each of these writers sought some sort of resolution and redemption inside the world and within history itself, having discarded or lost the path to salvation outside time that Christianity offers. But no matter their efforts, these thinkers seemingly cannot escape the shadow of the cross they so despise.

Read the entire review. 

And I hope you will buy the book too, because its importance at this critical moment in our history cannot be overstated. Rose is a Christian, as I mentioned. He begins the final chapter by writing about “Dan,” a young correspondent who left Christianity because, in his view, “The Church has become the number one enemy of Western Civilization.” Rose goes on:

Almost everything written about the “alternative right” has been wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous; they are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy. The reputation is deserved, but do not be deceived. Behind its online tantrums and personal attacks are arguments of seductive power.

This chapter is the first attempt I have seen by a Christian on the Right to grapple honestly with the threat to Christianity posed by the radical (anti-Christian) right. Rose pays these thinkers the compliment of taking their ideas seriously. He says that the politics of the post-Christian Right are going to sound a lot of the themes that the far-right authors he profiles advocated — this, even if the post-Christian Rightists of the future have never heard of these men. We Christians had better be ready for these arguments, Rose says. He goes on:

Like believers in late antiquity, Christians need to be willing to see their cultures, including their proudest achievements, through the eyes of their most unforgiving critics. Doing so requires that they resist the temptation, however powerful, to dismiss their critics’ ideas as motivated solely by prejudice or hatred. The radical right can be ignored or marginalized for a time, and we can hope that its season will not soon arrive. But it represents a perennial possibility in our political life, and where social changes continue to open new intellectual spaces, its opportunities for expression will undoubtedly grow. Its ideas do not cease to animate human minds when they cannot be openly expressed and debated, and it is not credit to us if we succeed in repressing them without first understanding them. We cannot know what we affirm without knowing what we deny, and we cannot know who we are if we do not know what other ways of life are possible.

More:

Liberalism aspired to order society around a vision of human beings, abstracted from all attachments, whose fundamental needs are for prosperity, peace, and pleasure. It imagined human beings as rights-bearing individuals who could pursue their own understanding of the good life. If liberalism is in crisis, it is because this picture of human life has proven to be impoverished. Human beings are not defined through acts of individual choice and self-expression alone; they are social creatures who find meaning through relationships they have not chosen and responsibilities they cannot relinquish. Human identity is in this respect irreducibly illiberal, being embedded in lines of kinship and descent, existing only in a sequence of generations, always as a child, and invariably an inheritor of a particular cultural and social patrimony. It is an irreducible part of our nature, an absolute given, that we owe our existence to parents and peoples we did not originally choose.

In light of that paragraph, consider a complaint that was voiced years ago by a commentator, long since departed, called German Reader. He was a German who was not a Christian, and who said openly that he held Catholic and Protestant pastors in his country responsible for its destruction. Why? Because they promoted open-doors immigration, which was tearing apart the social fabric. Anybody who has spent time in European cities knows what a crisis immigration is causing there. Pope Francis constantly promotes open-doors immigration, apparently disregarding the right of the various peoples of Europe to decide for themselves who will live in their territories, and disregarding the fact that there is something valuable in the lives of their particular peoples, stretching far back into the past — something that is worth preserving, but that cannot be preserved if their people are replaced, or semi-replaced, by foreigners.

As you know, I spent significant time in Hungary this year. Immigration is a big deal there, with Prime Minister Viktor Orban following a hard line against immigration to his country. Orban’s argument is that Hungary has existed as a nation for a thousand years. Nobody else in the world speaks a language like theirs. There are fewer than 10 million Hungarians living in Hungary. To open the doors to immigrants is to put the existence of their nation in danger. Given that much of the migration to Europe comes from the Islamic world, it would be to put the existence of Christianity in Hungary in danger — this, at a time when secularism has it flat on its back.

Of course Orban is right about this. If people like Pope Francis want to urge people like Viktor Orban to change their minds, then he (Francis) has to take seriously the arguments of the anti-immigrant folks — whose number includes many Catholics. But I don’t see that happening. Instead, there is nothing but chastisement and bland speechifying talking about welcoming the stranger. To be fair, Christians do have a particular obligation to consider their moral responsibility towards the stranger. But does fulfilling that obligation require the suicide of a people, and of their state? These are extremely difficult questions, and there is no indication that liberals — neither Francis nor any other leading liberals — are capable of addressing them seriously. At some point, though, denouncing all dissent from the liberal line as “hatred” and “bigotry” becomes untenable. These questions are not going away.

If Christianity cannot figure out how to answer the real questions these people have, then we Christians will lose them to the radical right. Matthew Rose makes this extremely important point in his vital book. But bourgeois Christian conservatism of the Neuhaus-Novak-Weigel-Colson era is no longer enough. What, then? I have proposed the Benedict Option as a contribution to that discussion. Patrick Deneen, Rusty Reno, Sohrab Ahmari, and others have their own ideas. This 2015 First Things essay by Michael Hanby is a great place to start the deliberations. 

