Rod Dreher's Blog, page 504

Putin, Notre Bon Ami

A reader writes:

My wife and I are regular readers of your blog, French living in France, orthodox Catholics, and we thought you might be interested in a “grassroots” perspective on Putin enthusiasts in France, among which we count ourselves. We are not National Front (FN) supporters. Christian values or the support thereof probably have little influence on people’s view of the Russian president. The very reasons Putin’s leadership style is despicable to Americans are at worst neutral to many Frenchmen — and, in fact, as we face many similar problems, his way of dealing with them seems enviable to us ! Let me elaborate.

Why Putin’s support of Christianity holds little weight in France

For us, the fact that Putin holds himself as a defensor of traditional values and the Christian faith is a positive factor, with the caveat that many gestures — eg the financing of the traditional Christmas tree in front of Notre Dame — are nakedly political and it is difficult to have any illusion as to the depth of his personal religiosity. It is in fact more and more difficult in Europe to live as Christians, in large part because of EU politics, as is shown by the harsh reactions to the Hungarian decision to inscribe the criminal nature of abortion in their constitution. However, in France, this type of religion and morality-based reasoning is not very common.

It’s important to note that *in France* religion or religious values, in our experience, usually have almost nothing to do with why people may find Putin likeable or the “extreme-right” — better called the national right — appealing. Catholic values have almost completely disappeared. As you note in another post, less than 5% of the population attend mass with any regularity, most of whom are elderly. Outside of some very particular areas (some neighborhoods in Paris, Versailles …), you would be hard-pressed to meet a practicing Catholic outside of church-related events ! In truth, though Catholicism is very linked with French culture, and some people still like to get married in Church, have their children baptized, get palms blessed on Palm Sunday, etc., the Catholic Church and Catholic morals have very little influence on the lives of the vast, vast majority of our countrymen. Some anecdotal examples of the lack of exposure to Catholic thought of French youth:

– inability to understand classic works of literature (eg La Princesse de Clèves) for some university students because of lack of familiarity with, among others, the concept of sin

— lack of knowledge of major Christian feasts such as Palm Sunday (despite twelve years of Catholic schools)

The FN is the French party with the most or second-most support, consistently scoring around 30 % of the popular vote, even among the young; it is safe to say that it is probably not linked to religious thinking. Homosexualism has been extremely destructive to life in the American public square, as you document on your blog, but here, it has changed very little.

How we perceive Putin’s leadership style

It’s also important to note that the suppression of free speech, the free press, etc. in Putin’s Russia is far less schocking to the French than to Americans. In general, we don’t value democracy in the same sense Americans do. American-style civic freedoms are not a given in other democracies. Obviously it’s worse in Russia, however, in France:

— Freedom of speech is substantially abridged: (race-based or nationality-based) hate speech as such is forbidden by law; “lois memorielles” penalize, for example, Holocaust denial or Armenian genocide denial; recently, a bill making pro-life websites criminal was passed by the Assemblée Nationale and is awaiting a Senate vote.

— The press is deeply enmeshed with the political powers that be: the scandalous or criminal behavior of politicians is often an “open secret” among those in the know, but never appearing in the pages of newspapers to discredit them. Examples are too numerous to list ; thanks to the American courts and the Sofitel maids, old accusations against former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn came to light. Former president François Mitterand’s double life was revealed only after his death. Former Eureopean deputy Cohn-Bendit and the former minister Frédéric Mitterand live in peace despite past indiscretions too disgusting to contemplate, up to and including avowed child abuse.

— Our intelligence services have pretty much unlimited abilities to spy on people (e.g. mass breaking into facebook accounts of Manif pour Tous participants)

I could go on, but these examples are already pretty telling. Not saying this is good or bad; these invasive intelligence collection methods are possibly the only thing preventing some pretty terrible terrorist attacks right now.

I will add that, as the NYT points out, the FN recently took out a 9m euro loan from a Russian bank — but that is because no EU or swiss bank agreed to lend to them, for reasons that are unclear… Were I a banker, it’s not the last party on which I would have placed my bet. But many of the banks contacted did not even reply to their requests.

Most importantly, French culture has a very high emphasis on having a strong leader — “l’homme providentiel” who leads the country to greatness. The French monarchy was one of the strongest in the world (in the sense that the monarch’s authority was truly absolute and not dependant on the approval of powerful families); the heroes of French history include tyrants such as Napoleon, who re-instated slavery but gave France glory. Charles de Gaulle, who basically tailored the Fifth Republic to his personality but gave France some international clout back after WWII and Indochina is still revered, both on the French right and left ! Our constitution gives the President great power — that to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale (House of Representatives) and call a new election, that to take “full powers” “in case of a grave and immediate threat” for thirty days, and then indefinitely unless a council of senators or representatives decides the conditions no longer applies (article 16), and more. President Hollande, in a recent book, admitted that the President could call for targeted executions (again, an open secret)—almost no one criticized him for ordering such executions, only for openly admitting it. Having a strong, tough, very powerful leader, in the French psyche, is a good thing. This is part of Putin’s appeal.

The way he deals with our problems

Russia and France have similar problems. Putin deals with them in a more efficient and often more agreeable way than our leaders.

As concerns internal affairs : Putin shows his authoritarian bent (again, not particularly shocking for us — see above). First example : the Femen group, who are a nuisance. In France, they invaded Notre Dame, damaged the new bells, and faced no consequences. On the contrary, it was the policemen who arrested them who were punished ! The face of one of the Femen leaders is in fact immortalized on our postal stamps… In Russia, they are behind bars. Second example : Greenpeace, a nuisance as well. In France, they found it amusing to “break in” to nuclear power plants roughly yearly and, until 2015, no one was allowed to do anything about it. In Russia, they were dealt with more energetically when trying to enter an oil platform.

As concerns Islam : it is a huge problem in France, highlighted by the recent terrorist attacks. France has the second largest muslim population (after Russia) in Europe, (5 to 10 per cent), and the many problems that go along with it. In some neighborhoods, street prayers, blocking large streets, take place every Fridays. The police *cannot enter* some areas. Jews are leaving in unprecendented numbers because of muslim antisemitism. We now have hundreds of homegrown terrorists who go fight for ISIS and come back, mostly with impunity. After an attack, our intellectual class’s biggest fear is often the oh so frightening specter of “islamophobia”. It’s a problem in schools, it’s a problem as concerns the treatment of women, it’s a problem in hospitals, it’s a problem in swimming pools, it’s a problem just about everywhere. Thus far, the most our politicians have done is say it’s a serious question. Russia, with the largest european muslim population (15 per cent), doesn’t have as many problems. Thousands of Russian nationals have gone to Syria to fight for ISIS, but there has, so far, not been a single ISIS-related terrorist attack on Russian ground!

As concerns national sovereignty : Putin has made Russia relevant again. He has acted in Syria in what seems to many in Europe the only sane manner, against US opinion. He supported Serbia as concerns the independance of Kosovo, against US and EU decisions. He again defied the US and EU in the Ukraine. We can only wish that France could be as free from the claims of “international opinion” ! Even if it would be unfair to say that we blindly follow NATO or EU dictates, often, it seems that France is subordinate to extranational interests — e.g. we are forced to take in migrants (both from the Middle East and from poorer EU countries), though we can’t afford it, culturally or economically.

I hope these few remarks will be helpful in understanding the relative popularity of Putin in France. He seems like a strong man able to make strong decisions as concerns the problems his country faces. I can only hope Russia will become, for France, a more precious ally than Saudi Arabia, Qatar or China.

Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Merry Christmas From Norcia

From a Bethlehem of our time, Christmas greetings. Pray for the monks, and help them with material needs if you can. Watching this video, I saw different monastic friends, and excitement surged within me, knowing that in just a few months, I will introduce them to you in The Benedict Option. What these good men are doing in their poor encampment on the hillside of the earthquake-ravaged town is so important for the salvation of the world. I deeply believe that. In the clip, you see Brother Ignatius Prakarsa ringing a bell. From The Benedict Option:

God will use the little things in a life ordered by His love, to His service, to speak evangelically to others, said Brother Ignatius Prakarsa, the monastery’s guest master. In the summertime, the monastery’s basilica church fills up with tourists, many of whom are lapsed Christians or unbelievers, who sit quietly to watch the monks chant their regular prayers in Latin.

When Brother Ignatius meets them on the church steps later, visitors often tell him that the chanting was so peaceful, so beautiful.

“I tell them we’re just praying to the Lord. We’re just opening our mouths to sing the beauty that’s already there in the music,” he said to me. “Everything is evangelical. Everything is directed to God. Everything has to be seen from the supernatural point of view. The radiance that comes through our lives is only a reflection of God. In ourselves, we are nothing.”

What He Saw At The Terrorist Attack

Here is something quite remarkable. It’s a letter from the American reader living in France who comments on this blog under the name “Du Bartas”. He was present for an Islamist terrorist attack in Africa earlier this year, one that killed 16. His account of that drama is gripping. I present it to you with his permission:

You being a journalist, I thought you might be interested to know about something that happened a few months ago but received relatively little coverage. Do you remember that story of a terrorist attack that took place in March of this past year in Grand Bassam, Ivory Coast? About 20 persons were killed and more injured: most of the victims were Ivorians as well as a handful of Europeans. The 3 terrorists were from AQMI (Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb) sent to attack the beachside restaurants; Christians, children and adults, were reportedly singled out and shot dead. It is a wonder that the Islamist terrorists didn’t kill more people. About 500 meters north of the beachside restaurants, on the main road leading from the city center, there was a busload of American university officials, about 25 or so, when the attack started at a quarter past noon. I should know: I was one of them.

In addition, about a kilometer away, there was an assistant secretary of a U.S. federal department, the head of our delegation, who was at the home of the mayor of Grand Bassam. I sometimes wondered whether or not we were (part of) the intended target if only because we should have been at the restaurant, the one that got attacked, at noon according to our itinerary plans. We were delayed, however, and eventually sidetracked to go visit the national costume museum. I wasn’t happy about this decision to visit the museum: I was hungry and wanted to see the beach. But up we strolled the front steps of the museum located in the old 19th century residence of the governor general from colonial times. Standing on the veranda-like porch of this old mansion with nary a costume to look at, we heard the first clack clack go off from what sounded like the beach area. I don’t know guns and I rarely hear guns fired, so my first thought when I heard the noise was that it reminded me of noises I had heard when I was in Washington, DC, one summer a long time ago. It is the sort of noise where you tell yourself they’re firecrackers but you know it’s really gunfire. But you keep trying to convince yourself that it’s just firecrackers.

