Rod Dreher's Blog, page 523

Citizen Trump: A Hollow Man

The portrait of Trump that emerges from hours and hours of recorded interviews with a biographer is cinematic. What is this man’s Rosebud? It is terrifying to think of a person like this holding supreme executive power in the most powerful nation in the world. Excerpts:

The intense ambitions and undisciplined behaviors of Mr. Trump have confounded even those close to him, especially as his presidential campaign comes to a tumultuous end, and he confronts the possibility of the most stinging defeat of his life. But in the more than five hours of conversations — the last extensive biographical interviews Mr. Trump granted before running for president — a powerful driving force emerges: his deep-seated fear of public embarrassment.

The recordings reveal a man who is fixated on his own celebrity, anxious about losing his status and contemptuous of those who fall from grace. They capture the visceral pleasure he derives from fighting, his willful lack of interest in history, his reluctance to reflect on his life and his belief that most people do not deserve his respect.

In the interviews, Mr. Trump makes clear just how difficult it is for him to imagine — let alone accept — defeat.

“I never had a failure,” Mr. Trump said in one of the interviews, despite his repeated corporate bankruptcies and business setbacks, “because I always turned a failure into a success.”

The interviews were conducted in 2014 by Michael D’Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who later wrote a biography of Mr. Trump called “The Truth About Trump.”

More:

Despite his reluctance, Mr. Trump reveals himself over and over, in the stories he tells, in his wide-ranging answers to questions and at times in casual, seemingly throwaway lines.

Who does he look up to? “I don’t have heroes,” Mr. Trump said.

Does he examine history to better understand the present? “I don’t like talking about the past,” he said, later adding, “It’s all about the present and the future.”

Who earns his respect? “For the most part,” he said, “you can’t respect people because most people aren’t worthy of respect.”

Not all that surprising, but you can listen to the actual audio. What kind of person looks up to no one as a model to emulate? A pathological narcissist, is who. He told the interviewer — again, you can listen to the audio — that he doesn’t want to be too reflective about his life, because he might not like what he sees. More:

Of this, however, Mr. Trump is certain: He needs the world’s attention and its embrace, a life force that has sustained him for decades.

He recalled the feeling of walking into a giant room and watching as the crowd surrounded him, as if he were a magnet attracting everything around him.

Mr. D’Antonio asked him when that first started. “Long time ago,” Mr. Trump replied. “It’s always been that way.”

Did it ever unnerve him, the author wondered.

“No,” Mr. Trump said. “I think what would unnerve me is if it didn’t happen.”

Read the whole thing. “But Hillary” doesn’t come close to compensating for these character deficits. There is no person there, only fear and appetite. There is nothing that restrains him: no respect for God, no respect for anyone else, nothing but contempt for the weak and rage at anyone and anything that makes him feel small. Think how easy it would be for foreign leaders to manipulate a man like that.

How a Christian can support putting a man like this in power, I cannot imagine. I seriously can’t. It’s not simply that there’s no character or conscience in the man; it’s that there is no soul. It’s as if he were perfectly possessed by a malignant spirit.

It is not going to go well for our country after he loses humiliatingly, and receives his comeuppance on a global stage. Read what he did to his wife Ivana when she surprised him by being a better skier. Like I said, cinematic.

UPDATE: Commenter Stephen S., who teaches high schoolers, made a profound observation in the comments section below. In Dante’s Inferno, all of the damned are two-dimensional men and women. There is nothing there but the facsimile of a person. They loved their sins so much that they became them. They have no free will anymore; that is what it means to be damned. They are nothing but appetite, and have lost forever communion with God. This is Donald Trump, or at least the Trump we see in these tapes, and in public. He’s one of the living damned, and doesn’t even know it. Stephen says that Trump needs our prayers, not our votes. It’s true.

A Politics Of Localism

That’s a short report from Catholic News Service about the recent Front Porch Republic conference. The print version — not a transcript, but a somewhat different piece! — is here. Excerpts:

Early in the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump and then-candidate Bernie Sanders were called “populist,” but neither represented a viable form of populist politics because theirs was “all fury and no love,” said a speaker at a recent academic conference.

The sixth annual Front Porch Republic conference at the University of Notre Dame was not affiliated with any political party or religious group, but attracted many Christians who want to revitalize a local community culture in an effort to stave off what Pope Francis has termed a “globalization of indifference.”

Bill Kauffman, a political writer who spoke about “Populism and Place” at the conference in early October, told Catholic News Service in Rome that a healthy political culture must focus on the local community — something that no major candidate today is doing.

“Any healthy populism has to be grounded in the particular, in the love of one’s neighbors, of one’s town, of one’s community, and it’s a defense of that community, of those neighbors, against remote rule,” Kauffman explained.

More:

The conference participants “are really very worn out with the conventional political discourse in this country,” said Elias Crim, founder of Solidarity Hall, a website and publishing house specializing in topics related to Catholic social teaching.

The participants, he said, “have always been ‘third way’ people” who do not wholly identify with either the Republican or Democratic Party and are focused on inventing a political philosophy that works for “our own neighborhood, communities, localities.”

“Jesus taught us to love our neighbors, therefore we need to know who they are,” said Susannah Black, a Christian blogger who spoke at the conference.

Another participant, Grace Potts, said she home-schools her six children and prefers to buy handmade goods from local vendors.

“Where can I get fair-trade chocolate for the least price and from a local vendor?” Potts asks herself. “And the answer is, there’s one guy and he’s dealing out of his garage. And this is how I’m doing my grocery shopping.”

For Potts, buying locally is a moral act, because “connection and communion is everything, it’s the center of who we are” and “having nameless, faceless transactions degrades that,” she said.

Read the whole thing — and watch the video. What Patrick Deneen and Grace Potts have to say in it is really interesting and important.

The Religious Right: A Eulogy

Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore delivered one hell heck of a speech Monday night in New York. When First Things magazine tapped Moore to deliver its prestigious annual Erasmus Lecture, I wonder if the editors imagined how consequential the speech was going to be. It amounts to a eulogy for the Religious Right, delivered by a conservative Southern Baptist who has had enough. I believe it will be seen as a generation-defining speech, a line in the sand between the Old Guard and the Next Generation, as well as a line in the sand marking the end of an era and the opening of a new one.

When I said so on Twitter, Ryan T. Anderson expressed skepticism, wondering why Ross Douthat’s or Archbishop Charles Chaput’s previous Erasmus Lectures didn’t count. Both of those were excellent and important speeches on the same general topic as Moore’s. What makes Moore’s speech more important is its timing, and the fact that it was delivered by a conservative Evangelical.

What I mean is this: Moore’s speech comes near the climax of a brutal and in many ways unprecedented US presidential election campaign, one in which the GOP nominee has just about destroyed the Republican Party, and bitterly fragmented the Religious Right, once a powerful force in American politics. Had Russell Moore given this same speech a year ago, it would have still been interesting and important, but not nearly as consequential. Had a non-Evangelical delivered this speech tonight, same thing. The reason has something to do with Moore’s claim that “American evangelicalism is enmeshed with the Religious Right

psychologically and institutionally and in terms of reputation in ways the Catholic

bishops, the Mormon apostles, or Orthodox rabbis just aren’t.”

