Rod Dreher's Blog, page 484

Our Hawkish ‘World War T’ Elites

From McKay Coppins’s profile of Tucker Carlson:

“Look, it’s really simple,” Carlson says. “The SAT 50 years ago pulled a lot of smart people out of every little town in America and funneled them into a small number of elite institutions, where they married each other, had kids, and moved to an even smaller number of elite neighborhoods. We created the most effective meritocracy ever.”

“But the problem with the meritocracy,” he continues, is that it “leeches all the empathy out of your society … The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid—I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is.”

Preach. I’m thinking about this in context of the media freak-out over Trump rescinding Obama’s directive on transgender access to public school bathrooms and locker rooms. It never seems to occur to these elites that the Obama administration badly overreached by effectively federalizing bathroom and locker room policy. Do they really think that it’s so obvious that people should agree to let sexually mature teenage males into the bathroom and locker room with their daughters? Do they really think that this is the proper role for the federal government?

Trump didn’t order schools to cease and desist policies that permit this. He only withdrew Obama’s mandate that ran roughshod over public schools in the matter of a highly controversial, intimate decision. The Trump administration simply said that this is an issue that should be worked out at the local level. This makes sense. And yet, given the pious ardor with which elites have taken umbrage, you would think that the locker room door is the new Edmund Pettus Bridge. You have a problem with penis-havers sharing the toilet with your daughter? Bigot!

I just spent the past couple of days driving around Canton, Ohio, a Rust Belt city. Here’s a USA Today piece from last year, during the campaign, about life in Stark County, where Canton is. Excerpt:

Stark County — home to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the McKinley Presidential Library & Museum and the National First Ladies’ Library — is particularly fertile ground for the GOP candidate’s criticism of trade deals and his vows to return jobs to the Rust Belt.

The county has lost a third of its manufacturing jobs in the past 15 years. To the extent that those jobs have been replaced, it has been with fast-food and health care positions with lower pay and stingier benefits. People don’t necessary believe that Trump can bring back those lost jobs — he can’t, and no one can — but many think he’ll make it more difficult and less attractive for employers to move jobs overseas.

Nowhere is the impact of manufacturing’s decline starker than in North Canton, where the hulking brick shell of the old Hoover vacuum cleaner plant stretches along Main Street. Founded here in 1908, Hoover once employed 3,000 unionized workers in 1 million square feet of space.

But over two decades starting in the mid-1980s, Hoover and later its new owners shifted the production jobs from North Canton to Texas, Mexico and ultimately China. Today, membership in Local 1985 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is down to 16. The union hall across the street from the plant is scheduled to close for good at the end of July.

The county’s largest and most important manufacturing employer, Timken, also faces tough times. Under pressure from activist investors, the company split into two concerns in 2014, one focused on making steel and one on bearings. The split is a long and complex story, but it provides more evidence that the system is rigged against working-class people in favor of Wall Street. Since the split, TimkenSteel, in particular, has been hurt by weak energy markets and foreign competition.

In 2008, Forbes identified Canton as one of America’s 10 Fastest Dying Cities. Nearly everyone I talked to there expressed passionate concern about the opioid epidemic, which is overwhelming resources. Just driving around the city, you can see evidence of hard, hard times. Yesterday, I drove past a scrum of men and women, black and white, standing on a street corner waiting for a bus. They all looked tired, overweight, defeated. And some of their public schools are about to take a big financial hit:

Canton Local Superintendent Steve Milano said the district, which saw its enrollment drop by 11 percent between 2011 and 2016, would receive a double hit if Kasich’s budget proposal is adopted.

He said the district still is grappling with Kasich’s phase out of the tangible personal property tax, which has translated to a $200,000 loss over the next 10 years. He said subtracting another $481,035 would significantly impact district operations.

“In order to make up losses like that, you have to look at when people retire and (ask yourself) do you replace them or not?” Milano said.

I wish Betsy DeVos, the billionaire Education Secretary who fought AG Jeff Sessions to defend the transgender bathroom mandate, would motor over to Canton, pull her limo over and ask those people how important it is to them that girls with penises be allowed to share the bathroom with their daughters.

Our elites, waging World War T, while most of America has a very different fight on its hands. In a CBS/NYT poll last May, 57 percent of Americans said that this issue should be left up to state and local governments — which is exactly the position of the Trump administration. Only 35 percent said the federal government should dictate bathroom and locker room policy in public schools.

“…highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid—I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is.” Yep.

 UPDATE: A reader commented on an earlier thread:

Did you have any time to explore Canton? It’s a perfect example of the post-industrial decay that spurred Trump’s victory. Downtown Canton is full of buildings that once were beautiful back in the late 19th through mid-20th century but are now mostly dilapidated and empty. The downtown is surrounded by shuttered factories and abandoned store fronts. The median income in Canton is below $30,000. The few people wandering around have a general air of sullen desperation. The whole atmosphere feels like visiting a country that lost a war, or possibly what it felt like to be in a once-Roman city around the year 650 AD. There’s a tremendous sense of loss.

If you visit Canton or places like it, you should be able to understand why the slogan “Make America Great Again” has resonance there. Canton used to be great. It self-evidently isn’t great anymore. It’s a shell of its former self.

UPDATE.2: Exhibit A, from the CNN correspondent:

i wonder if she is the problem or her overprotective and intolerant dad? teach tolerance. https://t.co/DbxAkrrH7n

— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) February 23, 2017

How in your warped mind is that the choice? Why must the answer be something terrible? So many other options https://t.co/rabGDIYvyY

— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) February 23, 2017

Trevor Phillips, PC Turncoat

Trevor Phillips is a prominent Englishman who was once at the cutting edge of diversity:

October 2000 saw the publication of a report commissioned by Phillips, then chair of the Runnymede Trust, called The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. It marked perhaps the high-water mark of multicultural thinking, and suggested that Britain should become a “community of communities” in which each community would respect the other by avoiding causing offence.

This, says The Guardian, was an expression of the belief that controlling discourse would result in social harmony. And now?:

“Well I think it would be fair to say that I made a big mistake,” he says now. “It was a clear statement that some groups can play by their own rules. That to me runs counter to my own political beliefs. Why I am still a supporter of the Labour party is because I believe fundamentally in solidarity and reciprocity, and I think most on the left have forgotten both of those things.”

Remaining a man of the Left, but refusing to live by PC cant, has cost him. But not as much as living by lies:

I ask Phillips if the threat of expulsion from his political tribe does act as a disincentive to speak out about what he really thinks.

“Depends how much of your life you want to spend lying to yourself,” he says. “I think it’s pretty wearying to get up each day and tell yourself to go advocate for something that you know not to be true. And what is even worse is if you’re in public office or politics and everyone you’re telling this to also knows it isn’t true. Not only are you a liar, you’re also an idiot.”

