Rod Dreher's Blog, page 521

The Church In The World

My friend Peter Leithart takes issue with my characterization of Russell Moore’s Erasmus lecture, taking care to say that he’s not sure if he is disagreeing with Moore’s point, or my characterization of it. He writes:

I haven’t listened to Moore’s lecture. From Dreher’s account, it sounds as pitch-perfect as most everything Moore has been saying and writing of late. But I want to register an objection to Dreher’s statement about trying to influence the culture. (I can’t tell whether I’m responding to Dreher or Moore or both.) My objection may sound like a quibble, but it’s not. It’s a friendly amendment, but a fundamental one.

The claim that Christians affect the world when they forget about trying to affect the world rests on a particular understanding of the gospel and the church’s mission. On this understanding, the gospel isn’t essentially about the world or its destiny. It’s about the destiny of souls, or the destiny of the church. The church has only a secondary interest in the world.

If that sounds too harsh a reading of Dreher’s comment, think about it back-to-front: If the gospel is a message about the world, then Christian couldn’t give up trying to influence the world, or culture, without giving up the gospel. If the gospel is about the acts of the Triune God to transform creation, we couldn’t give up trying to transform creation without calling a halt to mission.

More:

I doubt that Dreher (or Moore) actually believes we should give up trying to influence the culture. They call Christians to carry on a testimony with a countercultural lifestyle. But testimony to what? And to what end? Surely they both want our testimony to have some effect. The question to pose to the Religious Right is not whether we try to influence, but how. And there Dreher and Moore are exactly right: We influence the world (and should try to) by living faithful lives of prayer and witness, worship and service, by discipling our kids and loving our neighbors, living out the kingdom we proclaim.

Read the whole thing. 

I think Peter is right, and I regret the confusion that my wording caused. I took Russell Moore to be saying that the kind of truly world-changing effects we are likely to see come indirectly from trying to serve God with all our heart, soul, and mind. This does not mean that we cease to engage in pro-life activism, or religious liberty advocacy, or anything else like that. It only means that we should re-think and re-frame our approach. The early Benedictines didn’t set out to “save Europe from barbarism,” or anything like it. They simply responded to the times in which they lived by dedicating themselves to an intense, purposeful life in a community whose habits were centered around prayer. Everything else followed from that. 

I have known too many conservative Christians who think that the main work we have to do is to change the world through political action of one sort or another. For that matter, I was that sort of Christian for a long time, though if you had accused me of that, I would not have understood what you meant. I believed — or at least I lived as if I believed — that the main part of our work in the world was to apply Christian teachings to public matters, with the intent of creating a more just world. There is nothing wrong with that! But what I did not discover until I was put to the test, and failed it, is that I had not done the kind of deep, contemplative, even monastic work internally, and in community, that would have given me the strength to live and to advocate as I ought to have done. That is, I carried on as if my task was to get the arguments straight and apply them to politics. It was, and is, insufficient.

Don’t misunderstand: I am certain that there are many Christians engaged in public life who do live balanced, grounded lives of faith. God bless them. I was not one of these people, and I paid the price for my short-sightedness and lack of discipline and preparation. I thought I was strong, but in fact in my vanity and confusion, I had hidden my weaknesses from myself. I thought I was a lot stronger than I really was. Had I spent as much time in deep prayer and other Christian disciplines as I did on reading, talking, and thinking about politics (especially cultural politics), I would have been in a much better place, not only in terms of personal piety, but more importantly, as someone capable of bearing witness to the world.

It is not my calling to be a monk. But I see much more of Jesus Christ in the faces of the monks of Norcia than I do when I look in the mirror. My belief is that the more I try to live as they do, within the station in life God has called me to as a husband, father, layman, and writer, the more authentically and effectively I will be able to live out my vocation. It’s a matter of putting first things first, of rightly ordering things. The times in my life when I have been worst at my various callings are times when I was spending the least amount of time in prayer and contemplation, and the most amount of time on action.

Tony Esolen Contra Mundum

Many readers will have heard of Anthony Esolen, the robustly orthodox Catholic literature professor at Providence College, the Dominican-run college in Rhode Island. Prof. Esolen is the author of a number of books, including an exquisite translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is one of the three translations I recommend to anyone who asks me which is the best to read. He also writes frequently for orthodox Christian magazines like Touchstone and Crisis.

A couple of essays he published in Crisis this autumn sparked a huge row on his campus. The first criticizes the politics of “diversity” as they play out within a Catholic academic setting. The second poses the question to faithful Catholics (and other Christians): What will you do when the persecution comes?

Naturally, some students and faculty on Esolen’s campus were so outraged by his suggestion that “diversity” as they understand it is misguided and destructive that they have commenced a campaign to punish him, perhaps even to fire him. Now, Esolen is having to answer the very question he recently posed to his readers in the second essay. Tony Esolen agreed to answer a few questions from me via e-mail. Our conversation is reproduced below.

Rod Dreher: What is happening to you at Providence College? Explain the controversy.

Tony Esolen: It’s a long story — that is, there is a two-year-long back-story that does not involve me, but that does involve five Catholic colleagues who have been treated disgracefully by their secular colleagues or have suffered under the inquests of the “Bias Response Protocol.” I wrote the two articles in Crisis Magazine, one of them in April and the other a few weeks ago, as alerts.

Someone at school then got hold of them and, before I knew it, I was in the middle of outrage, coming mainly from a group of students who I believe have been misled by radical professors who have adopted politics as their god, whether these professors are aware of it or not. The students accused me of racism, despite my explicit statements in the articles that I welcome people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, and despite my appeal, at the end of one of the articles, that they and their secular professors should join us in that communion where there is neither Greek nor Jew, etc. They were angered by my suggestion, in one article, that there was something narcissistic in the common insistence that people should study THEMSELVES rather than people who lived long ago and in cultures far removed from ours by any ordinary criterion, and that there was something totalitarian in the impulse of the secular left, to attempt to subject our curriculum to the demands of a current political aim.

I spoke to one of the students, a friendly fellow whom I like very much, and explained to him that my quarrel was not with the students but rather with anti-Catholic professors and their attempts to hurt or to stifle my colleagues. It was a long and warm conversation, at the end of which I asked him to relay to his group that I was happy, even eager, to meet with them any time to talk about what it is like to be a minority student at Providence College. I also asked him to relay to our chief Diversity Officer my offer of a year ago, to start up a film series centered on themes of injustice and prejudice; one of the movies I specifically mentioned to him and to the Officer was the devastating One Potato Two Potato, about an interracial marriage. Since then, though, I have received NO phone calls and NO e-mails from any students; and yet word has spread around campus, possibly originating from the administration itself, that I have “blown off” the students, when exactly the reverse is true, and if anybody has been “blown off,” it has been me.

