Rod Dreher's Blog, page 462

Trump Attempts To Blackmail Comey. Really

James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017

Think about it: the President of the United States is threatening to blackmail the former chief of the nation’s top domestic law enforcement agency in an attempt to shut him up.

Maybe Trump is bluffing, which would be outrageous enough. But what if he’s telling the truth? We have no way of knowing. Now, every single man or woman who goes into the White House to converse with him now has to worry that the president is secretly recording their conversation, and has no scruples against using what is said to blackmail them. What say you, Sen. Mitch McConnell? What say you, CIA director Mike Pompeo?

This is banana republic stuff. This man is out of control. How can we have a functioning government if the President feels entitled to threaten blackmail, and every single official who meets with him in the White House has to worry that they’re being bugged, and that words they say in confidence could be used against them?

Note well that Trump manufactured this crisis out of his own ineptitude and corruption.

Congress is going to have to impeach him to protect the integrity of our Constitutional order. The House impeached Clinton for lying under oath (though the Senate did not convict). Now we have a sitting president threatening blackmail against the FBI director he fired. This, only four months into the president’s administration. Mind-boggling. But here we are. If this is not a bright red line, what is?

The Left, Still Eating Itself

These people, I swear:

The editor of the Writers’ Union of Canada’s magazine has resigned after complaints over an article he wrote in which he said he doesn’t believe in cultural appropriation.

Hal Niedzviecki, editor of Write — a publication for the union’s members — published an opinion piece in the spring 2017 issue titled “Writer’s Prompt.” In the article, in an issue dedicated to indigenous writing, Niedzviecki wrote: “In my opinion, anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities.

“I’d go so far as to say there should even be an award for doing so — the Appropriation Prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him.”

He went on to argue that Canadian literature remains “exhaustingly white and middle class” because writers are discouraged from writing about people and places they don’t know.

A sociological term, cultural appropriation is used to describe the adoption of elements or practices of one cultural group by members of another.

Now writers and editors affiliated with the magazine are falling all over themselves to denounce it and to distance itself from this cultural atrocity. Read the whole thing, and just shake your head at the self-loathing, the artistic gutlessness, and the all-consuming neurosis of these Canadian writers, editors, and academics.

These white people are so timid that they will only allow themselves to produce art that offends exactly no one within their extremely narrow circle. And the minorities who have appointed themselves as Grand Inquisitors tasked with policing the bounds of discourse within fictional works with all the self-righteous militancy of the Saudi vice squad are also cowards, and they’re destroying art for the sake of cultural politics.

Remember when people created, published, and taught literature because they loved words and stories, and believed that literature, like all great art, taught us something about the human condition? Could it be that having lost a connection with the vital sources of creativity, the academic writing-industrial complex has nothing left to do but to police pathetic left-wing orthodoxies?

Imagine that: writers demanding that an editor resign over his calling on writers to write outside their own bubbles. Here’s Niedzviecki’s resignation statement, in which he apologizes to the Maoist rabble he ought to have been insulting on the way out the door:

May 10, 2017

Statement regarding my article in the Spring Issue of Write Magazine:

This is a public statement regarding the article that I wrote in the Spring Issue of Write Magazine, “Winning the Appropriation Prize.” As with all articles in the magazine, the opinions of the author are not the opinions of the Writers’ Union of Canada.

The article “Winning the Appropriation Prize” was meant as a short reflection about voice and authenticity after having the privilege of conceiving of, and editing, an issue devoted to Indigenous writing and publishing. My evocation of cultural appropriation was meant solely in the context of writers and writing, given that the context was a discussion in Write Magazine. My aim was to make two points: First, that writers should never be dissuaded from writing in a variety of viewpoints and voices, as, when it is done in the right way, this deepens the cultural conversation and gives rise to greater understanding and cultural reciprocity. Second, that many of the Indigenous writers published in the Spring issue of Write wrote about having suffered from the effects and aftereffects of the Residential school system and other systemic attempts to suppress their culture. They wrote poignantly about reclaiming authenticity and voice.

The short article then goes on to say that “Indigenous writing is the most vital and compelling force in writing and publishing in Canada today.” I believe this is true, and that’s the main point I was trying to make with the piece: That Indigenous writers are courageously developing their writerly voices and writing about their experiences, and that this is resulting in salient and meaningful works.

I regret that my words failed to acknowledge the profound and lasting adverse impact of cultural appropriation on Indigenous peoples. I began the piece glibly, which resulted in some readers misunderstanding my intentions. I understand and accept their point of view. I have the utmost respect for the Indigenous writers who contributed to this issue, and did not in anyway mean to diminish or demean their work, the importance of their authentic experiences and voices, or their struggle against racism and colonialism in Canadian society. To anyone who found the piece an inappropriate introduction to the work in the issue, I sincerely apologize. I have spent the last twenty years fostering and providing a forum to writing from the margins. Anyone who is familiar with my work knows that I would never intentionally demean or diminish the experience of other people. I appreciate individuals taking time to share their thoughts and respond to the piece, since I do value the opportunity to learn from this experience and from the thoughtful feedback of others.

I have resigned as editor of Write Magazine. In my time as editor I’ve worked with many great writers, helped to foster many voices, and am particularly proud of my collaborative work developing an ongoing column written by writers exiled from their home countries and now living in Canada.

Sincerely, Hal Niedzviecki

What should young people who love fiction and feel a calling to teach it, and maybe even write it, do? Could you in good conscience advise them to go to college to study literature or creative writing? People who have a true calling to create are going to create no matter what obstacles get put in their way. But I cannot imagine having to subject myself to this kind of nonsense for the sake of learning my craft. I would worry that immersing myself too thoroughly in that world would cause me to go native, and to strive to turn myself into a court poet of the literary elite. And I would worry that I would inadvertently step on a land mine, as poor Niedzviecki has done, and blow up my career by offending a gaggle of commissars.

Where are the Paul J. Griffithses and the Havel’s Greengrocers of the literary world? Come out, come out, wherever you are!

Trump: An Unusually Bad Liar

So, when do the wheels finally come off this thing? From the NYT:

President Trump offered a new version of his decision to fire James B. Comey, saying on Thursday that he would have dismissed the F.B.I. director regardless of whether the attorney general and his deputy recommended it.

It was just the latest in a series of statements, some of them contradictory, to whiplash Washington over 48 hours that began with Mr. Comey’s firing on Tuesday evening. And it was unusually harsh: Mr. Trump castigated Mr. Comey as “a showboat” and “a grandstander,” suggesting that his issues with the F.B.I. director went beyond any previously stated concerns.

Mr. Trump said Thursday he had not relied solely on the advice from the Justice Department’s top two leaders in deciding to dismiss Mr. Comey. Earlier, the White House had said that Mr. Trump had acted only after Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, came to him and recommended that Mr. Comey be dismissed because of his handling of last year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email. In his Tuesday letter terminating Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump said he had “accepted their recommendation.” And Vice President Mike Pence, talking to reporters, echoed his boss.

But by the next day, that story had begun to unravel.

Read it all, and ask yourself why on earth any Republican member of Congress would stand by this president, who is congenitally unable to tell the truth. And look at this:

Only seven days after Donald J. Trump was sworn in as president, James B. Comey has told associates, the F.B.I. director was summoned to the White House for a one-on-one dinner with the new commander in chief.

