Rod Dreher's Blog, page 479

Dutch Turks For Geert Wilders

Geert Wilders (Robert Hoetink/Shutterstock)

Oh, this is getting wild right now in the Netherlands. The Dutch government refused to let a plane carrying the Turkish foreign minister land, and declined to let another minister in the Ankara government address a political rally of Dutch Turks scheduled for Rotterdam. Reuters reports:

The Netherlands barred Turkey’s foreign minister from landing in Rotterdam on Saturday in a row over Ankara’s political campaigning among Turkish emigres, leading President Tayyip Erdogan to brand the fellow NATO member a “Nazi remnant”.

The extraordinary incident came hours after Mevlut Cavusoglu said he would fly to Rotterdam despite being banned from a rally there to marshal support for sweeping new powers Erdogan seeks. Europe, he said, must be rid of its “boss-like attitude”.

Cavusoglu, who was barred from a similar meeting in Hamburg last week but spoke instead from the Turkish consulate, accused the Dutch of treating the many Turkish citizens in the country like “hostages”, cutting them off from Ankara.

“I sent them so they could contribute to your economy,” he told CNN Turk TV, days ahead of Dutch polls where immigration may play a significant part. “They’re not your captives.”

“If my going will increase tensions, let it be … I am a foreign minister and I can go wherever I want,” he added hours before his planned flight to Rotterdam was banned.

Got that, Netherlands? Your country is not your own. Turkey claims some form of sovereignty. You might have wanted the Turks and their authoritarian president R.T. Erdogan to keep their national political campaigning outside of Holland, but really, who are you to tell people from other nations what they can and cannot do in your own country? More from Reuters:

Addressing a rally of supporters, Erdogan retaliated.

“Listen Netherlands, you’ll jump once, you’ll jump twice, but my people will thwart your game,” he said. “You can cancel our foreign minister’s flight as much as you want, but let’s see how your flights will come to Turkey now.”

“They don’t know diplomacy or politics. They are Nazi remnants. They are fascists,” he added.

At the moment, hundreds of Turks, and/or Dutch citizens of Turkish descent, are protesting outside the Turkish consulate in Rotterdam. There are reports that the Dutch authorities have activated riot police in case things get out of hand.

Here’s what the so-called “far right” politician Geert Wilders tweeted about the ongoing event in Rotterdam:

Decennialang open grenzen, massaimmigratie, behoud van eigen cultuur, nul integratie, dubbele nationaliteit.

Zie hier het resultaat. pic.twitter.com/kMK6oDDy0Y

— Geert Wilders (@geertwilderspvv) March 11, 2017

Translation:

For decades, open borders, mass immigration, maintaining one’s own culture, zero integration, dual nationality.

See the results here.

I think the Turks must want to elect this guy. The Dutch vote in national elections on Wednesday. Even if Wilders’s party comes out on top, he is unlikely to be able to form a coalition government. Still, it would be quite a statement.

Weimar America’s Long Island Ménage

#LoveWins again:

A Long Island couple and a neighbor with whom they had a threesome have been granted “tri-custody” of their 10-year-old son in a groundbreaking ruling.

“No one told these three people to create this unique relationship,” Suffolk County Supreme Court Judge H. Patrick Leis III wrote in the ruling for the first-of-its-kind case in New York.

Bay Shore residents Dawn and Michael Marano, who wed in 1994, had a conventional marriage until they befriended downstairs neighbor Audria Garcia in 2001.

Garcia had been living with her boyfriend, but when they split up, she moved upstairs and “began to engage in intimate relations” with the Maranos, Leis’ ruling says.

Because Dawn Marano, 47, was infertile, Michael Marano, 50, fathered the boy, born on Jan. 25, 2007, with Garcia, 48, court papers say.

“It was agreed, before a child was conceived, that [the Maranos and Garcia] would all raise the child together as parents,” the judge said.

The story goes on to say that the judge is believed to have “acted in the child’s best interest” — this, because the kid was raised believing he had three parents.

So, did Love Win™ here? This story brings to mind the questions asked by an undergraduate at a Benedict Option talk I gave last month, which I paraphrase: “Why can’t we just love Jesus with all our hearts, and that be enough?”

The answer is because love, according to Thomas Aquinas, is “to will the good of another.” Love for another can never be simply an emotion, a desire. To be fully itself, it has to exist in relationship to an idea of the Good. The judge in this case has an idea of the Good for that child. But is it really the Good for him? Maybe it’s the best choice of a series of bad ones. Maybe this society agrees that it’s the Good. Maybe not. One point is that if we don’t have a shared idea of the Good, it will be increasingly difficult to govern ourselves. Another point is that if the judge’s decision is not based in the Good, if it is bad for the child, then it is not based in love.

Two things here: 1) practically speaking, the Good is always determined by social context; and, to the college student’s question, 2) we can only determine if the emotions we feel towards another constitute love by the object of those emotions. To use a stark example, if your teenager wants to use heroin, it is not loving to agree to that because you want to give the child you love whatever he wants. Love in that case requires you to do what is good for your child, even if it means saying no.

That’s an easy case, because everybody agrees that it is not loving for a parent to facilitate his child’s drug addiction. But the principle is important. Going back to the student’s question, Christians are supposed to love Jesus with all their hearts, but we can’t determine if the emotions we feel towards him are authentic unless we judge them by some external standard. “If you love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus said (John 14:15). You cannot claim to love Jesus if you disobey him. None of us obey him perfectly, which is why the Benedictines vow to pursue “conversion of life” — that is, to spend the rest of their lives in active repentance and in pursuit of obedience to the Gospel. To love God perfectly is to have replaced your own will with His.

How do you know what God’s will is, though? I believe it was Alasdair MacIntyre — or if it wasn’t, it could have been — who said that we cannot know what we are supposed to do until we know of which story we are a part. But that’s an argument for another time. The point to take away from this story is that a society that has no strong concept of the Good other than granting individuals within it maximum liberty to live as they prefer to is not a society that has within in it the capacity to govern itself, or to endure. A religion that is only about formless “love” is a religion that worships emotion, and that ends up making an idol of the Self. Love, understood this way, cannot protect that child, because it can’t even understand what protecting the child would require.

As we are seeing. As we will continue to see. The decadence of this Long Island ménage is not just a story about Long Island.

UPDATE: David Mills has a helpful reminder that when you’re dealing with people, you cannot force everybody into abstract categories. There are times in which trying to enforce an ideal results in a greater injustice. This is why wisdom requires discernment, and why robots can’t be judges. It is possible that in this Long Island case, the judge’s decision is the most just one, given the alternatives.

UPDATE.2: Reader John Burzynski has a very personal take on it:

I am not sure that the law is always designed for the ‘good’ or to make everyone concerned in a case happy, rather in a case like this, the judge and law are there to settle a dispute within a framework of law and circumstance and hopefully use some shred of similar legal precedent. I think that likely the judge came up with the best possible solution, and I hope that he had a chance to speak with the child and with any appropriate specialists to get a sense of how this dynamic has so far had an effect on the child and might in the future effect him.