Phillips blames left-wing elites for the rise of illiberalism in the US and Europe, saying that ordinary people got sick and tired of not being able to say what they thought without being accused of being History’s Greatest Monsters. I also found interesting what he says about how progressive elites police access to their own circles:

“A ruling elite maintains an idea of what’s good and reasonable by a whole series of methods,” he counters. “Who gets advancement, rewards and status? If you don’t hold to the orthodoxy, you stop being invited to meetings. There’s a phrase that people in centre-left politics use: oh he’s very good. What they actually mean is: I agree with him.”

Isn’t it funny how progressives fret mightily about how social and religious conservatives supposedly cannot bear to be in the presence of people unlike themselves, when in fact it is the most woke progressives who agitate for “safe spaces” within which they can dwell without ever having to come into contact with an idea or a person that challenges their delicate sensibilities?

Anyway, read the whole thing. Thanks to reader Tom S. for sending this in.

Friendship & Encouragement

I’m in the airport headed back home to Baton Rouge after a deeply satisfying few days at Malone University in Canton, Ohio. Before I go on, it is urgently necessary for me to advise any and all readers headed to Canton that the place to stay is Hambleton House B&B. Kathy, your hostess, loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life — and it involves chocolate chip cookies! I’ve never been made to feel more at home anywhere I’ve stayed in my travels.

I was able to spend a fair amount of time talking to professors about the Benedict Option (of course), life in the academy, Christian life in America, religious liberty, and other things that I think about a lot. We share the same concerns, unsurprisingly, but what I take away from this week is a sense of comfort and even confidence. The teachers I was with have a good community among themselves, and it did me more good than I expected to be welcomed into their circle, if only for a couple of days. I live a fairly isolated life, regrettably, so when I get to spend time face to face with fellow pilgrims, it reminds me that I’m not alone, that we’re all working in the same vineyard.

In fact, I’m reflecting on that this morning, and on my own words delivered to the students last night about the importance of embedding oneself in a community of shared conviction — and I’m realizing that I need to work harder at finding and/or creating that kind of community where I live. As much as I treasure being able to be in touch with friends and colleagues online, there’s no substitute for face-to-face fellowship.

So, thank you, new Malone friends. I had forgotten.

Beliefs Are Not Always Facts

marekuliascz/Shutterstock

A reader named Salim writes, about The Benedict Option:

I read Emma Green’s review & your response with interest. Without having read the book, it’s hard to know how fair or unfair she was being. (From a reviewer’s perspective, the book has to stand alone, so one can’t expect her to inform her review too much from your blog or the interview).

What struck me is how unaware Green is that the majority culture now represents a belief system. If you asked her, “how should Muslims and Christians live together?”, she would no doubt have a sensible answer very similar to yours or mine. Muslims and Christians should respect each other, collaborate where possible, and keep their disagreements in appropriate venues. It wouldn’t do for shared, public institutions to force people to pretend to agree the other religion’s tenets.

What Green and others often don’t recognize is that their beliefs – especially their beliefs about sexuality – are beliefs. She finds your dismissal of pro-LGBT arguments disgusting where she would find a similar dismissal of Muslim beliefs sensible.

I find that I often have this problem in talking with progressives, even fair-minded ones like Emma Green (who may or may not be a political progressive, but who is apparently progressive on social issues). They genuinely don’t grasp that their take on certain issues are just that: a take. I’m not sure why that is. I have a couple of insights as to why. Take ’em or leave ’em.

For one, social liberalism is so overwhelmingly normative in American journalism that it obscures to those inside that particular bubble how subjective their views are. Fifteen or twenty years ago, two political scientists from Baruch College did an analysis of mainstream media reporting from around 1980 to the present. They found that the national media did a great job of reporting on the rise of the Religious Right inside the Republican Party. But they completely missed the parallel rise of the Secular Left inside the Democratic Party. The scholars hypothesized that because secular liberalism is the default mode of American newsrooms, they could not see what was happening right in front of their eyes. They just saw it as normal.

For another, sexual mores have drifted so far from Christian orthodoxy that Christian orthodoxy simply looks odd, and contrarian — especially to younger progressives, who have little or no cultural memory of how radically American society has changed on homosexuality. The Prophet Anthony Kennedy spoke truly for contemporary America when he said:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

Of course that right has limits. It has to; we don’t live in anarchy. In the progressive imagination, it seems to me, conservative Christians are the ones who wish to deny liberty to others. It never occurs to them that they wish to deny liberty to us.

The church has to own up to its own failures too. We have become so accustomed to compartmentalizing our Christianity, and holding to it cafeteria style, no matter our church tradition, that people who don’t do that (or who at least try hard not to) don’t make sense. It looks like bigotry, when in fact it’s mere theological and philosophical consistency. As Salim said, lots of progressives would accept this in a Muslim, whatever their private regrets about the belief, but not in a Christian. I think that has a lot to do with the role conservative Christians play in the progressive imagination as bogeymen.

Similarly, I’ve found over and over that I run into a reaction from liberal interlocutors that can be summed up like this: “You’re driving me crazy. You seem normal and nice and smart, but you believe this preposterous thing because of your religion. Argh!” Look, I subscribe to the New Yorker and The New York Times, drink fine wine, eat well, read widely, like to travel, and so forth — but I remain stubbornly troglodytic on this one issue. It doesn’t make sense to them.

(Nota bene, I’m not trying to read Emma Green’s mind here. I’m just riffing off the reader’s e-mail, and generalizing. Y’all please be nice. You aren’t defending me in any way I want to be defended if you trash Emma Green.)

Salim continues:

[I’m probably more optimistic than you, but I think modern America does a pretty good job at tolerating beliefs & practices. You can be generous or profligate, health-obsessed or couch-potato, teetotaler or tippler, Trinitarian or Taoist, vegetarian or omnivore, erudite or a reality-TV fan, Democrat or Republican, straight or gay, and find very little resistance in the vast majority of workplaces, marketplaces, churches, and neighborhoods. Elite college campuses are occasionally loony, and there are some other exceptions. But mostly, people (at most) note their disagreement and move on.]

Yes, this is true. I was puzzled by Emma’s sincerely expressed concern over how people like me think about getting along with people not like ourselves. Hey, that’s been my daily life for forty years or so! Truly, it is not a big deal. Some of my dearest and oldest friends are atheists and liberals, and I would defend them to the death. And one of my oldest and dearest friends is gay. I think there’s a lot of projection going on from progressives, who can’t imagine that moldy old conservatives like me actually enjoy the company of people not like ourselves, and that we are capable of holding two seemingly contradictory thoughts in our heads at the same time. Emma’s point struck me as so odd because I take pluralism for granted — something that many progressives in fact do not, hence their inability to tolerate religious and cultural conservatives in their midst.

Salim:

There seem to be two core problems for orthodox Christians. The BenOp can help with one, but probably not with the other.

1. How to encourage ourselves & our kids to be holy in a secular world that is utterly suffused with entertainment. The BenOp can help enormously with this.

2. How to maintain the integrity of our institutions against legal assault when they demur from the dominant belief system and praxis. I don’t think the BenOp will make much difference. With or without it, orthodox believers will need lawyers and politicians to protect them from the left’s culture warriors.

I look forward to reading the book soon – maybe you can convince me to modify my views!