The conversation that night in January, Mr. Comey now believes, was a harbinger of his downfall this week as head of the F.B.I., according to two people who have heard his account of the dinner.

As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies. The president then turned the conversation to whether Mr. Comey would pledge his loyalty to him.

Mr. Comey declined to make that pledge. Instead, Mr. Comey has recounted to others, he told Mr. Trump that he would always be honest with him, but that he was not “reliable” in the conventional political sense.

The White House says this account is not correct.

Maybe the White House is telling the truth here, but I don’t believe it. How can anybody believe it?

The thing to keep in mind is that this Dumpster fire is entirely of Trump’s own making. Maybe Comey deserved to be fired. If so, you don’t fire him in the middle of this Russia investigation, you don’t fire him in a dirty way guaranteed to raise everyone’s suspicions, and you sure don’t lie about it, and send your people (Pence, Sanders, et al.) out to lie about it.

And now, in his NBC News interview today, Trump blew it all up again, suggesting that the Russia probe did play into his rationale for firing Comey:

Trump to NBC: “When I decided to [fire Comey], I said to myself, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story.”

— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) May 11, 2017

… and that he had decided to fire Comey no matter what Sessions and Rosenstein said:

HOLT: Did you ask for a recommendation?

TRUMP: What I did is, I was going to fire Comey. My decision. It was not . . .

HOLT: You had made the decision before they came in the room.

TRUMP: I was going to fire Comey. There’s no good time to do it, by the way.

HOLT: Because in your letter, you said, ‘I accepted their recommendation.’ So you had already made the decision.

TRUMP: Oh, I was going to fire regardless of recommendation.

— thereby sawing off the limb behind all his spokesmen.

Remember when Sen. Bob Kerrey said of Bill Clinton that he’s “an unusually good liar”? Clinton was. Trump is an unusually bad liar — and it is destroying his administration only four months into his presidency. It is becoming very hard to deny that President Trump believes that the FBI ought to be not just under his authority, but under his control.

If you’re a Republican member of Congress right now, what must you be thinking?

via GIPHY

UPDATE: Here’s a good piece from Politico talking about how, whatever Trump’s real reasons for canning Comey, that Comey had been courting this fate for a long time. Excerpt:

There are already hints that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was gunning for Comey at the White House’s request, but Trump’s letter firing the FBI director came attached to memos from both the attorney general and deputy attorney general that concluded Comey had compromised the bureau’s integrity and reputation.

It’s a conclusion that few in Washington will argue with today. As interviews with current and former FBI agents and executives as well as officials at the Justice Department and both the Obama and Trump White Houses make clear, Comey has spent the past year delivering enemies on all sides all the evidence they needed to conclude that he had become uniquely compromised as FBI director. That cover may prove a fig leaf for Trump’s real reason—hoping to avoid Comey’s tenaciousness as a prosecutor as he finds himself in the FBI’s spotlight—but the seeds of Comey’s downfall have been germinating for years.

Killing White People, Part II

The Daily Nous reports that Texas A&M philosophy professor Tommy Curry is receiving death threats because I highlighted a podcast he made in which he discussed black people killing whites, and when it might be acceptable. From the Daily Nous:

The article, “When Is It Ok To Kill Whites?” by Rod Dreher, appears at The American Conservative, and uses as its launching point an interview that Professor Curry did four years earlier. In that interview, Professor Curry discusses the contemporary popular lack of awareness of calls for violent black resistance against slavery and racism in U.S. history, the history of violence against black people in the U.S., the way in which the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment has been made use of in racist ways, and related topics. Dreher uses misleading rhetoric and selective quotations in an attempt to frame Curry’s remarks as “racist bilge.”

For example, in the interview, Curry, discussing Jamie Foxx’s joke about how great it was for him to be able to kill all of the white characters in the movie Django Unchained, says:

What I’m surprised about is that I’ve seen no black public intellectual come out and actually address the issue of violence or social revolution or radical self-defense by black people historically. So right now black people simply buy into the idea that “oh, it’s entertainment,” or “oh, you know, violence against white people is only the idea of the Black Panthers.” But in reality we’ve had people from Nat Turner to Robert F. Williams who was the father of the radical self defense movement that inspired the Black Panthers… that thought about killing white people in self-defense…

When we have this conversation about violence or killing white people it has to be looked at in the context of a historical turn, and the fact that we’ve had no one address, like, how relevant and how solidified this kind of tradition is for black people saying, “look in order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people may have to die,” I’ve just been immensely disappointed, because what we look at week after week is national catastrophe after catastrophe where black people, black children, are still dying…

Dreher takes all of that and reports it as follows:

“In order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die,” he says

—completely ignoring that with those words Curry was describing a view that some people, historically, have held. You get the idea. Dreher, no stranger to the Internet, knows exactly what he is doing here, and what the likely result will be.

Ridiculous. Anybody who is threatening Dr. Curry ought to be ashamed of themselves, and arrested if possible. I say that as someone who, back in 2001, had to hide out in my apartment for a week after Al Sharpton and other racist demagogues whipped up sentiment against me, resulting in multiple death threats. It’s not very comforting to have left on your answering machine at work, “We know what you look like and what door you use when you come out of your building. We will be waiting with a knife, and we’re going to cut your throat.” That really happened, that threat. And it was not the only threat.

But I stand by my interpretation of Curry’s remarks. Listen to the entire short interview. He begins by condemning Barack Obama and Martin Luther King for being peaceable in talking about race and racial reconciliation. Then, at around the two minute mark, Curry condemns black and white liberals who try to dissuade discussion of blacks killing whites as a form of achieving justice. Curry says (sarcastically) that “you can never have a political conversation about the killing of white people, that that in itself is evil, is not productive, that only evil black nationalists do that, right?”

He goes on to lament that so few black intellectuals today consider “how relevant and how solidified this kind of tradition is” it is to today, when, he says, police are killing black children. He says openly that we should be talking about black people taking up arms to protect themselves from the police. You listen to the Curry rant for yourself and decide what he’s saying, but he began by talking about how wrong Jamie Foxx was to fantasize about killing white people as mere entertainment. Curry says in context that this was a serious thing, and that people like Obama and King and other black intellectuals in that tradition are wrong to downplay the threat of deadly violence as a means of black liberation. In context of the entire piece, it seems pretty clear to me that Curry is saying that this ought to be a live option for black Americans today. Again, Curry’s quote:

When we have this conversation about violence or killing white people it has to be looked at in the context of a historical turn, and the fact that we’ve had no one address, like, how relevant and how solidified this kind of tradition is for black people saying, “look in order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people may have to die,” I’ve just been immensely disappointed, because what we look at week after week is national catastrophe after catastrophe where black people, black children, are still dying…

Listen to the entire Curry interview, and tell me that he’s not saying that black folks today ought to be talking about killing white people for the sake of liberation and equality. I don’t believe Tommy Curry is encouraging black people to go out today and cut throats. I think he is entertaining dangerous thoughts here, same as far-right white radicals.

You can find all kinds of talks online from Tommy Curry trashing white people and black people who are insufficiently radical (e.g., “Stop Absolving White Folks”). In that talk, Curry condemns progressive white academics who criticize whites for the way they have treated Native Americans.

