Rod Dreher's Blog, page 507

Ben Op Meets Bruderhof

View of the Norcia basilica, before the earthquake destroyed it (Photo by Rod Dreher)

Plough, the magazine of the Bruderhof, has just published a long interview editor Peter Mommsen did with me here in Louisiana earlier this fall (with a post-election follow-up question). The topic: the Benedict Option. What you don’t see is that I took Peter and his crew member to dinner at Hot Tails after the taping. Man, that was a good night. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Critics of the Benedict Option say that it’s a form of retreat – of abandoning society in order to live a purer, holier life. Are they right to see a kind of selfishness in withdrawing?

That’s a claim that drives me crazy: “You just want to go run to the hills and live in your bunker and wait for the end.” That’s absolutely not what I’m saying. What I am saying is, we need to have a strategic, limited retreat from the mainstream for the same reason you would protect a candle with a lantern if you go outside in a gale. Otherwise, the wind would be so strong that it would blow the light out. The currents of culture have become so antithetical to Christianity that if we’re going to form ourselves and our kids in the authentic faith, we’re going to have to have some kind of limited withdrawal.

What do I mean by that? I mean to put your kids in an authentic Christian school, for example. I mean things as simple as turning off the TV. Don’t be so quick to open the door to popular culture. Growing up, I experienced how television wrecked any morals my parents were trying to teach us – they were fairly conservative, but the TV was like a sewer pipe into the home. Today it’s smartphones. Even in my small Louisiana town, fifth-grade boys are watching hardcore pornography on their smartphones. The parents of these boys just choose not to see.

But it’s not just running away from what’s destructive – it’s running toward something good. Our kids go to a classical school here in Baton Rouge. The teachers are trying to show the parents of the students: You may have the right instinct to get your kid out of the cesspit of the mainstream by sending them to this school, but it’s not going to help if you just shelter them. You have to show them something good and beautiful and true to build their souls up.

That’s what I think the Benedict Option ideally should do. It should show the good fruits of a countercultural life in Christian community, and in that way be evangelical. If you’re not evangelical in some sense you’re not Christian. It is a missionary faith. But that doesn’t mean that we have to throw ourselves in the middle of everything when we’re not even properly formed. I know a lot of Christian parents don’t want to take their kids out of the public schools because they say, “Well, our kids need to be salt and light.” I’m afraid that’s incredibly naïve in many cases, when you have third and fourth graders already talking about transgenderism and bisexuality.

The Benedictine monks set a good example here. They are much more cloistered than any lay community could afford to be. They say, “We have the walls there because we cannot fulfill our mission to serve Christ in the way we’re called to serve him without some walls separating us from the world.” But they also have a Benedictine principle of hospitality. Saint Benedict tells his monks to welcome every stranger and every visitor as Christ himself. That openness allows them to maintain contact with the world and to share the good things they have with the world.

More:

Russell Moore, a Southern Baptist leader, recently suggested that the marginalization of Christianity in the public square may be bad news for America but it’s good news for the church. Would you agree?

Insofar as it purges the cultural Christianity from the church, I think it’s good. On the other hand, there’s going to be a lot of suffering ahead, and a lot of people on the margins of the church, who might have been gradually brought closer to Christ, are going to fall away. I can’t rejoice in that or just say, “Bring it on,” even though the purification will probably make the church stronger and more faithful in the end. When the Christian witness gets muted or pushed to the side, it’s not just people in the church who will get hurt – society as a whole will suffer when it loses its leaven.

I think the church is going to have to become not more seeker-friendly but more finder-friendly. That means discipleship. We’ve got to go beyond just showing up on Sunday or having that altar-call conversion moment. What does it mean the next day? What does it mean to be formed in Christian habits, in Christian ways of life?

That’s something the monks in Norcia teach. They showed me the value of routine, of saying the same prayers and psalms and getting the Bible into your heart by reading it daily in lectio divina. Those everyday, ordinary rhythms get the Christian faith into your bones. It’s something we’re going to have to recover if we’re going to survive as a community of faith.

And:

What effect does the election of Donald Trump have on Christians’ public witness? Does it change anything for the Benedict Option?

I was not a Trump voter, or a Clinton voter, and was prepared to be part of the loyal opposition no matter which candidate won. I still am. What does Trump’s election change for the Benedict Option? Only this: I believe it gives us a bit more time to prepare – and, if he puts justices on the Supreme Court who value religious liberty, it gives us a little more space in which to prepare. But the idea that electing a Republican president, especially one as unchristian as Donald Trump, will arrest a cultural process of desacralization that has been underway for centuries – that’s madness! I fear that Christians who were coming to appreciate the perilous position of the church in post-Christian America may conclude that we can all stand down now, that the danger has passed. That would be incredibly foolish. It’s not simply the Democratic Party that threatens authentic Christianity. It’s modernity. The best we can expect of politics is for it to open a space for the church to do its work of conversion and culture-building. The Trump presidency may – may – solve certain immediate problems for the church, but it will certainly create new ones. Again, I say to my fellow Christians: do not take false hope from the machination of princes. Prepare.

Last one:

In what may be dark times ahead, where do you see signs of hope, and what should we focus on to keep the joy of the gospel?

In my book, I write about a Catholic community in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, called the Tipiloschi – Italian for “the usual suspects.” Although they go to the normal church, they also come together for communal meals, service projects, Bible study, communal prayer, and Mass every week. When I visited this community, I saw so much joy – not self-satisfied joy but creative joy. I met a couple of young men who had done prison time for minor offenses and now had been brought into the community, given work to do, and rehabilitated. I went to their school, and saw such a sense of confidence. It’s not a white-knuckle, we’re-so-afraid-of-the-world approach. Because they know who they are in Christ, they live with joy. When I see people like that, I realize that this is not just some pipe dream or abstract ideal. There are flesh-and-blood people living this out right now.

I asked Marco Sermarini, who leads the Tipiloschi community, “Do you ever worry about anything?” He said, “Oh yes, Rod, I lie in bed at night and I worry about what’s going to happen to my children and our community. But then I realize that our Lord came into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, not a thoroughbred, and that I just have to be a donkey for the Lord.” As long as we can be simple little donkeys, just plugging away doing the everyday ordinary things and sanctifying our everyday life, that’s where we will find our hope.