The gunshots kept sounding off, though, by the beach: the firecracker hypothesis was discarded. I never heard any rat-tat-tat-tat of machine gunfire spitting out bullets, just single shot noises: Kalashnikovs (for some reason, I knew that). Standing on the veranda looking south over the road leading from the museum to the sea, the beach and the restaurants, we saw a mass of people running towards us, locals panicking trying to get away from the gunfire which kept sounding off, pap, pap.

My thoughts then next ran to wonder who was doing this: gangsters from the rough parts of Abidjan? Political agitation against President Ouattara? I was scouring my mind for causes, pushing to the back of it the most evident: this was a terrorist attack. And then: KKKAAAKKK! a shot went off. It was so loud, the loudness hurt my ears. In unison, the dozen or so of us now standing inside ducked down and booked it to the back of the building. I didn’t hear the bullet whizz by or hear it slap a wall. I don’t know who fired the shot or from where, my instincts and that of my peers was that we were shot at. It sounded VERY close. We crouched down, ducking for cover and running to the backend of the building to the rear porch veranda and down the stairs leading out to behind the museum building. I don’t remember hearing any another gunfire being fired at us at that moment. We did continue to hear the single shot fires going off clack clack clack , in the distance.

We hung out behind the museum building for maybe 15 or 20 minutes: there was an unfinished building of some sort and another building, apparently abandoned, looked like an annex. There may have been other members of the delegation who were out in the front of the museum. Somebody remembered that one of our group, from a California college, had actually gone to the beachside restaurant to go rest in the hotel room she had reserved there. In the group, there were not only university officials like myself but also officials from the US government and from the US Embassy Abidjan who were in charge of the tour logistics, chaperoning us, etc. We were dressed business casual, some very casual, whereas the government and embassy officials (all women) were in business attire: heels, dress skirts but one or two in casual attire. As for us university folk, we’re all kind of geeky-looking anyway. The group as a whole was about 2/3 women and about 1/3 minorities (Hispanic, black, immigrant, etc.) for anyone who’s counting. When we were running to the back of the museum and down the backstairs, I thought to myself: my day has changed in a big way. I like traveling and I like adventure but I didn’t like what was happening. I wasn’t very happy with the idea of hanging out behind the museum, either. I wanted to run, run, run in the opposite direction.

After the Paris attacks, the French government published a brochure on what to do during a terrorist attack: hide behind thick walls, or just run in the opposite direction. But there, we were staying put in the back of the museum. I stayed there because I didn’t want to leave the group. Eventually, one of the embassy officials, a young lady who must be in her mid-twenties had called all of us into the abandoned annex building. There were two rooms, both empty with weak ceiling lights. The ambiance of the group was good: we were all showing concern for each other, making sure everyone was alright, some trying to make light of the situation, keep morale up. We were strangers who had just been together for only the past week. Aside from the couple of Ivorian staffers from the embassy, we were all Americans, acting the way Americans do in most situations: just be a bit smiley polite and keep to small talk. But we were all sort of dazed as to what was going on. Who wouldn’t be?

The group dynamics seemed to have set in: the embassy officials were in charge, attempting to make contact with the US embassy or the State Dept., or whomever, and get us out of there. Everybody else knew that our task was just to keep our shit together. Locals would come in to the room where we were hiding, in order to rest and to relax, but mainly to hide, too. The gunfire was still going on, in the distance. I don’t know when it stopped. Now, you have to understand, we had no idea what was going on. Nobody did. The locals who would come in and then leave the room were recounting contradictory stories: some said it was just one crazy guy on the beach, others said it was a group of criminals attacking and robbing the hotel. None of the locals said anything about terrorists, and I don’t think any thought to do so.

So we hunkered down there, all of us corralled in one of the rooms in this sort of basement of the annex building behind the national costume museum. We turned the lights off and waited in the dark, waiting until it passed over, or waiting until whomever it was on the other end of the phone line with the embassy official said it was safe to go outside. We kept telling everybody to keep their cell-phones turned off – no noise, no lights! We didn’t want to get discovered! Now, again, I was thinking: I would rather have run away, far from there, because there I am in a dark room, in this dark basement with one door as the exit hoping that the gunmen don’t find us. I didn’t feel terrified. A few months previous, I felt terror watching, helplessly, the news unfold during the Paris attacks. But here, I felt as if (or nourished the illusion) that I still had some control over the course of things, and this control depended on my two legs getting me the hell out of that room if the gunmen found us hiding there. Which, when you think of it, is a silly thought. There was only one door to get out, and if a gunman came and found us, I would necessarily have to run through him, which was actually my plan. Maybe I’d take him out, too. In any case, my plan was to book it out of there. The idea of just sitting there like a dead duck just waiting to get riddled with bullets lined up against the wall wasn’t acceptable to me.

For about an hour or an hour and a half, or maybe two hours (I don’t know how long we were there, time stood still), I was crouched down like in a starting block position for the 100meter dash waiting to spring out of there in case the gunmen found where we were. I must’ve been frozen in that position for at least an hour, my eyes transfixed on the doorway I could hardly see. I heard some sobs, some people were crying. The thought that my one-year old boy wouldn’t remember me quickly crossed my mind but I immediately put it out of my mind before turning my focus back again on the doorway and how I would run out of there if we were found out. So there was a moment, which must’ve lasted for the better part of an hour, when I leveled with myself saying that this is it, old boy, your life was in the balance and your chances were 50/50. It is a very…sobering feeling.

Whether in deed and in fact this was the case is beside the point: again, we had no idea what was going on outside. Every single creaking sound of footsteps on the floor of the room above us could’ve been a gunman, so we all thought. There was no sound in the room for moments on end, no exhaling of breath, whenever we heard somebody walking above. I don’t remember thinking of God or praying. I remember feeling concerned as to whether or not I was doing whatever it was I supposed to be doing (being quiet, making sure others were okay, etc.): my mind was focused on figuring out what my duty was, my acts, and on my body’s movements, not abstract concepts. As I said, speaking for myself, I guess I indulged in some fantasy-thinking in order to attenuate the thought that my life was at stake. I pushed aside the idea that these were Islamist terrorists and I told myself I would run like a bat out of hell if they (whoever they were) came and found us hiding out in that basement.

Eventually, we did leave our hiding hole. News came in through the embassy official’s cell phone that it was safe to leave the building, and we were to make it back to the bus. The bus driver, a nice Ivorian fellow, never left the bus. He didn’t leave us: a deed for which the whole group felt ever grateful. And I can assure you, he had every reason to run away since I imagine the bus was in the perimeter at risk of being hit by gunfire. If he had left, well, who else could drive a bus?

Plus, there was such commotion outside in the streets at that point, it was incredible. As I didn’t know what was going on, I began wondering whether this wasn’t an uprising or a coup d’état. The streets were full of people. The embassy and government officials leading the group were tense and it appeared urgent to get out of there as soon as possible because, even if the initial gunfire seemed over, who was to say there wouldn’t be more? After much confusion, the bus was eventually directed to go to the home of the mayor of Grand Bassam who we had met earlier that morning and whose long, drawn-out meeting ended up making us late for lunch. The assistant secretary was at the mayor’s home because there was to be a luncheon for him and Ivorian political grandees. The tents and catering were there on the back lawn of the mayor’s home but instead of the hometown grandees chowing down on some good fare, they let us, this haggard group of university and government/embassy officials, feast on it. It was a very fine lunch, French cuisine with good wine.

What a weird day this was. I felt so bad for this courteous mayor who welcomed us into his house. At that point, the event was on the news. I heard France 24 had begun reporting an attack, soon to be called a terrorist attack.  Of course it was. I could stop kidding myself.

The terrorist attack took place the last day of the delegation’s mission to Africa and pretty much everybody had a flight to catch later that day, except those who were planning to stay a day or two more at the beachside hotel/restaurant in Grand Bassam. Indeed, we asked, what happened to our colleague at the restaurant’s hotel? We were not to leave the mayor’s home until all the group was together. Security officers from the embassy I suppose, were sent to go find her and bring her back so that she could be with the rest of us. I found this singularly noteworthy. I have heard of the ethos of US military units not leaving fellow soldiers behind: that they’ll go fetch and save their buddies if they can. Here, we were a delegation organized by a US government department, one of us was lost and separated from the group and we wouldn’t move until that colleague was found and united with us (she was not hurt but she was very shaken).

The US takes care of its own. I cannot commend enough the embassy officials, the government officials and the under-secretary involved in this mission who were responsible for getting us to safety. They were very professional very considerate. The exfiltration, if that’s the term, was being directed from the State Department’s special crisis situation office (I think) in Washington. It was kind of odd to think that the White House knew about us, about our situation.

The delegation of university officials boarded the bus again after lunch and was taken to the US embassy. We were escorted by the embassy’s black SUVs, four in the front of the bus, four in the back, as we headed to the embassy. It was an awesome sight to behold the means that were deployed to keep us safe. Not awesome as in cool, I mean awesome as in likely to provoke awe and fear.

On the way back to Abidjan, the convoy drove on the other side of the road from Grand Bassam to the US embassy. Which is to say that all other car drivers heading in our direction had to make way for us. Far up ahead, I saw the first SUV of our convoy hit head-on a taxi car that hadn’t gotten out of the way fast enough. I saw the occupants, the taximan, a woman and a child get out: they appeared okay but it was a sorry sight to see. This blew one of the delegation member’s nerves: all this special treatment to get us to safety and we almost end up killing local people! Who else but us – a group of Americans – were receiving such treatment?!

This is not a boast. Rather I mean to underline something which is immediately obvious for everybody except Americans and that is that the US has the potential to deploy a lot of power, abroad, in other people’s countries, and this for the sole benefit of its own citizens. We were taken to US embassy. It felt good to be there: the place seems unassailable. I didn’t feel like I was in just an office building (which it is), but also that I was within the safety of US territory (which it is, too). The US embassy dispatched staff, local and American, to corral all the delegation’s members and make sure everybody got on their plane back home. I discovered how heavy those black SUV’s car doors are (they’re wicked heavy).