“Contemporary white feminists pretend that they can simply converse [sic] these ideas without consequence,” Curry says. In other words, shut up, white woman, because your skin color makes you guilty. Curry goes on to say that white feminists allow the “academic-industrial complex” to “pimp out oppression,” and that “white people and whiteness” are “responsible for the genocide” against Native Americans, “and continue to enforce today as a slavetocracy [sic] against African descended people.”

Tommy Curry believes that black Americans today live under a “slavetocracy.” He said so. And he thinks black Americans ought to be thinking about the historic example of armed black people who were prepared to use lethal force to protect themselves in a time when white people were allowed to terrorize them with impunity.

Tell me, then, how my interpretation of Tommy Curry’s point of view is wrong. I do not believe it is. I think Curry prefers to think of this stuff as something he can talk about and rant about, but that nobody outside the circles of the elect should listen to and take seriously. It seems to me that contemporary radical black nationalists like Prof. Curry pretend that they can simply talk about these ideas without consequence. If you’d like to do that, then don’t post your crackpot racial hatred to the Internet. If you’d like to know more about what Tommy Curry believes regarding this stuff, it’s easy to find out on the Internet. He has spoken at length about it.

That said, again, anyone who threatens to harm Dr. Curry or his family ought to be arrested.

UPDATE: And, I might add, I hope Dr. Curry is armed, so that if anybody shows up at his house threatening him, he defends his home and family by any means necessary.

Seems to me that what links this case to the Duke Divinity School situation is that academics would like to carry out their own discourses within the bounds of the academy, and do not want outsiders looking in or passing judgment. My guess is that within the academy, people have gotten so accustomed to hearing professors like Tommy Curry spout radicalism that they think it is normative. When outsiders peek in and judge it, they get furious. Could it be that they’re so accustomed to their audiences deferring to them that they cannot imagine anyone objecting?

Perversion As Progress

A reader sends in this latest example of the Law Of Merited Impossibility (“That’s never going to happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”): a big piece in The New York Times asking if open marriages are happier marriages. From the story:

Elizabeth, baffled by Daniel’s disappointment, wondered: How great does sex have to be for a person to be happy? Daniel wondered: Don’t I have the right to care this much about sex, about intimacy? Occasionally, when he decided the answer was yes, and he felt some vital part of himself dwindling, Daniel would think about a radical possibility: opening up their marriage to other relationships. He would poke around on the internet and read about other couples’ arrangements. It was both an outlandish idea and, to him, a totally rational one. He eventually even wrote about it in 2009 for a friend who had a blog about sexuality. “As our culture becomes more accepting of choices outside the norm, nonmonogamy will expand as an acceptable choice, and the world will have to change as a result,” he predicted.

An outlandish idea back then. But you know what happened next to Elizabeth and Daniel, who are now living in an open marriage. The Times story says that polyamory has become much more accepted today, thanks in large part to the efforts of Dan Savage:

In recent years, probably no one has made the idea of open marriage more accessible than Dan Savage, who coined the word “monogamish” to describe his own relationship status. Savage, an internationally syndicated, podcast-hosting and often-quoted voice on sexual ethics, is gay, married, a father and nonmonogamous. He has used his vast reach to defend consensual nonmonogamy, which Savage says is widely accepted in the male gay community as a choice that can foster a relationship’s longevity, provided all parties involved behave ethically.

And technology:

Technology also imports nonmonogamy into mainstream heterosexual dating life, making the concept more visible and transparent. On the popular dating site OkCupid, couples seeking other partners can link their profiles; users can filter their searches for people who label themselves “nonmonogamous.” The site, an intimate tool in the romantic lives of its users, renders no judgment, and therefore normalizes, institutionally, a practice few people had neutral language for in the past. Among 40-to-50-year-olds who identify themselves as nonmonogamous on OkCupid, 16 percent also announce that they are married, according to the site.

The taboo is eroding:

Two-thirds of Americans feel that “a growing variety in the types of family arrangements that people live in” is “a good thing” or “makes no difference,” according to a 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center.

And this is surprising:

Conventional wisdom has it that men are more likely than women to crave, even need, variety in their sex lives. But of the 25 couples I encountered, a majority of the relationships were opened at the initiation of the women; only in six cases had it been the men. Even when the decision was mutual, the woman was usually the more sexually active outside the marriage. A suburban married man on OkCupid told me he had yet to date anyone, in contrast to his wife, whom he called “an intimacy vampire.” There was a woman in Portland whose husband had lost interest in sex with anyone, not just her. A 36-year-old woman in Seattle said she opened her marriage after she heard about the concept from another young mom at her book club.

Perhaps the women in the couples I encountered were more willing to tell their stories because they did not fit into predictable unflattering stereotypes about the male sex drive. But it was nonetheless striking to hear so many wives risk so much on behalf of their sexual happiness.

… risk so much on behalf of their sexual happiness. I guess this is what counts as courageous in this post-Christian culture. If you read the entire story, you will see — surprise! — that the author pretty much concludes that polyamory can strengthen marriages:

Daniel and Elizabeth had turned their union into an elaborate puzzle, one they could only solve together, had to solve together, for the well-being of their family, even if doing so demanded more from each of them than their marriage ever had. Energy for generosity in a marriage can easily suffocate beneath the accumulation of grievances and disappointments, or even laziness of habit; now both Elizabeth and Daniel felt the weight of those histories somehow shifting, if not entirely lifting. They had experienced enough to know that they could not predict how much their lives might change in another year or two; but they felt more confident that they could weather what was coming their way. “The marriage is better than it was when it started,” Daniel said in March. “It is. It really is.”

Look, at this point, why argue? This kind of thing means the dissolution of family and eventually of society. Marriage is damned difficult, as anyone who has been married for any length of time knows. It requires immense sacrifice on both sides. The priest who prepared my wife and me for marriage told us that sometimes, the burden of sacrifice would fall heavily on one of us, and at other times on the other. But neither of us would be able to avoid sacrifice and suffering within the marriage; that is in its nature. When we made our vows at the altar, we entangled our fingers around a crucifix. The priest said at the altar that as long as we hold on to Christ, we can hold on to each other, but if we let go of Christ, we would find it hard to hold on to each other.

Today, after 20 years of marriage, I think of what the priest told us, both in the wedding rite and in our preparation, was profoundly true, and profoundly useful. It’s not for nothing that in the Orthodox Christian wedding rite, both bride and groom receive a symbolic crown. It is the crown of martyrdom, for dying to self is key to the mystery of marriage. Father Stephen Freeman, an Orthodox priest, writes:

No issues in the modern world seem to be pressing the Church with as much force as those surrounding sex and marriage. The so-called Sexual Revolution has, for the most part, succeeded in radically changing how our culture understands both matters. Drawing from a highly selective (and sometimes contradictory) set of political, sociological and scientific arguments, opponents of the Christian tradition are pressing the case for radical reform with an abandon that bears all of the hallmarks of a revolution. And they have moved into the ascendancy.

Those manning the barricades describe themselves as “defending marriage.” That is a deep inaccuracy: marriage, as an institution, was surrendered quite some time ago. Today’s battles are not about marriage but simply about dividing the spoils of its destruction. It is too late to defend marriage. Rather than being defended, marriage needs to be taught and lived.

The Church needs to be willing to become the place where that teaching occurs as well as the place that can sustain couples in the struggle required to live it. Fortunately, the spiritual inheritance of the Church has gifted it with all of the tools necessary for that task. It lacks only people who are willing to take up the struggle.

More:

The classical Christian marriage belongs to the genre of martyrdom. It is a commitment to death. As Hauerwas notes: faithfulness over the course of a life-time defines what it means to “love” someone. At the end of a faithful life, we may say of someone, “He loved his wife.”

Father Stephen continues:

Some have begun to write about the so-called “Benedict Option,” a notion first introduced by Alasdair MacIntyre in his book, After Virtue. It compares the contemporary situation to that of the collapse of the Roman Christian Imperium in the West (i.e., the Dark Ages). Christian civilization, MacIntyre notes, was not rebuilt through a major conquering or legislating force, but through the patient endurance of small monastic communities and surrounding Christian villages. That pattern marked the spread of Christian civilization for many centuries in many places, both East and West.

It would seem clear that a legislative option has long been a moot point. When 95 percent of the population is engaging in sex outside of marriage (to say the least) no legislation of a traditional sort is likely to make a difference. The greater question is whether such a cultural tidal wave will inundate the Church’s teaching or render it inert – a canonical witness to a by-gone time, acknowledged perhaps in confession but irrelevant to daily choices (this is already true in many places).

And:

The “Benedict Option” can only be judged over the course of centuries, doubtless to the dismay of our impatient age. But, as noted, those things required are already largely in place. The marriage rite (in those Churches who refuse the present errors) remains committed to the life-long union of a man and a woman with clearly stated goals of fidelity. The canon laws supporting such marriages remain intact. Lacking is sufficient teaching and formation in the virtues required to live the martyrdom of marriage.

Modern culture has emphasized suffering as undesirable and an object to be remedied. Our resources are devoted to the ending of suffering and not to its endurance. Of course, the abiding myth of Modernity is that suffering can be eliminated. This is neither true nor desirable.

Virtues of patience, endurance, sacrifice, selflessness, generosity, kindness, steadfastness, loyalty, and other such qualities are impossible without the presence of suffering. The Christian faith does not disparage the relief of suffering, but neither does it make it definitive for the acquisition of virtue. Christ is quite clear that all will suffer. It is pretty much the case that no good thing comes about in human society except through the voluntary suffering of some person or persons. The goodness in our lives is rooted in the grace of heroic actions.

In the absence of stable, life-long, self-sacrificing marriages, all discussion of sex and sexuality is reduced to abstractions. An eloquent case for traditional families is currently being made by the chaos and dysfunction set in motion by their absence. No amount of legislation or social programs will succeed in replacing the most natural of human traditions. The social corrosion represented by our over-populated prisons, births outside of marriage (over 40 percent in the general population and over 70 percent among non-Hispanic African Americans), and similar phenomenon continue to predict a breakdown of civility on the most fundamental level. We passed into the “Dark Ages” some time ago. The “Benedict Option” is already in place. It is in your parish and in your marriage. Every day you endure and succeed in a faithful union to your spouse and children is a heroic act of grace-filled living. [Emphasis mine — RD]

We are not promised that the Option will be successful as a civilizational cure. Such things are in the hands of God. But we should have no doubt about the Modern Project going on around us. It is not building a Brave New World. It is merely destroying the old one and letting its children roam amid the ruins.

Please, please, please read the whole thing. This is the bold, clear, hard, shining truth. There is no point in trying to argue with this culture anymore. Shake the dust off your feet. The ark is here, within the Church. Turn your back on this culture, and run towards the ark of the Church. There you will not find relief from suffering, but rather the strength to endure it, to sanctify it, and by God’s grace, overcome it.

I have written a book called The Benedict Option, which I hope will inspire Christians to wake up to the reality around us, and to take necessary measures to hold on to what we know to be true in this age of lies. As Father Stephen writes, “It is too late to defend marriage. Rather than being defended, marriage needs to be taught and lived.” The fight that many conservative Christians have committed themselves to, to “defend traditional marriage” is over — and we lost. We lost not because we were wrong, but we lost all the same. My friends who are still involved in trying to fight this culture war at the level of policy and politics are battling for a lost cause.

The cause of traditional marriage is not lost, in the sense that it has been proven wrong. But the forces of atomization in the modern world did overcome it; the changing laws reflect the changing cultural consensus. The great fight now is within the Church, to hold on to what we know to be true — and to pass it on despite overwhelming pressure from outside. The Church will have to be prepared to take on castaways and refugees, children who have been left to roam amid the ruins. We cannot do that if we do not teach and live out a model of marriage that stands in radical contradiction to the way of the world today. 

This is the Benedict Option. It’s not anything new, but rather something very old and tested by time. The Times story documents one aspect of the decadence and self-destruction of Western civilization. Let the spiritually dead cuckold the spiritually dead. Life is elsewhere.

Everybody Knows, But No One Will Say

Freddie de Boer has a provocative, informative discussion of the “backchannel” — the things people within an organization or society say quietly among each other, but refuse to discuss publicly, for various reasons. He mentions the University of Virginia fake fraternity rape scandal. Lots of progressives privately had reservations about the outlandish claims, but didn’t say so publicly, because they did not want to be seen as undermining a broader cause in which they believed. Eventually, the entire thing collapsed under the weight of evidence. Says de Boer:

This is the problem with the backchannel. When within-group criticism is only voiced privately, there’s no opportunity for the group to evolve, to shore up its weakness, to evaluate its own problems, to correct its own course. And political movements have to evolve or die. It’s a classic cause of political self-destruction, when a group’s inner dynamics become so ossified and conformist that no one is willing to point out the group’s problems. That’s the condition in far too many left spaces today: a near-total inability to point out the cracks in the foundation for fear of being shamed yourself.

De Boer talks about this in academic life, with reference to the outrageous witch-hunt treatment of feminist professor Rebecca Tuvel by other feminists and progressives, over her supposed transphobic bias — a groundless claim. De Boer:

My life, as a academic who also writes about politics and culture, and as someone who is willing to publicly critique the absurdities and excesses of social justice politics, functions as proof of what Oliver is saying. For years now I’ve been the recipient of just that kind of private expression of fear and unhappiness from those who are similarly unwilling to speak out publicly. Since the beginning of my graduate education, I have been someone who other academics feel that they can come to in order to voice their shock and dismay at just how toxic the culture within academia has become. They tell stories about petty witch hunts and show trials within their departments. They share their fear about objecting to arguments they find unfair or unsupported. They say they feel compelled to follow current academic fads for fear of being labeled. They are convinced that stepping out of line with the constant search for offense will render them permanently unemployable, even though they are themselves progressive people. You’ve heard the litany before. They share it with me.

This is exactly what happened to me in the first half of the 2000s regarding the Catholic sex abuse scandal and conservative Catholics (usually, but not always, priests) within the institution. Because they knew I was a fellow conservative Catholic, they would come to me and talk about things they had seen first-hand, or knew reliably to be happening. Really dirty things — not ongoing abuse itself, but cover-ups, and ongoing sexual decadence within the clergy. Secrets, lies, cabals — not just gossip, but things that really did affect the integrity of the institution amid crisis.

Few if any of these sources were willing to go on the record. Why not? It would jeopardize their standing within the institution and its community. These were conservative Catholics, but they were afraid they would lose everything if they talked.

“I hope you can do something about this,” they would say. I would tell them that without them producing documents or some other evidence, or being willing to go on the record, my hands were tied. And nothing would come of it.

But all those insiders knew what was happening.

I’ve been doing a lot of media interviews about The Benedict Option, and I have had a couple of high-level journalists tell me privately how frustrated they are with the culture of media. These are secular progressives, but they’ve had it with the biases within their own institutions and circles. “They don’t even know what they don’t know,” said one journalist, of his colleagues, “but they are certain that they are right about everything.”

I keep hearing that, and though I haven’t been in a newsroom in seven years, I know it’s true. Media bias in this regard is so thick and pervasive not only because journalism is pretty much a liberal monoculture, but also because journalists cultivate an image of themselves as open-minded truth tellers. I doubt there are many seminaries in America more moralistic than a big-city newsroom.

Freddie de Boer is talking about this in academia, though, which is the world he knows. He continues:

And that all comes down to a broader reality: on campus and off, even many or most of those who are deeply committed to the cause of social justice and its expression in feminism, anti-racism, and the fight for LGBTQ rights recognize that the culture of social justice is deeply unhealthy. You’ve heard all that from me before. I have been attempting to address that simple fact for years: that there is a difference between a commitment to fighting bigotry and accepting uncritically every argument that is made in the name of that fight. Many people join me in feeling that something has gone deeply wrong in how we prosecute the movement for social justice, but precisely because of the unhealthy conditions of that movement, they feel they can’t say so publicly.

And:

I’ve said it for years: there’s a backlash brewing, against these tactics. People are fed up. Those who live and operate in left discursive spaces are numb and exhausted from living in the constant fear of saying the wrong thing and stepping on a landmine. Over-the-top wokeness is now obligatory in media and academia, which means that much of it is performed in bad faith, with the cynical and the opportunistic now adopting that language and those tactics for their own selfish ends. Meanwhile, decent people who are sincerely committed to the actual ideals that underlie that language are forced to self-censor or else to drop out entirely. This is no way to advance the cause.

Read the whole thing. And think of it in context of Paul J. Griffiths’s fate at Duke Divinity School, which we’ve been discussing on this blog this week. As The New York Times reported today, Griffiths has for years taken socially progressive stands on race and gay rights.  But he objected in very strong terms to a diversity training program at the Divinity School, saying it was a propaganda session that would be a waste of time. This is anathema at Duke Divinity School. Paul Griffiths sounds like one of de Boer’s “decent people” who refused to self-censor, and so felt compelled to resign from the school rather than submit to its over-the-top wokeness.

This dynamic happens in a number of fields, because it’s human nature. The Republican Party did such a great job of repressing its internal critics that it didn’t see Donald Trump coming. We can all think of things that people recognize are true, but aren’t allowed to say publicly because doing so would cost them too much. But a problem doesn’t cease to exist simply because it costs too much to acknowledge it. Father doesn’t cease to be an out-of-control drunk simply because everyone in the family has decided to pretend it’s not happening, because the price of saying the bleeding obvious would be too high.

Sooner or later, Father is going to crash. The question is whether or not he takes down the whole family with him. Better to say what’s happening and deal with it forthrightly than to assume everything will sort itself out if we just sit still and wait.

Maritain & The Benedict Option

I am indebted to my friend James Matthew Wilson of Villanova for this deeply thoughtful take on The Benedict Option. He does me the undeserved honor of comparing the reception of the book to the reception, nearly a century ago, of the great Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain’s new vision of Christian politics in a secular age. As Wilson has it, Maritain recognized that the secular liberal democratic order was here to stay in the West, and tried to formulate a way for believers to live within it faithfully.

On Wilson’s account, Maritain taught that it is possible to do, but only if believers put prayer and contemplation at the center of their own lives, and work outward from there, to build a society that, while not explicitly recognizing God and the Christian truth about human nature, nevertheless honored those truths, and was set up in a way that helped people realize the Christian vision of human flourishing. Wilson:

How was it greeted? By those on the right, he was deemed a capitulator and heretic, who wanted not to bring about a “new Christendom” but an altogether “new Christianity” (a willful mistranslation of Maritain’s French). By those on the left, he was met with curious fascination rather than actual engagement.

In the end, though, Maritain’s thought became the mainstream, authoritative Catholic approach to politics in the modern age. So he won within his Church. But he lost in society, because, as Wilson writes:

Maritain tried to teach liberal democracy that the human person merited freedom and equality because he was ordered by reason to know the truth. He did not perceive that it was less out of mere ignorance than by positive decision that liberal society proposed something contrary: the person is valuable only insofar as he can impose his manufactured truth on the world by force of will and make something good for the satisfaction of his own desires. Ordination of the person to the contemplation of truth, in liberal eyes, appears positively grotesque and is deemed in any case an impediment to man’s equal-freedom to exercise his will whatever way he sees fit.

Which brings us to The Benedict Option. Wilson observes that the left and the right are replaying the reaction to Maritain back in the late 1920s. Wilson:

Just as Maritain was misunderstood at a time when real reform of the liberal order seemed necessary and likely, so has Dreher been misunderstood now, because so many of his readers misunderstand both what it means for man to be, in Aristotle’s words, a political animal, and how Dreher is suggesting we fulfill that nature in a hostile age.

I believe this is quite true. So many of the questions and arguments around the Benedict Option are really second-order questions and arguments. The real questions are: What is Christianity for? And, what is man? 

Wilson again, on modernity:

Whether we approve these changes or see them as diabolical, we are part of the society in which they are taking place. Should Christians seek to shore up or gain control of the mechanisms of power of that society? Will that better enable them to practice a good way of life and pass it on to their children and grandchildren? Or is it rather the case that the liberal order has advanced so far in its secular voluntarism that we would better spend our lives entering more consciously into our religious practices, seeking to deepen and renew them all the better to resist their deformation by the corrupt fancies of our age?

Dreher’s answer to these questions is a qualified one. Because orthodox Christians are intrinsically a part of the broader society, they have no choice but to influence its institutional life as best they can, but the forces arrayed against them are rich, formidable, and bloodthirsty. The Christian right has largely failed to redirect our culture after forty years of trying; we will be fortunate now to hold the opposition at bay—and this we must do. Dreher sees, rightly, that the powerful “liquid” liberalism of our age would not be so great if Christians had more truly rallied to Maritain’s vision nearly a century ago to purify the sources of our religious devotion and to renew our political lives so that they conform to and aid our vocation to the knowledge and love of God. Because the times are less propitious now, Dreher summons us to follow the example of the Benedictines, to conceive of new “rules” or disciplines by which we may live so that our days are shaped primarily by our perception of God as our good rather than by the fluid, insidious influences of the mainstream culture.

And:

Dreher’s “Benedict Option” is therefore not a suggestion that we withdraw from political life, but rather that we live out our political natures even more fully, variously, and consciously, by seeking to build up those moral communities that will actually help us to become, in Maritain’s words, ever more fully human.