A week ago last Thursday I was tipped off by a student — not a member of the group in question — that there was going to be a protest on campus. That’s unheard of, at Providence College. About 60 students marched around, while a female student led them around, shouting slogans through a bullhorn. I think it was “What do we want? Inclusion! When do we want it? Now!” The noise could be heard all through the three-story building where my office is. I had thought they were going to come down the hall and knock on my door, but then they seem to have turned around and gone to the president’s office, where they demanded a response from him, and of course some of the students demanded that I be fired. In fact, the president had already met with those students the day before, and had heard that particular demand, though of course he said that I enjoyed academic freedom. It is likely that he knew of the demonstration beforehand, because the Vice President for Student Affairs actually took part in it. I should have guessed — because that morning somebody had written on the blackboard of my classroom, “Diversity is not a cult!”

The president then sent round to all the faculty, all the staff, all undergraduates, and all graduates the following letter:

Dear Members of the Providence College Community:

Yesterday I met with about 60 of our students who marched through campus and eventually came to Harkins Hall. Their primary source of complaint was the content of a pair of articles recently published by a member of our faculty, how it made them feel, and their frustration that there had been no response from the College or me. After dialoging with the students, I believe it is imperative for me to respond to their concerns.

Academic freedom is a bedrock principle of higher education. It allows professors the freedom to teach, write, and lecture without any restraint except the truth as they see it. It also gives them the freedom to express their opinions as citizens so long as it is clear that they do not represent the views of the institution with which they are affiliated. This freedom obviously extends to espousing views critical of their own college or university.

So when one of our professors writes an article accusing Providence College of having “Succumbed to the Totalitarian Diversity Cult,” he is protected by academic freedom and freedom of speech. But it must be understood that he speaks only for himself. He certainly does not speak for me, my administration, and for many others at Providence College who understand and value diversity in a very different sense from him.

Universities are places where ideas are supposed to be brought into conflict and questioned, so let us robustly debate the meaning of “diversity.” But we must also remember that words have an impact on those who hear or read them. When a professor questions the value of diversity, the impact on many students, faculty, and staff of color is to feel that their presence is not valued and that they are not welcome at Providence College. I have heard from many students about the pain that this causes. When student activists are described as “narcissists,” they understandably feel demeaned and dismissed. We need to be able to disagree with each other’s ideas without attaching labels to them or imputing motives that we cannot know.

At the same time that we value freedom in the pursuit of truth, let us value even more our fundamental imperative on a Catholic campus: to be charitable to one another. We may deeply disagree on any number of topics, but we should do so in such a way that respects those with whom we disagree.

Our Catholic mission at Providence College calls us to embrace people from diverse backgrounds and cultures as a mirror of the universal Church and to seek the unity of that Body in the universal love of Christ. Pope Francis has likened this communion to the weaving of a blanket, “woven with patience and perseverance, one which gradually draws together stitches to make a more extensive and rich cover.” He reminds us as well that what we seek is not “unanimity, but true unity in the richness of diversity.” Finally, Francis reminds us that “plurality of thought and individuality reflect the manifold wisdom of God when we draw nearer to truth with intellectual honesty and rigor, when we draw near to goodness, when we draw near to beauty, in such a way that everyone can be a gift for the benefit of others.” Amen.

Fr. Brian Shanley

My friends of course were outraged, and I was stunned — basically, I had been singled out and exposed before the whole faculty, very few of whom were probably even aware that there was such a thing as Crisis Magazine; and of course they and the students are not my audience when I write for Crisis or whatever. Then, as if that were not bad enough, the President met with faculty on Wednesday afternoon, and all they did for a solid hour was to revile the evil Professor Esolen, with a few old-fashioned liberals defending my right to express my opinions, and several of my stalwart friends from philosophy and theology defending me personally and criticizing the president for his decision and for his handling of related matters. When the president said that he believed that he had to act “for pastoral reasons,” they replied that it was a strange form of pastoral care that pits every member of a community against one.

And it is still not over. The faculty have circulated a “petition,” or a resolution, or something neither flesh nor fowl, to the effect that though we all have academic freedom, it has to be exercised responsibly, and reviling “some part of the PC faculty” that is “unabashed” in publishing articles that are racist, xenophobic, sexist, homophobic, and religiously chauvinistic. The petition has been signed by various faculty members and students. And STILL I hear that they are not satisfied, but are trying to figure out if they can use my articles to nail me for “bias” and hate, basically asserting that I am not capable of teaching certain categories of students — gay, female, and so forth.

I have been advised by a lawyer friend that that assertion itself is eo ipso defamatory.

The Good Guys in all this are meeting tonight to draft a stern response. All I want to do is to teach ALL STUDENTS the glories of three thousand years of poetry, art, theology, and philosophy; and NOT to have the campus riven by the politicians….

In your recent essay on persecution, you tell your Catholic readers that “the war is here,” and you identify four kinds of Catholics with regard to the persecution. How does the situation you’re in at Providence College illustrate your argument?

I have seen the soldiers come forth. I can give you the names of some of them; they can add a great deal, too; they have been either the victims or witnesses of recent forays into persecution. Chief among them is Prof. James Keating, who I believe will be eager to correspond with you.

I won’t say anything about Quislings at this time. But the college is peppered with Persecutors. One secular professor tipped his hand at the faculty meeting with the President. When the President asked what could be done to increase the diversity at Providence College — whatever that means; nobody has defined “diversity” — one of the art history professors replied, “Get rid of the response to the mission statement,” the requirement that prospective professors write in response to a statement of our Catholic identity. The crowd cheered.

The dirty not-so-secret is that the same people who for many years have loathed our Development of Western Civilization program — the focus of curricular hostility — also despise the Catholic Church and wish to render the Catholic identity of the college merely nominal. They are now also gunning for the DWC program, though they are so encapsulated in their secular monoculture, they have no idea what a tsunami of outrage they will bring on from the alumni if that program were ever to be eliminated.

In the other essay that stirred up your critics on campus, you laid into the way “diversity” is handled on your ostensibly Catholic college campus. In particular, you wrote: “But there is no evidence on our Diversity page that we wish to be what God has called us to be, a committedly and forthrightly Catholic school with life-changing truths to bring to the world. It is as if, deep down, we did not really believe it.” How have events there since you published that essay just over a month ago affected your views?

As I’ve said to people, authors don’t choose the titles for articles for Crisis Magazine; the editor does that, for the sake of “traffic” on the page. His title was a bit provocative. But everything that has happened since then has shown me, alas, that the editor saw more than I did, or more than I have been willing to admit. The irony would seem to be obvious: “How DARE you suggest that there is a totalitarian impulse in our behavior? You should be FIRED!” And then of course there is the brazen cheering of the faculty when it is proposed that we should not be Catholic after all.