Always the last one to leave a party, I was the last one of the delegation to leave Abidjan as my flight was in the wee hours of the morning heading straight back up north from where I came. I must’ve waited in the lobby a few hours, I had been dozing off losing track of time. As I got up to go to the gate, I saw that the US embassy staffer, an Ivorian, who had accompanied me to the security clearance a few hours before was still there, discretely standing by and looking over me. I left Abidjan feeling lucky and thankful.

When I started this note I had all the divisions in the US, especially in academia, in mind. I don’t see the link anymore and besides it would be inappropriate to dwell upon them. I don’t get and I don’t really relate to what is transpiring on US college campuses, and in society as a whole. I am used to the American experience abroad where such differences, in foreigners’ eyes, are secondary compared to other things such as America the ideal dream, or America the martial superpower. All that I described above and that was done during this brief, critical, episode was done for Americans regardless of our beliefs, opinions and race. But these enormous means were rolled out and deployed only for us, and not for others, because we are American citizens. I don’t know how that fact sits with many Americans but that is what happened: I was there and that is what I saw.

 

The Abolition Of Man (No, Really)

My libertarian friend Conor Friedersdorf has stared into the abyss, and has been jolted by what stared back. He writes about it in a must-read essay with the deceptively anodyne title “The Limits of Diversity”.

Conor begins by laying out his own openness to diverse experience. Then he imagines, as an intellectual exercise, someone who is totally closed to experiencing different things. He says that his “bubble may be thickest” precisely here: in trying to see the world through the eyes of those who are highly closed to diversity.

(Nota bene: the standard narrative in our culture is to stigmatized those who are closed to diversity, but that is the normative human experience. Besides which, as we often talk about on this blog, progressives who take pride in their supposed openness to diversity can be some of the most closed-minded people you’ll ever meet. They just draw their lines in different places.)

Conor says that listening to a recent podcast, he came hard up against the borders of what he would consider acceptable diversity. He writes:

Its main subject, bio-artist Adam Zaretsky, is not one of these authoritarians. Rather, he is a member of my tribe, a “libertarian,” Stenner’s term for those who prize individualism, diversity, and difference. And he is the first person to evoke in me a gut desire for enforced sameness and suppressed diversity––a visceral reaction I cannot recall having before.

That’s pretty strong. But read on, and it’s very easy to see why:

At the edge of science, researchers are using a newfound ability to edit any gene to work toward wonders: sustainable biofuels, ridding the world of malaria, seeking cures for genetic diseases. Trans-genesis, the process of taking a gene from one organism, cutting it out, and pasting it into another, has advanced radically, with new precision that will revolutionize medicine. It could give rise to genetically enhanced soldiers or astronauts; it may allow whole nations to increase their IQs.

Its aesthetic ramifications are less discussed. Consider the embryos that Adam Zaretsky has tweaked in the course of his bio-art projects and the art classes he teaches. “To call a developing embryo that’s been altered a sculpture is meant to cause a kind of double-bind in people’s minds,” he said. “They’re like, ‘It’s not a sculpture, it’s a being, or growing to be a being.’ What I’m trying to get across is that the making of transgenic humans, or non-humans, is a somewhat invasive act, but also based on a particular aesthetic, at a particular time, in a particular state of mind.”

Never mind curing Alzheimer’s or understanding the universe.

“I’m not here to cure anything or make knowledge. I’m here to make enigma,” he said. “I’m trying to problematize the concept and de-science it so people can see it for what it is.”

Let that sink in. He is not bringing new forms of human life into existence for aesthetic reasons; he’s working on animal embryos. But if you read the transcript of the podcast you’ll see that he’s looking forward to working on humans. Excerpt:

Transgenesis is taking one gene from one organism, cutting it out and pasting it into another organism. Now, we are reaching a point where we’re getting better at the potential for making transgenic humans, genetically modified humans, humans that are GMOs.

First of all, let me just say this – transgenic human embryos are already being made. They’re not necessarily being grown full-term, but this is something that’s possible. It’s been possible to do this since the ’70s, but people have been saying “I don’t know… No one would actually do that! That would be psychotic” because the technique that was how to target the genes into the human genome without them falling anywhere or everywhere, so it lands willy-nilly in the genome and can cause all kinds of problems, like cancer or death. But there’s a new way to get genes into the human genome that isn’t as disruptive as before. CRISPR/Cas9 has made the news as a technique that’s more refined, it’s more targeted, exactly where your gene is gonna land, so we could just use it to knock in or knock out problematic genes or ad genes, and so it won’t harm the rest of the organism.

It’s a fairly easy to use technology, and it’s available in do-it-yourself CRISPR kits already for yeast, for worms, but not necessarily on human cells. It’s not perfected yet, but on the world scene there are different laws in different nations, and I have to say this is one of those standard Pandora things – if you can do it and it’s been 50 years, it’s about to be released that people ARE doing it because they HAVE been doing it.

Later, he says:

It’s been a goal of mine for more than ten years to make transgenic humans. I do have problems with the process, I do have problems with the results, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t do it if I could.

Just so you know what kind of sick monster Adam Zaretsky is, here he is describing himself and his background:

I think I wanted to be a banker, a pornographer and a communist. It’s hard to mix all those three, but I’m on my way. I’m already a pornographer and a communist, so I think I just have to go to business school.

Somewhere between science fiction and sado-masochism is an aesthetic based on prurient interest. It’s alright. It’s alright. Sexuality shouldn’t just be about flowers and a glass of wine and some smooth music and some loving sex. I actually love dropping cotton balls on someone who’s tied up – that’s fine, but there’s something raw and rancorous, and there’s something camp, and there’s something trans, and there’s something transvestism, and there’s something transgenic. They’re all sort of flowing together under the aegis of basically queerness.

Let’s just face it, okay? I’m a child of Rocky Horror, I’m a child of Soft Cell. I really like luring disco dollies to a life of vice.

You guys are just uncovering every little thing about me, this is so nice. It’s nice to study myself like a specimen!

“All sort of flowing together under the aegis of basically queerness.” Do you understand what’s being said here, reader? He reminisces about being in New York as a young man, and seeing the performance artist Karen Finley do her infamous routine where she shoved yams up her rear end. He remembers being enthralled by Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait shoving a whip handle up his butt. More Zaretsky:

And some people refer to shock art in a way to dismiss it, when actually art that shocks is achieving an aesthetic goal. The goal is to make you revulsed; the goal is to make you dismiss or repress the art, but also the goal is to crack through your resistance, your screen, and show you what’s underneath. It’s not always pretty, but this idea that you’re allowed to bullshit-detect rational culture and go ahead and be honest without it being like a situation comedy that ends in a moral, happy ending… I felt a little freer, to go ahead and do the work of the negative. It actually matters.

Desensitizing people to the perverted, the radically abnormal, the … evil. This is what he’s into. More:

To call a developing embryo that’s been altered a sculpture is meant to cause a kind of double bind in people’s minds, where they’re like “Oh, it’s not a sculpture, it’s a being” or “It’s growing to be a being.” What I’m trying to get across is that the making of transgenic humans or transgenic non-humans is a somewhat invasive act, but is also based on a particular aesthetic at a particular state of time in a particular state of mind. I’m trying to problematize the process, and sort of de-science it a little bit so that people can see it for what it is.

He believes in creating mutants for the sake of art. Just because he can. As an expression of the artist’s will. Here’s the world Adam Zaretsky foresees:

I think that it’s important to make versions of transgenic human anatomy that are not based on idealism. I wanna make sure that there’s plaid kids, all the other queer anatomy out there to compete with the other add-ons that parents are gonna be paying for. To get bio-queer transgenic humans is going to save a lot of difference on the planet. It’s gonna stop us from monoculturing ourselves and it’s gonna also offer a real and possibly unacceptable face of the democratization of the human genome.

The idea is that you take a gene, say for pig noses, or ostrich anuses, or aardvark tongue, and you paste that into a human sperm, a human egg, a human zygote. A baby starts to form. Developmentally, the baby is mostly human, but it has an aardvark tongue, a pig nose and an ostrich anus. That makes for bodily difference and surely metabolic differences etc, but it also makes for a version of ourselves that’s based on collage. It’s literally gene collage.

What’s weird about it is that once you get that started, if it stabilizes, if you can find partners, if you’re still fertile, if you’re still into it, you go ahead and reproduce and you’ll have children born with ostrich anuses and aardvark tongues and pig noses.

Children born with ostrich anuses. That’s what this man dreams of. A sane society would forbid his work and throw him in prison if he got anywhere near a lab. But this mad scientist-artist is on the faculty at MIT, and teaches at has taught or been affiliated with other prestigious universities.

Adam Zaretsky freaked Conor Friedersdorf out. Drawing on the insights of Jonathan Haidt and Karen Stenner, he says:

The point here is not to evaluate sanctity as a moral intuition, never mind to defend every application of it. The point, rather, is to remember that sanctity is a powerful driver of moral intuition for many, and that lots of Americans who aren’t particularly prone to disgust would, when confronted with antlered, aardvark-tongued babies, agree with Leon Kass.

“Repugnance,” he once wrote, “revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity.”

Insofar as the power of those intuitions is forgotten or dismissed by liberals, or libertarians, or difference loving peoples, or transgressive artists understandably alarmed by the prospect of “perfect” designer babies, the result is as likely to be a horrific backlash against diversity and neophilia as a future in which they face no limits.

I will tell you this. I would eagerly vote for a leader who promised to put Adam Zaretsky and his kind in prison, and close their labs. These are lines that must not be crossed.

But I also tell you this: our society will never do this. If it is okay to manipulate human genes to protect someone from disease, why not to provide them with enhanced abilities? And, having established that there is nothing sacred about human genes, who’s to put a limit on what the Adam Zaretskys of the world choose to do with them?