Well, I think the book will help Salim understand my POV better, though he may not, in the end, agree with me. In the book, I say that we Christians have to stay involved in politics, if only to protect religious liberty. I talk about that in some detail. But the day is likely to come when the left rolls over us. We do not have younger people on our side. It’s just democratic politics. If we don’t have a Plan B for living out, teaching, and passing on the orthodox Christian faith should our lawyers and politicians keep losing, we will be in serious trouble.

Top Jesuit: We Have To Rewrite Jesus

Sandro Magister relates content from an interview the Superior General of the Jesuits, a Latin American cleric close to the Jesuit pope, has to say about marriage. Unbelievable. Excerpt:

Q: Cardinal Gerhard L. Műller, prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, has said with regard to marriage that the words of Jesus are very clear and “no power in heaven and on earth, neither an angel nor the pope, neither a council nor a law of the bishops has the faculty to modify them.”

A: So then, there would have to be a lot of reflection on what Jesus really said. At that time, no one had a recorder to take down his words. What is known is that the words of Jesus must be contextualized, they are expressed in a language, in a specific setting, they are addressed to someone in particular.

Q: But if all the worlds of Jesus must be examined and brought back to their historical context, they do not have an absolute value.

A: Over the last century in the Church there has been a great blossoming of studies that seek to understand exactly what Jesus meant to say… That is not relativism, but attests that the word is relative, the Gospel is written by human beings, it is accepted by the Church which is made up of human persons… So it is true that no one can change the word of Jesus, but one must know what it was!

Q: Is it also possible to question the statement in Matthew 19:3-6: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder”?

A: I go along with what Pope Francis says. One does not bring into doubt, one brings into discernment. . .

Q: But discernment is evaluation, it is choosing among different options. There is no longer an obligation to follow just one interpretation. . .

A: No, the obligation is still there, but to follow the result of discernment.

Q: However, the final decision is based on a judgment relative to different hypotheses. So it also takes into consideration the hypothesis that the phrase “let man not put asunder…” is not exactly as it appears. In short, it brings the word of Jesus into doubt.

A: Not the word of Jesus, but the word of Jesus as we have interpreted it. Discernment does not select among different hypotheses but listens to the Holy Spirit, who – as Jesus has promised – helps us to understand the signs of God’s presence in human history.

Whole thing here. Let those with ears to hear, hear what the second-most powerful Jesuit in the world is saying unto the Catholic Church.

We are living through Big History, for sure.

Trump & Transgender

This is fascinating, and a sign of the times:

A fight over an order that would rescind protections for transgender students in public schools has erupted inside the Trump administration, pitting Attorney General Jeff Sessions against the secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.

Ms. DeVos initially resisted signing off on the order and told President Trump that she was uncomfortable with it, according to three Republicans with direct knowledge of the internal discussions. The draft order would reverse the directives put in place last year by the Obama administration to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice.

Mr. Sessions, who strongly opposes expanding gay, lesbian and transgender rights, fought Ms. DeVos on the issue and pressed her to relent because he could not go forward without her consent. The order must come from the Justice and Education Departments.

Mr. Trump sided with his attorney general, these Republicans said, telling Ms. DeVos in a meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday that he wanted her to drop her objections. And Ms. DeVos, faced with the choice of resigning or defying the president, has agreed to go along. The Justice Department declined to comment on Wednesday.

Assuming this reporting is true, I am pleased that the president sided with AG Sessions. Though he is broadly pro-LGBT, Trump surely knows that ordering public schools to let transgenders into the bathrooms and locker rooms is not the place to take a stand. Still, it is fascinating — and important — that Betsy DeVos threw down with Jeff Sessions over this stuff. It shows that even within the broad community of conservative Evangelicals, there is no unanimity on this issue. Think about it: the fact that allowing boys who believe they are girls into a high school locker room is even an issue between conservative Evangelical Christians is a sign of the times.

Last night in the Q&A part of my presentation at Malone, a university in the Evangelical tradition, a student asked why we need the Benedict Option. “Why isn’t it enough just to love Jesus with all your heart, like I was taught growing up?” she asked.

I told her that love cannot be abstract, that it has to take form. I don’t remember what else I said, but as the evening was breaking up, several people who had been present said that the young woman’s question, however naive it might have sounded to some, is an important one. Important, they said, because it reflects the way so many younger Evangelicals have been taught to think — or rather, not to think.

One man who identified himself as an Evangelical described this as “pure gnosticism.” Another one, also Evangelical, said that I probably don’t appreciate the extent to which these young people were formed by emotivism — by the idea that the only thing that really matters is to affirm the right ideas in your head, and to manage your emotions to “love Jesus.”

“The students at my school are all really nice,” said one young man. “The problem is, when that niceness runs up against obstacles in the real world, it’s going to fold. A lot of Christians think being nice is pretty much all there is to being Christian. They don’t get it.”

Today on campus, I met a professor — an Evangelical — who brought up that young woman’s question from the night before, and said that the more he thinks about it, the more profound that question was as an expression of contemporary Evangelicalism. “Their churches have given them nothing but emotionalism,” he said. “They are totally unformed.”

And you know, readers, sweet kids like that are not going to have any idea what hit them. This is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism to the core. This is what it does. This is why in the years and decades to come, the churches are going to collapse under pressure from the outside culture.

Christian mom, Christian dad, Christian pastor — I’m talking to you. It’s not the fault of these young people that we are sending them out into the world as lightly Christianized gnostics. That’s on us. What are we going to do about it?

The future of American Christianity belongs to Betsy DeVos, because so many of us — Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox — surrendered intellectually and in terms of authentic discipleship one or two generations ago. We are now seeing the fruit of that. We disarmed our own children. I was once at a meeting of Evangelicals in which I heard a middle-aged woman say, “When can we quit talking about homosexuality and get back to loving Jesus?” What is male? What is female? What is sex? Forget all that, and focus on “loving Jesus,” never mind the implications.

This functional gnosticism didn’t start with the Millennials. This is why serious Christians are going to have to take the Benedict Option.

By the way, because I’m not going to be able to blog again till much later tonight, I wanted to draw your attention to Michael Brendan Dougherty’s tweetstorm about Emma Green’s Ben Op piece. Let me say to you readers that I don’t want you to be unkind to Emma. I respect her and her writing, and still do, despite my strong disagreement with her piece. What MBD says is true, though:

The descriptions of American life and the BenOp in this @emmaogreen essay are so different from my own impressions. https://t.co/MFFFnjqscG

— Michael B Dougherty

Redeeming Eros

As a further elaboration on my response to Emma Green’s review essay on The Benedict Option, I’d like to offer this excerpt from Archbishop Charles Chaput’s new book, Strangers In A Strange Land: Living The Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World. In it, he’s talking about the meaning of sexual love in Christian thought, and how it’s woven inextricably into a web of family and community life:

Again, from [Roger] Scruton: “[A] vow is a self-dedication, a gift of oneself”—open-ended in its commitment to a shared destiny between parties. “A vow of marriage creates an existential tie, not a set of specifiable obligations.” And it’s these irreversible ties, which can’t be revoked, that hold marriages, families, communities, and societies together over time. They’re the sinews of a genuinely human world, connecting the past with the present, and the present with the future. Thus they’re different in kind, not merely in degree, from a contract or a negotiated deal. “[The] world of vows is a world of sacred things, in which holy and indefeasible obligations stand athwart our lives and command us along certain paths,” whether we find it convenient at the moment or not.

