Rod Dreher's Blog, page 475

World War T & North Carolina

Steve Sailer calls the big post-Obergefell push to normalize transgenderism “World War T”. It’s an apt phrase.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools system in North Carolina was going to use a book about a boy who likes to wear dresses as part of a first-grade lesson on what to do when someone is bullied.

But school administrators this week pulled the book, “Jacob’s New Dress,” after critics complained about its content.

The book came under fire from the North Carolina Values Coalition, a conservative group that promotes “pro-family positions,” according to its website.

Tami Fitzgerald, the executive director of the coalition, said that no notice was given to parents about the book and that it was sprung on teachers only days before it was supposed to be used.

“I read the book online,” she said. “It’s clearly geared to young children. The book is meant as a tool of indoctrination to normalize transgender behavior. I think a lot of parents would object to that.”

She said a teacher tipped off the coalition, which emailed its members, issued a news release and was organizing a petition when the school system reversed course.

“We believe the purpose of first grade is to teach writing, reading and math and not to teach boys to wear dresses,” she said.

The book opens with Jacob in the dress-up corner of a classroom where students can put on costumes and imagine themselves in different roles. Jacob puts on a sparkly pink dress and a crown and declares, “I’ll be the princess.”

And of course the NCAA, an organization that is supposed to be about sports, but which, like ESPN, now considers itself to be a Social Justice Warrior outfit, has issued an ultimatum to North Carolina:

The NCAA will start deciding on locations for its upcoming championships next week and has indicated it will leave North Carolina out of that process if the state hasn’t changed a law that limits LGBT rights by that time.

In a statement Thursday, exactly one year to the day after the law was passed, the sports organization said its committees will begin picking championship sites for 2018-22 and will announce those decisions April 18. The statement also noted that “once the sites are selected by the committee, those decisions are final.”

What business is it of the NCAA to decide that North Carolina must be punished because of the way it regulates transgender bathroom use? I wish North Carolina would tell the NCAA to get stuffed. The reader who tipped me off to this story pointed out “the hypocrisy of the NCAA making millions and millions of dollars on the backs of unpaid college students but [having] the audacity to lecture North Carolina.”

Here’s the rule of contemporary progressivism: you can exploit anybody you want, just as long as you say the right thing about minorities and gays.

Meanwhile, on the World War T front, did you see what Ryan T. Anderson had to face this week at a lecture at UT-Austin? Here’s a link to the video on Facebook. Warning: the protesters have filthy mouths. Watch it, though, and understand what pro-trans berserkers these protesters are. They have no interest in anything but coercion and suppression of dissent. Universities must get to the point where they expel any student who behaves like this in a lecture. No warning, no apologies: expulsion. Otherwise, they will destroy universities.

Some woke liberal Evangelical on Twitter this week griped about me, and said people like me have had time to change our views, and now deserve to be shouted down. I blocked him, because who has time for Jacobins like that? “Agree with me, or I will scream at you until you surrender.” And this cat is a pastor. That’s exactly what you see on the Ryan Anderson video. But this is where we are going as a culture. Let us propagandize your first grade children for transgenderism, or we will scream at you until you surrender!

No child, trans or otherwise, should be bullied. Full stop. The genius of the LGBT activist strategy for the past 20 years or so has been to package their radical ideology in anti-bullying, safety-and-health rhetoric. No decent person wants to see gay kids or any kids bullied in school. But there is no reason at all to say that one has to teach children that it’s normal for boys to present themselves as girls in order to teach children care and respect for others. Christian students shouldn’t be bullied either, but no Christian claims that teaching that requires reading Gospel-based storybooks to first graders.

This kind of ideological craziness cannot be reasoned with, because it denies reason. It can only be resisted. That resistance can take many forms, but it has to happen. If orthodox Christians and other social conservatives take our beliefs as seriously as these Jacobins and their churchy fellow travelers take theirs, we have to act on it. Defend our universities. Defend our children. And if the administrators of our universities and schools capitulate, then walk.

The GOP Sellout Of Working People

So, the health care bill. It appears that the House GOP is poised to eliminate Obamacare’s rule that would protect people with pre-existing conditions from being denied insurance. They might say no, they aren’t, but that’s not really true; the protection may remain in name only.

Whatever you thought of Obamacare, that part of it was fair and necessary. Why on earth would this supposedly newly populist party want to do something that stands to hurt the most vulnerable? What kind of ideologues would do this? What kind of populist president would support it?

David Brooks tells us that this is a catastrophic failure of Republican elites. Excerpts:

I opposed Obamacare. I like health savings accounts, tax credits and competitive health care markets to drive down costs. But these free-market reforms have to be funded in a way to serve the least among us, not the most. This House Republican plan would increase suffering, morbidity and death among the middle class and poor in order to provide tax cuts to the rich.

It would cut Medicaid benefits by $880 billion between now and 2026. It would boost the after-tax income for those making more than $1 million a year by 14 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center. This bill takes the most vicious progressive stereotypes about conservatives and validates them.

It’s no wonder that according to the latest Quinnipiac poll this bill has just a 17 percent approval rating. It’s no wonder that this bill is already massively more unpopular that Hillarycare and Obamacare, two bills that ended up gutting congressional majorities.

More:

If we’re going to have the rough edges of a populist revolt, you’d think that at least somebody would be interested in listening to the people. But with this bill the Republican leadership sets an all-time new land speed record for forgetting where you came from.

The core Republican problem is this: The Republicans can’t run policy-making from the White House because they have a marketing guy in charge of the factory. But they can’t run policy from Capitol Hill because it’s visionless and internally divided. So the Republicans have the politics driving the substance, not the other way around. The new elite is worse than the old elite — and certainly more vapid.

A study released this week found that mortality rates among the white working class shot up 60 percent — 60 percent! — in fewer than twenty years. It’s complicated why this is happening, but the last thing these people need is to give insurance companies an opportunity to deny them coverage. These are Trump’s people, and as Brooks indicates, he’s selling them out for the sake of a political win. I completely understand the need to reform Obamacare and make it better, but it looks like the Congressional Republicans never had a plan for this, and went into this process hacking willy-nilly, and have no idea what they’re doing.

This is not an abstraction! This is the health care of the American people. People, not integers.

These Republicans can’t govern, can they? Again, let me mention a conversation I had last week in Washington with a conservative, pro-Trump friend. He said that policymaking is such a disaster — in large part because the president himself is disinterested and disengaged — that when the wheels come off, the Democrats are going to come roaring back, and it’s going to be hell to pay for conservatives. Feels like the GOP is careening today towards a wheels-off moment.

If the people who sent Trump to Washington come to see him as having sold them out, we are going to be at a dangerous political moment. Trump could have used what scant political capital he had to do something big on trade policy, which is what his people wanted more than anything, and arguably needed. But no, they had to mess with Obamacare. Reminds me of George W. Bush using up his re-election capital in 2005 pushing for a Social Security reform that nobody but conservative elites wanted, and that failed.

UPDATE: Note comments in the thread calling into question my math re: white mortality rate. It’s not as bad as I made it sound, I’m told … but it’s still pretty horrible!

Benedict Option: ‘Purpose-Driven Premodernism’

Now on sale

I have to thank Samuel James for this great capsule description of the Benedict Option: “purpose-driven premodernism.” From his blog post about The Benedict Option book:

When I started reading, I expected this book to be mostly about how Christians can outsmart the Left. And while Rod does employ some of that culture war language, I was pleased to be proven wrong. The Benedict Option is not, at least in how Rod has laid it out in the book, primarily between Christians and secularists. It is between Christians and Christ. What surprised me about the book was how overwhelmingly concerned Rod is with Christian sanctification. This is not really a battle plan to be used against progressives. It’s an instruction manual in basic Christian faithfulness. What refreshed me about “The Benedict Option” was not how much of it seemed innovative and timely, but how much of it felt familiar and old.

At one point while reading, I wrote this in the margins: “Purpose-driven premodernism.” Here’s what I mean. Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven-Life” was a massive bestseller when it was released more than 10 years ago. Now, regardless whether you think “The Purpose-Driven Life” was mostly good, mostly bad, or a mixed bag, one thing remains true: The PDL was a book that assumed the life of a Christian was structured around spiritual habits. Warren argued that a life with purpose was one that is built around faithful spiritual practices, not a life that merely tolerated them.

That’s precisely what Rod is getting at in the Benedict Option.

