Rod Dreher's Blog, page 482

Orchestra Hero

Onward Transgender Soldiers

Yesterday I sat in a doctor’s waiting room and saw on TV Harry Connick Jr. interviewing the transgender star Laverne Cox. It was a happy-go-lucky interview, about what you would expect from blandoid daytime television. This is how you know transgenderism is mainstream.

But here’s a side of transgenderism that we rarely see:

It didn’t take long for the inaugural scientific conference of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health (USPATH) to descend into an ugly display of intolerance and identity politics, with gender-confused kids as ideological pawns.

When the dust finally settled, trans bullies and their medical allies had colluded to kick a dissenting expert (Kenneth Zucker) off the program, justified their censorship by indirectly blaming President Trump (the “direct threat” to trans people from the “new political climate”), and declared victory.

The conference was designed to be emphatically and politically pro-trans:

Sponsored by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the conference debuted the newly formed “USPATH,” ostensibly to serve WPATH’s U.S. members, who account for 75 percent of WPATH’s membership. However, according to USPATH Conference Chair Dan Karasic and Co-Chair Jamison Green, the conference served a political purpose as well: “USPATH LA 2017 will stand as a strong statement of support for continuing the rapid developments in trans health in America, and for the community of health providers, researchers, and advocates who are advancing that care.”

But not all health care experts are welcome. Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist with years of experience treating gender confusion, was slated to speak on several panels at the conference. He was a token, actually, a voice representing politically disfavored but scientifically weighty research that cautions against labeling gender-confused children as “transgender,” in part because the majority of these children later “desist” from cross-gender identification.

You might remember Dr. Zucker from Jesse Singal’s account a year ago about how militant trans activist got him fired from a Canadian institution, even though he’s one of the top experts in the field of transgender health. Zucker’s crime? He says that doctors should not be so quick to label children who manifest gender dysphoria as transgender, given that statistics show that most of them will resolve their dysphoria as the mature.

Trans activists showed up at the USPATH conference and disrupted the panel on which Dr. Zucker was speaking. More:

During the meeting, trans activists denounced the invitation to Zucker, whom they described as a champion of “reparative therapy,” and accused WPATH of being “grounded in cis-normativity and trans-exclusion” and prioritizing “white and cis-gendered clinicians and researchers” without input from the trans community (especially trans women of color).

They also charged WPATH with inflicting “violence and inaccessibility” on the trans community because hotel security was called to keep protesters from disrupting the talk. Activists also complained that WPATH “continues to pathologize our experiences” by supporting the DSM–5 classification of gender dysphoria as a mental health issue. To get a sense of how unhinged all this is, realize that trans activists are leveling these charges against their friends—the professional organization that has done its best to legitimize trans identities.

You know how people on the left consider themselves to be defenders of Science against the benighted right-wing conspiracy? Well, it depends on which science we’re talking about. The doctors’ organization capitulated to the trans protesters:

Karasic admitted that WPATH “made a mistake” in allowing Zucker to speak. In fact, Karasic volunteered, in hindsight he should have overridden the competitive process by which WPATH’s scientific committee selected papers to ensure that Zucker was rejected. Ironically, according to Karasic, the scientific committee that approved Zucker’s presentations included several professionals who are also transgender.

In a blatant admission of his willingness to censor scientific research in the future, Karasic apologized to the trans activists, saying, “even if it [Zucker’s proposal] was getting a high enough score, I don’t think we should have let him present,” and WPATH/USPATH would not make that mistake in the future.

That wasn’t enough for the protesters. They demanded under threat of violence that Zucker not be allowed to speak at the conference, because it made them feel unsafe. The gutless organizers caved.

Read the whole thing.  There are more shocking details. Again, this is how they treat their friends. And this is how actual real-life doctors surrender any sense of professional responsibility and yield to a mob. It’s monstrous. If a militant mob of Creationists had done this to a biological or anthropological conference, it would have been front-page news. If they had invaded and intimidated a pro-Creationist conference because the conference organizers had invited an evolution supporter to offer a dissenting view, well, can you imagine?

But this? Silence. Because it suits the Narrative.

Meanwhile, a reader sends in a newspaper report of a lawsuit filed by a “gender nonconforming” Ithaca, NY, cop against her department.  Details:

An Ithaca police officer has filed a federal lawsuit against the Ithaca Police Department, alleging she has been discriminated against based on her gender non-conformity and sexual orientation. The officer is seeking millions in damages, as well as policy changes.

Sarah Crews, the officer who filed the lawsuit, has been an officer for more than 15 years and has worked at the Ithaca Police Department since 2007. Crews is openly gay and gender non-conforming, which means Crews does not conform to society’s expectations of gender expression.

Because the Ithaca Police Department identifies Crews as female, Crews has had to transport and physically search female prisoners. Doing this, Crews said in the lawsuit, has put her job at risk because female prisoners recognize that Crews is openly gay and female prisoners have allegedly threatened false sexual abuse allegations against Crews.

The Ithaca Police Department’s policies require Crews to transport, search and monitor female prisoners. The policy states that a female prisoner will be searched by an on-duty female police officer, or other qualified female person when possible. If there is not a qualified female available, the shift commander will be notified to make arrangements and provide one.

The IPD’s policies rely on hetero-normative ideology, the complaint states, in which Crews does not fit because Crews is gender non-conforming. Despite Crews’ objections, the IPD has continued to force Crews to transport, jail and physically search female prisoners more than her heterosexual male peers who are also on duty because of what the lawsuit calls “outdated, stereotypical and inherently discriminatory” polices at the IPD.