Please read the whole thing.  Wilson has articulated my point more clearly than I have: that the real business of politics is to build the social space within which we can flourish, and become who God created us to be. Because the Christian faith has become so feeble and compromised in this post-Christian era, it is at best a distraction for believers to put all their political effort into participation in the mainstream, though inevitably we will be part of that mainstream. I do not call for a withdrawal from politics as usual, but as Wilson correctly perceives, a recalibration of our idea of politics, such that we redirect our attention to the kind of politics that matters most. I use the resistance of Vaclav Benda and the Czech dissidents from communism as an example not because I believe that we are living under a version of communism, certainly, but because they show us what is not only possible, but what is mandatory, when believers find themselves disempowered (for whatever reason) and marginalized in a political and social order.

Christians in the United States (and the West generally) are not disempowered, but the trends are moving that way, in part because we ourselves have chosen to sever our roots in the Christian past, and instead have turned our faith into Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, in which we worship a Jesus whose lived, died, and rose again so that we could feel great about ourselves no matter what we did. How can we expect the social and political order to be more accommodating to Christian values when we don’t even live by them in the church? When we have become the consumerist, materialist society at prayer?

James Matthew Wilson notes that he finds it regrettable that I took the name for this project from the final graf of MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Let me point out quickly that I did so simply because of the stark portrait MacIntyre painted in that paragraph: saying that the future belonged to those who realized that it was pointless to try to keep building up the institutions of a dying Roman imperial order, because in doing so they neglected to build up the smaller, local forms of community within which their belief in truth and a vision of human flourishing can be lived out. My view is that we Christians are in a similar situation today, and that the choice (the “option”) facing us is whether or not we will continue to live as if nothing were wrong (in which case we will continue to be assimilated out of existence) or whether we will resist by strengthening our own communities rooted in particular places.

(I’ll have more on this later, including commentary on important politics-of-the-Ben-Op essays by Matthew dal Santo and Susannah Black.) In the meantime, really, check out J.M. Wilson’s essay. 

The Christian Bridge Too Far

The liberal Baptist theologian David Gushee makes if official: he has left Evangelicalism. He explains why in this column. Excerpt:

What happened? A love affair with Jesus that for the great majority of forty years was spent in Southern Baptist and evangelical contexts, until my own sense of moral and intellectual integrity forced me to take stands leading to my exit from those worlds.

Everybody’s story is different. Of course millions of American Christians remain quite happily situated in Southern Baptist and/or evangelical Christianity. I wish them only the best, and am done fighting with them.

But millions of others have made their exits, or had their exits made for them, and now wander in a kind of exile. I think that my story might connect with that of many others who find themselves post-all-of-that, perhaps helping chart a way forward.

I now believe that incommensurable differences in understanding the very meaning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the interpretation of the Bible, and the sources and methods of moral discernment, separate many of us from our former brethren — and that it is best to name these differences clearly and without acrimony, on the way out the door.

I also believe that attempting to keep the dialogue going is mainly fruitless. The differences are unbridgeable. They are articulated daily in endless social media loops.

He’s right about that. Andrew T. Walker, a conservative Southern Baptist, explains why. 

I appreciate Gushee’s candor and agree with him: The dividing line between those who align with biblical and historical teaching around sexual ethics and those who do not, is incommensurable. This is not a debate about eldership versus congregational authority, or internecine squabbles on how the end times will occur. This is about what the true church confesses. This is about truth and error. This is about eternal destiny. Christians who hold to the historical biblical position believe that affirming individuals in homosexual sin has the consequences of eternal separation (1 Cor. 6:9-11). We believe affirming sexual sin in this capacity eviscerates the clarity and intelligibility of God’s special and general revelation that sees humans purposefully sexed and complementary — tenets upon which the social order and cultural mandate are founded. We believe the disavowal of sexual otherness obscures the greatest reality in the cosmos — the Christ-Church union. Progressives who have jettisoned the historical position believe that denominations like my own, the Southern Baptist Convention, are doing harm not only to LGBT persons, but to the Spirit’s movement in the world. Those are the terms of this contrast and we should not paper over the disagreements in order to serve some false perception of unity in the name of fellowship.

Moreover, Gushee’s words are a welcome reprieve from the voices of so-called “affirming” Christians that are attempting to make LGBT affirmation a welcome pillar of Christian orthodoxy.

More:

Gushee is gambling with high stakes; unreasonably high stakes in my opinion. He’s asking the church — and by extension, the global church — to repent of two thousand years of biblical teaching. He’s asking us to journey with him accepting that the church’s entire witness, including the words of Jesus himself, have been misunderstood or wrong for the entirety of church history. He’s asking us to trust him on his journey and those like him — highly educated and predominantly Western social progressives — to speak univocally for the entire church.

This is the stark reality that evangelicalism must come to grips with. There is no “third way” possible. Everyone is going to have to pick a side. Sitting on the fence might be convenient for some people’s career, but the trajectory of where the West is headed will not countenance moderation when the canons of social justice require nothing short of celebrating LGBT orthodoxy.

I agree with all of this — and do read the whole thing.  Last year, Gushee himself wrote that middle ground is impossible, and so is avoiding the LGBT issue.

If you really do believe, against clear Scriptural teaching and the unified witness of almost 2,000 years of the Christian church, that homosexuality and gay unions are blessed by God, then it is unjust to deny gays and lesbians full participation in church life (including marriage) without repentance — because what is there to repent of? If you’re especially broad-minded, you might sign on to an “agree to disagree” policy within the church, as a measure to protect unity until a clear majority within the church agrees with you. But you would do so with the expectation that eventually the entire church would unambiguously affirm the progressive policy. This makes sense, given your belief that this is a matter of human dignity and fundamental justice.

But if you affirm Scripture and tradition on the issue, then you must agree, finally, that this is an issue on which there cannot be compromise. Oh, you may have tried it for the sake of maintaining church unity (this is what the Anglicans have been writhing over for a long time), but that is no longer tenable. Your opponents within the church will no longer stand for it — and, if they are theologically and morally correct, they should not stand for it. There is no more middle ground: you have to decide. In truth, there never was any middle ground, and those who thought there was were deceiving themselves. If your side is correct, then it is time to quit playing games for the sake of a peace and unity that does not and cannot exist. As Andrew T. Walker says, the stakes are too high.

But if the other side is correct, then on what grounds should they tolerate unreasonable bigots like you (well, like us)?

The center is not holding because there is no longer a center on this issue, and in truth, never was.

Be grateful, at least, for the clarity David Gushee brings to the conflict. Which side are you on? You must decide. You do not and must not hate those who reach the opposite conclusion. But you must not pretend that we can share a church, unless one side is prepared to keep its views on the matter quiet, and stand down from contesting the issue within the church.

Why Did Trump Fire Comey?

You just never know with Donald Trump, do you? Firing the FBI director, especially like this? Yes, the Democrats are being outrageous hypocrites in wailing over the fate of the FBI director whose scalp they wanted over the Clinton e-mail investigation — but still, this thing stinks like a Superfund site.

Notice the second paragraph in Trump’s firing letter:

That’s weird, isn’t it? “Though you told me you’re not investigating you, I’m firing you anyway.” This of course is Trump trying to short-circuit anybody claiming that he canned Comey in a “Saturday Night Massacre” move. But come on. Are we really supposed to believe that Donald Trump abruptly fired the FBI director over the handling of an e-mail investigation that Trump praised, and from which he may have benefited politically?

