Rod Dreher's Blog, page 470

Rusty Reno & The Benedict Option

My friend R.R. “Rusty” Reno, editor of First Things, gives in the new issue his opinion of The Benedict Option. It begins like this:

There’s something very right about Rod Dreher’s call to action in The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. He urges us to ask if we have “compromised too much with the world” and suggests ways to renew the integrity of our religious communities. Yet there’s also something wrong. A rhetoric of crisis runs through The Benedict Option. The dire picture of our present challenges is likely to confuse Christians rather than help us discern the way forward.

Unless you subscribe to the magazine, you can’t read the whole thing; it’s paywalled for now. I don’t want to quote too much from the review, but I will cite a bit. Here’s Rusty’s basic complaint about the book:

In his account of our circumstances, however, Dreher goes wrong. He makes astute observations about particular challenges, including an important warning about our captivity to the screens we seem always to have in our hands (on this spiritual threat, see Patricia Snow, “Look at Me,” May 2016). The problem is that he gathers them up and frames them as an apocalyptic threat to the very survival of Christianity. The millennial generation is abandoning Christianity, and “if the demographic trends continue, our churches will soon be empty.” Those who remain are uncatechized and captive to a paper-thin, pseudo-Christian deism in which the cardinal virtue is being “nice.” The sexual revolution is everywhere triumphant. Gay marriage is the law of the land. Florists and bakers are being persecuted. Religious liberty may soon be extinguished. “We’ve lost on every front,” and “nobody but the most deluded of the old-school Religious Right believes that this cultural revolution can be turned back.” At times, The Benedict Option can read like Breitbart with incense.

That’s a funny line. More:

We need to beware of exaggerating our peril and misjudging our circumstances. We have not “lost on every front.” A commitment to the sanctity of life has risen gradually over the last generation. Recent studies show that millennials have less sex than their parents or grandparents did at their age—a sign, perhaps, that the sexual revolution isn’t moving from strength to strength. Gay marriage is a marginal phenomenon, and transgenderism, the latest stage of the LGBT movement, faces grassroots resistance by no means limited to religious conservatives. The Obama administration used executive orders and other techniques to impinge upon religious liberty, but when the core question was raised of whether religious communities have complete discretion in their choices of ministerial leadership, the Supreme Court was unanimously opposed to the administration’s efforts to diminish constitutional protection of religious freedom.

OK, let’s stop here for now. I don’t agree that “a commitment to the sanctity of life” has risen. Here’s a link to Gallup polling on abortion since 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision.  The numbers haven’t moved significantly. Further down the page, you do find that since 1996, a lot more people have been willing to accept the “pro-life” label … but support for abortion rights is holding steady (though it’s important to note that most Americans want some restrictions on abortion). And here are Pew’s most recent data on abortion rights support among various age demographics:

Even if numbers were more encouraging to pro-lifers, the “sanctity of life” covers a lot more than what happens in abortion clinics. You tell people that human embryos have to die in the lab for research on healing ourselves to progress, people will be for it.  In vitro fertilization typically results in the creation of more unborn children than the fertilized mother can carry, and those embryos — human persons to those who believe life begins at conception — either live in frozen limbo, or will be destroyed. In Britain, 93 percent of embryos created in the lab are never used; 1.7 million of them have been discarded since the early 1990s. The numbers must be much larger in the US.

But nobody protests this. Few people think about it. The commodification of the creation of human life is just the way we live now. The genetic experimentation coming via CRISPR is likely to redefine what human beings are, and usher in an age of eugenics. Where is this rising reverence for the sanctity of life? I wish it existed, but I don’t think it does.

Are Millennials having less sex than their parents and grandparents at the same age. Yes, but social scientists aren’t quite sure how to interpret the data.  If this is the result of males preferring to watch pornography, or of social media making it hard for men and women to know how to talk to each other, is this really moral progress? The overwhelming presence of pornography in the lives of younger Americans is a scourge. Go talk to campus ministers, and you’ll find that porn is by far and away the biggest problem they see among the students who come to church.

Gay marriage may be a “marginal” phenomenon, but that misses the point of its cultural significance. As I’ve said many times here, a society that embraces same-sex marriage, as ours has, first has to change the older idea of what marriage is, which is to say, what marriage is for. The Sexual Revolution accomplished this long before same-sex marriage became a real possibility. In France, Christians and others took to the streets to demonstrate in favor of the natural family. In the US? Nothing.

Over the past 15 years, Gallup found that the American public flip-flopped on whether or not it was morally acceptable to have a baby outside of marriage. Now, most Americans think it’s fine. This is connected to the gay marriage issue in that it shows that most Americans don’t understand, or don’t accept, the connection between marriage and childbearing. This is about the fragmentation, the break-up of the natural family. Gay marriage may remain a marginal phenomenon, simply because there are so few gays, but the fruits of a culture that has lost the Christian meaning of marriage are all around us — especially among poor and working class people of all races, and their children.

Where is the resistance to the transgender movement? I know it’s there, but is it effective? Big business held the state of North Carolina in a full Nelson until it gave up its law governing transgender bathrooms. And on the religious liberty front, it is certainly important that SCOTUS unanimously affirmed the right of religious organizations to choose their own ministers. But that ought not be too surprising, considering the narrowness of the issue. What’s going to matter is how the Court rules on broader issues, such as whether or not a Christian college that discriminates in any way against gays can still receive federal funding, however indirectly (e.g., through federally backed student loans). I talked not long ago to a senior administrator at a prominent Christian college who said that a Court ruling that went against Christian colleges would either shut his down, or compel them to violate their consciences. “It is an existential threat to us,” he said.