If I’m reading the story correctly, Crews is a masculinized female lesbian who does not denies that she is female, but doesn’t claim to be male either. She’s “gender-nonconforming.” And because the police department doesn’t behave towards someone who claims indeterminable gender status the way she wants to behave, but rather treats her according to the sex that she actually is, according to basic biology and her birth certificate, she’s filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against her town of 30,000 people.

How are police supposed to deal with these highly subjective categories in the workplace? How is anybody? If Crews was being made fun of or harassed, then she definitely should have some relief. But how are people in the workplace to understand how to conform themselves to the rarefied mental state of a coworker, at the risk of being sued for discrimination? I personally know of a case in which a female identifies as “genderfluid,” and chooses to present as either a male or a female depending on how she feels when she wakes up that morning. Nobody she interacts with knows whether she wishes to be addressed as “she” or “he” until and unless she tells them. And she is quick to take offense over being “misgendered.”

Madness. I accept that gender dysphoria is a real thing. But the lengths to which this society is going to accommodate the demands of the gender-ideology militants are frightening — and unsustainable. It’s the LGBT version of Lysenkoism, which forces science to come to politically correct conclusions.

The Liturgies Of Secular Democracy

What a terrific, provocative, and intelligent e-mail from an Australian reader, responding to Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig’s review of The Benedict Option:

Reading Bruenig’s review, I’m going to stick my neck out and offer some longish integrative thoughts:

The liberal-democratic order is founded on suspending the question of whether God exists or not (and has authority over human life) and relegating that to the level of personal opinion. This means that democracy itself functions as though atheism is metaphysically true—there is no God whose demands on people must be embraced—but gives people the freedom to shape their own lives around theism (or deism, or polytheism etc). In the short term this is a great solution to the problem of religious wars, by simply punting ultimate questions of morality and metaphysics and seeking to create a society where people can live together despite deep differences.

The problem is that this arrangement is unstable for two reasons. First, living in a western democracy catechizes people into practical atheism. Because the underpinnings of society forecloses the question of God and makes material reality the ultimate horizon, then society itself is run on atheistic presuppositions. The more you invest in being a good citizen and are part of democratic public life, the more you are shaped by the rituals of democratic life into thinking, dreaming, desiring, acting, as an atheist.

Second, as democracy goes on its horizons are increasingly limited to the individual and the state—the individual as the reason and justification of all social life, and the state as the ultimate horizon of human experience and life, accountable and subordinate to nothing beyond it. Hence why ‘government is just the word we use for things we do together’ is thought to be just common sense, and why politics is considered to be *the* vehicle for human flourishing. Everything is politics, because politics is the final horizon that shapes the conditions for individual liberty.

But making everything base around the individual will (almost) inevitably make everything be reduced down to hedonism—happiness through pleasurable experiences, and the pursuit of wealth and social status that preserves the maximum kind of individual freedom that liberalism recognizes and esteems. Increasingly democracy gains confidence in its metaphysical position (this world is the only meaningful horizon) and begins to move from a naked public square to enacting its vision of the good that expresses that metaphysical position (the good life has to be justified entirely within the constraints of this life).

As a consequence increasingly democracy actively seeks to form people as little more than worker-bees, consumers, and pleasure seekers and begins to use its authority to maringalize and harass those groups that seek to create a social life that catechizes people into a different vision of the good life based on different metaphysics. That is increasingly incomprehensible to them—simultaneously irrational and abusive. At most it can be permitted as an individual choice, but not at the level of a social choice within democracy – unless the group basically removes itself from broader social life almost completely (the Amish option). It also fuels new wars of religions—really weird ones because they are so secular, where the goal is to impose our practical atheism and vision of the good life on the world—killing people to bring our version of the triumph of the individual, to promote hedonism, to push countries towards democracy. These are crusades fuelled by the same underlying convictions that give rise to more overt religious wars.

Bruenig’s review shows just hard it is for people inside that framework to see it in these terms—even as an empathic and imaginative act of walking in someone else’s shoes for a mile. She’s a good reviewer, and been thoughtful and fair, but she just can’t ‘get it’. Precisely the points at where she thinks your positions are incoherent are the places where she needs to grasp them in order to have any chance of getting your position as a whole. What she fixates on is the political dimension because that’s the ultimate horizon for democratically shaped people. The idea that you might somehow contribute to the common good by disengaging from politics a bit and putting something non-political up as the ultimate horizon of social life just can’t even be heard.

Because (like most of your other critics) seem to think the only problem to be addressed is the last one—the implementation of an ethical vision of the good life arising out of a metaphysics through the agency of state coercion—their reaction falls into two camps. The group you tend to lose your temper with and call ‘jacobins’—who say, nothing must impede the enshrining of an atheistic and hedonistic vision of the liberated individual as the framework of our social life, and any dissent is asking for special legal privileges that are irrational and abusive. And then people like Bruenig who say—too pessimistic, you can accomplish your goals through politics, you have more political power than you realize.

What that latter group just don’t get (partly because you Americans have postmillennialism deep in your DNA, whatever your faith and theological commitments are, and so you really do think that history’s arc bends towards justice, and so you are so insufferably pollyannaish that you think all stories can have a happy ending if we just tried harder. I’m not sure there has ever been a culture as resistant to being theologians of the cross rather than theologians of glory as Americans) is that their advice is going to make another part of the problem worse under your diagnosis. Throwing oneself even harder into rituals of social life in a democracy on democracy’s terms will just increase the catechizing and formative effects of those rituals and liturgies. You might shift the external pressure of the state trying to forcibly encode its view of the good life, but at the cost of being subverted from within. That’s the key part of your analysis that they just seem unable to get their heads around at this point in the conversation.

The interesting thing will be if initial miscommunication produces a deeper understanding as engagement continues. That really will be undiscovered territory, and I can’t predict what the outcome of that would be – good or bad. But it would be something genuinely new.