UPDATE: A reader who is non-white e-mails to say:

Nearly all of what you say is of critical importance, but “Learning From The Radical Right” had an urgency to it that I haven’t felt in your other posts. For one, it immediately reminded me of what Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry said in 2017 (but also attributed to Ross Douthat): If you didn’t like the Christian right, you’ll really hate the post-Christian right.You know by now I’m an atheist. Which is strange, because most other atheists who share my views of God and spirituality, many within the scientific community, are not on the Right like I am. The critical difference between myself and other atheists is that while I don’t believe in a higher power or an existence outside ourselves, I see religion as eminently useful. Religion has formed the bedrock of families, communities, and societies for all of human history. At this late hour in our republic, I’m also more convinced than ever before that religion, singularly Christianity, has not only formed the basis for and great enabler of all of Western civilization, but has also acted as a brake on humankind’s worst impulses.Consider what Gobry said in 2017 (the entire article is at If you didn’t like the Christian right, you’ll really hate the post-Christian right | The Week):The progressive dream of secularism entailed the right turning into, essentially, the center-left. Instead, all over Europe, and increasingly America, we see the post-Christian right turning into a nationalist, or even ethno-nationalist, movement.I don’t know what Gobry’s political alignment is, but it doesn’t matter, because what he says is correct: the Left, in its assault on Christianity and America’s heritage overall, is creating something it has even less control over. This selfish (at best) power grab by the Left to create a collectivism has certainly succeeded in putting them in the driver’s seat, at the cost of creating a struggle which increasingly cannot be resolved in civil fashion.Gobry concludes with:The secularization of America can have another effect. When America was a majority Christian nation, it was also a less polarized nation. It’s hard not to see that Christianity played a role by providing a common language that helped bridge partisan differences. A secularized America is going to have a much more extreme right wing, but also a much more extreme left wing, and fewer ways for them to interact and talk. Welcome to the future.200% The Left has PTSD because of this fact, as it indicts them as criminally culpable for the destruction of this country and the West. You can argue that America shouldn’t be a theocracy and that nobody should be forced to believe or go to church while also conceding, as I have, that the United States wouldn’t ever have existed (at least not as we’ve known it) without Christianity. Classical liberalism was the product of those who were of faith, many of whom took the Bible literally. The Founding Fathers were all religious men.Despite the Left’s lies, the Abolitionists were not, anything remotely resembling today’s Woke. They were, instead, conservative and religious. This makes the Left’s assault on Christianity all the more baffling – these conservative Christians rendered more “progress” on humankind than most people. So why the vitriol? Is it because you saw a televangelist say you’re going to Hell if you’re gay? Does that one act alone by one person invalidate all the good the faith has done for the world?Samuel Huntington, who was heavily influenced by Oswald Spengler, said things similar to what Gobry said. He observed that Americans are, compared to Europeans, far more religious and that Protestant Christianity should serve as a foundation for American culture, because that’s what made us. Without this distinction, there’s nothing keeping us from becoming more like Europe. Maybe that’s a good thing, but it’d certainly be the end of the American experiment.I guess the urgency I felt reading your post is due to my atheism, which makes me susceptible to Radical Right thinking. I have to admit, their ideas are fascinating and I think they’re actually correct about a great many things. But a society cannot be created on the basis of “correctness.” A society built on the basis of science alone is effectively a Darwinian society, which we all reject. There’s a reason why secular humanism is so popular among scientists, because the underlying philosophy behind it is to channel science for the greater good, not to surrender ourselves to it.The same goes with the Radical Right. It may, in fact, be better for all ethnicities and races to live separately, for example. But paths inevitably cross, and then what? Shall we reduce ourselves to an existence of ethnic conflict or race war? Or shall we find ourselves an imperfect means of coexistence which, if it doesn’t resolve our differences, prevents our differences from being used as an excuse to kill each other?I can’t remember who said it, but it goes something like, “A society is something where people agree on certain myths.” Myths have become synonymous with lies and I agree, it’s a thin line. But, on some level, we have to be willing to believe certain things together if we’re to stay together. We have to render unto a higher power, even if we don’t actually believe in its literal existence. We have to believe we’re a good people, even if we’ve committed unspeakable sins in our past. We have to see one another as family, even if we’ve never met each other. Without any of this, a society cannot exist and certainly not a nation.This is why Viktor Orban is doing it right, like you say. He’s not the alt-right, but a man who knows what it takes to create a truly civil nation and society. Emphasizing Hungary’s Christian heritage is bigoted to most, but I’m more convinced than ever this is the only way to prevent something terrible from coming its way. The Left’s failure to cease fire is going to backfire on them big time and they’ll rue the day they commenced their assault on Christianity. The Christians, love them or hate them, aren’t the bad guys in all this. They probably never were.And you know what? I don’t think I’ll stand in the way of whatever’s coming back at the Left.

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Tech Censorship

You saw, I take it, that YouTube has banned a number of channels that disseminate what YouTube considers to be fake news about vaccines. Here’s a link to YouTube’s statement about its policy against “medical misinformation”.

Do you trust YouTube’s censors to make honest and appropriate decisions about this topic? I don’t. I am 100 percent certain that there are accounts that could legitimately be banned for putting out vaccine misinformation … but I don’t trust YouTube to discern between those garbage accounts and accounts by people who are sincerely asking valid critical questions about vaccines, or pointing out flaws in the official story.

Just saw this:

Just got BANNED on Facebook for 3
days for posting actual quotes from Joseph Goebbels about propaganda.

They will not let us discuss history. Not even to share direct quotes. This is chilling. @Facebook pic.twitter.com/g732gV85Et

— Keri Smith, Unsafe Space (@ksemamajama) September 29, 2021

This past summer in Romania, a Romanian journalist was kicked off of Facebook for posting a link to an interview he did with me about Live Not By Lies. And a Hungarian conservative magazine was warned by Facebook’s Hungarian staff that they risked being thrown off by continuing to post things Rod Dreher has written.

It’s real. These tech people are not benign and impartial moderators of the conversation. We have given them far too much control over public discourse. They are showing themselves for who they really are now.