Read the whole thing. It’s much longer. Peter asked great questions. And Plough is a great magazine. Check out the Winter 2017 issue, where this Ben Op interview appears. I’ll be going out to see the Bruderhof community in Upstate New York around the time The Benedict Option is published in March.

The Demoralization Of The West

Rod Liddle, who grew up poor in Middlesbrough, a town in the north of England, reviews J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy in First Things.  Here is Liddle referring to Vance’s drug-addicted, unstable mother, who cycled through a number of men and neglected her child:

I was of J. D.’s mum’s generation, the people who made fecklessness a lifestyle choice, and were somehow encouraged to do so. We jettisoned almost everything our parents believed in and made ourselves much worse off—just as did J. D.’s mother. I tried to make sense of this generational shift in a book—Selfish, Whining Monkeys—which attempted to explain the reasons why my generation had managed, in such a short space of time, to let down their children and their parents. Some of it accords with what Vance has to say, even if he does not spell it out. Gone, for example, was any notion of deferred gratification and work ethic—just one of the many consequences of the diminished importance of religion in our lives.

Protestantism inculcated a simple and perhaps confining moral code: work hard, invest, don’t steal, look after your community, put your family first, wait for reward—always wait for reward. Don’t sleep around, don’t lie, don’t spend more money than you have. For my parents’ generation, divorce was a stigma and vanishingly rare, at that. But recently I stood outside a Middlesbrough job center interviewing one hundred or so people who were seeking work. Every single one of that hundred came from a broken family. Every one. And of those who now had children themselves, every one was no longer with the partner with whom she’d had the child. And this state of affairs had not made them happy; it had wrecked them. They were all J. D.’s mum now.

Liddle goes on to say that liberalism has a lot to do with this — not just the left-wing liberalism of social permissiveness, but also the right-wing liberalism of market über alles:

 Both of these doctrines, left and right, in the end amounted to the same thing: You are your own God now. The old God will not stand in your way, nor, frankly, will the state. You have total freedom to do as you please. Go, use, enjoy. But for the poorest of us, these injunctions did not bring liberation. They brought the illusion of liberation and the reality of a new poverty, characterized by broken homes, idleness, vast mountains of personal debt, and a disconnectedness with the communities in which we lived.

Read the whole thing.  Liddle suggests at the very end that liberalism might have had its day. If so, what comes next? I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody knows, any more than Italians in the 6th century knew what was coming after the fall of the Roman Empire. Liberalism, in all its iterations, is much more than a governing philosophy; it’s a way of seeing the world. When all your life your horizons have been delineated by liberalism of one sort or another, it’s very difficult to imagine anything beyond it.

But there is a world beyond it. Several worlds, in fact, depending on which direction we choose. Not saying this is going to be a pleasant journey for us all, but it’s going to be a journey. From the introduction to The Benedict Option:

If we want to survive, we have to return to the roots of our faith, both in thought and in deed. We are going to have to learn habits of the heart forgotten by believers in the West. We are going to have to change our lives, and our approach to life, in radical ways. In short, we are going to have to be the church, without compromise, no matter what it costs.

This book does not offer a political agenda. Nor is it a spiritual how-to manual, nor a standard decline-and- fall lament. True, it offers a critique of modern culture from a traditional Christian point of view, but more importantly, it tells the stories of conservative Christians who are pioneering creative ways to live out the faith joyfully and counterculturally in these darkening days. My hope is that you will be inspired by them and collaborate with like-minded Christians in your local area to construct responses to the real-world challenges faced by the church. If the salt is not to lose its savor, we have to act. The hour is late. This is not a drill.

Take a look at these tweets from Ross Douthat, who in a previous tweet, called this list “hilarious,” meaning it is very much out of touch with the world as it is, versus how the globalist elites wish it were:

An alternative list of “global thinkers” who actually mattered in 2016: Houellebecq, Buchanan, Aleksandr Dugin …https://t.co/DbWZhPVbNe

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) December 12, 2016

… Eric Zemmour, Ryszard Legutko, Pierre Manent, Thilo Sarrazin, Peter Hitchens, and throw on the late Sam Huntington and Chris Lasch.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) December 12, 2016

With any luck, by this time next year, Benedict of Nursia’s name will be on the list. Also, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst have a new book out about the failures of liberalism, pointing the way to the post-liberal future. I was recently sent a review copy, and expect to be writing about it soon. Rowan Williams, the former primate of the Anglican Church, has reviewed it in New Statesman. Excerpts:

Milbank and Pabst see the dissolution of this classical Christian picture by the individualism of the Reformation as a cardinal moment in the decay of the West. In other words, the very moment identified in conventional history as the birth of “Western” supremacy – the triumph of a notion of individual right, the recognition of the objective authority of scientific method – becomes the cradle of the metacrises through which we are now living.

More:

Human survival, no less, depends on recovering a sacred cosmology, so that we learn again to value the material and the local, to affirm the solidity of “intermediate” communities that are neither private nor state-franchised (professional guilds, trade unions, religious associations, volunteer organisations and activist citizens’ networks) and to welcome the imaginative and ideological contribution of traditional religion to social cohesion and justice. Despite the immense acknowledged influence here of Catholic social teaching, the authors present the Church of England (unfashionably, to put it mildly) as a model for church-state symphonia, to borrow the Byzantine term; they defend the monarchy as a symbolic focus for a social order resistant to functional reduction and oligarchic absolutism; they identify “gender fluidity” as a contemporary instance of the victory of abstract will over mere physicality. And these are not the only points where the average left-leaning, right-thinking reader will raise his or her eyebrows – or just stop reading.

But before such a reader dismisses the whole book as an apology for theocracy by the back door, there is reason to pause. The analysis of the metacrises is in fact unfailingly detailed and acute, from the lucid argument that economic liberalism is inimical to sustainable democracy to the diagnosis of the universal commodification of culture – including culture that likes to present itself as critical, ironic or revolutionary.