The strange irony of it all is that I’m the one who believes that a wide diversity of cultures and of institutions is a good thing, and they really do not. I do not WANT all colleges and universities to be basically the same; they do.

You have tenure, right? They can’t get rid of you — or can they?

I am told by a friend that I can be fired despite my tenure, though that is very unlikely.

I’ve read your forthcoming book, Out Of The Ashes: Rebuilding America Culture — and it’s terrific. You are particularly hard-hitting about the corruption of college life in America. You say it is “an absolute necessity” for faithful Christians to build new colleges, because it is “not enough to reform the old.” What do you mean? Along those lines, what are the lessons of your present trial at Providence College?

Reforming the old schools will take an entire generation at least, if it is even possible; and in most cases the reform will be spotty. Many schools are beyond reform: they are filled with professors who have disdain for the Church, and their courses in the liberal arts are thoroughly secular, and not particularly impressive intellectually, at that — how can they be, when the greatest concern of human life is systematically ignored or belittled? Providence College can tip either way. I don’t know. My lawyer friend used to teach at PC and told me that that fight is lost. I believe it is not lost … but if I had money, I would give it straightaway to the real deals: Our Lady Seat of Wisdom (Ontario), Thomas More (NH), Wyoming Catholic, Dallas, Benedictine, etc.

What advice would you give to young Christian academics? To Christian parents preparing to send their kids to college?

It’s long past the time for administrators at Christian colleges to abandon the hiring policies that got us in this fix to begin with. We KNOW that there are plenty of excellent young Christian scholars who have to struggle to find a job. Well, let’s get them and get them right away. WE should be establishing a network for that purpose — so that if a Benedictine College needs a professor of literature, they can get on the phone to Ralph Wood at Baylor or me at Providence or Glenn Arbery at Wyoming Catholic, and say, “Do you have anybody?”

Christian parents — please do not suppose that your child will retain his or her faith after four years of battering at a secular college. Oh, many do — and many colleges have Christian groups that are terrific. But understand that it is going to be a dark time; and that everything on campus will be inimical to the faith, from the blockheaded assumptions of their professors, to the hook-ups, to the ignorance of their fellow students and their unconscious but massive bigotry. Be advised.

What would Dante say about the Christian in the contemporary university?

Fight. Be a cheerful warrior if you can be cheerful; all the better. But be a warrior.

Finally, I don’t know if you’ve read anything about my Benedict Option idea, but I found that Out Of The Ashes resonates strongly with the things I’ve been thinking and writing about. My book The Benedict Option will be out in mid-March. Your book comes out in January. Archbishop Charles Chaput has a great book, Strangers In A Strange Land, coming out in February, which says more or less the same things that you and I are saying, though in his own distinct voice. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these books are emerging independently of each other, at the same time. What’s going on in our culture now? If a Christian wishes to read the signs of the times, what message should he see?

I agree with you entirely, Rod. It is time to rebuild. There can be no more pretense of a culture around us that is Christian or that is even content with Christianity being in its midst. We must be for the world by being against the world: Athanasius contra mundum. The world is leveling every cultural institution in its path — we must save them or rebuild them from the dust, for the world’s own sake, and for God’s.

UPDATE: A reader sends the text of the anti-Esolen petition being circulated on Providence College’s campus, originating with the school’s Black Studies Program faculty:

Please Sign the Petition: Breaking the Silence

PROVIDENCE COLLEGE BLACK STUDIES PROGRAM·

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2016

Breaking the Silence, Faculty Statement

As PC Faculty, we pledge to break the silence around systemic racism and discrimination on Providence College’s campus. While we vigorously support free expression, recent publications on the part of PC faculty have involved racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic, and religiously chauvinist statements. The use of this type of language by people with power over students runs counter to the Catholic mission of Providence College, which aims “to reflect the rich diversity” of our world, and “extend a loving embrace to all.” As a diverse coalition of students have consistently highlighted, such statements are part of a broader pattern of racism, sexism and other forms of hate that are all too common not only on campus, but in the broader public culture. As professors who care deeply about the wellbeing, safety, and growth of our students, we are committed to combating racism and overcoming the hostile learning environment for too many of our students, while creating spaces where all of our students can engage in meaningful ways.

The professor-student relationship is marked by a significant imbalance in power and authority. Conferred by the institutions of which we are a part, professors possess the power and authority over students to determine the content of the syllabi, assign tasks, create supportive or destructive learning environments, and evaluate student performance, and we are able to do so largely free from direct oversight. Such a large degree of academic freedom — especially the power to grade — coupled with the right to free speech comes with professional standards and responsibilities. Some professors have openly, publicly, and unabashedly articulated a disdain for racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and religious inclusion. In contrast, we the undersigned, are committed to ensuring that marginalized groups are not further marginalized in the classroom, especially when many of our students already experience multiple forms of exclusion at Providence College. Furthermore, we commit to addressing anti-immigrant and anti-black racism on campus, creating a more diverse and inclusive community, and implementing student demands (http://www.thedemands.org/).

In a political context marked by renewed attempts to divide us along racial, ethnic, and gender lines, as well as renewed protests to promote equality and justice for all, we as PC faculty think it is vital to respond to these recent examples of hateful speech and actions. Along with PC students and students across the country, we stand on the side of equality and justice, and an inclusive campus for all.

Take a look at the specific “demands” the black faculty, students, and their allies are making of Providence College’s leadership. It is shockingly illiberal, and amounts to a thoroughgoing politicization and racialization of every aspect of campus life. This stuff is Orwellian. Any college or university that yields to these tyrants ceases to be a place where true liberal learning is possible, and instead becomes an ideological indoctrination factory.

A Question For ‘Affirming’ Churches

Yesterday this short 2014 reflection by Alan Jacobs turned up on my Twitter feed. In it, Jacobs poses a difficult theological and ecclesiological question to churches who are “on the journey,” as they say, towards affirming homosexuality.

Assume for the sake of argument that God has not changed His mind about sexuality. You can then evaluate that church’s changing position in one of three ways:

The church’s view on homosexuality was always determined by the social environment. Changing social and cultural circumstances enabled the church to understand the same set of facts in new ways, and evolve towards a more authentically Christian position, one that harmonizes Gospel fidelity with embracing and affirming homosexuality.
The church’s view on homosexuality has been authentic, but it is now changing under social and cultural pressure.
The church’s views of homosexuality have always been determined by the dominant culture. This is no different.

Jacobs writes:

Note that there is no way to read this story as one of consistent faithfulness to a Gospel message that works against the grain of a dominant culture.