It’s not really the fact that they are acting as editors. Every website or portal has to have an editor. As you know, I censor the comments here all the time. Nothing goes up without my approval — and that approval means not that I agree necessarily with what some commenter says, but only that I allow it to appear. Sometimes I make mistakes, especially when I have to approve a lot of comments in a single stretch, but on those occasions one of you usually calls me on it, and I remove the bad comment. If you saw the things I see — submitted comments, I mean — you would doubt whether it was a good idea that Al Gore invented the Internet.

So, yes, somebody has to make the call of what’s acceptable and what’s not. If you don’t have someone doing that, your forum becomes unusable, because bad content drives out good. (You might remember the day I lifted the censorship for one post, and it took about twenty comments before people started to ruin the thread.) The question is, who is making those decisions — and who is affected by those decisions? When it comes to a little guy like me, nobody really cares what a single journalist does with the comments on his site. But YouTube and Facebook (along with Amazon, Google, and others) are the biggest deals in the world! If they forbid a certain kind of discourse, it will be much harder to have those conversations.

We have to ask ourselves: is it worth having to put up with RFK and Dr. Mercola for the sake of serious counternarrative analysis and commentary on vaccines? I think it is. We should all be thinking about for what purpose that YouTube, Facebook, and Silicon Valley in general are manufacturing consent. They are not transparent, and not accountable to anybody.

In its video telling YouTubers what kind of vaccine-related content can get you kicked off the platform, YouTube says

What constitutes a “false statement about vaccine safety”? Something that contradicts the official US Government line? Under these new guidelines, is it possible to post a good-faith dissent from the official line? How would we know?

UPDATE: Remember: Always trust authority!

UPDATE.2:

“This Tweet can’t be replied to, shared or liked.”

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Federica Sermarini, RIP

Yesterday in San Benedetto del Tronto, Federica Graci Sermarini died from cancer. She was surrounded by her husband, Marco, and their children. They prayed her home.

If you read The Benedict Option, you will know of my esteem for Marco Sermarini, whom I affectionately call the Doge of l’Opzione Benedetto. Once I was asked on French television who my hero is. I said Marco, because he shows what an ordinary man full of faith, hope, courage, and boundless love, can accomplish.

What people who didn’t know the family personally did not know, and could not know, is how much Marco the flower depended on Federica the gardener. She was everything to Marco, who loved her fiercely. Our friend Rodolfo Casadei, an Italian journalist, pays Federica tribute in the magazine Tempi. From the translation:

I cannot imagine the Company of Tipi Loschi of San Benedetto del Tronto, the GK Chesterton parental school , the Capitani Coraggiosi social cooperative, the Polisportiva Gagliarda, the Hobbit cooperative, the La Contea educational center without Federica Graci. Federica and Marco Sermarini were the representation in flesh and blood of what the fruitfulness promised by the sacramental grace of Christian marriage is.

Rodolfo says that in conversation with an unnamed cardinal, he defended the Benedict Option against the false claim that it was closed and sectarian. Rodolfo cited the Tipi Loschi and their “Shire” (as they call their domani), as a glorious refutation of that claim. He writes:

It is necessary to know how to get out of mental schemes of all kinds. In the dominant mentality, even in ecclesial environments, a subject who promotes a primary school, loves and attends the Mass in the ancient rite celebrated by the Benedictine monks of Norcia (but also all the other Masses) and where a seriously ill patient like Federica offers in recent weeks her sufferings for the healing of none other than Cardinal Raymond Burke, projects a grim, rigid, closed image. But no, things are just the opposite.

The Bergoglian sheep with that smell of them, the poor, the common people, the little ones, the timid, the simple, the foreigners you can find them in the Shire, in the classrooms of the primary school, at work in the social cooperatives, playing with other children in the summer centers whose management the municipalities of the district contract to them (how strange these Christians closed in their shelter: with a cooperative they manage three after-school activities with about 120 children and young people, five clubs with another 185 between children and young people, seven summer centers and a home assistance service, in a small reality like San Benedetto del Tronto). And above all you will find the joy, the gladness, the listening, the gratitude that sees a gift in everything, the wit in the judgments on the contemporary world that are the hallmark of Pier Giorgio Frassati’s spirituality, by Gilbert Keith Chesterton, by St. John Bosco. The latter said: “The devil is afraid of laughing people.” Exactly. And Blessed Frassati: “You ask me if I am happy; and how could I not be? as long as Faith gives me strength, always cheerful! Every Catholic cannot fail to be cheerful: sadness must be banished from Catholic souls.”

Rodolfo reports that some have struggled to accept Federica and Marco’s decision to treat her cancer in San Benedetto, without leaving their small city on the Adriatic to find advanced treatment elsewhere. Writes Rodolfo:

I expected it, because of what little I understood of their relationship with life and with creation. One cannot live and one cannot die far from one’s affections; a plant is not uprooted to cure it. The place where we are born, we grow up, we bring children into the world in the flesh and in the spirit, we open a school, we kneel to pray, we buy an entire hill in the spirit of the “three acres and a cow” of the distributism of Hilaire Belloc, is the only place in the world where one can live and die, heal life and embrace its end.

The Shire is not an adolescent romance, horticulture, the park all made up of local plants, the breeding of donkeys and bees, environmental education workshops with children (also financed with money from the Waldensian Church! From the series: the Catholics of the Masses in Latin turned in on themselves …) are not ecological fixations. They are the integral ecology of man who has his feet planted on the ground with the same strength as the roots of the oak and his head raised among the stars of God’s Heaven.