If you convince people that we must tolerate Adam Zaretsky’s children with ostrich anuses for the sake of curing childhood disease, or helping them to have their dream baby, they’ll accept it. That’s how we are. We Americans figure out what we want, then come up with the rationalization later. Zaretsky is right that if the technology exists, people somewhere are going to do whatever they want to with it. I can’t argue with that. But if this evil is going to come into the world, let it not be through my country. That’s my belief. I would accept severe restrictions on liberty to stop that evil.

Also, notice how Zaretsky accurately points out the role transgressive art plays in desensitizing us and making us willing to accept ever more transgressive acts as normative. It’s true not just of transgressive art, but transgression itself. Look at this image of the two covers National Geographic ran this month:

The one on the left, featuring a nine-year-old transgender boy-girl, went to subscribers. The other was for newsstands. Apparently the magazine’s editors realize that there are still plenty of people who find the idea of a prepubescent child presenting as the opposite sex disturbing. The editor of the magazine described this child as “brave,” which gives you an idea of the editorial slant of its presentation of transgenderism.

You can hardly get more establishmentarian than National Geographic. This is the future. Adam Zaretsky is right: “everything is sort of flowing together under the aegis of basic queerness” (and by “queerness” he means most broadly the overturning of all values and distinctions). Many of the most intelligent and powerful people in this culture are deliberately destroying the categories of man and woman, and calling it virtue.

When I call the Benedict Option “a strategy for Christians in a post-Christian nation” (the subtitle of my forthcoming book), I’m not talking about preserving our political views. I’m talking most fundamentally about preserving basic humanity and sanity through this coming darkness.

I shake my head at my fellow conservative Christians who think the danger has passed because Donald Trump is president. One of Trump’s big backers is the Silicon Valley transhumanist Peter Thiel. If you think there’s anything within Donald Trump that will stand against the technological exploitation of human life, you’re dreaming. The Democratic Party won’t oppose it because they see Science as sacrosanct. Plus, the philosophical principles they accept to justify abortion lays the basic groundwork.

As for the Republicans, if you think the sanctity of life will cause them to stand against transhumanism, ask yourself how far a proposal to outlaw IVF would get in Congress. It’s a procedure which has created and continues to create millions of human embryos that have been, or will have to be, destroyed (here are the numbers for the UK; ours are certainly worse, given our larger population). Isn’t it wrong to compare IVF to Zaretsky’s evil folly? No. Once the principle is established that human life can be deliberately created, knowing it will be destroyed in embryo, we’re only talking about details.

A Traitor To His Class

Charles Moore, writing in the Spectator, describes his conservatism:

It is true that I am thrilled by Brexit (assuming it actually happens), somewhat pleased by the defeats of Hillary Clinton and Matteo Renzi, and more interested than horrified by the victory of Donald Trump. On the other hand, I don’t actually like any of the great populist institutions of the age — Mr Trump, Vladimir Putin, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Beppe Grillo, the Daily Mail, Breitbart, or the ex-populist, now EU lackey, Alexis Tsipras. Instinctively, I prefer a more establishment style — courteous, gently humorous, inclined to admit error when challenged rather than to shout louder. I admire the Queen. I want archbishops, generals and senior judges to be intimidating (though kindly) people who find it hard to unbend. I am upset that the Speaker no longer wears a wig. There aren’t many traditions I wish to overthrow. I hate politicians tweeting, appearing in dance programmes, or abusing parliamentary privilege to denounce supposed child molesters.

So, if the free world is riven by a battle between the highly educated elites of which I am, I suppose, a part and a bunch of seditious oafs and show-offs, why do I nowadays find myself inclined to the latter? It may sound Marxist to say this, but I do think the elites have constructed a world order which serves their interests, not those of their subject populations.

Read the whole thing to see what he means. I find myself in violent agreement with him. I’m not sure that Sam Gamgee would have voted for Trump, but I’m confident that he would have been a Brexiteer.

Weapons-Grade Academic B.S.

Is this bruised veg a victim of queer-bashing? Ask an academic! (Seiko3p/Shutterstock)

One of the best Twitter accounts is New Real Peer Review (@realpeerreview), which combs through abstracts of academic papers looking for crackpottery. It is, unshockingly, a very active account. Take this post from today:

PhD dissertation: Asking 12 people to draw comic strips about being vegan. #IAmVegan https://t.co/cVnAIOArcM pic.twitter.com/jURVIwFcOY

— New Real Peer Review (@RealPeerReview) December 22, 2016

“Queering Veganism” — is it possible to come up with a more academic loony-left title than that? And this young scholar got his PhD for penning such codswallop! Let’s go in a little closer to look at a line that NRPR didn’t highlight:

Notice this line:

“Vegan identity is performed and achieved in various embodied ways. These processes intersect with other social structures such as gender and sexuality.”

Intersectionality! I think that’s a word that means whatever you want it to mean. Inasmuch as virtually nothing exists wholly independent of every other thing, the possibilities for academic bullshitting are endless.

Queer Vegan also writes of his project:

It sets a precedent for the potential use of comics in research…

Coming next: Playing one-potato-two-potato sets a precedent for the innovative research methods in statistics and chaos theory, at the intersection of agriculture. And queer theory. Don’t forget the queer theory. Always with the queer theory.

Sign up for New Real Peer Review. It offers a motherlode of Schadenfreude. Plus, you will get an early look at what historians of the future will be looking at in trying to understand why our civilization went kerflooey.

Finally, I wish to offer you the gift of Uncle Monty (the late, great Richard Griffiths) from Withnail and I, who in this short clip reveals himself to be the paterfamilias of queer vegans. You’re welcome:

‘1938 Approaching 1939’

A reader writes:

My Father-in-Law and I have been having something of an extended conversation on the ‘state of things’, for lack of a better term for a broad conversation.  Earlier in the week, I had forwarded him your ‘Jihadi vs. Christendom’ post, and it amazed me how much his comments dovetailed those of your French acquaintance.  He has given permission to pass along comments to you, which I am editing for anonymity.

My father-in-Law is Norwegian by birth, but now an American Citizen.  He made his career in international finance, often with his family following his career from one continent to another.  Much of his work has been in international development, working to help localities and their farms and industries become solvent.  Almost immediately upon his retirement, he took a special fellowship in an Ivy League university for retired (and bored?) with executive experience.  I add this in for the purposes of emphasizing that he’s an intelligent man whose view of things I respect.  What follows are comments from him  and some associates on either side of the Atlantic:

Good morning. I will get some additional views on this. But let me just say that when [Mother-inLaw] and I were in Oslo Last December (2015), we were quite surprised (stunned in fact) by the anger against the immigrants voiced by friends who one would characterize as very liberal and accepting across the whole spectrum of social and political… no so any more. The average Norwegian (and more so in EU-Land) is fed up, worry and scared.

The crux of the anti-immigrant sentiments that flow from this is directed towards the fact that many (not all) the Muslim immigrants are disrespectful of the culture and way of life of their new home and literally spit in the faces of the people who has welcome them. Norway is sending (returning) a lot of “refugees” back to their country of origin. You will see more of this. A Dutch friend of mine who is by all measures very liberal and accepting said that …”the way this is going in Holland, we will have civil war (this was 5-10 years ago…). What the Frenchman, living in Louisiana says, is echoed across much of Europe.

My own view is that the immigrants of the Muslim faith must make a better effort to integrate and be part of the cultural fabric of the countries they move to. Muslim (religious and political) leaders must also do better in keeping their own house in order. We don’t see any of these issues (in the US or Europe) with immigrants from Asia, India, Latin America or Africa (unless they are African muslims…). Seemingly, immigrants from Asia/India arrive here in the US and go to work to achieve the American Dream. I also find most the Latinos I know in the same way. They work hard and when they have problem (which are numerous in all of these communities) they don’t run around and blow up other people. 

I am conscious of the fact that we cannot (and should not) forget the historic perspectives and/or events that got us here. 1914 (some 100 years ago) marks the year when the French and the Brits divided up the Middle East. What we did (later) in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places has not helped and we now have a Middle East that is terribly destabilized with 60-70 million (??) refugees. The world is a mess and the Middle East is in the center of the problems overshadowing much else. The people of the Middle East (Syria) is suffering badly. What is less talked about these days is the Israeli-Palestine conflict and how that is going…No people has been persecuted and have suffered more than the Jews and they have rightly found a home in Israel. Why Israel’s neighbors cannot come to terms with (accept and embrace) the existence of the State of Israel is to me puzzling…, but admittedly few of us can grasp the thousand years animosity among these folks…Israel is the only functioning country in the Middle East that could be THE business locomotive for the entire region…hate destroys so much… and sadly I fear that more horror is on its way…and yes (he French guy) is correct that “something big is coming,” both in France and in Europe.

Roger, the reader, adds these comments. I’m not sure whether they come from his associates, or his father-in-law’s:

From an Associate:

“I think you are.right something big is.coming. The real challenge to assimilation is the social state. Previously large scale immigration was dependent on finding work or support from close family. In fact for.years US required a pledge of financial support from family member to allow you to immigrate. We have no historic comparison to draw on. Hence for europe, civil war is a possibility.”

And from another Associate:

“This is true by in large.  You don’t see many Haitian refugees blowing themselves up in a crowded marketplace.  And, Haiti; you cannot get much worse than that, terrible place!

“Well, the French have some experience with unwanted refugees; the Paris police in 1942 sent quite a few foreign Jews off to the death camps; they themselves had a nasty concentration camp in Drancy.

“All in all, this looks more and more like 1938 approaching 1939; events are moving faster now thanks to the internet.  We all know how well that worked out…I am not optimistic at all at the shape of things to come.  People say history does not repeat itself.  Wrong!  It is the same endless cycle over and over again….”

Roger concludes:

I cannot help but think back to the opening of my copy of Oswald Spengler’s ‘The Decline of the West’ where he said something to the tune of “to understand Rome is to understand all of history”.  That is, in a very cliff’s notes sense, civilizations are analogous to organisms and have a ‘life span’, and we can look at Rome as an archetype.  As it happens, that lifespan is about 1000 years.  (Western Civilization crystalized about 1000AD…I’ll leave the math to you.)  Anyways, I think the center-right/left establishment is in for a shock in the Western World, as our populations opt to try leadership further from the ideological center (in both directions).