I thank the reader for his reflection. I was thinking last night about Bruenig’s review, and puzzling over the fact that she, like many others, can’t seem to see beyond politics regarding the Ben Op project. There is one chapter on politics in the book. There are other chapters on education, the workplace, church, technology, family and community, Benedictine virtues, and a couple others. I can’t fault people for focusing on what they’re most interested in, but I would caution the reader that it’s not a long book. I had between 6,000 and 7,000 words for each chapter. Each one of these chapters could have been a book on its own.

In any case, the reader above is onto something. In America today, we only seem to be able to think of politics in terms of what happens in legislatures or at the ballot box — that is, in terms of what the government can do for us, and what we do for the government. In The Benedict Option, I write:

What kind of politics should we pursue in the Benedict Option? If we broaden our political vision to include culture, we find that opportunities for action and service are boundless. Christian philosopher Scott Moore says that we err when we speak of politics as mere statecraft.

“Politics is about how we order our lives together in the polis, whether that is a city, community or even a family,” writes Moore. “It is about how we live together, how we recognize and preserve that which is most important, how we cultivate friendships and educate our children, how we learn to think and talk about what kind of life really is the good life.”

The Scott Moore book from which I took that quote is The Limits Of Liberal Democracy: Politics And Religion At The End Of Modernity. 

The book to read, one that brilliantly illuminates the Australian reader’s point, is Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy. I blogged about it here and here.

 

Marine Le Pen Vs. Angela Merkel

Ça c’est superbe!

Life In ‘The City Of Rod’

I didn’t know Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig was going to review The Benedict Option, but she has, in the progressive journal Democracy. I would have expected a negative review, and indeed I got one. But I also would have expected a really thoughtful pan, and I got that too — and for that, I genuinely thank her. All an author has the right to expect is that critics will engage intelligently and honestly with his work. ESB has done that, and this pleases me. (The title of the piece, “City Of Rod,” is pretty clever.)

I want to respond to certain parts of her review. Excerpts:

Indeed, liberalism and Christianity are in conflict; there really is an irresolvable kernel of discord between them, and in that respect Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option is not exactly wrong. Yet it’s not exactly right, either. But as I hope to demonstrate, some level of wrongness does not preclude value or insight, which is, incidentally, where I disagree most with Dreher, whose response to the wrongness threaded into liberalism is essentially to abandon modernity altogether.

Emphasis mine. This is the thing that ESB and I agree on, but the conclusions we draw from that agreement are very different. This is a valuable insight for the Ben Op conversation going forward, though, because so much thoughtless opposition to these ideas seems to me premised on the idea that there is no meaningful disagreement between Christianity and liberalism. To the extent that there is disagreement, the liberal churches side with liberalism, and have hollowed themselves out because of it. The ugly truth that conservative churches hide from themselves is that deep down, many of us side with liberalism too, though we don’t want to admit it.

This is not always bad. Liberalism has brought us some good things, things worth conserving. But if we are not going to lose amid the triumph of secular liberalism the things we Christians must hang on to at all costs, we are going to have to be more self-searching and honest with ourselves about what we are doing.

More:

Suffice to say, some find the moral landscape of modernity rather impoverished, and the options for pursuing it in a liberal world frustratingly limited. One can chase what one believes to be the good life, but one cannot place moral claims on others. This is the “catch,” as it were, of liberalism: “Liberalism,” political theorist Judith Shklar wrote, “has only one overriding aim: to secure the political conditions that are necessary for the exercise of personal freedom.” Or, as Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain had it: “Obey none but yourself.”

Thus ardent Christians who believe that a life modeled after Christ’s is not best for them but simply best have little room to advance their case in public life. To do so would be to infringe upon the liberties of others, and liberalism cannot abide such a violation. (It’s no accident that the earliest liberals had a special contempt for Catholics, who are especially inclined to protest the reduction of the faith to a private sentiment.)

This is good. She understands what’s at stake here. If the absolute telos of liberalism is to free the individual to do what he or she wills, then not only is that the “irresolvable kernel of discord” between Christianity and liberalism, but it also explains (as ESB does above) why liberalism now pushes Christians who dissent from liberalism out of public life.

ESB takes note of the prevalence of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism in our life, and says:

Even where Americans are Christian, then, they’re only nominally so in Dreher’s imagination.

And without their ancestral faith to guide them, these demi-Christians are as vulnerable to the libidinal indulgences of modernity as any secular person.

Couple things here. For one, the urges are not merely sexual. They have to do with all our desires. In The Benedict Option, I say:

MTD is not entirely wrong. After all, God does exist, and He does want us to be good. The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and its conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering—the Way of the Cross—as the pathway to God. Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort.

As bleak as 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.”

I don’t know ESB, but I’m pretty sure she would be as alarmed as I am by those numbers on consumerism and materialism. They are the logical outcome, though, of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the pseudo-Christianity that sociologist Christian Smith and his colleagues have documented is the de facto religion of Millennials (and, I would say, most Americans middle-aged and younger). Smith has distinguished it from orthodox forms of Christianity like this (from a PDF version of a Smith essay):

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is also about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents. This is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine, of steadfastly saying one’s prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through suffering, of basking in God’s love and grace, of spending oneself in gratitude and love for the cause of social justice, etc. Rather, what appears to be the actual dominant religion among U.S. teenagers is centrally about feeling good, happy, secure, at peace. It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people.