He’s right about that. I’ve been a religious, political, and cultural conservative since the early 1990s, a Catholic for 13 years, and an Orthodox Christian for 10. Yet I have never felt comfortable describing myself as a member of the “Religious Right,” even though I have done so before. That’s because “Religious Right” as a concept is an Evangelical thing in a way that it isn’t for Evangelicalism’s political and cultural allies, of which I certainly am. Therefore, when an Evangelical talks about the Religious Right, it carries more weight than when any of the rest of us do. That’s just a political fact.

Here are excerpts from that conservative white Evangelical pastor from the Deep South said tonight. His topic: “Can The Religious Right Be Saved?”

Moore began by talking about his Southern Baptist childhood in south Mississippi, and how exhausting it was to live within an Evangelicalism that was so obsessed with Bible prophecy, and that lionized loudmouthed hucksters. And this:

And then there were the voter guides. A Religious Right activist group from Washington placed guides in our church’s vestibule, outlining the Christian position on issues. Even as a teenager, I could recognize that the issues chosen just happened to be the same as the talking points of the Republican National Committee. On many of these issues, there did seem to be a clear Christian position—on the abortion of unborn children, for instance, and on the need to stabilize families. But why was there a “Christian” position on congressional term limits and a balanced budget amendment and the line item veto? Why was there no word for people in the historical shadow of Jim Crow on racial justice and unity? I was left with the increasingly cynical feeling— actually an existential threat to my entire sense of myself and the world — that Christianity was just a means to an end—a way to shore up southern honor culture, to mobilize voters for political allies, and a way to market products to a gullible audience. I was ready to escape — and I did.

He left not for secularism, but for a different kind of Christianity. His Virgil was C.S. Lewis, who showed young Moore a different kind of Christian faith than the one he had been raised with. It was the same in many ways, but it had a dimension to it that was missing from the highly politicized faith of his youth.

Moving forward to the political situation today, Moore said that economic and foreign policy conservatism will come out of the 2016 election beaten up, but they will adjust and recover. It’s different with religious conservatism, because “the reason for the

existence of religious conservatism is, after all, about moral formation and family values.”

And here’s where Russell Moore started throwing punches. Hard ones:

The crisis before us now is that of a national Religious Right political

Russell Moore (from erlc.org)

establishment that has waved away some of the most repugnant aspects of immorality — from calls for torture and war crimes to the embrace of an “alt-Right” movement of white identity ethno-nationalists and anti-Semites to the kind of sexual degradation of women we could previously avoid by not choosing to listen to Howard Stern on the radio or the subscribe to Hustler magazine. Some of these—mostly evangelical—political leaders have waved away misogyny and sexually predatory language as “locker room talk” or “macho” behavior. Some have suggested that their candidate has never claimed to be “a choirboy”—thereby defining deviancy down to such a degree that respect for women and respect for the vulnerable and respect for sexual morality is infantile and unrealistic. One said that his support for this candidate was never about shared values anyway. Others suggested that we need a strongman, and implied a strongman unencumbered by too many moral convictions, in order to fight the system and save Christians from a hostile culture. Some Christian political activist leaders said that those who could not in good conscience stand with either of the major party candidates this year were guilty of “moral preening” and of putting our consciences before the country, sometimes even putting the words “conscience” and “witness” in scare quotes worthy of an Obama Administration solicitor general.

Moore went all-out condemning religious conservative figures who, in his view, traded their moral principles for first-class seats on the Trump Train. The same movement that condemned Bill Clinton for his immorality and denounced feminists for their hypocrisy in sticking by Clinton for the sake of holding on to power has produced leaders who have done exactly the same thing. For Moore, they are morally bankrupt, and the world knows it, even if they don’t. And it’s their own fault:

Mr. Trump did not give us this. This is a preexisting condition. The Religious Right turns out to be the people the Religious Right warned us about.

Significantly, Moore drew a distinction between religious conservatism per se (which he said is doing pretty well), and politicized religious conservatism, which has committed suicide this year.

There are no 22 year-old John Hagees. This is not because of liberalization. The next generation of these evangelicals pack orthodox confessional universities and seminaries, are planting orthodox confessional churches with astounding velocity. The evangelicals who are at the center of evangelical vitality are also the least likely to be concerned with politics. Again, this is not because they are liberal but because they keep a priority on the gospel and the mission that they do not wish to lose. The leaders they read and listen to are also often fairly indifferent to politics. … Those who do care about politics, and who lead populist movements, tend to be theologically vacuous, tied to populist “God and Country” appeals that seem simultaneously idolatry and angry to younger Christians, and often form a kind of “protection racket” seeking to silence Christian voices as “liberal” who wish to speak about such matters as racial justice.

At this point, Moore got to the heart of his lecture. He said that if the Religious Right is to be saved, it will have to put aside the emotionally cheap theatrics and the politics, and walk through the wardrobe towards a more theologically serious, C.S. Lewis-style Christianity. I loved this passage:

Even if one concedes that demagogic populism is morally acceptable (and I don’t), others can quite simply do demagogic populism more effectively in a postChristianizing America. What we have to offer is more akin to the abbot in the dystopian novel A Canticle for Leibowitz who in seeking to persuade a woman not to euthanize her child, ultimately realizes that the most important thing he could say is “I, a priest of God, adjure thee.” When, as he puts it, God’s priest was overruled by Caesar’s traffic cop, the narrator tells us, “Never to him had Christ’s kingship seemed more distant.” In an age suspicious of all authority outside of the self, the appeal to a word that carries transcendent authority can be just distinctive enough to be heard, even when not immediately embraced. This is the difference Kierkegaard makes between a genius and an apostle, one sent with a word that is not his own.

See what Moore’s getting at here? He’s saying that the best way to influence the culture for Christ is to stop trying to “influence the culture for Christ”, but rather to be deeply and thoughtfully Christian, and to allow your countercultural life to be your testimony. More:

The evangelical commitment to the Bible means the possibility of the shaping of the consciences of the people, not just by the doctrines and propositions of the Scripture but also by experiencing the world through a sense of place in the biblical story. Jesus recognized the temptations of the devil not merely by opposing propositions with propositions but by seeing that he stood where Israel had stood before, in the wilderness before the tribunal of God. The recovery of the kind of catechesis that fits the whole Bible together around the centrality of Christ crucified is necessary for Christians to see that they are indeed “strangers and aliens” to every culture, but that their allegiances transcend the political, the tribal, and the cultural. We need public arguments. We need philosophical persuasion. We need political organizing. But behind that, we must have consciences formed by a prophetic word of “Thus saith the Lord.”

And:

Those who stand with Christianity must articulate, including to themselves, why and how Christianity matters. This theological, confessional resurgence is often called “gospel-centered” evangelicalism. Can this and has this, at times, become faddish? Of course it has, at times, just as the renaissance of “born again” language in the 1970s Jesus Movement could sometimes do so. But, in both cases, behind the recovery is a reaching back to firmer foundations,. A Religious Right that is not able to tie public action and cultural concern to a theology of gospel and mission will die, and will deserve to die.

