Rod Dreher's Blog, page 477

Feminists Abort Unborn Jesus

Sometimes, the true nature of the great battle before us becomes horribly clear:

In Pope Francis’s home country of Argentina, pro-women rallies of any sort have become synonymous for attacks on churches and on the Catholic faith.

This week was no different, when, on March 8, as the world marked the United Nations-sponsored International Women’s Day, a woman dressed like the Virgin Mary pretended to have an abortion in front of a cathedral.

The events took place in Tucuman, a northern province in Argentina, where thousands rallied in favor of equal pay for women and against femicide. In Argentina during 2016, a woman was murdered by her male partner every 30 hours, so it’s not as if there weren’t reasons for the protest.

Yet as has happened in many other countries, a rally that was once about equality between women and men has also become for most of those participating a rally in favor of abortion, a practice that is forbidden in Argentina unless the life of the mother is threatened by pregnancy.

Hence, in what is being described as “an artistic representation” by some, a group of women pretended to do an abortion on a woman dressed like a very pregnant Virgin Mary in front of a Catholic cathedral in a clearly provocative gesture.

The gruesome images, which include what looks like blood and baby parts coming out from under the woman’s dress, were shared thousands of times on Facebook.

An organization called “Socorro Rosa Tucuman” organized the fake abortion. On their Facebook page, they wrote: “In Tucuman, the Virgin aborted in the cathedral the patriarchate, the mandatory heterosexuality and the mandates of this reprising society and demanded all misogynist of this medieval province to remove her image from every maternity ward, to stop forbidding abortions in her name, that he, throwing this abortion in the face of monsignor Zecca [the local Catholic archbishop], this rotten fetus, conceived only for the raping system that mandates us to forced maternity.”

That wasn’t the only thing feminists in Argentina did. More:

In the southern city of Bahia Blanca, the Catholic cathedral was painted with pro-abortion and anti-church remarks. In Buenos Aires, a group of women who had participated in the Women’s March, tried to bring down the protective fencing the police had set up in front of the cathedral, former home of Pope Francis.

Bare-chested protesters lit up a fire in front of the building, while chanting “The only church that illuminates is one that is burning,” “take your rosaries out of our ovaries,” and several other similar songs. A few dozen women were arrested by the police.

A young man who stood in front of the group, holding a Vatican flag, defending the church, was violently attacked.

Read the whole thing. The article includes an image of the Virgin’s “abortion”. I won’t repost it here, but if you can stomach it, you should look at it, so you will understand the rage and the hatred that we face.

Recalling a recent Facebook debate about it, Eric Mader writes that secularists who blaspheme in this way are only hurting themselves. Excerpt from Mader’s exchange with a correspondent:

Two points:

1) If there exists a God anything like God as understood in Western monotheism, then the virgin birth as a literal event is of course eminently possible, as are any other miracles, including the universe suddenly folding up into nothing or being rearranged on entirely new laws. As an orthodox Christian, I view miracles in this lens.

2) There are however many Christians who do not believe in the virgin birth as a literal event, who understand it as a myth, but show respect to the story itself as an ancient part of their tradition, that Christian tradition that grounds some of the most crucial elements in their present-day culture: its legal norms, its concepts of history, its notions of justice, its critique of vulgar wealth and power.

On at least this second basis you might at least recognize that in mocking Christianity you are a little like the man high up in a tree sawing away at the branch he’s sitting on.

In any case you should have enough of a sense of history to understand the following: All great civilizations have risen up on myths and died when these myths fell into disrepute. You as a person wouldn’t be what you are today, and your country, England, wouldn’t be what it is today if it weren’t for Christianity. Many of the things you take for granted–the Western concept of human rights for one–arose from and because of the Judeo-Christian inheritance.

Which is to say: Westerners who think there’s any virtue in mocking their own culture’s religion tradition are like spoiled teenagers who scoff at their parents, the people who fed and raised and taught them. How do such kids look to you? This is where you’re putting yourself with these kinds of statements.

If the Christianity these deranged, satanic women so despise were to disappear, the will-to-power world that will replace it will not suit them. To put it mildly.

 

The Rose And The Cross

Feast of the Holy Cross, St. Matthew’s Orthodox Church, Baton Rouge, La.

Today is the Feast of the Veneration of the Cross in the Orthodox Church. It marks the halfway point in Great Lent. On the feast, the cross is displayed in the center of the church, usually surrounded by flowers, basil, or some kind of greenery that reminds us that the Cross is the Tree of Life. Today, our priest Father Joshua began his homily by noting that one of the choir members said last night, when the rosy cross was presented at vespers, that there were “too many roses.”

“You can’t see the cross,” the choir member said. It was true. They took a few of the roses off so the cross would be clear.