The paradox of Christian faith is this: It affirms the importance of every individual, no matter how weak or disabled. God loves each of us uniquely and infinitely. But our faith also binds us in a network of mutual obligations to others. God made us not just for ourselves. He also made us for others.

In this, our beliefs directly oppose a growing dimension of American economic life. The nature of that life, says the Lutheran theologian Daniel M. Bell Jr., may be disguised by its remaining biblical residue. But in practice, it “encourages us to view others in terms of how they can serve our self-interested projects.” Other people “become commodities themselves— mere bodies to be exploited and consumed, and then discarded”:

As a consequence, marriages are viewed as (short-term) contracts subject to a cost/benefit analysis, children become consumer goods or accessories, family bonds are weakened and our bodies are treated like so many raw materials to be mined and exploited for manufacture and pleasure. Those individuals rendered worthless as producers and commodities by obsolescence—the old and infirm—are discarded (warehoused or euthanized) and the nonproductive poor (the homeless, the unemployed, the irresponsible, the incompetent) are viewed as a threat.In current American experience, true to Bell’s words, marriage often resembles a real estate transaction. Two autonomous individuals enter into a limited liability partnership that can easily be dissolved. Children serve as the various shared properties. And in such a world, an unplanned, unwanted unborn child is clearly the most annoying kind of drain on the emotional profits.

Read the entire excerpt at First Things — and better yet, buy the book. It’s essential reading for all small-o orthodox Christians, not only Catholics. It is difficult to present Christian teaching about marriage and sexuality in all its wholeness and complexity, especially in a soundbite culture. You can’t do it in a four-minute television appearance. The stand traditional orthodox Christians take against same-sex marriage is not based on “gays, ick,” but on our view of what the human person is, what sex is for, and what marriage is. As I say in The Benedict Option, we wouldn’t have same-sex marriage if not for heterosexuals revolutionizing the idea of sex and marriage in the Sexual Revolution. Straight people who affirm the sexual autonomy in the Sexual Revolution but who wish to deny the same to gays really are hypocrites. Small-o orthodox Christianity insists on the same standard for everybody.

So many Christians, Catholic and otherwise, who reject what the church teaches on sexuality don’t really know what the teaching is — perhaps because it was never presented to them.

Is The Benedict Option Good For Gays?

Emma Green’s review piece on The Benedict Option is up today at The Atlantic site. Here’s a link to it. She didn’t really like the book. That disappoints me, because she’s one of the best religion reporters out there, and I admire her work. But she seems to understand that the book isn’t really for readers like her. Anyway, I appreciate the attention she gave to my book. I do want to respond to some of her points, though.

We talked for over an hour a few weeks back. I enjoyed the interview, but I told my wife afterward that I was struck by how much time Emma spent asking me about LGBT issues and the Ben Op, as if that were the main part of the book and the project. I got the impression that the main question she has about the Benedict Option project is whether or not it’s good for the gays. This didn’t surprise me too much, given that she writes for The Atlantic, which has a particular affinity for writing favorably about LGBT culture (e.g., “Meet the Latino Drag Queens Defying North Carolina’s Anti-LGBT Law”). Still, it struck me as off-kilter — in fact, as an example of progressives and journalists deciding that social and religious conservatives are obsessed with homosexuality, when in fact it is they who are preoccupied with it, and focus disproportionately on it when they see churches not on board with full LGBT acceptance.

And so it turns out that Emma Green didn’t really like The Benedict Option because … it’s not good for the gays. Excerpts:

Donald Trump was elected president with the help of 81 percent of white evangelical voters. Mike Pence, the champion of Indiana’s controversial 2015 religious-freedom law, is his deputy. Neil Gorsuch, a judge deeply sympathetic to religious litigants, will likely be appointed to the Supreme Court. And Republicans hold both chambers of Congress and statehouses across the country. Right now, conservative Christians enjoy more influence on American politics than they have in decades.

And yet, Rod Dreher is terrified.

“Don’t be fooled,” he tells fellow Christians in his new book, The Benedict Option. “The upset presidential victory of Donald Trump has at best given us a bit more time to prepare for the inevitable.”

She finds this alarmist. But I argue in the book that the de-Christianization of Western culture is a process that has been going on for centuries, and that it is something that has been masked in recent decades by the political influence conservative US Christians have enjoyed. I make the argument that political success is misleading, because it conceals the abject failure of traditional Christians on the cultural front. As I explain in the book, being a faithful Christian is not the same thing as being a Republican. The fact that so many of my fellow conservative Christians have made that mistake over the past 30 years are so helps account for the dilemma we find ourselves in today.

More:

There was a time when Christian thinkers like Dreher, who writes for The American Conservative, might have prepared to fight for cultural and political control. Dreher, however, sees this as futile. “Could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to … stop fighting the flood?” he asks. “Rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, we should instead work on building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.” This strategic withdrawal from public life is what he calls the Benedict option.

Dreher’s proposal is as remarkable as his fear. It is a radical rejection of the ties between Christianity and typical forms of power, from Republican politics to market-driven wealth. Instead, Dreher says, Christians should embrace pluralism, choosing to fortify their own communities and faith as one sub-culture among many in the United States.

But it is a vision that will not be easily achieved. Conservative Christianity no longer sets the norms in American culture, and transitioning away from a position of dominance to a position of co-existence will require significant adjustment, especially for a people who believe so strongly in evangelism. Even if that happens, there are always challenges at the boundaries of sub-cultures. It’s not clear that Dreher has a clear vision of how Christians should engage with those they disagree with—especially the LGBT Americans they blame for pushing them out of mainstream culture.

Well, let me clarify the judgment in that last line. Quite often secular or progressive people want to know why conservative Christians are so concerned about LGBT issues. They ask it as if there is something wrong with us for our concerns. There are several reasons, but the most pertinent one is this: LGBT activism is the tip of the spear at our throats in the culture war. The struggle over gay rights is what is threatening our religious liberty, putting Christian merchants out of business, threatening the tax-exempt status and accreditation of Christian schools and colleges, inspiring the federal government to order public schools to allow transgenders into locker rooms (thankfully, the Trump administration is going to reverse that Obama order), and so forth. We pay so much attention to LGBT issues because we are made to care. Our religious liberty and the doctrinal integrity of our churches, especially our understanding of human nature and the meaning of sex and the family, depends on it.

This is not the fight that most conservative Christians I know (including me!) want to have. But it’s the fight that has been brought to us, and is brought to us every day.

More:

“We Christians have a lot to learn from Modern Orthodox Jews,” he told me in an interview. Many of Dreher’s suggestions appear to echo Orthodox Jewish life, including daily prayers, restrictions on diet and work, and extensive educational networks. “They have had to live in a way that’s powerfully counter-cultural in American life and rooted in thick community and ancient traditions,” he said. “And yet, they manage to do it.”

This comparison is telling about how Dreher perceives the status of Christians in American society. Jews make up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, and Modern Orthodox Jews are a tiny minority within that group—Pew estimates that they account for 3 percent of all American Jews, or roughly .06 percent of Americans. While it’s impossible to estimate the exact number of Americans who would identify with the ecumenical, theologically conservative Christianity Dreher describes, it is far bigger than the number of Modern Orthodox Jews.

It seems as though Dreher is saying that Christians need to be ready to live as religious minorities. But he fails to acknowledge an important distinction between the two groups, beyond mere size. Jews act like a counter-cultural, marginalized group because they’ve been that way for two millennia—powerless, small in number, at odds with the broader cultures of the places where they’ve lived. The American conservatives Dreher is addressing, on the other hand, are coming from a place of power. For many years, they dictated the legal and cultural terms of non-Christians’ lives. The Benedict option is relevant precisely because America is becoming more religiously fractured, and Christianity is no longer the cultural default.

I think I see where the disconnect is between Emma and me. She can’t shake the idea that political power is the best measure of religious influence. Over the course of The Benedict Option, I marshal evidence to show that Christianity in America, even conservative Christianity, is a Potemkin village, one that’s going to be pushed over in the decades to come, because there’s nothing behind it holding it up.

By far the more important measure is the one sociologist of religion Christian Smith and his colleagues have made of the actual religious beliefs of young Americans, regarding Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Here is an excerpt from The Benedict Option:

This creed, they found, is especially prominent among Catholic and Mainline Protestant teenagers. Evangelical teenagers fared measurably better but were still far from historic biblical orthodoxy. Smith and Denton claimed that MTD is colonizing existing Christian churches, destroying biblical Christianity from within, and replacing it with a pseudo-Christianity that is “only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.”

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.4 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.”

If you want to see the future power of conservative Christianity in America, look to Europe today. If I write with an alarmist tone — and I do — it’s because I’m trying to wake up the churches, my own people, and tell them that we are in much worse trouble than we think. I spoke to a campus minister who came to hear my talk last night in Canton, and he said everything I said about how unprepared Christians are for the world we’re in now, and the world we’re going into, is true, based on his experience.

In the Q&A portion of the event, an undergraduate stood and said, “I don’t understand. You say we have to do this Benedict Option, but what’s wrong with just loving Jesus with all your heart, like I was taught to do growing up?” She was sincere and genuinely confused by what I was saying. My heart went out to her, because her winsomeness and innocence was so palpable, but this world is going to eat her alive.

The pastor who approached me said that young woman is so typical of the young people he works with at the institution he serves. They’re sincere and good-hearted, but they think that’s going to be enough to carry them through. It’s not. The pastor said, “We have to do a much better job of discipleship. That is our challenge today.”

I had a wonderful conversation with a small group that included reader Chad Green, who drove all the way in from Columbus for the lecture. He told a story about a significant sacrifice he and his wife are making to ensure that their kids are receiving real formation in church, as opposed to youth group shallowness. On this blog this morning, Chad reflected:

I woke up this morning thinking about the young lady in the back who asked the question at the conclusion of your talk “Isn’t loving Jesus enough?” Your answer was very patient and kind but I think she was shaken by it. In my experience, there is very little emphasis on orthopraxy in most evangelical churches. There is very little in the way of instruction or discipleship taking place either. Her question re-enforced the awareness of the responsibility I have as a father to impart the faith to my four boys. Those of us who profess Christ as Lord must seize the initiative in our families to instill in our children the faith that has been entrusted to us. I am not sure of all the details of how the Benedict Option fits into this exactly, but a community of Christians reinforcing the teachings in the home is vital to our spiritual survival.

It’s like this: we could have Republican Party-led government from now till kingdom come, led by politicians endorsed by Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress, and the lot — and it would avail the church nothing. That is the message of the Benedict Option. American Christians who want to hold on to Christian orthodoxy in a post-Christian society would do well to emulate Orthodox Jews. It’s like this: a young Evangelical high school student told me that her current (public) school is one in which she is only one of a handful of confessing Christians. She said her old public school, the one she attended before moving, had a lot more Christians in it. Yet she says she prefers the school she’s in now, because “at least here I know what it really means to be a Christian.” I asked her to explain. She said that all her youth group friends in the old school are now smoking, drinking, sleeping with each other, and living no different than the non-Christians in that school. The fact that they are members of the youth group allows them to think that they’re really walking the walk, when in fact it’s just cultural Christianity. My young correspondent told me she appreciates the clarity in her  new “post-Christian” environment.

Emma Green focuses heavily on the chapter of the book in which I talk about the Sexual Revolution as having been catastrophic for orthodox Christianity. She writes:

Most importantly, he writes with resentment, largely directed at those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender and their supporters—the people, he believes, who have pushed Christians out of the public sphere.

“We are on the far side of a Sexual Revolution that has been nothing short of catastrophic for Christianity,” he writes:

It struck near the core of biblical teaching on sex and the human person and has demolished the fundamental Christian conception of society, of families, and of the nature of human beings. There can be no peace between Christianity and the Sexual Revolution, because they are radically opposed. As the Sexual Revolution advances, Christianity must retreat—and it has, faster than most people would have thought possible.This has had far-reaching consequences in all spheres of life. In the professional world, “sexual diversity dogma” is pervasive, he writes—an attempt by companies to “demonstrate progress to gay-rights campaigners.” In the future, “everyone working for a major corporation will be frog-marched through ‘diversity and inclusion’ training,” he says, “and will face pressure not simply to tolerate LGBT co-workers but to affirm their sexuality and gender identity.”

In politics and culture, “we in the modern West are living under barbarism, though we do not recognize it,” he writes. “Our scientists, our judges, our princes, our scholars, and our scribes—they are at work demolishing the faith, the family, gender, even what it means to be human.”

That chapter — one of ten in the book — is based in large part on this TAC essay, “Sex After Christianity,” which I published in 2013.  If you want to know the philosophical roots of my position, please read it. And yes, I write in a prophetic, alarmist tone, because that is the actual reality facing the church. In the book, I am clear that this is not the fault of gays, that the heterosexuals who made the Sexual Revolution’s first wave demolished the Christian model of sex and sexuality. I quote Philip Rieff, no Christian he, on how the Sexual Revolution dissolves orthodox Christianity. I certainly don’t expect progressives, Christian or otherwise, who favor affirming homosexuality to agree with me and others who uphold the orthodox Christian view. But I do expect them to recognize how radical what they’re asking of us is, and how accepting their position requires us to surrender far more than we can.