This is one of the things I keep banging on about regarding the Benedict Option: a return to the basics of the faith, and deep grounding in them. Casual Christianity won’t make it, nor will casual Christians. This part of Moore’s speech is not quite the same thing as, but still akin to, the Rule of St. Benedict‘s teaching that all things in a Christian’s life must be ordered to Christ. It’s not just a pious saying; it means that every single thing we do in life must be ordered — that is, logically and systematically proceeding from, and subordinate to — a total and uncompromising commitment to following Jesus Christ. Moore continues:

One of the assumptions of some in the old Religious Right is that the church is formed well enough theologically and simply needs to be mobilized politically.

That is one of the most important things he said all night, and one of the great lessons of our time. American Christians are theologically ignorant, and it’s killing us. We really are, and it really is. Christian Smith’s research has proven this over and over again. The falcon can no longer hear the Falconer, and is flying blind. The recovery of theological knowledge and commitment, embodied in practices, is the most important task in front of the American church — not the Supreme Court. Get this:

The fundraising structure of political activism, left and right, means that often the most extreme and buffoonish characters are put forward. For the Religious Right, the strangeness to the world is not where the New Testament places it—in the scandal of the gospel—but in the willingness to say outrageous things on television. Some would suggest that even broaching this topic is “intellectual snobbery.” And yet, imagine a 1960s civil rights movement led not by Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, but by Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright. [Emphasis mine — RD] King did not simply speak to the passions of his followers but to the consciences of his detractors and to the consciences of those on the sidelines, overhearing it all. Behind that was a coherent set of ideas, grounded in the Bible and the Declaration of Independence.

BOOM! Moore defined “theological liberalism” as using the Gospel to advance worldly goals. Then, he denounced

the sort of apocalyptic language that presents every presidential election as an Armageddon from whence one cannot recover is the sort of theological liberalism that makes no sense in a religion in which Augustine wrote the City of God in the context of a collapsing Rome.

Notice what he’s doing here. Moore is comparing the in-your-face, sky-is-falling political rhetoric from certain Religious Right Evangelicals to the Jack Van Impe/Hal Lindsey End-Times mumbo-jumbo that used to electrify Evangelical audiences in his youth. He’s saying that it risks making Christians cynical about things that are truly important, because they’ve heard it all before, and it’s never true.

Moore was especially powerful in criticizing the way white Evangelicalism is blind to the changing ethnic composition of the church, and the small-c catholic (that is, universal) nature of Christianity. The fact is, the white church has a lot to answer for:

[T]he driving force of Christian orthodoxy and spiritual energy is not white , in any sector of Christianity. If left to some Western Europeans and North Americans, the Roman Catholic Church would be the United Church of Christ, with better real estate. But there are the Africans and the Asians. The United Methodist Church is pulling, erratically, back toward orthodoxy, largely due to African Methodists who hold closer to the supernatural vision of the Bible than their American or European counterparts. And where is the evangelistic energy within evangelicalism: with immigrant churches, whether Dominican or Cambodian or Nigerian or Iranian.

Later in the address, Moore said that the loss of the local churches as “intentional, cohesive, conscience-shaping communities of identity and social solidarity” has been devastating for Christianity in this country. We have to rebuild that.

In sum, if the Religious Right is to be saved, it needs not just a tune-up, but a heart transplant. “Religious conservatives will need a robust religion and a sense of what is, in fact, to be conserved,” he said. If we lack a radical commitment to the Gospel, said Moore, all we have to offer is moralism. “We must remind ourselves that we are not inquisitors but missionaries,” he said “that we can be Americans best when we are not Americans first.”

Finally, in a masterful rhetorical stroke, Moore said that we cannot forget the world is watching us, that there are young men and women out there just like he was as a teenager, bored and unsatisfied with what he had been given, and craving more. What will we show them? Christians are not called to save a nation or a culture, but to be instruments through which the grace of God reaches out and saves those lost souls.

I wish I could say “read the whole thing,” but the text is not yet on the First Things site. The address was livecast on Facebook earlier tonight. If you missed it, boy, you really missed something great.

Do I think Russell Moore’s address is going to convert a lot of our fellow religious conservatives away from captivity to an exhausted and empty hyper-politicized Christianity? No, I do not, though it might move some conflicted and heavy hearts. What’s most important about this speech is not what it’s attempting to do, but for what it proclaims: the death of the old political order among American religious conservatives, and the birth of something new. Let the dead bury their own dead.  There are more than a few younger Christians (and maybe a few older ones like me) who are ready for something new that is also something old and faithful. Nothing is fresher in the modern world than real orthodoxy. If you heard Russell Moore’s speech tonight, you experienced that for yourself.

UPDATE: Compare what you’ve just read to this well-known passage from Father Joseph Ratzinger in 1969:

The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.

She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members….

It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek . . . The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain . . . But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

SNL’s ‘Black Jeopardy’

A reader points out that Slate’s original headline said, cluelessly, that “Tom Hanks mocks Donald Trump supporters” in this SNL skit. Somebody must have pointed out that this is a really clever sketch. The piece’s writer (N.B., writers typically don’t write their own headlines) saw it otherwise:

Hosted by Kenan Thompson as Darnell Hayes, this episode of “Black Jeopardy” looked to be an easy setup to mercilessly mock Trump supporters at every turn. Instead, it revealed that conspiracy theorist Doug had a lot more in common with the other contestants—Leslie Jones as Shanice and Sasheer Zamata as Keeley—than most people would have likely expected.

That’s true, but still not quite right. What the piece really shows is that poor and working class folks, both black and white, have more in common than either might have thought.

J.D. Vance alert!

With A Rebel Yell

Goofus is always going to be Goofus, but don’t be surprised if Gallant comes out as genderqueer:

Highlights Magazine is known among parents and kids for its “Goofus and Gallant” features and seek and find pictures. But when one reader asked Highlights about including LGBT families in their magazine, the company quickly found itself the target of fierce online criticism.

More:

Well. Clearly, the editors of Highlights are neo-Falwellian gorgons. They got monstered by progressive parents on Facebook. Read the whole news account. Then read the editors base apology:

In the last several days, Highlights for Children has received many comments and questions about representing LGBTQ families in our magazines. In our initial response, our words weren’t reflective of our values, intentions or our position, and we apologize. We want to assure you that we have read every message and are listening carefully.

For those of you who know us—who read Highlights magazine as a child or have given it to a child—you know we have a long history of promoting inclusion and sensitivity. How to do this better and in a way that resonates with today’s kids is an ongoing dialogue in our editorial meetings—and has been for 70 years. Our mission never changes: To help kids become their best selves—curious, creative, confident, and caring. But we are constantly evolving. It may seem to some that we are evolving too slowly.

We want to reiterate that we believe all families matter. We know that there are many ways to build a family, and that love is the essential “ingredient.” This conversation has helped us see that we can be more reflective of all kinds of families in our publications. We are committed to doing so as we plan future issues.

As difficult as these past few days have been, we are always grateful for reader feedback.

We all know where this is going, don’t we? If “we believe that parents know best” isn’t expressive of the values of the magazine’s editors, there’s only one place it can go. And so, goodbye Highlights for Children, another innocent victim of the PC mob. Because an anodyne and beloved children’s magazine that doesn’t immediately accept an extremely radical redefinition of family that has taken place over the last 15 years must be punished.

One of my readers, on hearing this news, said, “Why do people have to care so much about everything? A little apathy would go a long way.”

