Rod Dreher's Blog, page 472

Don’t Be Broke, Be Woke

Kendall Jenner, leader of the young American resistance. Wow. That cannot be parodied. It’s like a 1980s Benetton spread got pregnant by this classic flat-footed 1968 print ad for Columbia Records:

Sam Rocha: The Critic As Failed Oyster

But where is the pearl? (Jiang Hongyan/Shutterstock)

I have learned some useful things about the limitations of my book from some critical reviews (e.g., Matthew Loftus’s). I learned nothing about The Benedict Option from Sam Rocha’s review, but I learned a lot about Sam Rocha. It’s not complimentary, I’m afraid. I wish I hadn’t promised Matthew Sitman I would write a response to Rocha’s review, but I did, so, here goes.

I had never heard of Rocha before this piece, but he seems to think he hath pronounced magisterially about the book, as if he were Edmund Wilson declaiming from the promontory of Partisan Review instead of an earnest and photogenic young assistant professor with a blog, a passion for warbling daiquiri-bar folk songs, and a forthcoming volume of essays he describes as “composed during the Obama presidency.” In lesser times, people wrote essays, but under the blessed reign of the globalist meritocracy’s own Marcus Aurelius, they composed them.

Perhaps Prof. Dr. Rocha sees The Benedict Option, appearing as it has two months after the ascension of Trump, that tweeting Commodus, as an analogue of Late Roman decline. Tant pis, as they say in Fishtown. Nevertheless, the sore, aggrieved tone of his review suggests that Attention Must Be Paid, in the same way a Band-Aid applied sloppily to a blister compels you to look at the thing, whether you want to or not. Okay, I’m game. Let us examine his review to see where The Benedict Option rubbed raw one man’s tender conscience.

Here’s the first sign of trouble:

After reading the introduction, I was shocked to find Dreher refer to the Rule of St. Benedict in anecdotal terms, from monks at present-day Nursia, and to make no effort whatsoever to describe who St. Benedict of Nursia was and what the Benedictine Order was in relation to its own time.

This is how we know this review is going to be of an increasingly familiar type: the petty griping of an academic who is aggrieved that I didn’t write the book he would have written, had anybody cared what he had to say. Look, as a non-academic, I did not write a scholarly book, and could not have done; I wrote a book meant to be accessible to the ordinary reader. This requires some simplification for the sake of storytelling Is my Chapter Two (for example), which covers the intellectual history of the past seven centuries in 7,000 words, rather sketchy? Um, yeah — and I admit so up front. From the book:

This outline of Western cultural history since the High Middle Ages admittedly leaves out a great deal. And it is biased toward an intellectual understanding of historical causation. In truth, material consequences often give birth to ideas. The discovery of the New World and the invention of the printing press, both in the fifteenth century, and the invention of the birth control pill and the Internet in the twentieth, made it possible for people to imagine things they never had before and thus to think new thoughts. History gives us no clean, straight causal lines binding events and giving them clear order. History is a poem, not a syllogism.

That said, outlining the role ideas—especially ideas about God—played in historical change gives us an important conceptual understanding of the nature of our present crisis. It’s important to grasp this picture, however incomplete and oversimplified, to understand why the humble Benedictine way is such a potent counterforce to the dissolving currents of modernity.

If Prof. Dr. Rocha is wounded by the lack of scholarly depth in this book, he either missed this passage, or he’s the kind of Very Serious Person who caterwauls about the lack of dramaturgical depth in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Moving onward:

More scandalous to me was that, after invoking MacIntyre as the contemporary philosophical insight for The Benedict Option, Dreher only mentions MacIntyre on four of the next 237 pages, three of them in a quick, self-affirming gloss of After Virtue on pages 16-18. If this is the standard for the lectio and disputatio of “Benedict Option Christians” then it is very hard for me to see it as conservative, traditional, or worthy of invoking St. Benedict, MacIntyre, or Pope Benedict XVI. It is an emotivist critique of emotivism.

Scandalous, even! Sinner that I am, it pleases me to think of Prof. Dr. Rocha spitting out his free-trade kombucha in outrage that I did not write a book explicating the collected works of Alasdair MacIntyre. O lectio! O disputatio! I explain to readers very generally what MacIntyre’s diagnosis of our contemporary crisis is in After Virtue, and use that as a jumping-off point for speculation of my own. If you want to know what MacIntyre thinks, read MacIntyre, or his interpreters. It would delight me if The Benedict Option served as a gateway for readers to the works of MacIntyre. But I did not write a book about Alasdair MacIntyre.

It is here where one gets the idea that Prof. Dr. Rocha opened this book eager to be offended. That probably happens a lot. I’m only surprised that he doesn’t find me guilty of cultural appropriation, stealing from a contemporary Scottish Thomist to serve my lowbrow project.

The Benedict Option continues to disappoint Prof. Dr. Rocha:

But what is this “option”? This is not easy to understand. The language of the “turn” of theory seems to be at play here. The linguistic turn, the ontological turn, the material turn, and so on. But in this case, the word ‘option’ implies a choice. However, Dreher doesn’t explain what the other choices are, even when he should know that Benedictine spirituality is not the only option for Christians. Maybe he shouldn’t be entirely ecumenical, but the idea of this option over here and that option over there is an absurdity for a book that is trying to argue that the optional nature of religion (a key feature of secular society in Taylor’s analysis) is a problem. So who knows what this “option” idea is.

Let me see if I can explain this to him. Here is a passage from the book, in which I quote MacIntyre:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.

The “option” is the choice facing orthodox Christians today: whether to continue living as if these were normal times, and identifying Christian life with the maintenance of the American way of life, or choosing something more radical and countercultural. The final chapter is titled “The Benedict Decision,” to indicate what I believe the choice is that all serious Christians must make. It’s right there in plain English. One wonders why Prof. Dr. Rocha didn’t grasp what was right under his nose.

And then, Rocha turns himself into Frank Costanza:

Rocha writes:

Now for the subtitle: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. Perhaps Dreher didn’t choose this subtitle. Maybe Sentinel, his press, forced it upon him. I hope that is the case because the subtitle threatens to dismantle the entire book, especially in the final chapter where Dreher quotes a Presbyterian pastor who seems able to judge what is and is not truly Benedictine, saying, “[The Benedict Option] cannot be a strategy for self-improvement or for saving the church or the world.” If The Benedict Option cannot be those things then what does the subtitle mean?

Um, really? No, the subtitle is my own, and it threatens to dismantle nothing. The title is a “strategy” for Christians — but clearly not a strategy for political victory or self-improvement. The Presbyterian pastor only reiterates what I wrote earlier in the book: that Benedict did not set out to save Roman civilization, or to do anything other than to come up with a way of living within which he and his comrades could serve God with all their hearts, souls, and minds, in a very difficult time. Everything else followed from that. I quote Pastor Greg Thompson to this point to remind the reader at the end that the Christian life — and the Benedict Option — cannot be instrumentalized to achieve worldly goals.

More Rocha/Costanza:

The other glaring question is how one squares a universal church with “a Post-Christian Nation.” Does this refer to the nation-state of the USA? Or does it refer to some other sense of “nation”? Is this an option for Americans, drawn on a Roman saint, a British philosopher, and a German Pope? Of course, one need not only use local sources, but the book works seamlessly between a national sense, a sense of “the West,” and occasionally the world. There is a serious theological problem here, of course, since the church is universal in a sense that goes well beyond the demographic or geopolitical modern sense.

“And, and, and another thing: the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire — and there’s a serious theological problem with that!”

The less emotionally discombobulated among us will readily grasp that the author is writing a book published in the United States of America, aimed at the American reader. If the book finds publishers overseas, the subtitle will change.

More:

The last question, before I move on the claims I find to be confused, might be a bit more subtle. What is Dreher’s method in this book? The first answer is that he may not have one. It comes across in the way a blog post does: direct, first-person, and with no sense of internal structure or order. Dreher enjoys telling stories and some of them he tells well enough, but many of them he tells at a moment when one would expect him to fill the gaps of an argument. Story, for Dreher, is something of a deus ex machina. The stories he relies on most heavily are woven into his analysis and add to his credibility, most of all from the monks at Nursia, but they also replace more careful work.

This issue here is not only that this journalistic method is profoundly modern (in a book that rails against modernity) but most of all that it is weak. There is little to nothing to support his opening claims which result in the middle of the book: a set of assertions made with no argument, platitudes invoked with no evidence. Nothing follows. Most of all, the book shows no ability to consider objections or to test its ideas against a possible weakness. The journalistic method takes a “report the facts” approach and uses philosophical sources as arguments from authority, not as aids in thinking things through. Whatever the method might be, it is not a thoughtful one.