Strange days we live in, nothing is traditional anymore. Our 2 year old granddaughter spends part time living at our house (with our son, her dad, who moved back in after his relationship with granddaughter’s mom fell apart), and my wife and I are like a second set of parents to our granddaughter many times (our youngest son is 20 and in college so no young ones running around here lately prior to this). Granddaughter’s mom has a 4 year old son with another man from a first marriage, I simply couldn’t get my head around Christmas plans and who would be where and pick up who when. What is funny is that this scenario is NO LONGER UNIQUE, I know half a dozen grandparents going through similar circumstances raising in part or full their grandchildren. Our son does a fine job as a dad day to day and holds down a steady but not high enough paying job, but frankly is emotionally immature for his age (23) as far as managing money and such and thus this might be the best and most stable (although in my mind not traditionally ideal) of circumstances for our granddaughter at this point.

My point….nothing fits nicely in a legal framework anymore, let alone a traditional moral or familial framework, and I fear for these kids who have parents, grandparents as parents and step parents at some point, too. Someone told me that just means ‘more people to love the child’ to which I countered that I sometimes wonder who REALLY has a chance to fully love the child, who will provide stability? I pray for the strength everyday for my wife and I to continue to provide love and stability.

This is the real point: we are expecting our legal system to deal in an orderly fashion with a society that has cast aside order, and is now on auto-destruct.

The Benedict Arnold Option

James K.A. Smith’s work on cultural liturgies has been important to me, and I cite him and credit him in The Benedict Option. But he does not like the Benedict Option, or the recent books by Anthony Esolen and Archbishop Charles Chaput that take a similarly gloomy view of American culture and Christian prospects therein. He writes in the Washington Post:

The home security industry trades on a combination of fear and idylls. In fact, they depend on swelling the idyllic in order to heighten the fear. The more you have to lose, the more you feel the threat.

A spate of recent books from Christian leaders and intellectuals seem to have stolen this script, swelling the jeremiad shelf. We might describe this as “the new alarmism.”

Well, yeah, I’ll own the alarmist label. There is much to be alarmed about. More:

These are books intended for choirs: they are written to confirm biases, not change minds. They are not written to be overheard. If you’re not part of the alarmist choir, reading these books will sometimes feel like watching video smuggled out of secret meetings in underground bunkers.

Now, this is interesting. Last January, when my literary agent was shopping around the proposal for The Benedict Option, the bidding came down to two publishers: Sentinel, and Jamie Smith’s. For me, it was a close call. I trusted both publishers to do a good job with the book, and I was especially attracted to Smith’s publisher, precisely because the Benedict Option tracks so closely with Smith’s work. I knew that they understood where I was coming from.

One hour before I had to make the decision, I was on the phone with Jamie Smith, who did his dead-level best to convince me to come to his publisher, saying that we could work together on this common project. I had two years worth of e-mails from him praising my Ben Op work. He sat next to me at a 2014 First Things symposium at which I presented a slightly longer version of this paper about the Benedict Option. In subsequent personal conversations and e-mails, he praised the Benedict Option to me, and never indicated that he had a single misgiving about it. So, I was almost persuaded to join his team, in large part because of him

In the end, though, I chose Sentinel, which made the better offer. This was on January 12, 2016.

Only two months later, Smith was denouncing the Benedict Option publicly for being “alarming and despairing.”  If you follow that link, you’ll see my response to him, answering specifically the charges of alarmism.

So, why the Strange New Disrespect for the Benedict Option? Nothing had changed in the proposal that Smith once admired. The only thing that changed is that I did not take James K.A. Smith’s advice and join him at a certain publisher. Funny how that happened. Let that indicate how seriously you should take his critique.

More from the WaPo piece:

But the new alarmism is something different. It is tinged with a bitterness and resentment and sense of loss that carries a whiff of privileged threatened rather than witness compromised. When Dreher, for example, laments the “loss of a world,” several people notice that world tends to be white. And what seems to be lost is a certain default power and privilege. When Dreher imagines “vibrant Christianity,” it is on the other side of the globe. He doesn’t see the explosion of African churches in the heart of New York City or the remarkable growth of Latino Protestantism. The fear seems suspiciously tied to white erosion.

That’s asinine progressive trolling, and as someone who requested and received a review copy of The Benedict Option, Smith surely knows it — especially because the book specifically warns that the Trump phenomenon is no solution to the problem we face, but a symptom of it. The book takes a view from 30,000 feet of American Christianity. I cite the research of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, who documents the stark decline of American Christian belief, compared to historical doctrinal norms. I cite the more recent findings, by Pew, by Jean Twenge, and by others, showing the unprecedented falloff of religious identification and practice among Millennials. And I cite the recent study by two eminent sociologists of religion who found that the United States is now on the same secularizing track as Europe (I wrote about that also here, on this blog.)

If you are a believing Christian who is not alarmed by this, you have your head in the sand. On his blog the other day, Alan Jacobs observed that some public critics of the Benedict Option seem to be operating from a position of “motivated reasoning” — that is, that they are reacting less about what’s actually in the book than in how the book’s premises, if true, threaten their own biases and interests. In other words, they may be motivated to react with hostility to it, beyond legitimate criticism. To put it more uncharitably, as the saying goes, it is hard to get a man to see something when his paycheck depends on him not seeing it.

Is that happening here? I don’t know. I can’t read James K.A. Smith’s mind. I do know that I find it awfully strange that he turned so sharply on the Benedict Option, in the time he did. And I find it especially dishonest — and, frankly, morally and intellectually discreditable — that he would impute racist motivations to me when the book I wrote, which he has in hand, makes a very different claim. Frankly, it’s disgusting. Smith writes:

And despite all their protests to the contrary, what sticks with you when you walk away from these books is a bunker mentality. It’s what sells the security system.

Yeah? And what do you have to say to preserve your brand’s viability in an increasingly liberalizing academic world?

Readers of The Benedict Option will find a different book than the one Jamie Smith’s comments here leads them to believe it is. The book I wrote is no different in content and tone from the many, many blog posts I’ve written here over the years about the Benedict Option, and that Jamie Smith affirmed and embraced. I find it impossible to believe that if I had taken James K.A. Smith’s advice on the publisher of The Benedict Option, that he would be seeing all these catty tweets and remarks from him as the book nears its debut.

The same is true regarding the (excellent) books by Archbishop Chaput and Tony Esolen. To call our three books “alarmist” is not much of a criticism, unless you demonstrate why they err in describing current conditions as alarming. This Jamie Smith does not trouble himself to do. And there’s this cheap shot at Chaput, Esolen, and me at the end of his piece:

The new alarmism seems to have bought the nonsense about the “right side of history,” just in the negative. Hunker down for a decline. But I’m reminded of a line from one of John Updike’s early short stories: “The churches of Greenwich Village had this second-century quality. In Manhattan, Christianity is so feeble its future seems before it.” Count me one of the “willfully blind” perhaps, but I would never count out a savior who rose from the dead.

So our concern demonstrates our lack of faith. Got it. What a sleazy thing to say — but sadly, this has become typical of Smith on this topic, given the Ararat-sized chip he’s carried on his shoulder for the past year. Just sit tight, says James K.A. Smith, and everything’s going to turn out fine. No need to build that ark, Noah; God’s going to make the sun shine any moment now. Reader, if you believe that, you’re going to drown. In our own discrete ways, Archbishop Chaput, Professor Esolen, and I are trying to help believers read the signs of the times and to prepare ourselves to be faithful under very trying conditions. The philosophy faculty of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, may be high ground (or maybe not), but that’s not true for most of America. Don’t take my word for it. Read the research. Anecdotes aren’t data. Anyway, when Jamie Smith has taken even a tiny bit of the abuse that Tony Esolen has for standing up for Christian orthodoxy within a liberalizing Christian college, I’ll take him seriously.