The fate of Highlights is a very small occurrence in this great big world, but it’s a telling thing. It is insane that even Highlights For Children gets bullied into this, and that the editors would capitulate so quickly. This revolution won’t leave anybody alone. If you think you’re going to get away without having to fight, you’re dreaming. They will not leave you alone. There is no neutral ground. You must affirm. 

If you do not intend to capitulate, you had better prepare to be hated, and you had better learn to regard that hatred as a blessing. Or you’re not going to make it. Back in the year 2000, I wrote in the Weekly Standard a piece about what GLSEN was doing in Massachusetts, with the backing of the state, and the implicit blessing of the Boston media. Excerpts:

Frustrated by official indifference, Whiteman secretly took his tape recorder along to the 10th annual conference of the Boston chapter of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, at Tufts University on March 25. GLSEN (pronounced “glisten”) is a national organization whose purpose is to train teachers and students and develop programs to, in the words of its Boston chapter leader, “challenge the anti-gay, hetero-centric culture that still prevails in our schools.”

The state-sanctioned conference, which was open to the public but attended chiefly by students, administrators, and teachers, undercut the official GLSEN line — that their work is aimed only at making schools safer by teaching tolerance and respect.

The event, backed by the state’s largest teachers’ union, included such workshops as “Ask the Transsexuals,” “Early Childhood Educators: How to Decide Whether to Come Out at Work or Not,” “The Struggles and Triumphs of Including Homosexuality in a Middle School Curriculum” (with suggestions for including gay issues when teaching the Holocaust), “From Lesbos to Stonewall: Incorporating Sexuality into a World History Curriculum,” and “Creating a Safe and Inclusive Community in Elementary Schools,” in which the “Rationale for integrating glbt [gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender] issues in the early elementary years will be presented.”

More:

Whiteman sat in on a “youth only, ages 14-21” workshop called “What They Didn’t Tell You About Queer Sex & Sexuality in Health Class.” If “they” didn’t tell you about this stuff, it’s probably because “they” worried they’d be sent to jail.

The raucous session was led by Massachusetts Department of Education employees Margot Abels and Julie Netherland, and Michael Gaucher, an AIDS educator from the Massachusetts public health agency. Gaucher opened the session by asking the teens how they know whether or not they’ve had sex. Someone asked whether oral sex was really sex.

“If that’s not sex, then the number of times I’ve had sex has dramatically decreased, from a mountain to a valley, baby!” squealed Gaucher. He then coaxed a reluctant young participant to talk about which orifices need to be filled for sex to have occurred: “Don’t be shy, honey, you can do it.”

Later, the three adults took written questions from the kids. One inquired about “fisting,” a sex practice in which one inserts his hand and forearm into the rectum of his partner. The helpful and enthusiastic Gaucher demonstrated the proper hand position for this act. Abels described fisting as “an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be that close and intimate with,” and praised it for putting one “into an exploratory mode.”

Gaucher urged the teens to consult their “really hip” Gay/Straight Alliance adviser for hints on how to come on to a potential sex partner. The trio went on to explain that lesbians could indeed experience sexual bliss through rubbing their clitorises together, and Gaucher told the kids that male ejaculate is rumored to taste “sweeter if people eat celery.” On and on like this the session went.

Camenker and Whiteman transcribed the tape and wrote a lengthy report for Massachusetts News, a conservative monthly. Then they announced that copies of the recorded sessions would be made available to state legislators and the local media. GLSEN threatened to sue them for violating Massachusetts’ wiretap laws and invading the privacy of the minors present at one workshop.

The tapes went out anyway and became a talk radio sensation. On May 19, state education chief David Driscoll canned Abels and Netherland and terminated Gaucher’s contract. But Driscoll also insisted that the controversial workshop was an aberration that shouldn’t be allowed to derail the entire program. Abels fumed to the press that the education department had known perfectly well what she had been doing for years and hadn’t cared until the tapes had surfaced. Camenker, ironically, agreed.

Read the whole thing. The entire Massachusetts establishment turned on these parents. It was a disgrace — but it was effective. Now the whole country is dealing with it — and as the Highlights episode shows, they’ve got a lot of parents on their side. Within a year or two, Highlights is going to face enormous pressure to, um, highlight transgendered tots. Do you doubt it?

At some point, people, you just have to quit caring what others think, and do what you know is right, regardless of the consequences. There is a lot of strength in just not giving a rip anymore. Over the weekend, I read an advance copy of Anthony Esolen’s forthcoming (Jan 2017) book Out Of The Ashes: A Layman’s Guide to Rebuilding Our Culture.  It’s a full-throated, big-hearted call to arms, both uncompromising and irresistible. This book is the St. Crispin’s Day speech of the Benedict Option. Look at these excerpts from the introduction:

Let’s get straight to the point. We no longer live in a culturally Christian state. We do not live in a robust pagan state, such as Rome was during the Pax Romana. We live in a sickly sub-pagan state, or metastate, a monstrous thing, all-meddlesome, all-ambitious. The natural virtues are scorned. Temperance is for prigs, prudence for sticks in the mud who worry about people who don’t yet exist. A man who fathers six children upon three women and now wants to turn himself into a “woman” attracted to other women—he is praised for his courage. Justice means that a handful of narrowly educated and egotistical judges get to overturn human culture and biology, at their caprice.

We are not in partibus infidelibus. We are in partibus insanibus.

What shall we do now? The answer is both daunting and liberating. We do everything. That doesn’t mean that I do everything, or that you do everything. Suppose you find yourself in a bombed out city. There are all kinds of things to do, and all of them have to be done. Some needs are more pressing than others, and some things can be done only after other things are in order. But everywhere you turn, there’s work to do. You have to find clean water. You have to find food. You have to tend to the wounded and bury the dead. You have to erect shelters. You have to see which of the few buildings left standing are actually safe. You have to demolish those that are ruined beyond repair. You have to organize work teams. Someone has to prepare the meals. Someone has to keep the children out of trouble. In such a situation, it’s almost absurd to ask whether it’s more important to build a latrine than to gather together some undamaged books. All of it has to be done. So you do what you can do—the work that is ready to your hand.

More:

Recover the human things.

You remember them? The things that human beings used to do. They are not to be underestimated. Let’s not pretend here. We’ve all lost a great deal of what once made up whatever sweetness that human life had to offer. People used to dress becomingly, play cards, talk to others, take long walks, sing songs, play ball, grow peas and beans, strum on the guitar, drop in on friends, and have friends to drop in on. Boys used to ask girls to do innocent things with them, like go bowling, or attend a concert, or dance. There’s an idea—learn how to dance again. The world, besides being quite mad, is now an unspeakably drab, tawdry, and lonely place. Build outposts of normality. It will take time. Begin.

Pray like the pilgrim you are.

That goes without saying. If you pray for ten minutes a day, pray for fifteen. But pray with a clearer aim. Remember that you are going somewhere. Its name, in one sense, is the grave. The whole world is in mad denial of that plain fact. It turns to the garish and obscene, lest it have to consider the quiet grassy mound and the stone with a few words on it. Be different. You are on the way. Take heart, and don the hat of the pilgrim. Do not be like those who have no hope. Jesus has gone before us to prepare a place. Will you have to repent of having sometimes gotten on the carousel of the world? Repent of it then. Begin.