Well, that is not the experience that has been reported to me by others, but whatever. Again, Prof. Dr. Costanza is aggrieved that a journalist has written a work of journalistic polemic for a popular audience. I’m not trying to provide an airtight syllogistic argument; I’m trying to tell stories that illustrate the concepts I’m trying to illuminate. If that doesn’t work for Prof. Dr. Costanza, I can live with that.

More:

The first is the confusing matter of the Middle Ages. Dreher says two different things about the Middle Ages in his book. On the one hand, he sees the Middle Ages as the period that required a radical retreat in the face of the fall of Rome. On the other hand, he sees the Middle Ages as a period of enchantment and deep faith. These two stories are both vastly oversimplified, but they are quite off when they are both said to be true simultaneously. How can it be the case that when Rome fell the Benedictines endured the Middle Ages guided by their Rule and, also, that the fall of Christianity happened, like Rome, after the end of the Middle Ages? Anyone can see that this story makes no sense logically. Historically, it makes even less sense.

This is extremely petty and deliberately obtuse. The Benedictines emerged amid a particular crisis, in which their charism turned out to be a very effective response. The Franciscans and the Dominicans were a response to a crisis in a very different West. G.K. Chesterton writes well of this. Seven hundred years of civilization happened between the fall of the Roman West and the end of the High Middle Ages, which has been called the Age of Monasticism. Besides, I don’t say that Christianity “fell” in the Renaissance. I say that its unraveling began, an unraveling that is completing itself in our own time, 600 years later.

More:

A second confusion is Dreher’s abstraction of Christianity. The book uses Roman Catholic sources and characters, but also includes a smattering of Protestants and a few Orthodox. By the end of the book, Dreher begins to sound like he’s written a manifesto, calling his new order “Benedict Option Christians.” Earlier he calls these “Benedict Option Churches” and “Benedict Option believers.” Just what are these churches? And what are the tenets of this belief? The book itself, with no ecclesiastical authority whatsoever and no scholarly credibility to speak of? This is tremendously abstract because there is obviously a real Benedictine Order that follows the real Rule of St. Benedict, which includes a lay apostolate for people like Dreher. Now, of course, this also implies that one be a Roman Catholic, which Dreher no longer is. In yet another boldly modern move, Dreher writes as if he can write on behalf of all of the Christian denominations that he has hopped from and to. Surely, someone so concerned with obedience and submission and the problems of modern excess can see that acting subjectively abstract about what is quite objectively concrete is a silly routine and a bad argument.

Go home, lad, you’re drunk.

I have written a book that explicitly attempts to speak not for small-o orthodox Christians, but rather to them. I attempt to make a case that we are all a lot more assimilated into modernity than we think, and that our very survival depends on becoming aware of that fact, and adopting practices to reverse that condition. I dedicate the book to the great Ken Myers, an Anglican whose Mars Hill Audio Journal is a model for how to minister to orthodox Christians from all three branches of the Great Tradition, to help us think critically about Christian life in modernity. I believe that Catholics undertaking forms of the Benedict Option faithful to their own particular tradition will do things that Protestants and Orthodox Christians may not do. And so forth. The book is addressed to all orthodox Christians of good will. In that sense, maybe Rocha hated it because it’s not written for or about him.

The critique goes on for much longer, but degenerates even further from there into spiteful bitching that only an academic could pull off, e.g., “He never once mentions mystagogy (although he talks about liturgy); only pedagogy seems relevant to him.” Oh, the humanity.

But I gotta mention this passage:

I would like to end by noting some ironies that might even be called absurdities about The Benedict Option. First, the book is about being prepared to be less popular, make less money, die a martyr’s death, stop using social media, “buy Christian, even if it costs more,” and more, but the book is published by a division of Random House (not a Christian publisher), was promoted for years online, and reads less like a guide for spiritual life and more like an aspiring New York Times Bestseller. The prose and pace have a Dan Brown quality that screams popularity.

A, the “Dreher’s A Cynic” gambit. It’s not original, and it’s stinks of envy no less than the first time someone said so. Rocha wrote this after The Benedict Option had hit No. 7 on The New York Times Bestseller List. There’s something more than a little self-serving about this remark. Seems to me that Rocha has protected himself from the likely prospect that his forthcoming book will fail to find an audience outside his friends and family by accusing me of having compromised myself to write a book that people might actually want to read. Well, he’s got me there. I write books people pay money to read. Rocha’s review reads like the neuralgic natterings of what Truman Capote once called a “failed oyster”: one that has an irritation, with no resulting pearl.

OK, look, I’ve been having a lot of fun here poking the pouty professor, but let me be serious for a second. Christianity in Western civilization is in severe crisis. No serious person can possibly suggest otherwise. Even Pope Benedict XVI has said that the West faces a spiritual crisis worse than any since the fall of the Roman Empire. My own efforts to address the crisis are flawed, heaven knows, but I prefer the imperfect efforts I am making to figure out what the church should do to the efforts gripers like Sam Rocha are not making to address the crisis. The church is burning down around us, and Prof. Dr. Sam Rocha is caterwauling about the sad lack of professionalism of the volunteer firefighters.

I did find one redeeming spot of Rocha’s review: at least he didn’t accuse me of racism and defending white supremacy, as others have. So that was something. But then I saw this tweet of his yesterday:

Guilt by association isn’t guilt. But if these are one’s friends maybe The Benedict Option has other problems besides the intellectual ones? pic.twitter.com/EDA2ThCWvu

— Sam Rocha (@SamRochadotcom) April 3, 2017

So there you have it. Dreher may not seem like a white supremacist, but a white supremacist is one of his 23,400 Twitter followers, so hey, I’m just going to leave that there.

Like I said, Sam Rocha’s commentary on The Benedict Option tells you far more about the character of Sam Rocha than it does about the content of The Benedict Option. Happy Festivus, all the same.

Queering Episcopal High

Per Bengtsson/Shutterstock

The administration of prestigious Episcopal High School in Baton Rouge sent this e-mail out this week to the school community:

Hi everyone, This week, we will be doing our “Breaking the Silence” week. Last year, we had a successful Day of Silence, and the GSA is very excited to have another one this year! The Day of Silence is a day in which students and some faculty members from schools and organizations from across the nation take a vow of silence (they don’t talk during free periods) to symbolize the silencing effect of homophobic and transphobic bullying.

Though the actual national date is April 21, 2017, we will be participating in it this Friday. In addition to the DoS, we will also be giving you all multiple opportunities to learn more about the LGBTQ+ community. See below for the times, locations, and other details regarding Thursday and Friday’s special activities. Also, please don’t forget to submit your writing about experiences regarding the LGBTQ+ community to [email address]! We would love to see your writing or artwork! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask me, Kirby, or Mr. Lebrun! Thank you all for your support!

Thursday, April 6 Friday, April 7 Tutorial (1:00 to 1:25): “Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: The Basics” – Optional Don’t know the difference between sex and gender? Confused about where sexuality fits into the mix? Curious about what it means to be trans-gendered? Intersex? On Thursday, April 6 during morning tutorial, Dr. Kuhn will host an interactive workshop designed to give basic information and answer questions you might have. The workshop will take place in her classroom. All are welcome.

Our Day of Silence! All Day: During your free periods, remain silent. By taking a vow of silence, you are symbolizing the silencing effect of homophobic and transphobic bullying! Chapel (9:45 to 10:15ish): Chapeltalk by Hayden Cresson ‘17 Immediately after, we will distribute special keepsakes that signify your allyship but will help you remember to be an “ally” for the future!

What is the faith life like here? The Spirituality page of this school informs us:

Episcopal schools are intentionally diverse communities. So, here at Episcopal we come together at different times, in various locations, and in many ways to encourage all of our students to dig deep into their individual faith and develop a sense of their own spirituality, all while helping them to develop a love for both God and their neighbor.

You can see it clearly as students express themselves through service learning, sharing their time and talent with the greater community.  You can hear it in Lower School morning meeting as children raise their voices in song.  It is the core of our school’s identity and what separates us from other education options in Baton Rouge. We invite you to experience the difference.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism to the fingertips. If you look around the school’s website, it’s plain that it conceives of its mission as being a college prep school for the upper and upper middle classes. Standard Christian mission and identify is only incidental to that worldly goal. Which is fine, I suppose, if that’s what you see your role in life as being. But let’s not confuse that with being meaningfully Christian.

This puts me in mind of the Rev. Dr. Gavin Ashenden, one of the top clerics of the Church of England, who was forced out of his job as Chaplain to the Queen when he forcefully objected to the reading of the Quran in an Anglican cathedral. When asked how faithful Christians should respond to liberal hegemony within their own churches and institutions, Dr. Ashenden said, “Leave their church and look for one that has kept as much of the historic, apostolic and biblical values as possible.”

Shortly thereafter, he left the Anglican Church, telling the organization Christian Concern that he could no longer serve in a church that had contented itself with being “chaplain to a secular and hedonistic nation.”

“Rather than being a permanent irritant in a secular church that’s determined to continue to repudiate what we have in the gospels,” Ashenden said, “[I] would rather play a more constructive and creating role in bringing the love of God in Christ to people who are willing to listen.”

This is all useful information. As with Christian churches that have effectively abandoned the faith, so too with Christian schools. It’s a time of sorting. It’s a time to stop pretending that many Christian schools are anything other than vaguely spiritual educators to a secular and hedonistic nation.

Outing Christian Bigots In Australia

In this space, I have mentioned the concerns of several Christian readers that they will face pressure in their companies to declare themselves in favor of same-sex marriage, or stand exposed as “bigots” and marginalized. This is now happening in Australia. A reader there sends this story from The Australian. Excerpts:

Some of the country’s biggest businesses have upped the ante in the crusade for marriage equality by asking Australians to wear a specially designed “acceptance ring” until same-sex marriage is legalised.

Led by accommodation provider Airbnb and supported by Qantas, ANZ, Fairfax Media and Foxtel, the Until We Belong campaign has been billed as the “most public declaration for marriage equality” so far.

The initiative calls on Aus­tralians to signal their support for same-sex couples by committing to wearing the ring, created by designer Marc Newson.

Airbnb Australia country manager Sam McDonagh said the campaign would involve the distribution of “hundreds of thousands” of the distinctive black metal rings to its hosts and guests, business partners and “key influencers”.

Qantas staff and cabin crew would wear them, he said, while Google Australia has also provided rings for its 1300 staff to wear. “Our goal is to build ­momentum around the issue of marriage equality and spark those conversations about ­acceptance,” Mr McDonagh said.

More:

Marriage Alliance spokeswoman Sophie York, who is ­opposed to same-sex marriage, questioned whether people who opted not to wear their acceptance ring would be called upon to explain their decision. She pointed to the recent harassment of a Price­waterhouseCoopers executive and a Macquarie University ­academic by gay activists over their links with a Christian ­institution as a sign of what could happen when individuals failed to comply with the “same-sex marriage agenda”.

“Almost every day, Marriage Alliance hears from an employee who has come under pressure at work to participate in an activity or donate funds to support the push to redefine marriage,” Ms York said.

“Now we see big corporates giving away free jewellery to those who take the pledge, while providing an easy way to identify those who disagree with the company agenda.

“We know activists will stop at nothing — even accessories — to target people for demise.”

And:

Qantas and Google yesterday confirmed their support for the campaign, but both said staff would not be under any obligation to wear the rings.

“We usually let our people know when we’re involved with a campaign like this, but there’s certainly no expectation that they will be part of it themselves,” a Qantas spokesman said. “They are welcome to join in, but it’s certainly not a requirement.”

No, of course not. No pressure at all. If Christians, Muslims, or others who work at these companies don’t want to wear the ring, nobody will force those hate-filled bigots to do what they don’t want to do. If they choose to advertise their bigotry by not joining in the campaign, that’s on them. It’s like back in the 1950s, during the Cold War in the US: if you didn’t want to show your patriotism by wearing a flag pin, nobody was going to make filthy communists like you do it.

Read the whole thing. And take a look at this Airbnb ad promoting the campaign:

American companies would be perfectly within their legal rights to do such a thing in the US, though given Obergefell, they have less incentive to do so. Still, what’s to stop them from urging their employees to wear some similar outward indication of their support of LGBT rights? You don’t think this is going to happen here? Then you have not been paying attention. The neo-McCarthyist goal here is to crush dissent. It is not enough to win the legal battle; the losers must be ground into the dirt. Only then will America be a safe space.

The Aussie reader who tipped me off to this adds:

It really fills me with despair. I know what I should do, cling to Jesus and be faithful but my job, the ability to support my family, our the mortgage.

The words of St Peter are in my head, “Where else have we to go,” but I fear when it gets tough and the choice is before me.

Again: if you think this isn’t coming to the United States and Canada, you’re a fool. What are you going to do when your company does this? Are you prepared to lose your job before burning that pinch of incense? How do you justify taking a stand for faith when it might mean losing the roof of your family’s head?

This is a perfect example of why we Christians desperately need to be thinking and acting in a Benedict Option way. We in the churches have to make it easier for men and women to stand up for their faith, because they know that their churches have their back in real ways. From The Benedict Option:

[W]e are on the brink of entire areas of commercial and professional life being off-limits to believers whose consciences will not allow them to burn incense to the gods of our age.

The workplace is getting tougher for orthodox believers as America’s commitment to religious liberty weakens. Progressives sneer at claims of anti-Christian discrimination or persecution. Don’t you believe them. Most of the experts I talked to on this topic spoke openly only after I promised to withhold their identities. They’re frightened that their words today might cost them their careers tomorrow.

They’re not paranoid. While Christians may not be persecuted for their faith per se, they are already being targeted when they stand for what their faith entails, especially in matters of sexuality. As the LGBT agenda advances, broad interpretations of antidiscrimination laws are going to push traditional Christians increasingly out of the marketplace, and the corporate world will become hostile toward Christian bigots, considering them a danger to the working environment.

More:

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.

And:

When that price needs to be paid, Benedict Option Christians should be ready to support one another economically—through offering jobs, patronizing businesses, professional networking, and so forth. This will not be a cure-all; the conversion of the public square into a politicized zone will be too far-reaching for orthodox Christian networks to employ or otherwise financially support all their economic refugees. But we will be able to help some.

Get it through your head, Christian: this is not an abstract threat. By now you ought to have grasped the nature of this long culture-war campaign, and the Law of Merited Impossibility (= “It’s not going to happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”) In The Benedict Option, I quote a  prominent religious liberty lawyer as saying:

“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.”

Traditional religious believers will be permanently to the margins by making the price of resistance intolerable. You priests, pastors, imams and Orthodox rabbis, how are you preparing your congregations for this coming reality? You Christian parents, how are you preparing your children for this world? How are you preparing yourselves? Are you talking about it in your Christian communities? You had better be.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

Regular here, commenting anonymously out of fear.

I work in HR at a federal agency. At a training today, we were instructed that expressing bigoted “beliefs” on social media, even while off duty, is “grounds for termination.”

I’m not sure that’s actually the law (yet). But judging by how unremarkable the trainer seemed to think the point was, it’ll be the law soon, if it’s not already.

Key to me here was that expressing “beliefs” was the issue. The First Amendment is dying. The future is commissars.

UPDATE.2: Sam M., brilliant as ever:

Solution to this is simple. Have a Catholic group declare that the same exact ring supports unborn babies. If that doesn’t work get some skinheads to wear the ring to signify that they beat their wives.

 

Straussians Vs. The Benedict Option

I had an interesting exchange this past weekend at Benedictine College with Prof. Susan Traffas, who argued that conservative Christians cannot abandon politics. In the Q&A, I pointed out that in The Benedict Option, I explicitly say that we cannot abandon politics entirely, mostly because we have to stay in the game to fight for religious liberty. But I also argue that we should reprioritize our approach to public engagement, and spend more time and effort trying to shore up the church and its internal culture — this, because our losses in politics on the issues that mean the most to us are the result of our having lost first the culture. My contention is that conditions have changed on the culture war battlefield, and that means we have to change the way we resist. That is very much not the same thing as surrender.

In the discussion afterwards, Prof. Traffas said a line at the end that I didn’t really understand at the time, because I don’t know a lot about political theory. It was something to the effect of, “I am a die-hard Straussian,” which she meant as a way of explaining her position. I did some research this morning, and I think now I better understand what she meant by that.

First Principles, a website of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, offers an explanation for how Straussian conservatism differs from traditional conservatism. Excerpt:

Harry Jaffa is the most prominent conservative to interpret the American Founding period as an unprecedented act of establishing a philosophically egalitarian government founded upon self-evident and universal principles. Unlike the traditionalists, Jaffa claims that the American Revolution formed a radically new polity and radically new way of thinking about political life. In works like How to Think About the American Revolution and American Conservatism and the American Founding, Jaffa expounds the notion that the United States was created as a creedal nation founded on philosophical principles. He has written that, “the American Revolution represented the most radical break with tradition…that the world had ever seen.” For West Coast Straussian conservatives, including American neo-conservatives, the United States is a creedal nation united not necessarily by a common history and common set of beliefs, practices, and institutions, but instead by a common philosophical commitment to the creation and sustenance of political equality.

