Rod Dreher's Blog, page 485

Saith The Man-God: ‘Everything Is Permitted’

Glenn Tinder, on the political meaning of Christianity:

If the denial of the God-man has destructive logical implications, it also has dangerous emotional consequences. Dostoevsky wrote that a person “cannot live without worshipping something.” Anyone who denies God must worship an idol—which is not necessarily a wooden or metal figure. In our time we have seen ideologies, groups, and leaders receive divine honors. People proud of their critical and discerning spirit have rejected Christ and bowed down before Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or some other secular savior.

When disrespect for individuals is combined with political idolatry, the results can be atrocious. Both the logical and the emotional foundations of political decency are destroyed. Equality becomes nonsensical and breaks down under attack from one or another human god. Consider Lenin: as a Marxist, and like Marx an exponent of equality, under the pressures of revolution he denied equality in principle—except as an ultimate goal- and so systematically nullified it in practice as to become the founder of modern totalitarianism. When equality falls, universality is likely also to fall. Nationalism or some other form of collective pride becomes virulent, and war unrestrained. Liberty, too, is likely to vanish; it becomes a heavy personal and social burden when no God justifies and sanctifies the individual in spite of all personal deficiencies and failures.

The idealism of the man-god does not, of course, bring as an immediate and obvious consequence a collapse into unrestrained nihilism. We all know many people who do not believe in God and yet are decent and admirable. Western societies, as highly secularized as they are, retain many humane features. Not even tacitly has our sole governing maxim become the one Dostoevsky thought was bound to follow the denial of the God-man: “Everything is permitted.”

This may be, however, because customs and habits formed during Christian ages keep people from professing and acting on such a maxim even though it would be logical for them to do so. If that is the case, our position is precarious, for good customs and habits need spiritual grounds, and if those are lacking, they will gradually, or perhaps suddenly in some crisis, crumble.

To what extent are we now living on moral savings accumulated over many centuries but no longer being replenished? To what extent are those savings already severely depleted? Again and again we are told by advertisers, counselors, and other purveyors of popular wisdom that we have a right to buy the things we want and to live as we please. We should be prudent and farsighted, perhaps (although even those modest virtues are not greatly emphasized), but we are subject ultimately to no standard but self-interest. If nihilism is most obvious in the lives of wanton destroyers like Hitler, it is nevertheless present also in the lives of people who live purely as pleasure and convenience dictate.

And aside from intentions, there is a question concerning consequences. Even idealists whose good intentions for the human race are pure and strong are still vulnerable to fate because of the pride that causes them to act ambitiously and recklessly in history. Initiating chains of unforeseen and destructive consequences, they are often overwhelmed by results drastically at variance with their humane intentions. Modern revolutionaries have willed liberty and equality for everyone, not the terror and despotism they have actually created. Social reformers in the United States were never aiming at the great federal bureaucracy or at the pervasive dedication to entertainment and pleasure that characterizes the welfare state they brought into existence. There must always be a gap between intentions and results, but for those who forget that they are finite and morally flawed the gap may become a chasm. Not only Christians but almost everyone today feels the fear that we live under the sway of forces that we have set in motion—perhaps in the very process of industrialization, perhaps only at certain stages of that process, as in the creation of nuclear power—and that threaten our lives and are beyond our control.

There is much room for argument about these matters. But there is no greater error in the modern mind than the assumption that the God-man can be repudiated with impunity. The man-god may take his place and become the author of deeds wholly unintended and the victim of terrors starkly in contrast with the benign intentions lying at their source. The irony of sin is in this way reproduced in the irony of idealism: exalting human beings in their supposed virtues and powers, idealism undermines them. Exciting fervent expectations, it leads toward despair.

Read the whole thing. I thought of that Tinder essay — though it’s from 1989, it’s still fresh — after reading this essay about the roots of the Alt-Right not in Nazism, but in Italian fascism. Excerpts:

The character traits applauded by today’s libertarians – ambition, superbia, speed, drive, spin, success and spikiness – are the qualities the Futurists valued. There is fire here but never warmth; appetite but never food. If conviviality has an opposite, it is this: anti-vivial, anti-genial and, in its treatment of the future, anti-generative.