And that’s the key issue, it seems to me — that’s what churches and other Christian organizations need to be thinking about. Either throughout your history or at some significant point in your history you let your views on a massively important issue be shaped largely by what was acceptable in the cultural circles within which you hoped to be welcome. How do you plan to keep that from happening again?

This reflection helps me to understand a dynamic that I have lately found difficult to articulate: why it is that when a church flips on homosexuality, everything is up for grabs. The other night in Waco, I was having a conversation with some Evangelical academics. One of them said that his local church, one in a denomination that has historically been conservative, is having “conversations” now about its stance on homosexuality. We know where this is going: once the “conversation” process starts, there is only one way it can end. Once you put something as fundamental as human sexuality up for fundamental reassessment, the fact that it’s even a matter of contention shows how far towards heterodoxy the church has gone.

Anyway, that professor said that he has changed his mind on the issue, and has adopted the more progressive stance. I told him that that was, in my view, incompatible with orthodox Christianity. His response to that was interesting: he said that his church does, in fact, hold to Christian orthodoxy — something that is true, in the broad tradition of his denomination (I’m being deliberately obscure to protect his privacy). What’s happening now with them, he said, is that they are expanding the definition of orthodoxy on matters sexual.

I disagreed. In the conversation around the table — which, I hasten to say, was friendly — I said that the overwhelming weight of Scripture and Tradition is binding on us. I agreed that the church itself, and Christian families and individuals, have treated homosexuals cruelly in the past, and that must stop. No question about that. But that does not mean one can or should change one’s theology, especially on so fundamental an issue, and one on which Scripture and Tradition can only affirm the contemporary liberal view if you torture them.

“It sounds like you’re saying that taking my position puts you outside of Christian orthodoxy,” said my new friend.

Yes, I said, that’s it.

We agreed to disagree, implicitly. Everybody around that table, I believe, was a good person, though clearly not everybody could be correct in his or her views on the matter at hand. I was grateful for the irenic nature of our conversation, which continued for a short while longer. I asserted that churches that affirm homosexuality don’t stop there. It opens the door for all kinds of revision. Besides, it does nothing to grow the church. Granted, a church that takes a righteous stand is correct in the eyes of God, even if it costs that church most of its congregation. But if what was considered righteous for almost 2,000 years among Christians is now considered bigotry, and the change happened in only one generation, it is not only fair, but necessary to ask: What makes us so sure that we’re right and every other generation of Christians back to the Apostolic Age were wrong? 

Jacobs’s pointed question at the end — How do you plan to keep that from happening again? — reveals why affirming homosexuality is the equivalent of removing the keystone that keeps the arch standing. A church that can rationalize such a radical revision of settled Christian doctrine is capable of rationalizing anything. The fact is, there is nothing that keeps this from happening again, should the social consensus on any other issue change, putting the Christian tradition on the losing side of cultural dominance. The Christian church’s view of human sexuality (not just homosexuality) and the body is so deeply rooted that you cannot simply change it when the cultural winds start blowing another way, without doing serious, perhaps fatal, damage to the authority of Scripture and Tradition. We are seeing that play out right now, and will see it over the next half century.

 

Every Church In Norcia Is Gone

The remains of the Church of the Madonna Addolorata in Norcia. Notice the inscription over the door, still intact. It’s from the Book of Lamentations. Translation from Latin: ‘He hath sent fire into my bones’ (Photo by the Monks of Norcia)

The latest from the Monks of Norcia:

Dear friends,

How can I even begin to describe the scene we witnessed yesterday in Norcia?

It was like those photographs of bombed-out churches from the Second World War. It reminded me of all those ruined monasteries one sees passing through the English countryside. It was an image of devastation. All the churches in Norcia are on the ground. Every single one. The roofs caved in on all of them; they are no more. What

remains of them are a few corners, a facade, a window with the sun coming through from the wrong side. Inside are “bare ruin’d choirs” as Shakespeare wrote of the destroyed monasteries in his time.

The wonder, the miracle, is that there were no casualties. All the fear and anxiety following the first few earthquakes now seem a providential part of God’s mysterious plan to clear the city of all inhabitants. He spent two months preparing us for the complete destruction of our patron’s church so that when it finally happened we would watch it, in horror but in safety, from atop the town.

Is it over yet? We do not know. These are mysteries which will take years — not days or months — to understand. We watch and pray all together on the mountainside for Norcia and for the world. The priests go into town to visit the sick and the homeless. We are grateful for your prayers, as ever.

In Christ,

Fr. Benedict

Subprior

This is powerful stuff. Every church in the town is destroyed, but the monks survived because they headed for the hills outside of town when the first earthquake hit back in August. Our poor, brave, faithful monks of Norcia are a sign to the whole church in ways I did not anticipate.

UPDATE: From a sermon Father Richard Cipolla, a close friend of Norcia, gave yesterday, on the Feast of Christ the King. Having heard the news of the latest earthquake, Fr. Cipolla wrote to Fr. Benedict in Norcia yesterday:

So I sent an email to Fr. Benedict, one of my spiritual sons whom I brought to Norcia years ago and watched him being tonsured and went to his ordination where the whole town came out and ate and drank in celebration.  “Is there damage? What is going on?”  His reply: ”Yes, damage much worse. But we are ok. Much to tell you but just pray. I am well and God continues to purify us and bring very good things.”

More:

From the viewpoint of the traditional Catholic these monks were ideal, did all the right things, the right Mass, restoring the monastery in a beautiful and tasteful way, understanding the role of St Benedict in the Church, making good beer to support what they were doing.  All that taken away by what some would call lawyers call “an act of God”.  An act of God.  What does this have to do with the feast of Christ the King?  This feast was instituted by Pius XI to remind the Catholic faithful of the reality and centrality of Jesus Christ in their faith against the secularism and nationalism growing at that time between the two World Wars.  It was Pope Paul VI who changed the name and date of the feast.  He moved it in the Novus Ordo calendar to the last Sunday of the Year before Advent, to emphasize the relationship with the end of time when all will be all in Christ, and he renamed it Christ the King of the Universe.  Both Popes understood this feast as a counterthrust to the strong forces of secularism that threatened to destroy that civilization which we call Western civilization and which was shot through and through with the Christian faith. It was a Christian culture, not perfect by any means, but nevertheless a Christian culture.