Either Trump is a colossal idiot, or he is hiding something, and is a colossal idiot about trying to cover it up. Either way, I don’t see how anybody can take what Trump has done here at face value. From the NYT:

Senior White House and Justice Department officials had been working on building a case against Mr. Comey since at least last week, according to administration officials. Mr. Sessions had been charged with coming up with reasons to fire him, the officials said.

The timing is extremely suspicious. Extremely. If Trump is not guilty of anything other than political stupidity in this matter, then he sure has a way of making it look like he’s trying to cover up something. Do you really believe that Donald Trump fired Jim Comey because he was mean to Hillary Clinton? No, seriously, do you believe that?

You cannot possibly believe that.

What Is The Benedict Option For?

A reader writes, commenting on my Rich Young Rulers Vs. SJWs post:

I teach at [a college in a deep red state] and the opinion held by the essayist in the SJW vs. Rich Young Ruler posting dovetails with what I see around here. The students we have and I observe are mostly too busy to engage in activism and a fanatical devotion to social justice.

Most are satisfied to smoke weed, drink, and fornicate. The posting you put up about “rape rape” last summer is largely accurate here–just more prescription drugs and weed. Then that is chased the next day by the morning after pills. This subject came up in one of my classes and I let the discussion run to hear what was said. I was under few illusions about the students, but that discussion caused what few scales I had to fall.

Around here, as long as the students are entertained and able to get cheap food they are happy. (Bread and circuses). That said, I teach history and have read enough to believe I can guess what is coming. The true believers at the Stanfords, Berkeleys, and Ivy Leagues plus a handful of other prominent universities are the SJWs of today; they will, by virtue of their educational perch, be the leaders of the country tomorrow. People who lead a state or run a bureaucracy don’t come from [my college]. These future leaders are illiberal today and will crush those who don’t bow to their orthodoxy tomorrow.

Applying that to the article, the kids I deal with don’t care too much about anything except bread and circuses–with a few exceptions. This majority remind me of the average German of the 1930s. When the Nazis sought to co-opt the church and use it to further the Nazi ideology, the Confessing Church resisted, (think Bonhoeffer) spoke out, and faced persecution. Most Germans, at least according to Richard Evans’ The Third Reich in Power, didn’t trust the fanatical Nazis because they were too dogmatic about National Socialism, but they had made the economy better, broke the Communists, and gave order to society. The average German didn’t trust the preachers either because they were fanatics for God and they took the Bible seriously. Ultimately, the Nazis came to understand that if the average parishioner and congregant were left alone to celebrate their holidays, festivals, and have an unobtrusive church service that didn’t demand too much, the average German was satisfied. That gave the Nazis the free hand they needed to break the opposition of the Confessing Church.

What I am saying is that most of the Christians I meet on campus are nice kids, but know little about their faith, and when the pressure of a bureaucracy or the threat of an empowered SJW comes, I am afraid they will roll over as long as their life is not disrupted too much. They might say, “Sure the SJW bureaucrat is a fanatic, but so are those preachers. Just leave us alone.”

I’m reading these comments after spending a big part of this morning doing the On Point with Tom Ashbrook radio show for NPR (follow the link to the episode). On Point is my favorite public radio interview show, and I wish I had done better on this outing. I’m realizing how easy the Ben Op is to caricature. I had to keep saying that I’m not not not not not calling for a total retreat from the public square.

A transgender person called in and wanted to know if there was any room in my church for her. I said of course there was, because we are all sinners. That transgendered person is a precious child of God, no question. But I did not want to leave the impression that being a part of the church means that we don’t have to change, to repent. There is one standard for all Christians. I don’t know enough about transgenderism from an Orthodox theological point of view to offer any kind of pastoral counsel to that particular person, and heaven knows a call-in radio show is not the place to do that. But when host Tom Ashbrook said that “there is no place for her in your country,” or words close to that, I did not really know how to respond. It’s not true, but by the time I understood the claim, the moment had passed. I think that many well-intentioned liberals simply cannot stand the thought of diversity unless they set the terms. Like very many liberals, Ashbrook was genuinely perplexed that I, as an Orthodox Christian, expect gays and lesbians to be celibate. I told him all Christians who are not married are expected to be celibate, and I said that this was what all Christians in all ages believed until the day before yesterday.

Anyway, a reader of this blog e-mailed:

I just finished listening to your bit for On Point; thank you for doing that. I was incredibly frustrated while listening, so I can’t imagine how you must have felt. I don’t think people are intentionally being thick when they respond in anger or dismissal to arguments that you don’t even put forth in your book, but, nevertheless, I imagine that is a source for discouragement for you. Thanks for being respectful and Christ-like today.

One thing I’ve thought about much in these past few weeks is how perfectly the popular response to your book fits into your narrative of Christianity being under attack. For decades, secular culture has been asking Christians to stick to themselves, to live out their faith in their community while not encroaching upon other communities. The existence of the Religious Right infuriated them, and they wished Christians would be less forceful in weaving their faith into the fabric of the popular culture. As pluralism and “tolerance” won the day, they demanded that Christians get in line. It occurs to me that the BenOp is perhaps the most prominent prescription for following these orders, and it’s instructive that it is still unacceptable to secular culture. Does that make sense? That is, in the BenOp we finally have a method of living that seems to jive with what secular culture has been demanding since the sexual revolution. That this method now isn’t good enough for secular culture because it doesn’t affirm and accept everyone is case and point for the premise behind the BenOp in the first place (to which so many stridently disagree). I wonder, as you defend yourself and your book, if it would be helpful to frame the response in that way? For instance: “Look, isn’t the BenOp exactly what you have been asking of orthodox Christianity for 60 years? We are now prepared to do what you want, why do you want to inhibit that? That you demand the BenOp affirm and accept everyone proves my point that Christianity is now intolerable to the prevailing culture, and thus that the BenOp is necessary.”

I also think it would be helpful to frame the BenOp as one interpretation of how to “live in the world, but not of it.” Since those words were first uttered by Christ, Christians have worked to develop a way of actually living them out that makes sense, and different methods have been necessary for different times and places. These methods have taken many forms, not all of them truly orthodox and not all of them truly successful. I get that maybe you would be more forceful than saying the BenOp is one of many options for American orthodox Christians, but I think it would help readers and listeners if they were able to frame it that way — as one interpretation of Jesus’ words. As Christians, how do we live out those words? Is the BenOp better for this time than any other option?

An interesting take. I wish I had been more aggressive in the radio interview in steering the conversation, especially when my friend Andrew Sullivan joined it, towards this question: What is Christianity for? The answer to that question ought to determine what you think of the Ben Op.

Modern Christianity — which inevitably devolves into Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — is about rationalism and self-comfort. Pre-modern Christianity is about conforming to a divinely mandated way of life according to standards beyond the self. Of course it’s not that simple either way, but this is the gist of the matter. I’m going to be on a couple more national NPR shows this month, and I’m going to try to discuss this central point. If we just end up talking about gays, or politics, or ancillary issues, we won’t get to the meat of it.