Father Joshua said that the roses have to be there to represent the joy and the life that comes from the Cross. But you also have to be able to see the Cross clearly amid the life and the joy. “You cannot have real joy without the Cross,” he said.

His point is about the balance that Christians have to have in their lives. Too much starkness and suffering, and you distort the message of the Cross. It’s all crucifixion and no resurrection. Christians are supposed to fast, but we are also supposed to feast. The suffering of the Cross was not the final word.

But if everything is always coming up roses — in the prosperity gospel heresy, for example, or Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — you obscure the suffering and sacrifice at the heart of our faith, and create an idol. That is, you end up worshiping the roses, not submitting to the Cross, because everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Cheap grace tells Christians that they can have joy without the cross — and that is why Bonhoeffer called cheap grace “the deadly enemy of our church.”

 

The Scottish Benedict Option

Iona Abbey in the Inner Hebrides, founded in 563 by St. Columba, a contemporary of St. Benedict’s (Iowsun/Shutterstock)

Victor Morton alert! The Scottish Catholic Observer publishes an interview with Your Working Boy about The Benedict Option and its application to church life in Scotland. Editor Ian Dunn says that “it is already one of the most discussed books in America — and it only came out last week.” Excerpts:

“People assume I’m saying run for the mountains and build a bunker and await the end—it’s not that at all,” he tells me from his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

“I’m calling for Christians to create spaces of real Christian contemplation, so we have the strength to go out into the world and be who Christ asked us to be.

“If we are not aware of ourselves as different from the world, and don’t do things to strengthen our Christian identity, we will be absorbed into it. I think that has happened to the Church in my country.”

More:

Mr Dreher visited the Benedictine Monks in Norcia, Italy, several times in researching the book, and their monastery, founded originally by St Benedict, had a profound effect on him.

“I remember the first time I sat down to interview Fr Casian, the prior at the monastery,” he said. “I felt this overwhelming sense of serenity coming from him. This is a man who thinks deeply, who prays deeply and conveys a strong sense of authority. It was like talking to my father and that’s what a priest and a monk should be, a spiritual father.

“And I felt that multiplied with other monks I spoke to there who were under his authority. That’s when I felt there was something special about this particular monastery.”

After he visited, tragedy was to strike the monks and their historic home, when a series of earthquakes hit central Italy, the final one destroying the ancient Basilica of St Benedict.

“The most serious one happened on a Sunday morning and I stood in my own Church here in Louisiana praying for those monks and trying not to cry because I love them as my brothers in Christ and I really believe God has established that monastery to be a light to the world,” he said.

“And when I heard from them I really believed God would use them in an even more powerful way than I anticipated, and the monks understand that too.

“It’s quoted in the book, one of them saying: ‘We look at the ruins of the basilica as a symbol of the Church today in the West that we have to rebuild.’

Mr Dreher points out that it is ‘extraordinary’ the monks are alive for the rebuilding because they moved just outside the city to a safe space when the first quakes hit. “They did not abandon the city; they were still there to serve the people of the town, and because they’d been living by the rule of St Benedict for so long they carried within them the monastery, so it was not so difficult to re-establish it,” he said. “I find the whole thing to be a remarkable example for all of us Christians in the West.

“It’s such a tragedy, but as we known from our Faith, new life comes out of death and I think extraordinary new life will rise out of Norcia and they will be a brighter light to the world than they would have been otherwise.”

“The monks already had to maintain through the worst periods in the history of the Church and they did it through regular prayer and ordered living.”

That, to Mr Dreher, is the template.

“It’s not much of a slogan to attract people, but we Christians in the West are going to have to learn to suffer well and suffer with joy. And if we unite our suffering with God it’s going to have meaning and lead to the redemption of the world.”

Read the whole thing.

The Observer adds an editorial saying that The Benedict Option is “a book every Scottish Christian should read.” Excerpt:

Many may disagree with much of it. His prescription that renewal of the Faith requires withdrawal from the world can be contested. But his central diagnosis, that we are living in a post-Christian world and we need to find ways to resist that world or be absorbed by it, is one we know to be true. … The age of Christendom has passed in the West. What comes next, and how we reckon with it, is the challenge of our days.

“The challenge of our days.” Yes — and this Orthodox Christian is grateful for the opportunity to stand with Catholic brothers like Ian Dunn to face our common future with hope and confidence, despite it all.

I am really surprised and pleased by the interest in the book from Christians in Europe. It will be published in Czech next spring. I’m writing a big piece for the Spectator (UK) about the Ben Op, so maybe the book will find a British publisher. A Catholic journalist for Le Figaro in France is reading the book, and has requested an interview. In Italy, Il Foglio has given the book generous coverage. I find this encouraging because all of us Christians living in the West in these times are going to need each other in the days to come — and if that’s going to happen, we first have to get to know each other.