More:

Like contemporary libertarians, the Italian Futurists saw themselves as anti-establishment – opposing political and artistic tradition – and driven, as the name suggests, forward to the future. As Marinetti wrote in the Futurist manifesto: ‘Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute.’ Libertarians, like the Futurists, loathe the past, which they associate with the natural world: the future is artificial, and they want to own it. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Donald Trump backer, describes himself as ‘way libertarian’, and is heavily involved in the Singularity, a vision of transhumanism that promotes artificial super-intelligence to create the end of natural history.

And:

Central to the Futurist manifesto was an adoration of the machine, to the point where the ultimate aim was the technological triumph of humanity over nature. Marinetti foresaw – and was intoxicated by – the idea of a war between organic nature and mechanised humanity. Futurists fetishised cars, planes and technology in general, loving steel and loathing wood, which came gentle from the natural earth. They wanted to force the Danube to run in a straight line at 300km an hour, hating the river in its natural state (‘The opaque Danube under its muddy tunic, its attention turned on its inner life full of fat libidinous fecund fish.’)

Do read the whole thing, but if you’re like me, you will be gobsmacked by the author Jay Griffiths’ blindness to how contemporary progressive ideologies are also all about “the technological triumph of humanity over nature.” They are also anti-teleological, anti-Christian, and all about will to power. They just draw the lines in different places, and take different routes to get there. Whether it’s making the Danube flow in a straight line or using hormones and surgery and philosophical-legal legerdemain to make men into pseudo-women, it’s all the same thing. If there is no logos in nature, all is chaos.

Ross Douthat is correct: if you don’t like the Christian Right, wait till you see the Post-Christian Right. To that I would add: look at the Post-Christian Left. You cannot deny the God-Man and replace him with the Man-God with impunity.

 

View From Your Table

Obertauern, Austria

Stoning Milo The Prophet

Rachel Fulton Brown, who teaches history at the University of Chicago, defends Milo. Excerpt:

Everybody hates a bully, or so we say. Yesterday, the national media bullied a young man into silence who had risen to fame speaking to audiences of young women and men about the lies that the grown-ups had told them for decades.

Lies about the relationship between women and men. That women don’t need men. That all men are potential rapists. That women should aspire to something other than motherhood or they are wasting their lives. That women should like casual sex with strangers, hooking up just for the sake of the orgasm. That the children will be fine if their parents divorce. That abortion is morally good.

Everyone knows these are lies. The young woman who wakes up in the morning having lost her virginity to a man who isn’t there and will not marry her. The young man who is tempted into exciting and transgressive sex with an older man and finds himself trapped by his desire in a lifestyle he cannot leave. The young woman who spends her most fertile years working in a career that leaves her childless at forty because she can no longer conceive and has no husband. The young man who has no ambition to work because he has no wife to care for or children to feed.

But the grown-ups tell them to shut up, not to complain. Don’t they know how awful it is that women don’t earn as much over the course of their lifetime as men? Don’t they know that men are still the ones with all the power, even though the number of men completing higher education has continued to drop? Don’t they know that nobody should be able to force a woman to bear a child she does not want, even if she did enjoy the sex by which the child was conceived?

And then a young man comes along and tells them, they were right all along. The young women wanted to be pretty, not grotesquely overweight. The young men wanted to be strong and vigorous and manly. The young women wanted babies as well as careers, and were willing to make adjustments to their ambition in order to stay home with their children. The young men wanted to be challenged to be gentlemanly and chivalrous.

“Gender roles work,” the young man told them. “Feminism is cancer. Abortion is murder.” And the young women and men cheered for him, because they loved him for telling the truth.

Whole thing here. Bold claims, these.

UPDATE: People, don’t assume that I agree with Rachel Brown. I don’t. I’m just putting her provocative comments out there for your consideration. By the way, she’s profane in parts, so be aware if you click through.

A Reader Defends Milo

Milo Yiannopoulos (NextCONF/Flickr)

Published with the reader’s permission:

I normally agree with everything you say but I completely disagree about what you said concerning Milo.

I think he explains it quite well in his latest statement https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/posts/851826321621931

and see also the video https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/videos/851905428280687/

Milo was abused as a child by a priest. This has clearly affected him (perhaps even contributing to his homosexuality – he had in the past said that in his case his homosexuality was mostly nurture rather than nature). To cope with the event he laughs about it pretending that he was in control. This way he does not see himself as a victim. I can’t see anything wrong with that.

(See his response for the other stuff. His reference to boys and older men was about 16/17 year olds – above the age of consent – not 13 year olds)

Notwithstanding this abuse he seems to have found the grace within him to forgive (or at least not condemn) the priest who did that to him. And instead of a catholic hating atheist he is someone who always defends the Church and its magisterium (see here for a collection of writing by a hostile atheist: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/barrierbreaker/milo-yiannapoulos-leading-catholic-guilt-evangelist/).

Milo has an audience of young people who are disaffected by liberalism. Instead of just getting them to to hate the left he also feeds a positive message to them (the social conservatism of the catholic church). But he does so in a subtle way. 80% of his speeches are just useless entertaining (for some) packaging but the 20% he does communicate is great and important. The reason he does so is to ensure that the left does not actually engage with him on his positive message (because they think he is just a troll who does not have one). But the way it looks to his fans is that this guy does have a message and not no one is actually engaging with him on the substance. And so he wins by default.

He plays up the sexual libertinism but that is part of the goal. In most people’s minds social conservatism is the same thing as prudishness. And no one likes prudes. As such communicating the message is harder if one is perceived as a prude. Milo plays all that hedonism up so that he is not perceived that. This disables the defence of the interlocutor against social conservatism. And then he explains why abortion is wrong, why contraception is bad, why marriage is between a man and a woman, why same sex couples should not adopt, etc… Milo is probably the most effective communicator of social conservatism that there is nowadays (at least among the young).

And in his more serious moment he does show real dignity and compassion. You saw his video at Memories Pizza. And also other moments where he talks about working class americans and how they have been mistreated. He does genuinely care.

What Milo needs right now is not our vilification but our prayers.

Question Gender? Your Life Might Fall Apart

Gianna Stadelmyer/Shutterstock

From an interview with Andy Izenson, a 28-year-old lawyer living in Brooklyn:

When I moved to the city I discovered the poly community and found all of this support. That was about seven years ago. I only know like one trans person in New York who’s monogamous. Once you start questioning gender, sometimes a lot of other things fall down like a house of cards. [Emphasis mine — RD] If I’ve been told my entire life that I have to be a girl, and if that’s not true, then what are the other things I’ve been told I have to be that might also be fake or not applicable?

I date the occasional cisgender person, but I’m mostly T for T (trans for trans). I have a partner I live with, my statistically significant other, but I don’t use hierarchical understandings of relationships. We live together in a collective house in Brooklyn that’s all queer, all trans, all polyamorous, all very political. I also have a partner who lives in Boston, and another who lives in New Hampshire who I get to see about once a month. I’m just googly-eyed over them right now. I also have a few sweethearts or “comets” in D.C. who I get to see a couple of times a year. “Comet” is a term I heard recently for the type of partner who you collide with occasionally when they come through your orbit in this little burst of brightness that’s brief and beautiful, like a comet.

Izenson says that the Trumpening has caused a disturbance in the Force:

Most of the people that I’m in a relationship with are alarmed and destabilized by the current political climate.

“Destabilized”? How could you tell?

The reader who sent this interview to me took note of the line about everything falling apart once you question gender. Another way to put it is, “Once you start questioning that there is ultimate meaning and purpose in material reality, sometimes a lot of other things fall down like a house of cards.” Andy Izenson is living out the end game of modernity. Andy Izenson is also living in a nuthouse.

We need to recover the sacramental significance of embodiment and place. Extreme loss of this is part of why the West is now in such crisis.

— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) February 17, 2017

Testosterone-Jacked Girl Defeats Other Girls

Girl on testosterone wins wrestling competition in north Texas:

Mack Beggs, a transgender 17-year-old at Euless Trinity, won the girls 110-pound championship at Saturday’s Class 6A Region II wrestling meet after a Coppell wrestler forfeited the final. Beggs, a junior, is taking testosterone while transitioning from female to male.

Madeline Rocha’s forfeit came 11 days after a lawsuit was filed against the University Interscholastic League by Coppell attorney and wrestling parent Jim Baudhuin, urging the governing body to suspend Beggs because of the use of the steroid. The suit claims that allowing the wrestler to compete while using testosterone exposes other athletes to “imminent threat of bodily harm.” Baudhuin’s daughter is not in the same weight class as Beggs.

Pratik Khandelwal, whose daughter also wrestles for Coppell, is named as the plaintiff and is bringing the case forward on behalf of his minor daughter and “other similarly situated female wrestlers” in the state, according to the suit. Khandelwal’s daughter did not wrestle Beggs because they were in different weight classes this weekend.

 

Here comes the comment from Mack Beggs’ grandmother. You have three guesses as to what she will say, and the first two don’t count. Here you go:

“Today was not about their students winning,” said Nancy Beggs, Mack Beggs’ grandmother and guardian. “Today was about bias, hatred and ignorance. (Mack Beggs and wrestlers from the Coppell team) have wrestled each other before, they know each other and they were not happy with this.”

Hate! Hatey-hatey-hate-hate! You think it’s cheating for a female jacked up on testosterone — she’s been taking it since 2015 — to compete in wrestling with other females? Bigot!

To be fair, Beggs wants to compete against males, but she cannot, because she is a biological female as far as reality and the State of Texas are concerned. She is in a no-man’s (ahem) land as far as athletic competition goes. Is it too much to expect her not to compete? Since when does she have a right to compete?

All the female wrestlers who come up against this testosterone-pumped girl will be cheated. But that doesn’t matter, because transgenders are a privileged class. Everything must be turned upside down to accommodate their desires.

Economic Insecurity

In the new issue of Commentary, Nicholas Eberstadt writes a piece so sobering that it makes Carrie Nation look like Foster Brooks (it was the ’70s, you had to have been there). Eberstadt, a demographer, looks at economic, health, and demographic data for the US in the 21st century, and sounds the alarm.

 

Yes, things are very different indeed these days in the “real America” outside the bubble. In fact, things have been going badly wrong in America since the beginning of the 21st century.

It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then—and broke down very badly.

The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons sounding, for more than a decade and a half. But our pundits and prognosticators and professors and policymakers, ensconced as they generally are deep within the bubble, were for the most part too distant from the distress of the general population to see or hear it. (So much for the vaunted “information era” and “big-data revolution.”) Now that those signals are no longer possible to ignore, it is high time for experts and intellectuals to reacquaint themselves with the country in which they live and to begin the task of describing what has befallen the country in which we have lived since the dawn of the new century.

What has gone wrong? Well, take the economy. By some measures, it’s robust. The stock market has gone through the roof, and Americans are richer than ever, on the whole. Sure, the windfall is unevenly distributed, but still, a rising tide lifts all boats, right? Why are so many people so angry that they voted for Donald Trump?

Those numbers don’t really tell the story of what’s going on, says Eberstadt. If you dig deeper, you’ll see that because of the 2008 crash, the US has suffered what amounts to a “lost decade” in GDP growth — which between 2000 and 2007 was already weak compared to the period between 1948 and 2000. Economists can’t figure out precisely why this is, but they agree on this: economic growth is going to be very minor for the foreseeable future.

 

On the employment front, the work rates  — people engaged in any paid employment — are dismal, at “their lowest levels in decades.” Writes Eberstadt, “Unless you are a labor economist, you may not appreciate just how severe a falloff in employment such numbers attest to. Postwar America never experienced anything comparable.” Eberstadt:

 

On Wall Street and in some parts of Washington these days, one hears that America has gotten back to “near full employment.” For Americans outside the bubble, such talk must seem nonsensical. It is true that the oft-cited “civilian unemployment rate” looked pretty good by the end of the Obama era—in December 2016, it was down to 4.7 percent, about the same as it had been back in 1965, at a time of genuine full employment. The problem here is that the unemployment rate only tracks joblessness for those still in the labor force; it takes no account of workforce dropouts. Alas, the exodus out of the workforce has been the big labor-market story for America’s new century. (At this writing, for every unemployed American man between 25 and 55 years of age, there are another three who are neither working nor looking for work.) Thus the “unemployment rate” increasingly looks like an antique index devised for some earlier and increasingly distant war: the economic equivalent of a musket inventory or a cavalry count.

 

“There is no way to sugarcoat these awful numbers,” says Eberstadt.

They are not a statistical artifact that can be explained away by population aging, or by increased educational enrollment for adult students, or by any other genuine change in contemporary American society. The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.

There are other economic measures Eberstadt talks about, all of them shocking. The people inside the bubble don’t see any of this, he says, because they’re doing pretty well. They may not understand why public trust in institutions is plunging, because everything’s working out for them. But that’s them; that’s not most of America.

It’s not just an economic problem, Eberstadt says. Family breakdown has been proceeding since the 1960s, so that’s not new, nor is the steady decline in civil society — the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon. The decline in health statistics is something new, and ominous.

Eberstadt mentions the famous 2015 study by Anne Case and Angus Deaton showing rising death rates for middle-aged whites, especially the working class — much of it “accounted for by suicides, chronic liver cirrhosis, and poisonings (including drug overdoses).” Overall life expectancy in the US recently posted its first decline in decades. The data show that “health progress in America essentially ceased in 2012—that the U.S. gained on average only about a single day of life expectancy at birth between 2012 and 2014, before the 2015 turndown.”

There’s the opioid epidemic, of course. Get this:

In the fall of 2016, Alan Krueger, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, released a study that further refined the picture of the real existing opioid epidemic in America: According to his work, nearly half of all prime working-age male labor-force dropouts—an army now totaling roughly 7 million men—currently take pain medication on a daily basis.

We already knew from other sources (such as BLS “time use” surveys) that the overwhelming majority of the prime-age men in this un-working army generally don’t “do civil society” (charitable work, religious activities, volunteering), or for that matter much in the way of child care or help for others in the home either, despite the abundance of time on their hands. Their routine, instead, typically centers on watching—watching TV, DVDs, Internet, hand-held devices, etc.—and indeed watching for an average of 2,000 hours a year, as if it were a full-time job. But Krueger’s study adds a poignant and immensely sad detail to this portrait of daily life in 21st-century America: In our mind’s eye we can now picture many millions of un-working men in the prime of life, out of work and not looking for jobs, sitting in front of screens—stoned.

 

There’s more — lots more — but you get the idea. Eberstadt says:

The funny thing is, people inside the bubble are forever talking about “economic inequality,” that wonderful seminar construct, and forever virtue-signaling about how personally opposed they are to it. By contrast, “economic insecurity” is akin to a phrase from an unknown language. But if we were somehow to find a “Google Translate” function for communicating from real America into the bubble, an important message might be conveyed:

The abstraction of “inequality” doesn’t matter a lot to ordinary Americans. The reality of economic insecurity does. The Great American Escalator is broken—and it badly needs to be fixed.

 

You can read the whole thing if you’re a Commentary subscriber.

Economist Tyler Cowen has even gloomier news.  He says when people talk about the coming mass automation of jobs, they talk about how it’s going to be a new Industrial Revolution. That’s not a comforting thought:

The shift out of agricultural jobs [in the first Industrial Revolution], while eventually a boon for virtually all of humanity, brought significant problems along the way. This time probably won’t be different, and that’s exactly why we should be concerned.

For example, depressed wages. Cowen says the lack of wage growth we’re living through now is reminiscent of the first Industrial Revolution. And there’s this:

Industrialization, and the decline of the older jobs in agriculture and the crafts economy, also had some pernicious effects on social ideas. The early to mid-19th century saw the rise of socialist ideologies, largely as a response to economic disruptions. Whatever mistakes Karl Marx made, he was a keen observer of the Industrial Revolution, and there is a reason he became so influential. He failed to see the long-run ability of capitalism to raise living standards significantly, but he understood and vividly described the transition costs and the economic volatility.

Western economies later turned to variants of the social welfare state, but along the way the intellectual currents of the 19th century produced a lot of overreaction in other, more destructive directions. The ideas of Marx fed into the movements behind the Soviet Union, Communist China and the Khmer Rouge. Arguably, fascist doctrine also was in part a response to the disruptions of industrialization in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I like to think we will be more intellectually moderate this time around, but the political developments of the last few years, and the observed global tilt toward the authoritarian, are hardly reassuring.

Read the whole thing.  I’m going to revise one of the Benedict Option talks I’m going to deliver this week to account for all this. The Benedict Option is primarily a way to hold on to the orthodox Christian faith in a time of chaos, turmoil, and decadence. But I’m beginning to think that it is also a way to build solidarity in the face of economic chaos and political turmoil of a sort that will characterize American life in the decades to come.

CPAC Welcomes Pederasty Advocate

It was announced this weekend that Milo Yiannopoulos will keynote the Conservative Political Action Conference opening this week in DC. Now, a video has emerged of Milo defending sex between adolescents and older men. From the transcript:

MILO: The law is probably about right, that’s probably roughly the right age. I think it’s probably about okay, but there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age, I certainly consider myself to be one of them, people who are sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world by the way. In many cases actually those relationships with older men…This is one reason I hate the left. This stupid one size fits all policing of culture. (People speak over each other). This sort of arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent, which totally destroys you know understanding that many of us have. The complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships. You know, people are messy and complex. In the homosexual world particularly. Some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming of age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents. Some of those relationships are the most –

Milo, who is Catholic, then credits the Catholic priest who molested him for teaching him how to perform oral sex skillfully. One of the people in the group says to Milo: “You are advocating for cross generational relationships here, can [you] be honest about that?” He replies

Yeah, I don’t mind admitting that. I think particularly in the gay world and outside the Catholic church, if that’s where some of you want to go with this, I think in the gay world, some of the most important, enriching and incredibly life affirming, important shaping relationships very often between younger boys and older men, they can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys they can even save those young boys, from desolation, from suicide (people talk over each other)… providing they’re consensual.

Molesting 13 year old boys can save them from suicide? Yes, says the CPAC keynoter, in a line sure to delight the hearts of NAMBLA members.

You can read the whole thing and watch the video here. 

Milo has responded forcefully on his Facebook page.  He points out, among other things, that he does not defend sex with pre-pubescent children. Well, okay, but how, exactly, does it make acceptable defending what is, legally speaking, the rape of teenage boys?

This is unconscionable. CPAC deserves to be radioactive after this. Run, don’t walk, away from these scumbags. This is true:

Milo-to-CPAC demonstrates how thoroughly the pretense that conservatism is about socially conservative morality has been abandoned.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) February 19, 2017

Matt Schlapp, head of the American Conservative Union, which sponsors CPAC, circles the wagons:

Jonah 1st amendment is dead on campus. Conservatives should fight back. As radioactive as milo is he is fighting back. https://t.co/grkdlGNBt3

— Matt Schlapp (@mschlapp) February 20, 2017

Look, I fully defend the right of Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on college campuses without being threatened by violence. But that is a very different thing from defending what he says, or his personal integrity.

Religious and social conservatives had better wake up and realize that there is no room for us in movement conservatism — at least not if our principles and self-respect matter to us.

A man who praised gay sex between adults and adolescents is the keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the highest-profile meeting of movement conservatives. Why? Because he makes liberals mad.

This scandal shows why it is more important than ever for conservatives to get straight in their minds that conservatism is not mere anti-liberalism.  Matt Schlapp and the American Conservative Union have forgotten this. Don’t you make that mistake. Defending pederasty is a stain that will not come out.

UPDATE: So now CPAC has disinvited him. That’s the right thing to do, but I don’t think they will be able to easily shake off the stink of having invited him in the first place. Why, exactly, would young conservative men and women of vision, character, and intellect want to go to an event like that?

Pope Benedict’s Benedict Option

A reader sends the text of a striking lecture delivered by Father Joseph Ratzinger in 1958. Here’s the dramatic opening:

According to religious statistics, old Europe is still a part of the earth that is almost completely Christian. But there is hardly another case in which everyone knows as well as they do here that the statistic is false: This so-called Christian Europe for almost four hundred years has become the birthplace of a new paganism, which is growing steadily in the heart of the Church, and threatens to undermine her from within. The outward shape of the modern Church is determined essentially by the fact that, in a totally new way, she has become the Church of pagans, and is constantly becoming even more so. She is no longer, as she once was, a Church composed of pagans who have become Christians, but a Church of pagans, who still call themselves Christians, but actually have become pagans. Paganism resides today in the Church herself, and precisely that is the characteristic of the Church of our day, and that of the new paganism, so that it is a matter of a paganism in the Church, and of a Church in whose heart paganism is living.

Therefore, in this connection, one should not speak about the paganism, which in eastern atheism has already become a strong enemy against the Church, and as a new anti-christian power opposes the community of believers. Yet, when concerning this movement, one should not forget that it has its peculiarity in the fact that it is a new paganism, and therefore, a paganism that was born in the Church, and has borrowed from her the essential elements that definitely determine its outward form and its power. One should speak rather about the much more characteristic phenomenon of our time, which determines the real attack against the Christian, from the paganism within the Church herself, from the “desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be” (Mk 13:14).

He saw this in 1958. He saw everything we’re living through now coming. Note well that this is before the Second Vatican Council. The rot was deeply set in years before the council opened.

Father Ratzinger says that the triumph of the church in the West in medieval times also meant her eventual downfall:

The Church was a community of believers, of men who had adopted a definite spiritual choice, and because of that, they distinguished themselves from all those who refused to make this choice. In the common possession of this decision, and its conviction, the true and living community of the faithful was founded, and also its certainty; and because of this, as the community of those in the state of grace, they knew that they were separated from those who closed themselves off from grace. Already in the Middle Ages, this was changed by the fact that the Church and the world were identical, and so to be a Christian fundamentally no longer meant that a person made his own decision about the faith, but it was already a political-cultural presupposition. A man contented himself with the thought that God had chosen this part of the world for himself; the Christian’s self-consciousness was at the same time a political-cultural awareness of being among the elect: God had chosen this Western world. Today, this outward identity of Church and world has remained; but the conviction that in this, that is, in the unchosen belonging to the Church, also that a certain divine favor, a heavenly redemption lies hidden, has disappeared.

Father Ratzinger says that whether the Church wants to or not, it is going to be disentangled from the world. This is not necessarily a bad thing:

In the long run, the Church cannot avoid the need to get rid of, part by part, the appearance of her identity with the world, and once again to become what she is: the community of the faithful.  Actually, her missionary power can only increase through such external losses. Only when she ceases to be a cheap, foregone conclusion, only when she begins again to show herself as she really is, will she be able to reach the ear of the new pagans with her good news, since until now they have been subject to the illusion that they were not real pagans. Certainly such a withdrawal of external positions will involve a loss of valuable advantages, which doubtless exist because of the contemporary entanglement of the Church with civil society. This has to do with a process which is going to take place either with, or without, the approval of the Church, and concerning which she must take a stand (the attempt to preserve the Middle Ages is foolish and would be not only tactically, but also factually, wrong).

By “attempt to preserve the Middle Ages,” I take him to mean the attempt to preserve the Church’s position at the center of society, with all its attendant privileges.

The future pope said the “de-secularization” of the Church would require taking the Sacraments a lot more seriously:

It must be freed from a certain simple confusion with the world, which gives either the impression of something magical, or reduces the sacraments to the level of being mere ceremonies (Baptism, First Communion, Confirmation, Matrimony, Burial). It must, once again, become clear that Sacraments without faith are meaningless, and the Church here will have to abandon gradually and with great care, a type of activity, which ultimately includes a form of self-deception, and deception of others. [Emphasis mine — RD] In this matter, the more the Church brings about a self-limitation, the distinction of what is really Christian and, if necessary, becomes a small flock, to this extent will she be able, in a realistic way, to reach the second level, that is, to see clearly that her duty is the proclamation of the Gospel.

Last week, a senior Vatican cardinal held a press conference to herald the publication of his new book on Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis’s last encyclical. Here’s what Cardinal Coccopalmerio writes:

The divorced and remarried, de facto couples, those cohabiting, are certainly not models of unions in sync with Catholic Doctrine, but the Church cannot look the other way. Therefore, the sacraments of Reconciliation and of Communion must be given even to those so-called wounded families and to however many who, despite living in situations not in line with traditional matrimonial canons, express the sincere desire to approach the sacraments after an appropriate period of discernment . . . Yes, therefore, to admission to the sacraments for those who, despite living in irregular situations, sincerely ask for admission into the fullness of ecclesial life, it is a gesture of openness and profound mercy on the part of Mother Church, who does not leave behind any of her children, aware that absolute perfection is a precious gift, but one which cannot be reached by everyone.

The conservative/traditional party in the Amoris Laetitia dispute within the Roman Catholic Church says, among other things, that Pope Francis’s encyclical embraces the emptying out of the meaning of the Eucharist, and is therefore a form of deception, and self-deception.

Anyway, there is this passage, which is also the message of The Benedict Option:

On the level of personal relations, finally, it would be very wrong, out of the self-limitation of the Church, which is required for her sacramental activity, to want to derive a sequestering of the faithful Christian over against his unbelieving fellow men. Naturally, among the faithful gradually something like the brotherhood of communicants should once again be established who, because of their common participation in the Lord’s Table in their private life, feel and know that they are bound together. This is so that in times of need, they can count on each other, and they know they really are a family community. This family community, which the Protestants have, and which attracts many people to them, can and should be sought, more and more, among the true receivers of the Sacraments. This should have no sectarian seclusion as its result, but the Catholic should be able to be a happy man among men—a fellow man where he cannot be a fellow Christian. And I mean that in his relations with his unbelieving neighbors, he must, above all, be a human being; therefore, he should not irritate them with constant preaching and attempts to convert them. In a friendly way, he will be offering him a missionary service by giving him a religious article, when he is sick to suggest the possibility of calling a priest, or even to bring a priest to see him. He should not be just a preacher, but also in a friendly and simple way, a fellow human being who cares for others.

This is exactly right, from my point of view. The task before us is not to run into the mountains and build a compound — despite what know-nothing Ben Op critics keep saying — but rather to strengthen our grounding in Scripture, Church teaching (depending, of course, on which communion you belong to), and traditional Christian practices, while simultaneously strengthening our bonds to each other. Only by doing that first can we be a distinctly Christian “happy man among men,” which we also must be. 

But, to the extent that being “a happy man among men” leads us to be secularized — that is, to abandon what makes us distinctly Christian, to be assimilated into the world — then we must limit ourselves. We must limit ourselves not only for our own sake, but for the sake of the world, which must not be deceived about what the Gospel is and why it needs it.

Read the whole thing.  I tell people that the second “Benedict” of The Benedict Option is Joseph Ratzinger. This kind of thing is why.

(Readers, I am traveling today to Canton, Ohio — deep David J. White territory — to give two lectures this week at Malone University. The events are free and open to the public, so I hope to see some area readers of this blog there. Comment approval will be spotty until I get there. Thanks for your patience.)

Polygamy: The Next Frontier

Here’s the jacket copy for a forthcoming book from the University Press of New England: Legalizing Plural Marriage: The Next Frontier of Family Law, by Emory law professor Mark Goldfeder. A law school librarian sent the link in, saying it was coming to her library:

Polygamous marriages are currently recognized in nearly fifty countries worldwide. Although polygamy is technically illegal in the United States, it is practiced by members of some religious communities and a growing number of other “poly” groups. In the radically changing and increasingly multicultural world in which we live, the time has come to define polygamous marriage and address its legal feasibilities.

Although Mark Goldfeder does not argue the right or wrong of plural marriage, he maintains that polygamy is the next step—after same-sex marriage—in the development of U.S. family law. Providing a road map to show how such legalization could be handled, he explores the legislative and administrative arguments which demonstrate that plural marriage is not as farfetched—or as far off—as we might think. Goldfeder argues not only that polygamy is in keeping with the legislative values and freedoms of the United States, but also that it would not be difficult to manage or administrate within our current legal system. His legal analysis is enriched throughout with examples of plural marriage in diverse cultural and historical contexts.

Tackling the issue of polygamy in the United States from a legal perspective, this book will engage anyone interested in constitutional law, family law, or criminal law, along with sociologists and those who study gender and culture in modern times.

Remember when all the Haters™ warned a decade or more ago that legalizing gay marriage required uncoupling marriage from procreation and basing it on expressive individualism, and that this would open the door to polygamy? Remember how they were all denounced as alarmist bigots?

Let us recall the Law of Merited Impossibility: It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it. I think that the late Antonin Scalia is the patron saint of the Law of Merited Impossibility. In his 2003 Lawrence v. Texas dissent, he pointed out that the Court had opened the legal door to constitutionalizing same-sex marriage. He was right about that, as we saw in the majority ruling in Obergefell. In his Lawrence dissent, Scalia also said this:

The Court embraces instead Justice Stevens’ declaration in his Bowers dissent, that “the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice,” ante, at 17. This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, none of the above-mentioned laws can survive rational-basis review.

Polygamy is coming. American society is deconstructing itself.