I can’t imagine all this without Federica. And in fact it will continue to be there. It will continue to be present among the desks that host the 90 students of the primary school which has grown to become a combination of junior high school, scientific high school and professional institute, as in moments of celebration and on occasions of conviviality on the hill of Santa Lucia.

The hill of Santa Lucia is the space overlooking the Adriatic where the Tipi Loschi and their children, and their guests, meet for prayer, for study, for feasting, for growing things, for games, and for living together. I have been there; it is one of the happiest places on earth. Federica helped make that place a reality.

Here is a link to an old video explaining the Scuola Chesterton (Marco is in it; be sure to turn on subtitles).

And here is a link to the new school building they are creating on top of Santa Lucia.

When I got the news that Federica had died, I went straight away to Expedia.com to book a flight. Turns out they were affordable, even at the last minute. But it turns out that I couldn’t get PCR test results back in time to get a flight to Rome and then get across the country to San Benedetto in time for the funeral. So what I did was make a donation to the Scuola Chesterton Building Fund, in memory of Federica, so her legacy can continue to grow. If you loved The Benedict Option, and the vision of Federica, Marco, and the Tipi Loschi, please consider doing the same.

My heart is so heavy for that sweet family, and the family of families of the Tipi Loschi. But we have all gained a powerful intercessor in heaven — that’s what I believe. Please keep Marco and the kids in your prayers. The Sermarini kids are all older than you see in the photo above. The oldest is 24, and the youngest is 13. Still, that’s a young age to lose your Mama — and a young age to lose your best friend, as Marco has done. Marco said to me that he told Federica to go ahead on and make their home in heaven, and that he would come as soon as he could, and they could be together with Pier Giorgio Frassati and G.K. Chesterton. What a party that will be! I hope God, in His mercy, lets me be there. And you too. I thank Him that he allowed me to meet Federica Sermarini, and be a part of her life, however small. You knew when you met that woman that you were meeting someone who was not tame, but who was good.

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Asimov & The Benedict Option

The other night, a friend in Kansas said that I should watch the new Apple TV take on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series of novels, because it sounds like the Benedict Option. I did, and really liked the first episode. Then yesterday, a friend in Texas texted to tell me that I should read those Asimov books to explain the Ben Op to people. Well, obviously I haven’t had time to read the books, but the first episode of the Apple series tells me a lot. Let’s talk about it for a moment.

This Wikipedia summary is accurate, and covers most of what you learn in the first episode of the Apple TV series:

The premise of the stories is that, in the waning days of a future Galactic Empire, the mathematician Hari Seldon spends his life developing a theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematical sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a Dark Age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Although the inertia of the Empire’s fall is too great to stop, Seldon devises a plan by which “the onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little” to eventually limit this interregnum to just one thousand years. To implement his plan, Seldon creates the Foundations—two groups of scientists and engineers settled at opposite ends of the galaxy—to preserve the spirit of science and civilization, and thus become the cornerstones of the new galactic empire.

The Ben Op tie-in, obviously, is that Hari Seldon (played by Jared Harris in the new series) foresees the Empire falling, and wants to preserve its knowledge in these Foundations settlements — scientific monasteries. In the show, the Emperors (they are a triad) do not want to hear this bad news, because they are correctly afraid that it would demoralize the imperial population. Seldon and his protege barely escape with their lives.

Watching the show, and taking note of the parallels, it struck me that “the inertia of the Empire’s fall is too great to stop” is exactly the way I would put it regarding our own Empire. I believe that we are headed for a very nasty crash, and that it’s probably too late to stop it. If we hope to stop it, we are going to have to live in ways that few people are willing to live. Therefore, we are going to fall. It might not take place in my lifetime, but it is going to happen.

Watching Foundation gave me a certain perspective on particular objections to the Benedict Option. People sometimes ask me, “Where is a place for queer people in the Benedict Option?” or “What about poor people?” or “What about people of color?” These questions are not unimportant, but they are very much second-order questions. I get the idea that some of the people proposing them, though they probably don’t realize it, are basically saying that if the Apocalypse is not going to be kindly, and allow us to construct a civilizational ark that follows building codes set down by late liberal civilization, well, then, we are not going to have truck with this dark vision! What people like that don’t understand is that if I’m right about the decline-and-fall, then we are all going to be faced with a sauve qui peut (“save who you can”) situation regarding our religion and culture. To put it another way, it’s not that I think these questions are unimportant, but that I think they are often asked in the spirit of, if we can show that the Benedict Option causes people to behave in illiberal ways, or other problematic ways, then we negate the entire critique.

This, I think, is what’s behind the people — often on the Christian Right — who construe the Ben Op idea as “head for the hills and burrow down deep”: they find the diagnosis deeply disturbing (and they should!), and are grasping for reasons to reject it all. The other day Cardinal George Pell of Australia, a very brave and good conservative Catholic, dismissed the Ben Op because it seems elitist to him. I’ve got news for Cardinal Pell: if my diagnosis is correct, then the fact that it predicts a much smaller church, one made up of people who really believe the faith, and who are willing to suffer for it — that does not make the diagnosis incorrect. In other words, Pell seems to believe that I somehow want the Church to be tiny and elite. He could not be more wrong. I’m not saying what I think should happen; I’m saying what I think is going to happen, at least in the West. As this brief post-Christian period gives way to an anti-Christian period, many millions are going to leave the faith, or adopt some watered-down version that conforms to the world’s spirit. Only the nonconformists, those who are spiritually knowledgeable and spiritually disciplined, and prepared to suffer for the faith, will make it through with their faith intact.