(N.B., Victor Morton, the Washington journalist and Right-Wing Film Geek, is a Scots-born Catholic.)

Chaput Backs The Norcia Benedictines

You might have heard of the big fundraising dinner the Benedictine Monks of Norcia are going to have in Dallas on May 27. Father Cassian, Father Benedict, and Father Martin are all coming in from Norcia to meet American supporters and appeal to them for help in restoring the monastery and the basilica there, which were destroyed by the earthquake last October. I’m going to give the keynote address. It is a great honor for me, and the very least I can do to repay the kindness of the Norcia monks. Plus, I have written The Benedict Option to tell the world what a priceless treasure the entire church has in that little monastic community high in the Sibylline Mountains of Italy. To meet them face to face in Dallas, and to give to the restoration of their monastery and basilica, is a rare privilege. I mean that. That’s why I’m donating my time and words to the building-up of the Norcia monastery, which I, though not a Catholic, deeply believe is a light for the entire Christian world, not just the Catholic one.

Here is a link with more information about the event.

And look at this! Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia is giving his support to the event. From a letter the Norcia monks have now released:

Dear friends,

In the six months since the first devastating earthquake hit central Italy, the monks of Norcia have lived in the forests of that region, first in tents, then in wooden houses, following their predecessors in their attempt to bring order back into the chaos of a ruined society.

The destruction of the thousand-year-old basilica built over St. Benedict’s birthplace is an icon of the end of an epoch. These monks now find themselves at a crossroads of European history.

Archbishop Chaput

It’s a moral and cultural crossroads we too have arrived at as Americans.

Against the odds, they must now rebuild from the ruins not just a buiIding, but a vision of the world where God is once again at the center, where the cross of Jesus Christ is the only answer to society’s crises. The needs of the monks are too many to list. But the duty (and the privilege) to engage in the work of rebuilding belongs to us all.

I consider it a great blessing for the monks of Norcia that Rod Dreher will offer the keynote address at their Dallas fundraiser this May. Rod’s new book, The Benedict Option, makes a vital contribution to our understanding of a confused age. Rod’s work in reclaiming the example of St. Benedict for our times — a form of witness that’s at once ancient and new — is a gift to all who take their faith seriously. The Benedict Option is not the only Christian approach to the issues of our day, but in its exceptional insight and sincere reach across Christian divisions, it can’t be ignored.

I urge you to consider meeting the monks at this venue and taking to heart Rod Dreher’s words. Though I can’t join you in Dallas because of pastoral demands here at home, this fundraiser is crucial to the monks of Norcia in their important efforts. Please be there to support them, and please be as generous as you can.

With best wishes in Jesus Christ,

Most Reverend Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

Archbishop of Philadelphia

That means a lot to me. I’m proud to stand with Archbishop Chaput alongside the dear monks of Norcia. And let me urge you to buy the archbishop’s new book, Strangers In A Strange Land: Living The Catholic Faith In A Post-Christian World, which is essential reading for all Christians trying to understand the times, and how to be faithful in them.

Come out in Dallas for a night of hope and prayer, and participate in the rebuilding of the Benedictine monastery and basilica in Norcia. It will be one of the most important and life-affirming things you will do this year. Christian people, this is the time help our brothers in Norcia. Archbishop Chaput is doing his part. I’m trying to do mine. What about you? I really want to see you in Dallas in May. It’s important.

Notes At The End Of The Benedict Week

Greetings from the Atlanta airport. I’m on the way back home after a whirlwind week in New York, Washington, and the Hudson River Valley. I spent the last couple of days communing with the Bruderhof communities there. Wonderful people, and a great time. I’ll be blogging separately on them and our visit, but let me say up front that we more mainstream Christians have a lot to learn from these Anabaptists.

I appreciate the concern a couple of you readers expressed for my health given my silence since Thursday. I’m fine! If you’re going to spend time in the countryside with Anabaptists, you can’t expect wi-fi access. This is a feature, not a bug. More on this later.

I have a lot of thoughts in my head from this busy, busy week. I saw old friends and made new ones. I was bowled over by the eagerness of folks to hear the Benedict Option message. Four hundred came out in DC, filling the room at the National Press Club, and five hundred showed up at the Union League Club in NYC, making it a standing room only event. C-SPAN’s BookTV was at the Union League, so you’ll be able to see that sometime soon.

Here’s a selfie with Jeff Polet of Hope College and Front Porch Republic, Ross Douthat, and me, just before the Union League event:

We had a really good public discussion after my speech, and then retired to the library there for a reception. Tristyn Bloom invented a cocktail for the event; she called it, naturally, the Benedict Option (“another — doubtless very different — cocktail”). It involves whiskey, Amaro, St. Germain, and lemon juice. The lead image of this post features me and my terrific editor, Bria Sandford, toasting the publication of The Benedict Option with glasses full of Tristyn’s delicious concoction: a little sweet, a little bitter, a little tangy, a lot just right.

At the afterparty, I was pulled every which way, talking to folks. I could have stayed there all night. A friend of mine who stuck around after I was taken to the official dinner told me that he was privy to a conversation involving a liberal Christian from a Mainline Protestant church, in which the liberal expressed real antagonism to my speech. The liberal reportedly said that the Ben Op sounds to him like a form of white supremacism because it equates Christianity with Western civilization.

Now, in the public discussion following my speech, I explicitly answered this charge by saying that in no way to I equate the global religion of Christianity with Western civilization. But I do say that Western civilization is inescapably Christian, because the Christian religion — with its roots in the Hebrew Bible, Greek philosophy, and Roman law — created the civilization that emerged in the West after Rome’s collapse. Pope Benedict XVI offered some detailed thoughts about this here.  Though I am a communicant of the Orthodox Church, I am a man of the West, and I make no apology for wishing to see what remains of Western civilization — which, after the Roman era, was a Christian civilization — preserved and revived. In fact, it is my fervent hope that ties between Christian peoples of all continents — especially the ancient churches of Rome and Byzantium — will be strengthened. People who expect me to hate my patrimony are not going to get what they want — and they’re not going to get it hard, if you follow me.

This particular liberal Protestant, who belongs to one of the dying Mainline churches, fulminated about white, Southern, privileged me not having the right to say what I did, at least without first acknowledging my privilege and noting the many sins of the Christian West. Oh, whatever. This is such ridiculous self-hating prog claptrap. Of course the West and the Western church is stained with blood and sin, but it also boast of glories sometimes matched but never surpassed. Only a blind man or a fool can survey Western civilization and see only misery and cruelty, overlooking Greek philosophy, Roman law and architecture, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Greek sculpture, St. Augustine’s City Of God, the Hagia Sophia, the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the cathedral of Chartres, Dante, Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Beethoven, Louis Armstrong — do I really need to go on? There is a reason liberal democracy emerged in the West and nowhere else. There is a reason the ideals of human equality, including the equality of women, came out of the West. I wasn’t present for this conversation, but I would bet money that most of the principles that progressive Christian holds dear came out of Western civilization, and were most refined there.

You cannot separate these things from war, oppression, slavery, exploitation, and all manner of cruelty. Here’s the thing: every single civilization is guilty of the same. Saints are individuals. We don’t have saintly societies, cultures, or civilizations, because we don’t have utopias. The best we can hope for is to create a civilization in which our virtues are stronger than our vices, and it is easier to grow in virtue than it is to sink into vice.

True, we must repent of our sins and failings. But if, in a spasm of self-loathing we sever our roots, we will die. If we gaze upon our civilizational sins and put out our own eyes in remorse, we will stumble blind into the future.

Here’s the thing: progressive Christianity is dying, and will die. For example, Presbyterian liberals  in the PCUSA are having a hissy fit over Tim Keller,  a conservative Presbyterian pastor who has become one of the most influential Christian leaders in America, receiving an honor at Princeton Theological Seminary. Why? Because Keller’s denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), will not ordain women and holds to Christian orthodoxy on LGBT matters. But — hello! — the PC (USA) is collapsing:

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) lost 6 percent of its membership in 2015, and that came after three consecutive years of 5 percent declines. Current membership is just under 1.6 million. …

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has seen 463 congregations nationwide depart for other denominations between 2012 and 2015, according to newly released statistics from the Louisville, Ky.-based denomination.

Virtually all left for smaller, more conservative denominations such as the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which the historic Bellefield Presbyterian Church in Oakland joined last week after reaching a separation agreement with the Pittsburgh Presbytery.

Many departing congregations reacted to liberal theological and social trends in the past five years that included the approvals of ordaining and marrying openly gay members. And while the national population as a whole has become more liberal on such topics, not one congregation has joined the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and not only is membership down, but so are rates of baptisms and confirmations.

In New York, I was talking to a fairly well known young Evangelical about the overall decline in church life. But he also said: “Of all the people I know who are converting, all are converting to one form or the other of orthodox Christianity. There’s just no point to liberal Christianity, and no future.”

True. Thinking about my Evangelical friend’s line in light of the conversation my other friend had with the progressive Mainliner, it occurred to me that we really don’t have much to say to those folks, and shouldn’t waste our time trying to. Nor should they waste their time with us. We follow different religions. It is certainly true that Christianity is not the same thing as Western civilization, but it’s no coincidence that those who loathe Western civilization (or at least the Westerners who do) also loathe orthodox Christianity. They have cut themselves off from the source of life, and from cultural memory. They have nothing to pass on to their children, and their children’s children, except their alienation. They are the left-wing Christian equivalent of the right-wing Christians who are so enmeshed in partisan politics and culture-warring that they’ve lost the point of Christian faith and life. It seems to be a miserable truth of our era: when you’ve lost your religion, you double down on politics.

But look, I can’t in good conscience leave it at that. there are some things that we small-o orthodox had better not lose sight of, even as we rediscover the treasures of our own civilizational heritage. For one, to love and affirm your own history and heritage does not require you to pretend that it’s without fault or blemish. To do so is to make an idol, a false god, of it. Second, we have a lot to learn from non-Western Christianities, and non-Western Christians, and they from us. It is by now a cliche to say that conservative Episcopalians in the United States have more in common in things that really count with Anglicans in Nairobi than Anglicans in London. I just spent a couple of days with a colony of Anabaptists in upstate New York, and despite our serious theological divisions, those brothers and sisters are closer to me in essentials than many who profess the same Creed as I do, but whose real belief is in modernity. This is just how it is today, and how it’s going to be. It’s a new world.

One more important thing: though the faith is more important than particular cultures, I believe that Christian revival in the West must also entail serious education in Western culture and history. We have to teach our kids what Western civilization is, and why it is worth loving in spite of its great faults. Many of them are being taught to hate themselves and their civilization. Those who do this — and, crucially, those who don’t provide a good, life-giving alternative to this hateful narrative — are only going to drive young people into the welcoming arms of the hardcore alt-right, which turns Christianity into a racial or nationalistic cult. That’s a gospel as false as anything the pious Social Justice Warriors preach — but far too many of us conservative Christians fail to perceive the threat from it in our unstable, unraveling culture. A reader comments correctly and importantly:

A frightening thought. At the moment, the main danger to Christianity comes from the Left. What happens when a post-Christian Right starts to degenerate and decides that the Church with its message of love and universal brotherhood gets in its way as well?

Anyway, I’m not going to end on a somber note. I saw way too much reason for hope and joy this week. Tomorrow, I’m going to tell you here about the inspirational life of the Bruderhof. But tonight, I’m going to enjoy my family and my dog, and sleep like a rock. Glory to God for all things!

Marco Sermarini, the Doge of the Tipi Loschi. The book has arrived in San Benedetto del Tronto. Grande! (Though I don’t know what happened with the image reversal…)

Our New St. Boniface

St. Boniface, Apostle to the Germans (Sergey Kohl/Shutterstock)

A reader writes:

I am a primary care physician in a major Southern city –

I can testify for sure – most people would be horrified if they knew what their children/grandchildren were looking at online.

Just this afternoon – I had a 42 year old mother in tears in my office. Her son is a sophomore in high school at a “gifted and talented school” here in the local community. One of his high school age friends texted my patient – the mother – the following in reference to her son – “leave him alone B=$%h – or you will have to deal with me”. Apparently the mother had been all over her son for spending too much time on his computer and had begun making restrictions. The friend was not happy. When she doubled down after this text – the friend then sent her a picture of a KKK grand wizard holding a revolver to the head of a kitten. When she called the mother of the boy about this incident – the mother began laughing hysterically – and marveling at his creativity.

Mind you – this is just today’s story – I can write a novel from just what has happened to my patients in the past 12 months.

My parents in the 1970s were worried about us ending up like Eddie Haskell on the Beaver show. He comes off as a saint compared to many of these kids I am dealing with today.

I have two sons at home – toddlers – the stories that I am dealing with every day horrify me about the America my children will inherit.

People need to begin taking this stuff seriously – but I am afraid they are not.

Reader Edward Hamilton, who teaches in a small Southern Evangelical college, writes:

Regardless of whether or not Christianity retains nominal membership by a large fraction of the country, it’s clear that the locus of passions in the hearts of many younger Christians has shifted from issues that involve the traditional church community to issues that involve post-Christian (or even nihilistically anti-Christian) online communities.

Last weekend, a bunch of my students were waxing enthusiastic about the 4chan humiliation of Shia LaBeouf’s “He Will Not Divide Us” campaign. This barely made a ripple in the broader media, even in the traditional conservative media. But it was a major coup in the alt-Right media world, and my student knew about it within hours of it happening. The general consensus of my boys was “Do NOT mess with 4chan. They will wreck you for life.”