He says this is a lot like the bland American civic religion that the late Robert Bellah documented in the 1960s. But MTD is different in an important way. Smith:

Like American civil religion, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism appropriates, abstracts, and revises doctrinal elements from mostly Christianity and Judaism for its own purpose. But it does so in a “downward,” apolitical direction. Its social function is not to unify and give purpose to the nation at the level of civic affairs. Rather, it functions to foster subjective well-being in its believers and to lubricate interpersonal relationships in the local public sphere. [Emphasis mine — RD] Moralistic Therapeutic Deism exists, with God’s aid, to help people succeed in life, to make them feel good, and to help them get along with others—who otherwise are different—in school, at work, on the team, and in other routine areas of life.

This distinction matters for democracy. In the Fifties and Sixties, however shallow civic religion was, it at least held the country together and gave people reason to get involved in their communities, engaged in public purpose. MTD is rather about making sure we all get along, end of story. That’s a meaningful shift.

It’s a civic religion for an America that bowls alone. Look at this story, about how Villanova University built a pedestrian bridge over a street in the Philadelphia suburb where it’s located, at the town’s request, to make it easier for students and others to cross the street. Villanova, which is Catholic, made the terrible, horrible, no-good mistake of erecting crosses on either side of the bridge — on its own property. This caused controversy in the town:

Roberta Winters, president of the Radnor League of Women Voters, read a letter from the league that she had earlier presented to the Design Review Board, raising concerns about the crosses. At the end of the meeting, she spoke to the BOC as a resident, saying, “Just because something is legal, it may not be the right thing to do. I can think of many things that I can do legally but they are not consistent with my values and beliefs. As an Augustinian institution, I would hope that Villanova University would embrace and celebrate diversity as has been repeatedly done by Pope Francis in these troubled times.“ She quoted the pope, who called diversity “one of our greatest riches.”

“Do we really need these four crosses as large as I am towering over the roadway, and facing head on drivers of all faiths and cultures? We should be welcoming and celebrating diversity in our community… (Villanova) can act to enforce what is legal. I pray they do what is right.”

Got that? In the name of liberalism and diversity, these opponents tried to get this shut down (they failed). This is the illiberal liberalism that is displacing the older version.

Anyway, I’m not sure that ESB has fully confronted what the effect of MTD on Christianity is, and therefore what it says about Christianity in the public square. One more time, here’s Christian Smith:

It is not so much that Christianity in the United States is being secularized. Rather more subtly, either Christianity is at least degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or, more significantly, Christianity is actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.

The importance of this cannot be overstated.

ESB says it’s not clear why I chose St. Benedict to focus on. I thought it was clear: because Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, held him up as an exemplar for forming little countercultural platoons amid cultural breakdown. What would a “new — and very different — St. Benedict,” to use MacIntyre’s phrase, look like if he appeared among us?

More ESB:

Dreher provides two separate, but apparently mutually exclusive, accounts of what the Benedict Option is supposed to accomplish: “[T]he Benedict Option,” Dreher writes in his first chapter, is “a strategy that draws on the authority of Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient church to embrace ‘exile in place’ and form a vibrant counterculture” which requires “focusing on families and communities instead of on partisan politics, and building churches, schools, and other institutions within which the orthodox Christian faith can survive and prosper through the flood.” Later, he advises Christians to “see their Benedict Option projects as building a better future not only for themselves but for everyone around them.”

Not mutually exclusive. As I say in the book, if we Christians are to be for the world who Christ calls us to be, we are going to have to take a couple of steps back from public engagement to thicken our communities and strengthen our identities. It sounds contradictory, but it is actually a paradox. As Robert Louis Wilken has written (and I quote this passage in the book):

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture.

To use Scriptural terminology, we cannot be salt and light to the world if we have lost our savor, and are fumbling around in darkness about what Christians believe. You cannot give what you do not have. Smith’s research shows that most Americans, at least of the coming generations, do not hold the Christian faith in anything but a nominal sense. If you want to see an America where more Christians reject consumerism and materialism in favor of deeper values, you will need a Christianity that is authentic, not MTDeist.

The reason I say in the book that we need to go back to pre-modern sources (patristic and otherwise) in search of authentic Christianity is because the privatization of religious belief, which is at the core of liberalism, has led to the dissolution of historic Christian orthodoxy. But this is a theological point that I don’t want to get into here, in this discussion of a review of the politics of the Ben Op.

More ESB:

In his last chapter, however, he reflects on a conversation with a pastor who said: “The moment the Benedict Option becomes about anything other than communion with Christ and dwelling with our neighbors in love, it ceases to be Benedictine…It can’t be a strategy for self-improvement or for saving the church or the world.” One is then left unsure what this Benedict Option is, if not a strategy for saving the church, given that Dreher has already stated rather plainly that it is a strategy for saving the church.

The paradox here is that we cannot “save” the Church or the World if we set out to save the Church of the World. Those outcomes will only be possible as secondary to the end of pursuing life in Christ. I tried to make it clear that St. Benedict and his monks “saved” Christian civilization in the West not because they were trying to save Christian civilization in the West, but because they sought nothing more than fidelity. Yet the way they found to live in community had a tremendous effect in the world beyond the confines of the monastery. The two were connected. Over time, what took place behind the monastery walls had an indirect but profound effect on the world outside. I believe it can be the same way with our Ben Opped churches, schools, and other communal institutions, because we live out lives that are visibly different from the world around us, and attractive.

ESB:

Intentions aside, the concrete requirements of the Rule of Rod are rather more prosaic: form communities oriented to the worship of God; eschew sloth and take up manual labor; homeschool or school privately in the classics and Bible; support unmarried Christians in their chastity and oppose, on all fronts, pornography, fornication, and other forms of excess and vice. No Evangelical living in my hometown of Arlington, Texas would find any of these directives remotely surprising or particularly new.

Exactly right! I did an interview today with some Christian podcasters in north Texas. They made the same point. I said this is true: that the Benedict Option is little more than a call for the Church to be the Church. If we had been doing that all along, MTD would not have taken over the Church. We would be smaller, no doubt, but we would be stronger disciples, more sure of what we believed and why we believed it. Our daily practices would be more formative. We wouldn’t be getting divorced as much. And so forth. What I try to do in The Benedict Option is to put our lukewarmness in a historical, civilizational context, as part of an exhortation to deeper conversion and more intentional Christian living.

Here is the core of ESB’s disagreement with the Benedict Option:

Christians who engage in politics have reason to engage beyond their own interests; politics can’t save one’s soul, but it can decree that children receive health care, or that poor families be able to purchase food, or that mothers can take time off work after a birth without suffering poverty or unemployment. Building communities of virtue is fine, but withdrawing from conventional politics is difficult to parse with Christ’s command that we love our neighbors. Politics order our society on every level, from deciding property laws to housing codes to social welfare policy to war and foreign intervention. An individual Christian might comfortably abandon the whole filthy mess of it, but she can’t do so cleanly: Her neighbors still need her, and not just personally, but politically. So long as we live in a democracy, each of us has agency and a responsibility for the stewardship of our fellow citizens, and though we may not succeed in all our goals, we are obligated to try.

As I say in the book, Christians have to stay engaged in ordinary politics, if only to protect our religious liberty interests. (I believe we have to stay involved for other reasons too, but even if you don’t agree, you can at least agree that religious liberty is absolutely vital.) But we cannot put as much trust in politics as we have in past eras. The great error of the Religious Right over the past 30 years or so is not to have gotten politically involved. It’s to have thought that advancing the Kingdom of God was more or less synonymous with helping the Republican Party ascend to power. Our leaders (and a lot of us followers), often without knowing what we were doing, put way too much focus on political engagement, and way too little on personal spiritual formation, and what the Benedictines call “conversion of life.”

Right now, a lot of Christian conservatives believe that we dodged a bullet with the election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. I agree that things aren’t as dangerous for us now as they would have been under Clinton. But it’s simply delusional to think that Trump is going to turn things around. Even if he were a saint, he couldn’t do that. As Bruenig makes clear early in her review, there is increasingly little space for us Christians, at least those who don’t go along with the latest iteration of liberalism, in the public square.

Richard John Neuhaus hoped that we would have a place there. That project has failed, it seems to me. What now? Yes, we still have to be engaged in politics, but what happens when and if we lose? We don’t suddenly cease to be Christian, or to have the obligation to serve Christ, even if we have to suffer for it. How are we going to do that? How will we find the faith and the courage within us to know when we are being asked to believe or to accept something that we cannot if we want to be faithful? Where is our “Here I stand, I can do no other” line? How will we know when we are being asked to bow down to Nebuchadnezzar’s idol, living as we must as resident aliens in Babylon, and how will we find it within ourselves to go into the furnace singing, as did Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego?

These are not fanciful questions. These are questions that countless Christians have faced over the years. These are questions that millions around the world face today. We have not had to face them in our country. But we will. Fear the Brave New World dystopia as much as you fear the 1984 dystopia — if you want to save your soul, that is.

Finally, ESB writes:

Because I believe all of nature does point to God, just as the Medievals did, I can’t seal myself away from society.

The good news is that you don’t have to. But if you are going to maintain your faithful presence as a Christian within the broader society, you are going to have to go more deeply within your faith, its teachings, Scripture, and traditional practices to keep your lamp lit amid the howling gale and the dark night outside.

Once again, I thank Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig for a fine critical review.

Losing La France Profonde

The French have an expression — “la France profonde” — to describe the deep sense of the nation that exists far from Paris, in the provincial towns and villages. No matter how much and how quickly things change in the big cities, the essence of the nation would always subsist in Deep France.

That is changing. Adam Nossiter of The New York Times writes about his visit to Albi, in France’s southwest, a small provincial city not far from Toulouse. It’s where the Albigensian heresy came from. Like so many other French provincial towns and small cities, Albi is dying. From the piece:

Keep walking, and you’ll find more vacant storefronts, scattered around the old center of this town dominated by its imposing 13th-century brick cathedral, one of France’s undisputed treasures. Tourist shops and chain clothing stores are open, but missing are the groceries, cafes and butcher shops that once bustled with life and for centuries defined small-town France.

Measuring change, and decay, is not easy in France, where beauty is just around the corner and life can seem unchanged over decades. But the decline evident in Albi is replicated in hundreds of other places. France is losing the core of its historic provincial towns — dense hubs of urbanity deep in the countryside where judges judged, Balzac set his novels, prefects issued edicts and citizens shopped for 50 cheeses.

More:

The visible decline of so many historic city centers is intertwined with [France’s political] anxieties. Losing the ancient French provincial capital is another blow to Frenchness — tangible evidence of a disappearing way of life that resonates in France in the same way that the hollowing out of main streets did in the United States decades ago. A survey of French towns found that commercial vacancies have almost doubled to 10.4 percent in the past 15 years. As these towns have declined, voters have often turned sharply rightward. Albi is traditionally centrist, but the same conditions of decline and political anxiety are present, too.

Turn a corner in Albi, and you’ll pass the last school inside the historic center, abandoned a few years ago. Down another street is the last toy store, now closed, and around a corner is the last independent grocery store, also shuttered. Walk down the empty, narrow streets on some nights and the silence is so complete that you can hear your footsteps on the stones.

More:

I arrived in Albi, population 49,000, on a Thursday evening, having driven in from Toulouse, an hour away. At the edge of town, I passed a giant shopping center, Les Portes d’Albi, where the parking lot was black with cars. In the Albi I had known before, people had lived in town above their stores. Centuries of accumulated living were packed inside the tree-shaded boulevards. Shopping was as much about sociability as about buying.