With this current Supreme Court line-up, how do you think a case like that would go? It would all come down to Justice Kennedy. A few weeks back, I talked to two religious liberty advocates who work on the front lines, in state legislatures. They are both deeply pessimistic, and explained to me why. Mostly it’s because big business is now driving this train, and state legislators inclined to support religious liberty find it harder to do so. And where are the churches — that is, the local congregations — on this? Silent, for the most part.

More Reno:

Although church attendance has not declined in any significant degree over the last three generations, our public culture has become more secular. During those same decades, however, Christianity grew at rapid rates in Africa and elsewhere in the world. By some accounts, Pentecostal Christianity is the most powerful force in Latin America, transforming the deepest currents of culture there. Even in the secular twenty-first-century West, the notion of a post-Christian culture obscures as much as it clarifies. Ancient Rome would not have anguished over countless migrants drowning in the Mediterranean.

Well, yes, Christianity is booming in the Global South. But my book explicitly addresses the problem of Christianity in the West. And by “post-Christian,” I mean that the Christian era is over (that is, the era in which the West understood itself through the Christian story), but it has not yet been fully erased from our cultural memory. We are not like a pre-Christian culture, but rather as post-Christians, we have gone through the experience of Christianization, and are now rapidly de-Christianizing. Europe today may anguish over drowning migrants, but will a Europe that is a couple more generations divorced from Christianity? In the 19th century, Nietzsche saw that God was dead in the hearts of Europeans. He would not have been surprised by the rise of Nazism to fill the void. Even a comparatively robust Christianity — Germany’s in the early 20th century — did not protect the nation from giving itself over to that false god, Hitler. Today, what moral or spiritual force among us could resist the allure of a new — and doubtless very different — Adolf Hitler?

Reno:

Dreher says that the “Judeo-Christian culture of the West” is dying, superseded by a therapeutic culture of self-realization. That’s right at one level. But the vanguard institution of this new therapeutic culture—the university—is in crisis, not churches and synagogues. I have confidence that religious institutions, however constrained or impaired in the future, will be living, vital institutions for my grandchildren. I don’t believe the university will survive. The distinctive tradition of higher education that emerged in the Middle Ages is being absorbed into the corporate-bureaucratic structures of our society. By contrast, monasteries, missionary movements, and storefront churches are not. Yes, our religious communities are influenced by that therapeutic culture of self-realization, as Dreher points out. It provides the logic for too many sermons that preach the false gospel of self-acceptance. But we should not be blind to the fact that this false gospel weakens secular institutions much more than religious ones. People still join churches. They’ve stopped joining Masonic lodges, political parties, and bowling teams.

I don’t understand how the crisis of the university negates the crisis among the churches. As I report in The Benedict Option, Christianity in America faces two enormous crises.

The first is its loss of numbers, as much fewer younger people come into the church to replace the generation dying off now. Last year, David Voas and Mark Chaves, two of the leading sociologists of religion, analyzed the latest data and concluded that the United States is now on the same track of religious decline that Europe pioneered.  The rise of the Nones is central to that secularization process. And it is devastating the churches. For example, sociologist Christian Smith, in his long-term study of youth and religion, found that 50 percent of his subjects who identified as Catholic as teenagers abandoned their faith in their 20s.

The second crisis is in the content of the Christianity taught to the rising generations. Readers surely don’t need me to trot out again the statistics from sociologist Christian Smith and his collaborators, showing how thin and vapid is the Christianity of young Americans today. You know by now the “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” study showing that the vast majority of American youth believe that God is there to help us when we need him, and wants us to be happy, to feel good about ourselves, and to be nice — but that’s about it. Smith et al. theorized that these young people came to think this way about religion because that’s what their parents and maybe even their churches taught them.

In a follow-up study (2011) focusing on American Catholic youth, Smith and his team reached very grim conclusions. In this review in America, Fordham professor Thomas McGovern quotes the Smith team’s finding of what works best to keep young people in the faith:

“Committed and practicing Catholic emerging adults are people who were well formed in Catholic faith and practice as children, whose faith became personally meaningful and practiced as teenagers, and whose parents (reinforced by other supportive Catholic adults) were the primary agents cultivating that lifelong formation.”

McGovern adds: “The rest of the book maps why there may be so few of them.”

He goes on, summarizing the Smith team’s findings:

Baby boomer readers may gasp at the historical analysis of their parenting summarized in Chapter 1. Centrifugal forces from 1970 to 2000 generated increasing pluralism in American thinking, labeled by these authors as a “vulgar version of post-modernism.” (One of my true-believer science editors labeled postmodernism the “anthrax of the intellect.”) With truth and standards fragmented in the larger culture—the center did not hold—its effects exacerbated values conflicts within the church in the United States. The authors declare at fault “the inability, and sometimes unwillingness of the parents of the Catholic and ex-Catholic emerging adults we studied—and those half a generation earlier—to model, teach and pass on the faith to their children. At precisely the same moment, older, more communal, taken-for-granted forms of religious practice and catechesis were eroding and sometimes collapsing in American Catholicism.”

This is still going on. One way to think of the Benedict Option is as an urgent call to parents and churches to take seriously the Christian formation of youth. Because it has been a rolling disaster. Again, Smith is just talking about Catholic youth in this follow-up study, but his broader findings regarding MTD still hold. In a 2009 book about the spirituality of “emerging adults” (18 to 23 year olds), Smith found that they were still overwhelmingly MTD. In statistics I quoted in the book, he found that 60 percent of those studied see no conflict at all between their faith and consumerism and materialism. Thirty percent of those see a conflict, but don’t think they can do anything about it, so it might as well not exist. Only nine percent saw a problem and were committed to doing something about it. In this 2009 interview with Christianity Today, Smith explained his findings in greater depth.  Excerpt:

What are the traits of religious American teenagers who retain a high faith commitment as emerging adults?