To be clear, I welcome honest, good-faith criticism, because I benefit from it (e.g., Russell Arben Fox’s excellent critical review). This is not that. This is a case of a troubled man chewing on his sour grapes with his mouth wide open. Just wanted you readers to know the back story here. I still strongly recommend James K.A. Smith’s books, which on evidence of the dishonest bilge he’s been writing and saying publicly about the Benedict Option, are a thousand times better than James K.A. Smith’s character.

UPDATE: I was puzzled by this tweet:

@ccpecknold @roddreher I think that is a stretch regarding the market/money stuff and quite uncharitable. 1/2

— Geoff Holsclaw (@geoffholsclaw) March 11, 2017

“Market/money stuff”? I couldn’t figure that out. Then I re-read my entry, and I think this must come from the line about one’s paycheck depending on not seeing something. Let me clear this up: I’m *not* saying that Smith is attacking me for the sake of making money, and I regret leaving that impression with some of you. I was using the saying to characterize the point Alan Jacobs made more carefully about “motivated reasoning” — that is, saying that some Ben Op critics could be reading it so uncharitably because they have reasons, both professional and personal, to put the worst possible spin on it. I can’t know what Smith’s motivations are, but I would not say they have to do with anything so crass as money. It’s more a matter of suspicion that he’s trying to maintain his position (his “brand viability”) within the academy.

What I’m getting at is that Smith’s nasty attack on Chaput, Esolen, and me — all of us prominent Christian social conservatives — makes me wonder if he’s trying to put some public distance between himself and us. A year ago, when he made his first public criticism of the “grumpy alarmist despair” he associates with the Benedict Option — the first time he ever said a single negative word to me about the Ben Op, as opposed to encouragement and agreement — I answered him at length and publicly. I addressed his concerns and put the most charitable possible spin on them. Read the post. In it, you can click through to the audio of his full remarks (which weren’t very long).

A man who can read that response and still write the kind of hatchet job he penned for the Post is not interested in fairness. I could be very wrong about his personal motivations for writing that piece, and it was unwise to speculate on them. Let me simply say that I do not understand why he was so supportive of the Ben Op for a while, then suddenly so antagonistic to it.

But, if Smith wants to separate himself from us alarmist troglodytic Christians, hey, that’s fine by me. Here’s the thing, though: if he publicly affirms Biblical orthodoxy on same-sex marriage and LGBT issues in general, he’s going to have some explaining to do to his own colleagues. Christina Van Dyke, who teaches philosophy at Calvin alongside Smith, helped lead the witch hunt against Richard Swinburne last year, when the 82-year-old philosopher briefly affirmed that homosexuality was not compatible with Christian orthodoxy — this, at a meeting of the Midwest chapter of the Society of Christian Philosophers last year.

I don’t know where Smith stands on LGBT issues, but if he were to publicly affirm Christian orthodoxy, I expect that life would get really … alarming really fast for him at Calvin. But if he were to deny it, that would come as a surprise to more conservative Christians who have long assumed that he was one of them.

One can put as much stylistic distance between oneself and the nasty, fearful, homophobic, white-privilege-defending Christians as one wants, but that’s not going to save you if you hold the “heretical” position on LGBT issues in the academy. As Smith will find out if he actually holds to orthodoxy on the issue, and dares to come out of the closet over it. Winsomeness is a shield made of tissue paper. I don’t even work in academia and I have heard from more than a few Christian academics, even some who teach in Christian colleges and universities, who live in real fear for their careers over this issue. That is alarming.

And by the way, it’s pretty funny to accuse Archbishop Chaput, a Native American (he’s a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi), of mourning the decline in white privilege.

UPDATE.2: Some of you have said it wasn’t fair for me to cite personal e-mails from Smith in which he praised the Benedict Option. OK. Let me just say then that in private, Smith had led me to believe that he was a supporter of my work on the Benedict Option. Does he deny that? I don’t think he can or will, because when I asked him last year after the Florida remarks why he had turned, he said, in writing, that he had changed his mind about it. Ask him. He knows.

Benedict Option Clip File

Here’s a small collection of recent coverage of The Benedict Option.

From the Real Clear Books interview:

Jesus Christ told his followers to go and make disciples.  He said to preach the gospel through actions.  Throughout history, missionaries and ordinary people have attempted to follow this command, even when their personal safety was threatened, or when they were subject to derision or ridicule.  How do you align your point of view with Christ’s directive? 

The Great Commission is non-negotiable. Period. We have to evangelize, or we fail Christ. But we can’t give people what we do not have. The decision for Christ is only the first step in a lifelong journey of discipleship. What we lack today is real discipleship. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says that in the modern West we have come to a place where we think feelings are a reliable guide to truth. This is true in the broader culture, and it is certainly true in the culture of the contemporary church. I spoke to an Evangelical couple recently who told me that their church, which had for a long time been biblically sound and theologically conservative, changed overnight to being progressive, all for the sake of relevancy. The ministry staff even marched in the local gay pride parade. This couple was gob smacked by what happened, and couldn’t understand how it could have happened so quickly. The answer is that when you are not firmly anchored in Scripture and the traditions of Christian thought and practice stretching back centuries, you blow wherever the winds of culture take you.

My contention is not that we should head for the hills and build metaphorical monasteries to keep the world out. That is not realistic for most of us, nor is it desirable. But I strongly believe that if our Christian families and churches are going to form generations of believers capable of bearing witness to this post-Christian culture, we are going to have to take some steps back from that culture, or it’s going to overwhelm us. It’s already happening. Popular culture does a much more effective job of catechizing our children and us than the church does. The evidence is there.

What does it mean to say “take some steps back from that culture”? First, it means withdrawal from certain formative aspects of the broader culture that make it harder to see and to serve Christ. For example, Christians have as disordered a relationship with technology as everybody else. I know churchgoing Christians who send their kids to Christian schools, and who think they’re covering all the bases, but who give their kids – even little kids – smartphones with Internet access, because they don’t want their kids to stand out as weirdoes. This is devastating, just devastating to their moral and spiritual formation, and not just because it puts a gateway to the world of hardcore pornography right into their hands.

It’s not enough to turn away from bad things. We have to turn toward good things, and deepen our relationship to the Good, the True and the Beautiful, in Christ. And we have to do that in community. We need each other, and we need to remember that if we are not joyful in the Lord, if we are instead terrified, then we are not doing something right. True love casts out all fear.

From the Lifesite News interview:

LifeSiteNews: An important part of your book is about your stay at the Monastery of St. Benedict in Norcia. But the Benedict Option is not a call for a return to monasticism, is it?

Rod Dreher: For those of us who are called to live in a monastery or a convent, I hope they will accept that call. But for most of us, that is not our call. We are called to live in the world. But there are lessons about how Benedictine monks and nuns live that we can draw on as lay Christians on how to live faithfully in a post-Christian world.