I was reminded of a recent post here about Islam being “the last bad-ass religion”. There’s nothing bad-ass about Christianity these days. I teach at a small Christian college that until just this year wouldn’t even let its faculty drink alcohol; I’m telling you now, there is no political action by a figure or organization on the old-style Christian Right, substantive or symbolic, that any of my students would care about — certainly not on the same level that they care about how 4chan is brilliantly messing with Shia LeBeouf. They know 4chan is a hot mess of racism and sexism; that came up in the conversation, without much push-back. But they just don’t care. The symbolic power of lowering that flag and raising a Trump hat was a shot in the arm in a way that anodyne calls for a more winsome Christian witness in the postmodern world can never be. I’ll take a 100-to-1 bet against ever hearing any of my students kibitzing passionately over the weekend about a David Brooks column, or a James K.A. Smith book. Or for that matter, a Rod Dreher book.

This was not always true. A millennium ago, it was Saint Boniface who was chopping down the sacred grove of Thor in order to gather wood to build the foundations for Fritzlar’s altar. Christianity and paganism were the allegiances that mattered, the ones that generated emotional energy and engaged the popular imagination. Christianity was ascendant, and it was totally bad-ass. Boniface was kicking a millennium of paganism to the curb, and ushering in a millennium of Christendom.

This week, the world’s next Saint Boniface was celebrated by an audience that will inherit the world, one that is growing as rapidly as the church is shrinking, as young and vigorous as the leadership of most denominations is aging and benign.

Celebrate it, dread it, or ignore it, but our new Saint Boniface is an anon on /pol/.

Hey, here’s a badass Orthodox Christian site.

The Douthat Scenario Is Coming True

The Atlantic‘s Peter Beinart takes note of the social effects of the decline in churchgoing. Excerpts:

Over the past decade, pollsters charted something remarkable: Americans—long known for their piety—were fleeing organized religion in increasing numbers. The vast majority still believed in God. But the share that rejected any religious affiliation was growing fast, rising from 6 percent in 1992 to 22 percent in 2014. Among Millennials, the figure was 35 percent.

Some observers predicted that this new secularism would ease cultural conflict, as the country settled into a near-consensus on issues such as gay marriage. After Barack Obama took office, a Center for American Progress report declared that “demographic change,” led by secular, tolerant young people, was “undermining the culture wars.” In 2015, the conservative writer David Brooks, noting Americans’ growing detachment from religious institutions, urged social conservatives to “put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations.”

More:

That was naive. Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal. And it has contributed to the rise of both Donald Trump and the so-called alt-right movement, whose members see themselves as proponents of white nationalism. As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.

When pundits describe the Americans who sleep in on Sundays, they often conjure left-leaning hipsters. But religious attendance is down among Republicans, too. According to data assembled for me by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the percentage of white Republicans with no religious affiliation has nearly tripled since 1990. This shift helped Trump win the GOP nomination. During the campaign, commentators had a hard time reconciling Trump’s apparent ignorance of Christianity and his history of pro-choice and pro-gay-rights statements with his support from evangelicals. But as Notre Dame’s Geoffrey Layman noted, “Trump does best among evangelicals with one key trait: They don’t really go to church.” A Pew Research Center poll last March found that Trump trailed Ted Cruz by 15 points among Republicans who attended religious services every week. But he led Cruz by a whopping 27 points among those who did not.

Why did these religiously unaffiliated Republicans embrace Trump’s bleak view of America more readily than their churchgoing peers? Has the absence of church made their lives worse? Or are people with troubled lives more likely to stop attending services in the first place? Establishing causation is difficult, but we know that culturally conservative white Americans who are disengaged from church experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful. Since the early 1970s, according to W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, rates of religious attendance have fallen more than twice as much among whites without a college degree as among those who graduated college. And even within the white working class, those who don’t regularly attend church are more likely to suffer from divorce, addiction, and financial distress. As Wilcox explains, “Many conservative, Protestant white men who are only nominally attached to a church struggle in today’s world. They have traditional aspirations but often have difficulty holding down a job, getting and staying married, and otherwise forging real and abiding ties in their community. The culture and economy have shifted in ways that have marooned them with traditional aspirations unrealized in their real-world lives.”

The heart of the essay:

For decades, liberals have called the Christian right intolerant. When conservatives disengage from organized religion, however, they don’t become more tolerant. They become intolerant in different ways. …

Whatever the reason, when cultural conservatives disengage from organized religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasizing morality and religion and emphasizing race and nation. Trump is both a beneficiary and a driver of that shift.

So is the alt-right.

And:

For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse.

Read the whole thing. It’s important. It’s a confirmation of a line Ross Douthat had a year or so ago, telling the left that if they didn’t like the Religious Right, just wait until the see the Post-Religious Right. I’m getting anecdotal reports from readers and from acquaintances that young people with smartphones are not only streaming pornography, but also getting massive doses of political extremism on their devices. One source who sees the boys in his conservative Christian high school embracing white nationalism speculates that the megachurch Christianity of these high school seniors is not facing the reality of the world around us. If true, then the pastors and other religious authorities in these kids’ lives are simply not forming them as Christians to live in the post-Christian world that we have.