The most important factor is parents. For better or worse, parents are tremendously important in shaping their children’s faith trajectories. That’s the story that came out in Soul Searching. It’s also the story that comes out here.

Another factor is youth having established devotional lives—that is, praying, reading Scripture—during the teenage years. Those who do so as teenagers are much more likely than those who don’t to continue doing so into emerging adulthood. In some cases, having other adults in a congregation who you have relationships with, and who are supportive and provide modeling, also matters.

Some readers are going to be disappointed that going on mission trips doesn’t appear to amount to a hill of beans, at least for emerging adults as a whole. For some it’s important, but not for most. But again, we emphasize above everything else the role of parents, not just in telling kids about faith but also in modeling it.

Note that the serious believers are a small minority of the whole. The church overall has a massive problem — and the problem, note well, is not simply within the institution and its functions, but is also within the family and among the laity. I would say it’s primarily within the family and among the laity.

The point is, I strongly disagree with Rusty that churches are going to be okay because they’re not collapsing as fast as Masonic lodges and bowling leagues, or they don’t have the same problems as universities. The crisis of our churches is in truth a crisis of the church in a post-Christian culture. Most Christians are go-along-to-get-along types who either don’t see the depths and the essence of the crisis, or don’t want to see it, because it would oblige them to do things that are hard, that we naturally don’t want to do. I get that. I struggle with it in myself. But really, we don’t have a choice. It’s not for nothing that Pope Benedict XVI said that the West is facing its most serious spiritual crisis since the fall of the Roman Empire. If you don’t believe me, believe him.

I do write with alarm in The Benedict Option, because I believe there’s a lot to be alarmed about — and because we can and must do things to get through this crisis. It’s not going to be easy, but what else is there?

UPDATE: This letter just in:

I went into the local Catholic grade / middle school yesterday (same grade school that my sons went to long ago) on behalf of the Knights of Columbus to speak about the Knights and charity (our most important principle) in general.   I spoke to 7th and 8th graders, and generally we had an excellent class filled with questions and discussion and thought about charity, serving as Christ and initiatives that the Knights are involved with charitably an otherwise.

I outlined to each class about the qualifications to join the KofC; be a male, aged 18 or older, and in communion with the Catholic Church (we call it being a practical Catholic).  I of course got the question in both classes that I was expecting, “why don’t you let women be members” which is simple enough to answer and explain, especially since we are so family oriented and most of our events involve spouses and family.

Well…..you guessed it, one 8th grade young lady piped up, “what about transgenders, are they allowed to be members?”.  I was floored.  I shouldn’t have been, but I was, even though it was obviously a “challenge question”, it still stunned me.  We have a pretty firm statement against gay marriage and such, and being male and a practical Catholic are how I framed my answer in the short time allowed and seeking to get back on topic, and I am quite sure that she was not satisfied with that answer, we moved on and had a great rest of the discussion about the Knights and charity.

Sigh, what the heck is this world coming to?   These kids should have been interested in Christian service and charity, not challenging the Knights on transgender rights.

Trump’s Girardian Moment

A reader in Dallas writes:

I draw your attention to the fact that the domestic political dynamic brought about by the Syrian air strikes is EXACTLY what Rene Girard is talking about. The sacrifice (Assad / Syria) brings reconciliation to the chaotic community (the US).

Yet the moment [the very moment!]Trump gave the order to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase used in a chemical weapons attack a few days earlier, all was forgotten and forgiven.

What else could bring Lindsey Graham and Hillary Clinton together? This is the scapegoat mechanism, pure and simple. Luke 23.12: “And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other.” They unite around the exclusionary violence they direct at Jesus.

Note too that, per Girard, the sacrifice of Jesus means that this dynamic doesn’t work anymore, not like it did in pagan antiquity. Because everyone sees that Jesus was innocent (a crucial aspect of constructive violence is the mythologizing of the victims – they have to be divinized – the community has to think that the victim brought the chaos and that the victim’s sacrifice will ameliorate it). This is one facet of our culture’s inability to return to paganism now that we think we’ve outgrown Christianity. Much as many might want to revert to paganism, as you have noted, it’s not possible. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross poisoned the cultural wells. Everyone now knows that sacrificial victims are all innocent. So there is no more reconciliation by means of exclusionary violence, not in any lasting way. (Assad is no more guilty than we are.) But that doesn’t stop us trying! You just watch: we will be searching ever more furiously for scapegoats. And THAT is apocalyptic, according to Girard. It leads inexorably to the grande guerre of all against all.

Interesting theory. Thoughts? Go read this page to learn about Girard’s theory of the scapegoat (scroll down). I don’t know how much attacking Syria has served Trump’s interests among voters, but it has certainly made the Washington Establishment happy.

Muslims, Christians, & Religious Liberty

Peter Beinart has a piece in The Atlantic in which he discusses growing anti-Muslim hostility among conservative Christians.  He singles out conservative Christians (Catholic and Protestant) who don’t want to extend religious liberty protections that they enjoy to Muslims. Beinart says this is preventing conservative Christians from joining with natural allies in Muslim communities. Beinart:

Last year, a man named Daniel Haqiqatjou warned that, “Expressing any negative attitude toward homosexuality is now seen as hate speech, and the purveyors of that speech are sanctioned, boycotted, and can even face criminal charges in certain countries. It should not be underestimated how such steep consequences and strict policing have influenced the religious conversation on homosexuality.” The words could have been uttered by Ted Cruz. But Haqiqatjou uttered them at the annual Imam’s Conference of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America. Haqiqatjou worries that Islamophobia is leading American Muslims to embrace a left that does not actually respect Muslim religious beliefs.