This biting satirical essay by Andrew Wilson speaks directly to the heart of the problem with modern Christianity.  In it, he talks about how Christianity rightly understood justifies idol worship (remember, this is satire). He writes:

I start with my own story, and the stories of many others like me. I’m an evangelical, and have a high view of the Bible—I have a PhD in biblical studies at King’s College London, which will be my third theology degree—and I know both the ancient languages and also the state of scholarly research. Yet, after much prayerful study, I’ve discovered the liberating truth that it’s possible to be an idolatrous Christian. That, at least, is evidence that you can be an evangelical and an idolater.

Not only that, but a number of evangelical writers have been challenging the monolatrous narrative in a series of scholarly books. A number of these provide a powerful case for listening to the diversity of the ancient witnesses in their original contexts, and call for a Christlike approach of humility, openness, and inclusion toward our idolatrous brothers and sisters.

Some, on hearing this, will of course want to rush straight to the “clobber passages” in Paul’s letters (which we will consider in a moment), in a bid to secure the fundamentalist ramparts and shut down future dialogue. But as we consider the scriptural material, two things stand out.

First, the vast majority of references to idols and idolatry in the Bible come in the Old Testament—the same Old Testament that tells us we can’t eat shellfish or gather sticks on Saturdays. When advocates of monolatry eat bacon sandwiches and drive cars on the weekend, they indicate we should move beyond Old Testament commandments in the new covenant, and rightly so.

Second, and even more significantly, we need to read the whole Bible with reference to the approach of Jesus. To be a Christian is to be a Jesus person—one whose life is based on his priorities, not on the priorities of subsequent theologians. And when we look at Jesus, we notice that he welcomed everyone who came to him, including those whom the (one-God worshiping) religious leaders rejected—and that Jesus said absolutely nothing about idols in any of the four Gospels. Conservative theologians, many of whom are friends of mine, often miss this point in the cut-and-thrust of debate. But for those who love Jesus, it should be at the heart of the discussion.

Jesus had no problem with idolatry.

He included everyone, however many gods they worshiped.

If we want to be like him, then we should adopt the same inclusive approach.

Read the whole thing. You see where he’s going with this. Modern Christianity does the same kind of thing: rationalizing modern beliefs, no matter how much they conflict with the Bible. (Yes, conservative Christians do this too at times.)

The point is this: is the purpose of Christianity to call you outside of yourself, to grant you forgiveness from your sins and to offer you new life, and healing? Or is it to confirm you where you are right now, and to relieve your anxiety over your condition?

We can agree that Christianity is therapeutic, in that it is meant to heal you. Does that healing consist of at-times painful surgery and spiritual therapy, or does that healing consist of a heavy dose of painkillers to mask the underlying broken condition?

I am grateful to Steve Thorngate, writing in the Mainline Protestant journal Christian Century, for his thoughtful essay, “What Is The Benedict Option For?” He writes:

Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option touches on an array of subjects, from the decline of the Christian West to the atomizing effects of smartphones to the competing rights claims of same-sex couples and evangelical bakers. It does this in tones pitched variously to inform, to motivate, or to air grievance. So there is ample opportunity for readers to be distracted from Dreher’s overall purposes, as indeed many have been—interpreting The Benedict Option as either a political tract against same-sex marriage or a separatist call to take to the hills. Both readings are there for the proof-texter’s picking; neither attends to the deeper vision of this provocative book.

To do that, you have to appreciate who the book is for. It is not aimed at conservative political activists, though its publisher is known for just that. It doesn’t target radicals who aspire to rarified modes of Christian community, though Dreher finds much to admire there. Nor is it meant to enlighten spiritual seekers or the social scientists who study them.

No, Dreher writes for the church and the ordinary Christians in it. He sees existential threats to the faith—from without but especially from within, where bonds are frayed and formation is thin. Inspired by the well-known ending of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Dreher looks to St. Benedict for a survival plan. How can the church build the internal strength it needs?

Would it surprise you to learn that I very nearly had tears in my eyes reading that? I hadn’t seen anything else Thorngate had to say about the book, but to know that here is someone who has heard what I have to say, whether or not he agrees with it, was such a relief.

More:

Dreher emphasizes, however, that the Benedict Option is not just about rejecting the bad, technological or otherwise. It’s about cultivating the good; it’s resistance by way of creation. Dreher is at his best when he is constructive and concrete, and his chapter explicating Benedict’s Rule for 21st-century laypeople is perhaps his most compelling. Cultivating the good means seeing God’s presence in the everyday, in mundane routine. Anxious people are “looking for that ‘killer app’ that will make everything right again”; Benedictine life shows another way. Develop a discipline of prayer. Let your approach to work flow out of that prayer. Grow roots in a place, among a people. Go to church, and linger afterward—be a pilgrim, not a tourist.

Our lives are inevitably centered on something, says Dreher, and it requires daily practice to ensure that something is Christ. So the most pressing task for Christians is to embed themselves in the day-to-day life of Christian community. And wherever thick Christian ways of life do not exist, they will simply have to be built, one local, unglamorous piece at a time.

This doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to national politics, but it does mean giving it less relative emphasis. If the Benedict Option is a withdrawal strategy, it’s one of priority, not principle. It’s not that public life has no value, only that time is limited and other things matter more: Christian culture and community, a faithful alternative to the reigning order.

This will all sound quite familiar to most mainline Protestant church leaders, and quite compelling to a lot of them. Dreher’s themes echo the postliberal theology popularized by, among others, Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon. Their thinking has met some resistance in the mainline, but it has also deeply shaped it—especially the distrust many of us have for the imperial state, our refusal to cede the high christological ground to evangelicals, and our localist-communitarian ideals.

I urge you to read the whole thing. Thorngate goes on to criticize The Benedict Option for giving short shrift to liberal Mainline Protestantism, and to explain why, in his view, I am wrong to dismiss that tradition, and the fruits it has borne (e.g., acceptance of same-sex marriage). I don’t agree with him, obviously, and I don’t agree with him on several points he mentions in the latter half of his piece. But I don’t want to emphasize that in this blog. I simply want to thank Steve Thorngate, liberal Protestant, for a fair-minded, vigorous engagement with the Benedict Option concept. Note that he ends with a call for his fellow liberal Protestants to articulate a Benedict Option for themselves.

He does that, I think, because though Thorngate doesn’t agree with the solutions I as an Orthodox Christian offer, he agrees (or seems to agree) that we contemporary Christians on all sides have lost a sense of what Christianity is supposed to be for. In reading Thorngate’s essay, I have a better sense of why David Brooks called The Benedict Option “the most important religious book of the decade.” It is meant for ordinary conservative/orthodox Christians, to challenge them to ask themselves what Christianity is for, and whether or not the way they live, individually and in community, serves to fit them to that purpose.

St. Benedict begins his Rule with this exhortation:

Listen, O my son, to the precepts of your master, and incline the ear of your heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of your loving Father, that by the toil of obedience you may return to Him from whom by the sloth of disobedience you have departed.

The one thing we contemporary Christians in the West do not want to do is to listen. A big part of it is being American. Whether we are liberal or conservative, many of us are quite certain that we have it all figured out, and that we need to tell other peoples around the world what they must do. We also reserve the right to lecture all the men and women of ages past about how they have fallen short of the wonderfulness that is the standard we set.

We are prideful. We have to change our lives. That is what Christianity is for.