Read the whole thing.  He’s really right about that: this book is far less about how to deal with the Left, and much more about how to structure our own daily lives around the pursuit of holiness — and why it is so very important to do that in these post-Christian times. As Samuel puts it, the main difference between PDL and TBO is that the former came out in 2002, and assumes a moral and spiritual stability in American culture that is not longer there.

Writing on Huffington Post, Michael Austin was also surprised by the book. Excerpt:

A year or so ago, I heard people bandying about the phrase “The Benedict Option,” but I had no idea what it was. When out of curiosity I looked into it a bit, I was pretty strongly opposed to it. Why would followers of Christ choose to withdraw from culture, especially at a time such as this? However, what I was opposed to was a mere caricature of Rod Dreher’s actual proposal in his newly published book.

Dreher’s primary audience is theologically and politically conservative Christians. There are already many reviews of the book available online, and good summaries of what the Benedict Option includes (here and here). I won’t rehearse all of the content of the book, nor will I argue with recent reviews, some of which are better, more accurate, and more helpful than others (e.g. The Atlantic, NYT, The Washington Post, WaPo again, and Comment).

However, it does seem to me that a disproportionate amount of attention has been given to what I take to be the lesser part of the book, namely, the call for Christians to withdraw from some aspects of culture, such as public school and the seeking of change via political power. What I came away with after reading the book was a renewed sense that the Church needs to redouble its efforts to be the Church, both individually and corporately.

Yes, that’s exactly right! As Marco Sermarini said in the book, when I asked him how the rest of us could have what he and his wonderful Christian community have:

“We invented nothing. We discovered nothing. We are only rediscovering a tradition that was locked away inside an old box. We had forgotten.”

Brad Littlejohn, in his thoughtful, ambivalent review, read the book in the same vein. Excerpt:

With all the buzz surrounding the book, I opened my review copy with some excitement and trepidation, but the more I kept reading, the more mystified I became what all the fuss was about. Fans and foes alike seemed to been taken in by the publishing event into thinking that something earthshaking was afoot.

But when you look at the forty-seven (or forty-three) concrete proposals that make up Dreher’s blueprint for the Benedict Option, you find instead a primer on thoughtful Christian discipleship. Dreher encourages churches to pay attention to their history, relearn liturgical rhythms, work together with other local congregations, and try to live as real communities. He encourages parents to put God at the center of their families’ lives, enforce moral norms, and think about who their kids are hanging out with. He proclaims the importance of Christian education, of Christian sexual morality, and of a Christian sense of work as vocation. In light of proposals such as these, one is forced to wonder just what is motivating the Christian intellectuals who contemptuously dismissed the book. Not only are most of these proposals simply mere Christianity, but a good number are mere common sense (for instance, “Think about your kids’ peer groups”; “don’t give your kids smartphones”; “don’t use social media in worship”; “fight pornography aggressively”). Now, to be sure, just because something is common sense does not mean it is necessarily common; in a world gone mad, stating the obvious can come across as revolutionary. But I really do think we all need to settle down and realize how ordinary and obvious most of the proposals in The Benedict Option really are.

He’s right about this. The reason I believe that Benedictine spirituality is so well-suited to our time is that it really is a meat-and-potatoes spirituality, one that is about doing ordinary things faithfully. As Leah Libresco Sargeant tells me in the book, “It’s just the church being what the church is supposed to be, but if you give it a name, that makes people care.”

She’s not being cynical, and neither am I. I embed a call to ordinary Christian discipleship within an alarmist narrative for three basic reasons.

First, I genuinely believe that conditions are alarming, and that the church needs to be shaken out of its frog-in-the-pot complacency.

Second, as Samuel James indicates in his piece, I believe that the situation is such that believing Christians have to draw back to a meaningful extent from uncritical participation in mainstream post-Christian culture, or they (we) will be assimilated.

And third, many Christians who think of themselves as countercultural actually aren’t, or at least not meaningfully so — and they need to change before it’s too late. The monastic metaphor is meant to spur that kind of thought.

More Littlejohn:

So let us ask the question that everyone is arguing about: are things really that bad? On the central issue Dreher is concerned about—the place of Christian faith in public life—I think the only realistic answer is “Yes,” more or less.

But he goes on to say that I am both too optimistic and too pessimistic. This is good:

I say “too optimistic,” since it seems to me that Dreher entirely fails to mention the three looming perils facing Western civilization that are perhaps every bit as consequential as Christianity’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” from the public square. These are:

the rapid collapse of faith in public institutions and truth-claims that threatens to reduce our society to a Hobbesian war of all against all, or at least to render us unable to engage in public deliberation or to take any preventative actions against crises natural or man-made.
The looming specter of the rapid automation of many fields of work that threatens a situation of mass unemployment and spiralling inequality for which our political and economic institutions are not adapted, and will not have time to adapt.
The likelihood of high-impact climate change, and the severe ecological, economic, demographic, and political disruptions that it is liable to engender if not dramatically slowed.

Of course, Dreher is not trying to write a book about everything, and he has been accused of being a Cassandra as it is. But any attempt to discern the future of our society , the perils that facing it, and the kinds of actions Christians must take in response is surely incomplete without taking these developments into account. Collectively, these three crises do threaten a civilizational reversal on par with what 5th– and 6th-century inhabitants of Western Europe experienced.

I think he’s right about all these things, by the way.  There are plenty more things I could have written about. This book is primarily about the spiritual life, and the life of faith. I could not make it about everything. I said nothing about depopulation and immigration in Europe, for example. But it’s there. So are many other things. But I had to limit the scope of the book somewhere. There’s only so much individual Christians and their local communities can do about climate collapse, job-killing automation. and widespread systemic degeneration. I focused on things that we do have more control over. Besides — and more importantly — if everything was going very well on all fronts, but the faith was still dying out, that would be a catastrophe for Christianity, and for humankind. From a Biblical point of view, Silicon Valley, with all its wealth and sophistication, could well be a kind of hell on earth.

Along these lines, more Littlejohn:

Sixth-century Christians faced a crumbling civilization, a vacuum of political power, but one in which Christianity was broadly accepted, if not always faithfully practiced. On the face of it at least, there is a rather stark discontinuity between the crisis that Dreher describes—triumphant secularism—and the historical analogue he invokes—civilizational collapse.

In my book, I follow Alasdair MacIntyre on this point. He says at the end of After Virtue that our wealth and technology conceals the extent of our decadence and vulnerability from us.  MacIntyre says plainly that there are big differences between our time and the Rome of late antiquity, but valid parallels exist. This is why we await “a new — and very different — St. Benedict” — that is, one suited to our times. Unlike the previous one, this new Benedict will have to inspire a world that has already known Christianity.

Remember, my book does not argue that civilization is going to collapse. It argues that Christianity in the West is already in collapse. The Rule of St. Benedict is not a program for civilizational survival, either in the conventional sense, or in the narrower sense that I’m talking about. It is nothing more than a program for how to run a monastery. But the monasteries became critically important to civilizational survival, in ways Benedict could not have anticipated, and in ways that may not have been at all clear to the monks of the early Middle Ages. For us, they are important in that they symbolize how a more disciplined religious life in community can provide spiritual, psychological, and social structures that can endure chaos and hardship, and hand the faith down from generation to generation, despite the times.

Littlejohn:

So which is our situation: are we Christians called to sustain communities of faithful witness within a powerful but hostile Empire for decades and centuries to come, or are we called to establish havens of order and virtue in the chaotic ruins of a collapsed civilization until we can rebuild strong cultural and political institutions?

I’m not sure why this distinction is so important. We are called to establish havens of order and virtue and faithful witness whether or not the Empire remains powerful and hostile, or it collapses. The challenges are very different in either case, but both require Christians to be far more countercultural, disciplined, and intentional than we are at the present time.

Here’s an important passage:

Dreher has precious little to say about what “exercising political power prudently” might look like, aside from a list of six very worthy suggestions he borrows from Kansas political leader Lance Kinzer on p. 87. Most of the book is dedicated to filling out a vision of what he calls, following anti-communist Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, “anti-political politics,” the kind of politics that a “powerless, despised minority” must embrace (91). This is not, Dreher is clear, “a retreat to a Christian ghetto.” Rather, he quotes Vaclav Benda 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’ . . . “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” (93-94). These lines should be proof enough that many of the most frequent criticisms of Dreher are based entirely on caricatures. Still, aside from insisting that these morally disciplined Benedict Option communities will necessarily prove a blessing to the undisciplined society around them, Dreher does very little to explore how the “anti-politics” of alternative community-building relates to the positive politics of loving our non-Christian neighbors through our actions in the town hall or the halls of Congress, or for that matter in the elite culture-making institutions that Hunter so emphasizes in To Change the World.