“There has been this tendency to racialize Muslims,” he noted, “for Muslims to adopt this civil rights discourse for themselves and clearly that has moral traction because if you can think of yourself as the newest group that’s been stigmatized then you can use the language of civil rights, which has a lot of currency. But that has theological implications because Muslim is not a race, it’s a set of beliefs that you subscribe to.”

In the Trump era, however, few American Muslims seem to care. They’re willing to support the progressives who defend them against the present onslaught. “I’m not popular in the American Muslim community for speaking out on certain social issues,” Haqiqatjou admits, “because people say this is not a priority for Muslims” right now.

I think this is a very risky path for Christians in the United States. They may not like the fact that there are Muslims in America, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are Muslims in America, and they have a right to a place of worship. As Russell Moore has stated clearly, a government powerful enough to deny a Muslim congregation the right to build a mosque is a government powerful enough to deny the same to Christians. When you defend the right to religious liberty for Muslims, you are defending the same for Christians. I would even say it’s to the strategic advantage of Christians to have Muslims in their corner, precisely because the liberal establishment doesn’t like going up against minorities of which they approve.

Seems to me that non-Muslims on both the secular left and the religious right need to understand that Muslims in America are a test case for both sides. If the left is eager to protect the rights of Muslims to live as Muslims outside of the mosque, then it needs to come to terms with the fact that this means Christians are covered by the same principles. And if the right is eager to protect its own freedom of religion, it had better not let daylight get between itself and Muslims on this issue. You don’t have to agree with Muslim theology to believe that in America, they have a right to be wrong.

Russell Moore has written:

The state must also protect citizens from the state itself. A government that can regulate worship and conscience is a government that can do anything. One can’t claim to be for “limited government,” while at the same time proposing that the government be in the business of regulating worship and conscience.

Like other freedoms, there are limits to how our freedoms can be exercised, and government has an obligation to protect its citizens from violence and harm. It should carry out this obligation faithfully. But the state also has an obligation to protect citizens from the state itself. Stripping a religious community of civil liberties is an act of aggression by the state against its citizens.

Moreover, the idea that religious freedom should apply only to Christians, or only to religious groups that aren’t unpopular, is not only morally wrong but also self-defeating. A government that can tell you a mosque or synagogue cannot be built because it is a mosque or a synagogue is a government that, in the fullness of time, will tell an evangelical church it cannot be constructed because of our claims to the exclusivity of Christ. Those voices (though a distinct minority, to be sure) that claim to be Christian but seek to restrict religious freedom for others are perhaps unknowingly on a campaign to destroy religious liberty. They would set the precedents that will be used to destroy churches, and they will give the opponents of religious liberty the charge that the issue isn’t about freedom at all but about seeking government approval of one’s religion.

This is true.

The world of American Islam is a very complicated place. In this piece from a decade or so ago, I wrote about how difficult it was to cover Islam in America.  Far too many liberal journalists are willing to accept at face value the claims made by Muslim leaders that their groups seek peace and tolerance. It is simply not true, and journalists (as well as others) had better be aware of who is funding these organizations. That said, one doesn’t have to be CAIR’s useful idiot to realize that however deceptive or otherwise unworthy the activists are, there is still a precious First Amendment principle at stake here.

UPDATE: Reader George, who is a professor and a believing Christian, writes:

Yes, Yes a thousand times yes. I am amazed at Christians who say stuff like “We cannot allow them to get established here because they will take over and set up a caliphate”. Do they not realize that this is basically what people with Christianophobia say about us. They will use that same reasoning to justify the removal of our religious freedom.

Now I think we should allow religious freedom simply because it is the right thing to do. But I cannot believe the short-sightedness of Christians who want to give those who hate them the tools to take away their freedoms.

One final comment. People with Christianophobia tend to be white, wealthy, highly, educated and male. In other words they are very powerful and well connected. Christians who use their social power against Muslims today will provide these powerful people with the legitimation needed to pass anti-Christian legislation. I do not know how we get through to Christians who do not see this problem but keep writing Rod and I hope someone breaks through to them.

Trump Puts Bannon On Notice

From the New York Post:

Washington’s rumor mill is working overtime on the fate of presidential aide Steve Bannon, who is said to be at the center of the rampant White House infighting. When I asked the president Tuesday afternoon if he still has confidence in Bannon, who took over the campaign in mid-August, I did not get a definitive yes.

“I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump said. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”

Oh, he’s gone. “I like Steve, but… .” If Bannon goes, he takes with him any chance that the Trump Administration will do anything meaningful that runs contrary to Washington’s culture. Love him or hate him, Bannon was the voice of outsiders in Trump’s inner circle. If Jared Kushner has pushed him out — and from the sound of Trump’s words, it’s pretty close to happening — then it’s over for the Alt-Right and this administration. With Trump having suddenly flip-flopped on military intervention overseas, and now distancing himself from Bannon, I’d say he is Growing In Office™. I figured this would happen eventually, but so soon? No.

Now Breastfeeding Is Unnatural?

From a 2016 issue of the medical journal Pediatrics, a paper arguing that promoting breastfeeding as a “natural” alternative to formulas is wrong because it doesn’t help the Cultural Revolution. Excerpts:

Medical and public health organizations recommend that mothers exclusively breastfeed for at least 6 months. This recommendation is based on evidence of health benefits for mothers and babies, as well as developmental benefits for babies. A spate of recent work challenges the extent of these benefits, and ethical criticism of breastfeeding promotion as stigmatizing is also growing.1 Building on this critical work, we are concerned about breastfeeding promotion that praises breastfeeding as the “natural” way to feed infants. This messaging plays into a powerful perspective that “natural” approaches to health are better, a view examined in a recent report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.2 Promoting breastfeeding as “natural” may be ethically problematic, and, even more troublingly, it may bolster this belief that “natural” approaches are presumptively healthier. This may ultimately challenge public health’s aims in other contexts, particularly childhood vaccination.