Whatever you do, do it as if everything depends on just that.

It does, after all. Let no one say to you, “What difference does it make if you sing beautiful hymns at Mass?” That’s the way the world thinks. For the world, despite all its pretense of love for every individual, considers men to be mere stuff, an accumulation or amalgamation. Do not believe it. The next person you greet may be on the verge of sainthood or damnation. Every moral choice we make repeats the drama of Eden. No one can do everything. Everyone can do something. Begin.

I encourage you to pre-order Out Of the Ashes, along with Archbishop Chaput’s book Stranger in a Strange Land, out in February. It follows the same themes. And don’t forget The Benedict Option, coming out in March. Something big is happening now. A band of brothers and sisters are saying, “Enough! No more. We are not going to shore up this corrupt and decadent imperium any longer. We are going to live as free and upright men and women, and we don’t give a damn what you think of us.”

Twenty years ago, the Catholic law professor Russell Hittinger wrote, regarding the Supreme Court’s increasing radicalism on social questions like abortion:

It is late in the day, and our options have dwindled. Either right-minded citizens will have to disobey orders or perhaps relinquish offices of public authority, or the new constitutional rulers will have to be challenged and reformed. The first option leads inevitably either to withdrawal from politics or to civil disobedience. Since there is still a window of opportunity with regard to the second option, it would seem to be the responsible course.

… There is a real possibility that the moral and religious motivations of some citizens will become not only actionable at public law, through constitutional suits challenging legislation informed by such motives, but also actionable at private law. Unless the elected representatives of the people can compel the Court to refrain from invalidating political activity merely on the basis of the citizens’ moral or religious motivation, the task of reform is blocked. Should that continue, the option remaining to right reason is the one traditionally used against despotic rule: civil disobedience.

Twenty years have passed, and we are at that point. Who knows what form civil disobedience will take in the future. For now, it requires a conscious, deliberate, and progressive secession from the imperium, a defection in place, a refusal to cooperate with its aims.

The rebels are going to be ordinary people, especially parents, who cease to care about appearing respectable in the eyes of the world. Some priests and pastors will join; most will continue to go along to get along. Some colleges, high schools, and teachers will join; most will conform. A lot of orthodox Christians who sympathize will mire themselves in trying to fight this war by giving money to the usual Washington activists and Christianity, Inc. suspects saddling up the cavalry horses, because it’s familiar. This too is a kind of conformity.

None of this work will  be easy. But it is going to be necessary. It already is.

A reader sent me something kind of incredible. It’s a passage from the late Neil Postman’s 1994 book The Disappearance of Childhood, which I’d read years ago, and still have on my bookshelf, but did not consult when I was writing The Benedict Option. I wish I had. Here’s a passage from the conclusion; the boldfaced highlights are by the reader:

But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one’s extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one’s children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one’s children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media’s access to one’s children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media’s content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.  

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.

The Monastery Effect. The Benedict Option. Who could have guessed that a contrarian secular Jewish leftie who taught at NYU would have prefigured the Benedict Option by almost a quarter century?

I mean, look, when they queer the Timbertoes, all bets are off, amirite?

The Cancer of Clericalism

I was dismayed over the weekend to learn this:

In 2004 Bishop Demetri of the Antiochian Archdiocese entered a guilty plea to a reduced charge of attempted fourth degree criminal sexual misconduct. To be specific he “grabbed the breast of a North Carolina woman seated next to him at a slot machine in the Turtle Creek Casino outside Traverse City” and was “highly intoxicated” (see here for more) as was evident from the closed circuit video that captured the event. He was drunk, he was gambling, and he sexually assaulted a woman.

Bp. Demetri was relieved of his duties and then suspended (it should be noted that the Antiochian Archdiocese recently deleted their pronouncement on this issue from their website, but a cached version is available here). In 2008 he was “restored as vicar of the Iglesia Católica Apostólica Ortodoxa De Antioquia México-Venezuela-Centroamérica-El Caribe in the Exarcado De El Caribe”(see more here). This was all covered on this blog some years ago (see here).

In a surprising new chapter to this saga, it seems Met. Joseph is making Bp. Demetri a locum tenens of sorts (a pseudo-locum tenens) for the Diocese of Los Angeles and the West.

In the comments section of that posting (on an Orthodox blog), a sharp dispute has arisen between critics of this move by the Metropolitan, and Archpriest John Morris, a staunch clerical defender of the disgraced bishop, who chides the critics:

Shame on all of you. Have you never heard of forgiveness. His Grace had a drinking problem and dealt with it. He sought and received treatment and has been sober for many years. He is a pious man who has many gifts that would greatly benefit the Church. It is a great tragedy that some narrow minded people refuse to forgive him and allow him to use his great talent to benefit the Church.

More:

And:

The critics are completely right, of course. Frankly, it’s shocking in 2016 to see that a) a convicted sex offender would be restored to active ministry, much less as a bishop, and b) that a priest would defend it. Given what the Catholic Church has been through over the past 15 years or so — a problem entirely of its bishops’ own making, because they reasoned as Fr. Morris is reasoning (and were assisted in doing so by many in the psychiatric profession) — it should be painfully obvious that a church cannot afford to do this. 

Leaving aside the legal liability, consider the much greater moral liability here. Who is going to respect a bishop (or priest) who is a convicted sex offender? That Bishop Demetri is on track to be restored to the active episcopate invites contempt for the hierarchy. A bishop is the spiritual father of his diocese. Nobody can respect the authority, except in a formal sense, of a bishop who has so thoroughly humiliated himself publicly: drunk, at a casino, grabbing the breasts of a stranger. A move like this also shows disdain for the woman +Demetri publicly groped while drunk. The Donald Trump campaign never recovered from the onslaught of allegations (made plausible by Trump’s own bragging on the Billy Bush recording) that he sexually assaulted women in pretty much exactly the same way Bishop Demetri did. Trump denies any of it ever happened. In his case, Bishop Demetri admitted that it happened, and had to, because it was captured on closed-circuit camera.

The church — all churches — are fighting an existential battle with the powerful dissipating forces of modernity. If the church doesn’t have its moral integrity, what does it have? It has never been easier for the laity to turn its back on the church. This is a sad fact of life in the 21st century. The scattering of the sheep is happening to all churches in the West. We Christians — all of us — are in a spiritual war in which a fierce and determined enemy is advancing on all fronts. We can’t take anything for granted.

We desperately need leadership. The church is a fighting army, not a parading society that exists for the pleasure of an old boys’ club of generals. Clericalism is a cancer robbing the church militant of the ability to defend itself and advance on the Enemy’s positions. Orthodox clerics who don’t understand that in the Year of Our Lord 2016 should stick their heads out of the incense-filled sacristies and see the world as it truly is.

The Tragedy of Trump

Ross Douthat had a good and important column yesterday, talking about “the dangers of Hillary Clinton.” Here’s his thesis:

The dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency are more familiar than Trump’s authoritarian unknowns, because we live with them in our politics already. They’re the dangers of elite groupthink, of Beltway power worship, of a cult of presidential action in the service of dubious ideals. They’re the dangers of a recklessness and radicalism that doesn’t recognize itself as either, because it’s convinced that if an idea is mainstream and commonplace among the great and good then it cannot possibly be folly.