Similarly, the Ben Op annoys politically engaged Christian conservatives, because they see it as discouraging believers from political involvement. It doesn’t, though — it’s right there in the book that we need to stay involved politically, if only to protect the liberty of our churches and institutions to do what they are supposed to do. My warning in the book, though, is that politics can never be a substitute for the hard work of discipleship. It does no good to win elections if you can’t pass the faith on to your children. What does it profit a man to win the House, the Senate, and the White House, but to lose his children’s souls?

I’m trying to prepare for the long game here. My Texas friend just texted to say that Hari Seldon is what the Ben Op is not: those people are actually fleeing the collapsing Empire. True, and I mean it when I say that in our case, we are not at the head-for-the-hills moment (and anyway, heading for the hills doesn’t mean much if you bring the Internet with you). There are so many things that can and should be done right now, by Christians embedded within this civilization, to prepare ourselves for resistance. Most people just don’t want to do them. Most people will choose bourgeois conformity and comfort every time. It’s human nature for one, and for another, they — we — have all been raised in a WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) culture that has not given us the wherewithal for resistance.

Here’s what I mean. To me, one of the most convincing voices of the decline-and-fall narrative is the late Philip Rieff. In this remarkable essay for UnHerd, Park MacDougald explains what Rieff taught, and why an unbelieving Jewish academic became a prophet of the West’s doom. I know that regular readers of this blog are familiar with Rieff and why I like him, but if you’ve forgotten, then MacDougald’s excellent piece is a great refresher. Excerpts, starting with what Rieff meant by “the triumph of the therapeutic”:

But Rieff’s point was not merely that we had come to view ourselves in therapeutic terms, supplanting older moral and religious modes of evaluation. He was making an argument about the wider implications of this shift in perspective — a shift that he considered to be, without exaggeration, the most important cultural development in the West since the Enlightenment. Indeed, Rieff saw it as nothing short of an apocalypse. Modern therapeutic culture, in his view, had become what he called in his later writings an “anti-culture”: a negation of the very idea of culture that, because it set itself in opposition to everything that had traditionally given human lives meaning, was inherently unstable. It could not reproduce itself indefinitely, and would be succeeded, Rieff predicted, by barbarism and chaos.

All societies, in Rieff’s telling, are sacred, in that they point to an authority beyond themselves. The task of “culture” is to “transliterate otherwise invisible sacred orders into their visible modalities — social orders”. This “transliteration” occurs by rendering the moral commandments given in advance by a culture’s highest authority — God, in the case of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim civilisation; the primitive vitality of nature in the case of classical pagan civilisation — into terms that people can understand and internalise, so as to regulate their behaviour in line with their culture’s conception of good and evil. Ensuring that this transliteration takes place is the task of the cultural elite (or “officer class”), who control both the character-forming institutions and the symbolic language through which commandments are expressed within the secular world.

Rieff believed that the commandments of sacred authority always come originally and primarily in the form of “interdicts”, or prohibitions — “Thou shalt not” sleep with your mother or covet your neighbour’s wife. “No” comes before “yes,” and “no” is the ultimate origin of culture. It is only by first restricting the legitimate range of behaviours, and in particular the expressions of instinct or libidinal energy, that cultures can be said to operate on their members. Culture is repression.

Why? Because we can only build by learning how to govern our impulses — how to sacrifice them for the greater good. These “interdicts” — Rieff’s made-up word for Thou Shalt Nots — are deeply embedded in the foundations of human psychology. We usually state them in religious terms, but whatever culture or civilization you’re in, there will be interdicts. There have to be, or civilization falls apart. More MacDougald:

All this may seem quite esoteric, but it is important for understanding Rieff’s account of therapeutic culture. The modern West, in his telling, is the first culture in history that has attempted to deny the legitimacy of the interdicts and to live without some form of sacred authority. Therapy is our means of getting away with this denial. The therapeutic ethos teaches us to overcome the guilt and shame, especially around sexuality, prompted by what we have come to regard as the unrealistic, unhealthy, and oppressive moral prohibitions inherited from Christianity. But because, for Rieff, these prohibitions are a core part of our psyche, therapeutic culture can only ever lead to their transgression or negation, never to their genuine overcoming. He believed, for instance, that sexual liberation was seen as a positive ideal purely because it transgressed the inherited Christian virtue of chastity. It was good because it was the opposite of what our religion used to teach; it had no positive value in itself.

Indeed, this is how Rieff came to understand our culture war. He believed that the Western elite had abdicated its responsibility to continue transmitting moral commandments, instead embracing an ethic of liberation and transgression designed to free themselves from the too-strict demands of the interdicts. But because this cultural shift had penetrated deeply only among elites, the result was a constant war between the “officer class” and the population at large, who still clung to a basically traditional conception of the moral order. Elite cultural output — both the modernist high art that Rieff analysed and the pop culture of our own day — had become a series of “deconversion therapies” attempting to train the lower classes out of their supposedly primitive superstitions, which in his telling were actually the vestiges of a sacred impulse toward transcendence.

For Rieff, of course, such efforts were doomed to failure. Even if the therapeutic elite succeeded in loosening the hold of the interdicts, they could not create new ones because their moral codes referred to no transcendent authority. Injunctions to be nice and rational, or not to be a “shitty person”, simply cannot burrow their way into our unconscious selves in the same way as commands from God. But without these commands to bind us together into a “saving larger self”, we are subject to persistent existential unease — a small, nagging sense that there should be something more to life, some higher meaning, than earning money and consuming sensory experiences. Indeed, to live according to the therapeutic ethos is, according to Rieff, to deny our nature as human beings. We crave the limitations, and the clarity and meaning, provided by a genuine authoritative culture, and we cannot live without them indefinitely.