More Emma Green:

Nothing in this language suggests that Dreher is ready to live tolerantly alongside people with different views. If progressives wrote about the Bible as “a lot of babble about Jesus and God,” using language similar to that of the parent Dreher cites, he would be quick to cry foul against the ignorance and intolerance of the left; his language is dismissive and mocking, and he peppers in conspiratorial terms like the “LGBT agenda.” At times, it seems like the goal of the Benedict option is just as much about getting away from gay people as it is affirming the tenets of Christianity. The book seems to suggest that mere proximity to people with alternative beliefs about sexuality, and specifically LGBT people, is a threat to Christian children and families.

That’s just weird. I have been living and working tolerantly alongside people with different views — including gays and lesbians — for almost my entire life. So what? It’s a big world out there. The threat I perceive is not from LGBT people per se; it’s from affirming the Sexual Revolution, which is something one has to do in order to affirm — not just tolerate, but affirm — homosexuality.

More Green:

[LGBT] lives implicitly pose the hard question Dreher has failed to engage: How should Christians be in fellowship with people unlike them—including those who feel aggrieved by the church and its teachings?

To his credit, Dreher nods to this, ever so briefly. “The angry vehemence with which many gay activists condemn Christianity is rooted in part in the cultural memory of rejection and hatred by the church,” he writes. “Christians need to own up to our past in this regard and to repent of it.” He does little to specify these past errors, though, and he never tries to answer the broader question: how Christians can live as one people among many in America without learning how to respect and relate to those who challenge their beliefs.

I really don’t get this criticism. For one, I didn’t “specify these past errors” because the whole question of homosexuality is such a small part of this book. Here is the fuller passage from which Green draws these quotes:

All unmarried Christians are called to live celibately, but at least heterosexuals have the possibility of marriage. Gay Christians do not, which makes their struggle even more intense.

Worse, too many gay Christians face rejection from the very people they should be able to count on: the church. The angry vehemence with which many gay activists condemn Christianity is rooted in large part in the cultural memory of rejection and hatred by the church. Christians need to own up to our past in this regard and to repent of it.

But that does not mean—and it cannot mean—that we should abandon clear, binding biblical teaching on homosexuality. Gay Christians, like all unmarried Christians, are called to a life of chastity. This is a heavy cross to bear, but one that cannot in obedience be refused.

Our gay brothers and sisters in Christ should not have to carry it alone. In recent years, several same-sex- attracted Christians living in fidelity to orthodox teaching have found their voice in the Spiritual Friendship movement. It is based on the writings of Saint Aelred of Rievaulx, a twelfth-century abbot.

“Aelred helped me to see that obedience to Christ offered more to me than just the denial of sex and romance,” writes Ron Belgau, one of the movement’s founders. “Christ-centered chaste friendships offered a positive and fulfilling—albeit at times challenging—path to holiness.”12

That’s an important point, for gay and single Christians alike. Too often chastity is presented only as saying no to sex. Though we can’t deny the real and painful sacrifice the Christian ethic requires of unmarried believers, we should not neglect to teach and explore the good that may come from surrendering one’s sexuality. Though monasticism had not yet developed when the New Testament was written, Jesus said that some are called by God to be chaste singles (“eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven”). This is a steep path to holiness, an especially treacherous one in our thoroughly eroticized culture, but a path to holiness it is for some. We have that on Christ’s authority.

It is hard for single Christians to stay on that path, but at least straight Christians have the prospect of marriage to comfort them. Not so for our gay brothers and sisters. Christians—individually, within families, and within parish churches—must give honor, respect, and friendship to gay Christians who have embraced celibacy.

Moreover, gay Christians who reject traditional teaching must still be treated with love, because they too are image-bearers of Christ. Love wins, though not in the way the LGBT movement says. But it still wins. Christians don’t dare forget it.

Hear that? “Gay Christians who reject traditional teaching must still be treated with love, because they too are image-bearers of Christ.” And I would say gay non-Christians too. Those are actual words. That I wrote.

I could be wrong, but it’s hard for me to conclude other than that for this reviewer, affirming homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism is the most important thing Christians should do. Inadvertently, this points to why orthodox Christians have to spend so much time dealing with this topic: because the pressure coming against the churches from outside (as well as from sympathizers within) is constant.

It didn’t occur to me to spend much time in the book dwelling on how Christians are to live in a pluralistic world because it’s obvious that we have no choice. In fact, though, I do address this in this section from The Benedict Option, talking about the Benedictine habit of hospitality. I’m writing here about the Benedictine monks in Norcia:

The monks live mostly cloistered lives—that is, they stay behind their monastery’s walls and limit their contact with the outside world. To do the spiritual work they are called to do requires silence and separation. As lay Christians living in the world, our calling is to seek holiness in more ordinary social conditions.

Yet even cloistered Benedictines practice Christian hospitality to the stranger. The Rule commands that all those who present themselves as pilgrims and visitors to the monastery “be received like Christ, for He is going to say, because He will say, ‘I was a stranger, and you took me in’ (Matt. 25:35).” If you are invited to dine with the monks in the refectory, they greet you the first time with a hand-washing ceremony prescribed in the Rule.

Brother Francis Davoren, forty-four, the monastery’s brewmaster, used to be the refectorian, the monk charged with overseeing the dining room. He approached that task with sacramental imagination.

“Saint Benedict says that Christ is present in the brothers, and Christ is present in our guests. Every day I would think, ‘Christ is coming. I’m going to make this as pleasant for them as I can, because it showed them that we cared,’” he said. “That’s a good outreach to people: to respect them, to recognize their dignity, to show them that you can see Christ in them and want to bring them into your life.”

As guest master, Brother Ignatius is the point of contact between pilgrims and the monastic community. He explains why the monks take Christ’s words about receiving strangers so seriously: “It is kind of a warning: if you want to be welcome in heaven, you had better welcome people as Christ himself now, even if you don’t like it, even if you suffer because of those people,” he said. “If your life is to seek Christ, this is it. You will find redemption in serving these guests, because Christ is coming in them.”

Saint Benedict commands his monks to be open to the outside world—to a point. Hospitality must be dispensed according to prudence, so that visitors are not allowed to do things that disrupt the monastery’s way of life. For example, at table, silence is kept by visitors and monks alike. As Brother Augustine put it, “If we let visitors upset the rhythm of our life too much, then we can’t really welcome anyone.”

The monastery receives visitors constantly who have all kinds of problems and are seeking advice, help, or just someone to listen to them, and it’s important that the monks maintain the order needed to allow them to offer this kind of hospitality.

Rather than erring on the side of caution, though, Father Benedict [Nivakoff] believes Christians should be as open to the world as they can be without compromise. “I think too many Christians have decided that the world is bad and should be avoided as much as possible. Well, it’s hard to convert people if that’s your stance,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to help people to see their own goodness and then bring them in than to point out how bad they are and bring them in.”

The power of popular culture is so overwhelming that faithful orthodox Christians often feel the need to retreat behind defensive lines. But Brother Ignatius warned that Christians must not become so anxious and fearful that they cease to share the Good News, in word and deed, with a world held captive by hatred and darkness. It is prudent to draw reasonable boundaries, but we have to take care not to be like the unfaithful servant in the Parable of the Talents, who was punished by his master for his poor, fearful stewardship of the master’s property.