The gesture of both Popes, while noble, did not recognize the reality of the situation.  The reality of the situation, and this is much more clear today than in 1925 or in 1972:  Christian civilization in the West is in fact dead. There are cultural and religious vestiges of this civilization still extant:  but the center is dead.  Much could be said about the wonderful aspects and content of that past civilization and the darkness of that same civilization.  But that is all commentary on the past because that civilization does not exist any longer.  The failure of the traditional movement in the Catholic Church for the past half century has been precisely to refuse to acknowledge this death and instead to work to restore certain elements in that culture: faith, morality, liturgy, family and so forth.  That is energy badly spent.  Those Catholics who love the Tradition of the Church, the truth of the Gospel, must finally abandon the past, must finally reject circling the wagons, and look forward to and participate in the rebirth of Catholic tradition and culture.  Someone said to me after a Solemn Traditional Mass I celebrated in New York two evenings ago:  “It’s time to circle the wagons”.  I said quite quickly and sharply:  “Absolutely not.  Be open, be joyful in your faith and let the dead bury the dead!”

And:

Traditionally minded Catholics must face the fact that Christianity has nothing to do with the present political situation in this country.  In fact, it has had nothing to do with Christianity for a long time, if ever.  When one is faced with a presidential election  where both candidates are radically post-Christian, to say the least, then one must face the reality of the situation.  But Father, but Father, you say, what about the Supreme Court?  Can you imagine any of the saints putting their trust in appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States, especially when it was a practicing Catholic who wrote the majority opinion that made abortion legal in this country?  The Christian culture in this country is dead, and what we have to do is to figure out not only how to survive in this situation, how to pass on our faith to our children, how to make them as wise as serpents and gentle as doves in the lives that they will lead—but ultimately how to make sense of the feast of Christ the King of the Universe in which the universe itself has been evacuated of ultimate meaning by the all demanding self-centeredness of a culture that makes Jerry Seinfeld look altruistic and thoughtful?

And how can we make sense of Christ the King in a Church whose strength has been sucked out by her own hierarchy and priests who are all too happy to live in a post-Christian world that is unhampered by both truth and personal sacrifice? We here make sense of Christ the King in this celebration of the Mass in the rite whose roots are in the Catholic Tradition, roots in Christ. What we do here together, priest and people is one of the antidotes and answers to the crisis in the Church and the world. And the re-formation of Catholic culture will happen quietly wherever the family says the Rosary not as an act of penance and discipline but as an act of love, wherever Lauds and Vespers are sung in this church not because of a schedule but because of an act of love, whenever men meet before dawn to adore Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, whenever people gather for prayer quietly and hopefully, wherever acts of kindness are truly spontaneous, when Classical education is not a slogan but rather a joyful attempt to restore all things in Christ, wherever the great monuments of art, music and literature of Christian culture are preserved, not as in a museum, but for the love of God– and this parish, Deo volente, will be one of those places.  And all of this with no Traddie angst or fear or hardness of heart.  At this point you think that I am going to tell you, amidst all of this, how to make sense of the feast of Christ the King today?  No.  I just once again quote Fr. Benedict’s email.  There is more damage, but we are safe.  We are being purified.

Read the whole thing. This is a Traditional Catholic priest speaking to a parish of Traditional Catholics. But if you ask me, he is speaking to all of us Christians. So is Father Benedict in Norcia. So is God. Let he who has ears to hear, hear. And do not weep, for the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed.

The Benedict Option & ‘Faithful Presence Within’

I received over the weekend a very thoughtful e-mail from a college professor, which I reproduce below:

Like you, I too was frustrated by Claes Ryn’s piece and the general obstinacy of people in getting the Benedict Option.  The problems seem to be many:

1) A refusal to admit defeat.  A lot of the older culture warriors are like those Japanese soldiers on Pacific atolls after World War II who never heard of the atomic bombs and the Emperor’s surrender.  Moreover, they seem to think that the proper response to the utter failure of a political strategy is to double down on it and keep banging our heads against the same wall.  It won’t work.  The culture is so much further gone than they think–they can’t see the import of Memories Pizza and Indiana and Arkansas.

That’s where your point about being the true Resistance kicks in.  Havel’s anti-politics is a way to keep fighting the war.  It’s also a way to stay true to our principles, unlike the sell-outs to the current nominee, which leads to….

2) Where your treasure is, there your heart is also.  Moreover, no man can serve two masters, and it’s pretty clear that a bunch of the older culture warriors have put mammon or Caesar ahead of God.  When Ben Carson can say bald-facedly that we have to put aside our Christian principles to get the job done, or when Falwell Jr and Dobson et al can toss aside all scruple in support of Trump, they not only ignore their faith, they also cheapen it and appear hypocrites in the eyes of the world and of prospective believers.  That’s not to say that one can’t take the Eric Metaxas line that the alternative is even worse, but it is to say that one can’t sugar-coat how awful things are and how badly they pull against Christian principles.

If our choice is between losing power and losing faith, we must take losing power any day.  What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?

3) A complacency about the state of the church.  It’s bad enough that Ryn et al. are willfully blind to how bad things are out in the world and how things have failed.  They also think things are hunky-dory in the church or at least their own part of it.  Well, sorry to say, the evidence is strongly to the contrary.  Sunday-morning-only feel-good MTD is no match for our culture.  Sure, at the end of the day the Ben Op boils down to “Be the Church,” but we are so, so, so far from the world of the Tipi Loschi and the monks of Norcia yet oblivious to how poorly it is going and how much more interior work we have to do.  Your alarmism is far preferable to their complacency.  That is not just for monastics, but for all believers.

We all need to be far more intentional about our spiritual life, and far more dedicated to building community and planning for the Flood that is upon us, daubing our arks with pitch and preparing to stay afloat.

This is where I think you need to be more overt: the Ben Op is indeed a shift in emphasis, in tone, in focus, and in energy.  Sure, fight some public battles.  But check out of the culture far more, care about the politics far less, direct our time, talent, and treasures far more to religious and cultural matters than political ones.  Some inward turn is necessary, and our outward turn should be more about religious witness and missionary activity than straight politics, and our straight politics should be more about religious liberty than anything else.

I think that checking out of the culture far more than most of us do is terribly important.  People of Ryn’s age have no clue how badly their own grandchildren and nephews and nieces are being formed by it, and how that is the most immediate threat–we have met the enemy and he is us.  The law could leave us alone tomorrow and we’d still be in the deepest, gravest peril from the culture, mindset, and temptation to go along to get along.  We have to be self-conscious about being a creative minority, not a majority about to be absorbed into the Borg.

4) A blindness to the anti-religion of the Zeitgeist.  What you really have to see is that most younger people have substituted a new religion for Christianity.  MTD as you note is one way of viewing it.  But for a lot of people, SJW is itself a religion–they are not really willing to tolerate, but rather go on witch-hunts to purify themselves of heretics in their midst.  Lots of people think they are Catholic or Protestant but are really MTD or SJW.  And the subversion from within the faith is in some ways worse–traitors and infiltrators are more dangerous than uniformed combatants.