Read it all. It’s superb.

See, this is why I don’t believe that the coming Fall is a left vs. right thing. We are all caught up in the therapeutic ethos. Very few of us want to live life within limits. The idea of sacrifice is alien to us. Last night I watched Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia for the fourth time, and I swear, I get more out of it with each viewing. The idea of sacrifice as necessary to fertility is powerful in that movie. In the opening scene, Eugenia, a cosmopolitan Roman woman, visits a rural church, and happens upon some sort of prayer ritual by women seeking to have babies. The sacristan tells her that she will never get anything unless she humbles herself to kneel and pray. She can’t, or won’t, do it. This introduces into the film the theme of sacrifice as connected to fertility — literally, in the case of this scene, but more broadly, the idea that in order to achieve anything lasting, you have to be willing to sacrifice for it.

Tarkovsky once said:

I am drawn to the man who is ready to serve a higher cause, unwilling — or even unable — to subscribe to the generally accepted tenets of a worldly ‘morality’; the man who recognizes that the meaning of existence lies above all in the fight against the evil within ourselves, so that in the course of a lifetime he may take at least one step towards spiritual perfection.

But what is “spiritual perfection” to us in this post-Christian age? Rieff said that it was impossible to believe in the interdicts absent a sense of sacred order — that is, a strong belief that there is a transcendent order to which we must try to conform ourselves. It’s easy to see how this belief can be abused in the hands of utopians of the Left or Right. The fact that this abuse is possible does not negate Rieff’s insight. I keep going back to John Adams’s observation that the US Constitution only works for people are already “moral and religious” — meaning they carry within them a sense of sacred order, a sense that they broadly share with everyone around them.

We are not that people anymore. We are now a people whose elites believe it is imperative to educate our children to doubt their sex, and to believe that there is no such thing as male and female simpliciter. We are a people who are so enamored of our idea of liberty that we cannot bring ourselves to ban pornography, which is destroying our ability to form ordinary human relationships of the sort that are necessary to creating the next generation. In short, and in a hundred ways, we are deconstructing our civilization because we believe that there is no sacred order, and that limits are anathema.

The Texas friend with whom I was texting this morning is a leftist who is not a Christian. He told me about a conservative Christian friend from high school who

tells me that he would rather be friends with Muslims and Hindus than other Christians, because the former, at least, are serious about their religions and view the hegemonic order as threats, while Christians are unserious about their religions, and to the extent that they see hegemony as a threat, it’s one they want to control, not destroy.

That makes a lot of sense to me. I usually vote Republican as the lesser of two evils, but I don’t have any faith in the Republican Party, because I see the choice between the two parties as between the one who accelerates decline (the Democrats) versus the ones who manage the decline (Republicans) — though in the case of the G.W. Bush administration, it was the Republicans who were accelerating the decline.

Anyway, you regular readers, you know my spiel here. I’ll stop now. Going back to the Foundation series, like Hari Seldon, I don’t believe that what’s coming can be stopped. The best we can do is to deflect the worst of it, and to prepare institutions, settlements, and ways of life within which the old wisdom can survive the accelerating collapse. I sent off to my literary agent last night the formal proposal for my next book, which I now see is the completion of a trilogy about Christianity in a post-Christian age. In this planned new book, I’m going to talk about the search for the sacred, and how we in the WEIRD West have blinded ourselves to the world as it really is. We are going to have to learn how to see again. And we are going to have to learn once again the value of sacrifice. In this passage from The Benedict Option, Father Cassian Folsom, then the prior of the Norcia monastery, explained why the monks’ habit of saying “thou shalt not” to themselves every day was a way of orienting themselves for life-giving sacrifices:

Despite the very specific instructions found in the Rule, it’s not a checklist for legalism. “The purpose of the Rule is to free you. That’s a paradox that people don’t grasp readily,” Father Cassian said.

If you have a field covered with water because of poor drainage, he explained, crops either won’t grow there, or they will rot. If you don’t drain it, you will have a swamp, and disease. But if you can dig a drainage channel, the field will become healthy, and useful. What’s more, once the water becomes contained within the walls of the channel, it will flow with force, and can accomplish things.

“A Rule works that way, to channel your spiritual energy, your work, your activity, so that you’re able to accomplish something,” Father Cassian said.

“Monastic life is very plain,” he continued. “People from the outside perhaps have a romantic vision, perhaps what they see on television, of monks sort of floating around the cloister. There is that, and that’s attractive, but basically, monks get up in the morning, they pray, they do their work, they pray some more. They eat, they pray, they do some more work, they pray some more, and then they go to bed. It’s rather plain, just like most people. The genius of St. Benedict is to find the presence of God in everyday life.”

People who are anxious, confused, and looking for answers, are quick to search for solutions in the pages of books or on the Internet, looking for that “killer app” that will make everything right again. The Rule tells us: No, it’s not like that. You can only achieve the peace and order you seek by making a place within your heart and within your daily life for the grace of God to take root. Divine grace is freely given, but God will not force us to receive it. It takes constant effort on our part to get out of God’s way and let His grace heal us and change us. To this end, what we think does not matter as much as what we do—and how faithfully we do it.

More:

If a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder, then the most fundamental act of resistance is to establish order. If we don’t have internal order, we will be controlled by our human passions and by the powerful, who are in greater control of directing liquid modernity’s deep currents.

For the traditional Christian, establishing internal order is not mere discipline, nor is it simply an act of will. Rather, it is what theologian Romano Guardini called man’s efforts to “regain his right relation to the truth of things, to the demands of his own deepest self, and finally to God.” This means the discovery of the order, the logos, that God has written into the nature of Creation, and seeking to live in harmony with it. It also implies the realization of natural limits within Creation’s givenness, as opposed to believing that nature is something we can deny or refute, according to our own desires. Finally, it means disciplining one’s life to live a life that glorifies God and helps others.

Order is not simply a matter of law and its enforcement. In the classical Christian view, the law itself depends on a deeper conception of order, an idea of the way ultimate reality is constructed. This order may be unseen, but it is believed and internalized by those living within a community that professes it. The point of life, for individual persons, for the church, and for the state, is to pursue harmony with that transcendent, eternal order.

To order the world rightly as Christians requires regarding all things as pointing to Christ. Chapter 19 of the Rule offers a succinct example of the connection between a disciplinary teaching and the unseen order. In it, Benedict instructs his monks to keep their minds focused on the presence of God and His Angels when they are engaged in chanting the Divine Office, called the opus Dei, or “work of God.”

“We believe that the divine presence is everywhere, and that ‘the eyes of the Lord are looking on the good and the evil in every place” (Proverbs 15:3),” writes Benedict. “But we should believe this especially without any doubt when we are assisting at the Work of God.” He concludes with an admonition to remember that when they pray the Psalms together, they are standing before God, and must pray “in such a way that our mind may be in harmony with our voice.”

Every monk’s life, and all his labors, must be directed to the service of God. The Rule teaches that God must be the beginning and the end of all our actions. To bound our spiritual passion by the rhythm of daily life, and its disciplines, and to do so with others in our family and in our community, is to build a strong foundation of faith, within which one can become fully human and fully Christian.

As a result of their orientation toward Christ, the monks recognize the He is the Creator, the One in Whom all things consist, and that man is not the measure of all things. Unlike the secular successors to the nominalists, the Benedictine monk does not believe that things of the world have meaning only if people choose to give them meaning. The monk holds that meaning exists objectively, within the natural world created by God, and is there to be discovered by the person who has detached themselves from their own passions, and who seeks to see as God sees.

“One cannot be attached to created things, because one will end up seeing them as ordered towards oneself,” said Brother Evagrius Hayden, 31. “This is wrong. We are not the ones who give things meaning. God gives things meaning.”

You see? These monks have a specific idea of sacred order, and have ordered both their outer lives and inner lives around it. In The Benedict Option, I say that the fall of this civilization is coming, and is indeed already underway; I call on Christians to look to the Benedictine monks, whose religious order arose out of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and understand that if what we know about the sacred order is true, then we have no choice but to change our lives, both individually and communally, to protect that knowledge of sacred order from the coming collapse — a collapse that has already begun.

If I’m right about the collapse, then it’s going to happen whether or not you think the Benedict Option concept is too elitist, or insufficiently diverse, or what have you. You might not like the Benedict Option, which is fine — but what do you have to offer instead?

I was thinking about this comment from a smart Protestant reader, who sent it to me last year (and which I posted here):

Your critics may lack imagination. Who in the 1950s could have imagined the behemoth GM would file for bankruptcy in 2009? No one. But when it did happen, it wasn’t catastrophic–no one beat their breasts. The world didn’t stop in awe. No comets hailed the great bankruptcy. It was just another news story from the great recession. Because by the time it happened, the world was such a different place that GM was virtually the sick man of Michigan.Similarly, I can imagine that the institution we know as the Roman Catholic Church might collapse in the next thirty years. But when it does, the world won’t gawk, it will have already moved on. RCC will likely go out with a whimper. When it does happen, it won’t be cataclysmic. But your readers can only think about this in terms of how they envisioned the RCC when they were young. Now if that institution were to suddenly collapse, that would be shocking and cataclysmic. But look with your eyes, not your memory, and that RCC is already gone. The sick one in front of us may not recover. See the RCC for what it is right now and for where it is headed–where it is trending, not your Platonic ideal concept of it you fashioned in your youth when you imagined the world was static and unchanging.Everything I say about RCC I could say about the SBC [Southern Baptist Convention] –which I think is definitely coming to nothing. Nonexistence by 2100, irrelevance within just 5 years. I could say about Wheaton, Calvin, Baylor, etc etc.

More from that post:

That piece, and the comments from the reader above, sent me back to thinking about historian Edward J. Watts’s The Final Pagan Generation, which I last wrote about here.It’s a study of pagan elites in fourth century Rome, when Roman society was radically shifting away from its pagan roots to the new Christian religion. The pagans Watts writes about didn’t see it, no doubt because they had so much psychologically invested in the continuation of Roman society, and because all anybody in Rome had known since time out of mind was paganism. I wrote two years ago:

[A]s Watts tells it, in fourth century Rome, the educational system was overwhelmingly pagan, and socialized the students into an overwhelmingly pagan hierarchy. They learned to identify with this, and simply assumed things would always be this way.  This was an educational system designed to educate kids into thinking things would be the way things were for their fathers.

I thought here about what so many Christians have said to me about Christian secondary and university education: that it’s built on the assumptions that things are always going to be the same way for Christians, despite the rapidly changing culture, and that Christian education is about socializing young Christians for leadership in that familiar social order.

Watts says it’s very important to remember that the first 50 years of the lives of the final pagan generation were quite stable in terms of government. Thus they were socialized into believing that things would always be that way. Elites did very well under the stable Constantinian system. Wealth concentrated in their hands. Personal connections became vital to entering and maintaining oneself in the elite classes. Cronyism was common.

By mid-century, when the elites of the FPG (final pagan generation) were well-established in their careers, the state’s attempt to privilege Christianity and marginalize traditional religion picked up. Constantine died in 337, and civil conflict followed. Roman leaders faced pressure from more radical Christians to step up the de-paganization, and tried to walk a balance between their demands and not upsetting the still large pagan population. In 356, Constantius stepped up the anti-pagan laws.

Interestingly, the pagan elites didn’t take all this too seriously, according to Watts. A lot of temples remained open despite Constantius’s orders that they be closed. The emperor’s policies “might have been disagreeable, but they hardly seemed to be a pressing or universal threat.”

Towards the end of his reign, Constantius’s anti-pagan laws grew even stronger, but paganism was still such a vivid and powerful presence in daily life that the pagan elites felt confident that the danger would pass when the emperor did. Watts judges that in retrospect, the elites ought to have stood up to the emperor in some way, to protect their religion. Instead, they chose to take the easier route, protecting their careers and their money-making opportunities by not antagonizing a powerful emperor. That seemed a reasonable bet.

Constantius was succeeded by Julian the Apostate, a Roman emperor so called because though he had been raised a Christian, reverted to his ancestral faith, and tried to re-impose paganism on the empire. He failed. The culture, though still dominantly pagan, was moving quickly. More:

What’s interesting about this is that even though daily religious realities for most Romans were not very different than they had ever been, this hid from most people the massive changes that were actually taking place. This seems contemporary to me. Liberals may well see Trump as a Julian the Apostate figure, trying to roll back the progressive Sexual Revolution. And there are certainly conservatives who regard Trump that way, and love that about him. But the cultural changes that have overtaken America, and that are continuing to do so, are fundamental, and aren’t going to be undone by government policy.

Furthermore, I believe that Christians see daily life going on locally much as it always did, with the exception, maybe, that their churches don’t attract as many people. Nothing radical is happening in most places. Maybe they think that a sympathetic president in Washington is going to turn things around for the faith. The situation strikes me as rather like that of the pagan believers in Rome in the 360s.

By the 390s, the strength of paganism had waned so much that Christian bishops began exercising political power to convince Roman officials to actively suppress paganism. Watts writes that when it came to appealing to Roman authorities to protect pagan institutions and practices from the Christians, “the final pagan generation sometimes seemed as influential as the president of Polaroid in the age of the smartphone.”

And yet, writes Watts, the final pagan generation, up to the end, still believed that it was going to last forever for them. Theirs was a failure of imagination. When I hear conservative Christians today talk about the “Constantine Option” — by which they mean making sure that Christians have allies in political power — I recognize that they have a point, but I urge them to consider also the fate of Julian the Apostate. He was every bit the Roman emperor that his ancestor Constantine the Great had been. But it didn’t matter. He was able to suppress Christianity to some degree, but the new religion was too well established to turn back by imperial decree. Political action alone will not stymie an idea whose time has come.

Among the things I said Christians of this “final Christian generation” should do:

Stop thinking that it’s always going to be this way, and that anything short of radical action is sufficient. The mindset of older Christians may actually be a hindrance, because they don’t understand how radically different the world today is.

Do not mistake the presence of Christian churches and symbols in public life for the true condition of Christianity in the hearts and minds of people. Remember, the pagan temples and statues of the gods remained long after paganism was a dead letter.

Enough from me on this. If you don’t really get The Benedict Option, and you haven’t read the book, watch the Foundation series on Apple TV. The concept will become clearer.

The post Asimov & The Benedict Option appeared first on The American Conservative.

Red Meat From Pete Wells

Eleven Madison Park in NYC is one of the best restaurants in the world. It recently reopened as a vegan restaurant. I really like the way Pete Wells, the dining critic of the Times, laid into the joint in his review. Wells complained about the mediocrity of the food, but he took it further, ripping chef-owner Daniel Humm for his moralistic pretensions. In announcing its vegan turn, Humm lamented that the current food system is “unsustainable.” Excerpts:

Diners who don’t eat animals for religious or moral reasons will probably welcome the new menu. Those whose chief concern is the environmental damage done by livestock farming may have less reason to celebrate. People tend to think of factory farms and feedlots when they hear about meat and sustainability. But Eleven Madison Park didn’t buy industrial pork for its compressed brick of suckling pig. As the servers were always reminding you in the old days, the pork, eggs, cheese and other animal products came from small, independent regional farms. Now, many of its vegetables are grown to order on farmland it leases in Hoosick, N.Y.

If every restaurant that supports sustainable local agriculture followed Mr. Humm’s new path, those small farms would be in deep trouble. To name just one likely result, developers would be lining up at the barn door to make offers. Millions of acres of pasture and cultivated fields across the United States have been lost to suburbs, which produce half of the country’s household carbon emissions.

And while Mr. Humm rarely talks about the bottom line, it’s obvious what happens when you keep charging $335 for dinner while getting rid of some of the most expensive items on your shopping list, like caviar, lobster and foie gras. (It’s the same thing that happened in 2016, when the restaurant essentially halved the number of courses in the tasting without changing the base price.)

Eleven Madison Park still buys meat, though. Until the year ends, the menu offered to customers who book a private dining room includes an optional beef dish, roasted tenderloin with fermented peppers and black lime. It’s some kind of metaphor for Manhattan, where there’s always a higher level of luxury, a secret room where the rich eat roasted tenderloin while everybody else gets an eggplant canoe.

Read it all. 

Here’s a video produced by the restaurant in which Chef Humm explains its move to veganism.

The post Red Meat From Pete Wells appeared first on The American Conservative.