Before arriving, I picked up a government report, an autopsy of many French provincial capitals: Agen, Limoges, Bourges, Arras, Beziers, Auxerre, Vichy, Calais and others. In these old towns, many harder hit than Albi, the interplay of the human-scale architecture, weathered stone and brick, and public life had been one of the crucibles of French history and culture for centuries. Now they were endangered, as even the dry language of the report conveyed that an essential part of French life is disappearing.

“This phenomenon of the devitalization of the urban centers is worrisome,” the government report declared, “as the stores contribute so much to city life and largely fashion it.”

And this:

To him, Albi’s fate was a cultural misfortune. City leaders had poured money into a high-concept modernistic new culture center at the town’s edge. And the shopping mall had been built. Large grocery chains, called hypermarkets, had also been constructed outside the city, with free parking. It is not that Albi no longer had commerce, or activity. But the essence of the ancient city was being lost.

The rise of the shopping centers traced the sharp rise in living standards brought on by what the French call the Trentes Glorieuses, the 30 glorious years from 1945 to 1975. Growth was around 4 percent; purchasing power of the average worker’s salary rose 170 percent. The boost to consumer demand could not be met by the old center-city structure of small shops, small purchases. Malls and strip centers were born.

And so, the fates of the provincial cities were sealed. Read the whole thing. 

This is a historic tragedy. “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” That was the first line of Charles de Gaulle’s memoirs. He concludes that first paragraph with, “France cannot be France without greatness.”

The idea of a nation cannot live if it remains an abstraction. This is why the provincial towns and cities have always been important, even if political, economic, and cultural power is centralized in Paris in more intense way than it is in the capitals of other nations. If a nation’s way of life dissolves, so does the nation’s idea of itself. And then what?

As an American, to visit a French provincial town or city is to see a way of life that is deeply enviable. Small shops, cafes, town squares, churches — the hustle and bustle of pedestrian life that one has not seen in the United States in decades, if one has seen it at all. It is vivacious, but it is also gentle. It is human, in a way that our built landscapes in America no longer are, and in most places never were.

As Nossiter said, the way of life in those cities and towns has been carried out according to that fashion for centuries. Until now. Notice what is killing it? Economics. Americans read about how economically backwards the French are, heavily subsidizing their farmers, and they sneer at this socialist inefficiency. I don’t know enough about France’s economy to say, but I do have French friends who say things have to change there on this front, because the economy is sclerotic, with a jungle-like tangle of regulations that strangle economic initiative in its crib. I’ll take them at their word on that.

Surely, though, it is a false choice between what France has now, and a total American-style liberalization of the market. Right? The changes in France’s consumer economy has caused and continues to cause the demise of its heartland, it appears. What will become of France if it loses these sacred secular places? What idea of France will the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Frenchmen alive today have of their country?

It’s not a question Americans think about much regarding ourselves. We are a people who cut ourselves off from history. Regarding the church, for example, many, perhaps even most, of us don’t think about our traditions and institutions in terms of stewardship. We think of them as we do consumers: where are we going to get the best deal to suit our needs? If we are worshiping in a 19th century neo-Gothic edifice or in an auditorium, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the experience, whether we “got anything out of it,” not the packaging. And this utilitarian approach is how we are about our towns and cities too.

But form matters. It shapes us in ways we usually don’t fully realize. A France whose character is shaped not by squares and cafes and town centers but by strip malls and shopping centers — that’s not France. In my city, there’s a big shopping center called “Towne Center,” the name of which is almost a cruel joke. Dévitalisation is Américanisation, the subjugation of culture to the market. If this is what France wants for itself, then France will have it. But at what cost?

As with the Trump phenomenon, those who support Marine Le Pen want to Make France Great Again. How could anyone object to that? But, as with the Trump phenomenon, is this only a futile, emotional gesture? Has globalization and related forms of economic modernization gone too far?

Can France be France without her provincial towns and villages? We may live to see that question answered, whether we like it or not. We are already living through that in America, and have been for a long time. Urbanization — the migration of peoples to big cities — is a global phenomenon. That’s where the jobs are. That’s where the life young people want is. Maybe it cannot be stopped or even controlled. If so, let’s not kid ourselves about what this means for the culture of a people and the soul of a nation. To lose Deep France is to lose depth, to live on the surface of things, malleable, impermanent, manipulable. This is a tragedy of historical dimensions — and not just for the French, but for all of us who love France, and indeed for all of us who love old places and old things in our own countries.

The Scourge Of Asia’s ‘Anal Colonialism’

wk1003mike/Shutterstock

 

Planning to go to the Association of Asian Studies conference in Toronto next month? It’s a big, important academic meeting in the field. You’ll not want to miss this one, Ignatius:

283. A New (Excremental) Order in East Asia: Colonizing the Bowels and its Contents across the Empires

Sat, March 18, 5:15 to 7:15pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Mezzanine, York

This panel seeks to explore the intricate mechanisms of colonizing the Self and Other through the control of gastrointestinal processes. The presenters examine how these power relations were created and how they functioned within the prevalent discourses of nationalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and Orientalism. Through texts related to the medical and geopolitical space of Japan and China and encompassing the Western discourses that appropriate the Eastern Other, this panel on a broad scale reveals what might be called ‘anal colonialism’ because the processes of control in question are carried out through the practices that in one way or another are related to the anus and because they highlight an excessive disposition to manage the Self and the Other in this manner.