Related to this is a blindness of the scale of the problem.  Winning one presidential election wouldn’t do it.  We need to be settling in for decades, probably centuries, staying faithful and laying the groundwork for a later renaissance.  This is like the Christians hanging on under the Ottoman dhimmitude or the Jews in Bablyonian Captivity, not a few years of civil warfare.

I think it’s absolutely fascinating that the split over the Ben Op seems to correlate with age and generation.  The older generation is still refighting the last battle and can’t believe the tectonic plates have moved even in the last few years.  The younger folks, your generation and below, see how bad things are and that the pace of change accelerates.

5) Removing the logs from our own eyes. Yet another problem with the culture-war framing is that it focuses only on the threat the Left poses to traditional believers–the SJWs and MTDs.

But we are far too complacent about problems that either lean right or have no particular political valence. Materialism and worldly ambition are false gods that tempt all Americans, perhaps especially those on the right. And the dangers of social media, distraction, fast-paced and overly mobile modern life, and all-consuming technology threaten our peace, prayerfulness, and attentiveness. Excessive media consumption is a problem not only because of Hollywood indoctrination, but even more because it rots the brain into passivity and lassitude.

Yet the anti-Ben Op folks seem either to ignore or downplay the spiritual peril we are in by going with the flow. Because it doesn’t fit into a culture-war narrative as a problem of the Left, we minimize the importance of resisting these pathologies of modernity.

The Ben Op seeks to open our eyes to what seems natural and inevitable to most Americans, so we can again see clearly. We must first heal ourselves in order to have a strong foundation for helping others. In short, we forget how spiritually ill we all really are.

I am deeply grateful to the professor for these insights. Last Friday, James Davison Hunter gave a talk at the Baylor conference I attended, in which he criticized what he called “the Benedictine Option” as a mistake. I was still on the road to Waco when he spoke, and unfortunately didn’t get to hear the speech. Friends who did told me about it. At the risk of sounding nit-picky, it irritates me when people dismiss the Ben Op but don’t even get the name right. That tells me that they only have a superficial understanding of what I’m talking about.

I don’t want to make the same mistake by criticizing Prof. Hunter’s talk without having heard it. Nevertheless, I do feel that it’s fair to make a general remark, based on several accounts given to me by people who were there. Hunter — a scholar I greatly respect, and whose work has taught me a lot — criticized what he perceived to be the withdrawal element of the Ben Op, positing instead his own model of “faithful presence within” institutions of the world.

Hunter introduced that concept in his 2010 book To Change The World, which reflects on Christian prospects in a world growing ever more hostile to Christianity. Unfortunately my copy of the book is in storage, so I can’t pull it out and look at all the passages I underlined. As I recall, Hunter’s basic thesis is to acknowledge that Christianity has failed to transform the culture, and has failed in part because Christians have not grasped that elites drive cultural change. He explodes the idea that Christians can entirely transform the modern world (as it is often said among Evangelicals, “take back America for Christ”), but also denounces the “neo-Anabaptists” for wanting to create “utopian enclaves.” Hunter doesn’t offer a strong solution, because he (rightly, in my view) sees that the solution is by no means clear. It will have to be worked out by the church. He advocates maintaining a “faithful presence within” the world: that is, staying engaged with the world, but bearing witness as faithful Christians.

Now, with the qualification that I did not hear his Friday address, and may get this wrong (I invite correction from anyone who was there), I think that the Benedict Option falls somewhere between Hunter’s categories of “neo-Anabaptist” and “faithful presence within.”

There is no question that the Ben Op calls for a much greater sense of withdrawal than the church has today. The idea is not to create a “utopian enclave,” as if that kind of thing could exist, but rather to live within stronger boundaries between the church and the world, for the sake of better Christian formation, both of individuals and local communities. Most of us will continue to have a “faithful presence within” the structures of the world outside the church. The Ben Op intends to shore up the “faithful” part, because the church has failed miserably to do so. The current moment is an “apocalypse” in the strict sense of an “unveiling”: a revelation of the nakedness and powerlessness of the church before the modern world. This is simple reality.

Does that mean we withdraw from political life? No. But we have to change our emphasis. As my correspondent said in point #3 above, we have been so active in engaging the world that we have neglected to care for our own most important polis, the church. The Benedict Option would be necessary even if Republicans held the White House and Congress, and gay marriage had never come about. Back in 2004, when all of this was the case, historian Robert Louis Wilken wrote:

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture.

I believe this to be true. As I see it, the Benedict Option is an affirmative response to Wilken’s insight. As you will see when the book comes out in March, the Ben Op assumes that most Christians will be trying to maintain a “faithful presence within;” the Ben Op (which is just my name for the church being what the church should be) intends to help them to just that. In order to maintain that faithful presence, they, their families, and their church communities have to withdraw from the mainstream culture far more than most of us do.

Second, the Ben Op assumes that the decision on whether or not to maintain a faithful presence within is out of our hands to a degree not fully appreciated by most Christians today. We may wish to maintain a faithful presence in the institutions of culture, but that doesn’t mean the culture wants us there, or will let us remain without crossing lines that we cannot in good conscience cross. What then? At the present moment, the literature professor, Dante scholar, and orthodox Catholic Anthony Esolen is under severe attack at his own institution, Providence College, for having recently written a couple of essays criticizing the present conception of “diversity” on his Catholic campus, and reflecting on the persecutorial phase of our culture (here’s one, and here’s the other). Protesting students and even some faculty are attempting to drive him out of the college for wrongthink. They may not succeed, not if tenure means anything, but they are likely to succeed in making his life there hell, such that he would love to shake the dust off his feet and get out of town.

But where would he go? I can think of a few colleges that would love to have him on faculty. Ten years from now, will they? Besides, what about the younger orthodox Christian scholars who, unlike Tony Esolen and James Davison Hunter, don’t have tenure? If they disclose their faith commitments, they may not be let into the institution in the first place. The Benedict Option says the church has to reckon with this present reality, which is only going to get much worse in the near future.

I think one big conceptual difference between the way I see things and the way folks like Hunter and my friend Ryan T. Anderson see things is that I am more pessimistic than they are about where we are and what can be meaningfully accomplished under current conditions. I don’t believe faithful presence within is possible without massively more formation and discipleship than churches offer now — nor do I believe that faithful presence itself will be possible in many institutions for much longer. Though they are still important to make, I don’t believe rational arguments help us much these days.

When I think of the position of orthodox Christians in this culture, I think of the monks and the nuns of Norcia, kneeling on the piazza by the statue of St. Benedict, praying in the presence of the ruins of the basilica brought down by the earthquake over the weekend. The façade is all that remains; the rest is rubble. We are left with only our faith, our memories of what was, and each other. What do we do next? How do we begin the rebuilding, a project that will take decades, maybe even centuries? That is the question before us.

