Rod Dreher's Blog, page 466

One Month Away From Walker Percy Weekend

 

Walker Percy Weekend 2017 draws nigh!   I was at Q Ideas last week, and had a couple of conversations about Walker Percy. In both cases, I said, “You know we have a literary festival celebrating him in my hometown, right?” My interlocutors did not. It’s true! I read it in The New Yorker:

One of Dreher’s favorite writers is Walker Percy, whose novel “The Moviegoer” is set in a fictionalized version of West Feliciana Parish, where St. Francisville is situated. (Every year, Dreher hosts a Walker Percy Weekend, combining lectures from literary scholars with crawfish, bourbon, and beer.) Binx Bolling, the book’s protagonist, is a young stockbroker who finds himself on “the search”—the search being “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the every-dayness of his own life.” Binx explains, “To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Well, look, you won’t be in despair if you come to our little party in the West Feliciana hills. Here’s the line-up of speakers and topics:

Walker Percy And The Benedict Option: Confronting The Culture Of Death. Presented by Ralph Wood/Baylor University. In his prophetic mode, Percy said we are living through the birth of a post-Christian order that worships technology and the will to power, and that thus devalues life’s sacredness. Drawing on Percy’s scorching estimate of contemporary American life—in his novels and essays as well as his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle—Wood explains why Percy’s diagnosis may find its healing remedy in Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. For Percy and BenOppers alike, we need new countercultural movements to defend and preserve what is uniquely human.

Walker Percy And The Burden Of History. Presented by Patrick Connelly. One of the most famous lines in Southern literature comes from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Walker Percy’s essays and novels acknowledge the enduring power of the ever-present past, but, argues Patrick Connelly, the burden of history does not lead him to fatalism or despair. Drawing on personal biography, the saga of Southern history, the American narrative, and world-historical themes rooted in religious and philosophical convictions, Percy presents the burden of history not simply as the crushing weight of the past but in terms of the responsibilities we share as creatures of hope and history.

The Devil Went Down To Georgia: Flannery O’Connor and the Religion of Me, Myself, and I. Presented by Jessica Hooten Wilson/John Brown University. The modern age is one of self-worship, putting us in thrall to a false idol and a pseudo-religious vision that leaves us blind to the human condition. In her fiction, Flannery O’Connor, the self-described “Hillbilly Thomist,” fought hard for the Real and the True. Wilson explores O’Connor’s anti-modern iconoclasm, and the lessons O’Connor has to teach readers struggling to make sense of contemporary problems.

Walker Percy’s Blues: Suffering And Self-Discovery in ‘Love In The Ruins’. Presented by Dr. Ralph Beaumont. Percy’s fiction and personal life are filled with experiences of melancholy, and various complex and searching responses to it. Not least among these is a concern with the sense of Self, and the Self’s relations with others. Psychoanalyst Ralph Beaumont explores some philosophical, psychological, and spiritual paradoxes related to this theme as it is manifest in Percy’s third novel, Love in the Ruins.Dr. Beaumont will also raise questions about how these issues may correspond to aspects of Percy’s own life and development.

Just before the Front Porch Bourbon Tour, we’ll be hearing from Harrison Scott Key, author of the Southern memoir The World’s Largest Man, which — no kidding — is the funniest book I have ever read not titled A Confederacy of Dunces or written by P.G. Wodehouse. When I sent a copy to a friend in New Orleans, she wrote back:

Dammit, this book is too funny. I laugh till I can’t see the words for the tears in my eyes, and I’m going to go bankrupt buying it for everyone I know.

Here is the prologue:

When I left Mississippi many years ago, I would sometimes come back to visit my parents, and at some point, my mother and I would end up in the kitchen, while my father sat in the living room watching America’s Most Wanted and trying to decide which of his neighbors were lying about their identities.

She would be cooking, and I would be watching her cook, and she would ask me this Very Important Question. She started asking it about twenty years ago, and has never really stopped. I still remember the first time.

Harrison Scott Key. Nobody touched him, officers, he swears!

“Did you have a happy childhood?” she asked.

She is a needy woman, but when you’re married for forty years to a man who has the emotional tenderness of a Soviet far tractor, it’s easy to be needy.

“I need to know,” she said. “I need to be validated.”

I bought her a Deepak Chopra book once, and this is how she started talking.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I have no memories of being molested.”

“Molested?” she said. “What are you talking about? By who?”

“By anyone.”

“I want to know. Who didn’t molest you?”

“Many people.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“Because it never happened.”

“Are you hearing this?” she said in the direction of my father, who now slept soundly in his big chair, dreaming of home invasions.

Harrison Scott Key ain’t right. Here’s a piece from a humor column he wrote in The Oxford American:

I arrived in my new home on a bleak winter afternoon, greeted by miles of fence line. I’d been admitted to Texas A&M University-Commerce, similar to the original A&M in that both institutions enroll many students who wear cowboy hats on days besides Halloween. A&M-Commerce was considered something of a satellite by Aggies, a lesser place, smaller and poorer, although in many ways it felt more authentically Texan, the livestock outnumbering the faculty by a large margin.

I had been invited to study with a cowboy playwright, which sounded exciting. Wow! What did a cowboy playwright do? He’d wear a cowboy hat, for sure, and would ride a horse to the theater, and would probably have a gun and shoot the bad actors.

The town lacked all the accoutrements of most college towns—the bookstores and art galleries and Greek Revival structures where one might be sexually assaulted by the sons of plutocrats. I did find the most amazing coffee shop in North America. You could smoke there, and you could order a special drink called a “Blizzard.” The name of this place was “Dairy Queen.” It became my refuge. Every day, I sat there reading the plays of Beckett and Ionesco, their spiritual declension deepening my own.