Chapter after chapter insists on how ­important it is that we dissolve our self-deceptions about the kind of world we have allowed to develop. If we are now panicking about the triumph of a politics of resentment, fear and unchallengeable untruthfulness, we had better investigate what models of human identity we have been working with. Our prevailing notions of what counts as knowledge, our glib reduction of democracy to market terms, our inability to tackle the question of limits to growth – all these and more have brought us to the polarised, tribal politics of today and the thinning out of skill, tradition and the sense of rootedness. Treating these issues with intellectual honesty is not a sign of political regression but the exact opposite. And if that requires a different kind of engagement with religious and metaphysical traditions of understanding and an abandonment of the assumption that instrumental secularism is everyone’s proper default position, so be it.

Read the whole thing. It’s a qualified endorsement of the book. Milbank is a well-known Anglican theologian. Pabst writes about politics and theology, but I’m not certain of his particular religious commitment, other than that he’s a Christian.

One big lacuna in my Benedict Option book is political economy. I have a chapter about politics, and one about work, but I found that the subject of political economy was not one I could tackle in this particular book. But it’s a hugely important one, and I am sure it will become ever more important over the coming years as we move into whatever this new era will bring us. “Instrumental secularism” is not enough. Sooner or later, this culture will return to the practice of religion. But that is far into the future, so for now, we have to remember our MacIntyre:

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.

Trump Vs. The Military-Industrial Complex

Well, this is encouraging:

Just over a year after Northrop Grumman won the multibillion dollar contract to build a next-generation stealth bomber, the company appointed Mark Welsh, who was serving as Air Force chief of staff at the time of the contract award, to its board.

The appointment, announced Friday, is not unusual in Washington, where former high-ranking Pentagon officials often go to work for the defense industry after their military service. But it comes as President-elect Donald Trump is highlighting the potential conflicts of interests in the “revolving door” between the Pentagon and industry, as he vows to clean up Washington.

On Monday, Trump also took a shot at Lockheed Martin’s $400 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, the most expensive in the history of the Pentagon, saying the “cost is out of control. Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases after January 20th.”

More:

In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Trump said there should be a “lifetime restriction” of top defense officials going to work for defense contractors.

“The people that are making these deals for the government, they should never be allowed to go to work for these companies,” he said. “You know, they make a deal like that and then a year later, or two years later, or three years later you see them working for these big companies that made the deal.”

Whole thing here. Well said, Trump! More of this kind of butt-kicking, please.

UPDATE: David Graham at The Atlantic says it’s a lot more complicated than that. Excerpt:

The plane’s critics range from lefties who see it as just another case of Pentagon bloat to conservative hawks who see it as good money spent on a bad project. Its defenders similarly run the gamut, from the military contractors who benefit from the plane to the members of Congress who want the plane constructed in their constituencies.

Some progressives will view Trump’s attack as a welcome broadside against the military-industrial complex, though they’re probably misguided if they expect to find much of an ally in Trump. He has made repealing the Defense sequester a priority, and wants to expand every branch of the armed forces by large amounts. Estimates of what all that would cost run around $100 billion—or about 1,000 times the cost of an F-35. While the F-35’s supply chain stretches around the country and around the globe, final assembly takes place in Fort Worth, in ruby-red Texas.

 

Trump Reviving Liberal Christianity?

Emma Green writes that the Trumpening has been good for liberal Christianity:

Anecdotal evidence suggests other liberal churches from a variety of denominations have been experiencing a similar spike over the past month, with their higher-than-usual levels of attendance staying relatively constant for several weeks. It’s not at all clear that the Trump bump, as the writer Diana Butler Bass termed it in a conversation with me, will be sustained beyond the first few months of the new administration. But it suggests that some progressives are searching for a moral vocabulary in grappling with the president-elect—including ways of thinking about community that don’t have to do with electoral politics.

A liberal Baptist pastor from Atlanta, Trey Lyon, sent Green a sermon he preached post-election. Excerpt:

If the state will not provide rations, then we will learn anew how to plant our own seeds. If the state questions the covenant of marriage, the church will say, “What God has joined together let no one cast asunder.” If the state says, “There isn’t enough to go around,” we will say, “Evidently you aren’t managing it right, because in God’s economy there is enough for everyone to have their fill and enough left over to take some home with you.”

Read the whole thing.  I like that quote from Lyon, not because I agree with it but because I’m glad to see Christians realizing that the church is more important than the state, and acting on it. And I am not going to fault people for wanting to come together more often in church, especially in a time they perceive as a crisis. I don’t happen to believe that this is going to sustain itself, because I don’t believe liberal Christianity has a future, but the impulse these folks have to gather together in church is not a bad one.

And I really and truly hope conservative Christians are having the same thoughts, and doing the same thing. As a Benedict Option proponent, of course I believe that for reasons that are much broader and deeper than who inhabits the White House. If a great saint of God had just been elected president, I would still promote the Ben Op, because no president can stop the dechristianization that has been underway for a long time.

Nevertheless, here are Trump-specific reasons why conservative Christians ought to be drawing closer to their churches now:

The Trump presidency tempts conservative believers to fall back into old habits of thinking that everything’s going to be fine because the Republicans hold the White House. It’s not going to be fine, or rather, if it is going to be fine, then it’s going to be fine because of what you do in your local church and local community.
Most everything about the life that Donald Trump lives and has lived is a rebuke to Christian principles. I understand why Christians voted for him, even if they did not approve of the way he lives or the things he champions. I’m not asking my fellow orthodox believers to regret their vote. But conservative Christians must keep squarely in front of them that the United States is going to be led by a man who manifestly does not share our beliefs. We would have be in that same position had Hillary Clinton won, but at least it would have been easier to see that. We have to hope and pray that we, the Church, will have a salutary effect on the executive branch of the State, and that the executive branch of the State will have no effect on us.
The next four years will be tumultuous ones, with frightened people on the left reacting out of anger to just about anything Trump does. We conservative Christians need to be in church, reminded constantly of our obligation to refuse to react in anger, even as we defend what we believe is right. As Christians, we are not free to hate, period. That’s something that a passionate political era makes  hard to see — which is why we need our church leaders to remind us.
 The Trump years, both in America and abroad, are likely to be marked by instability, even upheaval. Trump’s election is not a fluke. There’s a lot going on in the West right now, and even globally, as the old postwar order finally begins to break up. Just as the Benedictine monks in Norcia fled their monastery in the middle of night, during the first earthquake, and took shelter with the other townspeople in the piazza, around the statue of St. Benedict, and prayed together, so too should we seek refuge in our church communities, to keep ourselves grounded while the earth shakes and structures fall.