Here’s a point to consider, especially in light of my correspondent’s commentary. Because earthquakes earlier this year made the basilica and the monastery unstable, the monks had the good sense to flee outside the town’s walls and set up camp in tents on the side of a nearby mountain. This is why they are alive today. If the monks had been maintaining a faithful presence within the basilica on Sunday morning when the earthquake struck, they would all be dead.

Una delle immagini simbolo di questo disastro. #terremoto #ItalyEarthquake pic.twitter.com/cfMFSUaR0b

— Giuseppe (@imgiuseppes) October 30, 2016

View From Your Table

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

That’s my little dog Roscoe, being teased with a piece of meat by my son Lucas. I had to jack the photo up with all kinds of artificial manipulation, just so you could see Roscoe’s face. He’s as black as night, and usually photographs as a blur.

Benedictine Stability: They Shall Not Be Moved

Today in the Divine Liturgy, I prayed almost constantly for the people of Norcia, especially the monks. Like countless people around the world today who have been touched by the ministry and witness of the Benedictine monks there, and by the hospitality of the Norcini, I continue to reel from the earthquake’s destruction this morning of the 14th century basilica. It’s hard to comprehend that it’s gone.

The Basilica is destroyed… #terremoto – https://t.co/prlK0HOqtg

— The Monks of Norcia (@monksofnorcia) October 30, 2016

Only a week ago, Cardinal Robert Sarah, the head of the Roman Catholic Church’s Congregation for Divine Worship, visited Norcia, and said that it and the monastery remind him of Bethlehem. If you’ve been to Norcia to pray with the monks, you know exactly what he means. Something miraculous has been happening in that ancient mountain village where Saints Benedict and Scholastica were born, something that began in the year 2000, with the reopening of the monastery nearly two centuries after Napoleon’s laws closed it and dispersed its monks. The congregation of the Norcia monks restored Latin plainchant, and celebrated the mass in Latin. And they grew! If you’ve been to Norcia, you cannot help seeing the light and the warmth embodied in those faithful monks. It is deeply attractive.

This past February, when I was visiting, in conversation with Brother Ignatius Prakarsa, I asked him about how cloistered monks evangelize, if at all. This short passage from The Benedict Option contains his answer:

“The structure of life in the monastery, the things you do every day, is not just pointless repetition,” said Brother Augustine Wilmeth, 25, whose red Viking-like beard touches his chest. “It’s to train your heart and your spirit so that when you need it, when you don’t feel strong enough to will yourself to get through a difficult moment, you fall back on your training. You know that you wouldn’t be strong enough to do it if you hadn’t been kind of working at it and putting all the auxiliary things in place.”

In other words, ordering one’s actions is really about training one’s heart to love and to desire the right things, the things that are real, without having to think about it. It is acquiring virtue as a habit.

In the grand scheme of things, these habits are what the Lord can use to save the world. You never know how God will act through 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 guestmaster. 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 he meets them on the church steps later, visitors often tell Brother Ignatius 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 is only a reflection of God. In ourselves, we are nothing.”

I am confident — confident — that the Light of Christ will shine through those monks, piercing this present darkness as never before. This morning in the Orthodox liturgy, the New Testament reading was from St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. It contained these lines:

And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated.  Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me;  but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.  For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

Look at this image of Father Basil this morning, in the piazza of Norcia, steps away from the basilica shortly after its collapse:

From a video image/Twitter

There is a man driven to his knees, on the piazza, surrounded by nuns, the elderly, and someone in a wheelchair. The weak, the frightened, those without a roof over their heads. What did the priest-monk Basil do? He went to his knees to pray. This is the fruit of the spiritual training, day and night, that Brother Augustine talks about — the training that simply is the Benedictine life. This is the core of the Benedict Option: building up the daily habits of prayer, asceticism, and charity that allow the Holy Spirit to make us resilient. If you think losing their basilica and monastery is going to stop the Monks of Norcia, you badly underestimate them. All the prayer, worship, fasting and brotherhood they’ve been living these last 16 years, this ordering their lives around the service of Christ, has rooted them deeply in the faith. This terrible calamity shows their human weakness, but it also will reveal their inner strength, for as God said to St. Paul, “My power is made perfect in weakness.”

I am hearing from a lay source close to Norcia that all the churches in the town may be gone. We will get confirmation on this later. Never forget — never, ever forget — that from that little town, four years after the Roman Empire in the West formally collapsed, St. Benedict came into the world, in the very house over which the now-ruined basilica was built. It took centuries, but look what God did from that mustard seed of faith. He is going to do it again with the mustard seed of the Norcia monks. Just you wait till my book comes out in March. You will see, in the words of these brave and faithful men of God, what their message is to the world, and why we all need to hear it in these chaotic times.

I know a lot of you are scared now about what’s going on in the world. I hear it every day from folks in private e-mails and texts. I heard it in conversations at the Christian academic conference at Baylor last week. I heard it this morning in coffee hour conversations after church. And I’ve heard it from emails that have been coming in today. I feel it too. But look at Father Basil in that image this morning. There you have the Benedictine virtue of stability made manifest in the ruins. There is a spiritual battle underway now, and these monks are on the front line. Help them if you can.

Norcia: The Basilica Is Destroyed

Lord, have mercy! From Father Benedict, subprior of the Norcia monastery:

Around 7:40 AM, a powerful earthquake struck close to Norcia. The monks are all safe, but our hearts go immediately to those affected, and the priests of the monastery are searching for any who may need the Last Rites.

The Basilica of St. Benedict, the historic church built atop the birthplace of St. Benedict, was flattened by this most recent quake. May this image serve to illustrate the power of this earthquake, and the urgency we monks feel to seek out those who need the Sacraments on this difficult day for Italy.

Relying, as ever, on your prayers and support,

Fr. Benedict

Subprior

He sent a second missive just now. It reads:

After offering spiritual support to the people in town following this morning’s intense earthquake, the entire monastic community is together again at our mountain monastery which overlooks a now fractured Norcia. Messages are pouring in from all over the world, and we are grateful for your prayers for us and for the people affected.

Because we want to be present to the people of Norcia, and also due to the poor cellular and internet connectivity this emergency has created in the area, we will be difficult to reach by phone or e-mail for a while. We want to assure our friends and family that we are safe, and also that we are doing everything possible to help to our suffering neighbors. Please continue to pray Norcia.

More photos, these via Marco Sermarini:

Sunday morning view from the piazza, Norcia (Photo via Marco Sermarini)

Friends, I have no words this morning, at least nothing to add to Fr. Benedict’s note. That basilica has withstood so many earthquakes over the centuries. But not this year’s. Please, please pray for the monks, for the people of Norcia, and for the people of Italy who are suffering so terribly. This latest quake was so strong that Marco and his family, in the coastal city of San Benedetto del Tronto, had to run out of their own house. Marco says all over his city today, priests said mass outside their churches.