Because of their commitment to an egalitarian reading of the Founding period, the West Coast Straussian conservatives understand the Declaration of Independence as the American civil form of the Apostles’ Creed. The Declaration is the statement of the fundamental principles on which the regime is founded. There is a special emphasis on the second paragraph in which Jefferson declares that “all men are created equal.” For the West Coast Straussian conservatives, the Declaration asserts a set of God-given natural rights which serve as the civil theology or political religion which defines the character of American citizenship and the telos of American political activity. Jaffa, among others, also offers a critique of the traditionalist reading of the Declaration, suggesting that the traditionalist reading necessarily misses the ideological power which actually motivated the revolutionaries.

Assuming that this is an accurate characterization of the Straussian view, it explains in part why so many politically oriented conservatives (not only those who affirmatively identify as Straussian) react strongly against the Benedict Option. America is not a state so much as it is a religion. To give up on the liberalism that created this creedal nation is, to use New Testament language about the Church, to allow the gates of Hell to prevail against America. It would invalidate their political religion. Therefore, they cannot admit the possibility that the American experiment might be failing, or can fail.

If the Fifth Republic falls, France remains. If the constitutional monarchy collapses, England will still be England. But if the novus ordo seclorum in the United States wastes away, who will we be? This fear drives a lot of the reflexive opposition to the Ben Op among conservatives, I think.

I think that most Christian political conservatives who react so strongly against the Ben Op have no idea who Leo Strauss was, but they nevertheless share these sentiments. Someone at the conference last weekend, characterizing one negative review of The Benedict Option, said the reviewer was incensed at the book for inducing political despair among Christians, such that they will no longer want to fight for the pro-life cause and other political goals long cherished by conservative Christians. I did not read the review in question, but I hear this kind of thing quite a bit. Where does it come from?

In charity, I assume that it is sincere. If it is, I respond like this:

The good news is that the Benedict Option does not say we have to become political quietists. It says we should stay engaged. You are simply not telling the truth if you say I advocate abandoning politics entirely. You should deal with the argument that I actually make, not the one you think I am making.
But I do say that the political victories we have been hoping for all these years are simply not going to be possible going forward. We have fought very hard since 1973 against legalized abortion, and we have seen some real victories over the last decade. We should keep at it! Nevertheless, abortion remains legal in this country. If Roe v. Wade were overturned, that would only send abortion regulation back to the states. Most states would instantly affirm the Roe status quo. Some would expand abortion rights, and some would restrict them further. Overturning Roe would be serious progress for the pro-life cause, but it would not end abortion in this country.The more serious and pressing question has to do with gay rights, marriage, and religious liberty. Christians must understand that Obergefell is a popular decision that is not going to be overturned. If it were, most states would respond by passing gay marriage legislation instantly. This is a settled issue, politically. We are now fighting for our right to be left alone to run our institutions (especially Christian colleges and schools) as we see fit. This is a fight that most local congregations have chosen to ignore. It is an enormously important fight — but it’s one that we are not likely to win. I was talking the other day to two conservative Christian activists deeply involved in this political struggle, and they say prospects for our side grow ever dimmer. Republican lawmakers are highly susceptible to big business pressure, and terrified of being called bigots. And most Christians are saying nothing, either because they don’t know what’s happening, don’t care about it, or are too intimidated by accusations of bigotry.From a Benedict Option point of view, we conservative Christians simply must start thinking about and planning for the day when we lose these political and legal fights. The culture is moving swiftly against us. Look at the polling on US Christians and their beliefs. We cannot even keep our young people within  Christian orthodoxy. We are fast moving into a world in which Christian orthodoxy will be seen legally and culturally as equivalent to racism. This will have far-reaching implications for the practice of Biblically orthodox forms of Christianity in America.



If you are a conservative Christian and are not preparing for that day, and the long aftermath, then you are being irresponsible. The Republican Party is a Maginot Line at best.
This is not a counsel of despair, but a counsel of realism. I believe that a lot of conservative Christians are desperately attempting to fight the last war, because the last war was one in which we had a chance of winning. To change the metaphor, increasingly our side is like sending the Polish cavalry out to face the Panzer blitzkrieg. All the valor and courage in the world cannot compete against the kind of political, economic, and cultural firepower being thrown at us — especially when the churches have grown so feeble in their witness.
The churches have grown so feeble in their witness because they have assimilated modernity to an astonishing degree. This is why the Benedict Option is so badly needed among Christians: because it champions the traditional Christian model of the human person, and advocates for practices that incarnate it within our own communities. The book presents the Czech Catholic anti-communist dissident Vaclav Benda as a model for how to live in public as faithful Christians when the regime disempowers you politically. From The Benedict Option :

Benda’s distinct contribution to the dissident movement was the idea of a “parallel polis”—a separate but porous society existing alongside the official Communist order. Says Flagg Taylor, an American political philosopher and expert on Czech dissident movements, “Benda’s point was that dissidents couldn’t simply protest the Communist government, but had to support positive engagement with the world.”

At serious risk to himself and his family (he and his wife had six children), Benda rejected ghettoization. He saw no possibility for collaboration with the Communists, but he also rejected quietism, considering it a failure to display proper Christian concern for justice, charity, and bearing evangelical witness to Christ in the public square. For Benda, Havel’s injunction to “live in truth” could only mean one thing: to live as a Christian in community.

Benda did not advocate retreat to a Christian ghetto. He insisted that the parallel polis must understand itself as fighting for “the preservation or the renewal of the national community in the widest sense of the word—along with the defense of all the values, institutions, and material conditions to which the existence of such a community is bound.

I personally think that a no less effective, exceptionally painful, and in the short term practically irreparable way of eliminating the human race or individual nations would be a decline into barbarism, the abandonment of reason and learning, the loss of traditions and memory. The ruling regime—partly intentionally, partly thanks to its essentially nihilistic nature—has done everything it can to achieve that goal. The aim of independent citizens’ movements that try to create a parallel polis must be precisely the opposite: we must not be discouraged by previous failures, and we must consider the area of schooling and education as one of our main priorities.

From this perspective, the parallel polis is not about building a gated community for Christians but rather about establishing (or reestablishing) common practices and common institutions that can reverse the isolation and fragmentation of contemporary society. (In this we hear Brother Ignatius of Norcia’s call to have “borders”— formal lines behind which we live to nurture our faith and culture—but to “push outwards, infinitely.”) Benda wrote that the parallel polis’s ultimate political goals are “to return to truth and justice, to a meaningful order of values, [and] to value once more the inalienability of human dignity and the necessity for a sense of human community in mutual love and responsibility.”

In other words, dissident Christians should see their Benedict Option projects as building a better future not only for themselves but for everyone around them. That’s a grand vision, but Benda knew that most people weren’t interested in standing up for abstract causes that appealed only to intellectuals. He advocated practical actions that ordinary Czechs could do in their daily lives.

That is the model of political engagement I believe Christians will have to embrace in the years to come. I could be wrong about this, certainly, and I invite counterarguments to my pessimistic take. But I also urge people who think I’m wrong to examine their own prejudices, and to inquire of themselves as to whether or not their position comes not from analysis of the facts on the table, but rather from an act of faith — especially of an idolatrous faith in the American ideal.

Here is a helpful post by Father Stephen Freeman regarding the Benedict Option and the American Dream.  Excerpt:

We must understand that you cannot have a suburban version of the Benedictine [sic] Option. Place, habit, economy and a host of “unintentional” things will overwhelm every counter-intention, no matter how well-grounded in Christian teaching. Practices always do their work. The practices of suburban life are not productive of Christian virtue. They were designed to serve a different God.

Are there Christian options for healthier communities more suited to the nurture of virtue? Dreher offers a number of suggestions that are worth considering. But we will make little headway unless and until we recognize that the modern American suburban life (in its many aspects) is a moral choice. Living a half-hour away from a parish, isolated from fellow believers, may very well be the most serious moral choice we make after Holy Baptism, despite how innocuous it may seem.

Virtue is a very natural thing. It is acquired slowly, frequently without great intention, through repeated practices and habits. Those who worry about the collapse of civilization have become too lofty in their thoughts. It is the collapse of the parish that matters just now. For only in the parish will a new St. Benedict get anything done. The origin of the word, “parish,” says a lot. It is derived ultimately from paroikia (“near the house”). That pretty much says everything Benedict needs to say. I will add that Benedict never had it in mind to save or restore the Roman imperium. The American imperium should hold no particular value for Christians today. The outcome of history is the work of God, not of the Church. It is the task of the Church simply to be the Church. The consequences of that reality belong to God, not us.

He’s right. If you worry about the collapse of Western civilization and the American political and cultural order, the best thing you can do is to strengthen your own parish community, and other little local platoons, in the teachings of the Christian faith and in practices of Christian discipleship. I emphasize in The Benedict Option that St. Benedict did not set out to Make Rome Great Again. He only wanted to figure out how he could best serve God in community. To the extent that the Benedictines did lay the groundwork for the rebirth of civilization (if not the Empire), they did so by placing serving God and His people first, as monastics. If we traditionalist Christians want to make America great again, the best way to do it is to be more faithful to the Church, and let God do the rest through us.

The old way of conservative Christian thinking about politics is no longer adequate to the enormous challenge facing us. It is not a question of whether or not we can be involved in public life as believers. We have to be. The question is about which forms that involvement will take, and can take in this post-Christian — increasingly anti-Christian — new order for the ages.

Whether this degeneration was baked in the cake from the Founding is a fascinating question of political theory, one well worth discussing. But that does not change the grim facts on the ground.

Queering Dentistry

Screen shot from Boulder Dental Arts

That’s a screen shot from a new patient form at Boulder Dental Arts, a Colorado dentist’s office. Note the final question on the image.

What would it mean to have female teeth in a male body? Can one’s teeth be genderfluid? Do fillings constitute colonialism? Are braces the orthodontic equivalent of “conversion therapy”? Why does the patriarchy get to determine that teeth are supposed to be “straight”?

Queering dentistry is going to be a lot of fun. Who needs laughing gas anymore?

UPDATE: If this is meant to be a joke, let me be the first to congratulate Boulder Dental Arts for poking fun at political correctness. If the joint is being snarky, I would definitely go there for my dental needs, if I lived in Boulder. I am scared to death of dentistry, and need all the laughs I can get when I cross the dental threshold. And the sedation.

Campus Wars Of Religion

There was an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend — an interview with Jonathan Haidt about the ideological hysteria on campuses today. Excerpts:

When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.

“The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.”

These believers are transforming the campus from a citadel of intellectual freedom into a holy space—where white privilege has replaced original sin, the transgressions of class and race and gender are confessed not to priests but to “the community,” victim groups are worshiped like gods, and the sinned-against are supplicated with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”

The fundamentalists may be few, Mr. Haidt says, but they are “very intimidating” since they wield the threat of public shame. On some campuses, “they’ve been given the heckler’s veto, and are often granted it by an administration who won’t stand up to them either.”

More:

The Berkeley episode Mr. Haidt mentions illustrates the Orwellian aspect of campus orthodoxy. A scheduled February appearance by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos prompted masked agitators to throw Molotov cocktails, smash windows, hurl rocks at police, and ultimately cause $100,000 worth of damage. The student newspaper ran an op-ed justifying the rioting under the headline “Violence helped ensure safety of students.” Read that twice.

Mr. Haidt can explain. Students like the op-ed author “are armed with a set of concepts and words that do not mean what you think they mean,” he says. “People older than 30 think that ‘violence’ generally involves some sort of physical threat or harm. But as students are using the word today, ‘violence’ is words that have a negative effect on members of the sacred victim groups. And so even silence can be violence.” It follows that if offensive speech is “violence,” then actual violence can be a form of self-defense.

Down the hall from Mr. Haidt’s office, I noticed a poster advertising a “bias response hotline” students can call “to report an experience of bias, discrimination or harassment.” I joke that NYU seems to have its own version of the morality police in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia. “It’s like East Germany,” Mr. Haidt replies—with students, at least some of them, playing the part of the Stasi.

Haidt has a lot more to say in the piece about all of this — and below, he explains why it matters to our entire society:

If you’re not a student or professor, why should you care about snowflakes in their igloos? Because, Mr. Haidt argues, what happens on campus affects the “health of our nation.” Ideological and political homogeneity endangers the quality of social-science research, which informs public policy. “Understanding the impacts of immigration, understanding the causes of poverty—these are all absolutely vital,” he says. “If there’s an atmosphere of intimidation around politicized issues, it clearly influences the research.”

Today’s college students also are tomorrow’s leaders—and employees. Companies are already encountering problems with recent graduates unprepared for the challenges of the workplace. “Work requires a certain amount of toughness,” Mr. Haidt says. “Colleges that prepare students to expect a frictionless environment where there are bureaucratic procedures and adult authorities to rectify conflict are very poorly prepared for the workplace. So we can expect a lot more litigation in the coming few years.”

If you lean left—even if you adhere to the campus orthodoxy, or to certain elements of it—you might consider how the failure to respect pluralism puts your own convictions at risk of a backlash. “People are sick and tired of being called racist for innocent things they’ve said or done,” Mr. Haidt observes. “The response to being called a racist unfairly is never to say, ‘Gee, what did I do that led to me being called this? I should be more careful.’ The response is almost always, ‘[Expletive] you!’ ”

Yes it is. Read the whole thing.

It is interesting to contemplate this phenomenon as a manifestation of religious conflict. Yesterday I wrote in this space about Philip Rieff’s theory of culture, saying that it is built on “sacred order.” Rieff considered our own culture to be an “anti-culture” because, in his view, the only thing it sees as sacred is the tearing-down of sacred order. What we see on campus is more complex. There can be no doubt that these student Jacobins and their faculty fellow travelers wish to impose a new, highly illiberal sacred order on campuses — and are succeeding. But what they are doing is destroying the capacity of universities to do what universities are supposed to do. If they are allowed to continue, American universities where they hold sway will come to resemble East German universities.

This past weekend, I met a woman who had grown up in communist Hungary. I mentioned to her something I have heard from several older people, defectors from communist Eastern Europe living in the West today: that the speech culture emerging in the West today reminds them of life under communism, because of the way you never know whether or not your words will get you destroyed by power-holders who consider you ideologically dangerous.

She nodded vigorously. “This is how the state destroyed society,” she said. “You had to be afraid of everybody, because you didn’t know who might report you to the government for something innocent you said.”

Here is a great scene from the German film “The Lives Of Others,” set in the final years of communist East Germany. The scene takes place inside Stasi headquarters, in a cafeteria. Everybody in the scene works for the secret police, but the men in the distance are officers:

It is not hard at all to imagine a similar scene playing out in a college cafeteria in the US. Imagine not being able to tell a joke without having to worry that someone would report you to the campus diversity commissar, potentially ruining your name, and even your academic career.

Can a university thrive under such circumstances? Can any community?

Haidt’s Heterodox Academy website has a list of colleges that are much better at respecting free speech and open inquiry. If you are thinking about going to college, or sending your kids to college, you really need to see this list. Certain leftist professors at Wellesley College are not interested in maintaining the school as a place where faculty, students, and campus guests can speak and think freely. They have written an e-mail calling on the college to ban speakers who challenge the point of view held by sacred victim groups, lamenting that aggrieved students are compelled to “invest time and energy in rebutting the speakers’ arguments.”

Yes, actual college professors wrote that. These professors, members of the school’s Commission for Ethnicity, Race, and Equity, generously offer themselves as gatekeepers for who should and should not be allowed to speak on campus, based on the content of their speech.

By the way, Princeton’s Robert George reminds us:

A MONTH has passed since a mob attacked a professor & core academic values at Middlebury. Still no one held to account. #remembermiddlebury https://t.co/B3ZcH0KNCJ

— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) April 3, 2017

Imagine that Charles Murray were a black man, and had been shut down by a Middlebury mob, and chased off campus in fear of his physical safety. Do you think it would have taken Middlebury a month (and counting) to discipline those responsible for it — even the students caught on camera, their faces clearly shown, disrupting his speech?

For Finder-Friendly Churches

J. Patrick Niles, a Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) pastor, has a great list naming Five Things The Church Wishes The Culture Understood. Among them:

The church is bigger than you. This is the part that you might not like to hear, but it is the truth. The church is not about you, your preferences or your tastes. The church is about Jesus. It is about the Son of God who came down to earth in humility as part of His creation. It is about this same God-man who dies willingly on the cross bearing the sins of the whole world–bearing your sins. It is about Jesus who left your sins in the tomb and rose victorious to reign for you. It is about the victorious Christ who will come again, who will create a new heaven and a new earth, who will restore these lowly bodies to be like His glorious body by the power that allows Him to subdue all things to Himself. This is the church in which uncounted saints have had their uncounted sins forgiven. Uncounted souls have been saved through the waters of Holy Baptism, taught through countless hours of instruction, bowed at numerous altars and received the infinite body and blood of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins and strength for their lives in Him. This church is the voice of ages of martyrs who have not recanted the faith that we make to appear so malleable. This church has a language, an order, a life that is bigger than you. It is a life that includes 90-year-old Uncle Bud and 9-day-old Stryker. It is a life that is big enough to include you also. So if you want to be part of this church, show some initiative. Learn the language. Learn the story of the church that spans all time and space in the promises and words of Jesus.

What we need are fewer seeker-friendly churches, and more — a lot more — finder-friendly churches.

Her Life Among The Deathworks

What does a civilization’s art tell us about its soul? Consider the case of Catherine Opie, a photographer profiled in the current New Yorker.  Excerpts:

In the course of a thirty-year career, the photographer Catherine Opie has made a study of the freeways of Los Angeles, lesbian families, surfers, Tea Party gatherings, America’s national parks, the houses of Beverly Hills, teen-age football players, the personal effects of Elizabeth Taylor, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Boy Scouts, her friends, mini-malls, and tree stumps. But her most famous photographs are probably two that she took of herself, early in her working life. In “Self-Portrait/Cutting,” which Opie made in 1993, when she was thirty-two years old, she stands shirtless with her back to the camera in front of an emerald-green tapestry, which offsets her pale skin and the rivulets of blood emerging from an image carved into her back with a scalpel: a childlike scene of a house, a cloud, and a pair of smiling, skirt-wearing stick figures. In “Self-Portrait/Pervert,” made the following year, Opie is faceless and topless and bleeding again: she sits in front of a black-and-gold brocade with her hands folded in her lap, her head sealed in an ominous black leather hood, the word “pervert” carved in oozing, ornate letters across her chest.

More:

Really, what Opie liked best about transgressive sex was the way it created a feeling of family. “S/M was all about community for me,” she said one afternoon, sitting in her sunny kitchen in Los Angeles, with its gleaming stainless-steel stove and Heath-tile backsplash. On a bench by the window was a pillow with a needlepoint inscription that read, “Grandmothers are a special part of all that’s cherished in the heart.” Opie, who is fifty-five, smiled wistfully when she recalled that era: “You dress up with your friends; you do things together in the dungeons.” At the time, she was taking photographs of her cohort, with their tattoos and piercings, in formal compositions and vibrant colors that evoked the Renaissance paintings of Hans Holbein. Opie felt that she was creating a portrait gallery of her own “royal family.” There was something not just regal but disarmingly heartfelt in those pictures. As the Los Angeles art critic David Pagel put it, in 1994, “The strangest and most telling quality that Opie manages to smuggle into her images of aggressive misfits is a sense of wholesomeness.”

Opie grew up in the Midwest. She was going to be a kindergarten teacher before she became a photographer. She always wanted to be a mother. “ ‘Self-Portrait/Cutting’ was about longing,” Shaun Caley Regen, Opie’s gallerist since 1993, told me. “It was about an unattainable ideal—two women, a house, whatever it was she felt she couldn’t have—cut into her back.”

She’s so marginalized, othered, and in every way oppressed that she’s on the top of her world:

In the intervening decades, Opie has moved from marginal radical to establishment fixture. In 2008, the Guggenheim devoted four floors to “Catherine Opie: American Photographer,” a major mid-career retrospective that attracted some three thousand people a day. Several luminous shots that Opie took of Lake Michigan hung in the Obama White House. Opie is a tenured professor at U.C.L.A., and sits on the boards of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Andy Warhol Foundation. She earns more than a million dollars in a good year. Recently, when the Smithsonian Archives of American Art gave Opie a medal at a gala on the Upper East Side, the host noted that it was his first opportunity to honor a pillar of the “ ‘Los Angeles leather-dyke community.’ ”

Her father, a Republican from Sandusky, Ohio, was a dirtbag who screwed up his family. It ended like this:

When Opie was sixteen, her parents divorced. “Dad drove my mom to a condo and said, ‘This is where you’re gonna live. I’m keeping the house and the kids,’ ” she told me. “Then my dad remarried immediately—he married this crazy woman, and my brother protected me from her in really nice ways. Like, he put a lock on my bedroom door when he realized she was crazy.” Her brother left to join the Air Force, and her father—less than a year into his second marriage—started having an affair with Opie’s mother, over at the condo. “It’s like a soap opera, I know,” she said. “The whole idea of the family unit was just totally chaotic and completely messed up for me.”

But she pushed onward:

Opie was stumbling toward her own domestic future. In the fall of 1999, she was awarded a fellowship at Washington University, in St. Louis, Missouri. In the two months that she spent there, she became friends with a professor of painting named Julie Burleigh, a single mother from a prominent family in small-town Louisiana. They had just begun to grow close when Opie accepted a job offer from Yale, and moved to New York City. Her life was changing rapidly: she’d decided that she didn’t want to wait any longer to become a mother. “A number of my butch friends were shocked that I was going to get pregnant and have a baby—like, ‘How can you do that?’ ” Opie recalled. “I was, like, why can’t I be butch and have a baby? Why can’t I acknowledge the fact that I’m a biological woman and I have a vagina that can do shit?” She tried five times to get pregnant, using her friend Rodney’s sperm and a turkey baster. “Different dykes would come by the loft, and Rodney would come over and look at gay male porn magazines—then they’d take it in to me in a Russel Wright teacup.”

And now?

The dream of lesbian domesticity that once seemed out of reach—that she once had cut into her back—is now Opie’s reality. She lives with Burleigh in a handsome, spacious house in Hancock Park, with chickens and rabbits in a coop in the back yard. Oliver, who recently turned fifteen, attends a progressive private school, where he has classmates named Aristotle and Theory; three years ago, Burleigh’s daughter gave birth to a son, whom she brings to visit every Sunday.

Read the whole thing.  At the end, she’s talking with a friend about the movie she’s working on now:

“It’s weird,” Opie said after she described the premise of her film. “It’s kind of a piece that’s gonna work better under a Trump Administration.”

 

“Right,” Taschen said. “Because the world is ending.”

 

That may not seem like the worst thing to some of us.

 

What makes Catherine Opie worth discussing is that she is not a marginal figure, but at the pinnacle of the art world. The photography of Catherine Opie is what the late Philip Rieff would have called a “deathwork” — art that deliberately destroys the foundations upon which a society can build a flourishing life. Read this passage from a great piece on Rieff that TAC once published, written by Jeremy Beer:

Rieff evinces more concern about the “triumph of the therapeutic” in his famous book of that name published in 1966. That work opens with the text of Yeats’s “Second Coming”—a sure sign that what follows will not be painted in the sunny colors of American progressivism. Rieff now worried that, though Christian culture had been all but entirely shattered, nothing had succeeded it; there were therefore no extant authoritative institutions whose demands and remissions (the culturally regulated relaxation of those demands) could be internalized, thereby acting to “bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs.” This failure of succession was no accident but rather the explicit program of the “modern cultural revolution,” which was deliberately being undertaken “not in the name of any new order of communal purpose” but for the “permanent disestablishment of any deeply internalized moral demands.”

This revolution posed an unprecedented problem, for at the heart of Rieff’s theory of culture lies the insight that all cultures consist precisely in a “symbolic order of controls and remissions.” Lacking such an order, one gets not a new culture but rather a kind of anti-culture. For that reason, in Rieff’s view, therapeutic ideology rather than communism represented the revolutionary movement of the age. Communism inverts religion but accepts, at least in theory, the idea of a social order that embodies certain moral commitments; therapeutic society, on the other hand, stands both against all religions and for all religions. That is, it refuses to engage religious claims on their own terms, to take them seriously as a “compelling symbolic of self-integrating communal purpose.” It represents the absolute privatization of religious doctrines, absorbing them as potentially useful therapies for individuals. “Psychological man,” remarks Rieff, “will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use.”

Indeed, compared to the emergent Western rejection of all “moral demand systems,” Rieff notes that communism was, in a certain sense, conservative. Americans, on the other hand, had been released by the anti-cultural doctrine of the therapeutic to be “morally less self-demanding,” aiming instead to enjoy “all that money can buy, technology can make, and science can conceive.” (This comparison helps explains why self-publicists such as Christopher Hitchens have been able so easily to “switch sides” in our culture wars; their fundamental allegiance is to the globalization of therapeutic remissiveness, and they realize that that goal is now best served by Western secular liberalism.)

The loss of “corporate ideals,” of any communally recognized symbols of authority or guides to conduct, as well as “the systematic hunting down of all settled convictions,” began to trouble Rieff, who knew that such an anti-culture had never before existed and was likely not even possible. Still, at this point Rieff was willing to entertain the notion that this attempt to build civilization on the foundation of psychic well-being rather than a system of moral demands (which he would later call “interdicts”) and their circumstantial remissions might work. He even concludes his book with the claim that “the new releasing insights deserve only a little less respect than the old controlling ones.” It is not clear whether he is being coy.

More:

Rieff develops a typology of three “worlds” or cultures that is also a chronology. The first world is essentially that of pagan antiquity; it is no longer psychologically or sociologically available except in pastiche form as a consumer item, and its leitmotif is fate. The second world is essentially rooted in Jerusalem but—Rieff concedes, so far as it is inclusive of the form of Judaic law—also includes Christianity. Its leitmotif is faith. The third world is that which is now being born; it is the anti-culture of the therapeutic, which has come into being through the “deathworks” mounted against second-world interdicts by such third-world figures as Freud, Joyce, Duchamp, and a host of others. Its leitmotif is fiction.

Hitler, too, is a third-world figure, a proponent of the anti-cultural “clean sweep, the brush aimed first and foremost at the kingdom of priests and holy nation, however members in that kingdom may rebel against their membership.” Media notices of My Life among the Deathworks have, predictably, focused on Rieff’s scorn for multiculturalism, feminism, and “homosexualists.” But what is most striking is the extent to which Judaism, Hitler, the Shoah, and the author’s Auschwitz-surviving grandfather occupy the almost too visible foreground. The price of therapeutic freedom, Rieff suggests, insofar as it consists in the removal of all authoritative interdicts, those delicately constructed checks against human evil, has already been incalculable.

“My grandfather told me, in Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago, that he wanted to go to Svad, Israel, the town of his great teacher, Isaac Luria, to die. America was to him a land without grace, and he could not die amid such gracelessness,” recalls Rieff near the end of the book. “My grandfather saw this de-created world coming; he thought that Hitler had won in some way. The evidence surrounded him: the gross sexuality of the young, the aestheticization of my father’s Judaism… ” Has Hitler really “won in some way”? Perhaps the question is not as insane as it sounds.

“The commanding truths are Nots,” Rieff reminds us, one last time. “As my grandfathers well knew, before permission there must be prohibition.” These are the fruits of Philip Rieff’s decades-long pieties of silence: to become a “remembrancer,” in his terms, of the past, one man’s lifework against the deathworks mounted by modernity against all sacred orders. 

An aged and great scholar recently said to me, “I am on my way out. I am glad I’m not going to be around to see what’s coming. But I grieve for my grandchildren.”

What a lot of people don’t get about the Benedict Option is that I don’t propose it as a form of cultural protest, a pious therapy, or a program of moral rigorism. I propose it as the only thing that believing Christians (and, I suppose, others) can do to hold on to sanity and stability as this culture of death continues its long, slow suicide. Its death rattle is going to shake us to the foundations.

People keep thinking that the current order can be saved. On what do they base this, given that the past century, at least, has been devoted to destroying the conditions under which ordered life is possible — most basically, the belief in sacred order? It is impossible to know at this stage which things, precisely, we should do for the sake of cultural survival, but it is essential to understand what is happening, what is going to happen, and that we need to start working together to prepare, spiritually and otherwise, for a very difficult future.

UPDATE: Rare footage of Your Working Boy confronting the horror of the abyss:

The Benedict Option & Evangelism

Prof. Tim O’Malley of Notre Dame, on a break between sessions at Benedictine College’s New Evangelism Conference

Greetings from Atchison, Kansas, home of Benedictine College. Bunch of Catholics are gathered here this weekend to talk about evangelization. They honored me with an invitation to deliver a keynote address last night to kick off the event. I talked about — surprise! — The Benedict Option. I looked this morning at the schedule for today’s talks, and saw 13 separate lectures offering a reflection on an “Option”. So I reckon this is a meme. Seriously, this is delightful to me. The greatest hope I have for this book is that it seeds creative and serious discussions among Christians for how we can live more authentic, resilient Christian lives in a post-Christian (and increasingly anti-Christian) social order. Come back to this blog entry today for updates throughout the day, based on talks I hear.

I’ve never been to Benedictine College, but … wow. It is very easy for me, living inside my online silo, to become too focused on doom and gloom. So to come to a place like this little orthodox Catholic liberal arts college on the Missouri River, and to see so many young people who are faithful, happy, and … normal — well, I can’t tell you how encouraging it is. Talking to students and professors here is to realize that there really are great good places where the faith really is being lived out in community, and joyfully. I have trouble sometimes explaining to people that the Benedict Option is not only communities like, for example, the Catholic agrarians gathered around Clear Creek Abbey, but it can also take many different forms. What they’re doing at this small liberal arts Catholic college is a great example of the Benedict Option. The thickness and the richness of the traditional spiritual and intellectual life here is startling, in a very, very good way. It’s great to be able to point to one more place in the world and say, “There! What they’re doing there — go see it, and learn from it.”

And yet, understand: this is the kind of institution facing an existential threat from Washington progressives precisely because it is faithfully Christian. When the day comes that the federal government forbids federal funding, including federally-backed student loans, to colleges like these because they don’t accept the post-Christian view of sexuality and gender, these colleges will either find some way to survive, or they will disappear.

Conservative Christians have to stay involved in the political battle to defend institutions like Benedictine. But conservative Christians also had better be making alternate plans to support these institutions if we do lose the political fight. It’s coming, readers. If you are not making a Plan B to use our resources to stand up institutions like this, you are failing in your duty to your children and your Christian community. This is not alarmism; this is real. I had a conversation last night with a couple of men not affiliated with the college, but who are deeply involved in the religious liberty fight. They are not optimistic. At all.

More later. Keep checking back.

UPDATE.2: Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame, after a long, penetrating reflection on T.S. Eliot and post-Christian society, says that conditions we face are probably going to get worse than even our most pessimistic people imagine. He quotes Eliot as saying that Christians who are not conscious of what’s happening are being increasingly de-Christianized without realizing it. Deneen says Christians today who expect to remain Christian have to be far, far more intentional in their Christian lives, including embracing practices.

Eliot says that Christians cannot leave the public square, however, if only out of charity for our neighbors. Deneen adds that those taking the Benedict Option had better construct our “new monasteries” amid the people who are must hurting in this new pagan culture. Our “monasteries” must also be the field hospitals that Pope Francis calls for, or they will be less than Christian.

(N.B., I agree with this, certainly. My contention — and I don’t know that Patrick disagrees — is that we cannot give the world what we do not have. The work of Robert Louis Wilken, Christian Smith, and other Christian intellectuals show that we Christians are very, very thin on the ground. The Benedict Option is not an either/or, but a both/and. That is, it’s not either withdrawal or engagement in the public square, but both withdrawal and engagement — indeed, withdrawal for the sake of more effective and transformative engagement.)

Patrick urges Christians not to abandon the elite media, academic, creative and other fields. We need faithful people there too. Consider, he said, the outsize role in academic and public life played by faithful Christian academics like Princeton’s Robbie George, or James Davison Hunter and Robert Louis Wilken (now retired) at the University of Virginia, and of the late John Senior at KU.

UPDATE.3: In a hallway conversation after Patrick’s lecture, an interlocutor said that he used to be more confident that more Christians ought to seek to be the Robbie Georges of the world. Now, he’s not as confident on this front, given the cultural realities. The interlocutor cited this passage from T.S. Eliot (written in 1939!) that Patrick quoted in his talk:

The problem of leading a Christian life in a non-Christian society is now very present to us, and it is a very different problem from that of the accommodation between an Established Church and dissenters. It is not merely the problem of a minority in a society of individuals holding an alien belief. It is the problem constituted by our implication in a network of institutions from which we cannot dissociate ourselves: institutions the operation of which appears no longer neutral, but non-Christian. And as for the Christian who is not conscious of his dilemma—and he is in the majority—he is becoming more and more de-Christianized by all sorts of unconscious pressure: paganism holds all the most valuable advertising space.

My interlocutor said that if paganism really does hold all the most valuable advertising space, then we have to consider whether or not it is more important to devote oneself to doing whatever we can to transmit the Christian tradition to the next generation, or to work to try to transform the greater culture. To be sure, not everyone has the same particular calling. If one discerns a calling to be a Christian Daniel in the academic lion’s den, then by all means one should accept that calling. I think the point of my interlocutor is that we don’t think often enough about dealing with the situation that we’re actually in. We want to fight the battle we want to fight, which is not necessarily the one we really need to be fighting.

I thought later about this principle as it plays out in some newspaper newsrooms. Very few reporters in urban newsrooms want to cover the suburbs. For ambitious reporters, the stories they want to cover are downtown, or otherwise in the city. But what if the stories that are really important — or at least many of the most important stories — are taking place in the suburbs? These places strike a lot of journalists as incredibly dull, and the stories playing out there as peripheral to “real” life. It’s worth considering that the problem is within us, and the limits of our own imagination. Is it possible that at least some of us don’t consider that our calling may be to something else because our pride and vanity blinds us to less romantic but more pressing possibilities.

I walked away from that conversation thinking about my sister Ruthie Leming, and how it was only in her death that I saw the greatness of what she was able to accomplish there, walking her little way in a small, out-of-the-way place. My own vocational calling was not the same as Ruthie’s, but in light of Ruthie’s death and her accomplishment, I had to reflect that people in my class exclude — consciously or unconsciously — the idea that we might be called not to be heroes, but rather oarsmen.

Benedict of Nursia might have had a brilliant political career ahead of him had he chosen to serve in the administration of barbarian-ruled Rome. Instead, he went to live in a cave and to seek the Lord’s will. He formed monastic communities. When he died on March 21, 547, Benedict could not have imagined how consequential his vocation would be for all of Western civilization, and indeed for the eternal life of countless souls. All Benedict wanted to do was to follow the will of the Lord. For all he knew, he would die in obscurity, his work amounting to nothing. But he was driven by the conviction that Mother Teresa articulated like this: “God has not called us to be successful, but faithful.”

(I got that Mother Teresa quote from Ryan Marr, who, in his presentation, said that the challenge of the Ben Op is sailing between the Scylla of resurrecting Christendom, and the Charybdis of hunkering down in ghettoes and awaiting the end. Which is true.)

UPDATE.4: Susan Traffas, in her presentation, said that we cannot imagine that we can withdraw from the state, because the state will not leave us alone. Unlike in the Roman Empire, we don’t have as much personal liberty.

“The new imperium wants to have everything,” she said. “Remember the change from ‘religious liberty’ to ‘religious worship’? … The first step of the new imperium is to limit us to our houses of worship, and that space will get smaller and smaller.”

She’s right, of course, but I continue to puzzle over the mistaken idea that I call for Christians to abandon politics entirely. But I do think she has a point about whether or not we Christians should abandon the American project. I incline to MacIntyre’s view that we need to focus not on “shoring up the imperium,” but on forming local communities within which the moral life can be sustained through the Dark Age to come. Does that mean abandoning America?

Perhaps it does, in the sense of believing that things aren’t going to be turned around anytime soon, if ever. But what is America? If it’s an ideal, then abandoning that ideal is defensible (I think). But America is not merely an ideal. America is Atchison, Kansas. America is Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. America is your community. We cannot abandon those places. You don’t have to believe that the American experiment is sustainable to be faithful to America, in the sense I mean.

In The Benedict Option, I write about Vaclav Benda, a mathematics professor, a believing Catholic, and a dissident suffering under Czech communism. I invite all who think that I’m advocating head-for-the-hills abandonment of the public square to meditate on this passage from the book:

A good example of what this better life could look like comes from the late mathematician and dissident Václav Benda. A faithful Catholic, Benda believed that Communism maintained its iron grip on the people by isolating them, fragmenting their natural social bonds. The Czech regime severely punished the Catholic Church, driving many believers to privatize their faith, retreating behind the walls of their homes so as not to attract attention from the authorities.

Benda’s distinct contribution to the dissident movement was the idea of a “parallel polis”—a separate but porous society existing alongside the official Communist order.5 Says Flagg Taylor, an American political philosopher and expert on Czech dissident movements, “Benda’s point was that dissidents couldn’t simply protest the Communist government, but had to support positive engagement with the world.”

At serious risk to himself and his family (he and his wife had six children), Benda rejected ghettoization. He saw no possibility for collaboration with the Communists, but he also rejected quietism, considering it a failure to display proper Christian concern for justice, charity, and bearing evangelical witness to Christ in the public square. For Benda, Havel’s injunction to “live in truth” could only mean one thing: to live as a Christian in community.

Benda did not advocate retreat to a Christian ghetto. He insisted that the parallel polis must understand itself as fighting for “the preservation or the renewal of the national community in the widest sense of the word—along with the defense of all the values, institutions, and material conditions to which the existence of such a community is bound.

I personally think that a no less effective, exceptionally painful, and in the short term practically irreparable way of eliminating the human race or individual nations would be a decline into barbarism, the abandonment of reason and learning, the loss of traditions and memory. The ruling regime—partly intentionally, partly thanks to its essentially nihilistic nature—has done everything it can to achieve that goal. The aim of independent citizens’ movements that try to create a parallel polis must be precisely the opposite: we must not be discouraged by previous failures, and we must consider the area of schooling and education as one of our main priorities.

From this perspective, the parallel polis is not about building a gated community for Christians but rather about establishing (or reestablishing) common practices and common institutions that can reverse the isolation and fragmentation of contemporary society. (In this we hear Brother Ignatius of Norcia’s call to have “borders”— formal lines behind which we live to nurture our faith and culture—but to “push outwards, infinitely.”) Benda wrote that the parallel polis’s ultimate political goals are “to return to truth and justice, to a meaningful order of values, [and] to value once more the inalienability of human dignity and the necessity for a sense of human community in mutual love and responsibility.”

In other words, dissident Christians should see their Benedict Option projects as building a better future not only for themselves but for everyone around them. That’s a grand vision, but Benda knew that most people weren’t interested in standing up for abstract causes that appealed only to intellectuals. He advocated practical actions that ordinary Czechs could do in their daily lives.

If we Christians living in a post-Christian nation are going to prepare the world for a better, more humane, more just politics, we have to start with the pre-political basics, and with political actions that are about serving the common good, though not necessarily about elections and laws. This means we have to be creative minorities.

Prof. Traffas said that we cannot abandon the public square, in part because we cannot abandon others outside the Christian community to a bad regime. Well, to be clear, and contra about a thousand million people who claim otherwise, I don’t believe that we can or should totally abandon the public square. We have to fight as hard as we can. But what happens when we lose? What then? Benda and the dissidents had no realistic chance of overthrowing Communism. But they also did not believe they had the right either to assimilate or to hide out in their own bunkers. How did they bear witness to the truth in a meaningful way when ordinary politics was closed off to them?

Obviously we are not restricted as those under Communism were. But when there is little to no prospect that we can get a hearing in our political and legal system — and I think this is increasingly going to be the case — what do we do then? We can’t surrender, but continuing to fight the last war is a waste of time and effort.

Consider the battle for traditional marriage. We lost that one. Obergefell sealed the deal — and Obergefell is a popular decision! If Obergefell had been decided the other way — that is, had the Court said that there is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage — all that would have meant is that it would have been a matter for states to decide. In that alternative universe, most states today would have gay marriage, voted in democratically by their legislatures. And ten, twenty years from now, there would be no states without same-sex marriage. That’s because we Christian traditionalists have lost the culture. The people may be suffering under a bad regime in this sense, but it’s a regime of which they approve.

So what now? I think it’s a waste of time even to think about overturning Obergefell, or even reversing same-sex marriage laws. By far the greater challenge facing Christians today is explaining to ourselves the truth, beauty, and goodness of the Biblical model of marriage and sexuality, and passing it on to our children. We have same-sex marriage, and we have seen it embraced by so many of our fellow Americans, because it makes sense in the moral world they’ve come to inhabit. The battle for same-sex marriage was won in the 1960s and 1970s. If there were no such thing as gay people, would marriage culture in America today really be something of which Christians should be proud? Law and politics can only do so much. Same-sex marriage is a very big deal, but the crisis of fatherlessness, of broken families, and so forth is a much bigger deal. These phenomena are connected, in that they all start with a flawed anthropology, a non-Christian anthropology that entails seeing the individual and sexual desire in a post-Christian (un-Christian) way.

 

How do we counter that? It’s got to be countered in our families, in our churches, and in our own communities. We are losing our own. And if we lose our own, there will be no one left to bear witness to the truth of the Christian vision at some point in the future when the broader society is willing to hear it.

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Someone in the audience said: Alasdair MacIntyre was not writing about retreat and separation. He was writing about the incommensurability of moral language in our time. Why are you invoking him?

Answer from me: I’m not trying to exegete MacIntyre in my project. I’m just using his general diagnosis as a way to think about our current crisis. Though I am obviously indebted to MacIntyre, it’s not called the Alasdair MacIntyre Option. I’m trying to figure out how we can form those communities and institutions within which our tradition can be lived out in this new Dark Age.

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“We live today in the Church Militant, but the Church Militant, like any military, needs a good boot camp,” said someone in the audience. “It seems to me that the Benedict Option is about boot camp for the Church Militant.”

I love that.

UPDATE.5: 

Catholic theologian David Schindler says that God is effectively dead in America insofar as liberal self-understanding refuses to allow God’s existence to have any effect on what we do. The ancient Christian metaphysical understanding of God’s existence is dead in America — and was from the beginning. This is what modernity is. In other words, he said, paraphrasing Joseph Ratzinger, in modernity, we no longer see things as good in and of themselves, but good only insofar as we can put them to use.

And: “‘Success’ is not a name of God. We all need to learn that, and reflect on it every day.”

UPDATE.6: Bishop Conley closes out the event. What a great weekend! Can’t wait to come back here. There’s something so confidence-building about spending time with good people who love God and are happy about it.