This question is more urgent for us than it is for anti-communist dissidents because we do not live under a closed totalitarian system—certainly not yet. Faithful Christians in positions of cultural and political influence in the West must work in an environment of growing hostility, and are even beginning to find doors closing in their faces. But most of the doors are still open, and although it may get harder and harder to push through them, Christians still have a duty to serve in these vocations—as lawmakers and lawyers, teachers and writers, police officers and governors, businessmen and philanthropists—as long as they have opportunity to do so. Dreher offers precious little guidance for them.

It is here, though, where I think Dreher and Hunter—the Benedict Option and Faithful Presence—can prove to be complementary models, rather than rival alternatives. Either on its own is insufficient. Hunter’s concept of faithful presence is naïve to the extent that it thinks that Christians can readily infiltrate positions of elite culture-making influence without losing their souls; he offers us presence, but will it be faithful? Dreher’s Benedict Option is sterile to the extent that encourages the formation of communities for the cultivation of faithful citizens who have no idea how to be present. What we need is a fleshing out of how we might put the two concepts together.

Fair enough, but I left it vague because I simply did not have the space in this book — which had a hard limit of 75,000 words (roughly 250 pages) — in which to cover any issue in depth. I talked about the importance of staying involved with politics and exercising political power prudently as a way to signal that I do not advocate dropping out of conventional politics. I say in the book that it is certainly possible for Christians to keep working on issues important to the common good. Given that so many people have complained for so long that I’m calling for political quietism, I wanted to say: No, I’m not. 

I elaborate on the point about prudently engaging politics by quoting an actual former politician, Lance Kinzer, who is deeply involved in religious liberty advocacy. Among the things he advises: religious conservatives need to be reasonable about what they can and cannot achieve in this post-Christian political environment, and choose their battles wisely. Giving a detailed program for this is simply beyond the scope of this book.

Also, I don’t know how I could have given more specific advice for how faithful Christians should be present within different institutions. Aside from the fact that conditions differ from field to field, things are changing so fast on the legal and cultural front that particular advice today could be out of date tomorrow. (True story: an academic friend told me about a left-wing colleague who refuses to use social media because she fears that anything she says today could be used against her tomorrow, given how militant student life is becoming, and how quickly the standards shift.) These are going to be pastoral situations in which the same answer will not work for everyone. But, if we have been spiritually formed, and are part of a strong community of believers, we are in a good position to know what to do in situations we will face. I have friends in the academy who are disgusted and planning to leave, and other friends who believe it’s worth staying to fight, though they’re going to have to be wise as serpents to do so. Which is the correct path to take in every case? How could I possibly know? There is no rule book. A well-formed believer, one who can count on wise counsel from his pastor and Christian friends, is in the best position to discern the right path in particular situations.

That said, a book devoted to developing detailed strategies for thinking through these questions and acting faithfully would be very useful. As I am growing accustomed to saying, let The Benedict Option be a catalyst for deeper, more detailed, and more focused books on broad themes raised in each of my relatively brief chapters. The Benedict Option is a broad sketch; I eagerly await other, better Christian thinkers filling in the details.

Anyway, it’s a good, long, thoughtful piece, Brad Littlejohn’s, and I commend it to you.

 

Benedict, Out Of The Rubble

Watch that short video. In it, Italian firefighters go into the crypt of the collapsed basilica in Norcia, and rescue a statue of St. Benedict that was not damaged when the earthquake caused the medieval church to fall in on itself.

They brought the statue out, and set it in the piazza. It is a sign of hope. From The Benedict Option:

The Benedictine monks of Norcia have become a sign to the world in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing this book. In August 2016, a devastating earthquake shook their region. When the quake hit in the middle of the night, the monks were awake to pray matins, and they fled the monastery for the safety of the open-air piazza.

Father Cassian later reflected that the earthquake symbolized the crumbling of the West’s Christian culture, but that there was a second, hopeful symbol that night. “The second symbol is the gathering of the people around the statue of Saint Benedict in the piazza in order to pray,” he wrote to supporters. “That is the only way to rebuild.”

The tremors left the basilica church too structurally unstable for worship, and most of the monastery uninhabitable. The brothers evacuated the town and moved to their land up the mountainside, just outside the Norcia walls. They pitched tents in the ruins of an older monastery and continued their prayer life, interrupted only by visits to the town to minister to its people.

The monks received distinguished visitors in their exile, including Italy’s prime minister Matteo Renzi and Cardinal Robert Sarah, who heads the Vatican’s liturgical office. Cardinal Sarah blessed the monks’ temporary quarters, celebrated mass with them, then told them that their tent monastery “reminds me of Bethlehem, where it all began.”

“I am certain that the future of the Church is in the monasteries,” said the cardinal, “because where prayer is, there is the future.”

Five days later, more earthquakes shook Norcia. The cross atop the basilica’s facade toppled to the ground. And then, early in the morning of Sunday, October 30, the strongest earthquake to hit Italy in thirty years struck, its epicenter just north of the town. The fourteenth-century Basilica of St. Benedict, the patron saint of Europe, fell violently to the ground. Only its facade remained. Not a single church in Norcia remained standing.

With dust still rising from the rubble, Father Basil knelt on the stones of the piazza, facing the ruined basilica, and accompanied by nuns and a few elderly Norcini, including one in a wheelchair, he prayed. Later amateur video posted to YouTube showed Father Basil, Father Benedict, and Father Martin running through the streets of the rubble-strewn town, looking for the dying who needed last rites. By the grace of God, there were none.

Back in America, Father Richard Cipolla, a Catholic priest in Connecticut and an old friend of Father Benedict’s, e-mailed the subprior when he heard the news of the latest quake. “Is there damage? What is going on?” Father Cipolla wrote.

“Yes, damage much worse,” Father Benedict replied. “But we are okay. Much to tell you, but just pray. I am well, and God continues to purify us and bring very good things.”

The next morning, as the sun rose over Norcia, Father Benedict sent a message to the monastery’s friends all over the world. He said that no Norcini had lost their lives in the quake because they had heeded the warnings from the earlier tremors and left town. “[God] spent two months preparing us for the complete destruction of our patron’s church so that when it finally happened we would watch it, in horror but in safety, from atop the town,” the priest-monk wrote.

Father Benedict added, “These are mysteries which will take years—not days or months—to understand.”

Surely that is true. But notice this: the earth moved, and the Basilica of St. Benedict, which had stood firm for many centuries, tumbled to the ground. Only the facade, the mere semblance of a church, remains. Because the monks headed for the hills after the August earthquake, they survived. God preserved them in the holy poverty of their canvas-covered Bethlehem, where they continued to live the Rule in the ancient way, including chanting the Old Mass. Now they can begin rebuilding amid the ruins, their resilient Benedictine faith teaching them to receive this catastrophe as a call to deeper holiness and sacrifice. God willing, new life will one day spring forth from the rubble.

“We pray and watch from the mountainside, thinking of the long three years Saint Benedict spent in the cave before God decided to call him out to become a light to the world,” wrote Father Benedict. “Fiat. Fiat.”

This is why The Benedict Option is not a book testifying to optimism, but a book testifying to hope.

Watch the video through to the final frames. Beautiful, just beautiful. This can be a sign to you, if you let it be. Through great suffering comes purification and renewal, if our hearts are properly disposed to receive grace.

If you want to contribute to the Norcia rebuilding effort, go here.

At Notre Dame, Standing Firm For Liberal Education

Notre Dame professor Vincent Philip Muñoz explains why he invited Charles Murray to speak at his university next week, and why he will not rescind the invitation, despite some faculty and student requests. Excerpts:

My class, “Constitutional Government & Public Policy,” addresses some of the most important and divisive issues in American politics: abortion, gay marriage, religious freedom, inequality, freedom of speech, death penalty, race and the meaning of constitutional equality, immigration, euthanasia, and pornography.

The class is designed to prompt students to think more deeply and thoughtfully about contemporary moral and political issues. I don’t assign a textbook or “neutral” readings that summarize the issues; I require students to read principled thinkers who advocate vigorously for their respective position. I want my conservative students to read smart, persuasive liberal thinkers, and I want my liberal students to read thoughtful conservatives. Educated citizens can give reasons for their beliefs and can defend intellectually the positions they hold. That requires that we understand and articulate the positions with which we disagree.