Emphasis mine. Here are examples of what he means:

Almost every crisis that has come upon the West in the last 15 years has its roots in this establishmentarian type of folly. The Iraq War, which liberals prefer to remember as a conflict conjured by a neoconservative cabal, was actually the work of a bipartisan interventionist consensus, pushed hard by George W. Bush but embraced as well by a large slice of center-left opinion that included Tony Blair and more than half of Senate Democrats.

Likewise the financial crisis: Whether you blame financial-services deregulation or happy-go-lucky housing policy (or both), the policies that helped inflate and pop the bubble were embraced by both wings of the political establishment. Likewise with the euro, the European common currency, a terrible idea that only cranks and Little Englanders dared oppose until the Great Recession exposed it as a potentially economy-sinking folly. Likewise with Angela Merkel’s grand and reckless open-borders gesture just last year: She was the heroine of a thousand profiles even as she delivered her continent to polarization and violence.

And:

One can look at Trump himself and see too much danger of still-deeper disaster, too much temperamental risk and moral turpitude, to be an acceptable alternative to this blunder-ridden status quo … while also looking at Hillary Clinton and seeing a woman whose record embodies the tendencies that gave rise to Trumpism in the first place.

Boy, is that ever true. Read the whole thing. Along these lines, there was a quite good Peggy Noonan column in the WSJ last week (now, alas, behind the paywall, but I found the whole thing here), saying that if Trump were not a “nut” — which he clearly is — he would be winning this thing by a landslide, because a lot of folks are sick and tired of the status quo that Hillary represents. Excerpt:

Mr. Trump’s great historical role was to reveal to the Republican Party what half of its own base really thinks about the big issues. The party’s leaders didn’t know! They were shocked, so much that they indulged in sheer denial and made believe it wasn’t happening.

Because she is largely in sympathy with Trump’s political views, she is “particularly sorry” that Trump is a nut (me too! me too!). She wonders what would have happened if we had had a Sane Donald Trump. For one, she says, he “would have won in a landslide.” Excerpts:

Sane Donald Trump, just to start, would look normal and happy, not grim and glowering. He would be able to hear and act on good advice. He would explain his positions with clarity and depth, not with the impatient half-grasping of a notion that marks real Donald Trump’s public persona.

Sane Donald Trump would have looked at a dubious, anxious and therefore standoffish Republican establishment and not insulted them, diminished them, done tweetstorms against them. Instead he would have said, “Come into my tent. It’s a new one, I admit, but it’s yuge and has gold faucets and there’s a place just for you. What do you need? That I be less excitable and dramatic? Done. That I not act, toward women, like a pig? Done, and I accept your critique. That I explain the moral and practical underpinnings of my stand on refugees from terror nations? I’d be happy to. My well-hidden secret is that I love everyone and hear the common rhythm of their beating hearts.”

And:

Sane Donald Trump would not treat the political process of the world’s greatest democracy as if it were, as somebody said, the next-to-last episode of a reality-TV series. That’s the episode that leaves you wondering how the season will end—who will scream, who will leave the drunken party in a huff, who will accuse whom of being a whore. I guess that’s what “I’ll keep you in suspense” as to whether he’ll accept the election result was about. We’re being teed up. The explosive season finale is Nov. 8. Maybe he’ll leave in a huff. Maybe he’ll call everyone whores.

Does he know he’s playing with fire? No. Because he’s a nut.

True, all too true. Read the whole thing.

Ben Stein agrees with Noonan that Trump is a nut, but he’s voting for Trump anyway, because he thinks Trump is less of a nut than Clinton. This is not persuasive, but this is true:

Trump’s a nut. I don’t doubt Peggy Noonan at all. But we have a choice of nuts this year, and that’s the tragedy. It’s a tragedy the greatest nation in history does not deserve.

The only real question for conservatives and Republicans now is what happens to the Right and the GOP, its political vehicle, in the wake of Trump’s loss. #NeverTrumpers will be strongly tempted to indulge in bitter “I told you so!” recriminations. Trumpers, likewise, will be strongly tempted to indulge in bitter “You stabbed him in the back!” polemics. All of this will work to the advantage of President H. Clinton, of course. What is needed is for the GOP establishment to humble itself enough to admit those who, like Noonan, accept the critique of the party and the system that Trump’s candidacy embodies, however, well, nuttily. And the Trump insurgents — including their leader — need to have the sense to realize that it advantages them not at all to drag this fight with Republicans out past the election. Their candidate will have received a thorough, resounding rejection by voters in an election he likely would have won had he not consistently spoken and acted like a nut.

Do I think this (humility on both sides, uniting in the face of Hillaryism) is likely to happen? No, I do not. But I hope I’m wrong. The Trump people, like their candidate, are not known for their ability to think strategically and to restrain themselves for their own good. And the bitterness and spite among Republican regulars is going to blind them to their own role in creating this mess. I overheard a conversation the other day in which some Republican lamented that “we” — meaning the GOP — “have Donald Trump.”

“We don’t have Trump,” his interlocutor shot back. “We have Paul Ryan. He’s ours.”

And I thought, “Who’s this we?” The party isn’t yours anymore, mister, though admittedly it’s hard to say who it belongs to or what it stands for. Because Trump did not build any kind of movement, and doesn’t have any obvious heirs in the party leadership, there’s no telling where the GOP is going after November. But we can be sure it’s not going back to the way things were pre-Trump.

View From Your Table

Glendalough, Ireland

An American reader on vacation writes:

I thought you might enjoy this view of a handful of fantastic sandwiches in front of St. Kevin’s Church and the round tower of Glendalough, Ireland. A steadfast site of Christian tradition, indeed.

I love the contrast of the picnic’s bright colors with the cold, gray stone and cold, gray sky. Ireland! I really would love to pray in that old church.

Here’s what James C. has been up to in his new country of residence. Notice the light and the stones in this photo. Could there be any doubt that this is Italy?

Barletta, Puglia, Italy

James writes:

Just a simple post-Latin mass supper: wonderful pizza alla bufala with beer, but what an viewpoint. In the background is a tunnel that runs through the bell tower of the medieval cathedral, which towers glittering above the sea. One of these days, I have to send you some pics of the incredible and dizzying array of seafood that teems as much in the local mercati and trattorie as it does in the Adriatic. And much of it crudo (raw)—yes the oysters come raw as well (of course).

Just an ordinary late Sunday evening in a town on Puglia’s coast. Seriously, post-siesta piazzas in southern Italy offer the best people-watching in the world. Come 7 or 8pm, the eerily quiet village, town and city centres all explode with infectious, intoxicating life. From groups of teenagers to whole families, from affectionate couples to animated clusters of working men, from babies in strollers to the very aged, all chattering away and gesturing wildly while shuffling along the chalky pavements below brilliantly white stone buildings (all the old towns on the coast here glint spectacularly in the abundant sun; the Mezzogiorno indeed).

Does life get any better than that?

Here’s a great little culinary snapshot from my own part of the world. Not really a VFYT (more like a View From Your Kitchen Counter), but I love the colors:

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

That’s two of my kids, about to taste a box of macarons Dad brought home from New York City. Picked them up at Macaron Cafe in Midtown.