“More coffee?” the girl said, in her Texas-y way.

“No, ma’am, just Diet Coke.”

“How much ass you want in it?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Ass,” she said.

I didn’t normally put ass in my Coke, but felt I should be open to new experiences. She took the cup back to wherever they kept the ass, and I thought: Texas is full of surprises. But all she brought back was a cup of ice, and I got even sadder. I’d met so many kind and warm people in those first days, but couldn’t shake the desolation of the place, the nowhere-ness. Don’t mess with Texas? Gladly. All I’d found so far were free refills of ass.

I know he’s not making this up because I married a Texan, who once told her daddy in my hearing that there was “ass all over the streets” of New York City. She was describing a freak Easter weekend snowstorm in our new home.

But I digress.

You know you want to come hear these talks, and you know you want to talk to Harrison Key about the ass in his bourbon cocktail while standing on Royal Street. You know you want to eat boiled crawfish and drink cold Louisiana craft beer with Mary Pratt Percy Lobdell (one of Walker and Bunt’s daughters), our speakers, this blog’s all-star team members Franklin Evans, Bernie, Leslie Fain, Jon F., and others. It’s a heck of a lot of fun. Peter Augustine Lawler wrote this about the first one, back in 2014:

To sample from Walker Percy’s description of the man who raised him, it was one of a kind, and I’ve never been to anything remotely like it. … People came from far and wide because they either loved the writing of Walker Percy (most cases) or loved the idea of loving the writing of Walker Percy. For most people, it was a kind of vacation, with lots of couples and more than a few kids. There were doctors, lawyers, bankers, professors (but not that many), members of the clergy, editors, think-tankers, retirees, businessmen and businesswomen, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial public intellectuals, an architect or two, an assistant principal from the Bronx, an official with the SEC (a football conference), and many others I didn’t get to meet. And I should probably say more than a few words of about the extraordinary religious diversity of the participants.

Hardly anyone was on the make or even networking. Nobody was cynical about the significance of the event. So everyone was taking a vacation from the despair of diversion, the despair one of Percy characters smelled on the people he saw in museums and surely he would have smelled on the tourists who come to St. Francisville to tour the plantations in the area. No one thought that Percy was an historical period piece or had diminished relevance because he is dead or was white or male. Sounds a lot like some Chautauqua thing, you say. But there are big differences — gourmet Louisiana food, an emphasis on drinking both bourbon and beer, and country music. It was a very southern or completely unpuritanical experience. It was, in the precise sense, an aristocratic or leisurely experience, the South at its finest. Leisurely means, of course, highly relational and somewhat mannered. I enjoyed every moment, but it is a struggle for me to be relational all day and all night long.

Another difference: The festival wasn’t about being edified in general but about a particular man who was about telling us what we most need to know to live well. He’s also the one who tells us what almost no one else does: why it’s better to be a dislocated human being than a contented chimp.

There really isn’t a better place in the country to be dislocated and wayfaring on the first weekend of June this year. So come see us. There are still tickets available, but do not put off buying them. We always have a few people who think they can show up on festival weekend and get an all-inclusive ticket. You can’t. Click right here to buy your tickets.  To learn more about this year’s event, go to www.walkerpercyweekend.org.

Front Porch Bourbon Tour

Hey readers, if you’re planning to go to the Weekend this year, let’s figure out some way to do a meet-up. It’s very hard for me to sit still for more than ten minutes at this thing, given my responsibilities as one of the hosts. But y’all want to try to do something?

Franklin Evans and his mint julep welcome you to Walker Percy Weekend

Louisiana FTW!

#Crawfish hanging out at #JazzFest listening to Dr. John @theadvocateno pic.twitter.com/RhN8h9A4GE

— Sophia Germer (@SophiaGermer) April 30, 2017

The Suicide Of Europe

British journalist and public intellectual Douglas Murray — who, for the record, is a) conservative, b) atheist, and c) openly gay — says that Europe is well on its way to civilizational suicide. Excerpts:

Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether the European people choose to go along with this is, naturally, another matter. When I say that Europe is in the process of killing itself, I do not mean that the burden of European Commission regulation has become overbearing or that the European Convention on Human Rights has not done enough to satisfy the demands of a particular community.

I mean that the civilisation we know as Europe is in the process of committing suicide and that neither Britain nor any other western European country can avoid that fate, because we all appear to suffer from the same symptoms and maladies.

As a result, by the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.

Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument. Those in power seem persuaded that it would not matter if the people and culture of Europe were lost to the world.

Murray says that the causes for this are many, but he singles out two massive events that happened simultaneously: the world decided to migrate to Europe at the same time that Europeans lost faith in themselves and their civilization. More:

While generally agreeing that it is possible for an individual to absorb a particular culture (given the right degree of enthusiasm both from the individual and the culture) whatever their skin colour, we know that we Europeans cannot become whatever we like. We cannot become Indian or Chinese, for instance. And yet we are expected to believe that anyone in the world can move to Europe and become European.

If being “European” is not about race, then it is even more imperative that it is about “values”. This is what makes the question “What are European values?” so important. Yet this is another debate about which we are wholly confused.

Are we, for instance, Christian? In the 2000s this debate had a focal point in the row over the wording of the new EU constitution and the absence of any mention of the continent’s Christian heritage. The debate not only divided Europe geographically and politically, it also pointed to a glaring aspiration.

For religion had not only retreated in western Europe. In its wake there arose a desire to demonstrate that in the 21st century Europe had a self-supporting structure of rights, laws and institutions that could exist even without the source that had arguably given them life.

In the place of religion came the ever-inflating language of “human rights” (itself a concept of Christian origin). We left unresolved the question of whether or not our acquired rights were reliant on beliefs that the continent had ceased to hold, or whether they existed of their own accord. This was, at the very least, an extremely big question to have left unresolved while vast new populations were being expected to “integrate”.

And:

Even now Europe’s leaders talk of an invigorated effort to incorporate the millions of new arrivals. These efforts too will fail. If Europe is going to become a home for the world, it must search for a definition of itself that is wide enough to encompass the world. This means that in the period before this aspiration collapses our values become so wide as to become meaninglessly shallow.

So whereas European identity in the past could be attributed to highly specific, not to mention philosophically and historically deep foundations (the rule of law, the ethics derived from the continent’s history and philosophy), today the ethics and beliefs of Europe — indeed the identity and ideology of Europe — have become about “respect”, “tolerance” and (most self-abnegating of all) “diversity”.

Such shallow self-definitions may get us through a few more years, but they have no chance at all of being able to call on the deeper loyalties that societies must be able to reach if they are going to survive for long.

This is just one reason why it is likely that our European culture, which has lasted all these centuries and shared with the world such heights of human achievement, will not survive.

Read the whole thing. Murray’s book The Strange Death of Europe will be published in the UK this week; American readers, click here to pre-order it on Kindle.

I can better understand why publishers in France, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia will be coming out next year with translations of The Benedict Option. This really and truly is “Fall Of Rome” stuff for them, though one key difference is that when the Empire in the West fell in 476, the Church was still strong, if not yet widespread in the West. Now Europe has lived through Christianity, and has largely discarded it. By accepting the flood of Islamic refugees, Europeans are creating a future in which Christianity will struggle to exist at all. Ask the Christians of territories conquered in the past by Islam how easy it is to live as believers in those lands.

Murray’s point, though, is that the European elites (and, it seems to me, the masses) don’t care. They consider themselves virtuous in sending Christianity into history’s dustbin. What they don’t comprehend is that in so doing, they are cutting their own national throats as people who presumably would like to preserve liberal democracy. You cannot march confidently and coherently into the future feeding yourself on the thin gruel of “diversity”.

European Christians are going to have to develop a mode of living that gives them a better chance at surviving this Dark Age. This much is very clear. What is not clear at all to many Americans is that we are on the same path, though farther back, with more time to prepare.

To restate, in simplest terms, an argument familiar to reader of The Benedict Option:

The West, including the United States, has entered a post-Christian era. This means not that Christianity has ceased to exist — an absurd claim — but that Christianity is no longer at the center of our cultural definition and self-understanding, and its hold on the collective imagination is waning.
Evidence of this can be found in the dramatic, and historic, falling-away of younger generations from the Christian faith. Indeed, leading sociologists of religion, examining statistical trends over the past two decades, now say that the US is on the same downward trajectory pioneered by Europe. 
Among those who still claim allegiance to the Christian faith, in its various manifestations, awareness of fundamental Christian teachings is virtually nil.  They do not know what it means to be a Christian, and are drifting far out to see, though unaware of this.
There are no social forces now present capable of stopping the cultural momentum towards full secularization — which, to put it another way, is apostasy. While believing Christians have to fight as hard as we can against these forces, it is more important for us to build up the internal resilience, within our families, churches, and institutions, that will allow us to endure post-Christian America with our faith intact.
The lack of awareness of our predicament and its nature is the chief obstacle among Christians to preparing for it. Many Christians cannot fathom the magnitude of the change now upon us.

American Christians do not face an emergency nearly as acute as our European brothers and sisters. The churches here are healthier, and we do not face the existential threat of immigration from an alien and historically hostile people. But don’t lie to yourself: the threat we face is on the same spectrum. European Christianity, and indeed Western civilization, in Europe is threatened both by outside pressure and internal weakness. American Christianity is primarily threatened by internal weakness. But the threat exists, and those Christians who think that there is a political solution to this are whistling past the graveyard.

Civilizations do not lay down and die peacefully. Again: prepare.

The Anglican Blessing Of The Asparagus

A culinary controversy rageth among Anglicans, it appears:

Asparagus is so venerated in Worcester that it has been blessed in a special ceremony in the city’s cathedral.

But the thanksgiving service celebrating the local crop has been criticised by other Anglicans who have called it “absurd”.

The bizarre Sunday evensong service was defended by the cathedral’s Precentor, who said the vegetable was “a sign of the abundant provision and generosity of God”.

Christian groups told the Daily Telegraph that the ceremony, which also involved a man in costume as an asparagus spear, was inappropriate.

Andrea Minichiello Williams, chief executive of pressure group Christian Concern, said: “This is an absurd pantomime-type scene that makes a mockery of Christian worship.”

Influential Church of England blog Archbishop Cranmer, which is run by conservative theologian Adrian Hilton, said the service was “an infantile pantomime” and said it brought the Church of England into disrepute.

More:

The post added: “This is church, for God’s sake. Really, for His sake, can the Church of England not offer something clean and undefiled in the worship of God?”

Rev Peter Ould, a priest from Canterbury, said: “I think the service itself is a good idea – there isn’t anything wrong in praying for a good growing season.

“But someone dressed up as an asparagus and a bloke in a St George costume behind him holding a sword – that just looks a bit silly.

“That takes it from being a good church service to something which looks like it’s more to do with promoting the asparagus growers.”

Read the whole thing, and take a look at the photo of the procession within the cathedral.

I am strongly inclined to disagree with the traditionalists here, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. What holds me back fully is that the image of a man dressed like a giant asparagus, participating in the church procession, does make it seem more like an asparagus growers’ promotion.

But leave that clown out, and, well, what’s the big deal? Why should we not ask God’s blessing on our crops, especially one that is so important to the local people within the cathedral’s parish? In south Louisiana fishing communities, Catholic priests bless the shrimp boats on the first day of the season. This sort of thing strikes me as very traditional, very medieval.