This week and next, the class is discussing inequality. Even the New York Times, which is certainly not sympathetic to Murray’s point of view, recognized that on this subject Murray makes an important argument that should be heard. And we are not reading just him. I have also assigned selections from Robert Putnam’s Our Kids. Putnam leans left; Murray is a conservative libertarian. Putnam spoke at Notre Dame last year. So this year, I invited Murray.

More:

I have no desire to inflict unwanted stress or anxiety on any member of the Notre Dame community, especially our minority students. I appreciate the concern for student wellbeing that motivates some of the opposition to Murray’s visit. But I believe what is most harmful to students—and, to speak candidly, most patronizing—is to “protect” our students from hearing arguments and ideas they supposedly cannot handle.

To study politics today requires handling controversial, difficult, and divisive topics. After discussing Princeton professor Peter Singer’s defense of abortion, one of my students told me she left class “deeply disturbed.” If you are genuinely pro-life, you probably should be disturbed by Singer’s arguments. But should I, therefore, not teach them?

And:

Given what happened at Middlebury, it would be cowardly to disinvite Murray now. Rescinding his invitation would communicate that violence works; that if you want to influence academia, sharpen your elbows, not your mind. It would tell those who engaged in violence—and those who might engage in or threaten violence—that universities will cower if you just appear intimidating. Rescinding Murray’s invitation would teach exactly the wrong lesson.

And it would teach it at exactly the wrong time.

Notre Dame is one of Charles Murray’s first post-Middlebury campus lectures. It makes our event a referendum on free speech and how universities handle controversial speakers. I didn’t intend for his visit to address these issues, but it now does. Given the trends of cancelled lectures, ever-increasing calls to disinvite speakers, and ideological bullying on college campuses, we must take a stand for civil discourse and reasoned engagement. We must show that universities can host respectful conversations among people who disagree. If we can’t accomplish that minimal academic exercise, the university has lost its purpose.

Amen. A-men! Bravo, Prof. Muñoz. This is exactly the kind of principled courage we need to be seeing on every single university campus, in defense of liberal education — a cornerstone of our civilization — against the Social Justice Warrior barbarians. More, please.

By the way, has anybody heard if a single student or other person who participated in the violent anti-Murray event at Middlebury has been disciplined over it? Seriously, anybody?

How Dante: The Epilogue

You might have missed the news that my 2015 book How Dante Can Save Your Life was published last week in paperback. The book ends in December 2014, with my father and I having a heart-to-heart conversation in the hospital, as he was waiting to be checked out. It seemed like it was going to be the big conversation I had wanted, the final reconciliation, and we came thisclose … and didn’t make it. But amazingly enough, I was okay with that, because of what I had learned from reading The Divine Comedy — or, to be more precise, because of the journey of spiritual discovery and penitence God led me on through Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

How Dante came out in the spring of 2015. Below is a version of the epilogue I would have added had I had the opportunity. Some of it appeared in a different form two years ago on this blog.

That spring, Daddy and I were getting along much better, though sadly, his physical decline accelerated. He was 80, and knew he didn’t have much time left. We all did.

One Thursday morning, he called and asked me if I would take him to Jackson, the next town, over to his barber for a haircut. I told him I would, and picked him up after lunch. As we headed back home, we got to the bridge over Thompson Creek, and he said, “You know, I figure I’m about to round the last bend.”

“Yeah, seems like it,” I said.

I asked him if there was anybody he would like me to contact on his behalf, and set up a conversation.

“No, can’t think of anybody,” he said.

“Is there anybody you would like to ask forgiveness of?” I said.

“Nope. I’ve never done anybody wrong.”

I remember exactly where we were when he said that: passing an old cemetery, and about to turn onto Audubon Lane. He said that with such guilelessness. Daddy honestly couldn’t imagine that he had every been unjust or hurtful to a soul. He was a righteous man who was certain of his righteousness.

“Daddy, look, I have to tell you something,” I said. “You’re a Christian, right.”

“Well, yeah.”

“All of us are sinners. The Lord says we have to forgive, and ask for forgiveness. There have been a lot of people you’ve hurt in life. You haven’t always been good to Mama. And between you and me, we’ve had some conflict. You didn’t always do right by me.”

He calmly explained why in those conflicts, he had been right, and done the only thing a just man could have done. I could feel my guts tensing up. But then I felt bad for bringing it up. Hadn’t we left all that back at the hospital in December?

I apologized for raising the issue again, and told him that we were past that, not to worry about it. I pulled into his driveway, got his walker out of the trunk, and helped him inside.

The next morning, I went over early to fix his weekly pillbox. By that time, he was on 15 different medications. The dosages were far too complicated for either my mother or him to keep up with, so the job fell to me. That morning — it was Good Friday — I found Daddy in his usual place, sitting on his front porch in a rocking chair, reading the newspaper and drinking his coffee. He smiled at me, wished me good morning, and dragged his walker to the side so I could lean in and kiss his cheek.

I told him that I didn’t have time to stay that morning, that I had a lot of work to do. I was going to slip in and refill his pillbox, then head on back to my house. It took about ten minutes to get the pills sorted. I dashed out the door, then leaned in to kiss him goodbye as he sat in his chair.

As I drew back after kissing his cheek, he grabbed my forearm and drew me in close. His chin was quivering. The old man looked frightened. His eyes filled with tears, and he began to stammer.

“I … I … I … I had a long talk with the Lord last night,” he began. “I talked to him about, about my transgressions against you. I told him I was sorry. And I think he heard me.”

There I stood, stunned. All my adult life, I had been waiting to hear something like that. My father, that mountain of a man, could not condescend to address his son directly and ask forgiveness. It just wasn’t in him to do. But make no mistake, that’s exactly what he was doing. It took a lot of courage for him to say what he had just said to me. With a man like my father, that was as good as it was ever going to get. But it was sincere.

I leaned back in, put my hand into the back of his thinning hair, pulled his head close, kissed him on the forehead, and told him, “Thank you. I love you.”

Then I walked away, got into my car, and drove off. I was afraid to look back at him, because I did not want to see him crying. I knew that’s exactly what he was doing.

As I drove home, I could not believe what had just happened. Daddy apologized. That wasn’t supposed to happen, ever. But it had. The previous three years, since I had been home, had been among the most painful of my life, because they compelled me to confront the profound brokenness in our family — a family in which we all loved each other, but could not live in harmony. The shocking family secret disclosed to me at the end of the Little Way of Ruthie Leming narrative — that for over 20 years, my father and my sister had been nursing a deep grudge against me for moving away, and had conditioned my sister’s children to reject me — sent me into an emotional, spiritual, and physical tailspin. Coming out of that dark, dark wood required a pilgrimage, including through the dark places of my own heart — a journey on which I was accompanied by my priest, my therapist, but which was led by Dante Alighieri.

The main things I came to understand were these.

First, I had made an idol of Family and Place, embodied most of all in the person of my father, and without knowing what I was doing, had given my father the place of God in my imagination. This is why I could never escape the sense that God may love me, but He does not approve of me, and that if only I worked harder, I could win that approval. In truth, this was how my father saw me. Becoming aware of this, disentangling God and my father within myself, and repenting of the idol worship, was the first crucial step in my healing.

Second, I had to face down my anger over the situation. My family wasn’t going to change. It seemed like every day or two, there was something else to rub my nose in the fact that I wasn’t good enough, and didn’t belong. It was unjust, and it was painful. But Dante, and my priest, told me that I could not let my anger over this prevail. As my priest put it, love is more important than justice. Besides, God wills us to love those who mistreat us. As my priest put it, if Jesus Christ, on the Cross, asked his Father to forgive those who did this to him, because he loved them just that much, what right do we have to withhold our love from those who cannot return it, or who return it in an impaired, distorted form. Piccarda, a saint in Dante’s Paradiso, explains to the pilgrim Dante that his notion of justice does not make sense in heaven. She says simply, “In His will is our peace.”

If I was going to dwell within the will of God, I had to somehow work through my brokenhearted anger and love my father. This was not going to be easy. It was going to be like climbing the sheer face of a mountain. But what else could I do?

I did it — imperfectly, God knows, but I did it. And slowly, healing came. The healing was not only immediate, of my stress-caused chronic fatigue, but more profoundly, I found the burdens I had been carrying around all my life from my complicated childhood in Daddy’s house lifted.I thought I was going to be carrying that weight all of my life, but now it was gone. Who could have imagined that? Certainly not me. Driving home that Good Friday morning, the truth came to me: that if I had known all the suffering that lay ahead for me back home, I never would have returned after Ruthie died. But if I had not done that, if I had not obeyed what my wife and I felt was a call from God to do this, I never would have been healed of this wound that I had been carrying all my life.

I never would have been there on the front porch to hear my father say, in his imperfect way, that he was sorry.

What had just happened on his front porch was my father putting a key into shackles — a key only he possessed — unlocking them, and casting off the invisible iron ball that I dragged around with me everywhere I went, and had done for most of my life.

I was free. And so, in a way, was my father.

As I said earlier, Daddy’s falling-apart physically accelerated that spring. The decay of his body was, for him, a terrible cross. He became housebound. In early summer, he entered a home hospice program. He spent the summer of 2015 waiting to die, measuring out his days in the pilgrimage from his bedroom to his chair in the living room, to his rocking chair on the front porch, and back again.

For my dad, every day he could not go outside and do something was a humiliation. About two weeks before he died, I heard him telling some visitors that he hoped to build his strength back up so he could get out of the house and onto his Mule, a small farm truck, and ride to his back acreage to check on his pine trees. In his final days, he told me once, from his hospital bed, that he needed to exercise his arms so he could regain strength in them. I thought: Are you kidding? He wasn’t.

Daddy was one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever known, but he distrusted contemplation. He was a man of action. Indeed, his entire sense of self depended on his ability to do things. Ray Dreher housebound and bedridden was not Ray Dreher at all, not in his mind. His greatest suffering, I think, was his loss of identity. This is something that was hard for me to understand, until I thought how different I would be if I lost my ability to read and write. It is impossible to conceive of myself in that mode of living. Would it be living at all? When I thought of my dad’s physical decline in that way, it made sense to me, and made me more compassionate. The idea of spending my old age in my armchair with a book in my lap sounds like paradise, but to him, it was a kind of hell.

Daddy felt useless, and in a different culture, this would have tempted him to euthanasia. Nearly everything that gave his life meaning had been taken from him. He could not stand to be dependent on anybody, for anything, but in the last period of his life, he could not do anything on his own. Why did he not kill himself? Perhaps it was out of Christian conviction, but I think it’s closer to the truth to say that he thought it would be the coward’s way out. Better to bear it till the end. And that he did. Several times over the last week of his life, I stood at the foot of his bed, reciting Psalm 90, and stopping over these lines:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

He was eighty, and indeed the final decade of his life was toil and travail. Yet he endured, as a good Stoic would. What he could not see — maybe because Southern culture is traditionally more Stoic than Christian — is that he was not useless to the rest of us. His utility was in giving us a chance to serve him.

Father Matthew, my priest, liked to say that living in community causes us to rub the rough edges off of each other. This is true. Daddy was not easy to care for, even though he was not a complainer. He could be demanding, and gruff; my mom bore the brunt of this. It wasn’t that he was ungrateful, not at all, but that it grieved him to have to depend on the charity of others. Maybe, though, the Lord used this to free his soul from its pride. I know he used it to free me to some extent from mine.

One day, in August, I received a call from him. Would I come over and help lift him off the couch and into his wheelchair so he could get back to bed? He had finally become too weak to stand at all, and my mother couldn’t lift him on her own. I sped over to their house, about a mile away. Mama and I wrestled to get Daddy into the wheelchair, and finally succeeded. The pain of humiliation on his face was searing. In the right order of things — and my father was a Bayou Confucian, who believed in right order — he was the one helping others. For Ray Dreher, to be dependent on anybody else was like the tearing of the veil in the Temple — the violent disruption of the cosmos.

Yet there he was, defeated by time. Mama and I helped him to settle in the hospital bed that the hospice folks had set up in his bedroom. He would not get out of that bed again, until the undertaker carried him to the hearse.

I moved in that morning with my dad. This was the end, we all knew. My mother was too exhausted to continue in her role as caregiver. I asked her to move into the guest room, and to let me take the bed she and my father had slept in for most of their marriage. It was next to his hospital bed, so I could be there to attend him.

I count it one of the great privileges of my life to have been able to live with Daddy on his last eight days on earth, and to sleep right beside him, helping him with all his needs, and giving my mom a break. (I should note here that his devoted friend John Bickham was heroic in his service to my dad and mom, doing far more than I did, or could have done.)  As it turns out, the greatest gift my father gave me in life was the opportunity to help him when he was helpless, to suffer with him, to pray with him, to give him the medicines that helped him, to moisten his mouth when he could no longer swallow, and to pour myself out for him as I was seeing others, especially John Bickham, do.

If anyone thinks of the sick, the elderly, or the infirm as useless — or if they think of themselves as useless — send them to me. They are gifts to the rest of us to make us more compassionate, and more Christ-like, therefore more human. It was hard to look upon the wreckage of my once-handsome, once-strong father’s body as he lay dying this past week, but it was also a lesson in humanity, and a lesson in divinity. And it was a lesson that my action-hero daddy taught me about the value of not simply thinking about things, but acting on those thoughts.

I thought more than once over the past week, sitting at my dad’s bedside, about the example of Pope St. John Paul II, who bore his own physical suffering bravely and publicly. In his 1984 letter on the meaning of suffering, he said that suffering is a mystery, the answer to which is … love. This is the meaning of the Cross. As the Pope wrote:

Christ does not explain in the abstract the reasons for suffering, but before all else he says: ‘Follow me!’ Come! Take part through your suffering in this work of saving the world….Gradually, as the individual takes up his cross, spiritually uniting himself to the Cross of Christ, the salvific meaning of suffering is revealed before him.

Hospice provided Daddy with morphine to ease his pain and suffering. My job — and John Bickham’s job — was to administer it to him regularly. His mind was clear for a couple of days, but he began to recede into the mist, sleeping a lot, and seeming not quite to return to us when he would wake up. I read to him, prayed with him, prayed over him, talked with him, rubbed lotion into his dry, pencil-thin legs, and did everything I could to let him know that he was loved, and he was not alone. We never had a single “meaningful” conversation that week — but then, we didn’t have to. The communication was wordless.

We telephoned my sister’s daughter Claire at boarding school to tell her it was time to come home to say goodbye to Paw. I was nervous about her coming home. Claire had kept her distance from me out of devotion to her mother’s warning that Uncle Rod, who had gone to the city and gotten above himself, was not to be trusted. She is a sweet, kind girl, but she is most like her mother in her sense of loyalty. For my sister, my leaving home was above all a sign of disloyalty to the family. For Clair, to disobey Mama’s directive would have been to be disloyal to her memory.

But Claire is a devout Evangelical Christian. We both took the faith seriously. Why wasn’t that enough to bridge the chasm between us? Maybe it was. That night, from my chair next to Daddy’s bed, I heard Claire come into my mother’s kitchen at the other end of the house. I decided to do something bold. I went into the kitchen and asked Claire if she wanted to come join me at Paw’s bedside and pray for him.

Her face brightened into a big smile. “I was hoping you would ask.”

And so we did, until he drifted off to sleep. We sat there in the dark of his room, illuminated only by his bedside lamp, not knowing what to say to each other. Then, remembering my lesson from Dante — that no spiritual progress comes without humility — I summoned up the courage to put my hand on her right forearm and to speak.

“Claire,” I said, “I know things have been difficult between us since I came back. I want to ask your forgiveness for all that I have done to hurt you, and to make this hard on you.”

She drew back and gasped. Then the words rushed out: “We don’t hate you! We don’t!”

My niece, then 16, told me what had happened. Her mother, Ruthie, had done everything she could to shield her daughters from the reality of her suffering. Though she was deteriorating in front of their eyes, she would not talk about it, or let them dwell on it. To think about death and dying would be in some sense to weaken her resolve. Her approach to suffering was: ignore it, and push on through. On the day Ruthie died, when a family friend went to the school to fetch Claire and her sister Rebekah, they were genuinely shocked by the news.

“How is that possible?” I asked. “She was skin and bones there at the end. How could you ignore it?”

“We only saw what we wanted to see,” Claire told me. “That’s how Mama wanted it, and that’s how it was.”

After we buried Ruthie, said Claire, everybody who surrounded the girls went out of their way to distract them from their grief and suffering. They thought they were doing the right thing. But what happened, Claire told me, was that nobody allowed them to mourn. The girls felt thrust into a position of getting on with life, of acting as if nothing catastrophic had happened. No point in talking about it, in discussing Mama. Just keep moving forward.

“We didn’t know what to do except to fall back on the things we were raised with,” Claire said. “That meant thinking of Uncle Rod as the bad guy. I am sorry for that.”

So there it was: those girls had been deprived by their mother and our broader family of the contemplation of suffering and death, as a misguided way to protect them. And when death finally came, they were not prepared, and those who surrounded them also believed that caring for them meant keeping them happy — and happiness meant the effective denial of death.

I forgave Claire. She forgave me. We embraced. Right there by Paw’s deathbed, we embraced. New life emerged from our gathering to pray over the dying patriarch.

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

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

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

We all said the Lord’s Prayer together over his body, then sang “I’ll Fly Away.” Someone went to call the funeral home. The word went out to the community that Mr. Ray had passed. People started coming by to pay their respects, as they do.

He died just after four in the afternoon. Mourners didn’t leave my mom’s house until after ten. I made it back to my own place at 10:30, utterly exhausted. It was the first time I had been home in eight days. I sat down at my kitchen table, alone with my thoughts, marveling at the sense of calm I felt. I had just watched my father die, and lived through the day that all my life I have dreaded above all others. The thought of the world without my father in it was intolerable to me, and terrifying. I don’t know why, but it was. It was as if I would be annihilated without his presence to ground me, and all of us. Fear of his death was something close to a terror for me.

And yet, here we were. Daddy was gone. And I had no thought other than gratitude for his life, and gratitude that he was no longer in pain. The future did not appear frightening at all, nor did the present. All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, as Julian of Norwich wrote. I felt this powerfully.

How was this possible? By what means did this gift come to me?

Then it hit me: “In His will is our peace.” The words of Piccarda. Dante had led the way for me to dwell in the Lord’s will, not my own. And in that was harmony, was the peace that passes all understanding.

In His will is our peace. Believe it. Live it. Suffer for it. There is no other way through this life of exile, to the far shore of home. This is the higher justice, and it is Love itself.

Read the entire book. If you are observing Lent, How Dante is the book for you in this penitential season.

No. 7

That’s the newest New York Times Bestseller List, released late this afternoon (it will be in the weekend papers). The Benedict Option debuts at No. 7. What a humbling thing to have happened. Thank all of you who bought my book, or who contributed in some way to its creation these past few years.

Speaking of humbling, I just got home from the Divine Liturgy, which we celebrate on Wednesdays during Lent. In the liturgy, we all say this ancient penitential prayer, the Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian, and prostrate ourselves three times during it:

O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.

But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Thy servant.

Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother, for blessed art Thou, unto ages of ages. Amen.

With my head forehead touching the floor, I realized that I had something to publicly repent of, and to apologize for. Yesterday, I got into a rather disedifying public spat with an academic who made what I consider to be racially charged, low-down comments about my book. I responded by getting sarcastic on this blog in response. He subsequently went lower. Not a good look for either of us.

I deeply believe that his comments were disgraceful and a smear. But that does not excuse my provocative reaction. I wish I had had the grace to ignore what he said, focusing instead on “my own transgressions,” which are many, instead of adding fuel to the fire. My anger and my pride tripped me up, and I was wrong to give in to them. I apologize for that, and for contributing to scandal among Christian readers. I removed the material that caused the controversy from the previous blog post.

Now, a treat for you all: excerpts of the text of dear Uncle Chuckie’s review of The Benedict Option:

My friend Rod Dreher has struck again. He has this horrible habit of writing books that I am supposed to dislike and failing miserably because I end up liking them. The Benedict Option, A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation is no exception.

This one is different in one important way from his previous works. I am not the market. I’m really not the market. I’m the Enemy.

Now, when I say that, I do not mean that I, the person Uncle Chuckie, am the enemy. I may represent all the things that the Enemy is but Rod is a good friend and regularly prays for me to see the light. So, ok, now that you are totally confused, I’m going to try to give a little background.

More:

We are living in a time of civilizational transformation. Christianity, in any of its forms, is no longer the only game in town. Its words often fail to persuade and it usually lacks the power to coerce. Often it is the opposite, which is why the book was written in the first place. The real civilizational battle now is what is going to replace Christianity as the dominant religion and what, if any, will be the place of Christianity in that future, when the Gates of Hell will have seemed to prevail. The strength of this book is that it advises hunkering down for the long term. The weakness is not in the book itself but in the assumption that at some future time the folks of the Benedict Option will emerge to rebuild Western Civilization that has collapsed. But what if Western Civilization does not collapse but changes in ways that make what the Benedict Option has to offer merely irrelevant curiosities of a bygone age, as alien to the men of that time as the days of St. Benedict are to us?

When Men walk the stars as easily as to the corner store and look at a mountain and say, “Take a little off the top and leave the sideburns,” what will the Benedict Option have to say that they will be interested in hearing? In “The Year of Our Ford” who will care?

We do not know. To Rod, the effort must be made and as his friend I wish him well though I believe it will fail.

That all been said, read this book. You will find it interesting even if at times mystifying and infuriating.

Now, for one minor but funny aside. I found the subtitle, “A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian World” interesting for the simple reason that back in 1988 I wrote small manual as part of a larger project with the subtitle, “A Strategy for the Age of Chaos.” Seems one of us has been onto something.

Read the whole thing. When I meet people at speaking events, readers of this blog, somebody inevitably asks, “Is Uncle Chuckie for real?” When I tell them that verily, he is, they often ask, “How do you put up with him?”

The truthful answer is: Because I love him. He’s the damnedest eccentric, and you know how I feel about eccentrics. There, I’ve said it. Now, that should blow his psionics helmet sky-high.

Is The Benedict Option Only For The Privileged?

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From my interview with Crux, the Catholic web magazine:

The Benedict Option offers some strong proposals-such as homeschooling or pursuing classical Christian education, relocating to live in more intentional Christian communities, and rethinking employment so as not to compromise religious commitments. Does this limit the Benedict Option to a very wealthy and privileged group of Christians that can afford to take such measures?

That’s a good question, and it might well could do that. For example, homeschooling is not exclusively the province of the well-off middle class, but it does take having one parent at home to be able to pull this off successfully and one parent with a high enough income that can support the family, so that does limit it.

At the same time, I think that we have to start somewhere, and it can’t be the case that we have to wait to come up with a Benedict Option proposal that can suit everyone in all places before we start doing some small things. I think we have to work outward and make this something that can take in more people, such as the working class and the poor.

I’m thinking now of this classical Christian school in Dallas-the West Dallas Community School-it’s in the poorest part of Dallas and it brings classical Christian education to the poorest of the poor, almost all of whom in that neighborhood are African American or Hispanic. The school exists primarily out of the generosity of white Christians who are well-off in another part of Dallas and are reaching out to the poor and supporting them with their donations, expertise, and all kind of things. So, that’s a start-that’s one Benedict Option community that is a good example for the rest of us.

I think that ultimately, just as the church is not “the middle class in prayer” or “the upper class in prayer,” so too, the Benedict Option must avoid the same thing. But, we have to start somewhere and I don’t want people to get so discouraged that they don’t try to be creative and to be what Pope Benedict called us to be: “creative minorities.”

Caleb Bernacchio takes this question to a deeper level in an Ethika Politika column today. Excerpt:

In the beginning of the book, Dreher offers, what might be termed, a conservative Christian reading of MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Where MacIntyre made passing reference to Saint Benedict, Dreher – through a reading of the Rule and a detailed portrait of life in the Benedictine Monastery in Norcia – offers a powerful vision of communal life centered upon shared goods and cooperative social relations. In doing this he gives flesh to MacIntyre’s brief reference, illustrating the qualities that MacIntyre must have appreciated in the Benedictines, qualities that make for a striking contrast with today’s atomistic social relations.

Dreher goes beyond MacIntyre, arguing that what matters today is the preservation of Christianity in the face of the contemporary secularism. But it seems incredible to suggest that preserving or establishing a Christian culture – even if only within the confines a Benedict Option community – could somehow avoid considering such basic questions about human needs. As Irenaeus said, gloria Dei est vivens homo – typically paraphrased as the Glory of God is man fully alive. What is lacking in The Benedict Option, and what is needed, is a holistic vision of human flourishing that contextualize Dreher’s concerns with secularism. Otherwise Benedict’s Rule will only be relevant to those who are relatively well-off.