LifeSiteNews: What are those lessons?

Rod Dreher: There are a number … but the first one is, I think, that we have to impose a certain order on our lives if we are to keep our eyes focused firmly on Christ. Father Cassion Folsom — who, for the time I was there, was the prior — told me that in the modern world our attention is so dissipated and fragmented by a thousand different things that our spiritual powers are also depleted.

What the monks do is that they live this highly regimented life according to the rule of St. Benedict, not for its own sake but for sake of deepening their conversion. So they pray when the rule tells them to pray, they celebrate Mass when the rule tells them to celebrate Mass, they study Scripture when the rule tells them to study Scripture.

Out in the world we aren’t going to live according to such a strict rule, but we do have to have order in our lives. To say on the straight path, so to speak, a path, a pilgrimage towards conversion. They also have to things like practice stability. That is one of the most counter-cultural things the Benedictines can teach us.

From my interview with The Blaze:

Contrary to some media reviews of his book, he said, he doesn’t actually think Christians need to literally head for the hills.

“A Christianity that doesn’t love and serve its neighbors is not true Christianity,” he said, adding, “We have to go out into the world knowing who we are and what we believe.”

Dreher said that like the early church, today’s Christians need to prepare to live as “minorities in a pagan culture.”

Christians are facing incredible challenges, challenges that have never been seen in the West since the West was Christianized. We can’t live as if the world was still Christian.

He said if Christianity is to survive the coming dark age, Christians must rededicate themselves to living counter-culturally. He outlines the steps for counter-cultural living in his book.

Dreher said that too many churches and Christian institutions have fallen victim to a pseudo-Christianity scholars have dubbed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, or the idea that Christianity is merely about making an attempt to be a good person and occasionally asking God for help in times of trouble. He added that churches should support their flocks by instructing them on repentance and asceticism, so they know how to suffer for their faith.

I hope these interviews are making it clear that even if you don’t think you will agree with this book, or with everything in it, the questions it raises are vitally important ones for the church in this moment to engage.

UPDATE: Just posted — my podcast interview with Russell Moore.

Reza Aslan, Cannibal For CNN

Well, golly:

Television personality and religious scholar Reza Aslan sampled cooked human brain tissue with cannibals in India in the first episode of CNN’s new “Believer” series exploring “fascinating faith-based groups” around the world.

Take that, Andrew Zimmern! More:

Aslan, 44, plugged his experience with the Aghori, a small Hindu sect known for its extreme rituals, on Facebook on Sunday night before the show aired.

“Want to know what a dead guy’s brain tastes like? Charcoal,” Aslan wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday. “It was burnt to a crisp! #Believer.”

Outrage immediately followed. Some attacked Aslan, a Muslim who was born in Iran and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, for choosing to portray the most extreme form of Hinduism for shock value. Hindu leaders and groups condemned the show for focusing on a fringe form of Hinduism presenting a negative picture of the overall religion.

That doesn’t seem fair. If he went to Appalachia and profiled snake handlers, would mainstream Christian leaders go to pieces over it? I think not. Nor should they. Aslan made it clear in the show that these people are extremists in Hinduism. He was up front about it.

But the reader who put me onto this story sees the real meaning of the kerfuffle:

While with [the Aghori] he drank from a human skull and ate part of a human brain. Now he finds himself the object of criticism from his liberal fellow travelers because by doing this he has reinforced anti-Hindu stereotypes etc. etc. Vamsee Juluri, professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco, for example, has accused Aslan of being “racist, reckless, and anti-immigrant.” Aseem Shukla, of the Hindu American Foundation, says that Aslan is reinforcing “common stereotypical misconceptions.”

Yet not a word about the fact that ASLAN ATE A HUMAN BRAIN AND CNN AIRED IT.

Grist for the mill. We’re doomed.

These Indian loons are quite the eccentrics, and I don’t mean in that charming Bertie Wooster way, either. Get a load of this:

At one point [Aslan] fell out with the Aghori guru who shouted: ‘I will cut your head off if you keep talking so much.’

The guru began eating his own faeces and then hurled it at Aslan.

Aslan quipped: ‘I feel like this may have been a mistake.’

He later posted on Facebook: ‘Want to know what a dead guy’s brain tastes like? Charcoal’.

‘It was burnt to a crisp!’

You know the saying: “Sit down to eat with Hindu cannibals, get up with flung poo on your ascot.”

CNN ran a promotional commercial for this series in which Aslan described what he sees as the difference between “religion” and “faith”. I can’t find a link to it on YouTube, but I did find it on his Facebook page. On it, he says:

“Religion is just the language you use to describe your faith. Although we’re all speaking different languages, we’re all pretty much saying the same thing.”

No, we’re not. In what sense is a Sunni Muslim in Cairo who will go to weekly prayers today saying pretty much the same thing as the poo-flinging cannibal in India? How is the pious Orthodox Jew praying at the kotel in Jerusalem saying the same thing as that Hindu sectarian who smears the ashes of the dead on himself and noshes on human flesh?

Aslan’s statement takes universalism to an absurd length. In fact, his focus on religious extremists in this series proves the opposite point. The Roman Catholic monk at prayer in Norcia is not “pretty much saying the same thing” as the voodoo devotee in Haiti profiled by Aslan. One is worshiping the true God; the other is worshiping demons. That’s what I say as a Christian. You may not share my harsh judgment on voodoo, but I don’t see how it’s possible to claim that Catholicism and voodoo are nothing more than flavor variations of the same thing.

A good book to read on this is Boston University religion scholar Stephen Prothero’s God Is Not One. About the book, Prothero has written:

On my last visit to Jerusalem, I struck up a conversation with an elderly man in the Muslim Quarter. As a shopkeeper, he seemed keen to sell me jewelry. As a Sufi mystic, he seemed even keener to engage me in matters of the spirit. He told me that religions are human inventions, so we must avoid the temptation of worshipping Islam rather than Allah. What matters is opening yourself up to the mystery that goes by the word God, and that can be done in any religion. As he tempted me with more turquoise and silver, he asked me what I was doing in Jerusalem. When I told him I was researching a book on the world’s religions, he put down the jewelry, looked at me intently, and, placing a finger on my chest for emphasis, said, “Do not write false things about the religions.”

As I wrote God Is Not One, I came back repeatedly to this conversation. I never wavered from trying to write true things, but I knew that some of the things I was writing he would consider false.

Mystics often claim that the great religions differ only in the inessentials. They may be different paths but they are ascending the same mountain and they converge at the peak. Throughout this book I give voice to these mystics: the Daoist sage Laozi, who wrote his classic the Daodejing just before disappearing forever into the mountains; the Sufi poet Rumi, who instructs us to “gamble everything for love”; and the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, who revels in the feminine aspects of God. But my focus is not on these spiritual superstars. It is on ordinary religious folk — the stories they tell, the doctrines they affirm, and the rituals they practice. And these stories, doctrines, and rituals could not be more different. Christians do not go on the hajj to Mecca; Jews do not affirm the doctrine of the Trinity; and neither Buddhists nor Hindus trouble themselves about sin or salvation.