On that point, last night in DC, I talked with a senior official of a prominent Christian college, who told me that institutions like his are at Defcon 1 on religious liberty for institutions like his — and he is as baffled as I am why so many churches are silent. He spoke to me after my Benedict Option speech about the point I made in it re: pastors and religious leaders who aren’t preparing their congregations for hard times, even the possibility of persecution, are failing in their responsibilities. He said that’s true in his experience. We agreed that Christians in America aren’t going to know what hit them.

Christians who read The Benedict Option, and act on what they read, won’t be caught off guard, though. Hey, if you and your church or group want to read the book together, e-mail Taylor Fleming at Sentinel, and she can help you. She’s at tfleming — at — penguinrandomhouse — dot — com.

The Ben Op Under Trump

Ross Douthat writes today about the Benedict Option, saying that the Age of Trump puts conservative Christians in an unusual position. He says The Benedict Option is the book to read right now for several reasons. Excerpt:

[The Benedict Option] begins in sweeping pessimism, describing a Western Christianity foredestined to all but disappear, collapsing from within even as its institutions are regulated and taxed to death by secular inquisitors. Then it pivots to a more practical how-to guide for believers trying to build religious communities — churches, schools, families, social networks — that are more resilient, more rigorous and more capable of passing on the faith than much of Christianity today.

If I were giving “The Benedict Option” to religious readers, whether conservative or progressive, I would almost urge them to save the opening for later and just approach the how-to guide with an open mind.

That’s because prophecy is hard, and as the last two years have reminded us, history’s arc bends one way only until it doesn’t. So I can’t say whether the recent decline in American religiosity will become an unstoppable collapse, as Dreher argues, or if it’s just the evaporation of nominal Christianity that will leave a churchgoing core intact. I can’t say how far liberalism will go in forcing religious traditionalists and their institutions to bend the knee to the sexual revolution: For every instance of successful sexual-revolution Jacobinism, there’s one that’s fizzled out. And I can understand why progressive Christians dealing with the reality of President Trump would find the persecution narrative of their conservative co-believers less than persuasive at the present time.

But Dreher’s deeper, “how to build a counterculture” argument matters regardless of whether his prophecies are accurate, because it matters in the polarized, fragmenting America that exists right now. Whatever comes in 2030 or 2040, whether or not a once-dominant Christianity is doomed to marginalization or merely in decline, we have a severe problem of rootlessness, hyper-individualism and anomie already — how do you think we got Trumpism? There is blame enough to go around, but the weakness of religious community is an important part of the story; strong religious bonds were often an antidote to rootlessness and dissolution in America’s more Tocquevillian, communitarian past, and they remain so in certain present-day case studies (Mormon Utah, most notably).

More:

The Trump era, in this sense, has not made “The Benedict Option” and the other books like it less timely, but more so. Thanks to Trump’s unlikely rise, religious conservatism has temporarily regained influence that its younger leaders and thinkers assumed was all but lost. But at a price — the price of being bound to an unstable and semi-competent form of right-wing nationalism, and suspended over the abyss by the not precisely Godlike hands of Donald Trump.

Conservative Christians active in politics have no choice but to do the best they can from that unsteady, wavering position. But only a robust counterculture, a healthy sense of their own freakishness and, yes, a few St. Benedicts will save them if they fall.

Read the whole thing.  Conservative Christians who think we’ve all dodged a bullet with Trump’s election, regarding religious liberty, had better not fall into complacency. The deep cultural forces that have scattered and secularized us are not going away. Even if Donald Trump were a saint, he couldn’t stop them. Use this time to prepare. Politics cannot save us.

View From Your Table

Washington, DC

While it was snowing outside, I had a small feast for the Feast of St. Benedict today in Washington with an old friend (right) and a new friend (left). The special treat was a bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin, a Burgundy of which I am very fond.

Glory to God in his saints, especially the holy monk from Nursia.

Technological Alarmism Is Our Friend

I received an interesting e-mail from a reader, which I’ve slightly revised to protect privacy:

I’ve been contemplating many of the responses to the Benedict Option that have already been circulating. It strikes me that one piece of the argument for decline that people overlook–until you remind them—is the role of technology in tethering our children to the sinking hull of Western Civilization. Your alarmism about technology seems to reinforce the wishful belief that you are merely a troglodyte who wishes to return to an age without dentistry and indoor plumbing. “Dreher,” they say, “always and only looking backwards.”

But if you’re right about technology and the real and present threat it poses, the Ben Op diagnosis is close to unassailable.