Seems to me that one terrible, tragic fact is that the European leadership — political, business, academic, ecclesial (such as it is), and media — cannot abandon the same policies that are pushing their countries to the brink of disaster because to do so would be to surrender the post-Christian, Enlightenment vision that gives their lives meaning.

Blindly Staggering To The Precipice

Well, it certainly sounds like the police in Bristol, England, have taken the right lesson from the terrorist truck attack on the Christmas market in Berlin:

Police in Bristol have stepped up patrols in the city centre due to concerns about Islamophobia in the wake of the Berlin terror attack.

The Christmas markets in the German city were the target of a terrorist attack on Monday where a lorry was driven into crowds of people, killing 12 and injuring another 48.

Since then mounted police officers, bobbies on the beat and PCSOs have been spotted around the Bristol Christmas market in Broadmead.

If you read the story, you’ll see that the lede wasn’t simply a matter of media spin, but what the police spokesman said. Do the police actually believe this lie, or do they feel that they have to say it? Either way, it’s pathetic.

Meanwhile, in Germany:

The prime suspect for the Berlin massacre was under covert surveillance for months as a possible terrorist threat until police let him slip through their grasp earlier this month.

Anis Amri, 24, a Tunisian asylum seeker who arrived in Germany last year, was investigated for “preparing a serious crime endangering national safety”, involving funding the purchase of automatic weapons for use in a terrorist attack.

Amri had been arrested earlier this year and was known to be a supporter of the terrorist group thought to be behind the Sousse terrorist attack in Tunisia, as well as being a suspected disciple of a notorious hate preacher.

He had multiple identity documents with six different aliases under three nationalities, and a criminal record in Italy and Tunisia. He spent four years in an Italian prison before travelling to Germany after an expulsion order expired.

The German authorities, who were on Wednesday facing serious questions about how Amri was still at large, tried to deport him in June, but because he had no valid papers proving his nationality he was allowed to stay.

It’s insane that such a person was allowed to run free in Germany, or even be in Germany. But think about it: how are the police supposed to monitor every potential Islamic terrorist in Germany, a country that took in a net total of 1.14 million immigrants — mostly refugees — in 2015 alone?

I can’t recall where I first read the story, but sometime in the past year, I saw a lengthy magazine piece going into detail about the security problem facing French authorities. There are far too many radicalized Muslims in the country for the police to monitor. There simply aren’t enough cops, and never will be enough cops, not in a free country.

Angela Merkel is having a very bad week. From the NYT:

That all reflected the danger she feels from the right-wing Alternative for Germany, which was established in 2013 as an anti-euro party but which swiftly pivoted in 2015 to an anti-migrant platform that has now propelled it into 10 of Germany’s 16 state legislatures.

Alternative for Germany has steadily eaten into the market share of Ms. Merkel’s mainstream, conservative Christian Democratic Union. This week, Alternative for Germany’s leaders wasted no time in blaming Ms. Merkel and her policies for the Berlin attack.

More ominously for the chancellor, Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Bavarian sister party to her Christian Democrats, demanded a complete overhaul of immigration and security policy.

German establishment figures are doing what European establishment figures always do in these situations: blaming the right for, you know, noticing that there is a massive problem with violent Muslims living in Europe. Remember the regional government leader who, back in January, said that the right-wing people griping on social media about the Muslim men who assaulted women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve were just as bad as the rapists? Remember the left-wing pro-immigrant activist who was gang-raped on a playground by refugees, then later felt guilty for ratting them out to the police? Yeah, these loony leftists are still at it. On NPR this week, German newspaper journalist Stefan Kornelius told host Robert Siegel that the problem is really with the right wing. From the transcript:

SIEGEL: What do you make of Angela Merkel coming out so quickly well before ISIS claimed responsibility, say, (unintelligible) to the issue of refugees?

KORNELIUS: Well, Angela Merkel was trying to preempt the debate, which she certainly did. But she will be framed now by this shadow which basically blames her for inviting those people to Germany and, by inviting them, bringing in danger and threats to the German public. Even though this argument is extremely short-cut and wrong if you ask me, it sticks. And it frames the campaign which actually starts next year, the campaign for federal elections. And so Angela Merkel is out to fight for her reelection.

SIEGEL: What have been some other reactions to this attack in Berlin from German politicians?

KORNELIUS: Quite honestly, most reactions were calm and considerate. There was no blaming going on apart from two camps, and those are the right-wing populist camps, first of all – the newly founded and now very strong AfD party, which is trying to make its way into the federal parliament next year.

No blaming going on except those horrible people from the AfD. Seems that “blaming” is a synonym for “holding the government responsible for its policies that contribute to these mass murders.”

This cannot go on forever. Ed West foresees big trouble ahead from the pigheaded refusal of European establishment leaders to see what is right in front of their noses:

German social media is apparently filled with anger, not with Islamic extremists or Angela Merkel but with Alternative für Deutschland and its supporters. I’m not sure what the psychological condition is called; I suppose it’s a form of Stockholm Syndrome.

West points out that the huge wave of Islamic immigrants washing through Merkel’s open doors into Germany dramatically lack the skills to make them fit for work there. Unsurprisingly, very few have found jobs. What’s more:

On top of this, we need to look at what technology is coming our way: in the next ten years, for example, automated cars are going to be putting hundreds of thousands of men out of work just in Britain. All the Uber drivers I’ve spoken to have come from the Muslim world; all have been hardworking, courteous and obviously doing their best by their family; unlike me, they’ve made the effort to move country and have to put up with boring drunks like myself talking to them. But the low-skilled jobs they are currently doing are not going to exist for that long, and many of their sons will grow up with workless fathers, feeling confused about their identity in a rootless world, at far higher risk of mental illness, struggling to find work themselves, and feeling neither fully part of this country nor that of their father’s. In these circumstances an internationalist ideology rooted in a sense of brotherhood and rage at the rich, decadent, western world is going to appear hugely attractive.

It will sooner or later occur to Europeans that liberal democracy is not a suicide pact. It may be too late already, but I doubt very much that most Europeans will give up without a fight. Writing in The Guardian, Pankaj Mishra says that 2016 revealed some stark realities about the world we live in. The essay is long and left-wing, but worth reading. Excerpt:

Our political and intellectual elites midwifed the new “irrationalism” through a studied indifference to the emotional dislocation and economic suffering induced by modern capitalism. Not surprisingly, they are now unable to explain its rise. Indeed, their universal assumption, hardened since 1989, that there are no alternatives to western-style democracy and capitalism – the famous “end of history” – is precisely what has made us incapable of grasping the political phenomena shaking the world today.

It is clear now that the exaltation of individual will as something free of social and historical pressures, and as flexible as markets, concealed a breathtaking innocence about structural inequality and the psychic damage it causes. The contemporary obsession with individual choice and human agency disregarded even the basic discoveries of late-19th-century sociology: that in any mass society, life chances are unevenly distributed, there are permanent winners and losers, a minority dominates the majority, and the elites are prone to manipulate and deceive.

Even the terrorist attacks of 9/11 left undisturbed the vision in which a global economy built around free markets, competition and rational individual choices would alleviate ethnic and religious differences and usher in worldwide prosperity and peace. In this utopia, any irrational obstacles to the spread of liberal modernity – such as Islamic fundamentalism – would be eventually eradicated. Fantasies of a classless and post-racial society of empowered rational-choice actors bloomed as late as 2008, the year of the most devastating economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Today, however, the basic assumptions of cold war liberalism lie in ruins – after decades of intellectual exertion to construct flimsy oppositions between the rational west and the irrational east. The political big bang of our time does not merely threaten the vanity projects of an intellectual elite, but the health of democracy itself – the defining project of the modern world. Since the late 18th century, tradition and religion have been steadily discarded, in the hope that rational, self-interested individuals can form a liberal political community that defines its shared laws, ensuring dignity and equal rights for each citizen, irrespective of ethnicity, race, religion and gender. This basic premise of secular modernity, which earlier only seemed menaced by religious fundamentalists, is now endangered by elected demagogues in its very heartlands, Europe and the US.

That last sentence is somewhat dishonest, given that Mishra spends most of the essay arguing that liberal democratic elites in thrall to Enlightenment models of the human person have done much to cause this crisis by their own misplaced faith. Donald Trump and his European counterparts are not the cause of the problem, but the result of the persistent failures of elites of both the left-wing and the right-wing parties.

Also in the Guardian, Wolfgang Streeck, a top left-wing German economist, says that we are headed for a collapse of capitalism and a new “dark age.” Yeah, I know, left-wing economists are not exactly shy about predicting the end of capitalism. But read the article. Streeck is not an outsider, but has worked for years at the summit of the German establishment. Excerpt:

“You look out here,” He gestures out of the windows of the National Gallery, at the domes and columns of Trafalgar Square, “And it’s a second Rome. You walk through the streets at night and you say, ‘My God, yes: this is what an empire looks like’.” This is the land of what Streeck calls the Marktsvolk – literally, the people of the market, the club-class financiers and executives, the asset-owning winners of globalisation.

But this space – geographic, economic, political – is off-limits to the Staatsvolk: the ones who fly yearly on holiday rather than weekly on business, the downsized, the indebted losers of neoliberalism. “These people are being driven out of London. In French cities it’s the same thing. This both reinforces them as a political power structure, and puts them completely on the defensive. But one thing they do know is that conventional politics has totally written them off.” Social democrats such as the outgoing Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi are guilty, too. “They’re on the side of the winners.”

International flows of people, money and goods: Streeck accepts the need for all these – “but in some sort of directed, governable way. It has to be, otherwise societies dissolve”.

Those views on immigration landed him in another fight this summer, when he wrote an essay attacking Angela Merkel for her open-door policy towards refugees from Syria and elsewhere. It was a “ploy”, he said, to import tens of thousands of cheap workers and thus allow German employers to bring down wages. Colleagues accused him of spinning a “neoliberal conspiracy” theory and of giving cover to Germany’s far right. Streeck’s defence is simple: “It is impossible to protect wages against an unlimited labour supply. Does saying that make me some proto-fascist?”