Of course, religious differences trouble us, since they seem to portend, if not war itself, then at least rumors thereof. But as I researched and wrote this book I came to appreciate how opening our eyes to religious differences can help us appreciate the unique beauty of each of the great religions — the radical freedom of the Daoist wanderer, the contemplative way into death of the Buddhist monk, and the joy in the face of the divine life of the Sufi shopkeeper.

I plan to send my Sufi shopkeeper a copy of this book. I have no doubt he will disagree with parts of it. But I hope he will recognize my effort to avoid writing “false things,” even when I disagree with friends.

It is, of course, possible to go too far in the other direction, and deny commonality with other faiths. Of course a devout Christian has more in common with a devout Muslim than either of them do with the Aghori brain-eater. But that is not to say that the Christian and the Muslim are “pretty much saying the same thing.” Such a reductionist view, it seems to me, doesn’t respect the integrity of religions and their claims. Aslan profiles Scientology in this series. How on earth do a Scientologist and a Southern Baptist end up “pretty much saying the same thing”? To square that circle, you need to put on a pair of ideological eyeglasses that reduce sharp distinctions down to a pleasing blur.

Seems to me that Aslan’s approach to religion is a common one among liberal Westerners: that religion is primarily about what we say to God about ourselves and our desires for him. But for more conservative people, religion is primarily (but not exclusively) about what God says to us about Himself and his desires for us.

Be that as it may, the point remains: ASLAN ATE A HUMAN BRAIN AND CNN AIRED IT.

Ben Op Calendar

Are you interested in reading The Benedict Option with your church, school, homeschool co-op, or some other group? Sentinel, the book’s publisher, can facilitate a discount for order of 25 copies or more. Please e-mail Taylor Fleming (tfleming – at – penguinrandomhouse — dot — com) for more information.

All the seats at the Thursday March 16 lecture in New York, sponsored by Plough magazine, The American Conservative and First Things, have been claimed. If you would like to hear my speech and the ensuing conversation among Ross Douthat, R.R. Reno, Peter Mommsen, me, and others, you can join the livestream here.  Going to that link enables you to sign up for e-mail notification when the streaming starts. The event is set for 6pm Eastern on that night.

Seats are still available at the Wednesday March 15 lecture in Washington, DC. Sponsored by the Trinity Forum, the event will take place from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at the National Press Club ballroom. Tickets are $25 each. Click here to reserve your seat, or to get more information. After my presentation, I will be joined on stage by Kirsten Powers and Pete Wehner, who will be drinking Trappist ale and chanting Gregorian-style. Or so I hope. Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy is co-sponsoring the event.

What’s the next Ben Op public event? On Friday March 24, I will be addressing the Ciceronian Society conference at LSU in Baton Rouge. My lecture will be from 3 to 5 pm, and is open to the public. More information here. There will be proper theology and geometry, I believe, but absolutely no attempts to immanentize the eschaton.

After that, I will be joining Bishop James Conley, Patrick Deneen, David Schindler, Bill Cavanaugh, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and others at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, for the Symposium on Advancing the New Evangelization. This will take place on March 31 and April 1. This year’s theme is “In the World, but Not of the World: Paradigms for the Evangelization of American Culture.” What a great series of talks that will be. The only regrettable thing about that weekend is that Atchison is too far from Wichita, so I won’t have the opportunity to visit Eighth Day Books. My first time in Kansas without going to Eighth Day. Hit don’t seem right.

Also on the calendar:

April 5: lecture on the Benedict Option at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

April 26-28: Q Ideas Conference, Nashville

May 19-21: Wilberforce Weekend, Baltimore.

June 2-4: Walker Percy Weekend, St. Francisville, La. (I am not planning to speak, but Ralph Wood will be lecturing on Walker Percy & the Benedict Option, and I will be on hand all weekend in our bayou version of Lost Cove, Tenn., to eat crawfish, drink beer, talk to y’all, and thereby avoid despair.)

June 8-9: Ancient Evangelical Future Conference, Trinity School for Ministry (Ambridge, PA)

June 21-24: Society for Classical Learning annual conference (Dallas)

More things coming for the fall, no doubt. I hope to see you at one of these events, though. Don’t forget: e-mail Taylor Fleming if you would like to order 25 or more copies of The Benedict Option to read with your church or other group.

Walker Percy & The World’s Largest Man

I sent a copy of Harrison Scott Key’s memoir The World’s Largest Man to a friend in New Orleans. She writes just now:

Dammit, this book is too funny. I laugh till I can’t see the words for the tears in my eyes, and I’m going to go bankrupt buying it for everyone I know.

She’s right about that. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read not written by P.G. Wodehouse or John Kennedy Toole. No, I’m sorry, Key is right up there with Toole. I’m serious. And get this: Key is going to be speaking and telling stories at Walker Percy Weekend in June 2-4 in St. Francisville. Why don’t you come this year? We’ve got a great line-up of speakers — Ralph Wood is even going to be talking about Walker Percy and the Benedict Option — plus crawfish and the famed front porch Bourbon Stroll. And Franklin Evans!

Buy your tickets here. When they’re gone, they’re gone. We always limit the number.

Rachel Held Evans Dismisses Benedict Option

I’ve been asked by folks what I think of the #BenedictOption put forth by @roddreher (see https://t.co/hMhLRaut8K). So, a thread on that:

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 8, 2017

The #BenedictOption is based on the premise that Christians in the U.S. are such a persecuted minority they must withdraw from society.

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 8, 2017

Christians are NOT a persecuted minority in the U.S. Christians make up 75% of population & 91% of congress. #BenedictOption

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 8, 2017

White Christians have enough influence to hand Donald Trump the presidency. They are NOT a marginalized group in our society.

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 8, 2017

But @roddreher & others have been advancing persecution narratives like these for so long, Christians believe them.

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 8, 2017

In fact, white evangelicals believe they are more discriminated against than blacks, Muslims, and Jews! https://t.co/7TDtkXhipz

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 8, 2017

An entire industry of books, films, & orgs reinforce this narrative. I call it the White Christian Industrial Persecution Complex.

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 8, 2017

So focused on themselves & their “persecution,” white Christians = oblivious/indifferent to suffering of actual religious/ethnic minorities.

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 8, 2017

In summary: The #BenedictOption fails from the start because the entire premise is based on fantasy.

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 8, 2017

Hoo boy.

In summary: Rachel Held Evans’s critique fails from the start because its entire premise is based on a fantasy that could only be held by someone who doesn’t know what she’s talking about because she has not read the book.

Then again, if someone who believes the things about Christianity that Rachel Held Evans professes approved of The Benedict Option, I would wonder what I had done wrong. So I take this as a vote of confidence.

But so you aren’t misled by these twittered expectorations, let me assure you that the only “persecution” part of the book is the chapter about Work. It focuses on warnings from law professors and others who actually work in this field sound, based on actual study and familiarity with legal and political trends. Just today I was talking with a professor who teaches in a conservative Evangelical college, and she said that she can’t understand why more Christians aren’t aware of what’s facing these institutions. “For me and my colleagues, the question isn’t if they’re going to take our accreditation away, but when,” she said.

These conversations are happening throughout the world of Christian academia, at least among the colleges and universities that intend to remain faithful to Biblical teaching about sexuality. They know what’s coming. And if you pay attention to this stuff too, you cannot be sanguine about it. Of course no Christian college or Christian small business owner who shares RHE’s views on human sexuality stands to lose a thing. As for the rest? Well, they’re bigots, so they deserve what they get.