Alexander Bay focuses on a large project of policing the Japanese nation through control exercised over the human waste production, sanitization, and hygiene over the 20th century. Linda Galvane studies one specific instance of this kind of control and demonstrates how the representations of gastrointestinal orders in Hayashi Fumiko’s journal Northern Bank Platoon reflects the discourse of Japanese imperialism that crosses the national and gender borders. Hashimoto Yorimitsu with his paper extends the examination of authority exerted over the Other within the Japanese and Chinese context that preceding papers focus on and reveals how Chinese torture that involved the consumption of one’s gastrointestinal organs by rats was been appropriated by and propagated through Western texts.

Sounds delightful. What would we do without Asian Studies scholars? I thank the reader living in Japan who sent me this notice.

Hey Dallas! Help The Norcia Monks

The ruined library of the monastery. (From the Monks of Norcia website)

 

This was announced from Norcia today:

An Evening with Rod Dreher

Proceeds Benefit Monastery Rebuilding Projects in Norcia Following the 2016 Earthquakes

Join Prior Benedict, Fr. Cassian and Fr. Martin in Dallas!

Saturday, May 27, 2017

6:00 PM

Reception in the Promenade

Private Reception with Rod Dreher (Table Sponsors Only)

7:00 PM

Dinner

Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek

2821 Turtle Creek Blvd

Dallas, Texas 75219

United States

Contact the hotel directly for possible special offers.

Mention that you are attending the Monks of Norcia event.

On October 31, 2016, a 6.6 earthquake levelled the historic 14th-century Basilica of St. Benedict and crippled the adjacent monastery.

The Monks of Norcia, who call these ruins home, have been the custodians of the birthplace of St. Benedict since the year 2000 A.D.

Following the rule of the great patron of western monasticism, the monks are committed to rebuilding the structures that make possible monastic life in Norcia.

“An Evening with Rod Dreher” is aimed at raising awareness and generating the means to make that goal a reality.

Keynote Speech by Rod Dreher

Rod Dreher is a journalist, commentator, and author, most recently, of The Benedict Option: A Strategy For Christians In A Post-Christian Nation. The book contends that the West is entering a post-Christian “Dark Age,” and calls on all traditional Christians — Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox — to adapt for the 21st century St. Benedict of Nursia’s response to the collapse of the Roman Empire.

In the book, Dreher highlights the monks of Norcia as a bright light in the present darkness, and features interviews with them about the relevance of the Benedictine way of life to contemporary Christians. Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput calls The Benedict Option “an invaluable tool for understanding our times and acting as faithful believers.”

Dreher, a former columnist and editorial board member of The Dallas Morning News, is a senior editor at The American Conservative. His earlier books include Crunchy Cons (2006), The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (2013), and How Dante Can Save Your Life (2015). Dreher is an Eastern Orthodox Christian who lives in Baton Rouge with his wife and three children.

Copies of The Benedict Option will be available for purchase at the event.

Featuring the Monks’ Own Birra Nursia!

Birra Nursia is brewed in the great Belgian monastic tradition and complements well the cuisine and atmosphere of the city of Norcia. The rose window of the Basilica of Saint Benedict graces every bottle as a sign of our respect to the home of his birth.

Attend This Event With Donations Starting at $250

Inquire About Sponsoring a Table

The monks need help with underwriting tables!

You can make an impact by sponsoring one. Host Committee tables can be sponsored for $10,000. Other tables start at $2,500.

The Monks of Norcia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non profit organization. All gifts are deductible to the extent allowed by law.

RSVP

Mr. Andy Mozisek

By E-Mail:

armjrdallas@gmail.com

By Post:

3708 Brown Street

Dallas, Texas 75219

United States

I am so honored to have been invited to be there to help repay my debt of gratitude for the gifts the Benedictines of Norcia gave to me. The struggle they now face to rebuild their ruined monastery is immense, and will take years. In The Benedict Option, you will learn more about them, and, I am sure, you will agree with me that these men are a light unto the world.

Here we are at Lent. If you have the money to spare, please consider buying a ticket. I am eager for you to meet Father Benedict, Father Cassian, and Father Martin. I am not a Catholic, but these men are brothers in Christ to us all, and their mission is in some sense the mission of all faithful Christians today. That is my conviction. I am thrilled to play some tiny part in the rebuilding of the monastery and basilica in St. Benedict’s hometown, and I invite you to join me in Dallas for this important project for Christianity in the West.

Besides, there will be Birra Nursia!

To learn more about the Benedictine Monks of Norcia and their life and mission, go to their website.  Below, a beautiful report about them from CBS Sunday Morning, before the earthquake took the monastery and the basilica from the monks — and leveled every church in the ancient mountain town. Watch this to know what was lost, and what can and must rise again, by the grace of God and with our help:

Islam: ‘The Last Badass Religion’

Here’s a great interview by Razib Khan with Shadi Hamid, the Egyptian-American Muslim writer. I love this excerpt:

As for Christianity, I thought about it intellectually, but I didn’t think about it much as something real and lived-in, in part because it’s actually not super easy to meet outwardly and openly Christian people in the generally liberal setting of Bryn Mawr, PA.

I guess, even if subconsciously, this must have had an effect on me – this idea that the Christians I knew generally didn’t seem all that serious about their faith, where at the local mosque it was pretty clear that there were Muslims who were pretty serious about their faith.

I’ve always tried to be careful in how I talk about this, because it can pretty easily be misconstrued, but I remember talking to some friends a couple years back and someone described Islam as the “last badass religion,” which I thought was an interesting turn of phrase.

It’s this part of Islam that helps me understand and even empathize with why some atheists or secularists might be suspicious of Islam.

(But it’s this part of Islam that also helps me understand why Muslims themselves, even those who aren’t particularly religiously observant, seem so attached to the idea of Islam being unusually uncompromising and assertive).

If you’re nominally Christian and you see that your own faith, for whatever reason, can’t compete with Islam’s political resonance, then you might find yourself looking for non-religious forms of ideology which can offer a comparable sense of meaning.