A reader passes along an Atlantic piece by sociologist Victor Tan Chen observing “the spiritual crisis of the modern economy.” Excerpts:

Where do people turn when left to the dictates of an economic system like this? One white worker in Madison Heights, Michigan, described himself as a conservative, but added that he didn’t care about party labels when choosing whom to vote for. “I want to see change. … I could care less if you’re a Republican or whatever,” he told me when I talked to him not long before the 2010 midterm election swept Tea Party candidates into office across the country. In any case, he no longer had the luxury of worrying much about politics. When I met him, he had lost his $11-an-hour job at a solar-panel manufacturer. His wife had left him soon afterward. She was working a low-wage job of her own, and, as he explained, “She’s tired of struggling, and she can do better by herself.” The man told me he was ashamed about having to rely on food stamps. “I’m dependent on the government right now. … That’s degrading, but I gotta eat.” As for unions, he’d become disillusioned with them years ago after a strike at the car-parts plant where he’d been working cost him and his coworkers their jobs.

One of the few things he could really depend on was his church. He volunteered on their Sunday-school bus, leading the kids in singing songs. “It helps to be around young people,” he said. For many of the jobless workers I interviewed, religion and tradition provided a sense of community and a feeling that their lives had purpose. No wonder, then, that a sizable proportion of white working-class America is skeptical of the faithless, lonely, and uncertain world that the cultural left represents to them. However exaggerated by stereotypes, the urbane, urban values of the well-educated professional class, with its postmodern cultural relativism and its rejection of old dogmas, are not attractive alternatives to what the working class has long relied on as a source of solace.

What? Do you mean that the working class is not satisfied that the Left is preoccupied with genderqueering their kids? How is that possible? Golly.

Sarcasm off. Read the whole essay to see how Victor Tan Chen, who describes himself as “an agnostic,” argues that America is in desperate need of the religious concept of grace.

I think he’s correct, but I would also bet that the professor has greater optimism that we can reknit the social fabric than I do. My sense is that it is going to get much worse before it gets better, and that those who stand a better chance of surviving the dark age upon us without losing our children and our humanity are going to be those who respond by committing themselves to solidarity through strong forms of religious community that produce strong families. This is what I mean by the Benedict Option. It’s not religious escapism; it’s a general strategy for surviving and even thriving in chaotic and tumultuous times.

Secular liberal democracy did not anticipate the importation into Europe of a large unassimilable religious population who are hostile to European cultural traditions. Modernity was supposed to dissolve them, make good liberal individualists and consumers out of them. Liberal democracy also thought that the market — the freer the better — would sort everything out. They did not want to see men as they actually are, and man as he actually is. They still don’t. Sooner or later, though, they’re not going to have a choice.

More On The Fed-Up Secular Liberal

Man, has there ever been a lot of reaction to the letter from the northern California woman fed up with the secular liberalism she was raised in and has held to all her life, and who is now leaving it behind for some form of small-o orthodox Christianity. A surprising number of the comments under the article are very thoughtful, intimate stories from Christians who followed the same path that the California reader is now embarking on. Here is one:

As recently as two years ago I was a very outspoken agnostic liberal. I hope I wasn’t as obnoxious as the SJWs are today but maybe I was, in retrospect. I did a lot of sneering.

I’d become a liberal as a young man in the city (Pittsburgh), living on my own making a pittance as a newspaper reporter and working nights as a waiter. Some months I had trouble paying the electric bill, even though I’d go 3 or 4 weeks straight without a day off. And I distinctly remember covering one of those “yellow ribbon” rallies for the first Gulf War, where one speaker got up on stage and basically said that if you don’t support the war, you’re hurting the troops. In effect, they were dying for your freedom, so you should refrain from exercising too much freedom of speech.

And there really was a sneering coming from the ascendent religious right at the time. A holier-than-thou attitude, that they were somehow superior citizens, superior Americans, as a result of their faith, which obviously made them more moral than the rest of us. I detested that attitude.

Call these signposts ore mile markers on my way to liberalism.

But in more recent years, there have been many signposts on my way back to conservatism, signposts that I didn’t really recognize as such at first, though I do now.

The first came when my wife was pregnant with our youngest son, in 2009. At six months, a routine ultrasound turned up something that looked like a significant deformity; it appeared as if his spinal cord was split around a piece of bone in his back, then “tethered” to another piece of bone. On the basis of this we went for more testing a major metro children’s hospital; the worst-case scenario was that he might not walk and could have neurological damage.

One of the doctors we saw, an orthopedist, I think, said something along the lines of – “Well, you’ll be having an abortion then.” Not so much a question, but a statement; virtually all middle-class parents in our situation get an abortion.

I was offended, even angry. I’d always been pro-choice, but all I could think at that moment was, this isn’t some clump of cells, this isn’t some mere deformity – this is my son. And I wondered who could or would abort in that situation.

For as it turned out, the initial scans were wrong. More intensive testing revealed our son simply had a curvature of the spine, scoliosis, and at age 6 he’s happy and fine.

The whole situation rocked my view on abortion.

Then gay marriage. I argued strenuously in favor of it, saying – and believing – that if families are the essential building block of society, why would we want to prohibit people who love one another from making a legal commitment to one another? But shortly after the court rules, I saw this article in the Daily Beast which in effect admitted that gay marriage had been a Trojan horse all along:

According to a 2013 study, about half of gay marriages surveyed (admittedly, the study was conducted in San Francisco) were not strictly monogamous.

This fact is well-known in the gay community—indeed, we assume it’s more like three-quarters. But it’s been fascinating to see how my straight friends react to it. Some feel they’ve been duped: They were fighting for marriage equality, not marriage redefinition. Others feel downright envious, as if gays are getting a better deal, one that wouldn’t work for straight couples. …

What would happen if gay non-monogamy—and I’ll include writer Dan Savage’s “monogamish” model, which involves extramarital sex once a year or so—actually starts to spread to straight people? Would open marriages, ’70s swinger parties, and perhaps even another era’s “arrangements” and “understandings” become more prevalent? Is non-monogamy one of the things same-sex marriage can teach straight ones, along with egalitarian chores and matching towel sets?

And what about those post-racial and post-gender millennials? What happens when a queer-identified, mostly-heterosexual woman with plenty of LGBT friends gets married? Do we really think that because she is “from Venus,” she will be interested in a heteronormative, sex-negative, patriarchal system of partnership?

The title of the piece was “Were conservative Christians right about gay marriage all along?” And the writer’s answer is clearly “yes” – in your face, all you people who thought the issue was about equality.

I did indeed feel duped – and angry. It was another signpost on the road to conservatism.

Then social justice warriors became a thing. I saw my liberal Facebook friends trying to outdo one another with their virtue signaling. Long-time white friends posting about how all white people need to check their privilege and examine their souls, because all of us were guilty of the sin of racism on some level, and we must atone for it.

Give me a break. This wasn’t just a signpost, it was the exit sign.

But, it occurred to me they were preaching – this is the new fundamentalism; they sneer, they flaunt a smarmy self-proclaimed sense of moral superiority just as the fundamentalists of the Bush era did. I detested it then – and I detest it now.

And it occurred to me at some point that as a 23-year married father of three, [Note: I’m thinking that “23” must have been a mistyped number — RD] I have far, far more in common with religious conservatives than I realized. It benefits my kids to live in neighborhoods amongst people who value stable family relationships as we do, who teach their kids prudence and self-control and the value of deferred gratification. It benefits my kids to believe in something greater than themselves and their own pleasure.

The one place I haven’t gotten to is belief itself. I can’t shake my agnosticism. But I have come to realize how bad an idea it is for my agnosticism to be an organizing force in society, because frankly it isn’t that. The ethos of “do whatever you like” means no community consensus. Radical individuality destroys any sense of shared purpose.

Liberalism as it’s currently practiced yields only divisiveness and moral preening. And like your writer, I want something better for my kids – and for myself.

There are more like this. I chose this one because I put myself in the place of that man, looking at my six year old son, realizing that this boy wouldn’t exist if he lived by the ethic of prominent liberals like Lena “I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had” Dunham.

I received this follow-up e-mail from the California woman, who writes:

I really appreciate all the thoughtful comments and prayers(!).  Wow.  Thank you all for making me feel much less alone.

To briefly address two points that have come up in the comments:

Yes, it’s true – days after the election, I was on Art.com looking for some tasteful “flag art” for the living room. The idea was to surround it with photos of  family, some of whom immigrated to the U.S., as if to say: “We are proud and grateful to be Americans! Our multi-ethnic family story is an American story.”  This may seem a bit much, but after January 20 a lot of folks I know will be officially “embarrassed to be American.”  (I’ve seen this movie before, which played from 2000-2008.) So yeah, we may be getting a flag.

Getting off Facebook –   Great idea, as election-year Facebook has caused me a lot of distress.  I have culled my friend list and aggressively unfollowed people in an effort to spare myself.  Still, it’s a morbidly fascinating window into what the people around me really think.  Friendly, pleasant people say things on FB that make you realize they’re actually not that nice, but part of a self-righteous virtual mob who would despise you if they knew you better. So in a strange way, Facebook has hastened my setting out on a new and better path.

I was planning to write her privately today, but fate — in the form of having to spend all afternoon dealing with the insurance company and the body shop — intervened. One thing I intended to say is to caution her not to replace one set of closed-minded, self-righteous people with another. Not all secular liberals are like the nasty people she’s running away from, and not all Christian conservatives are kind and generous. I think it’s very hard for many liberals to imagine that more than a few of the people who share their views are as awful as the California woman says she experiences. Believe me, they are. For example, over the years, in e-mails and comments from conservative professors on college campuses, I’ve heard the worst.

On the other hand, in places where conservatives — including Christian conservatives — gather in large numbers, you can find the same kind of self-righteous and intolerance. Not everywhere! Just as not all college campuses are hives of nasty liberals, neither are all conservative churches similarly awful. This ought to be obvious, but it still needs saying. You have to be careful and discerning. Your new community is bound to disappoint you at some point. The wisest way to approach them is the same way J.R.R. Tolkien told his son to think of women: not as “guiding stars” but as “companions in shipwreck.”

Unsurprisingly, the reader’s letter prompted some defensive responses by liberal readers who feel unfairly disparaged. Rather than get sidetracked on a tit-for-tat over who’s more repulsive, strident liberals or strident conservatives, it’s more interesting to consider this philosophical point in the California reader’s letter.