Whether conservative or liberal, if you are a religious believer, feel free to add to the list your Trump-specific reasons why we should all draw closer to our religious congregations in the Trump years.

 

 

Why Don’t Poor People Move?

Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey comes from a family that used to live in West Virginia coal country, until his grandparents and their six grown children migrated out of the mountains and into Virginia, a hundred miles away. Though Bailey grew up very poor, he still thought of the folks back home in McDowell County as the truly poor. And they were, with many of them living in Third World conditions.

Bailey went back to McDowell after forty years away, to see how things had changed. Because the coal industry has withered, it’s worse than ever there; McDowell is the poorest and sickest county in a poor state. The average life expectancy for men — 64 years — is the lowest of any county in the United States. Bailey wrote a piece for Reason attempting to answer the question, “Why don’t people just leavet?” Excerpts:

Debra Elmore, who oversees Destiny’s after-school program, backs her kids’ generalizations with hard numbers that are hard to hear as well. “Ninety percent of kids in McDowell County schools are below the poverty threshold for free and reduced-price lunches,” she says. “Forty-seven percent do not live with their biological parents, often because of incarceration and drug addiction, and 77 percent live in households in which no one has a job.” And these bleak stats almost certainly understate the problem. Poverty numbers from the state, for instance, do not include children under 5 years of age.

With coal dying, there is nothing else for people to do to make a living in McDowell. Bailey raises the question of whether or not government aid is artificially supporting the economy there. Forty-seven percent of personal income in the county is in the form of disability, Social Security, or other kinds of welfare:

“The provision of subsidies to induce people to stay in…place delays the inevitable. At worst, such subsidies effectively retain the kinds of people who are the least able to adjust, ultimately, to market forces,” write Iowa State University economists David Kraybill and Maureen Kilkenny in a 2003 working paper evaluating the rationales for and against place-based economic development policies. “It does no good to retain (or attract) people in places that are too costly for most businesses, which cannot sustain economic activity. That turns the place into a poverty trap.”

Kathie Whitt, a woman who heads a local agency that coordinates aid services, says:

“So many folks in McDowell have an entitlement mentality. Everybody owes them a living, housing, clothing, and food. They are the first ones who line up at every giveaway,” she says. “Unfortunately that group is expanding.”

Whitt worries about what will happen when the Baby Boomers step down from their leadership roles. “We have really seen some dark days,” she says. “I do not feel that we have a good future based on where we are now. I think that McDowell County will continue to deteriorate.”

There has been a generational collapse of morals and morale:

Based on her experience with social services, Whitt reckons that a high percentage of McDowell County residents between the ages of 18 and 40 are drug users and require a lot of assistance. “So many younger people in their 20s and 30s are strung out and walking around like zombies,” she says. “They don’t work and they don’t raise their kids.”

“It seems like parenting is a thing that people don’t know how to do anymore,” she continues. “Our parents taught us, but somehow the next generation didn’t learn to be mothers and fathers.” Again, the evidence is that about half the kids in the county are not living with a biological parent.

And:

“A lot of the younger people don’t have the mind-set to keep up with themselves,” Whitt explains. “You see it in their houses, their cars, and their kids.”

As has long been reported in the inner-city black community, these poor white Appalachian communities feature grandparents and even great-grandparents taking care of their own grandchildren:

Asked why she takes care of her great-grandchildren, Slagle replies, “If we don’t, who is going to take care of them? If we don’t do it, social services will send them out of state.” She says her granddaughter, now a 22-year-old home health care aide “on pain pills,” has had three children by three different boyfriends. The newest baby lives with his father. The oldest was born when Slagle’s granddaughter was 15 years old. “She’s like so many young people today,” Slagle says. “They are so sorry; they just don’t want to do right. They stay on their phones and gadgets all day while their babies are doing God knows what.…Young people are not like when we grew up. Kids had chores then; now they only have gadgets to play with.”

I ask FACES’ Whitt why so many young unmarried women in the county become pregnant. She sighs and notes that birth control is freely available at school. Most of the girls and women are “on medical cards” (that is, enrolled in Medicaid) that would pay for contraception as well. It doesn’t matter. “There are no consequences to pregnancy—they get immediate access to a medical card, food stamps, a check, WIC, and home visits,” she explains. “They have all the welfare benefits as long as their kids are not adopted, plus there’s no babysitting, since the grandparents will look after the kids.”

And so on. Well, why don’t people just leave?

That question is actually surprisingly easy to answer: They did. After all, 80 percent of McDowell’s population, including my grandparents, cleared out of the county to seek opportunities elsewhere during the last half-century.

But as the mines mechanized and closed down, why didn’t the rest go, too? Reed, Whitt, and Slagle all more or less agree that many folks in McDowell are being bribed by government handouts to stay put and to stay poor. Drug use is the result of the demoralization that follows.

But if you cut welfare out, there will be incredible human damage, Bailey concedes. What to do, then? Read the whole thing. 

A couple of things here. One, middle-class liberals often think that the reason for teen pregnancy is the lack of sex education and/or the lack of availability of contraception. They can’t imagine that teenagers would actually choose to bear children, because it is so unreasonable. But it’s true. A friend of mine, who is white, taught for a couple of years in a rural all-black public school. She couldn’t get over how most of the ninth-grade girls in her class aspired to nothing higher than having a baby by some boy before graduation, and how most of the boys in the class aspired to nothing at all. All the talk with them about their own moral agency, about how things don’t have to be this way, about how they could better their lives if they did this thing and didn’t do that thing — it was all useless. She was met with blank stares. She even told them how she was a single mother who had been on welfare for a hard time in her life, but she got her act together, finished her college degree, and was now a teacher. Nothing. No response. It depressed her so much that she finally asked for a transfer.