I anticipated the RHE reaction when I wrote the book. From the Work chapter of The Benedict Option (which Rachel Held Evans has not read):

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

And:

Similarly, orthodox Christians in the emerging era will need to adapt to an era of hostility. Blacklisting will be real. In Canada, the legal profession is trying to forbid law graduates of Trinity Western University, a private Christian liberal arts college, from practicing law—this, to punish the school for being insufficiently progressive on LGBT issues. Similarly, an LGBT activist group called Campus Pride has put more than one hundred Christian colleges on a “shame list” and called on business and industry not to hire their graduates. It is unwise to discount the influence of groups like this on corporate culture—and that, in turn, will have a devastating effect on Christian colleges.

“The challenges to Christian education—especially higher education—are about to be aggressive,” one legal scholar said. “Degrees from unaccredited universities, or universities that can’t place graduates or receive federal research dollars, are of very low value.”

Does this mean that no Christian should go to medical school or law school or enroll in professional training to enter other fields? Not necessarily. It does mean, however, that Christians must not take for granted that within a given field, there will be no challenges to their faith so great that they will have to choose between their Christianity and their careers. Many Christians will be compelled to make their living in ways that do not compromise their religious consciences. This calls for prudence, boldness, vocational creativity, and social solidarity among believers.

How many law professors, business executives, physicians, college faculty, and others has Rachel Held Evans talked to about what the see now, and what they see coming?

That’s not persecution on the level that the suffering church in many countries abroad has to endure. But it’s not nothing, and the marginalization we’re starting to experience now is not going to stay the same or get better. Last year, K.A. Ellis, whose professional life involves working with the persecuted church overseas wrote in Christianity Today that believers she talks to in those countries express concern about the church in the United States.  Excerpt:

Still, given the terrible persecution of Christians overseas, I wonder whether it’s accurate to say that American Christians are “under persecution.” When I discuss the rise in anti-Christian hostility in the States, I avoid the “p word,” and I don’t make comparisons to other parts of the world.

But listen to a Middle Eastern underground house church leader: “Persecution is easier to understand when it’s physical: torture, death, imprisonment….American persecution is like an advanced stage of cancer; it eats away at you, yet you cannot feel it. This is the worst kind of persecution.”

A Syrian remaining in the region to assist Christians and Muslims cautions, “It wasn’t only ISIS who laid waste to the church; our cultural compromises with the government and our divisions against each other brewed for a long time. We are Damascus, the seat of Christianity; what happened to us can happen to you. Be careful.”

When persecuted Christian leaders overseas warn about how seriously US Christians are marginalized, it’s time to listen.

Ellis goes on to say that there are people (“hostility deniers”) who pooh-pooh the idea of persecution, and also “hostility seekers,” eager to see it everywhere. Both are wrong, in her view. She cites a third option:

Hostility realists understand that anything is possible. Rarely does a nation move from freedom to oppression overnight. Realists understand that while the US Constitution promises inalienable rights to all citizens, those rights are not always guaranteed for the church.

I deliberately chose not to write in The Benedict Option about the African-American church, because I didn’t feel right comparing the situation today to what black Christians suffered under slavery and Jim Crow. Besides, I’m a white Christian, and I don’t feel that I have the moral authority to write about that. But Ellis, who is African-American, goes there in her CT piece:

By the century’s end, though, freedoms had been steadily chipped away, race-based slavery established, and the worship, speech, and activities of black churches and gatherings were repressed. Still, the persecuted black church remained active underground, meeting in secret “hush harbors” of slaves and among free, believing abolitionists.

If The Benedict Option takes off, I hope some smart publisher will give K.A. Ellis a contract to write about what the American church in the 21st century can learn about how to suffer faithfully from the black church’s historical experience. And by the way, Ellis is right that “anything is possible.” Historian Peter Brown talked in this lecture about how even Christians living in the (Western) Roman Empire’s final century or two had no idea what was coming. Along the same lines, historian Edward Watts, in his 2015 book The Final Pagan Generation, writes of how prominent Romans pagans in the tumultuous fourth century didn’t see the end of their own world coming either. Even after the Empire became officially Christian, they could not wrap their minds around the fact that the world they had known, and their position in it, was about to end.

So: Are we Rome? Much rides on how we answer that question.

Anyway, I don’t follow RHE, though I know she’s a big deal among progressive Evangelicals. I looked her up after reading her tweets, and see that she was raised in a fundamentalist (or fundamental-ish) church background. I could be wrong, but I get the idea that she interprets the entire American church today from the standpoint of being an anti-fundamentalist reactionary. Hey, not all of us conservative Christians voted for Trump! And for those who did, that’s not the only important thing about them, and probably not the most important thing. It’s a big Christian world out there. Most of us have managed to be orthodox in our Christian belief without ever having been fundamentalist, or even had to deal with it. Sorry if you did, but don’t try to force the rest of us into your narrow dichotomy. Just because the Benedict Option looks superficially like the fundagelical churches you grew up in and rejected doesn’t mean it actually is that.

As people who read the book will plainly see.

Besides, does RHE really think that the Christians overseas whose intense persecution and suffering she would (I hope) deplore — does she think that they agree with her about LGBT issues, or other things so near and dear to the hearts of progressive white bourgeois Christians? When you have such a narrow, parochial, time-bound, uninformed view of the church, it’s easy to think that your own personal problems with it are universally valid. The life of the Christian church, both in 21st century America and in the 2,000 years it has existed on this earth, is not defined by the cultural politics and preoccupations of white middle-class American Christians of the left or the right. And that is what the Benedict Option is trying to fight.

It will surprise people who take RHE’s word for it on The Benedict Option (which she hasn’t read) to learn that the book is not, in fact, focused on persecution. That part is more or less confined to single chapter. Most of the book reads like this:

Asceticism, especially fasting according to the Church calendar, was for most of Christian history a normal part of every believer’s life. “But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face,” Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew (6:17), indicating that periodically abstaining from food for religious reasons was standard practice. In the first century, Christians fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays, in memory of Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion—an ascetical practice still observed today by Eastern Orthodox Christians.

A Christian who practices asceticism trains himself to say no to his desires and yes to God. That mentality has all but disappeared from the West in modern times. We have become a people oriented around comfort. We expect our religion to be comfortable. Suffering doesn’t make sense to us. And without fasting and other ascetic disciplines, we lose the ability to tell ourselves no to things our hearts desire.

To rediscover Christian asceticism is urgent for believers who want to train their hearts, and the hearts of their children, to resist the hedonism and consumerism at the core of contemporary culture. And it is necessary to teach us in our bones how God uses suffering to purify us for His purposes. Ascetical suffering is a method for avoiding becoming like those monks called “detestable” by Saint Benedict in the Rule “the worst kind of monk,” namely those whose “law is the desire for self-gratification.”

In the teaching of the Desert Fathers, every Christian struggles to root out all desires within their hearts that do not harmonize with God’s will. Brother Augustine explained how this works.