This may be obvious to you, but secular liberalism does seem empty in some way, despite all the things my educated, middle-class tribe has to be grateful for. If that’s what’s been handed down to me, I want more, especially for my precious kids. I’m trying.

I’m interested in that “in some way.” What do you think that “way” is? It’s the absence of a strong sense of transcendent meaning, of purpose, and of stable order outside of the self’s desires. At some point, you may ask yourself, “What’s this all for, anyway?” The answer of secular liberalism is that it’s not “for” anything, other than what you want it to be for. It’s for expanding personal autonomy. Is that really enough, though? What is all that freedom for? Does it have to be for anything?

Yes. There is something about human nature that craves meaning and transcendence. Augustine said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Dante, in the Inferno, introduces us to a cast of characters who all made gods of their passions. Kierkegaard considered the “aesthetic” mode of life — in which the Self dedicates itself only to fulfilling desire — to be shallow and unsatisfying. And it is.

Kierkegaard also taught that the “ethical” mode of life — following the rules and being a conformist — to be superior to the purely aesthetic, because it at least put duty to others and to some moral code outside of oneself above a life lived by ungoverned passions. But this too was unsatisfying. There is something inside of us that can’t find satisfaction in merely following the rules, however reasonable and socially beneficial those rules may be.

The California reader looks at her tribe and sees them living in both the aesthetic and ethical modes (because few of us are purely aesthetic or purely ethical), and she feels despair — defined by Kierkegaard as the self experiencing the tension between the finite and the infinite. In more ordinary language, she’s thinking, “Is this all there is? To be like these people, conforming to their standards, finding a purpose for life in acquiring goods, experiences, and status, and in hating the ‘right’ people? Is that the good life?”

No, it’s not the good life. It’s not even a good life. Kierkegaard is right, Dante is right, and Augustine is right: our hearts are restless until the rest in God.

But here’s the thing: you can be a professing conservative Christian and be just as lost as the secular liberals that sent that reader running away. Ask Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore, who recently explained what caused his own crisis of faith as a young man:

The cultural Christianity around me seemed increasingly artificial and cynical and even violent. I saw some Christians who preached against profanity use jarring racial epithets. I saw a cultural Christianity that preached hellfire and brimstone about sexual immorality and cultural decadence. And yet, in the church where the major tither was having an affair everyone in the community knew about, there he was, in our neighbor congregation’s “special music” time, singing “If It Wasn’t for That Lighthouse, Where Would This Ship Be?” I saw a cultural Christianity with preachers who often gained audiences, locally in church meetings or globally on television, by saying crazy and buffoonish things, simply to stir up the base and to gain attention from the world, whether that was claiming to know why God sent hurricanes and terrorist attacks or claiming that American founders, one of whom possibly impregnated his own human slaves and literally cut the New Testament apart, were orthodox, Evangelical Christians who, like us, stood up for traditional family values.

I saw a cultural Christianity cut off from the deep theology of the Bible and enamored with books and audio and sermon series tying current events to Bible prophecy—supermarket scanners as the mark of the Beast, Gog and Magog as the Soviet Union or, later, Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda or the Islamic State as direct fulfillments of Bible prophecy. When these prophecies were not fulfilled, these teachers never retreated in shame. They waited to claim a new word from God and sold more products, whether books or emergency preparation kits for the Y2K global shutdown and the resulting dark age the Bible clearly told us would happen.

And then there were the voter guides. A religious right activist group from Washington placed them in our church’s vestibule, outlining the Christian position on issues. Even as a teenager, I could recognize that the issues just happened to be the same as the talking points of the Republican National Committee. With many of these issues, there did seem to be a clear Christian position—on the abortion of unborn children, for instance, and on the need to stabilize families. But why was there a “Christian” position on congressional term limits, a balanced budget amendment, and the line item veto? Why was there no word on racial justice and unity for those of us in the historical shadow of Jim Crow?

I was left with the increasingly cynical feeling—an existential threat to my entire sense of myself and the world—that Christianity was just a means to an end. My faith was being used as a way to shore up Southern honor culture, mobilize voters for political allies, and market products to a gullible audience. I was ready to escape—and I did. But I didn’t flee the way so many have, through the back door of the Church into secularism. I found a wardrobe in a spare room that delivered me from the Bible Belt back to where I started, to the Lion of the tribe of Judah.

An existential threat to my entire sense of myself and the world … that Christianity was just a means to an end. This, from a young man immersed in a conservative Christian world. Mind you, Moore has elsewhere written about the deep love and gratitude he has for the gifts his congregation gave him as a child. The point is that a truly Christian life is not about baptizing conformity with worldly customs (e.g, being Southern white middle class Christians at prayer, or north Californian white middle class Christians at prayer), but entering on a pilgrimage towards unity with God, and experiencing Him in transformative ways in our daily lives. We might be blessed by a numinous encounter with God, but the ordinary way for people to encounter Him is through created things — mostly through people, each of whom bears His image, however disfigured.

This post is becoming more theological than I intended, so I’ll stop here. What I want to say is that we have to be careful not to make false idols of causes, of the church, of people, or of anything else. Only God is God; all creation only reflects Him (in some places more than others) and points back to Him. My hope and prayer for the California reader would be that she be grateful for her new church community, certainly, but that she realize that they are all fellow companions in shipwreck, pilgrims on the way — and only that, no more or no less.

 

Why Russell Moore Matters

You may have seen by now the Wall Street Journal story talking about how in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, a number of pastors and others in the Southern Baptist Convention are coming out hard against Russell Moore, the leader of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, which is the public policy arm of the 16 million-member church. They’re angry that he took such a strong public stance against Trump during the campaign. Here’s a short passage from the piece that stands out:

Yet some pastors fear Mr. Moore’s criticisms of President-elect Trump mean he can’t be an effective advocate within the Trump White House, thereby costing Baptists a chance to capitalize on a victory for the religious right.

“He’s going to have no access, basically, to President Trump,” said Mr. Graham, the Texas pastor.

That comment inadvertently highlights for me the real value of Russell Moore to Christian witness in public life. I say that even though I don’t agree with all the positions he takes. Let me explain.

I’m a religious conservative who concluded some years back that our tribe had become way too involved with politics. I don’t worry at all about the church corrupting the state. I worry about the pursuit of state power corrupting the church. We got way too cozy with the Republican Party. In 2006, David Kuo, an Evangelical who had worked in the Bush White House on faith-based initiatives, blew the whistle on how emissaries from the Religious Right were seen within the White House. Excerpts from what he told 60 Minutes about his then-new book:

In his book, Kuo wrote that White House staffers would roll their eyes at evangelicals, calling them “nuts” and “goofy.”

Asked if that was really the attitude, Kuo tells Stahl, “Oh, absolutely. You name the important Christian leader and I have heard them mocked by serious people in serious places.”

Specifically, Kuo says people in the White House political affairs office referred to Pat Robertson as “insane,” Jerry Falwell as “ridiculous,” and that James Dobson “had to be controlled.” And President Bush, he writes, talked about his compassion agenda, but never really fought for it.

“The President of the United States promised he would be the leading lobbying on behalf of the poor. What better lobbyist could anybody get?” Kuo wonders.

What happened?

“The lobbyist didn’t follow through,” he claims.

“What about 9/11?” Stahl asks. “All the priorities got turned about.”

“I was there before 9/11. I know what happened before 9/11 … The trend before 9/11 was…president makes a big announcement and nothing happens,” Kuo replies.

Kuo speaks as an insider. Even before he became the number two guy in the White House faith-based office, he had a long resume in the world of Christian conservatives.

Kuo says he took candidate Bush at his word during the 2000 campaign.

At the time, Bush proposed for the first time that he would spend $8 billion dollars on programs for the poor.

“I think it’s one of the most important political speeches given in the last generation. I really do,” says Kuo. “It laid out a whole new philosophy for Republicans.”

After the election, to much fanfare, President Bush created the office of faith-based initiatives to increase funds to religious charities.

But Kuo says there were problems right off the bat. For one, he says the office dropped very quickly down the list of priorities.

Asked how much money finally went to them, Kuo says laughing, “Oh, in the first two years, first two years I think $60 million.”

“When you hold it up to a promise of $8 billion, I don’t know how good I am at math, but I know that’s less than one percent of a promise,” says Kuo.

Part of the problem, he says, was indifference from “the base,” the religious right. He took 60 Minutes to a convention of evangelical groups – his old stomping ground – and walked around the display booths, looking for any reference to the poor.

“You’ve got homosexuality in your kid’s school, and you’ve got human cloning, and partial birth abortion and divorce and stem cell,” Kuo remarked. “Not a mention of the poor.”

“This message that has been sent out to Christians for a long time now: that Jesus came primarily for a political agenda, and recently primarily a right-wing political agenda – as if this culture war is a war for God. And it’s not a war for God, it’s a war for politics. And that’s a huge difference,” says Kuo.

David Kuo died from cancer a few years back, but I’ve thought about him time to time this year, wondering of what he would have made of leading Evangelical pastors and other figures rushing to embrace Trump. On David’s telling, even in a White House led by a believing Evangelical, George W. Bush, conservative Evangelicals weren’t taken seriously. The progressive Evangelical academic David Gushee writes this week that Christian leaders who think having access to the White House means they will be taken seriously in policy decisions are fooling themselves. He should know: he was one of the religious leaders brought in to the circles around President Obama, but says now that the value of this exercise was not to their causes, but to the cause of keeping the Religious Left fired up for Obama. Gushee now contends that religious leaders who fall for the allure of access to political power are “useful idiots” for politicians.

Russell Moore is many things, but he is not a useful idiot for the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party. I don’t agree with him on everything (e.g., I think I’m more of an immigration restrictionist than he is, but I completely support his advocacy for humane treatment of immigrants, illegal and otherwise), but he has undoubtedly become the most prominent and credible spokesman for small-o orthodox Christianity in the public square than any other church leader, including Catholics and other non-Protestants. Why? Because he’s nobody’s man but Christ’s — and what a rare thing that is among senior Christian leaders who engage in politics and public policy.

