Rod Dreher's Blog, page 467

Trump Selling Out Religious Conservatives?

Well, well, well:

President Donald Trump promised religious groups he would reverse the Obama administration’s requirement that employers provide birth control to their employees under the Affordable Care Act.

But his Justice Department indicated Monday that it’s continuing to fight religious groups who are suing over the contraception mandate.

But, but…:

Conservatives who oppose the birth control mandate on religious liberty grounds are bewildered by the move at a Justice Department headed by former Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who is well known for his conservative views.

And many had expected the Department of Health and Human Services, now led by another conservative, former representative Tom Price, R-Ga., to change the Obama administration’s underlying rule to fully exempt religious colleges, schools and charities from covering birth control. But HHS has not proposed any rule changes and didn’t respond to a request Monday about whether there are plans to do so.

As things stand now, it appears that Justice plans to continue defending the way the Obama administration applied the birth-control mandate, said Eric Rassbach, a Becket [Fund] attorney.

“That just seems to be very contrary to what they’ve been saying publicly,” Rassbach said.

Read the whole thing. 

Reason‘s Stephanie Slade says:

The best-case scenario is that this is mere incompetence on the part of an administration still in its first 100 days. The Post notes that “Justice argued in its petition…that it needs more time to litigate the case because numerous Cabinet and subcabinet positions in several federal agencies involved remain unfilled several months into the new administration.” Perhaps they really do just need to get butts in seats in order to put the wheels in motion to end the fight.

I’ve also heard it suggested that Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants this to be decided by the Supreme Court now that Trump’s pick in Neil Gorsuch is safely aboard. But until he comes out saying that’s his plan, this move will be cause for concern.

This doesn’t look good. At all. I find it hard to believe that Jeff Sessions agrees with this move. If he doesn’t, the AG had better say so loud and clear. Now. 

Let’s hope this is a bureaucratic oversight. If Trump wimps out on this one, all bets are off. This is about as basic as it gets for religious conservatives.

The (Marilyn) Monroe Doctrine

Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi cuts loose on religious popularizer Reza Aslan. Excerpts:

My late teacher Philip Rieff, may he rest in peace, had a doctrine he called “the Monroe Doctrine”. Whenever he shared this doctrine with a new group of colleagues or students he would immediately preface it by saying, “not the famous President Monroe Doctrine, but the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine.”

The famous “Monroe Doctrine” spelled out by the US President James Monroe had declared the American continent as the domain of US influence in which no European interference would be tolerated.  But Rieff’s Monroe Doctrine had to do with something Marilyn Monroe had allegedly said – something to the effect of “I believe in everything – just a little bit.”

Watching a couple of episodes of Reza Aslan’s feature show Believer, you would be best reminded of Rieff’s “Monroe Doctrine”, for just like Marilyn Monroe, Reza Aslan believes in everything, “just a little bit”.

Prof. Dabashi says that “Fake Believers” like Aslan are essentially no different from “New Atheists” in that they both “trespass … on the intuition of the sacred and the moral imagination of communities constituted by that very imagination.” He goes on:

Reza Aslan ups the ante in hypocrisy and showmanship. He is born a Muslim and has made a lucrative career for himself by tackling Islamophobia in the United States in terms domestic to that Islamophobia. So if he is asked point blank if he is Jewish he of course has to say no, just before he turns to camera and says, “I feel Jewish today.”

But the calamity of the Fake Believer is much more psychotic. Reza Aslan was recently asked, “What does your religious practice look like now?” To that he responded:

I have a Christian wife; I have twin sons, one of whom is convinced he’s Jewish, and one of whom, after he read the Ramayana, was like, “That’s it, I’m Hindu.” I have a two-year-old boy that we just assume is a reincarnation of the Buddha in some way. So every Sunday, we get together and share one particular religious story, whether it’s of the Buddha or Ganesha or from the Gospel, and then we pick some value to learn from it, and then we, as a family, put that value into practice in our home and in our lives. 

Thus he lays a simultaneous, unabashed, claim on four other world religions – Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, while being a convenient Muslim. For a career opportunist making a living out of other people’s sacred certitude, Reza Aslan will believe in anything and everything, “just a little bit”.

Six millions Jews were slaughtered during the Nazi Holocaust because they were real Jews. Tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims were killed or forced out of their homes in the 1990s because they were real Muslims, as indeed today Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar are being subjected to systemic ethnic cleansing for the same reason. As indeed Christians and their churches are being targeted in Egypt because they are real Christians. But for the commercial calamity of the culture industry to which CNN caters, Reza Aslan is now a yuppie celebrity because he is a Fake Believer in all of these religions at one and the same very convenient time.

Read the whole thing. 

Prof. Dabashi, an Iranian-born scholar of Islam, is quite the controversialist.  I don’t know that I would compare the trite Sheilaism of Aslan to New Atheism, but I think Dabashi is more right than wrong.

There Will Be No Religious Left

A lot of people don’t want to hear it, but it’s true: in the future, you will either be a religious conservative, or secular. The religious left will evaporate.

Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Daniel Cox, the head of research at PRRI, a firm whose religious views tend towards progressivism.  Excerpts:

The first and perhaps most significant reason for skepticism is that there are far fewer religious liberals today than there were a generation ago. Nearly four in 10 (38 percent) liberals are religiously unaffiliated today, more than double the percentage of the 1990s, according to data from the General Social Survey. In part, the liberal mass migration away from religion was a reaction to the rise of the Christian right. Over the last couple decades, conservative Christians have effectively branded religious activism as primarily concerned with upholding a traditional vision of sexual morality and social norms. That conservative religious advocacy contributed to many liberals maintaining an abiding suspicion about the role that institutional religion plays in society and expressing considerable skepticism of organized religion generally. Only 30 percent of liberals report having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in organized religion. Half say that religion’s impact on society is more harmful than helpful.

More:

Another challenge confronting the progressive religious movement is the yawning generational divide in religious identity. Young liberals today are simply not that religious. Nearly half (49 percent) of liberals under 30 are religiously unaffiliated, according to the General Social Survey, which is more than the number who belong to all Christian denominations combined. Only 22 percent of liberal seniors are unaffiliated, while the overwhelming majority identify as religious. Your average left-leaning Christian is pushing 50. Coaxing young progressives to join a movement that would require them to reset their approach to religion is no small undertaking.

Read the whole thing. 

I would add this to the critique: liberal religion is simply insufficiently substantive to hold most people, particularly across generations. It is also true that milquetoast moderate bourgeois Christianity isn’t going to hold people either, but that’s true for the same reason that liberal Christianity won’t do it either. If liberalizing religion to make it a better fit for post-Christian modernity were the answer, the Protestant mainline would be booming now. I don’t doubt that there are many true believers within liberal Christian circles — some of them comment here — but I do doubt that most of them will be able to pass that faith on in the same way to their children. To be sure, it’s not easy for any of us, not in these times. But the problem, I believe, is much more serious for religious liberals.

Cox, the researcher, explains why: because younger people who identify as liberal are far less likely to be religious.

The late Cardinal George of Chicago once said, explaining why liberal Catholicism is a dead end:

Behind the crisis of visible authority or governance in a liberal church lies a crisis of truth. In a popular liberal society, freedom is the primary value and the government is not supposed to tell its citizens how to think. The cultural fault line lies in a willingness to sacrifice even the gospel truth in order to safeguard personal freedom construed as choice. Using sociology of knowledge and the hermeneutics of suspicion, modern liberals interpret dogmas which affront current cultural sensibilities as the creation of celibate males eager to keep a grasp on power rather than as the work of the Holy Spirit guiding the successors of the Apostles. The bishops become the successors of the Sanhedrin and the church, at best, is the body of John the Baptist, pointing to a Jesus not yet risen from the dead and, therefore, a role model or prophet but not a savior. Even Jesus’ being both male and celibate is to be forgotten or denied once the risen Christ can be reworked into whomever or whatever the times demand. Personal experience becomes the criterion for deciding whether or not Jesus is my savior, a point where liberal Catholics and conservative Protestants seem to come to agreement, even if they disagree on what salvation really means. Liberal culture discovers victims more easily than it recognizes sinners; and victims don’t need a savior so much as they need to claim their rights.

All this is not only a dead end, it is a betrayal of the Lord, no matter the good intentions of those espousing these convictions. The call to personal conversion, which is at the heart of the gospel, has been smothered by a pillow of accommodation. The project for a liberal Catholic church is as unoriginal as the project for a liberal reinterpretation of the mission for the church. A church, all of whose ministries, construed only functionally, are open to any of the baptized; a church unwilling to say that all homosexual genital relations are morally wrong; a church which at least makes some allowance for abortion when necessary to assure a mother’s freedom; a church accepting contraception as moral within marriage and prudent outside of marriage; a church willing to admit the sacramentally married to a second marriage in complete sacramental communion; a church whose teaching has to stand the acid test of modern criticism and personal acceptance in order to have not just credibility but legitimacy—there is nothing new in all this. It already exists, but outside the Catholic church.

More broadly, we could say that many of the things liberal Christians believe in and advocate, in contradiction to normative Christian orthodoxy, already exist outside the church, period. Liberal Christianity often appears as a somewhat desperate attempt to sanctify modern beliefs. More to the point, Philip Rieff had the number of liberal Christianity, saying in 1966’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic that Christian pastors and priests would desperately but futilely try to update their doctrines to accommodate the modern world — especially regarding sexuality — but would fail, in part because there really is no credible way to do this. The testimony of the Bible is simply overwhelmingly against what they want to do. Rieff didn’t say this, but I will: the labor one has to accomplish to “liberate” Christianity from traditional Biblical sexual ethics is so immense that you have to tear down the entire castle to free the prisoner from the dungeon.

Rieff’s theory of culture explains why liberal Christianity has no future. Here is a longish Rieff passage explaining his theory.  In a nutshell, Rieff says that culture, of which religion is a part, is defined by what it prescribes and what it forbids. A culture based on knocking down taboos, on forbidding to forbid, is an anti-culture. It cannot do what a culture must do. Aside from advocating for the legitimization of homosexual desire and the approbation of sexual permissiveness, what does liberal Christianity really stand for? If it amounts to just the desiring individual and the sacrosanct quality of his own personal interpretation of Scripture and the Christian tradition, then liberal religion cannot do anything other than dissolve.

Note well, religious conservatives: if the essence of your religious conservatism is merely a reflection of your social milieu, your religion will dissolve in your children’s generation too. I know a number of older folks who might be fairly described as religious conservatives, but who have failed to transmit the faith to their offspring. Of course this is not a matter of data transfer, but rather a matter of cultivation. Not every plant in a garden will flourish, because they are organic, not mechanisms. So it is with human beings. Nevertheless, I am convinced that many, many conservatives who happen to be Christian are far too trusting in the habits of culture to pass on the faith. Given the post-Christian — and increasingly anti-Christian — qualities of the broader culture, if you are not affirmatively and meaningfully traditionalist in your approach to and practice of faith, your kids are more likely than not to lose the faith.

Let me end by reaching out to middle-aged and older readers who identify as liberal Christians, or as religious liberals within non-Christian traditions. Are your adult children practicing the faith? Why or why not? Do you think the way you brought them up in the faith had anything to do with the decision they have made? I’m not accusing you; I just want to understand this phenomenon.

UPDATE: A reader writes to recount a conversation with a senior leader in a Mainline Protestant church, who said, ruefully, that even the healthiest liberal congregations “are like mules: they’re perfectly healthy, but they can’t reproduce.”

UPDATE.2: Reader Jeremy Hickerson comments:

Here’s an example from my church that shows Rod is right to say that mainline or liberal Christianity is straying far from the faith. I give it out of honesty and dismay, and I’m still going to stay part of my church, but it shook me and made me question whether I did wrong by my kids by bringing them up in this church. I posted earlier that one of my two daughters is practicing the faith, and I have seen a number of children grow up in this church and stay in the faith. The thing that drew me and my wife to the church in the first place was the involvement of youth in the worship service the first time we visited. And my experience growing up in the evangelical church rules out that branch of Christianity for my, I have no regrets about not bringing up my kids in an evangelical church.

Here’s what happened yesterday. I was teaching an adult Sunday School class. In Methodism, we have what we call the “Wesley Quadrilateral”. This is 4 tools to arrive at decisions about doctrine, practice, etc. They are Scripture (which should be given the most weight of the four), Tradition, Reason, and Experience. A few weeks ago someone had brought this up in the S.S. class and I had asked if there were any limits to what we could change using the Quadrilateral. The general response was that there were no limits. Yesterday I said that the limits, the core that we could not touch were:

1) Humans are sinful

2) Jesus is God and human

3) Jesus died to pay for our sins

4) Jesus rose from the dead

There was a big uproar and massive disagreement with this. One person spoke up and said, look, Jeremy’s not crazy, this is basically just part of the apostle’s creed. I pointed out that we had just recited this in the service a half hour ago. Another person said that my list of four was ecumenical enough that Catholics, Orthodox, Evangelicals, would all agree with it. So out of the 15 to 20 in the class, 2 agreed and the rest didn’t or didn’t say anything.

This class is very close, and they are all my close friends. We have basically raised each others kids over the years. This is a great group. But it shook me to the core.

What really bothered me was not so much that people didn’t themselves believe the core of Christianity. I’m not surprised that might be the case – a big strength our church is accepting people where they are at. If they want to come be part, we welcome them. This follows the example of Jesus when he was on earth. What bothered me was that they felt it was out of place and wrong for a church to stand up for the faith it has in its doctrinal statement. Like they were surprised that this sort of thing would be said at a church. I thought they knew we were a church.

And there you have it. These days, a congregation that is not affirmatively orthodox in its theology will become de facto liberal … and then will evaporate.

The religious liberal Daniel Schultz gives a decent definition of the difference between religious conservatives and religious liberals:

Speaking in very broad terms, liberals see faith as giving them ethics, rather than a universal morality. That is, religious belief provides moral guidelines, but these still have to be applied to individual situations, with quite a bit of room left for diverse outcomes. This makes sense if you stop to think about it: if the world you live in is pluralistic, you accommodate different possible answers to the same questions. But if you live in a culture with more agreement on what God’s will is and how it should be applied, you’re more likely to see that as universal. (Again, this is very broad, and it’s possible to make too much of the distinctions.)

When liberals think about morality, then, they see a heuristic, not a law.

I would rephrase it this way — again, speaking very broadly: Religious liberals regard Scripture and Tradition as suggestions, perhaps ideals, but reserve to themselves the right to re-interpret in context of their own time and place, and according to their own needs and desires. Religious conservatives regard Scripture and Tradition as authoritative, and disclosing eternal moral and theological truths that bind human understanding and conduct. Another way to look at it: religious liberals think of religion as primarily what Man says about God, while religious conservatives think of religions as primarily what God says about Man.