A second aspect of Bailey’s story about the poor whites of McDowell County is the role of family and community in perpetuating the habits of poverty across generations. You really need to read Bailey’s story to get the whole picture, but the gist of it is that people don’t leave because that’s where their people are. If a poor person left McDowell County — assuming they had the money to pay for the move and to establish themselves elsewhere, which is a lot to assume — they would be moving from a place where they knew just about everybody to a place where they would be a stranger. And not just a stranger, but a stranger with no money, leaving them extremely vulnerable with no one to help them. You can see why the idea of leaving would be unappealing. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t.

Bailey’s story reminds me of a conversation I had not long ago with a black friend who had grown up in stark poverty, but who had put it all behind her, literally. She relocated far away from her rural hometown and her family because she wanted better for herself than what she saw growing up. Like so many poor young adults, she joined the military, which was her ticket out of town, and later, into college. When I saw her, she had been taking care of her aged father for a couple of months. He had been struggling with alcohol off and on all his life. She invited him to come live with her and her husband and kids for a time, just to clear her head. The day before, she had returned him to his home.

My friend told me that while he was staying with them, her dad kept openly marveling at her husband, saying that he couldn’t understand why his son-in-law was so nice to him and to his daughter. He had never seen men behave that way towards others, and it opened his eyes to possibilities he had never considered. My friend was worried that her dad was going to slip back into his old bad habits now that he had returned home, into a social environment where booze, drugs, womanizing, and cheating others was normative.

Here’s why I tell you that story. My friend had read my book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, with its praise of family, community, and place in stabilizing one’s life in time of crisis. She came from the same kind of town that I did, but her experience of family, community, and place was precisely the opposite of mine. When your family and community are badly broken, those bonds that keep you tied to a place could destroy you if you don’t sever them. Had my friend stayed loyal to the people and the place where she grew up, she would almost certainly have had a very different life than the one she has now — a life that would have been worse in every way. Yet, she told me, this is the life that all of the siblings in her large family chose — and they’re all doing badly.

McDowell County sounds like the same kind of place, but with poor white people. Family and community are supposed to be good things. When they go bad, though, you really are alone in this world, unless you have the imagination to conceive of a better life for yourself, and the resources, both in terms of determination and opportunity, to get out. It’s probably the case that many people stay in these places for the same reason that high school girls have babies.

I’m thinking this morning of the difference that the way people construe the narrative of their lives can make in these situations. The other day, I posted about the difference between “redemption stories” and “contamination stories.” Both are responses to suffering, and a person or a community can tell themselves either story based on the same set of facts.

The redemption story ends with some form of, “…and despite all those bad things, lasting good came out of that experience.” The contamination story ends with some form of “… and after that, things were never good again.” Emily Esfahani Smith, whose forthcoming book The Power of Meaning introduced those terms to me, writes that psychological researchers have found that people who construe their personal narratives as part of a redemption story are much more resilient than people who construe their lives as contamination stories.

My black friend who moved to the city from the country had long thought of her life as a redemption story, and worked to write the ending herself. I don’t know this for a fact, but I would suppose that her relatives back home see their lives as contamination stories in which they are fated to be victims of both circumstance and the malice of others. I have a white working-class friend who lives out in the country, and she’s forever trying to put fires out in her own sprawling clan. She’s a good woman, but it’s amazing to me how neither she nor her people seem to grasp that they have moral agency. These are not stupid people, but they just drift through life, from one mess of their own making to another. Every one of the stories my white friend tells about her life when we get together is a contamination story.

A couple of years ago had the opportunity to leave, to start her life over again with relatives in another part of the US. I strongly encouraged her to go. She did not go, because she couldn’t imagine leaving her people behind. I pointed out that by her own admission, they took advantage of her all the time, in part because she’s a hard worker whose job provides a steady income. Didn’t matter to her. Even though her children are adults now, she could scarcely imagine leaving them and the others, despite the fact that they were draining her dry.

And so, every time I run into her and ask about her family, I hear a litany of stories that have to do with drunkenness, drug abuse, violence, and above all, broken families. There’s my good-hearted friend, right in the middle, seemingly the only thing that holds them all together, insofar as they have it “together” at all. The world in which she lives is one of near-constant chaos, all of it caused by terrible behavior. When I hear people say that there’s nothing wrong with folks like that that good jobs won’t fix, I roll my eyes. These people’s lives are so chaotic it’s hard to imagine that any of them could discipline themselves enough to hold a decent job. This is a matter of a contaminated culture. The only way for the kids raised in it to break the cycle is to leave it all behind.

One last thing: my black friend is a practicing Christian, and has been all her life. She was raised in a strict church, and says from the time she was young, she was asking all kinds of questions about God. She told me something interesting. Despite belonging to a church and actually going to church, she was the only member of her family who ever thought that Jesus really wanted his followers to change the way they were living.

 

Christians Massacred In Cairo

Father Sergious of #Coptic cathedral “The devil himself would be too ashamed to do such a thing” #churchbombing #Egypt pic.twitter.com/g8IMCRqpWS

— Nermien Riad (@NermienRiad) December 11, 2016

Lord have mercy:

A bomb ripped through a section reserved for women at Cairo’s main Coptic cathedral during Sunday morning Mass, killing at least 25 people and wounding 49, mostly women and children, Egyptian state media said.

The attack was the deadliest against Egypt’s Christian minority in years. Video from the blast site circulating on social media showed blood-smeared floors and shattered pews among the marble pillars at St. Mark’s Cathedral, the seat of Egypt’s Orthodox Christian church, where the blast occurred in a chapel adjacent to the main building.

As security officials arrived to secure the site, angry churchgoers gathered outside and hurled insults, accusing them of negligence.

“There was no security at the gate” one woman told reporters. “They were all having breakfast inside their van.”

A man asked: “You’re coming now after everything was destroyed?”

Take care watching that video. In it, it appears that young Coptic men are collecting bits and pieces of human remains for burial.

The Guardian reports:

Amal Louka, who works with a service for disabled people at the cathedral, said she was in a meeting in an adjacent church when she heard the explosion.

“We heard a very loud noise – it felt as if the church was falling down,” she said. “When we got to the scene, there was a lot of blood and severed body parts as well as many corpses on the floor. The explosion had hit the women’s area of the church, so most of the casualties were women.”

Cathedral worker Attiya Mahrous, who rushed to the chapel after he heard the blast, said: “I found bodies, many of them women, lying on the pews. It was a horrible scene. His clothes and hands were stained with blood and his hair matted with dust.

No claim of responsibility yet, but I’m betting that the culprits will not be Scottish Presbyterians. Just another day in the life of Christians in Egypt, suffering at the hands of Islamists. Note well that not all Muslims are Islamists. Also note this:

For Coptic Christians, an attack on Saint Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral is like an attack on the Vatican. #Egypt #Cairo

— Ian James Lee (@ianjameslee) December 11, 2016

Rumors Of Schisms

Pope Francis continues his crackpot war on Catholic traditionalists. Vatican Radio presents a transcript of a talk he just gave, in which he once again lit into one of his favorite targets, the alleged “rigidity” of more traditional priests:

About rigidity and worldliness, it was some time ago that an elderly monsignor of the Curia came to me, who works, a normal man, a good man, in love with Jesus – and he told me that he had gone to buy a couple of shirts at Euroclero [the clerical clothing store in Rome] and saw a young fellow – he thinks he had not more than 25 years, or a young priest or about to become a priest – before the mirror, with a cape, large, wide, velvet, with a silver chain. He then took the Saturno [wide-brimmed clerical headgear], he put it on and looked himself over. A rigid and worldly one. And that priest – he is wise, that monsignor, very wise – was able to overcome the pain, with a line of healthy humor and added: ‘And it is said that the Church does not allow women priests!’. Thus, does the work that the priest does when he becomes a functionary ends in the ridiculous, always.

Yeah, so that’ll work: insulting a young priest by telling him he dresses like a girl. What a pope. Who would have thought a Roman pontiff would ever pathologize tradition? Vatican II is the gift that keeps on giving. Note this exchange from a recent interview with Edward Pentin, a journalist who covers the Vatican. You might recall Pentin’s name as the journalist whose recorded comments proved Cardinal Kasper a liar during the 2015 Synod on the Family:

REGINA: The Pope’s comments on ‘rigid’ young Catholics. What’s that all about?

Edward Pentin: The common view in Rome is that his ‘rigid’ comments are simply aimed at wearing down so-called “conservative” or traditional Catholics so that orthodoxy gradually disappears, and he can push through his reforms. That’s not necessarily the case, of course, but that is how it is being perceived in some quarters. Of particular concern to some has been the Pope comments in this regard which he has made in reference to seminaries as they see it is as plot to weaken orthodox priests from the start, especially in the area of conscience and sexual morality. It’s just one of many other acts made during this pontificate which has led to the disaffection of a large number of practicing Catholics. But it seems that seminarians, especially in the UK and US, tend to understand what’s happening in today’s Vatican and are trying to uphold the Church’s teachings and Tradition. And in trying to make sense of it all, they see it in a positive sense: of clarifying and uncovering what has long been seen as a veiled schism that’s existed at least since the end of the Second Vatican Council.

Also on the schism front, to the East, the Ecumenical Patriarch has asked the Orthodox Archbishop of Greece and the head of the Synod there to excommunicate bishops and others who opposed the Council he called in Crete this year. The Russian Orthodox Church declined to participate in it. Given that the Russian church contains at least half of the world’s Orthodox Christians, that’s a big deal. The Moscow patriarchate has not accepted the council’s decisions as binding on all Orthodox. The EP is not like a pope, and doesn’t have papal powers of governance, but he is, or is supposed to be, a unifying figure in world Orthodoxy. Prof. Tighe suggests that the EP’s move here could be a step towards fulfilling this prediction from the Russian Orthodox philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, written in 1895:

It is obvious that there are questions on which the Russian Church could and ought to negotiate with the Mother See [i.e., Rome], and if these questions are carefully avoided it is because it is a foregone conclusion that a clear formulation of them would only end in a formal schism. The jealous hatred of the Greeks for the Russians, to which the latter reply with a hostility mingled with contempt — that is the fact which governs the real relations of these two national Churches, in spite of their being officially in communion with one another. But even this official unity hangs upon a single hair, and all the diplomacy of the clergy of St. Petersburg and Constantinople is needed to prevent the snapping of this slender thread. The will to maintain this counterfeit unity is decidedly not inspired by Christian charity, but by the dread of a fatal disclosure; for on the day on which the Russian and Greek Churches formally break with one another the whole world will see that the Ecumenical Eastern Church is a mere fiction and that there exists in the East nothing but isolated national Churches. That is the real motive which impels our hierarchy to adopt an attitude of caution and moderation towards the Greeks, in other words, to avoid any kind of dealings with them. As for the Church of Constantinople, which in its arrogant provincialism assumes the title of “the Great Church” and ‘the Œcumenical Church,’ it would probably be glad to be rid of these Northern barbarians who are only a hindrance to its Pan-Hellenic aims. In recent times, the patriarchate of Constantinople has been twice on the point of anathematizing the Russian Church; only purely material considerations have prevented a split.

About the only non-contentious thing anybody can say about all this is that these are momentous times for the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.

UPDATE: Just returned from the Sunday liturgy at my parish. It was a beautiful time, so rich, with God so near and present. I thought about how very important the local church is. Without question these doings at the pinnacle of the churches, East and West, are very consequential, but in the end, it’s the local church that’s most decisive in our lives. In the new book of interviews with Peter Seewald, Pope Benedict XVI says that we can’t deny that we are entering into a new era, a post-Christian culture (though he doesn’t use that term, he does speak of the “de-christianization” of Europe — a process that’s well underway in the US too). It is a culture that is “more and more intolerant of Christianity.” Benedict says that believers cannot take anything for granted anymore, and must “strive all the more to continue to form and to bear the awareness of values and the awareness of life. A resolute faith among individual congregations and local churches will be important. The responsibility is greater.” [Emphasis mine]

I was heartened to see those words from the Pope emeritus, but also challenged by them. In The Benedict Option, I talk about how important it is to build up the local church, and one’s own parish, or to find and join a parish where people take the countercultural demands of Christianity seriously. This has always been important for believers, but as Pope Benedict indicates, it is much more so. This is a solemn responsibility, because the faithful at the local level will be carrying more weight. This is why I keep saying: do not wait for your bishop, your patriarch, your pope, your priest, or any representative of the institutional church to get his act together before you act yourself. To be sure, for us Catholics and Orthodox, we must not act against the church. What I’m saying is not to be the kind of Christian I used to be: somebody who sat around complaining about all the failures of the priests, the bishops, and everybody else, but never taking responsibility for my own role as a member of the church to pitch in and help out.

It’s very easy to get fixated on what’s happening in Rome, or Constantinople, and so forth. But in most cases, what happens in either place is not going to make the difference in the life or death of the faith in your heart and in the hearts of your family and your neighbors like what happens — or fails to happen — in your local church. Especially in this new era.

UPDATE.2: A Catholic reader writes in support of Francis. I have changed certain aspects of this e-mail at the reader’s request, to protect his privacy:

Having worked for the Church for almost twenty years, I have seen many problems from the left and the right. Each side needs to be held in check (indeed, the left-right bit is a non-ecclesial construct).

The left is dead. They don’t all know it yet, but they died.

Francis is not really a leftie in my opinion. His emphasis on working directly with the poor is his real gift. I know way too many conservatives wax eloquently about the need to help the poor but do not know them personally. The same goes for lefties.

My children go to a traditional Catholic school that de-emphasizes racism to a ludicrous degree. The people clearly do not even know many poor people. It leaves a horrible kind of Catholicism in its wake. It is a classical education school that does not deal well with truth. It is still far better school than any public school, but that is where the poor are. Public schools are totally against children and the family. (Read Gatto’s “Underground History of Education”?)

When Francis makes fun of people dressing up he is absolutely on point. I have seen what a traditionalist bishop can do in a diocese. In a diocese I’m familiar with, the traditionalist bishop totally destroyed the local church’s ability to evangelize people on the left. That bishop also has no sense for the poor. As ugly as it was under the previous left-wing bishop, the people of that diocese at least had a chance to talk to people without being seen as buffoons, which they now are, thanks to the way the current bishop has spoken and acted.

Francis ripping into the silliness of traditionalists is unlikely to change them, but he is calling a spade a spade. I am worried about Francis’ marriage discussion, but I think he wants more localism in a global world. Whether or not that is possible is up for debate, but I trust his intentions. We need an orthodox church that is with, on a daily basis, the poor. Silly dress is an insult to the poor. What you see as a smack in the face to traditionalists is in fact a much needed needle to the puff of pride.

Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch (Ververidis Vasilis/Shutterstock)

Congressman Cajun John Wayne

‘Memba that guy? He’s going to be in Congress. An outsider’s outsider, Clay Higgins trounced veteran politician Scott Angelle in the runoff tonight for a US Congress seat representing Cajun Louisiana. (Both candidates are Republicans; Louisiana has an open primary system.)

This is gonna get real interesting, real fast. If Trump wants a man on Capitol Hill to help drain the swamp, nobody knows about swamps like a man from Cajun country. But just before the vote, an audiotape emerged of Higgins arguing with his ex-wife about how if he wins, he’ll have the money to pay the over $100,000 he owes in back child support. He still won by a wide margin. A look at his campaign website gives you an idea why. This guy is something of a folk hero down here.

In Louisiana’s US Senate runoff, Republican John Kennedy handily beat Democrat Foster Campbell. This means the GOP will have a 52-48 Senate advantage in the next Congress.

Bonfire For Our Lady

In San Benedetto del Tronto

Partying with the Tipi Loschi at Santa Lucia, their clubhouse on a hill overlooking San Benedetto del Tronto, and the Adriatic Sea. Marco Sermarini writes:

Tonight’s the night when Holy House of Our Lady was brought flying by angels to Loreto. All the hobbits are in Santa Lucia to make a big fire to warm the air in honor of Our Beloved Lady of Loreto. It lasts since centuries – the Holy House came to Loreto at the end of XIII Century It’s a tradition of my town and my region, praying the Holy Rosary, singing and eating a sort of good pancake.

Sounds like the Benedict Option is going quite nicely in San Benedetto del Tronto. This is what I mean when I say the Tipi Loschi have the Ben Op worked out well: they fast and they feast, and they celebrate with bonfires and pancakes and prayers.

‘Chastisement As The Gift It Was’

A reader e-mailed the response below to the “Story Of Your Life” post. If you didn’t read that one, the thing you need to know is that it talks about people who construe bad or otherwise unwelcome events in their lives as part of a redemption story, and those who construe them as a contamination story. Sit down for this one:

This post of yours touched a nerve with me. It is interesting how these “contamination stories” and “redemption stories” will often tend to cycle back and forth over the course of a lifetime, depending upon our spiritual state. I have found in my own life that the redemption narrative, if not planted firmly in a dependency on God’s grace, often leads one into a false sense of prideful security and personal control–ripe pastures for the snares of the evil one. I considered posting this to your site anonymously, but it’s a bit long and perhaps veers a bit off topic. If you find it interesting, feel free to use it as you see fit. I think it illustrates how, depending on the narrative we choose to accept, what might look “good” on some level can cause things to turn “sour”, and things that are objectively “bad” (or at least, caused by our own sinfulness) might be the very catalyst which allow us to recognize God’s redemptive grace whereby we again participate in the redemption story. To illustrate my point:

My story begins more than 10 years ago in college. It was a few weeks before the commencement of my sophomore year when my younger brother passed away unexpectedly (long story short, he was born with a heart defect, but his end was very abrupt and unexpected both by his doctors). It’s always hard to lose a sibling, as you well know, but to lose one who is only 14 was devastating to myself personally, to my family, and to our church. My family was very devout and I was raised in a very active Southern Baptist Church. While I now have a deep and abiding respect for many aspects of that faith tradition, I had already begun to drift away due to the (at least perceived) paucity of that denomination’s intellectual tradition. I had a lot of questions and was generally told to just have faith in scripture and all my questions would go away. As you can imagine, my brother’s death intensified my need for answers. The two years after his death marked a period of deep spiritual longing and experimentation with various modes of the Christian tradition, but was also something of a spiritual wilderness and dislocation. I didn’t reject my faith at the time, though in retrospect I would describe this time period as falling within a “contamination narrative” in that I had burrowed so far into my own head so as to avoid my emotions and grief that it was hard to experience anything save a sense of longing and my own hardening cynicism.