These authors are actually claiming that promoting breastfeeding as natural — as it certainly is — may support anti-vaxxers. By that standard, doctors have to quit calling anything “natural,” because it might give aid and comfort to anti-vaxxers. I find it hard to believe that this is the reason for their complaint.

More:

It makes sense that breastfeeding promotion would make appeals to the “natural.” The resurgence in breastfeeding rates over roughly the past 4 decades is rooted in a history of women’s organized efforts during the 1950s and 1960s to redeem the value of feeding babies “naturally” in the face of widespread medical support for formula feeding. Coupling nature with motherhood, however, can inadvertently support biologically deterministic arguments about the roles of men and women in the family (for example, that women should be the primary caretakers of children). Referencing the “natural” in breastfeeding promotion, then, may inadvertently endorse a controversial set of values about family life and gender roles, which would be ethically inappropriate. Invoking the “natural” is also imprecise because it lacks a clear definition. For similar reasons, the recent Nuffield report states that public agencies, governments and organizations contributing to public and political debates about science, technology, and medicine “should avoid using the terms natural, unnatural and nature” unless they make transparent the “values or beliefs that underlie them.”

Emphasis mine. You see what’s happening here? The reader who sent me this does. She writes:

The real agenda is trans. Let’s de-gender motherhood because gosh. Breastfeeding isn’t just for girls, Right?

Not only that, but this looks like an attempt to force nature to agree with contemporary gender ideology. These medical ethicists appear to be trying to stigmatize breastfeeding as sexist and transphobic.

Bible Answer Man Embraces Orthodoxy

Have you heard the news?:

An evangelical radio personality known as “The Bible Answer Man” and president and chairman of the Christian Research Institute was formally received into the Eastern Orthodox Church Sunday.

The Christian Post confirmed that Hank Hannegraaf was chrismated on Palm Sunday at Saint Nektarios Greek Orthodox Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Hank Hanegraaff, from Equip.org

“What astounding news,” said Rod Dreher, an Orthodox Christian and author of the New York Times best-selling book The Benedict Option, in an interview with The Christian Post Monday.

“Many evangelicals seek the early church; well here it is, in Orthodoxy,” he continued.

“I am sure some will be scandalized by Hannegraaf’s conversion but I hope at least some will wonder how someone as knowledgeable about the Bible as Hank could convert to Orthodoxy, and go to a Divine Liturgy to taste and see what it’s like.”

Dreher humorously told CP that 11 years ago, he came to the “foreign country called Orthodoxy” and now cannot imagine being anywhere else.

“The richness of Orthodox theology and worship is incomparable,” Dreher said, and Orthodox life is “sedimenting love for Christ into my bones.”

More information here. 

I went to Bible Answer Man’s website for more information, and I found this big quote from The Benedict Option on the front page:

Too many of our churches function as secular entertainment centers with religious morals slapped on top, when they should be functioning as the living breathing Body of Christ. Too many churches have succumbed to modernity, rejecting the wisdom of past ages, treating worship as a consumer activity, and allowing parishioners to function as unaccountable, atomized members. The sad truth is, when the world sees us, it often fails to see anything different from nonbelievers. Christians often talk about “reaching the culture” without realizing that, having no distinct Christian culture of their own, they have been co-opted by the secular culture they wish to evangelize. Without a substantial Christian culture, it’s no wonder that our children are forgetting what it means to be Christian, and no surprise that we are not bringing in new converts.

If today’s churches are to survive the new Dark Ages, they must stop “being normal.” We will need to commit ourselves more deeply to our faith, and we will need to do that in ways that seem odd to contemporary eyes. By rediscovering the past, recovering liturgical worship and asceticism, centering our lives on the church community, and tightening church discipline, we will, by God’s grace, again become the peculiar people we should always have been. The fruits of this focus on Christian formation will result not only in stronger Christians but in a new evangelism as the salt recovers its savor.

I am very happy that one of the country’s most respected Christian apologists has found a home in Orthodoxy. I rarely use Facebook, but I see that some of my FB friends are saying that Hank Hanegraaff has left Christianity. Oh? Eastern Orthodox Christians have direct apostolic link to the early church. We are the second-largest Christian church in the world. That doesn’t make our theology correct, of course, but the idea that a church that has been around for nearly 1,500 years before the Reformation isn’t really Christian — well, that takes an amazing degree of American parochialism.

More here, on Hanegraaff’s conversion.

America, A Nation Of Polemophiles

Good morning, America:

North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2017

Our extremely status-conscious president has learned what it takes to get back into the good graces of the DC establishment: bomb somebody. Even hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been one of Trump’s most strident critics for a long time, now says Trump has Reaganesque instincts. Here’s a must-read column by Damon Linker on DC’s war madness. Excerpt:

The past week has been an immensely clarifying — and profoundly demoralizing — one in American politics. It has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the country’s foreign policy establishment, along with its leading center-right and center-left politicians and pundits, are hopelessly, perhaps irredeemably, deluded about the role of the United States in the world.