Is it not clear that we are to relate to those outside our communities with love and hospitality? We have to draw the line at the point where that hospitality threatens to disrupt our ongoing formation in truth. I get the idea that it is not enough that we relate in peace and tolerance to our neighbors who don’t share our religious convictions. We must approve.

One more excerpt from the Atlantic piece. Emma Green recognizes that for cultural traditionalists, these truly are alienating times:

And yet, Dreher begrudges a similar fear in people unlike him, including LGBT people who have long wanted to live freely in public—something that was largely impossible when conservative Christians dominated mainstream American life. From this vantage, his Benedict option seems less a proposal for pluralism than the angry backwards fire of a culture in retreat.

I did not record my interview with Emma, so I could be wrong here, but I’m pretty sure I said that I do not want to go back to the days of the closet. That I think it is a good thing that gays and lesbians are treated with more dignity and respect now. I even supported civil partnerships back in the day. But it’s not marriage. Anyway, how, exactly, do I begrudge a similar fear in people unlike me? If it’s LGBTs, the only grudge I have is that activists and their fellow travelers hold all the cultural high ground today, but act as if they will not be free of fear until the last Southern Baptist florist is strangled with the guts of the last Evangelical pastor. They treat conservative Christians as if we still hold all the cultural trump cards, and point to the election of Donald Trump — an openly pro-gay Republican who doesn’t have a religiously conservative bone in his body — as if that proved anything. You watch: the GOP Congress will not send any meaningful religious liberty legislation to Trump’s desk. If they do, then I might be willing to listen to complaints that LGBTs have to live in fear of the Jesus-Freak mob. From where I sit, we conservative Christians really are in retreat, and are being driven out of the public square mostly because we don’t affirm the new orthodoxy.

You want to talk about tolerance? How much tolerance would a conservative Evangelical or an orthodox Roman Catholic face on most college faculties, in most law firms, in most newsrooms, and in all the other centers of cultural power and formation? This is where the real power is for the long term.

Last quote from the Atlantic piece:

Dreher wrote The Benedict Option for people like him—those who share his faith, convictions, and feelings of cultural alienation. But even those who might wish to join Dreher’s radical critique of American culture, people who also feel pushed out and marginalized by shallowness of modern life, may feel unable to do so.

Well, yes, I can state without fear of contradiction that I wrote The Benedict Option for Christians who share my faith, convictions, and feelings of cultural alienation. That’s why the subtitle is “A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation”! The Ben Op cannot be all things to all people. It is not going to appeal to secular people or religious liberals. The fact that some people see examples of conservative Christians attempting to hold on to theological and cultural distinctives in a culture that is overtly hostile to them as weird or otherwise threatening — this, in a culture that does not see a threat from other groups doing the same — goes a long way toward explaining why The Benedict Option is so necessary right now. Whether we like it or not, the issue of sexuality, especially homosexuality, really is the chief dividing line within all the churches. When a book with such a wide-ranging Christian critique of contemporary culture gets boiled down to its stance on homosexuality, you understand why this issue, as I said earlier, is the tip of the culture war spear.

Read the whole Emma Green piece. I genuinely appreciate her attention to the book. And I think her essay, however mistaken I think she is on major points, really is helpful in that it signals how non-religious conservatives are likely to read the book.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I just read the Atlantic piece Emma Green wrote about the book, and I was a bit puzzled by some of it. She writes, “it’s not clear that Dreher has a clear vision of how Christians should engage with those they disagree with–especially the LGBT Americans they blame for pushing them out of mainstream culture.”  She also writes,”Their lives implicitly pose the hard question Dreher has failed to engage: How should Christians be in fellowship with people like them–including those who feel aggrieved by the church and its teachings?”

There’s so, so much going on in just those quotes, but what really puzzled me was that the article says she interviewed you. There are direct quotes and everything. Did she NOT ask you any of these questions directly? If Green wanted to know what your vision was for variations of the BenOp incorporating LGBTQ people, why didn’t she just ask? Or if she did, did she not include your responses in the article?

I’ve been reading you for a while now. You’ve engaged these issues repeatedly and explicitly on your blog at great length. It’s not hard to find your thoughts on the matter, and it’s clear from reading your blog that your thoughts are complicated, and that while your BenOp’s orthodoxy might exclude LGBTQ folks, you’re not declaring that every BenOp should, especially since the thrust of your critique is aimed at the arc of modernity’s atomizing, self-aggrandizing foundations. (Unless I totally misunderstand it, in which case I encourage correction!)

From my lay perspective, the piece reads like journalistic malfeasance, even though Green seems to strive to be fair. It’s just hard to believe that she read your words thoughtfully, given that the above quotes misrepresent your views. For instance, it’s not that “the LGBT Americans” pushed Christians out of mainstream culture. It was a variety of secularizing factors, including but not limited to the Sexual Revolution, which predates the contemporary civil rights battles surrounding non-hetero sexualities by decades. (Not to mention the degree to which the Church undermined itself in the U.S.) Then there’s the bizarre notion that Christians would be “in fellowship” with “those who feel aggrieved by the church and its teachings.” I suppose that all of us wrestle with the doctrinal, liturgical, and institutional failings of our church bodies. But fellowship is a practice of unity on central teachings. What does that actually mean? Is Green limiting herself to just LGBTQ folks who have been cast out of conservative churches? Is she encompassing all manner of grievance with orthodox teaching? Doesn’t that vary by denomination? My church, for instance, embraces gay clergy and performs gay marriages. But it is resolutely Trinitarian. Am I supposed to be in fellowship with someone who denies the triune God, even if they denounce gay marriage? Not to mention the fact that even if you, in your BenOp, aren’t in fellowship with an openly gay couple, it does not preclude you from being a good neighbor to them. Apart from Southern hospitality, that’s a part of orthodox Christian hospitality, and a part of the BenOp ethos. Right? Am I the one totally misunderstanding this, or did Green just not do her homework?

This seems to be the condensed symbol in practice. Green seems to wrist-slap you for talking primarily to other Christians at this point, but that may be necessary, since so many of them understand the BenOp the same way she does.

Then again, maybe it’s folks like me who misunderstand it, and I just need to slow down and read your blog more carefully. Just to make sure I don’t repeat Green’s mistakes, I’m just writing you directly. Hopefully you’ll post a response to her piece on the blog that that will clear all this up.

Well, I hope that the blog entry above answers a lot of your questions. I don’t see how small-o orthodox Christianity can reconcile itself to any kind of sexual activity outside of marriage, either hetero or homo, nor can marriage be, for Christians, a same-sex thing. I suppose the question is, what does one mean by “exclude”? I make it very clear in my book that we are not to shun LGBT folks, or mistreat them — and to the extent that Christians do or have done that, we should repent. But that’s not the same thing as affirming that homosexuality is a moral good, or even morally neutral. The question is not really, “What are you conservative Christians prepared to tolerate?” but actually “What are LGBTs and progressive allies prepared to tolerate?” Because all the pressure to conform to the new orthodoxy is coming from that side, and a lot of it is punitive. It’s Orwellian how they lament our supposed intolerance, but practice the very thing they purport to condemn.