Tradition & Law

Today at the Tradition conference, the discussion is about Tradition and the Law. I can’t follow most of this discussion except at a shallow level, because I have no legal training. But it’s a fascinating and challenging discussion to listen in on.

Most of the people at the table are law professors. At one point, the discussion touched on lawyers and the legal profession being a naturally conservative class and phenomenon because it guarantees stability and continuity, since bound by precedent. Change has to therefore be gradual.

A political theorist spoke up and talked about the importance of forms (e.g., those followed by the lawyers) for conveying tradition, especially in democratic societies, which tend to be against formalism. This is true. But his observation made me recall the dialogue Dante has with Folco in Canto IX of Paradiso. Folco tells the pilgrim that the Pope and the Roman Curia care nothing for living by and stewarding the Biblical tradition, and seeking the salvation of souls, but only for money and worldly power. He compares churchmen of Dante’s day unfavorably to Rahab the prostitute (from the Book of Joshua), who hid the two Jewish spies. She is in heaven because she was repentant and her loves were rightly ordered — unlike the Pope and his circle. Here’s an excerpt from Anthony Esolen’s translation; the words are Folco’s:

The “cursed flower” refers to the coin of Florence. Here it symbolizes the corruption of wealth. As I wrote about Canto IX in this space:

The Decretals are canon law; legal commentaries were written in the margins of the books of Decretals. What the poet is saying to us is that the Church has become a massive bureaucracy that cares wholly about maintaining correct form, and manipulating it for the wealth of the Pope and the cardinals, and nothing about the substance of the faith, as revealed in the Gospels and in the Church Fathers. More to the point, given the role of the Roman church in civil life in Dante’s day, to be an expert in canon law, says John Ciardi, “could make a shyster’s fortune.” The Pope and the Curia, Dante says, are Pharisees — whitewashed sepulchres who prostitute themselves and Holy Church to money and power, while an actual prostitute who risked her own life to serve the Lord receives her reward in Paradise.

The reason I bring Dante up in this context has to do with Jaroslav Pelikan’s distinctions (mentioned yesterday) between icon and idol. An symbolizes a thing beyond itself, but in truth only refers us back to itself. An icon, by contrast, both symbolizes a thing beyond itself and points us to that thing. In the Dante passage, the Pope and the cardinals have, in Folco’s judgment (= the poet Dante’s), come to see the Church as something that exists for itself, and is there to be used by its leaders for worldly gain. The canon law in this corrupt situation is not a means to achieve justice, but something to be manipulated for the sake of gaining power and wealth (which are basically the same thing). As a result, the Pope and the cardinals cut themselves off from Christian memory and tradition (that is, the events in the Gospels, the revelations, on which our faith is based), and make it hard for the Church to do what it is supposed to do: be the ordinary means of salvation for humanity.

What does this have to do with secular law? This, I think: the law brings itself into disrepute when it ceases to be an icon of justice, but rather an idol — that is, a thing that exists for itself. And if it is an idol, then it is a thing to be manipulated to achieve worldly ends. The result will be social disorder.

Does this describe the law in our time? I can’t say for sure, but I’m inclined to say yes. At least it’s a question worth asking. Now, the law is (generally) not crassly used for enrichment of the powerful, as you might think. That’s not my claim. My claim is this:

All law, aside from procedural and administrative law, is legislated morality. It embodies a particular view of the Good, of transcendent moral order.
The Christian moral order — or, if you like, the Judeo-Christian tradition as revealed in the Bible — has generally been the basis for our laws in the American tradition.
But this is no longer the case, not really. Our society has lost a genuinely Christian view of moral order. That’s not to say that the moral order is anti-Christian, necessarily, only that the extent to which it reflects a Christian view is incidental, given that contemporary American culture, especially elite legal culture, has severed itself cleanly from its base in Christian morality and metaphysics. For better or for worse, this is the reality we’re living out.
Therefore, absent a transcendent basis for our laws, the law ceases to be something that attempts to mirror the divine order (that is, the law doesn’t point to a reality beyond itself), but rather becomes  merely about manipulating things to achieve ends we choose.

This does not mean, I hasten to say, that the makers and interpreters of the law will use it to enrich themselves and hoard power. To the contrary, I would say that principled liberals are not cynical in the way Dante accused Boniface VIII of being. They genuinely believe they are pursuing the Good. The problem from a traditional Christian point of view is that the telos, the ultimate Good they are pursuing, is expanding individual autonomy, the sovereignty of the individual. 

One law professor, explaining this point to me during a break, said that he teaches a case in which a court had to decide what to do with frozen embryos a divorcing couple had conceived and stored during happier times. The verdict established the principle that individuals have a right to sell their embryos. The professor said that the core of the jurisprudence here was based entirely on individual autonomy. He mentioned one student who rejected any system of legal reasoning that would fail to guarantee same-sex marriage. The professor said this kind of thing is common among law students today. They’re not bad kids at all, he said; their moral imaginations have been formed by a culture that worships individual autonomy. We should not be surprised, then, that young lawyers and lawyers in training regard the law as an instrument to compel social progress, by their definition.

Later, in the group discussion, another professor said that part of the radical nature of the  Obergefell decision is how it excludes an entire category of argument from the judicial process — specifically, Judeo-Christian arguments for how Creation works. Again, you, reader, may believe that is a very good thing. I expect that most of you do. But from a Christian point of view, this is extremely problematic, and problematic in a way that many contemporary Christians don’t understand.

It’s like this. For orthodox Christians, Christianity is not simply a construal, that is, a complex set of opinions about how the world should be ordered. It is a revelation of how the world really is ordered. For example, to say that God created man and woman in His image is not simply a poetic expression. It is a poetic expression that embodies a profound anthropological and theological truth. Any laws based on a contrary point of view is false, literally. And if those laws end up justifying practices (e.g., trade in human embryos) it might be evil.

Yesterday at the Tradition conference, a participant brought up Tocqueville’s position that liberal democracy depends on religion to form the character of the people, so that they are capable of self-rule. Madison, by the way, said this too, famously holding that our Constitution is only suitable for “a moral and religious people.” Absent this, the unbridled passions of men would tear through our constitutional order “like a whale through a net.”

Anyway, the participant said that liberalism is not producing the kinds of people it needs to perpetuate itself. This point is explored at length by Patrick Deneen in this essay. Excerpts:

Liberalism began with the explicit assertion, and has continued to claim, that it merely describes our political, social, and private decision-making. Yet implicitly it was constituted as a constructive or normative project: What it presented as a description of human voluntarism in fact had to displace a very different form of human self-understanding and long-standing experience. In effect, liberal theory sought to educate people to think differently about themselves and their relationships. Liberalism often claims neutrality about the choices people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,” not of any particular conception of the “Good.”

Yet it is not neutral about the basis on which people make their decisions. In the same way that courses in economics claiming merely to describe human beings as utility-maximizing individual actors in fact influence students to act more selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments and adopt flexible relationships and bonds. Not only are all political and economic relationships fungible and subject to constant redefinition, but so are all relationships—to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to religion. Liberalism tends to encourage loose connections.