There will be no religious left in the long term because the religious left, as it is currently constituted, doesn’t even believe in its own religion.

J.D. Vance & Your Working Boy At UNO

‘Science!’ Said The Idiots

Said the reader who sent it to me: “There are no words (except “science”) so I’ll leave it there.”

Keep in mind that Bill Nye is considered a pop culture icon by the rationalist crowd intent on demonstrating what poltroons religious people are. And yet, this trash makes “Veggie Tales” play like the Oresteia.

“That’s exactly the right message, Rachel,” says Bill Nye, who thereby outs himself a dirty old man.

Crazy people. Batsh*t crazy.

Lost Causes And Stand-Taking Down South

Today the New Yorker published a long profile of me by Joshua Rothman. It’s really good, in the sense of being dead accurate, warts and all. And it’s very well written. I’m quite pleased with it, though there are parts that made me grimace a wee bit — parts that are not Rothman’s fault, but my own: he has captured me well. I’ll drop a couple of passages below.

I illustrate this post with a screen grab from the website. I don’t think it’s quite kosher (and maybe not legal) to flat-out grab the photo, a portrait done in the Starhill Cemetery by the great Maude Schuyler Clay. We spent an entire Sunday afternoon gallivanting around St. Francisville and environs, taking shots in different places. When I saw the one the magazine’s photo editor decided to use, my first thought was, “Oh, too bad!”, because I doubt it’s the most flattering of the bunch. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s exactly the right one. After staring at it a few seconds, I thought, “My God, it’s the face of my father.” I showed it to my wife and kids, and they agreed. We have all seen that look on Daddy’s face: the eyes looking suspiciously in the distance, the tension in his jaw, when confronted with things that vex him. Neither Maude nor the photo editor at the magazine knew him, obviously, but boy, have they captured my dad, and my dad inside me — and so has Josh Rothman.

Though my dad and I clashed intensely for much of our life together, what we shared was a profound need for order, to believe that the world was ordered in a certain way, and that people were seeking to harmonize with it. But people, being people, tend not to do this, hence the anxiety within the ordered person. My father worried a great deal because the world surrounding him would not order itself, or be ordered, as he thought it should. This anxiety took a painful toll on me, because my own disorder (in his eyes) was a thorn in his flesh. It was by no means the only one, but given that I was his only son, and was named after him, it was his chief torment. At least until his daughter, the Golden Girl who never did anything wrong, died of cancer at age 42.

What Josh Rothman’s profile, and Maude Schuyler Clay’s photo, revealed to me is how very much alike my late father and I are. There’s one big difference, though: Though we were (are) both restless souls, Daddy was convinced that he had found the right place; his restlessness manifested itself in countless projects around his land, by which he sought to order it. Mine was more inward, though certainly it had outward manifestations. Daddy never doubted himself or his way of living, and indeed could not have conceived of doing so. That’s not me, and never was. But the anxiety, that we share.

From the essay:

Year by year, the distance between father and son grew. In college, at L.S.U., Dreher was a leftist who invited Abbie Hoffman to campus; he tried to debate politics with his father, who once responded, in genuine bewilderment, “Why would I lie to you?” It was as though his dad couldn’t comprehend the concept of difference. Dreher describes his father and his sister as “Bayou Confucians.” He explains, “They had this idea that, if you did what you were supposed to do, you would succeed. I didn’t do those things, but I didn’t fail, and that drove them crazy.” (Dreher moved right after college—he has worked as a blogger for National Review but now says that he is more “traditionalist” than conservative: “I think there’s an individualism at the center of both parties—the economic individualism of the Republicans and the secular, social individualism of the Democrats—that I find really incongruous with what I believe to be true because of my religion.”)

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. When he was eighteen, he went to see Pope John Paul II at the Superdome, in New Orleans. The Pope appeared, and a thought flashed in Dreher’s mind: “I wish he were my dad.” In his twenties, Dreher wanted nothing more than to fall in love—he had a poster for the French film “Betty Blue” on his bedroom wall—but his romances felt increasingly shallow, even sad, compared with what he’d seen in France. At twenty-six, he converted to Catholicism. Fed up with what he perceived as his own caddishness—he had dated one girlfriend longer than he should have—he decided to embrace chastity until marriage. Three years later, he proposed to Julie in a church, kneeling before an icon.

More:

It was Dreher’s Orthodox priest, Father Matthew, who laid down the law. “He said, ‘You have no choice as a Christian: you’ve got to love your dad even if he doesn’t love you back in the way that you want him to,’ ” Dreher recalled. “ ‘You cannot stand on justice: love matters more than justice, because the higher justice is love.’ ” When Dreher struggled to master his feelings, Father Matthew told him to perform a demanding Orthodox ritual called the Optina Rule. He recited the Jesus Prayer—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—hundreds of times a day.

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.” A few months later, Dreher stopped by his dad’s house to organize his medications. Ray was sitting on the porch, reading the newspaper and drinking coffee. When Dreher leaned down to kiss him on the cheek, his father grabbed him by the arm. Tears were in his eyes. “He was stammering,” Dreher recalled. “He said, ‘I—I—I spent a long time talking to the Lord last night about you, and the transgressions I did against you. And I told him I was sorry. And I think he heard me.’ ” Recounting the story in the back seat of the car en route to D.C., Dreher still seemed astonished that this had happened. “I kissed him, and said, ‘I love you.’ ”

Dreher’s father died in 2015. The next summer, the mission lost its priest and one of the founding families moved away. To be near an Orthodox church, Dreher and his family moved to Baton Rouge. Looking back on his time in St. Francisville, Dreher thinks that, if he hadn’t moved there and then forced himself to follow the rules—prayer, proximity, love—he would have stayed an angry child forever.

Here is one of my favorite photos: of my father and Father Matthew, at a crawfish boil, back in 2013 or so:

Ray O. Dreher, Sr., and Father Matthew Harrington

More from the Rothman essay, this after our visit to the Catholic community around St. Jerome parish in Hyattsville, Md.:

Our visit had been short, but he seemed wistful, even a little sad, to be leaving a place where he might have belonged. In a 2013 post, Dreher meditates on his perennial outsiderness. He says he likes visiting places where he could live but doesn’t—places where he is “a stranger, but not strange”—more than he enjoys fitting in at home. “I don’t want to feel this way, but I do,” he writes. He wonders if he is “an outsider by nature,” chasing a “sense of fitting-in, of Home, that . . . I am incapable of experiencing.”

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.”

Working with Josh Rothman on this profile led me inadvertently to seeing why I am so drawn to the personality of Walker Percy, and to much of his writing. Percy seemed to be as happy as he was capable of being when he was onto something. I got onto something when I stumbled into the Chartres cathedral, and I’ve been on the search for it ever since. I have tried to figure out why I can think that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and still be so laid back about it — to enjoy, truly enjoy, life — crawfish, beer, books, prayer ropes, conversation — amid such anxiety. Well, that’s how Walker Percy was. It’s how I am. People are mysterious.

One more bit:

Another young Ben Op Christian who lives in New York told me that she didn’t share Dreher’s sense of outsiderness. “I grew up on the Upper West Side,” she said. “This is my St. Francisville.” At the same time, she said, “when I was growing up, there were these moments in the fall when you’d be walking in Central Park, and you’d see that pink, 7-p.m.-in-September sunlight on the buildings, and it seemed like there was another place the city was pointing to.” In an existential sense, she said, Christianity figured human beings as “resident aliens” in the world; the Benedict Option gave a name to the deliberate maintenance of that difference. Several years ago, with some friends who were also readers of Dreher’s, she had tried to start a theologically conservative church. She saw the church that she currently attended, in Manhattan, as a “deliberate community.” “A couple from my church lives in my house,” she said.