White Nationalism In Christian High School

A reader who goes to a conservative Christian high school, and who says he is a white, male conservative Christian, writes:

As someone who’s seeing the rise of Milo’s ideals specifically in teenagers raised in a conservative context in my Christian high school, I feel like I have a perspective that you don’t.

Milo isn’t getting conservative ideas out there in a subversive label that’s appealing to Millenials. He’s a prophet of the deeply un-conservative alt-right. He’s not creating a climate that’s accepting of conservative ideals. He’s creating one that specifically rejects those values as hallmarks of a system that they view as a failure through not being radical enough.

That’s why all the good little Christians at my high school are falling in behind him — not because they actually give a crap about conservatism but because he’s giving angry, aimless young men whose church hasn’t given them anything solid to fall back on an alternate source of values that happens to be steeped in fascist and white supremacist ideals. It’s just as absorbed in identity politics as any social-justice movement on the left is, except focused on white men and not LGBT people.

It has swallowed up most of the guys in the senior class at my school, and I’m tired of it. You can’t just not talk about politics with them, because everything is politics to them. Every discussion devolves into things like which girls are “feminazis,” celebrities dating outside their ethnicity being “white genocide,” and so on. It’s suffocating to feel like if you say “actually, that’s really racist” you’re going to be brushed off as some liberal or a cuckservative. I’m genuinely scared that it’s going to spread to the point where I won’t have anyone I can talk to like a normal human being. This isn’t hyperbole.

I’ve sat and heard multiple conversations in the school hallway about things like how the very concept of legal immigration is “cultural Marxism” and about how if all the blacks in America moved back to Africa there’d be less crime, and Africa would be better off because they would have people who had learned things in America. It’s absolutely nuts, but what am I going to do? I don’t know that any adults would take me seriously if I told them this was a problem. The alt-right has defensive talking points are baked right into the ideology so as to make it more palatable for conservatives, just like how communism masqueraded as concern for the workers in the early days to make it appealing to moderate socialists.

Maybe that’s just the norm for kids my age now, and I’m going to just have to be paranoid that everyone that I meet is secretly a white nationalist.

Wow. I’m going to have to think about this one. I verified this reader’s identity. High school readers of this blog, and college student readers, what are you seeing and hearing in your schools?

UPDATE: Another reader writes:

I cannot comment so much about what is going in high schools these days, but I can tell you that it is downright eerie how stale my college’s chapter of College Republicans is. There is no acknowledgement of the changing and changed situation in America or the world, just reflexive support for tax cuts and poking Russia in the eye. Some of them can quote Hayek at you for hours, but it is a shallow allegiance to conservatism, devoid of real life and creative growth. In a word: stagnant. Like a tree without deep roots, all it will take is a mighty wind to knock them from the comfortable perches held by their fathers before them.

I can believe that. When I was in college in the 1980s, the College Republicans at my school were huge. I can’t see, though, why any intellectually serious conservative college student today would want to give himself or herself over to working in the Republican Party (or anything related to movement conservatism, frankly).

A Double Standard On Milo?

I received a short time ago this exceptionally thoughtful e-mail about l’affaire Milo from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous:

Your first instincts on Milo are correct, I think. Milo is a degenerate provocateur and conservatives should be very careful to distance themselves from him. He is a deeply unprincipled person who discredits the Christian faith with his flippant use of it as a flag of convenience. That such an individual was invited to speak at a putative conservative conference is a shameful reflection upon what the movement is becoming.

I think it is important to pay attention to the responses on this issue, though, because they can be revealing.

I wonder whether there isn’t something of a double standard being applied to Milo. A number of darlings of the bien pensants have made similar remarks in the past and haven’t been hounded out of public life on account of them. [The UK gay rights campaigner] Peter Tatchell has suggested that the age of consent be lowered to 14 and, in a letter to The Guardian, praised the courage of a book challenging the idea that all sex between adults and children is abusive. George Takei has laughed and joked about being molested as a 13-year-old by a cute camp counselor, denying that it was molestation and calling it cute. StephenFry created a play about the relationship between a Latin master and his 13-year-old pupil which has been criticized for its minimization of the seriousness of what is actually abuse. He has also argued that girls who had sex with rock stars at 14 weren’t victims. Of course, a significant percentage of the rock pantheon is guilty of having sex with underage girls.

The difference between people’s reactions to statements seemingly minimizing ephebophilia when it comes to their heroes as opposed to their opponents is telling. It suggests to me that people recognize that the issue is a lot more complicated than we would like to think and that they are prepared to cut people a lot more slack if they like them, while being merciless if they don’t. I would like to see all sides ratchet responses down a level.

The strength of reactions on this issue seem to arise from the scale of our abhorrence of the abuse of teenagers and young children coupled with the reality that there really are both grey areas and exceedingly controversial facts in this area, facts and grey areas that we would really like to pretend didn’t exist. Some of these facts and grey areas:

1. Our concept of consent is a highly contestable social construction, which differs sharply from other societies, both present and historical, and which relies upon arbitrary lines that determine a lot of sex that people consider consensual to be non-consensual.

2. Young teens’ sexual experiences with adults are nowhere near as negatively experienced as many suppose. This is especially the case for boys with women, who, in the linked research, reacted three to five times more positively than girls with men.

3. There are some significant gender differences here. Discussions of concepts such as consent tend to dissemble the important but unpopular reality of sexual difference.

Had sex with teenage boys, got a postage stamp (Oldrich/Shutterstock)

4. The attitudes to intergenerational sex or sex with underage men held by some in the gay community. As with the scale of the practice of open relationships, it is something that isn’t good PR for the movement.

5. There seems to be growing reason to believe that paedophilia (which is distinct from hebephilia and ephebophilia) is itself a sort of ‘orientation’, a fact which unsettles many of the popular assumptions of the natural goodness of having been ‘born this way’.

There are strong—and, I believe, necessary—taboos surrounding sexual actions towards minors, but I think it is important to lower the temperature of the discussion and to find ways to talk about some of these complicated realities and unwelcome facts. There are important issues here that are ill-served by being addressed through emotional reaction, rather than careful reason.

I think we are seeing in the case of many new ‘affirmative consent’ guidelines the problems that can arise when we are so concerned to tackle abuse that we fail to attend to the messy nature of reality. I think we might be facing similar problems here. Also, when it comes to the case of paedophilia as an orientation—NOT actions of child abuse—I think that we need to remove the instinctive social judgment that the taboo excites (focusing it on abusive actions, not persons with an unchosen predilection) and provide supportive structures so that such persons do not offend.

By the way, in the 1960s, gay icon Harvey Milk took Jack Galen McKinley, a 16-year-old runaway boy, as his live-in lover. I didn’t realize that. According to Milk biographer Randy Shilts, McKinley said he ran away from home and came to New York to throw himself into the gay sex scene. So he was eager.

In the second Obama administration, Harvey Milk got a postage stamp with his likeness and named after him. So there’s hope for Milo yet, if only he will embrace progressive causes.