The second revolution, and the second anthropological assumption that constitutes liberalism, is less visibly political. Premodern political thought—ancient and medieval, particularly that informed by an Aristotelian understanding of natural science—understood the human creature to be part of a comprehensive natural order. Man was understood to have a telos, a fixed end, given by nature and unalterable. Human nature was continuous with the order of the natural world, and so humanity was required to conform both to its own nature as well as, in a broader sense, to the natural order of which human beings were a part. Human beings could freely act against their own nature and the natural order, but such actions deformed them and harmed the good of human beings and the world. Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—thus, natural law—places upon human beings, and each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits, through the practice of virtues, in order to achieve a condition of human flourishing.

Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It first displaced the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and thereafter the very notion of human nature itself. Liberalism inaugurated a transformation in the natural and human sciences, premised on the transformation of the view of human nature and on humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

More:

If my analysis is fundamentally accurate, liberalism’s endgame is unsustainable in every respect: It cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms, nor can it continually provide endless material growth in a world of limits. We can either elect a future of self-limitation born of the practice and experience of self-governance in local communities, or we can back slowly but inexorably into a future in which extreme license invites extreme oppression.

The ancient claim that man is by nature a political animal and must in and through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation—a condition properly understood as liberty—cannot be denied forever without cost. Currently we lament and attempt to treat the numerous social, economic, and political symptoms of liberalism’s idea of liberty but not the deeper sources of those symptoms deriving from the underlying pathology of liberalism’s philosophic commitments.

If Deneen is right — and I believe he is — liberal democracy in this radically individualist, post-Christian culture will eventually devolve into tyranny because it cannot do otherwise. It is baked in the cake. Commenter Rob G., on yesterday’s Tradition conference post, said:

This tendency is exactly why Dostoevsky has Shigalyev say “Proceeding from unlimited freedom, I end with unlimited despotism.” Radical individualism cannot help but eventually become some form of tyranny.

 

That’s from the novel Demons. Philosopher John Gray comments:

[Dostoevsky] was particularly scornful of the ideas he found in St Petersburg when he returned from his decade of Siberian exile. The new generation of Russian intellectuals was gripped by European theories and philosophies. French materialism, German humanism and English utilitarianism were melded together into a peculiarly Russian combination that came to be called “nihilism”.

We tend to think of a nihilist as someone who believes in nothing, but the Russian nihilists of the 1860s were very different. They were fervent believers in science, who wanted to destroy the religious and moral traditions that had guided humankind in the past in order that a new and better world could come into being. There are plenty of people who believe something similar today.

More:

Dostoyevsky’s novel contains a lesson that reaches far beyond Russia. Early English translations bore the title The Possessed – a misreading of a Russian word more accurately rendered as Demons. But the earlier title may have been closer to Dostoyevsky’s intentions. Though at times he is merciless in his portrayal of them, it isn’t the revolutionaries who are demons. It’s the ideas to which the revolutionaries are enslaved.

Dostoyevsky thought the flaw at the heart of Russian nihilism was atheism, but you needn’t share his view on this point to see that when he writes of the demonic power of ideas he has fastened on a genuine human disorder. Nor do you need to approve of Dostoyevsky’s political outlook, which was a mystical version of nationalism deeply stained with xenophobia.

What Dostoyevsky diagnosed — and at times suffered from himself — was the tendency to think of ideas as being somehow more real than actual human beings. It would be a mistake to imagine that we haven’t also fallen into this sort of delusional thinking.

In contemporary America, we are nihilistic in the sense Dostoevsky meant, according to John Gray. The core idea of the Enlightenment — that humans are not bound by religion, tradition, or any obligations not self-chosen — is, in the Dostoevskian sense, demonic. This is not going to end well.

There was some talk at the table about how difficult it is to get students even to think beyond individual autonomy. (It sounds like trying to get theology students in a medieval cathedral school to think beyond the concept of God’s existence.) One professor said it’s likely that the best thing we can do at this point is to educate our children in the kind of moral realism that is the antidote to the false religion of our time. We have no guarantees of success, but the resistance that Tradition must put up depends on culture — or rather, counterculture. You know where I’m going with this, so I’ll stop now.

What a great conference this was, and how important and relevant to our time. These conversations, these alliances, these networks — they all need to be happening now, and expanding. We are going to need each other in the years to come.

How Should A Vexed Conservative Vote?

David Frum conducts a helpful thought experiment, coming up with the best cases for conservative voters vexed with their choices in the presidential race. Frum starts from the point of view that the hypothetical voter is a principled conservative who can’t stand either Trump or Hillary, but is committed to voting anyway. What should she do? Here are some excerpts.

From the case for reluctantly voting Trump:

You remember what elections do. Elections choose governments, and then empower those governments to do certain things and refrain from doing other things. A President Trump will do more of what you want done than a President Hillary Clinton will; and do fewer of the things you wish not to be done. A President Trump will try to lower taxes. A President Hillary Clinton will try to raise them. Trump will lighten financial and environmental regulation. Hillary Clinton will tighten it. Trump will direct government spending in ways you are likely to benefit from. Hillary Clinton will try to redirect money away from you to benefit her supporters instead. You don’t blame the young and the urban from voting to move money from your pocketbook to theirs. But aren’t you equally entitled to vote to protect what you earned and created for yourself and your family? It’s not as if you aren’t paying a lot of taxes already—and seeing much of it vanish God knows where, and to enrich God knows who.

At least for the first two years, President Trump will face a Republican Congress. You have no illusions about that either. You know that Trump cares nothing about conservatism or the Republican Party. He’s poisoned his relationship with the House and Senate leadership. However, he’ll sign their bills! It won’t be dignified. There will be scandals. It’ll never be like Reagan again. But then, you’ll never be 25 again. This is good enough for now.

From the case for reluctantly voting third party:

What you want to do is send a distinctly conservative protest against both Hillary Clinton’s progressive ideology and Donald Trump’s con-man narcissism. The bigger the protest vote total, the more respect your conservative ideas can demand in future. Hoist the “Don’t Tread on Me” banner, and check out who else is on the ballot: Libertarian, Independent, or Constitution Party.

From the case for reluctantly voting Clinton:

Do you like Hillary Clinton’s program? No. Do you imagine that she will volunteer concesions to you and your beliefs? No again. Would you count the spoons afterward if Bill Clinton came to dinner? For sure. But can she “do the job”—manage a crisis, pay the bills, respond to hurricanes, face national enemies? Obviously. Look at how she’s coped with that maniac Trump on the debate stage. Couldn’t have been cooler. Despite yourself, you’ve been impressed. She’s smart and tough and open to reason. We could do worse. It’s four years—not even. She’ll perhaps be boxed in by a Republican Congress for the first two years; much more probably so in 2019 and 2020. By then, it’ll be time to try again, this time with a Republican nominee not suffering from a major personality disorder.

But whatever happens, you won’t flinch from the reality of the binary decision. Gestural politics are just ways of evading responsibility. “Don’t blame me, I voted for McMullin.” But choices are judged by their consequences, and the consequences here are stark: If not Hillary, then Trump. If not Trump, then Hillary. Since it can’t be Trump, it must be Hillary. You understand why people might evade that unwelcome reality. But you didn’t get where you are by evading realities. You face them, you meet them, you make the best of them. You’ll hope for the best, but at least you’ll know you did all you could to prevent the worst.

Read the whole thing. There’s more to all of them than I am able to highlight here. If you’re a troubled conservative voter, which one describes you? Did any of Frum’s cases change your mind?