“What the Ben Op means to me is this,” Leah [Libresco Sargeant] told me. “You’re married, right? Imagine a world where people didn’t agree that marriage was a concept—where there was no social understanding of marriage. And imagine that your marriage was really important to you, and that, when you interacted with other people, no one mentioned your marriage; there was no respect for it and no acknowledgment of its existence. You would do a lot to claw out some space to manifest that your marriage was important. And that’s how it is with the Benedict Option. We have a relationship with Christ. Really, it should be our most important relationship. But my relationship with Alexi is treated as more real and important and relevant. If I say, ‘Oh, I can’t make it, Alexi and I have a thing,’ that’s normal. But if I say, ‘Sorry, I have to go to church,’ that’s weird.”

They weren’t sure if they would stay in New York or move somewhere else. They loved the city, but its values—competition, individualism, transience, capitalism—seemed in tension with their faith. They were still making up their minds about how they wanted to live.

OK, I have to share this passage about Andrew Sullivan:

The writer Andrew Sullivan, who is gay and Catholic, is one of Dreher’s good friends. Their friendship began in earnest in 2010, when Ruthie got sick and Dreher, moved by a spirit of generalized repentance, e-mailed Sullivan to apologize for anything “hard-hearted” he might have said in their various online arguments. Sullivan has a long-standing disagreement with Dreher over same-sex marriage, but he believes that the religiously devout should be permitted their dissent. “There is simply no way for an orthodox Catholic to embrace same-sex marriage,” he said. “The attempt to conflate that with homophobia is a sign of the unthinking nature of some liberal responses to religion. I really don’t think that florists who don’t want to contaminate themselves with a gay wedding should in any way be compelled to do so. I think any gay person that wants them to do that is being an asshole, to be honest—an intolerant asshole. Rod forces you to understand what real pluralism is: actually accepting people with completely different world views than your own.”

In “The Benedict Option,” Dreher writes that “the angry vehemence with which many gay activists condemn Christianity” is the understandable result of a history of “rejection and hatred by the church.” Orthodox Christians need to acknowledge this history, he continues, and “repent of it.” He has assured his children that, if they are gay, he will still love them; he is almost—but not quite—apologetic about his views, which he presents as a theological obligation. He sees orthodox Christians as powerless against the forces of liquidly modern progressivism; on his blog, he argues that “the question is not really ‘What are you conservative Christians prepared to tolerate?’ but actually ‘What are LGBTs and progressive allies prepared to tolerate?’ ” He wants them to be magnanimous in victory; to refrain from pressing their advantage. Essentially, he says to progressives: You’ve won. You wouldn’t sue Orthodox Jews or observant Muslims. Please don’t sue us, either.

“What I really love about Rod is that, even as he’s insisting upon certain truths, he’s obviously completely conflicted,” Sullivan said. “And he’s a mess! I don’t think he’d disagree with that. But he’s a mess in the best possible way, because he hasn’t anesthetized himself. He’s honest about a lot of the questions that many liberal and conservative Christians aren’t really addressing.” Talking to Sullivan about Dreher, I was reminded of Father Matthew’s law: “You’ve got to love your dad even if he doesn’t love you back in the way that you want him to.”

Andrew is right: I’m a mess, but I hope I’m a mess in the best possible way.

I have never had a writer do a profile of me, though I’ve certainly done it to other people. When the first journalist to offer to do a profile of you is a writer for the New Yorker — my favorite magazine, one I’ve been subscribing to for over 20 years, and probably the most prestigious magazine in the country — you can probably be forgiven if your first impulse is to shriek like Homer Simpson and dive under the table. But I trusted Josh Rothman because I had read his terrific piece about J.D. Vance’s book last September, which was one of the best things I’d read about it (and I read a lot). I believe the piece validates my trust. We spent the week of The Benedict Option‘s publication traveling together. It’s not the easiest thing to have a writer for the New Yorker at your side for a whole week, asking questions, but Josh made it into a true pleasure. I told him last week that I was sure that whatever he ended up saying about me, that it would be a fair judgment. Now that I’ve read the piece, I know that I was right.

I can’t let go of the story of my family and its fate. I don’t think there are any mysteries left to plumb regarding why my dad and my sister regarded me the way they did, or why my attempt at re-entry (to use a Percy construct) failed. I don’t sense any burning need to sort out why I’m the particular mess that I am. But what remains on my mind is this.

We now live in a world that was made for somebody like me, with my aspirations and talents. It is a world in which people like Daddy and Ruthie, and what they stood for, can scarcely thrive. (I read Chris Caldwell’s piece on the situation in France, and it resonates with regard to the small places like West Feliciana.) The values and the customs and the way of seeing the world that meant everything to them is very hard to sustain. The great tragedy of my family is that my father and my sister held onto their vision so tightly that they made all those around them whom they catechized far too rigid to survive the shocks of their passing. And now the family that they revered above all else is shattered. What will happen to the land that my father acquired, cultivated, and revered, after my mom is gone? Ruthie loved the land as much as he did, and planned to live on it till the day she died. And she did — but she did not count on dying at 42. Everything that seemed so solid, so unbreakable, has dissolved, and is broken.

I’ve been thinking about how things might have gone differently had I been able to return to St. Francisville when Ruthie was first diagnosed. What if I had been there during the 19 months she lived, and had discovered the awful truth while there was still time to resolve things. Might everything been different? Maybe, maybe not. They were so dug in to their position that I probably would have broken myself trying to breach the barrier of iron will that they built between themselves and the outside world, to which I had defected. Still, the storyteller in me keeps thinking about how that would have worked out. Last week, onstage in New Orleans with JD Vance, JD asked me what my father would have thought of Trump. I said he would have supported him, no question about it. Trump stood for the lost world of people like my dad, and all the people of West Feliciana. And I reflected in my answer on how strange it was that I lived just down the road from my father, and am a conservative, just as he was, yet I was startled by the enthusiasm both my parents showed for Trump (something I only learned in my father’s final days, when we watched Trump’s Mobile rally in my father’s bedroom, about ten days before he died).

I keep thinking that somehow, the dynamic tension between my father and my sister on one side, and me on the other, tells us something about our country in its present state. What they had is what so many of us long for, me included: a strong sense of place, and of rootedness in that place. But they were so deeply rooted that they could not bear anything that challenged their sense of how the world was. That’s why I got out: because I didn’t fit, and I could not bear my father’s judgment. But I kept trying to come back because having been out in the world, and having succeeded, I was aware of the deep value of the world they inhabited. I wanted to be part of it, in some way. It took Ruthie’s death to open my eyes to the treasure they guarded.

And yet, when I moved home, my father could not accept the grace of my offering to him. None of them could (well, my mom did, but that’s how she is: she accepts all; if I came home as a Maoist drag queen, she would find a reason to affirm me in my Maoist drag queenliness). It violated their sense of order. In The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming, I wrote about how, after I came home, my father made a startling admission to me: that he ought to have left West Feliciana when he was young, and made his way in the outside world. He told me he didn’t do it because he believed he had a duty to love and to serve his parents and his extended family. He did this, he said, but they didn’t feel the same way about him. If only he had left, his life might have been different, he said.