The Archbishop Cranmer Blog disagrees. This is a very fine rant. Excerpt:

And no, before you leap to defend this farce, it is not akin to the Harvest Festival: ‘We plough the fields and scatter’ is about rejoicing in industry and the serious stuff of life: it is never, ever turned into a Teletubby-fest with a guest appearance by Worzel Gummidge prancing behind the vicar. Surely Worcester Cathedral could have found a way of thanking God for asparagus without bringing the Church of England into disrepute. If this doesn’t make ‘Have I Got News For You’, they’ll have missed the religious frolic of the week.

Gus the Asparagusman (for it is he) has no place at all in a worshipful act of reverence: he doesn’t direct our minds to heaven or toward God, but points us to Dipsy and Tinky Winky somewhere in La La Land. Sanctity should be free from all uncleanness, and that includes buffoonery, mumbo jumbo and capers (both sorts).

I hesitate to pronounce definitively on the event, because Abp Cranmer is far closer to the thing than am I, and no doubt understands things about it that I do not. Still, I am in my heart of hearts an Asparagus-Blesser; here I stand, I can do nothing other.

If you’ve not seen the wonderful, six-part British television series Tudor Monastery Farm (all available on YouTube), oh, please do! It’s fine for the whole family. In it, three modern academics recreate Christian village life in England, circa 1500. One thing you really see is how thoroughly woven into daily life religion was. Ruth Goodman, one of the historians who participate in the project, is an atheist, but in this post, I quote her about how much she learned about the sacramental way of seeing the world through it. In those days, all of life was ordered toward God, in a way that is so beautiful, so fruitful.

Here’s the first episode, but a short passage I really want you to see is toward the end of Episode Two, below. Fast forward to just shy of the 55-minute mark:

Goodman observes on camera how surprising it is that everything about life in that (very) late medieval time:

“This complete intertwining of social life and religious life and economic life is so typical of this period, isn’t it? Everything has a religious element to it. It’s almost like the air you breathe.”

“Yeah, and pretty free of tension,” answers a historian of the era. “On the whole, they got it right.”

Here is another old post of mine about Tudor Monastery Farm and Charles Taylor. Excerpt:

Let’s be clear that it’s not the case that the world became disenchanted the day Luther proclaimed his 95 Theses. Luther himself retained something of the sacramental viewpoint, and it’s somewhat in Calvin. Zwingli was the resolute anti-sacramentalist. In any case, Protestants certainly lived as if God were around them all the time. It’s just that His presence was not metaphysically anchored in materiality the way it had been in medieval times, and over time, that mattered. A lot.

Charles Taylor is extremely careful to say that it did not have to be this way. It is, he stresses, a self-serving anachronism to accept the standard secularist narrative that we live in “reality” now, and that reality is what you get when you strip the God delusion away from society. Had certain actors behaved differently, things might have turned out differently. The point is, “exclusive humanism” — the idea that this world is all there is, and we should seek out happiness and flourishing within it, with no reference at all to the transcendent — is itself a construal, a “take” on reality. Ours is the only civilization in history that has had this particular take, he notes.

There is no clearly demonstrable reason why the medievals were wrong to sacralize time, or to believe that they lived in an enchanted world. The key thing to take from this, though, is that we moderns live in a different plausibility structure than they did. This means that efforts to re-inhabit the medieval worldview cannot succeed, because we can’t un-learn from our experience. For Taylor, “a secular age” means not strictly an age in which religion has been walled off from the common experience. It means primarily an age in which we all know that belief in God, or unbelief in God, is a choice. The fact that belief in God is not taken for granted is what makes this a secular age. Even communities that fervently believe in God live in a secular age, because they are surrounded with evidence, as the medievals were not, that it is possible to live without strong belief, or to live with believing in God in a different way … or not at all.

Taylor’s work calls for epistemic humility. The way the medievals framed reality certainly made perceiving certain truths more difficult. But they were also able to see somethings more clearly than we do. The same is true of our own time. Taylor’s point is that the things that “everybody” takes for granted about how the world works — our “metaphysical dream,” as Richard Weaver put it — is by no means as uncontestable as many of us think. The “immanent frame” our Western culture’s master narrative imposes on our experience of the world — that is, the intellectual structure that orders the only truths we can admit are those that emerge within a system closed to transcendence — cannot forever keep out intimations of transcendence. The history of ideas from 1500 till today suggests that the immanent frame appeals to people today because it makes us free to do whatever we will. After all, if the world is not enchanted, if matter doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning, then we are free to bend it to our wills. There is a line — not a straight line, but an unbroken one — between the disenchantment of matter and the dissolution of gender categories, and transhumanism. The whole idea of “human rights” is parasitic on Christianity, and will not hold without a firm religious foundation.

We ought to consider the possibility that the anti-metaphysical dream is just a story we tell ourselves to justify our own desires and preferences.

All of which is to say that I approve, in principle, of the Blessing Of The Asparagus, though it could have been brought off better, it appears. But then, I approved of the Blessing Of The Horses At The Palio di Siena. If you have a problem with sanctifying asparagus in a church service, what they do in Siena — and have been doing for centuries — is going to set your hair on fire.

Lesbian Methodist Bishop Set Back

The Grand March to United Methodism’s Progressive Future has stalled:

The United Methodist Church’s highest court has ruled that the consecration of its first openly gay bishop violated church law, compounding a bitter rift over homosexuality that has brought the 13-million-member denomination to the brink of schism.

In a 6-to-3 vote made public on Friday, the church’s Judicial Council found that a married lesbian bishop and those who consecrated her were in violation of their “commitment to abide by and uphold the church’s definition of marriage and stance on homosexuality.”