Dreher discuses “anti-political” politics and religious liberty at length. This account hesitantly points toward a post-communitarian politics. What I mean by this is that it points toward a type of politics that treats the state as a bureaucratic institution to be configured in whatever manner best promotes the common good of local communities and associations. In doing this, Dreher moves closer to MacIntyre’s own position on the state, which is often mistakenly equated with quietism (see Elizabeth Bruenig for a recent example of this mistake). Instead MacIntyre has favored a range of federal and state-level political programs, things like universal basic income, school vouchers, congressional reform, and legislation to support those with disabilities.

Where MacIntyre acknowledges that local communities depend upon public goods provided by the state, Dreher focuses myopically on one public good, religious liberty. One wonders, how much does religious liberty really matter to someone who is unemployed and lacking healthcare? Dreher ought to expand his vision; Benedict Option communities require a robust state and federal politics aimed at securing all of the conditions needed for local communities to thrive.

While Dreher’s discussion of education raises serious concerns that cannot be ignored by any parent, it is unclear how Dreher’s proposals – the founding of classical schools or homeschooling – can be implemented by the vast majority of people, who are lacking time and financial resources for either suggestion. Again this points to a broader, more radical vision of local community where these needs can be better addressed as well as toward political efforts.

I think these are all fair and challenging points. In my defense, I would say that The Benedict Option is by no means a comprehensive book, nor was it ever intended to be. I’ve been dialoguing with Caleb Bernacchio about this stuff for a couple of years, and I’ve been telling him that the depth of his concerns would be far beyond the scope of the relatively short book I was going to write. And so it has proved to be. I have also been encouraging him for a couple of years to write the book on political economy in the Benedict Option that he wishes I had written. I renew that call today. It’s a seriously important book, one that needs to be written.. I’m just starting Adrian Pabst and John Milbank’s The Politics Of Virtue, which sounds a lot like the book Caleb wants to read.

By the way, every one of my chapters could have been — and could be — a book of its own. My hope for The Benedict Option is that it starts conversations, and inspires other Christians who have the passion and the expertise to go deeper in these areas to take the plunge. It is far more a question-raiser of a book than a question-answerer. As I say repeatedly in The Benedict Option, we small-o orthodox Christians are all going to need to work out our future together, as creative minorities.

To Caleb’s points, though, I fully concede that some of the proposals in the book are not available to the poor and working class. That does not mean we shouldn’t implement them, or at least try. It only means that we need to expand our thinking and our commitment to making these goods available to the entire community, beyond our economic class. I don’t believe it is necessary to have a Total Theory of The Benedict Option™ worked out before observing that the liberal order in which we live is breaking down and becoming ever more antagonistic to Christianity, and that the church had better quit taking its liberties and its character for granted.

I believe that the Benedict Option can exist under a liberal welfare state, and under illiberal regimes. I am especially focused on religious liberty, not because I don’t care about health care, national security, economic progress, and all the other aspects of ordinary political life. I focus on religious liberty because without it, the things we Christians (and all religious people) value most of all will be at risk. I can live as a Christian under Swedish socialism, and I can live as a Christian under Texas free-market libertarianism, and I can live as a Christian under Putin-style illiberalism, and so forth. But if you pare down my religious liberties, especially my ability to participate in Christian institutions governed by Christian beliefs, and my ability to buy, to sell, and to work — well, we’ve got a big problem.

As a general disposition, I favor federalism and localism, but I do not have an ideological hostility to the state per se. What I object to is the state moving into the vacuum left by the ongoing collapse of civil society and mediating institutions. Religious liberty is so important to defend because it preserves our ability to function in society as members of mediating institutions.

About schooling, it is certainly the case that most people will not be able to afford classical Christian schools, or private schooling at all. This is where vouchers and charter schools can help as a matter of policy. Beyond that, I think it’s a tremendously important ministry opportunity for local churches to start or expand classical Christian schools, and subsidize tuition for poor and working class children, as well as involve church members in mentorship activities. The West Dallas Community School is a terrific model. If I had it to do over again, I would have featured it in The Benedict Option as an alternative model, alongside St. Jerome Academy in Hyattsville, Maryland. But don’t think that St. Jerome, a Catholic parish school, is only for the middle-class and the well-to-do. From the book:

The new St. Jerome Academy made a priority of reaching out to parents and involving them in the life of the school and its classical vision. And the team followed a small-c catholic educational vision, rejecting the idea that classical education was only for highly intentional Catholics.

“This doesn’t mean you accept anybody into the school,” says Currie. “There are some kids who may not be able to profit from a classical education and will disrupt others in their classes. But that number is very small. We’re very diverse and have students from every racial and socioeconomic group. Once parents see the difference it makes in the kids, they’re sold. The way we see it, this education is for people from all walks of life.”

The school’s team sees classical education in part as a form of evangelism. It’s not even 100 percent Catholic in its population — but it is 100 percent Catholic in its vision and curriculum. I learned in my reporting that some parents have been so moved by the education their kids received at St. Jerome — not just the content, but the form of learning — that they converted to Catholic Christianity.

Again: I think it’s a mistake to think we have to have it all worked out in advance before we try anything at all. The Tipi Loschi started the Scuola G.K. Chesterton with only a handful of students. They’ve grown from there, and reach out to the entire community. You don’t have to be part of the Tipi Loschi fellowship to attend the school, but you do have to be willing to send your kids into a classical school that is vigorously Catholic. The school raises money to help provide scholarships for poor and working-class kids. Marco Sermarini and his Tipi Loschi colleagues did not have all of this worked out when they started the school. They took a couple of steps, and certain paths opened for them.

Point is, I welcome the efforts of Caleb Bernacchio and everybody else to figure out what the Benedict Option concept can mean in all aspects of our lives as Christians — political, educational, communal, and so forth. It’s not just a nice phrase when I say that we need each other; I really mean it. In my original plan for the book, I had hoped to visit the Mondragon cooperative in Spain, which I learned about through Caleb. It turned out that I did not have the time to do that before the deadline the publisher gave me. Besides, I had a hard limit on the number of words I could write, which strictly limited how long each chapter could be.

(People have this idea that writers have full control over the length of their books, but it’s not always the case. Believe it or not, unless you a well-established popular author, books that are much longer than The Benedict Option, which comes in just shy of 250 pages, I think, are less commercially viable. If you read this blog, you know how long I tend to write. I could have easily written The Benedict Option at 500 pages, and not batted an eye. But the audience for a book that long would have been very small. This is where having an editor is a godsend. It really is.)

Look, there honestly are a hundred things that occurred to me after I finished the book, things that I wish I had put in there, or wanted to rewrite to put in there. This can’t be helped. But please, don’t let the shortcomings of my little book dissuade you writers and journalists and academics who find the Benedict Option concept important and interesting from writing books of your own focusing more narrowly and in depth. There’s so much out there to learn. Last week, when I was at the Bruderhof in the Hudson River Valley, I visited the small factory where they make the furniture and other things with which the movement supports itself. It’s a communal endeavor that has been quite successful. There are lessons we can all earn from them.

There are plenty more books to be written about being creative, entrepreneurial minorities. Mine is only a seed. If The Benedict Option has you thinking and talking about it, by all means, write a book yourself! Teach me, and teach all of us. Nothing would make me happier than my book having encouraged a hundred writers to do books expanding on the themes in it.

SJWs Take Tim Keller’s Scalp

This is terrible news:

Faced with mounting criticism for its decision to give a major award to the Rev. Tim Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and one of the country’s best known conservative Christian thinkers, Princeton Theological Seminary has reversed course and said Keller will not receive the honor.

In an email to faculty and students on Wednesday morning (March 22), the president of the venerable mainline Protestant seminary, the Rev. Craig Barnes, said that he remains committed to academic freedom and “the critical inquiry and theological diversity of our community.”

But he said that giving Keller the annual Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Witness – named after a famous Dutch neo-Calvinist theologian – might “imply an endorsement” of Keller’s views against the ordination of women and LGBTQ people.

Barnes said the seminary would not give award the Kuyper Prize to anyone this year.

Get a load of this:

But he said that after talks with Keller, the chair of the Kuyper Committee, and the chair of the Board of Trustees, Keller had agreed to deliver the annual Kuyper Lecture on April 6 as planned.

“We are a community that does not silence voices in the church,” Barnes wrote [Emphasis mine — RD]. “In this spirit we are a school that can welcome a church leader to address one of its centers about his subject, even if we strongly disagree with his theology on ordination to ministry. Reverend Keller will be lecturing on Lesslie Newbigin and the mission of the church – not on ordination.”

Tim Keller is a far wiser man than I will ever be, so I’m not going to second-guess his decision to give the lecture anyway, though I doubt very much that his Social Justice Warrior critics, having taken the Kuyper Prize from him and humiliated the seminary administration, will be satisfied to let him come speak. If I were Tim Keller, I would let the dying Mainline bury the dying Mainline, and not bother with them. Mainline Protestantism in most places has become a suicide cult. Keller is one of the most successful missionary pastors in the country, a man who has won the respect even of secular liberals like Nicholas Kristof, surely has something to teach other Christians, even those who disagree with his theology (as I do, to a certain extent).

But a man of his great public accomplishment and widely-acknowledged irenicism cannot be honored by Princeton Theological Seminary because he is an orthodox Presbyterian Christian, and progressive Presbyterians consider that sort of Christian to be wicked.

Mark this well. It’s Neuhaus’s Law in action: Wherever orthodoxy is optional, it will eventually be proscribed. Look, if I were running PTS, I would draw lines too around who would and would not receive awards, based on their theology. The point is that what was long considered to be Christian orthodoxy is now considered so offensive that a Mainline Protestant seminary cannot honor an accomplished pastor who professes these things.

This incident is also a sign that liberalism, in the broad sense, is dying. Commenter Raskolnik said in another thread on this blog this morning that the only viable alternatives are Revolution or Reaction. The more the Left pushes the Right — even mainstream figures like Tim Keller — out of their institutions and the public square, the more radical people on the Right will become. The center is not holding.

UPDATE: 

On the standard articulated by Princeton Theological Seminary, they could not give the award to ANY faithful Christian. https://t.co/jGcA3KLsCm

— Denny Burk (@DennyBurk) March 22, 2017

What Is Christianity For?

A terrific post by sociologist Jeff Guhin, a thoughtful left-wing critic of The Benedict Option, talking about declining Christianity, social norms, and sexuality.  He begins by talking about MacIntyre and liberalism, noting that the philosopher went from Marxism to Catholicism without having had an intervening liberal stage (N.B., he means “liberal” in the historic sense of the term, in which most people who live in a liberal democracy are liberals):

Nowadays we’re a society a bit more aware of the difference between left and liberal, but there are still way too many people who just sort of figure freedom happens.  A certain kind of liberal thinks that people basically just grow up free you don’t have to worry too much about it, and the really important thing is just not to let other folks tell you what to do (or to tell others what to do).  Marxists-and in a different way, Catholics–recognize this as bullshit. We’re free in particular kinds of ways because of how we are raised (and, you know, our economic conditions, but this where the two groups might vary a bit).  And so when society changes, it can change us in ways that we can’t really be protected from, despite our earnest love of freedom, etc.

That’s very well and pungently said. Everything in a given society and culture is part of a grand liturgy, a narrative enacted, that forms us. More Guhin:

Now that’s a pretty harsh take on liberalism, which, you know, exists in no small part because the era before liberalism had lots of Europeans with very strong beliefs killing each other. Liberalism–and with it, democracy–trades the promise of utopia for the promise of not having your head cut off by utopians who disagree with you.

But what are we so afraid of? What’s the problem from which we need protection?  Dreher pulls from a lot of work by the sociologist Christian Smith to describe how contemporary young Christians basically have no idea what they’re talking about: members of a religion don’t know some of their own basic theological tenets, setting up what Smith calls a “moralistic therapeutic deism”: be nice and be happy is, apparently, all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

That’s right enough, I suppose, even if it’s a very Evangelical Protestant way of thinking about religion, emphasizing right belief (orthodoxy) over right action (orthopraxy).  One of the weird things about the history of the category of “religion” is that it was developed by Protestants who are, on both global and historical scales, the weirdest form of religion.  Most things we’ve come to call religions care a lot more about what you do (praxis) than what you believe (doxa): so it’s actually not super surprising a lot of religious people have no idea what the hell they’re talking about.  Of course, Smith et al would say this is a problem not just for non-Protestants, but for Protestants too: the intricacies of belief don’t seem to matter even for the ostensibly orthodox.

Well, let me push back on this. I am part of the Orthodox Church, whose name means “right belief.” Theological orthodoxy is a very big deal to us. But that does not mean orthopraxy is diminished, not at all. The connection is this: if we do not know what to believe, then we will not know what to do. 

The relationship goes both ways. Practices can be catechetical. I wonder if a distinction Prof. Guhin is missing is that Christianity is supposed to bring about gradual inner change in a person’s life. All of mortal life is a time of pilgrimage, in which, if we are faithful, we are moving ever closer to the ideal of Jesus Christ, conforming our life to his. It’s not a question of earning salvation, not at all; it’s a question of inner transformation, of dying to self so that we may live in Christ. Orthodoxy (right belief) is the map, and orthopraxy (right practice) is what we do when we follow the map’s directions towards our ultimate destination.

(This description may not ring true to certain Protestants, but it is at least what Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians believe, and, I imagine, what many Protestants do as well.)

Guhin introduces the matter of sex into the debate, saying that I have a historically distorted view of how sexual the world was prior to the 1960s Sexual Revolution. I disagree. Nobody who has written a book about Dante, as I have, and read the history of Florence in the High Middle Ages, could possibly think there was a golden age of chastity. The point is that with the Sexual Revolution — which, as Guhin correctly notes, was driven by the advent of a new technology: the Pill — society changed the way it thought about sex and sexuality. Mind you, the social and moral groundwork for this revolution had been laid down decades before, but the Pill was the Martin Luther of the Sexual Revolution.

The Pill changed orthodoxy and orthopraxy about sex. In Christian thought, sex has a telos, an end goal, which is childbearing. It has a secondary goal (some would say an equally important goal), which is the total unity of the couple. Sex never was a casual thing, done for pure pleasure. As Philip Rieff has written, sexual discipline was one big area that distinguished the early Christians from the pagan Romans around them. A great book to read about this is the classicist Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among The People, which explains how teachings on sexuality and the role of women that 21st century Westerners find hard to take were in fact liberating to women living in the first-century Roman Empire.

As we have seen since the 1960s, the practices made possible by the Pill changed the beliefs people had about sex, marriage, and family. The divorce revolution in the 1970s and 1980s was phase two of the Sexual Revolution. The rise of gay rights and the normalization of homosexuality is the most recent phase, and we have now moved into obliterating the differences between male and female. So, when critics of orthodox Christians gripe that we’re all hung up about sex, I believe they have in mind some prudish vicar sniffing at the young people getting handsy with each other. No. We’re talking about a Revolution that overturned Christian beliefs in the meaning of sex, marriage, and even male and female. We’re talking a new anthropology; see a more detailed explanation in this short essay I wrote for TAC.

Back to Guhin’s blog entry:

But then there are hard questions about Christians’ specific roles to change the culture, something to which Dreher is (very) sensitive, though his critics are divided on whether he goes far enough. This raises some interesting questions about how religious conservatives think about culture and how people are able to change (and be changed) by it.  I can appreciate how certain religious conservatives like Dreher (see also Patrick Deneen) recognize that capitalism is not always so great, that it can, in fact, lead to a greedy, callous materialism (to wit: this fellow) rather than any sort of Christian leadership.  And I think people like Dreher are right that that sort of procedural liberalism is hard to escape, perhaps even requiring a tactical retreat.

And this gets to something Dreher is very worried about and for what it’s worth, I think he’s right! Christianity in a certain strong form might well be dying, at least in the United States and Western Europe.  Of course, Peter Berger famously changed his mind about secularization theory, so, you know, we might be wrong about this as well.  But it does look like a certain form of Christianity–the kind that insists only Jesus can get you into heaven and the institution of marriage must look a certain way–is dying out.

More Guhin:

It’s a fair point that once Christianity says you don’t need it to get into heaven, it doesn’t seem to do as well (though the strict church argument is still somewhat controversial and I’m not convinced by the rational choice underpinnings, it still seems pretty useful).  And Dreher’s right: robust pluralism is hard (even if other orthodox Christians think it’s worth it still tro try).

Yet what’s hard for some is whether or not the dying of a certain kind of Christianity is such a tragedy once you don’t believe you need Christianity for heaven.

I see what he’s getting at, though that’s a very Evangelical Protestant way to think about religion.