It was an astonishing admission — really, even today I struggle to believe it, but I recorded it on my iPhone, so I know it was real. And yet — and yet! — it changed nothing. He continued to believe that I was a disappointment to him, even though I returned home. Because I wasn’t like him. This pained him so much — it was visible — but he could not escape the gravity of his place, neither in his person nor in his judgments. I explained the failure of my return to a friend like this: imagine the Prodigal Son story in the Bible, but the father taking the side of the resentful sibling, and telling the prodigal that he cannot return home, because he had made his choice. That was us.

In the standard Hollywood telling of this story, they are villains: the close-minded country people who refuse the outsider, refuse to change, etc. In truth, though, they weren’t villains at all; anybody who reads Little Way can see that. In many, perhaps even most, respects, my dad and my sister were better people than I am. There’s no false modesty in saying that. What they never did was doubt themselves and their judgment — and in that pride was the family’s dissolution.

Reading Dante gave me the key to this. My father was a kind of Farinata of the Felicianas. Farinata is a Tuscan nobleman condemned to the Inferno because he did not believe in God; rather, he believed in his family, his city, and himself. My father believed in God, certainly, but not as much as he believed in himself and the world he inherited, and helped to build. I wrote about Farinata on this blog here. Excerpts:

Herzman & Cook add that one way to think of the sin of heresy is mistaking one part of the truth for the whole truth. In this sense, the heresy of Farinata and Cavalcante includes believing that truth consisted in their all-consuming love for family, party, status, and so forth. The thing is, there is nothing wrong with loving your family, your party, your city and your creed. The error comes in believing that these are ultimate ends. To let this disorder reign in one’s heart inevitably results in disorder in the family, in the community, in the city, in the country, everywhere — because everything is connected. Could this be why Jesus said to call your brother a fool puts you in danger of the fires of Hell?

This was incredibly helpful for me in trying to untie the knot that bound me after my return to my Louisiana home. The divisions between my Louisiana family and me that had been there for most of my life proved impossible to bridge. I couldn’t figure this out. I had no doubt that my sister loved me, though she didn’t much like me, nor did I doubt that my dad loved me, though he disapproved of me. And I loved them. So why the struggle?

It was, I think, because all of us put far more value on the good things of this world than we ought to have done. Family is important, but it’s not the most important thing. Community is important, but it’s not the most important thing. Philosophy (by which I mean worldview) is important, but it’s not the most important thing. I could not ever hope to fit in as I wanted to because they considered me to be selfish and unloving for not loving as they loved — that is, for not sharing their particular view of what it meant to be devoted to family, to place, and so forth. In their view, if I loved as I ought to love, I never would have left, and I would have the same vision of the good as they do.

I deeply believe they were, and are, wrong about this. The thing is, I had grown up in this family culture, and had internalized its values. Deep down, I accepted this critique, even though I have spent all my adult life fighting against it on the surface. Much of this is in Little Way — in the part where my niece Hannah reveals to me that her late mother and my father had raised her and her sisters to think bad of me for having left home, and for believing the things I do and living the way I do. What I hadn’t counted on is this state of things existing even after my sister’s death. It is the immovable object. And crashing hard against it on my re-entry very nearly broke me.

Reading Dante — this canto in particular, but also the entire Commedia — helped me to see things I couldn’t see. It had not occurred to me that disordered love could be so destructive, at least not in this way. How could you love the idea of family too much, and the idea of place too much? It’s not hate, so how could it be wrong?

I saw how it could be wrong. I saw that the insistence on the primacy of these divisions, on treating them as fundamental, unalterable facts of life that gave life meaning and structure, could refuse grace, and, tragically, ensure that these divisions become permanent.

I had done all I could to bridge the chasm. There was literally nothing more that I could do. This wrecked me.

What I could do, and what I did, was this: recognize the extent to which in my heart of hearts, I had always accepted this judgment, and oriented my own interior life around it. The division existed tangibly in the world, and because of that, it existed in my soul as well. It came between God and me, and made me think that God loved me, but He couldn’t possibly approve of me, no matter what I did. My spiritual life, I came to see, had been for many years oriented around appeasing a God whom I was constantly failing in my duties regarding faith and morals.

Once Dante unmasked this within me, I saw that I had made false idols of Family and Place. It’s not that loving Family and loving Place are bad things — they are, in fact, good things — but that they are only good relative to the ultimate good, who is God. Once I gained that understanding, through the graces that came through prayer and confession (and therapy), I was able to renounce these idols, by which I mean I was able to rightly order them.

And that’s where my healing started. It all ended, as regular readers know, with me spending the last week of my father’s life, living with him in his bedroom at home (he was in home hospice care). I wrote about the epilogue here. Excerpt:

Days later, the moment was at hand. We gathered all the family members who were near, and as many of the neighbors as could be there. Daddy had not been conscious for a couple of days. His bedroom filled with the people who had loved him for most of his life. They had come to see him off.

At the end, his breathing became fast and labored, and he writhed, as if trying shake off his flesh. Mama took his right hand, and I clasped his left. As Daddy drew his final agonized breaths, I looked into his face. It was the only thing I saw, and in it, I saw the face of Christ. More importantly, I saw him, not as the man of whom I was in awe, the man whom I sometimes hated, the man with whose difficult legacy I wrestled in my heart for decades, but him as a fellow sinner and sufferer, and poor creature who needed my love as surely as I needed his. Death humbles us all. That hand of his that held me as a helpless baby, I held myself when his soul left his helpless body. There is perfect harmony in this, a harmony rightly divided and bound together by love — the love that moves the Sun and all the other stars.

My final words to my father were, “Thank you, old man, for everything.” They may be the truest words I ever spoke to him.

Here is a photo of Father Matthew blessing my father, a couple of days before he died:

And here is a photo of my mother and me, hours before Daddy breathed his last, comforting him by showing him a photo of Ruthie, and telling him that soon he would be with her:

 

The tragic beauty of this story, of all of it, won’t let me go. Why do I wonder if this saga of one Southern family says something about the way we live today? I think it has to do with the fact that most of us long for the rootedness that Daddy and Ruthie had, but we aren’t willing to make the sacrifices necessary to acquire it — if it is even possible for us to acquire. But what if you are willing to make that sacrifice, as I had been, but the door is closed to you? More deeply, what if, in defense of the rooted way of life, they close the door to you because they cannot forgive you for being disloyal to it — being disloyal simply by being different — and without knowing what they are doing, guarantee that the way of life will die with them?

Father Matthew, who is not a Southerner, once told me that one thing that stood out to him about the Southern character is the ferocity with which we hold grudges. After thinking about it for a moment, I had to agree with him on that. We too often know who we are by who and what we hate. It’s a very Dantean point: love and hate are the same thing, seen from different angles. Because, as Walker Percy said, we in the South tend to be more Stoic than Christian, my father and my sister (who was a faithful churchgoer) believed that they were doing the right — indeed, the righteous — thing by digging in in the face of the challenge I presented to them. By being unable, or unwilling, to change, to forgive, and to seek forgiveness, they lost the things that mattered most to them.

This is one of the paradoxical lessons of di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” That is, to hold on to the things that matter most to us, we have to be flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances. If we don’t, we could lose it all. This is a point I try to make with the Benedict Option: that we conservative Christians cannot keep doing things they way we have always done them, because we will lose everything if we don’t adapt. I say we have to build arks within which we can float atop liquid modernity; many Christians either deny the flood, or with heroic defiance say, “I’ll take my stand.”

My father and my sister took their stand with similar heroic defiance. Now they are gone, and the world they wanted to defend has gone with them. It did not have to happen. Or did it? Theirs was a lost cause, at least in the way they fought for it. Is mine?

Now you see the reason for the anxious, faraway look on the face of the man standing in the shadow of the crape myrtles in Starhill Cemetery, where his family lay all around.

Anyway, here’s a link to the entire New Yorker profile. 

UPDATE: All of this brings to mind the great and difficult Wallace Stevens poem The Idea Of Order At Key West:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.

The song and water were not medleyed sound

Even if what she sang was what she heard,

Since what she sang was uttered word by word.

It may be that in all her phrases stirred

The grinding water and the gasping wind;

But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew

It was the spirit that we sought and knew

That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea

That rose, or even colored by many waves;

If it was only the outer voice of sky

And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,

However clear, it would have been deep air,

The heaving speech of air, a summer sound

Repeated in a summer without end

And sound alone. But it was more than that,

More even than her voice, and ours, among

The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,

Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped

On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres

Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing.

She measured to the hour its solitude.

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,

As we beheld her striding there alone,

Knew that there never was a world for her

Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,

Why, when the singing ended and we turned

Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,

As the night descended, tilting in the air,

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,

Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

To what extent are we the makers of the songs we sing? Or merely the discoverers of songs we liberate, like Michelangelo setting the figure free from the marble?

UPDATE.2: This is delicious:

Jew, Jewish, What’s The Difference?

Mark Oppenheimer reflects on why so many people — including Jews — are hesitant to use the term “Jew.” Excerpt:

We Jews, too, recoil from calling ourselves Jews. In my experience as an editor at a publication focusing on Jewish news and culture, and hosting its podcast about Jewish life, I have noticed how many Jewish writers — me included — avoid calling anyone a “Jew.” I frequently edit articles that mention “Jewish politicians” or “Jewish artists” but not “Jews.”

Like our non-Jewish friends, we Jews have been conditioned to think of a “Jew” as something bad. We will say, “Some really nice Jewish people moved in next door,” rather than, “Some really nice Jews moved in next door.” Trying to discern if someone is suitable dating material for a single, religious friend, we’ll ask, “Oh, is he Jewish?” but not, “Oh, is he a Jew?” To be “a real Christian” is a compliment, but to be “a real Jew” is considered an insult. “A real Jew” may be stingy, crass or pushy — whatever she is, it’s not good.

There are understandable reasons one might prefer the phrase “Jewish person” to “Jew.” For one thing, anti-Semites love to talk about “Jews” and “the Jews.” The noun has been a slur in English since the 17th century, and to the Jew-haters of the world, Jew-ness, with all the genetically heritable perfidy it entails, is an essential and ineradicable trait. Whether it’s the stain of having murdered Jesus or an inborn capacity for greed or deception, the vices perceived by the anti-Semite belong to “the Jew,” not someone who happens to be Jewish. Anti-Semites have made “Jew” a term of opprobrium, and the rest of us have acquiesced.

But there’s another reason Jews prefer “Jewish.” Many of us don’t think of Jew-ness as central to our identity. If what we’re talking about is an ethnic inheritance, but not one that defines us in an important way, we may rightly feel that “Jewish” makes a more modest, weaker claim than “Jew” — just as “I’m German” sounds a bit milder than “I’m a German.” The former is purely descriptive, the latter a bit proud.

It’s precisely because “Jew” is a bit proud that I want Jews to use it more.

I agree with him that Jews should use it more, and for the reason he says. But until I read this piece, I had not realized that I do the same thing. I’m much more likely to describe someone as “Jewish” rather than “a Jew,” because I want to avoid any hint of anti-Semitism. There is nothing anti-Semitic about calling a Jew a Jew, of course, but as Oppenheimer notes, anti-Semites have made it sometimes a term of opprobrium. Better to be on the safe side. Nobody objects when you ask, “Is she Jewish?”, but if you say, “Is she a Jew?”, then there’s a part of you that may wonder, “Hmm, why does that person want to know?” I do that too, though again, I wasn’t aware of it until I read Oppenheimer’s column.

Oppenheimer writes:

To be “a real Christian” is a compliment, but to be “a real Jew” is considered an insult. “A real Jew” may be stingy, crass or pushy — whatever she is, it’s not good.

Again, I have to admit that I would not have noticed this unless he pointed it out, but it’s true. If someone described a devout Jew to me as “a real Jew,” I would assume that there was something sinister in the formulation. I don’t know why that is.

Here’s what it reminds me of. I became serious about my Christianity as an adult in my mid-twenties when I converted to Catholicism. I was living in Washington DC, and had been pretty secular for almost a decade. I remembered how derisively my secular friends had spoken of Christians — I had done this too — and I had a lot of social anxiety about it. I settled on describing myself when asked as “Catholic,” deliberately not using the word “Christian,” though certainly that’s what I was. Why? Because “Christian” was — in my circles at the time — usually a negative descriptor, in a way that “Catholic” was not.

After reading Oppenheimer’s piece, I tried to understand why “Christian” made me feel so uncomfortable back then. After all, politically speaking, as a Catholic I held the same pro-life views that made me so offensive to certain progressives. But there was this context: the power and presence of TV evangelism.

I was at LSU in the 1980s, when Jimmy Swaggart, based in Baton Rouge, was a big national deal. I was present in his congregation back in 1988 for his big confession sermon after he got caught with a prostitute. I associated Christianity with people like him, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and the whole herd of charlatans. Plus, on campus, the loudest Christian voices were the most obnoxious. To be fair, I was ideologically primed to see only the worst of Christians, and to think of them as emblematic. All the quieter Christians, both Evangelical and Catholic, escaped my notice, in part because of my confirmation bias.

When I finally got serious about Christianity, and did so through the Catholic church, I was well aware of the fact that whatever negative thing one might say about Catholicism, it could not be accused of the anti-intellectualism and chicanery that came with TV evangelism. I was ignorant back then of the differences among Evangelicals. I assumed — wrongly — that everybody who called himself an Evangelical was in some way part of the TV evangelism world. Choosing to identify as a “Catholic” and not a “Christian” when asked was a way of distancing myself from that mess. It played right into the ugly distinction that many of those believers make; I ran into it the other night in New Orleans, when an undergraduate at the J.D. Vance event introduced herself to me and said, “I was raised Catholic, but now I’m a Christian.” The TV evangelist types and the more conservative Evangelicals didn’t consider Catholics to be Christians, so by choosing the label “Catholic” instead of “Christian,” I signaled that I wasn’t one of the “bad” kind of Christian.

It was also, I hate to say, a form of intellectual snobbery. I didn’t want to be considered one of those Christians. It made sense to me back then, in my twenties, but the memory of it embarrasses me today. For a long time, I have been describing myself simply as “Christian,” or “a Christian.” If people want to know more, I tell them I am an Orthodox Christian. Of course I don’t agree with all Christians on everything, theologically or otherwise, but if you’re the sort of person who hates Christians, I would rather you go ahead and lump me in with all the other less “respectable” believers. I wear that spite as a badge of pride.

And that, more or less, is why I agree with Mark Oppenheimer about the word “Jew”.

In France, The Center Holds … Mostly

This time, the polls were right: It’s going to be a second-round fight for the French presidency between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Polls also indicate the May 7 runoff will result in an overwhelming victory for Macron, who stands to win by 30 points or so. It’s hard to imagine how Le Pen makes up that ground in two weeks.

The extraordinary fact of today’s vote is that neither of France’s mainstream parties — the Gaullists of the right or the Socialists — made it to the second round. This is the first time that has ever happened in the Fifth Republic. Macron, a former investment banker and government minister, left the Socialist Party to form a more centrist movement built around himself. The official Socialist candidate, Benoît Hamon, placed fifth in today’s race — putting the future of the party itself in question. François Fillon, representing the mainstream right, began the race as the favorite, but never recovered from accusations of nepotism.

Imagine that the US presidency came down to a contest between a candidate of the hard-right and the center-left, neither of whom were a Republican or a Democrat. Something like that has happened in France. The Establishment is shaken, and shaken hard. It is rallying around Macron to prevent the National Front from claiming the Elysée Palace — and it will probably work. But the fact that neither mainstream party in France can claim enough support to make it into the second round of presidential voting — that’s incredible.

Consider that the hard-right Le Pen and hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon together polled over 40 percent of the first-round vote, slightly less than the combined total of Macron, Fillon, and Hamon. That reveals a tremendous unease within the French electorate. Macron will almost certainly win the second round, but will do little or nothing to deal with the immigration and Islamic radicalization crisis. The last time the establishment rallied to keep a Le Pen out of the Elysée, 2002, produced three presidencies — Gaullists Jacques Chirac, followed by Gaullist Nicolas Sarkozy, and then Socialist François Hollande — that accomplished nothing meaningful on that front. It is a time bomb.

French readers, what do you think?

UPDATE: The lede, in translation, of an editorial in the conservative daily Le Figaro. Here, “the right” means the mainstream conservatives:

So, the captain was lost. The unthinkable imposed itself. The impossible has happened. The right wing, which for five years has sacked the Socialists in all elections, the right, whose ideas and values have never been so preponderant in the depths of the country, this right from whom victory could not escape was, yesterday, dryly eliminated. While the desire for change, after a fifteen years unanimously considered calamitous, has never been so powerful, the right will not, for the first time in its history, represented in the second round of the presidential election.

UPDATE.2: Read TAC’s Scott McConnell on the results. He’s in Paris now. Excerpt:

I spent the first part of the evening at a Paris forum in the hip, boboish République quarter, where philosopher Michel Onfray discussed the election returns. Onfray is an atheist and has sometimes been labeled an anarchist, but he writes big bestselling books on large subjects, and with his emphasis on decentralization and opposition to Brussels he might be a bit of a crunchy con. He arrived on stage in jeans and an open black shirt. The audience is like anything you would find at a comparable event on Manhattan’s Upper West Side: elderly, somewhat professorial, definitely leaning left—I doubt there were any Le Pen voters there. Onfray announced he didn’t vote, hadn’t voted since 2005, when France held a referendum on the European Constitution and voted “No” by a decisive margin and the vote had precisely zero impact in slowing the advance of the European project. He held the stage for quite a while, basically deflating the idea that there was any pressing need to vote against Marine Le Pen. He obviously signaled some distaste for her (I couldn’t really tell if it was genuine, or a requirement of his position as a bestselling, non-right-wing author) but spent more time mocking Macron, the non-democratic system, French elites, the continuation of the Hollande regime through Macron, the left’s refusal to ever say the word “Islamic” when it discusses terrorism. From the questions and audience reaction the crowd seemed split—half of them probably believe Le Pen and her ilk are dangerous fascists who must be stamped out forever; the other half at least enjoyed his expressions of scorn for Macron and the French establishment political class.

Quarantana, Widow Of Carnevale

Pulpit & Pen Salafi Baptist alert! James C. spent Holy Week in Bari, a city in far southern Italy. He took a photo of the above scene on the street of the town where he was. He writes:

I asked a local what it was. And he called her a ‘Quarantana’. Apparently she’s Carnevale’s widow…they have a ‘funeral’ for Carnevale (represented as a fat man) on Ash Wednesday and the black-clad Widow (symbol of Lenten deprivation) gets hung up, carrying a spindle of thread (to represent the brevity of life), a fish (as traditionally no eating meat during Lent) and a piece of fruit (representing the coming spring) with feathers stuck in it (6 black ones for each week of Lent and one white one for Easter; one black feather gets plucked out each week).

I. Love. This. I imagine it would provoke a gran mal seizure among the Pulpit & Pen fellers (the ones who didn’t spontaneously combust, I mean). Close up:

The Chelsea Class’s Vie En Rose

T.A. Frank wrote a very funny and very truthful commentary begging Chelsea Clinton to stop it, just stop it. Excerpts:

Amid investigations into Russian election interference, perhaps we ought to consider whether the Kremlin, to hurt Democrats, helped put Chelsea Clinton on the cover of Variety. Or maybe superstition explains it. Like tribesmen laying out a sacrifice to placate King Kong, news outlets continue to make offerings to the Clinton gods. In The New York Times alone, Chelsea has starred in multiple features over the past few months: for her tweeting (it’s become “feisty”), for her upcoming book (to be titled She Persisted), and her reading habits (she says she has an “embarrassingly large” collection of books on her Kindle). With Chelsea’s 2015 book, It’s Your World, now out in paperback, the puff pieces in other outlets—Elle, People, etc.—are too numerous to count.

One wishes to calm these publications: You can stop this now. Haven’t you heard that the great Kong is no more? Nevertheless, they’ve persisted. At great cost: increased Chelsea exposure is tied closely to political despair and, in especially intense cases, the bulk purchasing of MAGA hats. So let’s review: How did Chelsea become such a threat?

A threat? How so? Read on:

Since Chelsea has 1.6 million followers, we can only conclude that some people enjoy ideas like “Yes. Yes. Yes. Closing the #wagegap is crucial to a strong economy.” And maybe there’s no sin in absorbing and exuding nothing but respectable Blue State opinion. But it’s another thing to insist on joining each day’s designated outrage bandwagon. Did we need to slap down a curmudgeonly Charlotte Rampling, age 71, for griping about #OscarsSoWhite activists? Yes, and here’s Chelsea: “Outrageous, ignorant & offensive comments from Rampling.” Is gender identity not going to be included on the 2020 census? Here’s Chelsea: “This is outrageous. No one should be invisible in America.” Not that there aren’t breaks for deeper thoughts: “Words without action are … meaningless. Words with inaction are … just words. Words with opposite action is … hypocrisy.”

That is … beautiful.

The crude conventional wisdom is that Bill Clinton craved adoration and Hillary Clinton craved power. But Chelsea Clinton seems to have a more crippling want: fashionability—of the sort embraced by philanthropic high society. So you tell The New York Times that your dream dinner party would include James Baldwin, Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jane Jacobs, and Jane Austen, and discussion would be about how “people and communities can evolve to be more inclusive, more kind, have a greater and broader sense of solidarity, while still respecting individual liberties; what provokes or blocks those changes; and what stories might resonate today to encourage us toward kindness, respect, and mutual dignity.” You almost have to bow down before someone who could host Shakespeare for dinner and make the agenda wind up sounding like a brochure for the Altria Group. At least Kafka would be on hand to capture the joy of the evening.