This is the period in which I first became acquainted with the Orthodox Church. A dear college friend was in the process of converting and asked if I would like to attend a liturgy one Christmas Eve. It was beautiful, and I was intrigued, but I wasn’t really that interested at the time. Still, I was engaged enough that when it came time for a fall Orthodox college retreat I agreed to go, if for no other reason than that they needed drivers and I had a car. It was there that I got to know (not meet, we’d known each other casually for some time) the young woman who in short order would become my wife. She was from a similarly evangelical background and was a deeply committed Christian, but she was very smart and sophisticated and (like me) uneasy with the answers presented her by her faith tradition. On top of that, she had recently lost a sibling to cancer. We formed an immediate bond, and I think that we both felt as though we were finally able to grieve and to make sense of what had happened to us. Thus what had been a “contamination narrative” I came to see as a “redemption narrative”; God drawing two souls together who desperately needed someone who they could trust enough to work through the pain together.

We also began attending the local Orthodox Church. Very soon (too soon) thereafter I had asked her to marry me. We both agreed that we wanted our faith to play a central role in our lives. It was the end of my senior year and not wanting to be away from her (nor, believing as we did, wanting to cohabit unmarried) we married that summer and soon thereafter began the process of joining the Orthodox Church and were then Chrismated. Talk about a redemption narrative, I found myself on something of a spiritual plateau, and had nothing but optimism for the future! But all was not well.

I have thought long over the course of these 8 years since I separated from and later divorced my first wife what happened. Certainly my own sinfulness and naivete played a role. My continued struggle with pride and intellectualism at the expense of the heart also contributed. We had jumped into marriage before we knew enough about one another, and I neglected to take seriously the mental and emotional scars left on her by her own sad life, nor with my own capacity to handle their effects. In my pride, I thought that I was so much stronger than I was. Within six months of joining the Orthodox Church, a conversion to which she was integral, she decided not only that she no longer wished to be an Orthodox Christian, but also that she no longer believed in God. You can imagine how crushed and confused this left me, who just being at the beginning of my journey into the church was bereft of my partner. We struggled on for another year and a half. Perhaps if we had stayed put, surrounded by our church and familiar surroundings things would have been alright, but we made the decision to go back to school, and the marriage did not survive the first year.

And so, what I had perceived as a “redemption narrative” became to my hurting soul yet another even deeper and bleaker “contamination narrative” to which I slowly, but eventually succumbed. It’s amazing how relatively small decisions, made with the best of intentions, seal our fate within our own sinful narrative. While I remained attached to the church for some time after we separated, my eventual decision to divorce her and not to seek absolution (because, I poorly reasoned, if I don’t confess it, in some sense I haven’t lost her) sealed my fate. Intentionally cutting myself off from the sacramental life of the Orthodox Church, while I yet remained on the outskirts of her orbit, I became more spiritually dead (with the resulting symptoms of increased anxiety, depression, and despondency) as the years wore on.

Obviously, I have no idea where this story is going to end, but I am pleased to report that I am very much living in the midst of what I perceive as a “redemption narrative”, and one that, had I chosen to perceive it with different eyes, could just as easily have resulted in a “contamination narrative” propelled as it is by my own sinfulness. After years spent keeping my head down in my own self-pity, drifting ever further away from God, my family, and most of my true friends, I began to engage in, shall we say, a sinful social relationship with a member of the opposite sex. What had begun as a physical affair blossomed into affection and even love. I didn’t quite know what to do with this, committed as I had been to staying as far away from anyone as I possibly could (at this point less for reasons of morality than because of a desire to retain control of my life). How could I marry again? Our affair produced a pregnancy, and I faced a decision: live up to the full consequences of my actions, stop feeling sorry for myself, and seek redemption, or give in to logic of the despair that I had let myself fall into.

By the grace of God, I could not conceive of any other action than to see this chastisement as the gift that it was. I had been given the chance I had desperately prayed for. That’s when the amazing “redemption narrative” within which I now find myself began. I took this good woman, who being raised in an only nominally Christian household knew little of God but had a hunger in her heart far stronger than any that I have ever known, as my wife. We both wished (for somewhat different reasons) to find a church where we could be involved as a family. After visiting many churches and rejecting them for a variety of reasons, we attended one of the local Orthodox Churches and both discovered (again for different reasons) that we had found our church home. After 8 years, I am once again in full communion with the Orthodox Church and through regular prayer, confession, and partaking in the liturgy and the Eucharist have found the burden of the sins of these years slipping away.

Obviously we have many challenges ahead as a family, and I am not so naive now as to not believe that the fruits of my past sinfulness may continue to sprout bitter fruit which will require watchfulness. I know, more than ever, that prayer and vigilance is ever needed lest we sink into spiritual complacency. But for now, I am pleased to report that our son is to be Baptized and Chrismated in the Antiochian Orthodox Church this Sunday. [And you may be interested to know that his baptismal name is to be Benedict; while I am a fan of Alasdair MacIntyre and have been reading you for awhile, this is primarily a result of the time I spent working at a Benedictine Monastery and College a few years ago.]

I know your post was more about the stories we tell ourselves in general, and this email has taken a distinctively religious angle–pondering on the interaction between the story we tell ourselves about what is happening and the grace that we receive which seems (to my mind at any rate) to frame the edges of the narrative in which we may choose to participate either negatively or positively. As I said, if you think any of it is relevant, feel free to use it with any edits that seem appropriate. All Blessings of the upcoming Feast of the Nativity!

“Benedict” means blessing. After that, there is really nothing more to say but: Gloria in excelsis Deo!

I keep saying that for Christians, hope is not optimism, but the assurance that suffering is not in vain, that there is ultimate meaning, and redemption for all those who unite their suffering to faith in God. The story this reader tells is about hope.