Still, the court ruled that the bishop, Karen P. Oliveto of Denver, “remains in good standing” pending further proceedings, offering her supporters a glimmer of hope. But it also raised the prospect of a suspension or forced retirement.

“Under the longstanding principle of legality, no individual member or entity may violate, ignore or negate church law,” the council ruled. “It is not lawful for the College of Bishops of any jurisdictional or central conference to consecrate a self-avowed practicing homosexual bishop.”

More:

The Judicial Council also decided, in separate rulings, that the New York and Illinois regions must ask candidates for the ministry about their sexuality and rule out those who are gay “or in any other way violating the church’s standards on marriage and sexuality.”

The boards of ordained ministry in those regions announced last year that they would not discriminate against candidates based on sexuality or gender, but the Judicial Council ordered them to drop that practice.

“We won’t run back into the closet, and we won’t leave the church,” said the Rev. Alex da Silva Souto, who is openly gay and serves as senior pastor at New Milford United Methodist Church in Connecticut, part of the New York region. “The only way that I will leave this denomination is if I am dragged out.”

Whole thing here.

I confess that I am always surprised when the church left loses a ruling like this, given that it happens so rarely. But good for the Methodist judges, standing firm on the law. It is impossible to imagine the leftists being satisfied if they don’t get exactly what they want, though. When have they ever taken “no” for an answer when it comes to sexual matters? Either the conservatives will capitulate to avoid formal schism, or there will be a formal schism.

Given how the African Methodists have stiffened the spines of their conservative American colleagues, I’d bet that the conservatives of the UMC will choose principle over capitulation to the sexual left. I could be wrong. Methodist readers, talk to us about the prospects of schism. How likely is it? What form will it take? Will this be a PCA/PCUSA thing?

Last month, I was talking to a Methodist friend, an older man who is highly active in his church, both locally and nationally. He lamented the lack of formation for Methodist youth around questions of sexual behavior. “We are not making disciples,” he complained. When I asked him about the homosexuality question and how the institutional Methodist church was likely to settle it, he predicted that the UMC would accept and affirm homosexuality — and he was in favor of it. Looked forward to it, even.

I couldn’t figure this out until a theologian at the Q conference I attended this week explained it to me. Christians like my Methodist friend think that the standard Christian framework regarding sex and marriage can be offered to same-sex couples, and all will be well. So, if a gay Methodist  is dating another gay Methodist, as long as the two avoid unchastity, the church can and should support their relationship. That’s the theory, the theologian told me (and he doesn’t believe that theory).

If so, that’s absurd. First, it is clearly anti-Biblical. Second, it reveals a nominalist view of sexuality and the human person, which is to say, a belief that the meaning of sexuality and our bodies is whatever we say it is. Third, and more broadly, it is an extremely impoverished way of thinking about the human person and the gift of sexuality. Fourth, and most practically, it will never work. All the labor necessary to overcome and overturn the traditional Biblical sexual model serves the purpose, however inadvertent, of vacating all Scriptural authority over sexual desire. This is a Rubicon, as I explained at length here. 

To be fair, I think that gays and their allies within United Methodism are compelling the broader church, however unintentionally, to face the fact that it doesn’t take traditional Christian sexual teaching and obedience to it seriously. In this, I very much doubt the United Methodists are alone in this. As I have said before, when I converted to Catholicism as a single man in my twenties, I had zero help from the institutional church in living out the life of chastity to which all unmarried Catholics are called. It was a very difficult walk alone for me through the desert, until years later, when I married. God was merciful and gave me grace during that long struggle of repentance, but I was effectively alone.

Frankly, I’m pretty cynical about this stuff in all American churches, broadly speaking. So many people — pastors and lay leaders — just don’t want to touch the whole question of Christian sexual teaching. Too controversial. The mainstream culture knows what it believes about sex and sexuality, and it never misses an opportunity to catechize us vividly and emotionally. What do we in the church offer our people? Mostly, I think, an uncomfortable silence. Part of this is a failure to minister effectively to singles. Another part of it is a loss of nerve in talking about divorce, which is about as popular with churchgoing Christians as it is with everybody else in American society. Anyway, gay activists and allies within church bodies understand the weakness here, and are exploiting it. When I say “exploiting,” I don’t mean that they’re being cynical about it. In most cases, I would say, in charity, that they aren’t. I mean that they perceive the weakness and the double-mindedness, and are pressing their advantage to achieve something that they genuinely believe is good.

All of which is to say that if the Methodists to undergo a formal schism, then the conservatives will have to get a lot more serious about discipleship and formation on sexuality across the board. And not only the Methodists, but all Christian churches who do not want to be assimilated and to dissolve inside this erotomaniacal, post-Christian culture. It’s necessary to hold to an official teaching, but if it is not enforced or taught with conviction, such that it strikes others as persuasive, true, and binding, then it may as well be chucked, because it is going to go away in the hearts of the next generation.

Note well the words of Philip Rieff, in 1966:

The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves. Many spokesmen for our established normative institutions are aware of their failure and yet remain powerless to generate in themselves the necessary unwitting part of their culture that merits the name of faith. “Is not the very fact that so wretchedly little binding address is heard in the church,” asked Karl Barth, rhetorically, in 1939, “accountable for a goodly share of her misery—is it not perhaps the misery?” The misery of this culture is acutely stated by the special misery of its normative institutions. Our more general misery is that, having broken with those institutionalized credibilities from which its moral energy derived, new credibilities are not yet operationally effective and, perhaps, cannot become so in a culture constantly probing its own unwitting part.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

I’m a Duke Div (Methodist seminary) alum from a couple years back who pursued ordination in the UMC up until my Commissioning interviews, when it became clear that my traditionalist attitudes towards gender and marriage meant that I was simply not what the North Georgia Conference was looking for anymore.

The gatekeepers in most (perhaps all?) of the conferences in the U.S. represent the progressive wing of the clergy and pursue their agenda.

There is a large gap between the views of the clergy and the views of the laity on this issue as well as several others, and that gap will only widen over time as the gatekeepers prevent the traditionalists from joining the order of elder in the UMC.

In my mind, it’s not a matter of ‘if,’ it’s a matter of ‘when’ the UMC in North America changes the Book of Discipline so that the church can ordain practicing homosexuals and celebrate gay marriages. I’m not sure how they will work that out with the global communion, but my understanding is that they will try to create a more “federalist” polity so to speak that allows them to pursue their progressive agenda and the Africans to pursue their traditional agenda. That is what I expect them to announce at the special session of General Conference in 2019, though I am not in the know.

Finally, I must say that I am frustrated with many of the established, traditionalist clergy in the UMC. Reiff’s diagnosis seems to me to apply to them. They are not willing to stake anything on the issue because they lack conviction. When preserving your pension is a higher priority than preserving the faithful witness of the church to Christ, it is tough to argue that you serve anything other than Mammon.

Hatch Show Print Heaven

Look what I brought home from Nashville: a hand-tinted print from Hatch Show Print, which has been around since 1880. You can buy some of their stuff online. Here’s another one that accompanied me back to Baton Rouge, for my wife, who loves the design of classic travel trailers:

‘Fallen! Fallen Is Babylon The Great!’

(For those keeping score, the title of this post is a quote from Rev. 18:2.)

Damon Linker is feeling prophetic — and he’s damned correct to! Excerpts:

You can almost hear the sentiments echoing down the corridors of (political and economic) power on both sides of the Atlantic: “There’s nothing to worry about. Everything’s fine. No need for serious soul searching or changes of direction. Sure, populism’s a nuisance. But we’re keeping it at bay. We just need to stay the course, fiddle around the edges a little bit, and certainly not give an inch to the racists and xenophobes who keep making trouble. We know how the world works, and we can handle the necessary fine tuning of the meritocracy. We got this.”

And why wouldn’t they think this way? They are themselves the greatest beneficiaries of the global meritocracy — and that very fact serves to validate its worth. They live in or near urban centers that are booming with jobs in tech, finance, media, and other fields that draw on the expertise they acquired in their educations at the greatest universities in the world. They work hard and are rewarded with high salaries, frequent travel, nice cars, and cutting-edge gadgets. It’s fun, anxious, thrilling — an intoxicating mix of brutal asceticism and ecstatic hedonism.

The problem is that growing numbers of people — here in America, in the U.K., in France, and beyond — don’t see it like this at all. Or rather, they only see it from the outside, a position from which it looks very different. What they see is a system that is fundamentally unjust, rigged, and shot through with corruption and self-dealing.

To this point, if you are not following Chris Arnade on Twitter, now is the time to start. More Linker:

They see Marissa Meyer, the CEO of Yahoo, taking home a cool $186 million in stock (on top of many millions in additional salary and bonuses) for five years of “largely unsuccessful” work.

They see Henrique De Castro, who worked briefly for Meyer at Yahoo, pulling $109 million in compensation for a disastrous 15 months on the job.

They see Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly getting fired from Fox News for sexually harassing a parade of women over the years — and taking home tens of millions of dollars each in severance.

They see former Democratic President Barack Obama sharing a $65 million book advance with his wife, earning $400,000 for a single speech scheduled to be delivered in the fall at investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, and gallivanting around the globe with David Geffen, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey, and Bono.

And then, as Linker avers, there’s Trump and the Washington Republicans, who don’t seem to have much of a clue about what the people who voted for them want. Whether or not you think the border wall is a good idea — I have my doubts — Ann Coulter is absolutely right here:

No one voted for Trump because of the “Access Hollywood” tape. They voted for him because of his issues; most prominently, his promise to build “a big beautiful wall.” And who’s going to pay for it? MEXICO!

You can’t say that at every campaign rally for 18 months and then not build a wall.

Do not imagine that a Trump double-cross on the wall will not destroy the Republican Party. Oh, we’ll get them back. No, you won’t. Trump wasn’t a distraction: He was the last chance to save the GOP.

Millions of Americans who hadn’t voted in 30 years came out in 2016 to vote for Trump. If he betrays them, they’ll say, “You see? I told you. They’re all crooks.”

No excuses will work. No fiery denunciations of the courts, the Democrats or La Raza will win them back, even if Trump comes up with demeaning Twitter names for them.

It would be an epic betrayal — worse than Bush betraying voters on “no new taxes.” Worse than LBJ escalating the Vietnam War. There would be nothing like it in the history of politics.

He’s the commander in chief! He said he’d build a wall. If he can’t do that, Trump is finished, the Republican Party is finished, and the country is finished.

Trump was never going to get the wall built, but if there is nothing he promised more fervently. If Trump sells out his voters on this one, I don’t agree that the country is finished, but I do believe that the reaction when these voters realize that they’ve been had is going to be hellacious.

Anyway, back to the Linker column: Read the whole thing and pass it along to everyone you know.

They say that Marine Le Pen can’t beat Emmanuel “Micro Macro” Macron. They’re probably right. Le Pen may not deserve to win, but empty-suit Macron, who stands for nothing more than the interests of the French and European establishments, deserves to lose. If Le Pen wins this thing on May 7, that will be the equivalent of pulling down the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad. And the globalist elites will have brought it on themselves.

Hard, hard times coming. None of us are going to escape it; the best we can do is to build our resilience. Prepare.

UPDATE: A reader sends in this link to an Ian Welsh blogpost. Excerpts:

Economic problems take time to ripple thru political system because after 30 most people don’t tend to change their views. They believe what they believe, they are who they are, and while age produces real changes, it doesn’t tend to change their politics, absent absolute catastrophe.

But we are now moving to the other side of that. For decades people put up with decline, but now the youngsters, some of whom are in their early 30s, have never known anything but a failed system and a bad economy. This political world has never worked for them, ever: they have no emotional investment in it, no habit of supporting it.

So, as we continue our economic decline; as inequality gets worse and worse, and as the coming generations move to the age where they are politically viable, the current time ends.

The next set of rulers and their supporters will try new things; new systems. They will be willing to revolt. The age of neoliberalism is all but over.

More:

It is quite hard to predict history in the short term, where the short term means years, or even a decade or two. It is very hard to predict history in the long term of centuries or millennia. But between that it is quite easy. Each ideology, each empire, each economic system has a best by date. Some last longer than others, but all end, and they do so in fairly standard order.

We are near the end of an ideological order: neoliberalism. We are near the end of war-making technological era, with the rise of robots. We are near the end of a production technological era, with the rise of AI and bots.

Combined with environmental catastrophe (and nukes), this makes what is coming down the line much worse than the normal cyclical change. Much, much worse. We can create a better world, or a few better societies, out of it, to be sure, but there is probably no avoiding the Age of War and Revolution which is soon to be upon us.

Bill Nye, The Afraid-Of-Science Guy

The other day I linked to the crazy “my vagina has a voice” transgender video on Netflix’s Bill Nye program. Apparently that wasn’t the only terrible thing on that show. Dirty Old Man Bill Nye offers an animated fantasia on trans-flavored ice cream, introducing it by saying, “We are, of course, enlightened and forward-thinking, but not everybody sees it this way.” Behold:

Um, okay.

Alastair Roberts let’s Bill Nye have it for his absurd parading of gender ideology propaganda masquerading as popular science.  Excerpts:

Curious about whether the episode really was as terrible as these segments suggested, I watched it on Netflix last night and was disappointed to find that it was even worse than I had feared. It was one incredibly preachy segment after another about the ‘spectrum’ of sex, gender, sexuality, and gender presentation. There was a study of androgynous performers in K-Pop overturning conservative Korean gender roles. There was a panel of ‘experts’ on the subject: a gay comedian, a professor of gender and sexuality studies, and a cultural anthropologist. They talked about the social construction of the concept of sexuality and one’s right to identify as you want. The gender and sexuality studies professor shared a story of a woman mistaking his one-year-old son for a girl in the grocery store and later apologizing when she discovered her mistake: ‘I didn’t know he was a boy, I’m so sorry!’ The professor responded, ‘I don’t know that he’s a boy either!’

The most telling feature of the whole show? Reproduction was never once mentioned.

More:

Despite the many claims to be presenting the ‘science’ of sexuality and that opposing viewpoints had no basis whatsoever in science, at no point did the show mention the great elephant in the room. Apparently we can make sense of the human sexes, and human sexuality, gender, and sexual relations without once needing to make any reference to the reality of reproduction. The realm of sexuality is simply one of radical natural diversity, with no apparent natural cause, end, order, or purpose.

The omission of reproduction from the discussion of the realm of sexuality and gender is not accidental. Reproduction is the very last fact that a progressive-friendly show would want to admit; it is the spanner in the works of the progressive vision of sexuality. The fact of reproduction reveals that not all sexualities and identities are ambivalent or equivalent in their significance on the biological level. Men are overwhelmingly gynephiles (persons attracted to women) who are at home in their own bodies and who have predictable forms of gender expression for a reason, and that reason is a biologically rooted one. Human beings have sex for a reason and that reason is a biologically rooted one. Indeed, sexuality, gender expression and identity, sex, and gender all exist for reason and that reason is a biologically rooted one. Certain forms of sex have a significance that other forms of sex don’t have for a reason and, once again, that reason is a biologically rooted one.

As a fact, reproduction is essential to unlocking the scientific basis for all of these realities. However, it is a fact that causes deep problems for popular gender and sexuality theories, as it reveals that the realm of sexuality and gender isn’t one of mere ambivalent diversity, but that, at least on the biological level, there are certain orientations and bodies that are ‘natural’ in ways that others are not.

Read the whole thing. These people are entitled to say whatever crackpot thing they want to, and to show ice cream cones licking each other until they all melt down, but they are not entitled to call it science.

MacIntyre Is Ben Op & Doesn’t Know It

Hey readers, I’m at the Q Conference in Nashville until tomorrow, and have only limited access to wifi. Some of you are writing to ask if I’m sick, because I haven’t been blogging as much. You’re really kind — but be assured, all is well.

Caleb Bernacchio posted to Twitter the above comments by Alasdair MacIntyre. Fast-forward to the 1:07 part, where someone asks him about the Benedict Option. He responds testily, saying that the Ben Op has nothing to do with him. Then he explains what he meant by saying that “we await a new — and doubtless very different — St. Benedict.” The world he charts out is pretty much the world I talk about prescriptively in The Benedict Option! Like half the book’s critics, it seems, MacIntyre is responding to what he thinks the book is about (head-for-the-hills withdrawal) rather than what it is actually about. I hope someone who knows him will get him a copy of the book so he can read it. I am happy to send him one personally, if you’ll let me know how to do that.

To be clear, I am not saying that MacIntyre would necessarily agree with my book, were he to read it. But the criticism he would level would be at least informed by what the book is, not what he apparently thinks it is. MacIntyre doesn’t grasp that I agree with him that in our society, “liberals” and “conservatives” are two sides of the same coin.

More:

@calebb_caleb @MikeDatTiger @roddreher Agreed. BenOp is right to acknowledge the imp of religious dimension but religious and socioeconomic/political orders rise+fall together.