From the start of the 2016 Republican primaries on down through Donald Trump’s surprise electoral college victory, the transition, and the opening months of his administration, members of this foreign policy establishment and these leading politicians and pundits have been united in expressing dismay and alarm about Trump’s lack of temperamental and intellectual fitness to serve as commander-in-chief. Yet the moment Trump gave the order to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase used in a chemical weapons attack a few days earlier, all was forgotten and forgiven. Finally Trump became president! Finally he put Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his place! Finally the U.S. showed it had moved beyond former President Barack Obama’s reluctance to use military force!

It’s hard to know where to begin in formulating a response to this outpouring of delight at the thought of Trump giving the order to launch a barrage of deadly weapons at a sovereign nation over 5,000 miles from American shores. But let’s start with absolute basics: Launching even one missile at another country is not, as we euphemistically like to presume, a “military action,” a “military operation,” or even a “humanitarian intervention.” It is an act of war. Full stop. That many countries in the world, including Syria, are far too weak to consider launching a retaliatory counter-attack against the United States for such a bombardment is utterly irrelevant. How would a more powerful country — China, for example — respond if we fired even one cruise missile at its territory? How, for that matter, would we respond if China fired just one at us?

More:

Every country in the world thinks well of itself. But we’re the only country in the world that expects every other country to defer to our self-evident wonderfulness — apparently even when Trump is launching the missiles.

Read the whole thing. Linker’s discussion of an alternative history of the US Civil War, involving a powerful overseas nation who involved itself militarily in that conflict, is a useful exercise.

A new CBS News poll shows that a strong majority (57 percent) of Americans support the Syrian air strikes, though most Americans don’t think the US should become more involved militarily in Syria. I suppose one should be grateful for small things, but it seems like it wouldn’t be all that difficult to whip the American people up into a frenzy for more war. About half the people polled (48 percent) want more US military involvement, either troops on the ground (18 percent) or airstrikes alone (30 percent). Only 41 percent say they favor either diplomacy exclusively, or no involvement at all. (Presumably the other 11 percent had no opinion).

Are we really a nation of polemophiles? Do we love war so much that we are ready to rejoin the fray in Syria? Because now that we’ve hit the Syrians, we invite them or their allies to hit us back. This is on us.

Pat Buchanan is sounding the alarm:

We have no vital national interest in Syria’s civil war. It is those doing the fighting who have causes they deem worth dying for.

For ISIS, it is the dream of a caliphate. For al-Qaeda, it is about driving the Crusaders out of the Dar al Islam. For the Turks, it is, as always, about the Kurds.

For Assad, this war is about his survival and that of his regime. For Putin, it is about Russia remaining a great power and not losing its last naval base in the Med. For Iran, this is about preserving a land bridge to its Shiite ally Hezbollah. For Hezbollah it is about not being cut off from the Shiite world and isolated in Lebanon.

Because all have vital interests in Syria, all have invested more blood in this conflict than have we. And they are not going to give up their gains or goals in Syria and yield to the Americans without a fight.

And if we go to war in Syria, what would we be fighting for?

A New World Order? Democracy? Separation of mosque and state? Diversity? Free speech for Muslim heretics? LGBT rights?

We are still fighting the war we started for no good reason back in 2003 — and we still have an appetite for fighting in that fever swamp of tribal and religious hatred? Haven’t we done enough to the Middle East?

Are you aware that President Trump has decided to conceal from the American people the numbers of US troops he’s dispatching henceforth to Syria and Iraq? So we won’t even know how more deeply the Commander-in-Chief is embedding us in another nation’s hellacious civil war.

Damon Linker is right: this is madness. We have no business in Syria. And yes, North Korea is a big, big problem, with no obvious solutions — but the one thing the US should not do is have its president talk like a cowboy on Twitter.

Is There Still A ‘Vital Center’?

 

Emma Green interviews sociologist Phil Gorski, whose new book argues that Americans need to rediscover the “vital center” in this age of polarization. Gorski says that it’s not true that the Founders were either totally secular or totally devout:

The more accurate story of America is one of “civil religion,” Gorski writes, that cherishes a founding myth and agreed-upon set of civic values and responsibilities. Understanding America’s tradition of civil religion is important for reviving the “vital center,” as he calls it: “believers and nonbelievers, Republicans and Democrats who support a moderate form of secularism and a liberal form of nationalism.” This is “not a mushy middle that splits the difference between left and right,” he says, nor does it “purport to be a ‘third way’ that ‘transcends’ debate.” Rather, the project is about re-learning how to talk to one another and establishing a set of shared principles derived from American history.

From the interview itself:

Emma Green: What is civil religion?

Philip Gorski: Civil religion is the way a particular people thinks about the transcendent purposes of a life together. One might understand “transcendent” in a traditional religious sense, or one might just understand it as some kind of ultimate value or higher purpose that a nation or polity is built around.

American civil religion is a specific version of that.

And:

Green: You propose that many Americans are in a middle space of some sort—not necessarily between conservative and liberal thinking, but between these poles of radical secularism and religious nationalism. You seem to be arguing that the culture wars aren’t representative of what most people think, feel, say, and experience.

Who are these “middle voters,” and how do you know they exist?

Gorksi: I don’t know for sure that they exist. But I do think we have cultural resources in our shared history that have unified us, even in times of deep division like this one. The fundamental purpose of my book is to recover these resources, and to point people toward this place that I call the vital center.

It’s not a place of perfect agreement or complete consensus. But it is a place where at least we’re all arguing about the same values and feeling that we’re a part of the same long, hard, intergenerational project in the American experiment in democracy.

Read the whole thing.

You know I’m a pessimist about this kind of thing, but really, I would love to believe that there were a “vital center” that meant anything. I think it is certainly true that most Americans don’t share the sense of culture war that people on either extreme do. Whether that’s because they’re not paying attention, or they just don’t have the emotional investment in this or that issue, it’s impossible to say. You might not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is definitely interested in you.