Frank’s view — he is, by the way, a liberal — seems to be that Chelsea Clinton embodies what is wrong with the Democratic Party today: the vapid, brainless posturing that encourages metropolitan, global-oriented elites to believe unreflectively in their own virtue. To get a better idea of what he’s talking about, read this terrific Christopher Caldwell essay about Christophe Guilluy, a Parisian geographer who studies housing policy, and who, through that lens, has come to understand some dark and troubling things about France. Excerpts:

Guilluy has published three books, as yet untranslated, since 2010, with the newest, Le crépuscule de la France d’en haut (roughly: “The Twilight of the French Elite”), arriving in bookstores last fall. The volumes focus closely on French circumstances, institutions, and laws, so they might not be translated anytime soon. But they give the best ground-level look available at the economic, residential, and democratic consequences of globalization in France. They also give an explanation for the rise of the National Front that goes beyond the usual imputation of stupidity or bigotry to its voters. Guilluy’s work thus tells us something important about British voters’ decision to withdraw from the European Union and the astonishing rise of Donald Trump—two phenomena that have drawn on similar grievances.

More:

A process that Guilluy calls métropolisation has cut French society in two. In 16 dynamic urban areas (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes, Rouen, Toulon, Douai-Lens, and Montpellier), the world’s resources have proved a profitable complement to those found in France. These urban areas are home to all the country’s educational and financial institutions, as well as almost all its corporations and the many well-paying jobs that go with them. Here, too, are the individuals—the entrepreneurs and engineers and CEOs, the fashion designers and models, the film directors and chefs and other “symbolic analysts,” as Robert Reich once called them—who shape the country’s tastes, form its opinions, and renew its prestige. Cheap labor, tariff-free consumer goods, and new markets of billions of people have made globalization a windfall for such prosperous places. But globalization has had no such galvanizing effect on the rest of France. Cities that were lively for hundreds of years—Tarbes, Agen, Albi, Béziers—are now, to use Guilluy’s word, “desertified,” haunted by the empty storefronts and blighted downtowns that Rust Belt Americans know well.

Guilluy doubts that anyplace exists in France’s new economy for working people as we’ve traditionally understood them. Paris offers the most striking case. As it has prospered, the City of Light has stratified, resembling, in this regard, London or American cities such as New York and San Francisco. It’s a place for millionaires, immigrants, tourists, and the young, with no room for the median Frenchman. Paris now drives out the people once thought of as synonymous with the city.

Yet economic opportunities for those unable to prosper in Paris are lacking elsewhere in France. Journalists and politicians assume that the stratification of France’s flourishing metropoles results from a glitch in the workings of globalization. Somehow, the rich parts of France have failed to impart their magical formula to the poor ones. Fixing the problem, at least for certain politicians and policy experts, involves coming up with a clever shortcut: perhaps, say, if Romorantin had free wireless, its citizens would soon find themselves wealthy, too. Guilluy disagrees. For him, there’s no reason to expect that Paris (and France’s other dynamic spots) will generate a new middle class or to assume that broad-based prosperity will develop elsewhere in the country (which happens to be where the majority of the population live). If he is right, we can understand why every major Western country has seen the rise of political movements taking aim at the present system.

Caldwell talks about how globalization has radically changed French society. The transformation he describes below has its parallel in the fact (hidden from those inside the system) that in our country, the GOP and the Democratic Party are in many respects two sides of the same coin:

The old bourgeoisie hasn’t been supplanted; it has been supplemented by a second bourgeoisie that occupies the previously non-bourgeois housing stock. For every old-economy banker in an inherited high-ceilinged Second Empire apartment off the Champs-Élysées, there is a new-economy television anchor or high-tech patent attorney living in some exorbitantly remodeled mews house in the Marais. A New Yorker might see these two bourgeoisies as analogous to residents of the Upper East and Upper West Sides. They have arrived through different routes, and they might once have held different political opinions, but they don’t now. Guilluy notes that the conservative presidential candidate Alain Juppé, mayor of Bordeaux, and Gérard Collomb, the Socialist running Lyon, pursue identical policies. As Paris has become not just the richest city in France but the richest city in the history of France, its residents have come to describe their politics as “on the left”—a judgment that tomorrow’s historians might dispute. Most often, Parisians mean what Guilluy calls la gauche hashtag, or what we might call the “glass-ceiling Left,” preoccupied with redistribution among, not from, elites: we may have done nothing for the poor, but we did appoint the first disabled lesbian parking commissioner.

Upwardly mobile urbanites, observes Guilluy, call Paris “the land of possibilities,” the “ideapolis.” One is reminded of Richard Florida and other extollers of the “Creative Class.” The good fortune of Creative Class members appears (to them) to have nothing to do with any kind of capitalist struggle. Never have conditions been more favorable for deluding a class of fortunate people into thinking that they owe their privilege to being nicer, or smarter, or more honest, than everyone else. Why would they think otherwise? They never meet anyone who disagrees with them. The immigrants with whom the creatives share the city are dazzlingly different, exotic, even frightening, but on the central question of our time—whether the global economic system is working or failing—they see eye to eye. “Our Immigrants, Our Strength,” was the title of a New York Times op-ed signed by London mayor Sadiq Khan, New York mayor Bill de Blasio, and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo after September’s terrorist bomb blasts in New York. This estrangement is why electoral results around the world last year—from Brexit to the election of Donald Trump—proved so difficult to anticipate. Those outside the city gates in la France périphérique are invisible, their wishes incomprehensible. It’s as if they don’t exist. But they do.

Here is the key graf:

French elites have convinced themselves that their social supremacy rests not on their economic might but on their common decency. Doing so allows them to “present the losers of globalization as embittered people who have problems with diversity,” says Guilluy. [Emphasis mine — RD] It’s not our privilege that the French deplorables resent, the elites claim; it’s the color of some of our employees’ skin. French elites have a thesaurus full of colorful vocabulary for those who resist the open society: repli (“reaction”), crispation identitaire (“ethnic tension”), and populisme (an accusation equivalent to fascism, which somehow does not require an equivalent level of proof). One need not say anything racist or hateful to be denounced as a member of “white, xenophobic France,” or even as a “fascist.” To express mere discontent with the political system is dangerous enough. It is to faire le jeu de (“play the game of”) the National Front.

Caldwell goes on to say that France’s problems in this regard are more acute in the US, and also harder to face head-on, because the country’s politically correct speech laws make voicing criticism of the system in some respects a violation of the law.

Read the whole thing. It’s very good. Chelsea Clinton is an icon of the non-péripherique class of Americans. As in France, nearly all our leading media and culture-making institutions exist within the same metropolitanized bubble. (It’s not just a left-liberal thing; I refer you once again to Tucker Carlson’s great January 2016 essay laying into the Beltway conservative establishment for not seeing Trump coming).

The problem is not simply one of communication and understanding. There really aren’t jobs for the working class — and, increasingly, for the middle class. And the moral collapse among the poor and working class (think of Charles Murray’s Fishtown) is making a difficult situation worse. Of course the let them eat quinoa, the bigots attitude of The Chelsea Class only exacerbates the situation.

Hard times ahead. As TAC’s Scott McConnell points out, Americans had better watch France, because what happens there first will eventually happen here.

UPDATE: A (conservative) friend in Paris who is planning to emigrate to escape the coming turmoil writes:

Where I disagree with Guilluy is on the stability of the France périphérique model. It is dangerously unstable and my biggest fear, as I told you before, is partition. Some partition on the Israeli West Bank model, with pockets of sharia ruled territories. Actually, this presidential election has to pick the right person to transition from a de facto position to a de jure one regarding partition of France.

Here comes the good news: if you reside far enough from a sharia ruled territory, you can stay in France. …

On the short term, we’ll have to deal with the possibility of a surprising good showing for Le Pen in the 1st round, something above 24 %, spontaneous demonstrations and a confrontation with a very angry police force.

A very Titanicky kind of mood anyway with real estate prices going through the roof and cops getting killed on les Champs Elysées.