— Philip de Mahy (@philipdemahy) April 27, 2017

Yes, I think this is correct. The Benedict Option is a short-ish book written for a general audience, and is in no way a complete critique or program, or anywhere close to it. Had I been given all the time and space I wanted, I’d still be writing it, and it would end up at least three times as long. But I had a deadline, and a limited amount of space. Publishers, weirdly enough, want to sell books; most books that are longer than The Benedict Option, which is about 250 pages long, don’t sell as well as shorter ones. For someone who is as logorrheic as I am, it was a real challenge to write to that length, and to be honest, I couldn’t have done it without my editor’s scissors going snicker-snack. Having to lose all the stuff I wrote about a Mormon guy in Baton Rouge doing flood relief work, and about the Clear Creek Abbey community, and about a Catholic teacher in suburban Wichita and his neighborhood farm — it was like chopping off fingers. I’m not exaggerating — and if you’re a writer, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The model of political and economic engagement presented in the book is extremely elementary. But I knew it could not be any other way. Each chapter in the book could have easily been a book on its own — but I had to keep them to between 6,000 and 7,500 words each. Writers know that it’s almost always easier to write long than short. What I hope for The Benedict Option is that it’s simply the opening shot in what will be a wide range of books taking on particular aspects of what I propose, and going much deeper, and doing so from within particular traditions.

For example, I expect that the definitive Evangelical book about the Ben Op will be the one that the great Jake Meador of the Mere Orthodoxy blog is working on now (and I know he will be shopping around a book proposal soon; I think it will be red-hot). I have told Caleb Bernacchio that he should write a book (and should do so with Philipp de Mahy) focusing on politics and economics in the Ben Op. There are all kinds of educational books to be written. Yesterday at Q, I had a long private conversation with a man who is a big deal in classical Christian schooling. He told me that the world is wide open now for traditionalist experimentation on the education front.

This is an exciting time for us creative minorities! I am not any kind of expert; I am a journalist and a generalist who has tried to provide a framework for thinking about how to live as faithful tradition-minded Christians in a post-Christian, consumerist, individualist, anti-traditional culture. As I tell fellow Christians when I speak, I do not have all the answers, and I don’t know anyone who does. We in the churches are going to have to work this out together. Come join the fray. Before you decide that the Ben Op is B.S., though, please read the thing and understand what you reject. You may end up not rejecting it at all, because what you thought it was — a call to head for the hills and hunker down in some kind of separatist commune — is not at all what the Benedict Option calls for.

‘And Then The Universe Opened Up…’

In the current issue of the New Yorker, there’s a really interesting assessment, by Louis Menand, of Norman Podhoretz and his scandalous late Sixties memoir Making It, which has just been re-released. Menand’s essay includes this fascinating passage:

The reaction to the book changed Podhoretz’s life. He started looking for academic positions, and he began drinking when he was at home alone, almost a fifth of Jack Daniel’s a day, his stepdaughter later told Jeffers. He had a contract to write a book on the nineteen-sixties—he had hated the Beats, and he regarded the counterculture as the legacy of the Beats—and he went to Yaddo, the writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, where he had written much of “Making It,” to work on it. Writers’ colonies are not where you ideally want to be if you have a drinking problem. One day, a fellow-colonist, the critic Kenneth Burke, told Podhoretz that he needed to straighten out. So Podhoretz got in his car and drove, a little under the influence, to a farmhouse he had bought in Delaware County, and it was there, in the early spring of 1970, that he had a vision.

As he told the story to Jeffers, he had finished his writing for the day. He was walking outside, carrying a Martini and feeling content, when it happened. “I saw physically, in the sky, though it was obviously in my head, a kind of diagram that resembled a family tree. And it was instantly clear to me that this diagram contained the secret of life and existence and knowledge: that you start with this, and you follow to that. It all had a logic of interconnectedness.” Not quite Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” but strangely close. The vision lasted thirty seconds, and when it was over Podhoretz realized what the diagram was telling him: “Judaism was true.” He did not mean the ethical teachings of Judaism; he meant Judaic law. He vowed to change his life.

To all appearances, he did. He stopped drinking, he began interrogating friends about their spiritual condition, and he transformed Commentary again, this time into the scourge of left-wing permissivism and progressivism.

As most of you readers know, the same issue of the magazine contains Joshua Rothman’s incredibly generous profile of me. Compare the Menand bit with this from Rothman:

In South Louisiana, religion was everywhere, but, as a kid, Dreher was indifferent to it. Then, when he was seventeen, his mother, Dorothy, won a trip to Europe in a raffle and sent Rod in her place. He visited Chartres and felt judged by the beauty of the cathedral. He began to take religion seriously.

That’s like saying Julia Child began to take food seriously after tasting sole meunière just off the boat in Rouen.  I did not have a true mystical experience like Norman Podhoretz did, but I very much count that teenage visit to Chartres as one of the most formative experiences of my life, though I could not have known it at the time. It marked the moment when I turned my life around, and began the long, slow, messy pilgrimage back to God. Somehow, in that cathedral, I knew He existed, in a way I never had before — and that He wanted me.

Rothman quotes a more straightforwardly mystical story from my book How Dante Can Save Your Life:

Two life-changing events occurred after Dreher began the regimen of prayer. He was alone at home one evening, lying in bed, when he sensed a presence in the room. “I felt a hand reach inside my heart and put a stone there,” he said. “And I could see, in some interior way, that the stone said, ‘God loves me.’ I’d doubted all my life that God really loved me.”

That really did happen. And my God, it changed my life.

Question to the room: did one or more mystical experiences change the direction of your life, for good or for ill? Tell that story, or those stories. Make yourself anonymous in the comments if you feel the need to.