“It’s like you’re strengthening your will,” he said. “You may be in a time of fasting, and your stomach is growling because you can’t eat until five-thirty. And then you think, ‘If I can’t handle not eating for a few hours, how can I expect to control my more spiritual passions, like anger, envy, and pride? How can I expect to have any spiritual and moral self-discipline if I don’t start with the more tangible, material desires first?’”

Besides, as Father Benedict put it, asceticism can be a wake-up call for the spiritually slothful. “We are often further away from God than we realize,” he said. “Asceticism serves as a healthy reminder of how things are. It’s not a punishment for being so far away.”

And like this:

A generation ago two conservative Christian leaders—Evangelical Chuck Colson and Roman Catholic Richard John Neuhaus—launched an initiative called Evangelicals and Catholics Together. The idea was to foster better relations between Christians in two church traditions that had been mutually suspicious. Colson and Neuhaus realized earlier than many that the post-1960s cultural changes meant that conservative Evangelicals and orthodox Catholics now had more in common with each other than with liberals in their own church traditions. They called their kind of partnership, born in part out of pro-life activism, an “ecumenism of the trenches.”

Times have changed, and so have some of the issues conservative Evangelicals and Catholics face. But the need for an ecumenism of the trenches is stronger than ever. Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, a senior bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church, has on several occasions appealed to traditionalists in the West to form a “common front” against atheism and secularism. To be sure, the different churches should not compromise their distinct doctrines, but they should nevertheless seize every opportunity to form friendships and strategic alliances in defense of the faith and the faithful.

Erin Doom, a longtime employee of the legendary Eighth Day Books, a Christian bookstore in Wichita, Kansas, founded the Eighth Day Institute (EDI) as the store’s nonprofit educational arm. Committed to small-o orthodox ecumenism and to building up the local Christian community, EDI hosts various symposia and events throughout the year. Its signature event, though, may be the Hall of Men, a twice-monthly gathering in EDI’s clubhouse, a kind of Christian speakeasy next door to the bookstore, in which Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant men have been coming together since 2008 to pray, to discuss and debate the works of a great figure of Christian history, then to sit around the table drinking pints of beer and enjoying each other’s company.

The Hall of Men, and its recently launched parallel women’s organization, the Sisters of Sophia, are a way for “mere Christians” to engage the Great Tradition, to root themselves in it, and to go out into the world to renew culture. Doom says the men come together in a spirit of brotherhood, willing to talk about their theological differences in an atmosphere of Christian love. He credits the ecumenical generosity and sense of hospitality of Eighth Day Books owner Warren Farha for setting the tone.

“If we Christians are going to survive, if we’re going to make a difference, we have to be able to come together. Small-o orthodoxy is vital,” says Doom. “I’d like EDI to be a model for other communities. It all begins with Hall of Men, getting the guys involved. Ultimately I want to provide tools and resources for all Christian families to make their homes into little monasteries.”

That’s a Benedict Option community. There are many others. You can meet some of them in my book.

In the interview that RHE cites at the start of her Twitter thread, I say:

Trump is in fact no answer to the crisis. He’s a symptom of the crisis we’re in.

But you know what? So is Rachel Held Evans. In fact, from what I can tell of her thinking and her influence, I think she may be a more acute symptom of cultural breakdown within the Christian church than Trump. Why? Because with her Church Of What’s Happening Now-style progressivism, she represents the hollowing-out of Christianity by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. I wonder if there’s a single major point on which her theological and moral views clash with the opinions held by secular progressives.

The statistics she quoted in the beginning of her tweetstorm are all but meaningless. Everybody knows that most Americans identify as Christians. So what? Evans indicates that nine out of ten Congressmen identify as Christian — as if that meant anything important about the reality of cultural power in this country. Had she read The Benedict Option — which she didn’t — Evans would have understood the real nature of my critique. Guess what? It ain’t about politics, except tangentially.

Here are some meaningful statistics for Evans to consider. From The Benedict Option:

As bleak as [Notre Dame sociologist] Christian Smith’s 2005 findings were, his follow-up research, a third installment of which was published in 2011, was even grimmer. Surveying the moral beliefs of 18-to-23-year-olds, Smith and his colleagues found that only 40 percent of young Christians sampled said that their personal moral beliefs were grounded in the Bible or some other religious sensibility. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the beliefs of even these faithful are biblically coherent. Many of these “Christians” are actually committed moral individualists who neither know nor practice a coherent Bible-based morality.

An astonishing 61 percent of the emerging adults had no moral problem at all with materialism and consumerism. An added 30 percent expressed some qualms but figured it was not worth worrying about. In this view, say Smith and his team, “all that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”

These are not bad people. Rather, they are young adults who have been terribly failed by family, church, and the other institutions that formed—or rather, failed to form—their consciences and their imaginations.

MTD is the de facto religion not simply of American teenagers but also of American adults. To a remarkable degree, teenagers have adopted the religious attitudes of their parents. We have been an MTD nation for some time now, though that may have been disguised.

“America has lived a long time off its thin Christian veneer, partly necessitated by the Cold War,” Smith told me in an interview. “That is all finally being stripped away by the combination of mass consumer capitalism and liberal individualism.”

Trump has come and Trump will go away, but the information Smith’s research has turned up about the real state of American religious life ought to terrify people who believe in authentic orthodox Christianity, as opposed to MTD dressed with a light Jesus sauce. I wrote The Benedict Option to address this crisis, and addressed it to conservative Christians, my own tribe, in an attempt to wake them up to the reality of what’s happening, and to get busy preparing for a long period of resistance. The historical experiences of the Benedictine monks have a lot to teach us lay Christians concerning how to build faithful communities of resistance, rooted in Biblical truth and traditional Christian practices. The Benedict Option concept is based on the belief that the faith is under unprecedented threat for a wide variety of reasons, most of them from beliefs and practices within the church, which has compromised too much with popular culture. We can no longer shore up that culture, but instead have to focus on building communities within which we can live out our beliefs as best we can.

Look, I really don’t mind at all that progressive Christians like Rachel Held Evans are freaking out over the Benedict Option. I would have expected that. If you want to read a really intelligent critique of the Ben Op from the perspective of a liberal believer, ignore RHE’s trite tweets and be sure to check out Russell Arben Fox’s review essay on Front Porch Republic. 

I’m not worried about what Rachel Held Evans has to say about The Benedict Option, though if she actually reads it one day, it would be interesting to see if she still stands by her erroneous prejudices. No, what I’m worried about is that far in the future, should the police come looking for dissident orthodox Christians hiding out from state persecution, the Rachel Held Evanses of the world will point helpfully and patriotically, and say, “They’re in the basement, officer.”

Death Of A Teacher

Robert Germany, 1974-2017

Very shocking, very sad news from Haverford, PA:

Associate Professor of Classics Robert Germany died yesterday, March 7, of a sudden cardiac arrest.

“Robert was a beloved colleague, mentor, and friend, and his sudden and untimely death is a terrible blow to our entire community,” said President Kim Benston in a letter to the Haverford community. “Our thoughts and prayers are with Robert’s wife, Dianna, their four children (Grace, Ada, Elias, and Jack), his mother, Elizabeth, and all other members of his family.”

Germany joined the Classics Department in the fall of 2008 from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Though he was a natural and beloved teacher, he never expected to end up in academia. In 2013 he told Haverford Magazine that he hated school and never intended to go to college, but after graduating from high school and spending two years on an independent academic journey, reading widely in English literature, theology, theater, and philosophy, he found that all roads do, in fact, lead to Rome and, without classical language skills, he had run up against the wall of what he could study on his own.

So Germany returned to the classroom, earning a B.A. in classics with minors in German and Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in Classics at the University of Chicago. He was particularly inspired by a stint spent as a teaching assistant in Athens, where he lived, traveled, and ate alongside his students and uncovered a more immersive way to teach and learn.

“I saw a glimmer of something where education wasn’t hermetically sealed in classrooms and was a full body sport, and I loved it,” he said. “I had no desire to separate myself from my students, and so, for me, the opportunity to live on campus at Haverford and have students over to my house a couple nights a week—I really thrive on that.”

Robert was a friend from our old Orthodox parish in the Philadelphia area. His wife Dianna and their kids were part of the same classical homeschool education co-op that my wife and kids were part of. It is hard to express the shock we had at this news, and the sorrow and heartbreak for Dianna, their kids, and Robert’s mother Elizabeth, who lived with them. Have been praying for them since.

I saw thes tributes to Robert on his Facebook page, from former students. It is probably the best remembrance a teacher could hope for:

This is such a tragic loss. I met Robert when I was 18, in my first year of studying Greek, where he was the TA. His love – just complete, unadulterated, joyous LOVE – for Classics changed my life. He took a group of us to Greece (referenced in this article) and my memories of reading Plato’s Symposium while drinking “Greek” “coffee” (Robert took issue with both of those descriptors) are some of my very fondest. He played a crucial role in forming my love for classics, and was the person whose professional advice I took the most seriously when I decided to change careers and turn back toward it.

He modeled how to approach the classical world both with a light heart and a serious mind. My heart breaks for his family, friends, and students. And it breaks for those who will never get to be his friends or students. Robert was one of the very best. Unforgettable.

Another one:

Memory eternal to my godfather, Robert. I wish I could muster an eloquent tribute at the moment, but I can’t. His influence on my life was, and is, profound. Robert pursued his education and the education of those he loved with his whole self. He integrated body, mind, and soul in this quest, which was not just for knowledge, but also wisdom and goodness. He was a loving and dedicated father and he maintained the curiosity of a child amidst the rigors (and lets be real – the temptations toward vanity) in “the ivory tower.” He saw that a good education is not just preparation for life, but the pursuit of a good life in itself. Memory eternal, Robert! Please also embrace his wife, Dianna, and their four children, Grace, Ada, Elias, and Jack, with your prayers.

And here’s one from an old friend of Robert’s:

I am writing my own eulogy for Robert Germany, who passed away yesterday. It’s painful to do this for a friend, especially someone who has died so young. I wanted to share with you some of my thoughts, since I have reached a place of solace in this writing for the first time today: ‘It was during this visit to Los Angeles that a second epiphany occurred between us. We drove out to the pier at Santa Monica one Saturday afternoon, on one of those days when the sun setting over Southern California has the hue and shimmer of a Byzantine mosaic. We walked out to the end of the pier – out from under the shadow of a wooden gate that stands as a guard post above – and saw the perfection of the world open up in front of our eyes. We approached the edge of the pier, where the vast infinity of the Pacific Ocean, which Robert had never seen before, engulfs the horizon itself. “Do you see what lies at the ends of the earth?”, Robert said softly, tears in his eyes. I remained silent. “Fishermen.”‘

Robert Germany was 42 years old, but look at all he accomplished in that short life. That is to say, look at all he gave. May he rest in peace, and may his memory be eternal.

kesipun/Shutterstock

Paglia: Transgender & Civilization’s Decline

A reader sends in this clip from a Camille Paglia discussion at last fall’s Battle Of Ideas festival in the UK, in which the lesbian scholar and provocateur identifies transgenderism as a mark of a civilization deep into decadence, nearing collapse. The good stuff starts at the four-minute mark.

She says that androgyny becomes prevalent “as a civilization is starting to unravel. You find it again and again and again in history.”

“People who live in such times feel that they’re very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan,” she says. But in truth, they are evidence of a civilization that no longer believes in itself. On the edges of that civilization are “people who still believe in heroic masculinity” — the barbarians. Paglia says that this is happening right now, and that there’s this tremendous “disconnect” between a culture that’s infatuated with transgenderism, and “what’s going on ‘out there’.” She sees it as “ominous.” And she’s right to. This insanity cannot last. Again and again I say unto you: if you don’t like the Religious Right, wait till you get the Post-Religious Right. The post-Christian people who are coming don’t give a damn about your feelings.

Said the reader who sent that clip to me: “Did you ever think Camille Paglia would say something to validate the BenOp?”

Along these lines, here’s a clip from a post I put up last year, about a Q talk given by political scientist Dale Kuehne. He studies the family and society, and he says we have reached “a gender tipping point.” Excerpt:

No wonder journalists are noticing that this is a significant time. But most are still missing what’s most important: while today’s conversations push the boundaries of how we understand gender, they don’t understand that this brave new world of identity is about more than gender.

The students with whom I associate—from middle school to college students—have understood for several years that we now reside in a world beyond gender. The youngest of them probably don’t realize that TIME’s article announced anything “new.”

For many of them, gender discussions, even of the transgender variation, are just so yesterday. When we talk about personal identity, we don’t include the mundane questions about being male and/or female. A person can certainly identify as male or female if they wish, but there is little expectation that one would do so.

After all, today Facebook gives us over 50 “gender” identities to choose from. (Conversations about this can involve questions about why there are so few options.) And rather than looking to gender or variations on a gender, more and more young people are seeking to discover their identity by widening the options to include “otherkins” (people who consider themselves to have a non-human identity, such as various animals, spirits, mediums, and so on).

Young people today are much less binary when it comes to understanding identity because “male” and “female” as categories don’t express a unique or comprehensive identity.

When I tell this to many adult audiences, they laugh, believing that young people will grow out of this “stage.” They’re surprised that I don’t share their sense of the immaturity of our youth.

That’s because the young people with whom I interact are extraordinarily perceptive, compared to adults. As one high school student recently asked me, “Why does our school demand that we figure out if we are male or female or some variation? How could we figure it out even if we cared about gender? Can you tell me what it feels like to be woman? Can you tell me what it feels like to be a man? Of course not. No one knows.”

Precisely.

If everything is reduced to gender—even liquid gender—then how can anyone know by a solely internal exploration if they feel male or female?

What does it feel like to be a man? It can’t just mean that I am attracted to women, because it is okay to be attracted to men. It can’t just mean I feel like a lumberjack—because what does it mean to feel like a lumberjack? It can’t simply mean to be drawn to women’s clothes because what makes some garments women’s clothes?

In short, if the ultimate source of reference is the self, and if no other self than the individual is a reference point, how can you know who or what you are?

Indeed. The kids are right.

We don’t live at a tipping point; we already live beyond the tipping point. Whether adults realize it or not, the most important conversation today is not about gender, but about identity, as released from the confines of gender.

Kuehne thinks this is a very bad thing, because it is part — indeed, perhaps the end point — of the total deconstruction of the relational bases of society and its refashioning to serve the needs of the sovereign Self. You see Paglia’s point. She said this in one of her 1990s essays; it’s still applicable: