Rod Dreher's Blog, page 496
January 17, 2017
The Dissolution Of The Real
For years on this blog, I’ve praised the quarterly Mars Hill Audio Journal and its host Ken Myers for producing what I regard as absolutely the best resource for intelligent, culturally engaged Christians trying to make sense of modernity. In fact, everything I write in The Benedict Option is at best a book-length series of footnotes to the work Ken has been doing on the Journal since 1993. It’s the kind of thing I want to take every smart Christian I know by the shoulders and say, “You have to subscribe to this thing!” I feel so strongly about what the Journal means to the church today that these are the words on the dedication page in The Benedict Option:
While the academic left are planning to have a series of “teach-ins” on Inauguration Day to talk about the Meaning Of Trump, and to plot their “resistance” to him, I hope that thoughtful Christian conservatives will gather and listen to selections from the powerful interview series Ken did during the fall campaign on how to think theologically about politics. You don’t have to be a Mars Hill subscriber to hear the interviews, though they certainly give you a great idea about the form and content of the Journal‘s interviews.
While driving, I was listening today to the interview with philosopher of science Michael Hanby, and I almost wanted to pull over on the side of the road and take notes. I’ll recall a little bit here for you.
Hanby says the choice we faced in last fall’s election reveals the “despair” of people living in liberal democracy now. What we’re struggling with now is that we can all see the great weaknesses of liberalism (meaning the current political order), but we can hardly see beyond its horizons to the cure. That is, liberalism has been extremely successful at eliminating alternatives, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a success.
“Even though I would argue that liberalism is exhausted and doesn’t work, it’s with us as far as the eye can see — and the fact that the eye can’t see very far is part of the problem,” Hanby says.
Hanby calls liberalism “the political form of a technological view of reality, of a mechanistic understanding of nature.” Political philosophy presupposes a view of reality and of human nature. Our technological order sets the basis for our political order. What, then, is “a technological view of reality”? According to Hanby, it’s a way of construing the world according to technological criteria.
“We don’t simply know nature for the sake of control, but we know it by controlling it,” Hanby explains.
In the technological view, “truth” becomes “what works,” or “what is technologically possible.” The problem with this, says Hanby, is that we can only discover the ultimate limits of possibility by transgressing current limits. He says, “Technological society has within it a permanent revolution as a way of viewing the world.”
What does freedom mean in technological liberalism?
First, says Hanby, the US Constitutional order presupposes the modern view of reality and nature. In that view of nature, there was no such thing as intrinsic order built into reality. There is no ultimate meaning to things beyond what we choose to impute to them. Freedom, then, becomes not, as in the classical and medieval world, about having and exercising the power to live out the good, but rather about acquiring and utilizing power to enforce one’s will.
“The view of freedom that we have enshrined in our political order corresponds to our view of the natural order. They reinforce each other,” says Hanby. “In effect, the state leaves us free to transgress these limits.”
“Possibilities are more beguiling than what’s actual,” says Myers. “That’s the modern mentality.”
“It’s the essence of the modern mentality,” replies Hanby.
In modernity, says Hanby, the state “exists to protect me from the claims of reality.”
“What happens then is in the name of protecting freedom [the state reserves] the right to define, or define away, reality.”
What’s the classical Christian understanding of the world, and how does it differ from the modern, technological view of the world? The simplest way to answer that, says Hanby, is this:
Your final philosophical options come down to two. Either there is a word, or a logos, at the foundation of reality, so that reality is inherently intelligible and meaningful, and therefore there are natures, forms, that persist in spite of the flux of history and time; or, reality is fundamentally meaningless, and meaning is kind of an epiphenomenal construct superimposed upon it.
If reality is inherently meaningless, says Hanby, then the only important things to know about them is how they came to be, what they are capable of doing, and what we can do with them. The logic of this process is to create an order undergirded by a view of reason “that cannot even think about what things are.”
This, says Myers, results in the conviction that politics is about nothing but power, and that one should do whatever one can to acquire power. This, he says, is something that many Christians have fallen into in their support of Donald Trump: you know, the idea that he may be a bad man, but at least he’s on our side.
Anyway, there’s a lot for Christian conservatives (and, in fact, all social and religious conservatives) to talk about in that Mars Hill series. What Hanby’s interview brought to my mind is the contention by some commenters on this blog that the politics of transgender is nothing but a distraction from “what really matters.” Nothing could be farther from the truth.
As Hanby points out early in the interview, we now find ourselves in a world in which things that were given — maleness and femaleness, sexual complementarity as normative, the traditional family, and so forth — no longer are. The most radical of these things is the concept that male and female have nothing to do with biology, that they are conditions chosen by individuals, as they will.
A political and social order that normalizes transgenderism is one that accepts the technological view of reality — which is to say, that there is no such thing as inherent meaning, not even in biology. We are free to do whatever we want to nature. The thing is, it’s a lie. But if the state reserves to itself the right to control the definition of reality for the sake of protecting freedom, so construed, we are well on our way to tyranny.
The point I tried to make to fellow conservatives, including Christians, a decade ago regarding same-sex marriage was that legalizing and normalizing same-sex marriage required adopting a view of marriage and family that was unstable, and not rooted in anything other than human will. It was a monumental leap, for reasons I discuss at greater length in this essay. Transgender is even more categorically radical, because it denies biology entirely, and says that male and female depend entirely on the subjective psychological state of the individual. And it requires that we change the law, and even the language, to accommodate this view. It’s all in Justice Kennedy, ca. 1992: “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.”
That sounds like common sense to most of us. And that is precisely the problem. There is buried in that statement the idea that there is no such thing as truth.
There’s a lot of talk today about how we live under “post-truth politics.” What I wish Christians would contemplate going forward is that this is not an aberration of liberalism, but is rather the fulfillment of it.
What do we do, then? You know my answer: whatever we can to build citadels around the truth, so that it might survive this age of darkness.
Donald Milhous Trump?
John Dean — ‘memba him, Nixon’s White House counsel? — is worried. Extremely worried. From his interview with McKay Coppins:
“The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” Dean, who is now 78, told me. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested.”
With Trump preparing to take the oath of office this week, some of his more imaginative critics foresee a Nixonian demise on the horizon—the corrupt commander-in-chief felled by his own hubris, forced out of office. But if prophesies of impeachment seem a tad dramatic, Dean’s own forecast for the next four years is arguably much grimmer. He is not only convinced that Trump will be worse than Nixon in virtually every way—he thinks he’ll probably get away with it.
Why? Read the whole thing to see, but it comes down to a couple of points: 1) Trump lacks Nixon’s sense of limits, which set limits on what even he allowed himself to do; and 2) the public lacks the sense of outrage that it used to have, such that it will let Trump get away with things that would have doomed Nixon. (This, by the way, is one serious effect of the loss of a common culture, and a belief in civic standards.)
Dean’s diagnosis strikes me as accurate. It’s important to remember, though, that Trump is not so much a cause but a symptom. He did not come from nowhere.
Nearly one year ago, when it began dawning on the GOP establishment that omigod, Donald Trump is for real, Tucker Carlson wrote a Politico piece explaining why Trump had become a thing. It has never been improved on, not in my reading. It was aimed at establishment Republicans, but its insights could be expanded to American politics as a whole. “He exists because you failed,” Carlson said to Washington Republican establishment readers. True. But he also exists because Democrats failed.
And he also exists because we are in a historical period, one of dissolution, fragmentation, and institutional decay, whose habits make it hard for any politician to succeed. But that’s another story.
One more thing: like Nixon, Trump is blessed by having the enemies that he does.
Who Stands Against Gender Ideology?
The town hall also revived Sanders’s chronic problem of prioritizing economic justice over the identity-based concerns of marginalized groups. Towards the very end, Cuomo asked the senator what he’d say to Americans who see Democrats as “more concerned with what bathroom people go into [than] how they earn a living?”
“Very fair question,” Sanders said.
But it wasn’t a fair question. It was based on a pernicious premise that the senator should have challenged. Ensuring transgender Americans can use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identities isn’t some tertiary issue. It’s a vital anti-discrimination measure. And, for transgender Americans in the workplace, it’s very much about being treated equally as they earn a living.
You wouldn’t have known this from Sanders’s answer. As always, he railed against the plutocrats, disparaging Democrats for joining with Republicans to deregulate Wall Street and pass free trade deals. “I think the American people understand that there’s something profoundly wrong in this country when you have a small number of billionaires that have so much power,” he said. He also trotted out stump-speech lines about tuition-free public colleges and higher minimum wages; with passing mentions of fighting climate change and reforming our immigration and criminal justice systems.
What Sanders didn’t do was mention bathrooms—or transgender Americans—even once.
And he wonders why critics say he only cares about economic issues.
Not even once! Because toilets for transgenders is the most important political issue of our time.
In what follows I am not denying that there are some people with confused bodies who deserve our every help towards a viable individual solution. Nor that there are others with unfathomable psychological conditions estranging them from their own corporeal manifestation. Perhaps, in extremis, surgery is the only solution for them.
But many people rightly sense that the liberal obsession with the transgender issue has gone beyond merely wanting to help this minority. It has become a whole movement to change our notions of gender. And its preoccupations come across as irrelevant to most people, unjustified in its conclusions, and apparently condemnatory of the normal with which most people identify.
As with the new post-liberalism in general (in both nasty and wise variants), the point is not “conservatism” versus “progressivism”. It is rather a question of essentially liberal novelties tied to an individualist, positivist philosophy which recognises only “facts” and “choice” as real. To reject this philosophy does not make you a reactionary.
If it does make you a reactionary, then so much the better for reactionaries. More from Milbank:
Liberalism, then, drives the attempt to displace the heterosexual norm – which leads to the (shockingly illiberal) criminalisation of those who do not endorse either gay practice or gay marriage. But liberalism includes capitalism: in the end, liberalism defines people as simply property-owners, narcissistic self-owners, choosers and consumers. Aquinas thought that our natural orientation to something outside ourselves was fundamental to our being. Liberalism, by contrast, denies the importance of relationships. Thereby it encourages the undoing of community, locality and beauty – and also marriage and the family.
And there is, naturally, money to be made out of all this. Husbands, wives, children and adolescents (this last an invention of the market) are more effective and exploitable consumers when they are isolated. Fluctuating identities and fluid preferences, including as to sexual orientation, consume still more, more often and more variously in terms of products and services. The fact that the market also continues to promote the nuclear family as the norm is not here to the point – of course it will make money from both the “normal” and the “deviant” and still more from their dispute. Ultimately, profits will accrue from reducing the heterosexual norm to the status of just another “lifestyle choice”.
The populist (as opposed to the well-heeled and ultra-liberal) faction amongst Brexiteers and Trumpists implicitly see all this – and realise that the marginalising of the family, as of secure labour, coherent community and safe environment, is not in their interests. For, as RR Reno and others have pointed out, the poor or relatively poor simply cannot afford the experimentation with sex, drugs and lifestyle that can be afforded by those cushioned by wealth. Thus the result of sexual liberalism and the decay of marriage as a norm for working people is too often women left on their own with babies, and young men (shorn of their traditional chivalric and regular breadwinning dignity) driven to suicide.
More:
It is not surprising if the majority of people feel threatened by transgender obsessions, both for the way in which they themselves are perceived and for the fate of their children and their own way of life. Dimly, perhaps, they also discern the post-humanist direction in which this is all heading. Both the unchurched and Christian dissenters may have now obliquely spoken up for the western and Christian legacy more abruptly and absolutely than the mainline churches.
The cult of transgender is of course but one manifestation of a rejected liberalism, but it is highly symptomatic. And it may well be one of the things that has provoked an altogether unexpected populist reaction. Like so many, I do not admire much of the form this takes. But the people may sense that, in this case as in others, things have gone too far, and they are by no means wrong.
Read the whole thing. It’s important.
Lest we conservatives sneer at the haplessness of liberals and Democrats trapped in this identity-politics snare by its own activist and academic wings, let us note the comment appended to the Milbank article by the reader who sent it in:
What I find singularly curious is the absence of leadership on the part of those (ie, movement Conservatism, the GOP) who one should expect to have led the opposition against the transgender tide. They didn’t and leadership has still to materialize.
Who is leading the charge against transgenderism?
Far as I can tell, not a soul. Well, that’s not strictly true. Dr. Paul McHugh, for one, has been amazingly courageous. But why has movement conservatism, or what’s left of it, and the Republican Party fallen silent? I think it’s fear — that, and the fact that Big Business is 100 percent behind spreading gender ideology, and the GOP therefore won’t object. They’re too afraid of being called bigots. And you know, maybe they’re right to be. Ask the newly unemployed Republican governor of North Carolina.
The Texas GOP has taken a stand on the bathroom issue, over the business community’s objection. This is going to be a really interesting showdown, given how pro-bidness Texas Republicans are. What I wish would happen is that Republicans would get sophisticated about this stuff, and stop relying on the “yuck” factor, or the “because the Bible says so” factor. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with citing the Bible, nor is there always something wrong with instinctive aversion to that kind of disorder. But there are a number of reasons why this stuff has to be resisted — and why this old-fashioned approach doesn’t work.
Political scientist Dale Kuehne has written:
The students with whom I associate—from middle school to college students—have understood for several years that we now reside in a world beyond gender. The youngest of them probably don’t realize that TIME’s article announced anything “new.”
For many of them, gender discussions, even of the transgender variation, are just so yesterday. When we talk about personal identity, we don’t include the mundane questions about being male and/or female. A person can certainly identify as male or female if they wish, but there is little expectation that one would do so.
Kuehne is an Evangelical Christian who teaches at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. He’s not exactly in the geographical center of cosmopolitan liberalism. That’s how far this stuff has gone. Here’s his key point in this talk:
Young people today are much less binary when it comes to understanding identity because “male” and “female” as categories don’t express a unique or comprehensive identity.
When I tell this to many adult audiences, they laugh, believing that young people will grow out of this “stage.” They’re surprised that I don’t share their sense of the immaturity of our youth.
That’s because the young people with whom I interact are extraordinarily perceptive, compared to adults. As one high school student recently asked me, “Why does our school demand that we figure out if we are male or female or some variation? How could we figure it out even if we cared about gender? Can you tell me what it feels like to be woman? Can you tell me what it feels like to be a man? Of course not. No one knows.”
Precisely.
If everything is reduced to gender—even liquid gender—then how can anyone know by a solely internal exploration if they feel male or female?
What does it feel like to be a man? It can’t just mean that I am attracted to women, because it is okay to be attracted to men. It can’t just mean I feel like a lumberjack—because what does it mean to feel like a lumberjack? It can’t simply mean to be drawn to women’s clothes because what makes some garments women’s clothes?
In short, if the ultimate source of reference is the self, and if no other self than the individual is a reference point, how can you know who or what you are?
Indeed. The kids are right.
We don’t live at a tipping point; we already live beyond the tipping point. Whether adults realize it or not, the most important conversation today is not about gender, but about identity, as released from the confines of gender.
It’s all about the freely choosing individual, and the modern ideology that puts that person at the center of the world. Justice Anthony Kennedy is the Prophet of Our Age. As he said in his 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey majority opinion:
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.
What anyone who wants to resist the triumph of gender ideology has to understand is that this is deeper than gender or sexuality. This is all about identity, and to stand against it is to stand against the way most younger Americans have been conditioned by consumerist liberal democracy to understand themselves and the way the world works. It’s just that radical. As Kuehne once put it, Americans should get ready for things like the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s program to help students transition to the other gender to come to public elementary and secondary schools around the country. It’s already happening. We are far beyond bathrooms.
We may hope that a Trump Supreme Court nominee holds more traditional views on the matter, and is in place before the Court takes up the trans bathrooms issue. But there is no guarantee of it, and besides, the power of Big Business, the Media, and Academia to shape the views of civil society is immense. Never forget that Donald Trump truly doesn’t care about this stuff. He probably doesn’t want to push it, à la Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party, but he probably doesn’t care to interfere to protect the rights of dissenters when others do.
January 16, 2017
Burning Out On Race Relationships
Did you know that President Obama is on the wrong side of the argument about black fatherhood? So says Mychal Denzel Johnson, in a column for the Washington Post, in which he faults the president (and others) for drawing attention to the fact that most black children in America are born without a father in the home. Excerpt:
In a 2008 speech delivered on Father’s Day at a church on Chicago’s South Side, the first viable black candidate for president of the United States chastised black fathers. Too many black fathers, he said, are missing from too many lives and too many homes. “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison,” Obama said. “They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.”
It became a staple in his speeches delivered to majority- or all-black audiences. As recently as last year, Obama said at a poverty summit, “I am a black man who grew up without a father and I know the cost that I paid for that.”
However, responsible fatherhood only goes so far in a world plagued by institutionalized oppression. For black children, the presence of fathers would not alter racist drug laws, prosecutorial protection of police officers who kill, mass school closures or the poisoning of their water. By focusing on the supposed absence of black fathers, we allow ourselves to pretend this oppression is not real, while also further scapegoating black men for America’s societal ills.
So now a black President of the United States who was abandoned by his black father and wants to tell other black men that it’s wrong to do so — well, he’s only aiding the oppressor. When even Barack Obama cannot discuss race-related realities without being accused in the Washington Post of abetting racism, we are in trouble.
Along these lines, a reader e-mails:
I think some are missing some important aspects of the recent John Lewis flap, but your earlier post about the Gemby article touches on it. Trump’s response may have been predictable and harsh, and I grant the hypocrisy of it coming from him, but what’s more predictable is the media sanctimony that has followed. I’m fine with Trump criticizing Lewis, even though I don’t really like the idea of any President tweeting, but so be it, it’s 2017, and the alternative is to submit to their loaded questions in a press conference. I also think the Trump team’s messaging is a lot more intentional than people give it credit, assuming it’s only late-night ramblings and launching random bombs at enemies. I think a lot of conservatives are fine with the recent response, and precisely because of it’s disregard for Lewis civil-rights past.
Why? Because we’re so sick and tired of Democrat politicians using race as a uni-directional cudgel in politics and the media excusing their racism. Many are just over it, and all the sanctimonious decorum of commenters that are falling all over themselves to call Lewis an icon and a hero, and the fainting that Trump would disrespect him on MLK weekend — it’s just hard to treat as a holy day, and not because of Trump, but because the Left has used the civil rights legacy so unscrupulously. I’m frankly exhausted with the constant discussion of race, and the fawning media that thinks Obama is a hero for constantly hectoring the country about it (this is reporting?). Can anyone argue it’s made things better?
Lewis may have done something heroic in the 60s, but nobody cares anymore, because we know what he did last week. His empty testimony against Sessions revealed him to be a a race-hustler trading on the past and unwilling to accept that the race relations are better and embrace more productive ideas. And now we’re told by mainstream media talking heads he must be respected? Sorry, no sale, and this is big picture people in the media are missing, that we’re losing some decorum and politeness with Trump, but also the sanctimony and PC editorial boundaries, [emphasis the reader’s — RD] boundaries that they use to manipulate language and the bounds of discussion, which only benefit the Left. So, I’m all for throwing that out.
On a related note, Cory Booker’s testimony was shameful too (and flat). That’s not ‘just politics,’ it’s an attempt at character assassination, it’s in the permanent Senate record, and another oblique suggestion that a Southern, white, and Republican must be a racist even when there’s overwhelming evidence to the contrary. MLK wanted people to be judged by the ‘content of their character.’ Booker and Lewis disgraced themselves, and they don’t deserve respect. Tom Cotton’s response was more gracious scolding, that his colleague Booker “knows better,” but at some point people say, “sorry, if you’re going to practice this sort of race-bating, you do lose respect, however good your past deeds are.”
Maybe it’s just age too, that being in my 30s, I didn’t grow up in such a deeply divided racial context, and I can’t just accept the Left not allowing the country to move past it, and work productively on inequality. Or the intellectual tyranny of calling anyone that disagrees with you an immoral racist. Don’t underestimate either how personally people take the platitudes and race hectoring when the US president says things like “we have to do better.” Is that not suggesting that my behavior needs to improve for the world to be less racist?
I don’t underestimate Trump’s opportunity to make some big mistakes, but I’ve heard a lot in the last few years about how we need to have “an honest discussion about race,” and that includes dispensing with the banalities that currently fuel it.
Another reader, a conservative Christian, writes in about the Knots & Reparations piece that prompted the above reader’s letter. He has been participating in a Christian “racial reconciliation” group in his city, but he’s burning out. I have edited his letter slightly to protect his identity, and publish this version with his permission:
I spent the fall participating in a racial reconciliation group — all of whom are Christians—with an eye towards trying to begin to work out inside the church a reconciliation of the racial divide. The problem, I have discovered, is that left-wing ideology, grievance and liberation theology has deeply infested Christianity, particularly among millennials. In my time in this group,
1) At least one older white gentleman and his wife (and by older I mean 50-something) were more or less drummed out of the group because he tried to—in the most gracious, tentative, gentle and humble way imaginable—articulate a defense of enforcing border security. This despite the fact that he has been an extremely generous financial supporter of inner-city ministry.
2) Various members claimed, the day after the election, that “we now know that half the country is racist” and furthermore that almost all white evangelicals are racists because 88 percent of them voted for Trump. Not that there possibly could be any other reason to vote for Trump.
3) An invited speaker gave a long lecture about how Western culture from Augustine forward is based on white supremacy. He had no interest in conversing with someone who disagreed with him.
4) An African-American female explained her decision to leave her multiracial church because she had concluded that she could not thrive around white Christians. She said that to love her blackness, and to live in justice, she had to cut ties with a church that includes whites.
Rod, this is just scratching the surface. The experience has left me deeply troubled that even the church is struggling terribly with this problem. I don’t have solutions, and I still have some hope in the healing work of Christ, but the reality on the ground is deeply, deeply depressing. Sorry to be a downer—I am still hopeful that you are right, but there is just a huge, huge uphill battle, because the entire next generation has been colonized by left-wing theology.
The reader goes on to say that, “If “racism” no longer means “hating people of another race” but rather means “not entirely convinced by the extreme claims of left wing/progressive identity politics” then I really don’t much care if a SJW snowflake calls me a racist.”
A depressing thought on MLK Day. But it’s where we are now.
Know Thy Enemy
Not everybody who disagrees with you is an enemy. Mostly they’re simply opponents. But there are some people who have given themselves over to evil, and with whom there can never be compromise or cooperation.
Within Christian church circles, the lines must be drawn sharply and clearly between orthodox Christians and people like these “faith leaders” who recently showed up at Planned Parenthood’s new clinic to bless it. Excerpts:
“In almost every message to our staff, I talk about our doing sacred work,” says Dr. Laura Meyers, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington. “This confirms the sacredness of the work we do.”
The NoMa health facility, which opened in September, rang with the sound of drums as visitors entered, courtesy of all-female percussion troupe Batala Washington. Erin Schmieder, a Batala member, says the group chose to participate in the event organized by the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice because “there are a lot of us throughout our lives who have benefited from Planned Parenthood.”
Before the ceremony kicked off, religious leaders gathered upstairs for their own prayer circle, led by Rabbi Michael Namath. The program director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism called upon their obligation to the world to “make it whole and holy.”
Then the formal event began, featuring leaders from different Christian denominations, a rabbi, abortion providers, a Planned Parenthood patient, Hindu priests, an Imam over Skype, visual art, and a liturgical dance.
Understand, part of what they’re blessing is an abortion clinic. More:
Reverend Doctors Christine and Dennis Wiley of Baptist United Church of Christ organized the event with RCRC and PPMW, and acknowledge that anti-abortion perspectives dominate many religious institutions. “The conservative voices are big,” says Christine. “It drowns out the progressive voices, but it’s not that progressive voices aren’t there.”
Meyers agrees. Anti-choice activists have “tried to separate those of us working on or supporting the right of women to choose a from a sense of deep spirituality,” she says. “So today is a shift in that narrative.”
For many of the speakers at the ceremony, their religious faith was precisely why they stood in solidarity with Planned Parenthood.
Rabbi Namath spoke of the belief in Jewish tradition that making healthful decisions about one’s body is a way to honor God.
Here’s a short video clip of the thing:
I’ve not been able to find a full listing of the churches with pastors and others involved in this thing, but the bio page of the leaders show Baptists, a Methodist, and a member of the United Church of Christ.
Blessing a place where the lives of unborn children are exterminated.
In other news, the Rev. Jeff Hood is a super-progressive Baptist pastor in the Dallas area. How progressive? From the biography on his website:
The author of 16 books, Dr. Hood is particularly excited about the release of his latest 2 books, Dallas and The Execution of God. In 2016, Dr. Hood’s book The Courage to Be Queer was named the third best religion book of the year at the Independent Publishers Book Awards. In addition to writing books, Dr. Hood’s work has appeared extensively in the media, including in the Dallas Morning News, Huffington Post, Fort Worth Star Telegram, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Los Angeles Times, WIRED magazine and on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR amongst a whole host of other outlets.
Dr. Hood has served in the governing leadership of multiple organizations, and presently serves on the board of Fellowship of Reconciliation USA. In 2013, Dr. Hood was awarded PFLAG Fort Worth’s Equality Award for activism and service. In 2015, Hood was named Hope for Peace and Justice’s Ambassador of Justice for his theological activism and also the Next Generation Action Network’s Person of the Year for his work against police brutality. In addition to being the husband of Emily and father of Jeff III, Phillip, Quinley Mandela, Lucas & Madeleine, Dr. Hood also maintains a close friendship with multiple death row prisoners.
With deep soul and a belief that God is “calling us to something queerer,” Dr. Hood is a radical mystic and prophetic voice to a closed society.
Yeah, well, today on his blog, Rev. Jeff hears God calling us to something even queerer than you can imagine. He recalls a hospital conversation a few years ago with a man who had been injured by his Labrador retriever, with who he had been having sexual relations. Excerpt from the dialogue he recounts on his blog. “F” is “Frank,” the patient; “C” is himself, the Chaplain:
F8: Yes. When we were intimate the other night, Lucy sank her long teeth into my neck. She had never done that before. Lucy became very vicious very quickly.
C9: (Still holding his hand…) Sir, if you don’t mind me asking…what exactly is Lucy?
F9: Lucy is 88 beautiful pounds of Labrador.
C10: (Still holding his hand…) I appreciate the clarification. I’m sorry that things are not proceeding as well as you would prefer in your relationship with Lucy. Do you think the disconnect you’re feeling from Lucy could possibly be attributed to the vast differences between your species?
F10: I have thought about that…but things have been going fine for the last four years.
C11: What attracted you to Lucy in the first place?
F11: I have had numerous failed relationships. This relationship with Lucy just seemed to work.
You really have to read the entire exchange, realizing that the progressive pastor is presenting himself as the voice of compassion here. And maybe he was, in his way. He did end up talking Frank out of continuing to have sex with a dog. That’s not a bad thing.
But later, he came to wonder if he had done the right thing. Says Pastor Jeff:
I was very shaken by the encounter with Frank. Not long after I left, I went and talked with a psychologist. When I told him what happened, he challenged my assumptions. “What makes you think that someone can’t be in a consensual sexual relationship with an animal? It doesn’t just have to be all about sex either. Real intimate partnered love is a possibility too. Many animals are intellectually and emotionally more capable of healthier relationships than we are.” While it has been many years since these events transpired, I think about them often. I still don’t have clarity on what I should have said to Frank. I simply did the best I could with the understanding that I had.
The truth is that Frank is not alone. If you survey the online and print data out there, there are at least thousands of people currently carrying on intimate relationships with animals. Regularly, news stories come out after a relationship is revealed. These frequent occurrences bring about an important question. Can an animal consent to such a relationship? Through expanding science, we are gaining knowledge that animals are as intelligent if not more intelligent than humans. I’m still uncertain if consent is possible. I do know that there are an increasing number of people who claim that it is. The more I think and read about it the blurrier the lines seem to get.
I also think about what Jesus would say. There is nothing in the gospel narrative that speaks to intimate relationships with animals. In the midst of such absence, one is even left to wonder if Jesus might have even had intimate relationships with animals.
“One” is? What a pervert and a blasphemer. But he’s not a random nut. A straight man who is married and the father of children, Hood is a big presence on the SJW scene in north Texas, it appears (see here and here). When you abandon Christian orthodoxy, there’s no brake stopping the slide into the abyss. I do wonder, though, where progressive religionists draw the line on their left side. Are there any religious enemies to the left? Will The Christian Century blog network continue to host the blog of a Texas pastor who says God incarnate might have been into bestiality? What, exactly, does a guy have to do or say to be disfellowshipped from progressive Christian circles (besides vote Republican)?
Trump, John Lewis, And American Dissolution
My view is that it was irresponsible for John Lewis to say that Donald Trump is not a “legitimate” president. In this, Lewis is no better than Trump himself was when he indicated during the campaign that if he lost the election, he might not regard Hillary Clinton as legitimate. By saying these things, political partisans of both parties only hasten the crack-up of the Republic.
The greater sin, if that’s the word, was Trump’s absurd overreaction to what John Lewis said. I don’t believe that being a black man who is a Civil Rights hero, as Lewis absolutely is, gives you the right to say whatever you want to without criticism, but Trump’s fiery response was stupid, and a classic example of how the man’s thin-skinned, childish temperament renders him dangerous in the presidency. Nixon’s paranoia undid his presidency; it’s unnerving to think what may lie ahead with this one. I mostly agree with Michael Gerson on the Trump vs. Lewis fight:
It must be said that the whole business of questioning a president’s right to hold office is pernicious. It puts a hard stop on all civility and cooperation. The worst instance, of course, was the claim that Barack Obama was Kenyan-born and disqualified to be president — an argument based on partisan, conspiratorial and quasi-racist lies enthusiastically spread by Trump. When the president-elect calls out Lewis on this topic, it is a display of hypocrisy so large that it is visible from space.
Ain’t that the truth. More:
Trump often justifies his attacks as counterpunching. Even a glancing blow seems to merit a nuclear response. But this is the exact opposite of the ethical teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, and of the principled nonviolence of the civil rights movement. In these systems of thought, the true victory comes in absorbing a blow with dignity, even with love. It is the substance of King’s message. It is the essence of a cruciform faith.
This is not always easy to translate into politics. But a president-elect attacking a hero of the civil rights movement less than a week before he takes the oath of office is not normal. There is some strange inversion of values at work. Because Vladimir Putin praises him, Trump defends Putin. Because Lewis criticizes him, Trump attacks Lewis (as “talk, talk, talk — no action or results”). The only organizing principle is the degree of deference to Trump himself. It is the essence of narcissism.
This is one thing that’s so strange about Trump. He’s an extremely wealthy man who took on the entire Republican Party establishment, defeated it, then went on to win the US Presidency in a victory with world-historical implications — and still, he can’t stop himself from going to the mat with a Congressman from Atlanta, and sending out a harsh critique of an American television show that hasn’t been consistently or genuinely funny since time out of mind.
.@NBCNews is bad but Saturday Night Live is the worst of NBC. Not funny, cast is terrible, always a complete hit job. Really bad television!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 15, 2017
It’s clear that Trump and his enemies on the left are going to be at each other’s throats for the next four years, and turn the public square into a boxing ring. Does it presage worse to come? A reader sent in links to a long, fascinating tweetstorm in which a man named David Hines sums up what he learned from reading Bryan Burrough’s Days Of Rage, a history of violent left-wing American radicalism in the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s.
One main point in this particular tweetstorm linked above (parts 1 and 2, of 5) he makes is that that period of American life was far more violent (bombings, assassinations, etc.) than we recall, and because we have forgotten how bad it got, we fail to realize that it could get that bad again if we aren’t careful. He also points out that leaders of the radical left (e.g., the Weather Underground), despite their violence, managed to bounce back quite well in US society, because the left had an infrastructure that supported them. Hines goes on to say — again, summarizing Burrough’s book — that the radical left began to fall apart when two things happened:
1) when it finally occurred to them that the American working-class masses on whose behalf they were fighting wanted nothing more than to beat them up, and
2) when they tried to organize politically aboveground, they found that the people of color with whom they thought themselves allied didn’t want to take order from college-educated white people. According to Hines, one of the Weatherman veterans he interviewed said it upset her to be constantly called racist by others in the movement. Says Hines:
We are going to be seeing the same power struggle inside the Democratic Party in fairly short order.
— David Hines (@hradzka) December 6, 2016
Hines says another big takeaway from his tweetstorm to that point are that political violence can come from anywhere, and that the left has the infrastructure to make it happen more than the right does, in part because there are mainstream leftist leaders who would accept it. These don’t exist on the right. If you don’t believe that the left would accept it, ask yourself where the mainstream liberal leaders were condemning the attacks by organized left-wing mobs on Trump supporters last year. And ask yourself where the mainstream liberal leaders were condemning the illiberal mob actions on many college campuses these last couple of years. Not only didn’t they stand against them, on a lot of these campuses, the liberal administration leadership capitulated to them. They’re allowing courses that teach students of all races how terrible white people and their culture is. This is what you get when you march through the institutions. These people on the left are laying the groundwork for violent, racist white reaction. As Hines says, violent reactionary whites do not have the infrastructure, so any violence they wreak will be more decentralized, and therefore harder for the government to combat.
One more from this Hines tweetstorm:
3) Not a violent issue, but a political one: ethnic issues involving access to power both empower and derail radical movements.
— David Hines (@hradzka) December 6, 2016
Welcome to the Women’s March 2017.
In Part III of his epic tweetstorm, Hines recalls in detail the absolutely insane revolutionary environment of the 1970s, and how having allies within the left-wing Establishment managed to save violent white radicals, but didn’t work out so well for violent black radicals. (I read about a lot of this stuff back in my student days, but I’ve forgotten about it. It’s staggering history. If you wonder where Reagan came from, this will help you understand.)
In Part IV, the one that Hines calls “the craziest of the lot,” Hines tells the story of the FALN, Puerto Rican radicals who tried to assassinate President Truman, shot up Congress, and were still going strong through the 1970s. He talks about how its leaders colonized the Episcopal Church. Yes, liberal Christians paid these domestic terrorists and defended them in the public square. It’s an incredible story, and, says Hines, it offers a lesson on the protection you can get for yourself if you compromise institutions within the Establishment.
In Part V, the final episode of the tweetstorm, Hines asks what all of this means for us today. Excerpts:
Now, 2017 isn’t going to be the 1970s. Goals, situations, and cultures change. The actors want different things. But we can look for hints.
— David Hines (@hradzka) January 14, 2017
Like, what kind of people will do this stuff?
— David Hines (@hradzka) January 14, 2017
More:
The truth: Left is a lot more organized & prepared for violence than Right is, and has the advantage of a mainstream more supportive of it.
— David Hines (@hradzka) January 14, 2017
Imagine an abortion clinic bomber *getting a comfortable job at an elite university.* https://t.co/jgvl4n3J2m
— David Hines (@hradzka) January 14, 2017
Outrageous, right? No way the Right could get away with that. But the Left does! And the press gives them cover.
— David Hines (@hradzka) January 14, 2017
Hines gets very dark in this series, and says that the actions of the left on Inauguration Day may prove decisive. He links to this article about how various left-wing and anarchist groups are organizing to disrupt the Trump inauguration. If that goes down in a significant way, you can bet that Trump is going to break heads over it — and that a lot of ordinary Americans are going to be on his side. There’s a report that queer protestors are going to start the ball rolling with a gay dance party outside of Vice President Mike Pence’s home. If that happens, and there is anything lewd about it, then you can bet that the Christian Right, even people who aren’t fond of Trump, will begin to migrate solidly to Trump’s side, for the reason that Peter Leithart says in his First Things piece last week: we may not share the same values as Trump, but we share the same enemies — and that’s important.
In his tweetstorm, Hines speaks to this general point, saying that if political violence kicks off, a lot of people who find the far right repulsive are going to find themselves a lot more sympathetic if the only thing standing between them minding their own business and a violent, hateful left-wing mob are right-wing radicals. Again, Hines doesn’t say that he wants any of this to happen, only that he fears we are a lot closer to it than people think — in part because we have forgotten the history that Bryan Burrough recounts in his book Days Of Rage.
Read all of David Hines’s tweetstorms, in order, on this page. Trust me, it’s worth it. Seems to me that the big factor in all this is that in Donald Trump, the radical left has found not only a provocateur, but a man who, for better and for worse, will give as hard as he gets.
The Benedict Option In Trump’s America
Emma Green reports a fascinating story about non-orthodox Christians who are responding to the Trumpening by taking their version of the Benedict Option. Excerpts:
For the last eight years, Nicolas and Rachel Sarah have been slowly weaning themselves off fossil fuels. They don’t own a refrigerator or a car; their year-old baby and four-year-old toddler play by candlelight rather than electricity at night. They identify as Christian anarchists, and have given an official name to their search for an alternative to consumption-heavy American life: the Downstream Project, with the motto to “do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
As it turns out, exiting the system is a challenging, time-consuming, and surprisingly technical process. Here in the Shenandoahs and central Virginia, a handful of tiny communities are experimenting with what it means to reject the norms of contemporary life and exist in a radically different way. They seem to share Americans’ pervasive sense of political alienation, which arguably reached an apotheosis with the election of Donald Trump: a sense of division from their peers, a distrust of government. The challenges of modern politics—dealing with issues like climate change, poverty, mass migration, and war on a global scale—are so vast and abstract that it’s difficult not to find them overwhelming. But instead of continuing in passive despair, as many Americans seem to do, the people in these communities decided to overhaul their lives.
These communities show just how hard it is to live without fossil fuels, a government safety net, or a system of capitalist exchange. They struggle with many of the same issues that plague the rest of America, including health problems, financial worries, and racism. At the center of their political lives is a question that every American faces, but for them, it’s amplified: whether to save the world or let it burn.
Their answers are different, but they share one thing. They’ve seen what modern American life looks like. And they want out.
The Christian anarchist green couple discovered something interesting:
As they’ve built their project, they have also found themselves caught between two worlds. “Among people who are wanting to live the same lifestyle—being fossil-fuel free—there is a lot of push against Christianity,” Rachel Sarah said. “It’s almost like anything is okay except Christianity, because that’s oppressive.”
And this:
They’re hopeful that Trump’s election will spur more people to think critically about their lives. “Times like this really awaken people,” said Rachel Sarah. “Since [the election], we’ve started to feel really hopeful.” Trump’s election left Nicolas feeling sick to his stomach, he said, but he sees an upside. “When there’s a Democrat in power, social-justice-minded people go to sleep, because they feel validated by what they hear on NPR,” he said. The couple says they’re feeling more “awake” now, too. Trump’s election is “like a crescendo for the Christian anarchist call,” Nicolas said. “If we are citizens of another kingdom, and the empire is getting pretty ridiculous, it inspires us to take our convictions more seriously.”
Read the whole thing. The folks in the story live in bona fide communes, which is not something that I’m interested in doing, or capable of pulling off at this stage in my family’s life. The Benedict Option — the book, I mean, which I hope you’ll pre-order — does not call for intentional communities, though it certainly welcomes small-o orthodox Christians taking that route if they can make it work. I see it as more workable for Christians to do like the Tipi Loschi, the lay Catholics of San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, who all live in their normal houses and apartments in the city, but come together for school, Bible study, mass, community meals, sports activities, service work, and other things. Marco Sermarini, their leader, texted this photo over the weekend:
via Marco Sermarini
It’s the “Studium Sanctae Luciae,” a university-level study course within the community. On this day, they were studying what St. Thomas Aquinas has to say about suicide and euthanasia. Marco says that Father Cassian Folsom, who recently retired as the abbot of the Norcia monastery, is helping them launch this initiative. Gang, I cannot wait for The Benedict Option to hit bookstores so you can meet these Christians in Italy. They are ordinary people, not communards, but they are living together in real community, and doing all kinds of real and important things to strengthen their faith contra modernity. They’re not just talking about it; they’re making it happen.
The people in Green’s story are not all Christians. All of them are greens, though. What they have in common is having given up on normal activism as a way of changing things. They have been inspired by a 2012 essay by Paul Kingsnorth in Orion, in which he said:
And so I ask myself: what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time? And I arrive at five tentative answers:
One: Withdrawing. If you do this, a lot of people will call you a “defeatist” or a “doomer,” or claim you are “burnt out.” They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that “fighting” is always better than “quitting.” Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance—refusing to tighten the ratchet further—is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.
Two: Preserving nonhuman life. The revisionists will continue to tell us that wildness is dead, nature is for people, and Progress is God, and they will continue to be wrong. There is still much remaining of the earth’s wild diversity, but it may not remain for much longer. The human empire is the greatest threat to what remains of life on earth, and you are part of it. What can you do—really do, at a practical level—about this? Maybe you can buy up some land and rewild it; maybe you can let your garden run free; maybe you can work for a conservation group or set one up yourself; maybe you can put your body in the way of a bulldozer; maybe you can use your skills to prevent the destruction of yet another wild place. How can you create or protect a space for nonhuman nature to breathe easier; how can you give something that isn’t us a chance to survive our appetites?
Three: Getting your hands dirty. Root yourself in something: some practical work, some place, some way of doing. Pick up your scythe or your equivalent and get out there and do physical work in clean air surrounded by things you cannot control. Get away from your laptop and throw away your smartphone, if you have one. Ground yourself in things and places, learn or practice human-scale convivial skills. Only by doing that, rather than just talking about it, do you learn what is real and what’s not, and what makes sense and what is so much hot air.
Four: Insisting that nature has a value beyond utility. And telling everyone. Remember that you are one life-form among many and understand that everything has intrinsic value. If you want to call this “ecocentrism” or “deep ecology,” do it. If you want to call it something else, do that. If you want to look to tribal societies for your inspiration, do it. If that seems too gooey, just look up into the sky. Sit on the grass, touch a tree trunk, walk into the hills, dig in the garden, look at what you find in the soil, marvel at what the hell this thing called life could possibly be. Value it for what it is, try to understand what it is, and have nothing but pity or contempt for people who tell you that its only value is in what they can extract from it.
Five: Building refuges. The coming decades are likely to challenge much of what we think we know about what progress is, and about who we are in relation to the rest of nature. Advanced technologies will challenge our sense of what it means to be human at the same time as the tide of extinction rolls on. The ongoing collapse of social and economic infrastructures, and of the web of life itself, will kill off much of what we value. In this context, ask yourself: what power do you have to preserve what is of value—creatures, skills, things, places? Can you work, with others or alone, to create places or networks that act as refuges from the unfolding storm? Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?
The whole essay is here. Again, Kingsnorth is a green who writes for greens. How would we adapt his basic stance as those who may or may not be greens, but who are more interested in preserving the cultural ecology of Christianity in a technology-mad world that is as hostile to it as it is to the natural world? This is the challenge of the Benedict Option. This is what we have to start working on, now.
What I’m asking here is how would you re-write Nos. 2, 3, and 4 to address the threat to orthodox Christian culture that Kingsnorth sees to the environment? For example, when Kingsnorth calls on greens to “preserve nonhuman life,” then prescribes “rewilding” settled places, a Ben Op way to interpret that would be to preserve and restore artifacts of traditional Christian culture that have been pushed to the margins of extinction by modernity. Kingsnorth asks fellow environmentalists: “How can you create or protect a space for nonhuman nature to breathe easier; how can you give something that isn’t us a chance to survive our appetites?” The Ben Op version of that question might be: “How can you create or protect a space for expressions of traditional Christian culture (e.g., prayers, liturgies, art, customs and practices, literature, etc.) to breathe easier; how can you give some aspect of Christian culture that wasn’t invented in the last 100 years a chance to survive our appetites?”
No. 3, “Getting your hands dirty” — that’s easy to translate into a Ben Op idiom. Kingsnorth writes,
Ground yourself in things and places, learn or practice human-scale convivial skills. Only by doing that, rather than just talking about it, do you learn what is real and what’s not, and what makes sense and what is so much hot air.
This is what the Tipi Loschi are doing: not just talking about what we can do to ensure the survival, even the thriving, of orthodox Christianity in the West during this a post-Christian era, but actually getting their hands dirty creating the spaces and institutions to make that happen. In this excerpt from The Benedict Option, Marco Sermarino gives an example of how the spirit of creative entrepreneurship played out in their community in the example of the Scuola Libera G.K. Chesterton that they started a few years ago:
When he returned home, Marco told his wife they had to start a school. They had three months to do it. “Many people thought I was crazy, and maybe I am, but we started on the fifteenth of September,” Marco said. They had four students, two of them Sermarini children. Today there are seventy students in both a middle school and a high school.
The success of the Chesterton school inspired the Tipi Loschi to dream big. “When we discovered that we could do one strange thing, we started to think about how many things we could do in an uncon- ventional way,” says Sermarini. “We knew that we couldn’t live a reg- ular life with a Christian coating, but had to change the roots.”
Going against Italy’s educational stream, the Tipi Loschi found not only success with their school but inspiration to be countercultural Christians in many other ways.
“Many times in this life you will think it’s impossible to have any other kind of order,” he continues. “But if you start changing things, and moving things where they are meant to be, and if you put God over all of it, then you will be amazed by how many things fall into place.”
Elsewhere, Marco told me that not everything the community has tried has worked. They learn from those defeats and move on. The point is that they don’t just sit around like a bunch of intellectual Christians theorizing; they get their hands dirty.
No. 4, “Insisting that nature has a value beyond utility,” is entirely consonant with a return to metaphysical realism (roughly, the idea that matter matters in the divine economy, that there is a divine order embedded in nature, and we can’t just do whatever we want to with the created world — including our bodies.)
Someone said to me not long ago, “Well, I guess Trump winning screws things up for the Benedict Option.” It took me a second to understand where he was coming from. I told him by no means! People who think the Ben Op is a strategy for staying Christian under a Democratic president are unserious. Had any of the GOP candidates been elected, we still would have needed the Ben Op. That Trump is about to be our president ought to ramp up Ben Op concerns almost as high as they would have been under President Hillary Clinton. True, we might not have to worry as much about the Supreme Court as we would have under Hillary, but let’s not kid ourselves: nearly every single day for the next four years, we’re going to be waking up to a fresh mess. It is hard for me to believe that we are going to emerge from the Trump administration in a better place. A better place than if Hillary Clinton had been president? Probably. Maybe. But good grief, if saying, “Welp, at least he’s not Hillary” is all it takes to distract you from the cultural decline and fragmentation consuming us, then you are not paying attention.
You should pay attention. Don’t forget your Alasdair MacIntyre:
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point.
Here’s where I am on the Trump administration. I am glad he is becoming president, and not Hillary Clinton, mostly because religious liberty stands a better chance under his administration, but also because this progressive march towards using the government to tear down traditional religious and social structures will likely halt temporarily. That said, I am unwilling to see my sons go off to fight whatever wars Trump starts, and I have no faith that his administration will accomplish at best anything more than a slight slowdown in the inevitable. I would love to be proven wrong, but I don’t think I will be. Trump is what he is, and what he is not is a restoration of any kind of traditional Christian cultural order. To be fair to Trump, he never claimed to be, but so many of my fellow conservative Christians, accustomed to looking on the GOP as the protectors of social conservatism, have convinced themselves that Trump is the answer.
Look, we support Trump when he does things that are consonant with our values, and we oppose him when he does things that are not. But in every case, we have to use this time to prepare. These are not normal times. Think about what you’re doing when you shore up the imperium instead of building up local forms of community that can withstand the imperium’s overreach, and its dissolution. I’m not a left-wing environmentalists, but Paul Kingsnorth and the left-wing environmentalists in Emma Green’s story are onto something important.
UPDATE: Wise advice from Peter Leithart. Excerpt:
Self-protection doesn’t seem a high-minded political agenda. Christians are other-directed, and rightly so. But that can turn into political masochism: We defend everyone but ourselves. That’s a practical problem, and also a theological mistake. Protecting Christian interests is a legitimate Christian interest. …
One way to measure Trump’s presidency is: Will believers be freer to be believers under Trump than they have been for the past twenty-five years? Will Trump threaten the tax-exempt status of Christian colleges and ministries that reject same-sex marriage? Or will he challenge the fascist regime of group-think and group-speech? It’s pretty clear already: Trump may not share our convictions, but he shares our enemies. And that’s not nothing.
January 14, 2017
The SJW Singularity Has Been Reached
Furry. Gay. Halal. Woke (Mot/Flickr)
Slate published this unironically. Starts like:
Kyell Gold’s new novel may lie at the most unlikely intersection in literary history: a gay immigrant Muslim romance involving furries—that is, people who feel a close identification with anthropomorphic animal characters.
“I wrote this book in part as a response to the wave of Islamophobia in this country,” Gold explained in an author’s note, “never dreaming at the time that it would crest as it has now.”
The Time He Desires is the story of Aziz, a cheetah in a faltering heterosexual marriage who explores the boundaries of his sexuality with the help of a gay fox. Aziz is a Sudanese immigrant, and he engages in a struggle with his desires that will be familiar to queer readers. Gold’s been writing furry romance novels full-time for several years, after bouncing from chemical engineering to business school to zoology. After he was laid off in 2010 with a generous severance package, his husband said, “if you’re going to be a full-time writer, this is the time to start.”
More:
Muslims, queers, and furries all share the experience of having been marginalized by the mainstream, and of being continually forced to justify their existence. But just as public opinion on LGBTQ folks has softened over the last few years, furries seem to be enjoying a break as well.
Alert the Caliph. Slate says this book is a good anti-Trump effort. More please!
January 13, 2017
Free Speech In Islamizing Germany
A German regional court in the city of Wuppertal affirmed a lower court decision last Friday stating that a violent attempt to burn the city’s synagogue by three men in 2014 was a justified expression of criticism of Israel’s policies.
Johannes Pinnel, a spokesman for the regional court in Wuppertal, outlined the court’s decision in a statement.
Three German Palestinians sought to torch the Wuppertal synagogue with Molotov cocktails in July, 2014. The local Wuppertal court panel said in its 2015 decision that the three men wanted to draw “attention to the Gaza conflict” with Israel. The court deemed the attack not to be motivated by antisemitism.
Wow, whoever could have imagined that burning a synagogue would be termed not anti-Semitic in Germany. (/snark)
More than 5,000 French Jews pulled up stakes and moved to Israel in the past year following a spike in anti-Semitism and terrorism fears, according to a new report.
The 2015 Paris terror attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket where four shoppers were murdered has been a catalyst, the Jewish Agency of Israel said in its report.
More than 40,000 French Jews have emigrated since 2006.
Mene, mene tekel upharsin…
‘Sometimes Our Children Lead The Way’
This is a screenshot from National Geographic’s Instagram page, sent in by a reader. Not sure if you can read the text. It says:
Sometimes our children lead the way. Corey, 14, socially transitioned from boy to girl in the past few years. She gave her Mom, Eric(a) the courage to begin her own transition from female to male. They are moving in opposite directions but toward their true selves.
After her first shot of testosterone Erica said she finally felt “complete”. Photo by @ljohnphoto for Nat Geo’s Special Issue-Gender Revolution. @natgeo @thephotosociety #gender #nonbinary
“Toward their true selves.” Meanwhile, another reader sent in this shot he took in a Barnes & Noble in Nashville. If you think the Cathedral is pushing this destructive ideology, you’re right.
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