View from the piazza this morning. The monk you see is Father Benedict Father Basil:

And:

Una delle immagini simbolo di questo disastro. #terremoto #ItalyEarthquake pic.twitter.com/cfMFSUaR0b

— Giuseppe (@imgiuseppes) October 30, 2016

This story from CBS Sunday Morning last year shows you what the world has lost this morning:

The monks of Norcia need us all now more than ever. Please pray, and please, please give generously to the rebuilding.

View From Your Table

Waco, Texas

Behold, my Saturday morning breakfast, at the Waco outlet of the great, great Torchy’s Tacos, a small chain, mostly in Texas. On the left, migas (scrambled eggs, crispy tortilla strips, green chiles, avocado, cheese, pico de gallo, on flour tortilla); on the right, the #3 breakfast taco (chorizo, scrambled eggs, and cheese). I put the hottest sauce in the joint on top. That coffee of theirs is top-notch too.

Patrick Deneen and I ate there on Thursday night. Then I ate there for breakfast with Alan Jacobs (who introduced me to Torchy’s) on Friday morning. The chef or the manager, not sure which, walked out and thanked me for returning. I went there for supper on Friday night, but the wait was an hour long, so, sadly, I went elsewhere. As I was chowing down this morning, the chef/manager came out and shook my hand.

If I could have, I would have sat there quietly reading all morning and waited for lunch.

Alas, I had to drive back to Baton Rouge. I’m wo’ slap out. Made a stop in Houston to buy tortillas and such at Central Market. Nothing makes my kids happier than coming home with 200 CM tortillas in a sack.

Here’s some good news. My pal Ralph C. Wood, the world’s greatest Southern Baptist now that Jerry Clower is with us no more, is coming back to St. Francisville for his fourth Walker Percy Weekend in 2017. He told me on Friday that he wants to give a talk on this topic: “Flannery O’Connor and the Benedict Option”. Is that great news, or what?

No Bigots Need Book An Airbnb Room

Airbnb sent this out this morning to all its members and customers:

The Airbnb Community Commitment

Earlier this year, we launched a comprehensive effort to fight bias and discrimination in the Airbnb community. As a result of this effort, we’re asking everyone to agree to a Community Commitment beginning November 1, 2016. Agreeing to this commitment will affect your use of Airbnb, so we wanted to give you a heads up about it.

What is the Community Commitment?

You commit to treat everyone—regardless of race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age—with respect, and without judgment or bias.

How do I accept the commitment?

On or after November 1, we’ll show you the commitment when you log in to or open the Airbnb website, mobile or tablet app and we’ll automatically ask you to accept.

What if I decline the commitment?

If you decline the commitment, you won’t be able to host or book using Airbnb, and you have the option to cancel your account. Once your account is canceled, future booked trips will be canceled. You will still be able to browse Airbnb but you won’t be able to book any reservations or host any guests.

What if I have feedback about the commitment?

We welcome your feedback about the Community Commitment and all of our nondiscrimination efforts. Feel free to read more about the commitment. You can also reach out to us at allbelong@airbnb.com.

The Airbnb Team

What does this mean?:

You commit to treat everyone—regardless of race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age—with respect, and without judgment or bias.

Does it mean being kind and polite to all? If so, very few people would have trouble signing it. I certainly could sign it. But I don’t think that’s what it means. I read it as an affirmation that in every circumstance judgment or bias is wrong, and to sign it means a commitment to that belief. I could not sign it. By requiring me to sign it to participate in Airbnb, the company is passing judgment on my religious beliefs, and committing itself to bias against me and others who hold them.

I can understand Airbnb wanting to police the views and actions of those who rent out rooms to the public through it. I think it’s overreach. I mean, I think people who are welcoming others into their home should have total freedom to pick and choose their guests, even if they do so from bias. In fact, if a potential Airbnb host doesn’t want me in his house because I am a white Christian, I don’t want to be in the house of a person like that anyway. If an Airbnb host only wants to make her property open to women, or LGBTs, or Muslims, or any other designation, I believe Airbnb should grant them that right out of respect to their sovereignty over their home. So, I disagree with Airbnb requiring this policy of its hosts. But it is defensible.

What is not defensible is Airbnb expecting the same of its customers. If a customer behaves badly, in a rude, disrespectful manner to his or her hosts and their property, then they should be banned from the service. But by requiring customers to opt-in on a broad anti-discrimination statement as the price for doing business with them, Airbnb is setting up a de facto barrier to participation for religious traditionalists.

The ways around that are

a) to sign it with mental reservation,

b) to sign it as a mere formality, not considering yourself bound by it, or

c) to read the commitment as meaning merely that you will be polite and fair to all, and/or you read it as applying strictly to your interactions with the Airbnb host and other guests — both of which are reasonable asks

The first option strikes me as dishonest, a rationalization. Sure, you can say that you will treat people one way, despite what your think privately. Most people do that anyway. It’s called having manners. It’s called courtesy. If that were all that were being asked by this commitment, that would be one thing. But in the end, holding certain beliefs will require you to treat people differently in some circumstances. The line between what you believe and how you behave at some point converges. Airbnb, for example, believes in non-discrimination. But it believes in it so strongly, and believes in a particular definition of non-discrimination so strongly, that it is now willing to treat people differently — to discriminate — out of obedience to its principles. There is no way to be completely neutral about this.

The second option lacks integrity.

The third might be OK, but it strikes me as fairly legalistic. I don’t think that Airbnb would be satisfied, for example, with its customers being kind and respectful to all, but also opposing allowing transgendered people to use the bathrooms, locker rooms, and dressing rooms of their preferred gender, in all places. I believe that Airbnb would consider holding that opinion to be a violation of the commitment it asks customers to sign. If that’s true, then orthodox Christians and other social conservatives could not in good conscience sign it.

What do you think?

I still can’t get over how bizarre it is for a business to police its customers like this, not wanting to do business with people who hold the “wrong” views. I’m about to check out from a Courtyard Marriott. What if in the future, hotels like this compelled their customers to sign such a commitment? There would be few places that religious conservatives and others who didn’t accept the LGBT line could stay when they travel. It’s not hard to imagine gay activists in the near future instituting a corporate campaign to get “Fairness Pledges” to be part of the business model of hotels and other businesses. If they succeed, then somebody will need to come up with The Religious Conservative Motorist Green Book.

So, let’s get this straight: the state can force a florist to arrange flowers for a same-sex wedding, in violation of her religious beliefs. And if this Airbnb policy is legal, a homestay network can force its customers to affirm certain beliefs to have the ability to purchase its service. Crazy times.