That’s why the rise of Trump as well as the far-right in Europe is so interesting to me; these are fundamentally non-religious movements that are, in some sense, reacting to Islam but also mimicking the sense of certainty and conviction that it provides to its followers.

That’s something I respect about Muslims in general: they take their faith a lot more seriously than we Christians do. The only forms of Christianity that are going to survive the dissolution now upon us are going to be those that are serious about the faith, and incorporate it into disciplined ways of living. What would it mean for Christianity to be “badass”? Not violent, or intimidating, or cruel, but serious and countercultural. This is one reason that Orthodox Christianity is so attractive to men. It sets serious challenges in front of you — fasting, prayer, and so forth — and expects you to rise to the challenge. It’s not rigidly dogmatic and moralistic, certainly, but it’s not sentimental either. It sees the Christian life as a pilgrimage toward God in which we die to ourselves every day. That’s not Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. That is the faith.

Shadi Hamid identifies himself as a political and cultural liberal. His book Islamic Exceptionalism is an attempt to explain what’s happening now in the Muslim world. In previous interviews, he has talked about how Westerners have a bad habit of not taking Muslims at their word about what they believe and what it means. More from the Razib Khan interview:

My bigger issue, though, has to do with political scientists’ unwillingness to take religion seriously as a prime mover. In other words, because most political scientists in the academy aren’t particularly religious or haven’t spent much time around religious people, they usually see religion not as a cause, but rather as something caused by other more tangible, material factors, the things we can touch, feel, and of course measure. So if someone joins an Islamist organization like the Muslim Brotherhood, the tendency is to explain it with things like rural-urban migration, underemployment, poverty, being pissed off at America, the list goes on. Sure, all those things matter, but what does political science have to say about “irrational” things like wanting to get into heaven? It’s not everything, but it’s one important factor that has to taken into account.

This is something that becomes more obvious when you talk to Islamists about why they do what they do. They don’t say, “hey Shadi, I’m doing this because I want to get into heaven.” It’s more something that you feel and absorb the more you sit down and talk to a Muslim Brotherhood member. It matters to them and it’s something that drives them, especially when they’re deciding to join a sit-in and they’re well aware that the military is about to move in and use live ammunition. It’s not so much that they want to die; it’s more that they are ready to die, and it doesn’t frighten them as much as it might frighten someone else, because they believe there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll be granted paradise especially if they happen to killed while they’re in the middle of an act that they consider to be in the service of God and his message.

Another example: after the failed coup attempt in Turkey last year, President Erdogan said something that raised a lot of eyebrows. He called the coup attempt “a gift from God.” What could he have possibly meant by this? Does that mean he wanted it to happen or even that he was behind his own attempted assassination? No. There’s nothing weird about what he said. There’s no doubt in my mind that Erdogan really believed that this was, quite literally, a gift from God and that God was sending him a somewhat tailored message.

Which brings me back to the question of “rationality.” If you believe in this kind of cosmic universe – a universe where one experiences daily God’s magic, if you will – then sacrificing something in this world for the next is pretty much the most rational thing you can do. After all, this is eternal paradise we’re talking about.

Yes, exactly! If Christianity has lost its sense of purpose and meaning among contemporary Americans, this has a lot to do with the loss of a sense of supernatural reality.

One more quick thing. I admire Hamid’s intellectual and moral courage in not towing a PC line about the Islamic faith:

So, in my new book, there are definitely some ideas and conclusions that I’m not quite comfortable with, which is sometimes a bit of a weird feeling. When the book came out, I was nervous, not just for the usual reasons, but also because there were certain distillations of my argument – the sound bites – which, when I said them, it was almost like I was straining myself. This is an era, perhaps the era, of anti-Muslim bigotry, and I couldn’t bear to think that I was contributing to that. The thing, though, is that I know that I have. But, just the same, I can’t bear the idea of not saying the things I believe to be true just because someone might use it for purposes I find objectionable. To me, the alternative is worse, the whole “Islam is peaceful” nonsense. “Islam is violent” is just as nonsensical, but we don’t fight those stereotypes of Islam by pretending the exact opposite is true.

Read the entire interview. It’s well worth your time. I’m going to have to pick up Hamid’s book. It sounds challenging and important.

Funny, but I feel that in general, I have as much or even more in common with a believing American Muslim than with a modernist American Christian.

UPDATE: Reader Firebird writes:

Your WEIRD bias is showing. A practicing Muslim in the WEST is serious and counter cultural. The vast majority of believing, practicing Muslims are not in any way doing anything countercultural. The exact opposite, in fact.

Having lived in majority Muslim nations, including one that is partculularly known for conservatism, I cannot say that I saw a great deal more seriousness from self-identifying Muslims than I do among practicing Christians. I do not see a greater dedication to textual study, or philosophy, etc among the average mosque goer as opposed to the average church goer. The society is simply not as far down the line as we are towards default secularism, so mosque goers make up a bigger proportion of the population.

I do see a stronger societal bias towards conformity and traditions, of which Islam is a part (but by no means all). A perfect example of this is the ongoing dedication to the de facto caste system that exists in Pakistan, which while foreign to Islamic thought, coexists and thrives in the minds of plenty of Pakistani Muslims.

To sum up– practicing Islam is indeed a counterculural, badass statement in the U.K. or California. It is nothing of the sort in most of the Muslim world. In those places, a better analogy would be that practicing Islam is like being a liberal professor at Yale. Expected and enforced through coercion, persuasion, and simple inertia.

No doubt a fair and accurate point.

View From Your Table

New Orleans, Louisiana

Happy Mardi Gras!

UPDATE: Notice the Benedict Options on the menu: