Rod Dreher's Blog, page 460

Portsmouth, Ohio

It’s the end of the day, but I didn’t want to turn in without telling you about a story I first read this morning, but haven’t been able to forget about. Chris Arnade — follow him on Twitter — writes a piece for The Guardian based on his visit to Portsmouth, Ohio — a small city devastated by drugs. It used to be a manufacturing town. Then the factories left. Now it’s Rust Belt ruin, and narcotics. Read:

On my first night in town, a beat-up car parks next to me, positioned in the darkness cast by my van. The passenger, a middle-aged woman, injects the driver in the neck. He stays still, head tilted to expose a vein, as she works the needle in, while two young boys play in the back seat.

Done, they pull away as I try to fool myself into thinking I didn’t see what I saw.

For six days in Portsmouth, over three trips, I keep trying to fool myself. Eventually, I am unable to just watch and listen.

He sees a homeless young couple pushing around their two children in a shopping cart as they beg for money. He calls them “James” and “Meghan,” and talks to them:

I continue to see them over the next few days along a commercial strip, Meghan standing by the side of the road holding her sign, staring straight ahead, her expression vacant, while James pushes the cart with the kids in it, collecting bottles and cans. Sometimes he stops to let them play.

One afternoon I run into him in the McDonald’s bathroom, filling plastic bottles with water to clean his children.

Outside I ask him more questions about his situation, and he tells me his history with drugs. “I was born in Portsmouth and raised around drugs. Everyone used them. My father drank, and I started drinking when I was a teenager. Then started Percocets when I was 19. Then I moved to the harder stuff like Oxy 80s, then heroin.” I ask him if he still uses drugs, “No, I don’t. Well, only Suboxone [an opioid medication used to treat opioid addiction]. I buy it from the street since I don’t have a prescription.”

Most drivers ignore the family. Police pass without stopping. One woman drops off two slabs of bottled water, and a minister inquires about their condition, but otherwise they are unseen. I think about calling child protective services, but it is clear James cares and is attentive. I also assume I am missing part of their story. Surely others have called. Perhaps others have inquired more than I have. Perhaps things are more complicated than what I see.

Besides, there is so much visible pain in Portsmouth, it is hard to focus on any one situation.

Later, Arnade meets and interviews Kim, a beautiful young woman, only 19 years old, recovering from heroin addiction. She lives with her grandmother Vickie, who has had custody of her since she was one. Kim had her first child at age 15. She now has two. More:

[Vickie] is retired after 28 years as a cook in the school system. When I ask if there are drugs around, she laughs. “Oh honey, yes, this is Portsmouth. This is the armpit of Ohio.” She points to the neighborhood. “Everything around here is dope-town. Xanies, Oxys, meth, we got it all. Nothing for kids here. When I was young we had dances at the community centers. Now they have nothing. No work around here unless you are a nurse, or a doctor, or lawyer.”

Vickie doesn’t do drugs (“except for my smokes”), and so she has become the de facto mother for an entire neighborhood, a calm center in a tornado. That tornado eventually pulled Kim in. “When I adopted Kimberly, I promised her mom I would keep her in her life. Biggest mistake I made.”

Kim gets up to chase after a child and comes back. “I would go hang out at my mom’s trailer, with all my cousins. We would play there, spend evenings there. It is where my mom got me on heroin. At 13. My mom was doing it. Everyone was doing it. I wanted to do it because I thought it would be fun.”

You’ve got to read the whole thing — especially for the ending. What would you have done in that situation?

This is our country today.

I wonder what the people of Portsmouth, Ohio, have to say about whether or not Donald Trump’s job should be at risk for what he supposedly said to James Comey.

View From Your Table

Monte Mottarone, Italy

James C. takes a break to eat at the summit of a mountain above Lake Maggiore

Is There A Cure For Trumpian Vice?

Charles Featherstone has some provocative and interesting thoughts about the current crisis. In his piece, he quotes a novelist’s tweet:

Be advised America: you’re cheering for anonymous leakers trying to destroy an elected president. Can you see where that can go wrong?

— Peter Van Buren (@WeMeantWell) May 16, 2017

And then:

 

The very tools that made it possible to take down a bad emperor — Caligula — now make it possible to take down a good one, or even stake a claim to leadership based on sheer ambition alone. (Which would be Rome’s condition during the Crisis of the Third Century.) The series of military uprisings that led to the collapse of senatorial support for Nero, and the chaos that was rule in Rome, prompted the commander of the legions besieging Jerusalem, Vespasian, to return to Rome and seize power for himself. the Flavians and the Antonines would restore order, but like all things, it was not permanent.

If Van Buren is right, and the intelligence services are engaging in a slow-motion coup against President Trump, that should be a cause for concern. The intelligence community has become our Praetorian Guard, with the ability to make and unmake presidents. It has not been used yet, but there are an awful lot of people cheering for just that to happen. And once that weapon is unsheathed, for good and ill, and it will only be a matter of time before some ambitious soul realizes you can get and keep the presidency that way, instead of actually having to get elected.

Read the whole thing. 

As long as we’re in a Roman mode, the problem presented by the Trump situation brings to mind the historian Livy’s famous line about Rome, whose republican form of government had collapsed, giving way to imperial rule: “We have reached the point where we cannot tolerate either our vices or their cure.”

 

This Dangerous Moment

Ross Douthat argues today for “the 25th Amendment solution”: the cabinet and Congress removing Trump from office over his failure to be able to discharge his duties. Excerpt:

Read the things that these people, members of his inner circle, his personally selected appointees, say daily through anonymous quotations to the press. (And I assure you they say worse off the record.) They have no respect for him, indeed they seem to palpitate with contempt for him, and to regard their mission as equivalent to being stewards for a syphilitic emperor.

It is not squishy New York Times conservatives who regard the president as a child, an intellectual void, a hopeless case, a threat to national security; it is people who are self-selected loyalists, who supported him in the campaign, who daily go to work for him. And all this, in the fourth month of his administration.

This will not get better. It could easily get worse. And as hard and controversial as a 25th Amendment remedy would be, there are ways in which Trump’s removal today should be less painful for conservatives than abandoning him in the campaign would have been — since Hillary Clinton will not be retroactively elected if Trump is removed, nor will Neil Gorsuch be unseated. Any cost to Republicans will be counted in internal divisions and future primary challenges, not in immediate policy defeats.

Meanwhile, from the perspective of the Republican leadership’s duty to their country, and indeed to the world that our imperium bestrides, leaving a man this witless and unmastered in an office with these powers and responsibilities is an act of gross negligence, which no objective on the near-term political horizon seems remotely significant enough to justify.

Read the whole thing.

Charles C.W. Cooke doesn’t think such a move would be worth it. Excerpt:

I have for a long while believed that Trump is unfit for office, and, as such, I do not disagree with all — or even most — of Douthat’s characterizations. In addition, I continue to think that this president is his own worst enemy: The press is hostile, yes, but Trump seems utterly hellbent on making things difficult for himself. Nevertheless, at this point in American history — a point at which large numbers of voters in both parties believe that the system is “rigged” – for the president to be undone by a small group of establishment Republicans and replaced with a career politician would be disastrous for the culture. If it turns out that Trump has done something terrible while in office, he should be impeached by the usual process. If he finds that he no longer likes or wants the job, he should resign. But a legalized coup on the nebulous grounds of “witlessness” would be an invitation for discord the likes of which we have not seen in a while.

Chris Arnade, writing from the left, agrees. If you don’t know who Arnade is, he’s a liberal (and former Wall Streeter) who travels America photographing and talking to the poor and working-class folks. He’s been a particular scourge on his own side, dunning the Democratic elites for looking down on the white working class and its travails. Unlike a lot of Acela corridor pundits (and unlike yours truly, whose butt is in Louisiana but whose head is more often than not in the Acela corridor), Arnade has actually been out among the Trumpenproletariat, and sympathizes with their plight, if not their politics. His Twitter feed is a daily must-read. Today he writes that Douthat’s proposal is a terrible idea:

Failure to do so is not understanding how visceral, broad, and deep the anger in much of the country is.

Why you think Trump was elected?

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) May 17, 2017

I think all three men are mostly right — and that fact expresses the frankly terrifying situation the United States is in right now.

Douthat is correct about the perils of someone of Trump remaining in office. He does not know what he’s doing, and cannot control himself. Nobody in Washington can or should trust him. He has all but destroyed his own presidency. True, he gave us a good (we think) Supreme Court justice, but all the other things Trump might have accomplished will almost certainly not happen now, because of the non-stop drama that Trump causes. And he’s such a narcissist that even after he has screwed up so badly in the past two weeks that he has some Republicans in Congress using the i-word (impeachment), he stood today before graduating Coast Guard members and whined about how mean everybody is to him:

Trump at Coast Guard Commencement: “No politician in history…has been treated worse or more unfairly”

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) May 17, 2017

If one of my kids said that, I would chastise them for self-pity and excuse-making. You would do the same to your kids. This is a 70-year-old man who is President of the United States.

So it’s a massive risk having a man-child like this as Commander in Chief of a nuclear-armed great power. Having said that, removing him, even if done constitutionally, also runs a massive risk, for the reasons Cooke and Arnade identify. It is hard to imagine how the Washington establishment removing Trump from office would be received by Trump’s supporters. True, he got half the vote in the election last fall, and no doubt a significant number of those who voted for him would by now not be sorry to see Mike Pence take over. But I think it safe to say that there is and will be a hard core of Trump backers who are so furious at the establishment that there is nothing Trump can do to alienate them. You don’t think these folks are going to sit back quietly and take it, do you? No matter how justified the case for removing Trump might be, doing so will exact a tremendous, unpredictable cost on the political stability of our system.

It might still be the wiser choice. It is not clear to me which is the riskier move, though the release of all the Comey memos, and Comey’s testimony before Congress, will no doubt make that answer clearer. Not to mention what fool things Trump does in the weeks to come.

If you are having trouble imagining why some people cling to Trump despite it all, I want you to read this story from the Washington Post. Excerpts:

As the dean of Yale University’s Pierson College, June Chu is responsible for advising about 500 students and fostering “a familiar, comfortable living environment” in keeping with the university’s residential college system.

Chu’s biography states she has a PhD in social psychology and touts a long career in which she has “sought to help students not only succeed academically but to support their holistic academic experience and multifaceted identities.”

But the administrator’s seemingly supportive and culturally sensitive persona has been marred since Yale students came across her Yelp account. Images of Chu’s controversial Yelp reviews began circulating among Pierson students in recent months and were published by the Yale Daily News on Saturday.

The problem wasn’t so much what she said about the New Haven eateries and businesses she reviewed but rather her comments on the people who frequented them.

The posts, published over the course of the last few years, referred to customers as “white trash” and “low class folks” and to some employees as “barely educated morons.”

“If you are white trash, this is the perfect night out for you!” Chu wrote in a review about a Japanese restaurant, which she said lacked authenticity but was perfect for “those low class folks who believe this is a real night out.”

When Chu was exposed, she apologized … to the Yale community. The white trash, the low class folks, the barely educated morons of New Haven — well, they don’t count to June Chu, PhD, dean of Yale University’s Pierson College.

Chu’s expression of contemptible race and class bigotry tells a lot of people in this country what the elites think of them. It’s like Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark. Trump hates those elites, and they hate Trump, therefore the deplorables feel solidarity with Trump. The actual truth of what Trump said or did as president does not matter as much as that emotional truth, any more than the actual truth of what Michael Brown or Alton Sterling did matters to black people who see them as symbols of a deeper truth about American society.

It ought not be that way, but it is. “He may be a fool, but he’s our fool/If they think they’re better than him, they’re wrong,” sang Randy Newman sang in his great satirical song  “Rednecks” (which is NSFW), about populism and elitism. All this makes the job of the members of Congress who sit in judgment of Trump that much harder.

 

Death In Venice

I’ll be in Italy next month for a conference, flying into and out of Venice. I’ve never seen Venice, so I’ve made plans to stay there for a couple of days before heading home. I’m reading a history of the city now, and it’s simply a breathtaking monument to human endeavor that the city exists at all, much less that its people created such a work of art to live in. I anticipate that walking its streets will be one of the highlights of my life.

A friend sent me this short piece from Artnet about the Venice Bienniale, the art world’s most significant event. Excerpts:

The world in 2017 is a frightening and chaotic place: why not relieve your anxiety with some casual masturbation or perhaps some good old-fashioned sex? As a corollary to the heavy menu of post-colonial guilt, migration-related tub-thumping and an abstract, queasy panic induced by global capitalism, this year’s Venice Biennale is letting off steam with an abundance of carnal knowledge. From pagan fertility rituals to extreme genital modification: it’s all here for the taking.

Showing as part of James Richards’s exhibition for the Welsh pavilion, the film What Weakens the Flesh Is the Flesh Itself (a collaboration with Steve Reinke) explores the body as a work of art in itself. Besides a lingering tour through snapshots of cheerful young men hanging out at a festival, and footage from an erotic photo-shoot heavy on the squashed fruit, the film draws extensively on the private photographic archive of Albrecht Becker.

An actor and photographer arrested and imprisoned for homosexuality by the Nazis, Becker became obsessed with representation and modification of the body. Gradually the images shown of this mild-looking elderly man in his V-necked sweaters become more unconventional, revealing a body entirely covered in homemade tattoos and piercings. Fairly close to the top of Venice’s wince list this year comes Becker’s modified and elephantine groin, so swollen that the penis prods out like a little mushroom cap. From a bolt through his glans, he lifts great metal chains.

Sounds like fun, eh? More:

[I]n Shezad Dawood’s Leviathan cycle, the narrator Yasmine masturbates next to the corpse of a woman whose jeans she’s about to purloin.

And:

Pauline Curnier Jardin’s film and installation work Grotta Profunda Approfundita (for this critic, a highlight of the Biennale overall) places its viewers inside the human body, seated on a tufted rug that suggests the wall of a sexual organ. Among the many indelible images on offer is a louche Jesus, oiled and lounging in his loincloth like a 1970s tennis player, tempting a young Saint Bernadette with proclamations of love that sound divine in all the wrong ways. Oh, the ecstasies she suffers! Besides such holy visions, Curnier Jardin makes overt homage to the heavy-bodied and lysergic feminist film works of the 1960s and ’70s, which in themselves offer an essential intersection between sexual, and liberal/activist agendas.

Read the entire review, if you can stand it.

“His mind and his soul were intoxicated, and his steps were dictated by the demon who delights in destroying man’s reason and dignity,” wrote Thomas Mann, in Death In Venice. At this point, is it even worth mustering outrage? Mind you, the Venice Bienniale is not just one art event among many. It is the most prestigious in the world. And this rotting corpse of a show is the very best Western civilization can produce today.

True, none of us will go to the Venice Bienniale, and few of us would want to. But don’t deceive yourself into thinking that this only reveals the depravity of the elites. This is only an aestheticization of what the masses watch to stiffen their giblets in the privacy of their own homes. As Nicolas Gomez Davila put it, “The Gospels and the Communist Manifesto are on the wane; the world’s future lies in the power of Coca-Cola and pornography.”

The contrast between the glories of the past manifest in the great paintings and architecture of historic Venice, contrasted with this filth, this decadence, is a sign of the times. Look what our inheritance is, and look how we have squandered it. We are dead men. We have poisoned ourselves. We are a depraved civilization that deserves judgment.

And we are going to get it.

Comey’s Memos & Obstruction Of Justice

Here we go again. From the NYT:

President Trump asked the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.

“I hope you can let this go,” the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo.

The existence of Mr. Trump’s request is the clearest evidence that the president has tried to directly influence the Justice Department and F.B.I. investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia.

Mr. Comey wrote the memo detailing his conversation with the president immediately after the meeting, which took place the day after Mr. Flynn resigned, according to two people who read the memo. The memo was part of a paper trail Mr. Comey created documenting what he perceived as the president’s improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation. An F.B.I. agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations.

Mr. Comey shared the existence of the memo with senior F.B.I. officials and close associates. The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of the memo to a Times reporter.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Whole thing here. 

It’s pretty lame that the Times ran this story not having seen the memo, but only having had it read to them over the phone. But that’s the blood-in-the-water atmosphere in Washington now. Seriously, do you doubt for a minute that this Comey memo exists? It came from a Comey associate. Comey is known for keeping meticulous records of these conversations. There will be more memos to come — so say sources close to Come, according to the Washington Post, which confirms the Times story, adding that Trump asked Comey to focus instead on journalists who print stories leaked to them.

If Comey is telling the truth, then it’s another piece of evidence that Trump tried to obstruct a criminal investigation. Recall that had he not resigned, Richard Nixon would have been impeached for obstruction of justice and abuse of power.  Congressional Republicans have their back against a wall now.

Three and a half more years of this.

How could Trump be so stupid as to fire Comey knowing that he had asked him to do this? True, Comey could be lying, but we already know that Trump fired Comey in part because of the Russia investigation, because Trump said so himself in the NBC interview. Do you trust Jim Comey’s account, or Donald Trump’s? Did Trump not know what he asked of Comey was seriously wrong? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but as with the intel story from yesterday, Trump is ignorant of the norms and practices of the presidency, and thinks he can trample them.

Hubris makes you stupid. Trump came to Washington knowing that the Deep State would have it out for him. They hardly have to lift a finger — he’s taking himself down. Who — and what — will he take down with him?

Head Not For The Hills, Brethren

Vesna Kriznar/Shutterstock

My pal Frederica Mathewes-Green articulates well what I’ve been trying but failing to get across to many Benedict Option critics:

I will go out on a limb and say what I think Rod would say, about this persistent mis-impression that he is exhorting people to “head for the hills.” I think the confusion has to do with the idea of “withdrawing from the political arena” (or however it’s phrased).

If you are directly involved in politics, Rod is not advising you to stop. If you hold office, or are running for office, or supporting people in office, if you are professionally involved in politics in any way, Rod is not trying to stop you.

He’s noting instead that for the vast majority of Christians in America, politics is a spectator sport. We follow it and talk about it, but are not professionally involved. We assume that everything that’s important happens in the political arena, so we keep focused on it.

I think what Rod wants to say is that what’s wrong with our culture cannot be solved by politics. In terms of the social, cultural, and moral issues, popular opinion has been marching steadily to the left for fifty years. The vast majority of Americans actually likes those changes in morality. They like the freedom to do whatever they want. There is no conservative majority to energize, on the social issues, because the majority wants things just as they are, or more so.

So, even though we sometimes achieve political victories, even the presidency, we never make any progress on those issues. Those who are called to politics must keep at it, but the rest of us need to realize that they aren’t going to be able to stop a momentum that has the majority of public opinion behind it. We live in a democracy, and we’re going to have the kind of culture most people want.

But while we’ve been setting all our hopes on political victory, we’ve permitted the tide of secular culture to flow freely into our homes and families. Surveys show that today’s Christians are mostly ignorant of the core beliefs of their faith. In terms of moral standards, their behavior matches that of those in the world around them, rather than that held through Christian history. Christian marriages fail about as often as secular marriages do. In terms of the moral issues, Christians have become indistinguishable from the non-Christian population, probably because we actually agree with the majority, and prefer to do whatever we want.

Christianity is not matched up against atheism today, or even paganism, but against an easy, shallow, amiable public religion. It holds that God wants us to be nice to each other, and call on him in times of trouble; otherwise, he just wants us to be happy. (This is has been called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” or MTD.)

Real Christianity isn’t like that; it’s challenging, even difficult. Churches have found it a hard sell. They offer instead an affirming, sympathetic, entertaining version of Christian faith, pitched in the tones of clever advertisements. Worship is not focused on God but on the worshiper; the goal is giving the worshiper a good worship experience.

Regardless of the style it takes–contemporary, trendy-ancient, social-justice, etc–anxiety to please the consumer is itself detrimental to faith. Perpetuating the consumer’s expectation that he will be catered to is detrimental to faith. Because real Christianity means taking up your cross (Matthew 16:24).

So the Benedict Option is not about withdrawing from the public square. Those whom God has called to the public square had better stay there. Instead, it’s a call to recognize that politics cannot solve the problems that confront us. We have to let that fantasy go.

The Benedict Option is a call to recognize that, while we’ve been keeping our binoculars trained on politics, all this time the sweet, seductive, please-yourself culture has been seeping in under the door. It is saturating our minds and those of our children; it is training us to think of ourselves as primarily consumers, vigilantly monitoring our right to be pleased.

The Benedict Option is a call to resist this. It’s a call to “wake up and strengthen the things that remain” (Revelation 3:2). This is going to be unglamorous and demanding, a family-by-family, church-by-church recomittment to the difficult life in Christ, which entails taking up your cross. We are going to need each others’ support. It’s not going to be easy, but the hour is already late, so let’s get started.

Yes! Here’s a link to Frederica’s site. She’s such a good writer. If you don’t know her books, boy, are you missing out.

Code Red For Christian Doctors

Wesley J. Smith, a Christian and one of the most acute observers of bioethics and life issues, issues a strong warning: “Pro-Lifers, Get Out Of Medicine”. Excerpts:

Doctors in the United States cannot be forced to perform abortions or assist suicides. But that may soon change. Bioethicists and other medical elites have launched a frontal assault against doctors seeking to practice their professions under the values established by the Hippocratic Oath. The campaign’s goal? To force doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others in the health field who hold pro-life or orthodox religious views to choose between their careers and their convictions.

Ethics opinions, legislation, and court filings seeking to deny “medical conscience” have proliferated as journals, legislative bodies, and the courts have taken up the cause. In the last year, these efforts have moved from the relative hinterlands of professional discussions into the center of establishment medical discourse. Most recently, preeminent bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel—one of Obamacare’s principal architects—coauthored with Ronit Y. Stahl an attack on medical conscience in the New England Journal of Medicine, perhaps the world’s most prestigious medical journal. When advocacy of this kind is published by the NEJM, it is time to sound the air raid sirens.

The authors take an absolutist position, claiming that personal morality has no place in medical practice. Under the pretext of “patients’ rights” and a supposed obligation of doctors to adhere to the medical moral consensus—a tyranny of the majority, if you will—Emanuel and Stahl would prohibit doctors from conscientiously objecting to performing requested procedures on moral grounds.

More:

Emanuel and Stahl would drive noncooperating doctors out of medicine (my emphasis):

Health care professionals who are unwilling to accept these limits have two choices: select an area of medicine, such as radiology, that will not put them in situations that conflict with their personal morality or, if there is no such area, leave the profession.Shattering medical conscience rights would also dissuade those who hold officially unwanted values—orthodox Catholics and other Christians, Jews, Muslims, and pro-lifers—from entering medical school in the first place. There is a method to this madness: The goal is to cleanse healthcare of all those who would dare to practice medicine in accord with sanctity-of-life moral viewpoints.

Read the whole thing. 

I write about this in The Benedict Option. Excerpt:

Public school teachers, college professors, doctors, and lawyers will all face tremendous pressure to capitulate to this ideology as a condition of employment. So will psychologists, social workers, and all in the helping professions; and of course, florists, photographers, backers, and all businesses that are subject to public accommodation laws.

Christian students and their parents must take this into careful consideration when deciding on a field of study in college and professional school. A nationally prominent physician who is also a devout Christian tells me he discourages his children from following in his footsteps. Doctors now and in the near future will be dealing with issues related to sex, sexuality, and gender identity but also to abortion and euthanasia. “Patient autonomy” and nondiscrimination are the principles that trump all conscience considerations, and physicians are expected to fall in line.

“If they make compliance a matter of licensure, there will be nowhere to hide,” said this physician. “And then what do you do if you’re three hundred thousand dollars in debt from medical school, and have a family with three kids and a sick parent? Tough call, because there aren’t too many parishes or church communities who would jump in and help.”

I did not identify my source, at his request, but trust me, he is a physician at the top of his field. As Smith writes in that First Things piece, this is not an abstract threat. Canada is already farther along the road to this dystopian future.

What do you physicians, nurses, and others in the medical field think?

Christians Tempted By Trump Idolatry

Jerry Falwell Jr.: No other president “in our lifetimes has done so much that has benefited the Christian community” so quickly as Trump. pic.twitter.com/ZROfovWGzc

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) May 13, 2017

Yeah.

I don’t agree with Michael Gerson on a lot of things — I believe he is far too accommodationist to the moral values of post-Christianity — but I suspect he has this right about his fellow Evangelicals:

Third, without really knowing it, Trump has presented a secular version of evangelical eschatology. When the candidate talked of an America on the brink of destruction, which could only be saved by returning to the certainties of the past, it perfectly fit the evangelical narrative of moral and national decline. Trump speaks the language of decadence and renewal (while exemplifying just one of them).

In the Trump era, evangelicals have gotten a conservative Supreme Court justice for their pains – which is significant. And they have gotten a leader who shows contempt for those who hold them in contempt – which is emotionally satisfying.

The cost? Evangelicals have become loyal to a leader of shockingly low character. They have associated their faith with exclusion and bias. They have become another Washington interest group, striving for advantage rather than seeking the common good. And a movement that should be known for grace is now known for its seething resentments.

Of course I do believe that we are in an era of moral and national decline, and I do believe that we have to return in some real sense to the past to find the right way forward. To the extent those things are believed by Evangelicals, they have that right. The problem is that so many of them saw Donald Trump (and politics in general) as a credible answer to the challenge. As I write in The Benedict Option:

Though Donald Trump won the presidency in part with the strong support of Catholics and Evangelicals, the idea that the robustly vulgar, fiercely combative, and morally compromised as Trump will be an avatar for the restoration of Christian morality and social unity is beyond delusional. He is not a solution to America’s cultural decline, but a symptom of it.

More:

Besides, fair or not, conservative Christianity will be associated with Trump for the next few years, and no doubt beyond. If conservative church leaders aren’t extraordinarily careful in how they manage their public relationship to the Trump phenomenon, anti-Trump blowback will do severe damage to the church’s reputation. Trump’s election solves some problems for the church, but given the man’s character, it creates others. Political power is not a moral disinfectant.

And this brings us to the more subtle but potentially more devastating effects of this unexpected GOP election victory. There is first the temptation to worship power, and to compromise one’s soul to maintain access to it. There are many ways to burn a pinch of incense to Caesar, and some prominent pro-Trump Christians arguably crossed that line during the campaign season. Again, political victory does not vitiate the vice of hypocrisy.

There is also the danger of Christians falling back into complacency. No administration in Washington, no matter how ostensibly pro-Christian, is capable of stopping cultural trends toward desacralization and fragmentation that have been building for centuries. To expect any different is to make a false idol of politics.

What’s more, to believe that the threat to the church’s integrity and witness has passed because Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election is the height of folly.

One reason the contemporary church is in so much trouble is that religious conservatives of the last generation mistakenly believed they could focus on politics, and the culture would take care of itself.

Read the whole thing. And reflect too on this paragraph from Gerson’s column:

In a recent analysis, the Pew Research Center found that more than three-fourths of white evangelicals approve of Trump’s job performance, most of them “strongly.” With these evangelicals comprising about a quarter of the electorate, their support is the life jacket preventing Trump from slipping into unrecoverable political depths.

I’m not sure that Trump is in danger of “slipping into unrecoverable political depths” (but stick around!), but I am very sure that if Trump’s presidency collapses, that Christians in general and Evangelicals in particular are going to be the scapegoats.

It will not matter if you are a conservative Christian who spoke out against Trump during the campaign, or who did not vote for him. We are going to own him. The people within US culture, especially among the elites, who hate conservative Christians aren’t going to separate out the Russell Moores from the Jerry Falwell Jrs; it’s going to be on all of us. These diehard Trump-backing Christians will have provided progressives, as well as factions within the GOP who are sick of Christians’ influence in the party, with the pretext they need to crack down. Good luck defending religious liberty when it is associated with Donald Trump, whose only meaningful move on religious liberty has been to order the IRS not to enforce the law against political activity (including fundrai$ing) on the part of churches.

In October 2016, Andy Crouch, then executive editor at Christianity Today, penned an editorial that will be seen eventually as prophetic. It said, in part:

He has given no evidence of humility or dependence on others, let alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly celebrates strongmen and takes every opportunity to humiliate and demean the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity or capacity to learn. He is, in short, the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool.

Some have compared Trump to King David, who himself committed adultery and murder. But David’s story began with a profound reliance on God who called him from the sheepfold to the kingship, and by the grace of God it did not end with his exploitation of Bathsheba and Uriah. There is no parallel in Trump’s much more protracted career of exploitation. The Lord sent his word by the prophet Nathan to denounce David’s actions—alas, many Christian leaders who could have spoken such prophetic confrontation to him personally have failed to do so. David quickly and deeply repented, leaving behind the astonishing and universally applicable lament of his own sin in Psalm 51—we have no sign that Trump ever in his life has expressed such humility. And the biblical narrative leaves no doubt that David’s sin had vast and terrible consequences for his own family dynasty and for his nation. The equivalent legacy of a Trump presidency is grievous to imagine.

Most Christians who support Trump have done so with reluctant strategic calculation, largely based on the president’s power to appoint members of the Supreme Court. Important issues are indeed at stake, including the right of Christians and adherents of other religions to uphold their vision of sexual integrity and marriage even if they are in the cultural minority.

But there is a point at which strategy becomes its own form of idolatry—an attempt to manipulate the levers of history in favor of the causes we support. Strategy becomes idolatry, for ancient Israel and for us today, when we make alliances with those who seem to offer strength—the chariots of Egypt, the vassal kings of Rome—at the expense of our dependence on God who judges all nations, and in defiance of God’s manifest concern for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed. Strategy becomes idolatry when we betray our deepest values in pursuit of earthly influence. And because such strategy requires capitulating to idols and princes and denying the true God, it ultimately always fails.

Enthusiasm for a candidate like Trump gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord. They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us—in hope, almost certainly a vain hope given his mendacity and record of betrayal, that his rule will save us.

If Donald Trump, through his own bumbling braggadocio, inadvertently revealed some of the nation’s most secret intelligence to the Russians, this is a very, very big deal. We do not have proof that Trump did this, but finding out the answer to that question cannot be a matter of indifference. There is no doubt that there are people within the intelligence community and permanent Washington bureaucracy who would like to see Trump fail. Maybe they are lying about the disclosure to the Russians — and if so, may their lies be exposed and may they be held responsible for what they have done.

But maybe they aren’t lying. What Trump is alleged to have done is perfectly within his character. Either way, the American people have to know. It is time for the sources of this leak to come forward, even if it means they have to resign. The stakes are too high.

For my tribe, conservative Christians, the stakes are mighty high as well. Many of us have already been willing to ignore a lot of things we previously said that we should not ignore — this, for the sake of supporting Trump. I did not vote in the presidential election, but I certainly understand why conservative Christians may have voted for Trump with a heavy heart, given how hostile Hillary Clinton would have been to our interests. Now, though, we had better be asking ourselves where the line is that Trump would have to cross to cost him our support. If — if — we learn that Trump did what he is alleged to have done, and you stand behind him even so, how do you answer the charge that Christians care so much about access to power that they will turn a blind eye when the president they support blabs extremely sensitive national security secrets to the Russians? Are we really idolaters who would sell our souls to stay in the king’s good graces?

Again: we don’t know for sure that Trump did what he is accused of doing. But if, once the smoke clears, he turns out to have done it, what will we do? Where will our moral credibility be if we still stand by him? Why should anyone take us seriously after that? There was a time when we condemned Democrats and liberals for standing by Bill Clinton, despite how he disgraced the Oval Office. We accused them of caring more about power than principle — and we were right to. Remember when the liberal journalist Nina Burleigh said in 1998, amid the Lewinsky scandal, that she would fellate Bill Clinton to thank him for keeping abortion legal? Are conservative Christians really prepared to walk a mile in her kneepads for Donald Trump? And for what?

God is not mocked.

 

The Paradox Of Tradition In The Modern World

I enjoyed very much this conversation with Mark Movsesian about the Benedict Option and Tradition. Excerpts:

Movsesian: I wonder if we could talk about tradition, which runs like a red thread through your book. You argue that it’s necessary for Christians to return to tradition in order to resist “liquid modernity,” which denies the value of all attachments and identities except those individuals freely choose for themselves. In liquid modernity, the only thing that has meaning is momentary individual choice. This is quite destabilizing for individuals and for society; that’s where tradition can be helpful.

As co-director of the Tradition Project, I have sympathy for your view! But I think there’s a paradox about tradition in a pluralist society like ours. In such a society, tradition is itself a matter of individual choice; there’s no avoiding it. Tradition is just one available option among many for an individual to choose; in the end, each of us is free to choose tradition or to reject it; to choose it and then reject it; or to choose some aspects of it and not others. This is true even of people brought up in a tradition—like the kids attending classical Christian schools today. What do you make of this paradox?

Dreher: There’s no escaping it. I am quite aware of the near-absurdity of my own personal case: a 50-year-old man raised a nominal Methodist, a convert to Catholicism in my mid-20s, converting to Orthodox Christianity at 39, and having moved around the country a great deal for my career, writing a book in praise of tradition. Yet … what else is there? Charles Taylor says that we all live in a secular age, which he defines as the awareness of the possibility that we don’t have to live the way that we do. We cannot escape choice.

This is why our St. Benedict, if we are to have one, must be new and very different, as MacIntyre said. The first Benedict emerged in a West that was still new to Christianity. Now we have been through the Christian era, and can’t un-see what we have seen. And the consciousness of an ordinary person living in the 21st century can hardly be compared to the way a 6th century layman saw the world conceptually and imaginatively. This point hardly needs elaboration, but it conditions any approach to tradition we make today.

To bring this discussion down to earth, I think a lot these days about my late father and sister, who were in most respects traditionalists without knowing what they were doing. That is, they assumed that the rural way of life they had in south Louisiana was going to continue forever. They were quite intelligent, but they strongly rejected as alien anything that challenged their way of seeing the world. That meant rejecting me, and the things that I loved and stood for, though I didn’t realize how thorough this rejection was until I returned to south Louisiana after my sister’s 2011 death. My dad died in 2015. The family has not held together, for various reasons – and this was something I never expected. I deeply admired the unselfconscious traditionalism that my dad and sister represented. They didn’t theorize this stuff; they lived it. But I can see in retrospect that they believed that force of their iron wills was sufficient to ward off all threats to the things they valued most, especially family and place. It was a tragic mistake. Their rigidity, by which I mean their unwillingness to adapt and to change certain things that needed to be changed for the sake of holding on to the things that really mattered the most – that was the fundamental flaw that doomed the entire thing. They thought that stoically preserving their fortress-like outer walls would keep the interior safe. They were wrong.

It’s heartbreaking and tragic in the fullest sense of the word, and a very Southern tragedy too.  But I try to learn from what happened. I suspect I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to learn from what happened. Right now, I think the most basic lesson is the need for discernment in our approach to tradition. There is no substitute for it. We have to know what we have to change so we can conserve what is essential. This is hard.

On the more optimistic side, though, I believe that we are starting to see more and more people realizing that the future is not determined. Yes, I think we have to be aware of all that is against us in post-Christian modernity, but we also have to be aware that God can surprise us – and we can surprise ourselves. I mean, look, Napoleon closed the monastery in Norcia, St. Benedict’s hometown,  after at least eight centuries of constant presence there. For nearly 200 years, there were no monks. And then, at the turn of the millennium, a handful of American Benedictines who wanted to live in the old Benedictine way re-opened it. Now they have a thriving community of 16 monks. The average age is 33. Who could have expected that?

In The Benedict Option, I quote one of those monks, Father Martin Bernhard, who left the Texas Hill Country to follow his calling to Norcia. When I visited him there in early 2016, I told him that they are a sign of contradiction to the modern world. He smiled, and said that anybody could do something out of the ordinary if they are willing “to pick up what we have lost and to make it real again.”

The monk told me, “People say, ‘Oh, you’re just trying to turn back the clock.’ That makes no sense. If you’re doing something right now, it means you’re doing it right now. It’s new, and it’s alive! And that’s a very powerful thing.”

God knows it will not be easy to revive traditional Christian life and practices. But again: what else is there?

Read the whole thing.  Mark asked good questions. I especially liked his last two, which touched on important parts of The Benedict Option that few reporters or reviewers talk about.

Next month, I’m going to Italy for an international conference co-sponsored by Mark and the Tradition Project at the Center for Law & Religion at St. John’s law school. There are some exciting things happening on this front. Watch this space.