I say this for two reasons. First, even for cultural progressives of the Damon Linker variety, addictive technology is a problem. If you haven’t heard it already, I point out today’s FreshAir interview yet (or read Adam Alter’s book) alerting their listeners to the alarming (!) truth about screen addiction and the rehab centers which have emerged in order to deal with the problem. (Funny thing, these centers look suspiciously Benedict Option-y.) When you hear the story of a high-achieving, athletic young man going on a 45 day World of Warcraft binge, you are forced to admit this addiction is a problem, whether you champion same-sex marriage or not.

The second reason is because Evangelicals of the visionless, “stay the course” kind are unwilling to look at the ubiquity of pornography usage and what it means for today’s children. I was at an event not long ago, comprised of highly educated Christian movers and shakers. At one discussion, pornography came up as an example. When a sweet woman with a PhD chimed in to make a point she said, “Well I don’t have enough experience with porn to speak authoritatively, but I would think…” the Evangelical next to me turned to me in shock to whisper, “Did she just admit to using pornography?”

Really? That’s what you’re paying attention to? And that’s a shock to you? Or an egregious breach of decency? To me that signaled a profound disconnect between this guy—a college professor—and reality. Does he not realize how popular Game of Thrones is? Or that there are salacious ads on nearly every Facebook quiz these teens take? Will he be shocked to realize that teens use the internet to watch TV and movies illegally?

Of course he knows. He just doesn’t want to put 2 and 2 together to make 4.

Which brings me to one last point of encouragement. Whatever flak you get for the Benedict Option is worth it. This discussion needs to happen. I think it can be implied in your interview with Al Mohler that Evangelicalism is not ready for this discussion, but it’s overdue. I spoke last year to a high school headmaster, a man with decades of Christian private school experience. After hearing him pontificate of what he thought education was, how he saw Christian schools preparing, forming, and challenging the students spiritually, I asked him why he thought so many young adults these days did not remain in the church. He replied, “I haven’t really thought about it.”

Something needs to wake these people up. I think that’s what alarms are for.

From The Benedict Option‘s chapter on technology:

When parents hand their children small portable computers with virtually unlimited access to the Internet, they should not be surprised when their kids—especially their sons—dive into pornography. Unfortunately, with boys at least, it’s in the nature of the hormone-jacked beast. Moms and dads who would never leave their kids unattended in a room full of pornographic DVDs think nothing of handing them smartphones. This is morally insane.

No adolescent or young teenager should be expected to have the self-control to say no. Earlier in this book, we discussed the catastrophic impacts pornography can have on the brains of addicts. According to the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, 93 percent of boys and 62 percent of girls have seen online pornography in adolescence.12 It may be impossible to guard their eyes constantly, but it is irresponsible of parents not to try. Plus, parents in peer groups should work together to enforce a smartphone ban among their kids.

Moreover, teenagers are far too immature to understand the serious legal trouble they can get into with sexting. In many jurisdictions, sending sexually explicit images of minors counts as transmitting child pornography. Is it fair to put an impulsive tenth grader in the same category as a pervert? No, but that’s a call for the district attorney and the judge. Even if your child avoids conviction, to be dragged through the legal process with the prospect of sex offender status hanging over his head, potentially for the rest of his life, can be financially and emotionally devastating to a family.

Finally, though most teens who sext will never find themselves in legal jeopardy, the moral dimension can be ruinous. A single illicit image that hits social media can destroy a teen’s reputation and set them up for bullying and abuse.

Aside from the risk of pornographic content, there is the critical problem of what too much online exposure does to a young person’s brain. If we don’t treat our homes and schools as monasteries, strictly limiting both the information that comes to our kids (for the sake of their own inner formation), as well as their access to brain- altering technologies, we are forfeiting our responsibilities as stewards of their souls—and our own.

Did you know that Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs did not let his children use iPads and strictly limited their access to technology? Jobs was not the only one.

Chris Anderson, a former top tech journalist and now a Silicon Valley CEO, told the New York Times in 2014 that his home is like a tech monastery for his five children. “My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules,” Anderson said. “That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”

If that’s how Silicon Valley tech geniuses parent, how do we justify being more liberal? Yes, you will be thought of as a weirdo and a control freak. So what? These are your children.

“The fact that we put these devices in our children’s hands at a very young age with little guidance, and they experience life in terms of likes and dislikes, the fact that they basically have technology now as a prosthetic attachment—all of that seems to me to be incredibly short-sighted and dangerous,” says philosopher Michael Hanby.

“It’s affecting their ability to think and to have basic human relationships,” he said. “This is a vast social experiment without precedent. We have handed our kids over to this without knowing what we are doing.”

Read the whole thing.