I have not read Gorski’s book, let me stipulate, but I am skeptical of his hypothesis of a vast, silent, disengaged minority. First, it doesn’t matter that they’re in the majority if they won’t speak up and act out in defense of their centrist views. Second, “civil religion” is parasitic on real religion. You can have a plausible (from a sociological and political point of view) civil religion only when an actual religion is believed by enough people. That is, folks might not go to church much, but they share a basic Judeo-Christian framework for understanding the world and constructing society, including legislating. But when that fades away, as it has done and continues to do, what binding power can civil religion possibly have?

Increasingly, Christians can’t even agree on what Christianity is, and requires of us — particularly when it comes to public issues. Churches are splitting over gay rights, for example, and immigration is hotly contested. Sixty years ago, say, there would have been much less divergence of belief among churches, and the sense of national unity (achieved in part through the cultural forces of conformity) was much greater. Besides, today the quickest way to get something is to claim special victimhood status as the result of your identity. Whether or not you have a point in your particular claim, this habit has become divisive of the body politic.

It’s like this: if we have a vital center, then where are these centrists at colleges when the left tries to no-platform speakers? Where were the centrists on that day in the quad at Harvard Yale when Nicholas Christakis was shouted at and abused by the leftist mob? They don’t say or do anything. No civil religion is strong enough to counter the real American religion: worship of the sacred Self.

The Benedict Option In Hyattsville

Here’s a really good story by NPR’s Tom Gjelten on the Ben Op community in Hyattsville, Md., in the DC suburbs. If you read The Benedict Option, you’ll remember these folks. NPR’s Tom Gjelten digs deeper. Excerpts:

At a time of declining church attendance across America and growing disenchantment with traditional religion, a Catholic parish in Hyattsville, Md., thrives by embracing the very orthodoxy other congregations have abandoned.

St. Jerome Catholic Church and its affiliated school, St. Jerome Academy, have both experienced dramatic growth over the past few years, largely due to an influx of families drawn to the parish’s reputation as a haven for conservative Catholics seeking to live among others who share their values.

“The parish life was very important to us,” says Daniel Gibbons, 40, who teaches at Catholic University in nearby Washington, D.C., and moved to Hyattsville with his young family four years ago. “I know from my own childhood that it can be very hard to raise children as a Catholic if you don’t have a community of other Catholics who are trying to make the faith real in their everyday lives and raise the children in ways that are harmonious with their faith.”

Several of the new St. Jerome families previously had been home schooling their children, after disappointing experiences in both public and parochial schools.

“Faith-based education was very important to us,” says Julia Dickson, 37, who moved to Hyattsville with her husband two years ago from a Baltimore suburb. “There was no [private] school that I felt was any different from a public school with a religion class tacked on,” she says. “I wanted something with the Lord as the center of the entire day.”

St. Jerome School is at the center of a walkable community. More:

Most of the families live within a 2-mile radius.

“Our kids are continually at each other’s homes,” says Michelle Trudeau, 48, a mother of six who home-schooled her four oldest children before enrolling them at the parish school, where she is now the assistant principal. “As parents, we know we can trust what’s going on in that other house,” she says. “We know that if something goes on with our kids, other parents are looking out for them. We all become parents of each other’s children.”

The tightness of the Hyattsville Catholic community developed deliberately, not accidentally. The key figure in its growth was Chris Currie, a former nonprofit executive who moved to Hyattsville 20 years ago and now serves as director of institutional advancement at the parish school.

“It started with me inviting people I knew to come here,” he says. “My sister’s family was the first to move here, followed by a couple of friends. Other families came here to become part of the foundation, and then by word of mouth people heard about it and came here because of the heightened community life.”

Read — or better, listen — to the whole thing. One more bit:

Whether the community reflects Dreher’s “Benedict Option” is a matter of some dispute, however, in part because many of the Hyattsville Catholics are deeply engaged in the broader society and say they do not feel marginalized, angry or alienated.

Well, if someone doesn’t want to consider themselves part of the Ben Op, that’s fine with me. No need for them to feel that I am co-opting them. I will say, though, that being angry is not a requirement of the Ben Op (I believe that whether we feel like it or not, we will be increasingly marginalized and alienated). Here, in this passage from my book, is a big part of why I chose to include the St. Jerome community in The Benedict Option:

Living so close to “the imperial city,” as [Chris] Currie calls Washington, means that most of his community members work in the nation’s capital. Their close-knit Catholic neighborhood gives them the nurturing they need to be strong witnesses to the faith in the secular city. “We’re not battening down the hatches, hunkering down, and keeping quiet about our faith,” says Currie. “We don’t do it in a belligerent way, but we are not ashamed of who we are.”

He believes the St. Jerome’s Parish community has been called to be a presence in the greater Washington area. The only way they can resist the pressures of worldliness and secularization is by living near each other and reinforcing their religious identity through life lived in common. Their thick community is a strong model of being in the world but not of it. Striking the balance between being an evangelical presence to the wider community while protecting what makes them distinctly and authentically Christian is difficult—but Currie believes that this is the Gospel’s calling.

“Ultimately I think Christians have to understand that yes, we have to be countercultural, but no, we don’t have to run away from the rest of society,” he says. “We have to be a sign of contradiction to the surrounding society, but at the same time we have to be engaged with that society, while still nurturing our own community so we can fully form our children.”

Agreed.

Hey, I really want to encourage you Christian readers to drop a note to reporter Tom Gjelten on Twitter, and thank him for this piece. It was very fair and thorough, I thought. One doesn’t often see or hear conservative Christians portrayed in the national media, much less portrayed favorably. When it happens, be sure to praise the reporter for doing a great job. @tgjelten is his Twitter handle.

Don’t Call The Pro-Life Swedish Midwife

Since The Benedict Option was published, I have heard from a number of Christian readers on the European continent, wanting to know more about it. These believers are far ahead of us Americans in having to deal with what it means to live in a post-Christian culture. As I reported here last year, though the US still remains far ahead of Europe in terms of religious affiliation and practice, but the sociological data show that we are now on the same steady path of decline.  This is something very, very hard for American Christians to wrap their minds around. The harder we fight recognizing it, the more vulnerable we are going to be. A reader of this blog told me that the people who run his conservative church insist that the congregation’s young people are merely going through a “phase” with their unbiblical views in certain areas. They don’t grasp the magnitude or the essence of the change.

Here, from the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) is a story from Sweden that gives you an idea of what is probably coming to the US.  Excerpts:

Ellinor Grimmark didn’t set out to wage a campaign. In 2007 the 40-year-old mother of two quit her catering job to become a midwife. She studied for years, dreaming of bringing life into the world. But Ms. Grimmark was professionally blacklisted in Sweden for her opposition to abortion. Now she is at the center of a yearslong legal dispute whose outcome will have implications for freedom of conscience in Sweden and across Europe.

Despite a reputation for stellar health care, Sweden faces an acute midwife shortage. Eighty percent of the county councils that run local hospitals reported having trouble recruiting midwives last year. An older cohort is retiring faster than its members can be replaced, and the perception that midwives are overworked dampens enthusiasm for the profession.

Local governments in many areas provide prospective midwives with a monthly stipend while they complete their certification. Jönköping County, in southern Sweden, agreed to pay Ms. Grimmark $1,900 a month during the year-and-half she studied.

Ms. Grimmark, a devout Christian, knew that some midwives participate in abortions, but she assumed that hospitals would offer conscience carve-outs for practitioners like her. “There is so much to do as a midwife,” she says in an interview at her lawyer’s office. “So I just thought, ‘OK, that’s one part, but I will do everything else.’ ”

It turns out she was right. Over one-third of Swedish midwives have never had anything to do with abortion, and very few of them take place on a maternal ward of hospitals, where she wanted to work. More:

But Ms. Grimmark underestimated the authorities’ determination to root out antiabortion sentiment. In spring 2013, with one term left in her studies, she asked supervisors at the hospital where she planned to work to accommodate her conscience rights.

She received a furious call from one manager. “How could you even think of becoming a midwife with these opinions?” Ms. Grimmark recalls the manager screaming. “What would you do if a patient who’d had an abortion came to you bleeding?” Ms. Grimmark tried to answer that she would help a woman in that condition, but the voice on the phone kept screaming. Ms. Grimmark was told she wasn’t welcome. A few days later a text message informed her that her stipend would be cut off.

On and on it went. Grimmark was denounced by Sweden’s former antiterrorism chief as being like Islamic extremists — this, for holding pro-life views. A show on national television characterized her as part of a global war on women. This is all being sorted out by the courts now. A Swedish lower court ruled against her, but this week, an appellate court will have its say. And it could end up in the European Court of Human Rights.

The Journal piece points out that both Norway and Denmark protect abortion rights and freedom of conscience, with no problem. Sweden is doing what it’s doing out of spite: to shut down any and all opposition to abortion.

Because Norway and Denmark are highly secularized countries, and even they don’t go this far. It is not inevitable that the US will end up as Sweden. But it’s important for Christians to keep in mind that as we continue to secularize, we should expect challenges of this sort to participation in public life, and in professions. They may come over abortion. They may come over euthanasia. They may come over LGBT issues. They may come over all three. But they’re going to come, and we had better be ready for them. From The Benedict Option:

I have talked to a number of Christians, in fields as diverse as law, banking, and education, who face increasing pressure within their corporations and institutions to publicly declare themselves “allies” of LGBT colleagues. In some instances, employees are given the opportunity to wear special badges advertising their allyship. Naturally if one doesn’t wear the badge, she is likely to face questions from co-workers and even shunning.

These workers fear that this is soon going to serve as a de facto loyalty oath for Christian employees—and if they don’t sign it, so to speak, it will mean the end of their jobs and possibly even their careers. To sign the oath, they believe, would be the modern equivalent of burning a pinch of incense before a statue of Caesar.

It will be impossible in most places to get licenses to work without affirming sexual diversity dogma. For example, in 2016 the American Bar Association voted to add an “anti-harassment” rule to its Model Code of Conduct, one that if adopted by state bars would make it simply discussing issues having to do with homosexuality (among other things) impossible without risking professional sanction—unless one takes the progressive side of the argument.

Along those lines, it will be very difficult to have open dialogue in many workplaces without putting oneself in danger. One Christian professor on a secular university’s science faculty declined to answer a question I had about the biology of homosexuality, out of fear that anything he said, no matter how innocuous and fact-based, could get him brought up on charges within his university, as well as attacked by social media mobs. Everyone working for a major corporation will be frog-marched through “diversity and inclusion” training and will face pressure not simply to tolerate LGBT co-workers but to affirm their sexuality and gender identity.

Plus, companies that don’t abide by state and federal antidiscrimination statutes covering LGBTs will be not be able to receive government contracts. In fact, according to one religious liberty litigator who has had to defend clients against an exasperating array of antidiscrimination lawsuits, the only thing standing between an employer or employee and a court action is the imagination of LGBT plaintiffs and their lawyers.

“We are all vulnerable to such targeting,” he said.

Says a religious liberty lawyer, “There is no looming resolution to these conflicts; no plateau that we’re about to reach. Only intensification. It’s a train that won’t stop so long as there is momentum and track.”