I’ve talked with a few secular liberals over the past couple of years — some who have met Moore, others who haven’t — who have told me that Russell Moore is the first conservative Christian pastor they’ve felt like would listen to them. In the past, they wrote off all of us as stooges for the GOP. The thing is, Moore does not water down his witness; on the hot-button issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, he unapologetically preaches and teaches the traditional Gospel. But when he speaks, even if you disagree with him, you know that you’re talking to a real person, not an ordained advocate for a political agenda.

This became clear during the 2016 election, when he began speaking out against Donald Trump. Here’s something Moore told fellow Baptists back in June. He was talking like this all year, back when Trump was a seeming long shot, till the very day of his election:

Yes, I will be writing in a candidate this year and the reason for that is simple. The life issue can not flourish in a culture of misogyny and sexual degradation. The life issue can not flourish when you have people calling for the torture and murder of innocent non-combatants. The life issue can not flourish when you have people who have given up on the idea that character matters. If you lose an election you can live to fight another day and move on, but if you lose an election while giving up your very soul then you have really lost it all, and so I think the stakes are really high.

And I think the issue, particularly, when you have people who have said, and we have said, and I have said for twenty years the life issue matters, and the life issue is important… When you have someone who is standing up race baiting, racist speech, using immigrants and others in our communities in the most horrific ways and we say ‘that doesn’t matter’ and we are part of the global body of Christ simply for the sake of American politics, and we expect that we are going to be able to reach the nations for Christ? I don’t think so, and so I think we need to let our yes be yes and our no be no and our never be never.

He was right about Trump’s character and behavior. I can understand orthodox Christians voting for Trump as the lesser of two serious evils, but in that case, for believers, it ought to have been a sackcloth-and-ashes moment. I saw somewhere a link to this 1998 Resolution on the Moral Character of Public Officials, passed by the Southern Baptist Convention in the wake of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment over the Lewinsky affair. It says, in part:

Therefore, be it RESOLVED, That we, the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting June 9-11, 1998, in Salt Lake City, Utah, affirm that moral character matters to God and should matter to all citizens, especially God’s people, when choosing public leaders; and

Be it further RESOLVED, That we implore our government leaders to live by the highest standards of morality both in their private actions and in their public duties, and thereby serve as models of moral excellence and character; and

Be it further RESOLVED, That we urge all citizens, including those who serve in public office, to submit themselves respectfully to governing authorities and to the rule of law; and

Be it further RESOLVED, That we urge Southern Baptists and other Christians to fulfill their spiritual duty to pray regularly for the leaders of our nation (1 Timothy 2:1-4); and

Be it finally RESOLVED, That we urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.

Seems to me that Russell Moore, in speaking out against Trump on the basis of Trump’s public character, was being faithful to Southern Baptist policy — which, one must hope, applies equally to Republican candidates for office as it does to Democratic ones.

Earlier this fall, in his Erasmus Lecture at First Things, Moore focused on the future of the Religious Right. Here’s how it begins:

I am an heir of Bible Belt America, but also a survivor of Bible Belt America. I was reared in an ecosystem of Evangelical Christianity, informed by a large Catholic segment of my family and a Catholic majority in my community. I memorized Bible verses through “sword drill” competitions, a kind of Evangelical spelling bee in which children compete to see who can find, say, Habakkuk 3:3 the fastest. The songs that floated through my mind as I went to sleep at night were hymns and praise choruses and Bible verses set to music. Nonetheless, from the ages of fifteen through nineteen, I experienced a deep spiritual crisis that was grounded, at least partially, in, of all things, politics.

The cultural Christianity around me seemed increasingly artificial and cynical and even violent. I saw some Christians who preached against profanity use jarring racial epithets. I saw a cultural Christianity that preached hellfire and brimstone about sexual immorality and cultural decadence. And yet, in the church where the major tither was having an affair everyone in the community knew about, there he was, in our neighbor congregation’s “special music” time, singing “If It Wasn’t for That Lighthouse, Where Would This Ship Be?” I saw a cultural Christianity with preachers who often gained audiences, locally in church meetings or globally on television, by saying crazy and buffoonish things, simply to stir up the base and to gain attention from the world, whether that was claiming to know why God sent hurricanes and terrorist attacks or claiming that American founders, one of whom possibly impregnated his own human slaves and literally cut the New Testament apart, were orthodox, Evangelical Christians who, like us, stood up for traditional family values.

I saw a cultural Christianity cut off from the deep theology of the Bible and enamored with books and audio and sermon series tying current events to Bible prophecy—supermarket scanners as the mark of the Beast, Gog and Magog as the Soviet Union or, later, Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda or the Islamic State as direct fulfillments of Bible prophecy. When these prophecies were not fulfilled, these teachers never retreated in shame. They waited to claim a new word from God and sold more products, whether books or emergency preparation kits for the Y2K global shutdown and the resulting dark age the Bible clearly told us would happen.

And then there were the voter guides. A religious right activist group from Washington placed them in our church’s vestibule, outlining the Christian position on issues. Even as a teenager, I could recognize that the issues just happened to be the same as the talking points of the Republican National Committee. With many of these issues, there did seem to be a clear Christian position—on the abortion of unborn children, for instance, and on the need to stabilize families. But why was there a “Christian” position on congressional term limits, a balanced budget amendment, and the line item veto? Why was there no word on racial justice and unity for those of us in the historical shadow of Jim Crow?

I was left with the increasingly cynical feeling—an existential threat to my entire sense of myself and the world—that Christianity was just a means to an end. My faith was being used as a way to shore up Southern honor culture, mobilize voters for political allies, and market products to a gullible audience. I was ready to escape—and I did. But I didn’t flee the way so many have, through the back door of the Church into secularism. I found a wardrobe in a spare room that delivered me from the Bible Belt back to where I started, to the Lion of the tribe of Judah.

He’s talking about reading C.S. Lewis, and coming to understand that there was a lot more to Christianity than the Southern white middle class at prayer. Later in the lecture, Moore said:

The question of moral credibility is real, but a loss of moral credibility is not the most traumatic wound of 2016. Some Christian leaders and publications pronounce a self-described unrepentant man a “baby Christian” or as representing “Christian values and family values.” With this, we have left far behind quibbles about which candidate is the lesser of two evils or about the future of the Supreme Court or even whether we should support candidates we never could have imagined supporting before. This is instead a first-order question of theology—overheard by the world of our mission field—a question of the very definition of the Gospel itself, and what it means to be saved or lost.

In the twentieth century, a fundamentalist leader defined a “compromising Evangelical” as “a fundamentalist who says to a liberal, ‘I’ll call you a Christian if you’ll call me a scholar.’” It seems now that we have some Evangelicals who are willing to say to politicians, “I’ll call you a Christian if you’ll just call me.” Garry Wills, a harsh and sometimes caricaturing critic of those of us who are religious conservatives, once said that the failure of Evangelical political activism is that it is not Evangelical enough. “The problem with evangelical religion,” Wills said, “is not (so much) that it encroaches on politics, but that it has so carelessly neglected its own sources of wisdom.” He warned, “It cannot contribute what it no longer possesses.” That may or may not have been true when Wills wrote those words, but who can ignore the fact that his words now ring true?

Further in the lecture, he said:

I understand why some, including some devout religious conservatives, argue that they recognize the moral and temperamental unfitness of a man such as Trump for the nation’s highest office, but feel they must cast their ballots for him in an effort to forestall the very real perils of a Supreme Court increasingly hostile to the most basic of religious freedoms and constitutional restraints. While I disagree with my religious conservative friends who think this way, that is a respectable and defensible view. They are not provoking the crisis we face today.

Instead:

the crisis comes from the fact that the old-guard religious right political establishment normalized an awful candidate—some offering outright support in theological terms, others hedging their bets and whispering advice behind closed doors. The situation is more dire still because, following the release of the Access Hollywood tapes, it was religious conservatives who were about the only group in America willing to defend serious moral problems, in high-flying moral terms no less.

To be clear, the 2016 campaign did not provoke this crisis. This was a pre-existing condition. The religious right turns out to be the people the religious right warned us about.

Moore points out that the Religious Right as a political force is quickly surpassing its sell-by date. Among Evangelicals, he says, the young seminarians who are going to be tomorrow’s pastors are theologically orthodox, but don’t share the old guard’s interest in partisan politics. Said Moore, “this is not because they are liberal but because they give priority to the Gospel and mission.”

The last part of Moore’s lecture (

read the whole thing ) says that Evangelicals (and, I would add, the rest of us Christians) need to re-focus on our primary identity as believers in and servants of Jesus Christ. “Those who stand with Christ must articulate, including to themselves, why and how Christianity matters,” he said. Moore meant that we are now living in a time when nobody can take the American public’s religious knowledge or commitment for granted. (I have called this condition “post-Christian America.”) The cultural Christianity in which Moore was raised is rapidly disintegrating, though those living deepest in the bubble are going to be the last ones to know.

In his excellent 2015 book Onward, Moore says the end of cultural Christianity is a good thing, because it forces us believers to confront what we truly believe, and what that requires of us. The thing is, Moore does not believe Christians can disengage from politics or any other forms of activism in the public square. What he’s calling for is a fundamental re-ordering of American Christian life, such that all things — our politics and everything else — are subordinated to our theological commitments. That has gotten seriously disordered, says Moore, with many believers placing worldly success, including keeping access to power, over sacrificial service to Christ.

In this context, that means that the church can never be seen as in the pocket of one political party and its president. Access to power in Washington is quite a prize, but it is not worth selling out the integrity of one’s witness to the Gospel. I’m no Southern Baptist, but it seems to me that any church would want its chief public policy spokesman to be someone who understands this clearly, and who is not afraid to suffer slings and arrows for it — even when those arrows are shot at him from behind.

Disclosure: I know Russell Moore somewhat, and consider him a friend, though I can’t say we’ve spent a lot of time together. I admire his thought, his preaching, and above all his moral courage. I don’t know how this is going to shake out for him at the ERLC, and I hope for the best — not only for him and the church he serves, but for all of us orthodox Christians who look to him as the best and most effective advocate we have in the public square. Whatever happens, he will have come through this trial with his integrity intact — and, therefore, his moral authority as a Christian leader. That’s always a thing of great value, given its scarcity in all times, but especially so as a voice for Christian values in the public square of post-Christian America.