Rod Dreher's Blog, page 542

The Yahrzeit of Paw

Ray Dreher on his deathbed, August 2015 (Photo illustration by Rod Dreher)

It was one year ago today that my father died at 81.

May his memory be eternal.

Hey Newton County, This Is America

This is ridiculous:

More than 600 people packed inside a Georgia court house for a three-hour town hall condemning a proposal for a new mosque — a marathon meeting filled with bigoted insults and reassertions of well-disproven myths.

The Monday night public forum in front of the Newton County Commissioners grew loud and rowdy as speakers voiced their concerns about terrorism and their fear of the Muslim-American community.

“We have already seen bombings and beheadings,” one resident said during her time in front of the crowd, according to WXIA. “Eight years ago, our U.S. government got a Muslim president who has put Muslims in power.”

President Obama is a Christian.

These Muslims bought their land fair and square, for the sake of building a mosque. This is America. They are Americans. They have the right to build a house of worship there. Those angry Georgians need to listen to Russell Moore (see above).

Mucker’s Diary, Second Edition

From a reader:

My family are members of Istrouma Baptist church, my son graduated from Sequitur and my daughter is in her 3rd year at Sequitur as a freshman. My husband and I are big fans of your writing and The American Conservative. We appreciate so much you shining a light on our hurting region, but also the efforts of our resilient people who, in my opinion, are giving our nation a view of what it looks like to ‘love your neighbor’. The following is our story from yesterday’s muck.

Jeff, my daughter and I worked on a disabled elderly man’s home yesterday with three ladies from Arkansas, who came down for the week to help where they could. We worked beside of men and women, young and old, black, white and Hispanic, business owners, people whose homes had been flooded, Church of Christ, Baptists, and non-denominational people. One lady from Mandeville was a breast cancer survivor and had had a double mastectomy last year. It was hot, moldy, wet and stinky. We mucked through 6 inches of poo water, which this sweet man had been living in for 8 days, and none of us knew the others.

A precious group of people had brought food to the neighbors on Mr. Roy’s street the day before and they found him sitting in his wheelchair in his kitchen all alone. He has lived in his house for 30 years and because his son lives in California really didn’t have anywhere to go. All his neighbors had been flooded as well and tried their best to get him to leave, but he refused. A plea went out on Facebook to help this man and one helper came, then two, then three and so on….

I read your article with Brian’s essay the day before where he quoted Rudyard Kipling’s If poem. I remember memorizing that poem as a young child and thought, Yes! I want to “keep my head about me” while we live our new normal.

I confess I failed miserably “keeping my head about me when others lose their own” when I cried as I tried to vacuum the water out of his living room for over an hour. Many thoughts and emotions were pouring over me but the one the Lord wanted me to hear the loudest was this: The Bible tells us we are chosen, loved, redeemed, forgiven, adopted, blessed, and marked….in order to bring Praise to His Glory. This flood has given us multiple opportunities to bring God glory, yes?

I prayed as we dumped all Mr. Roy’s worldly possessions on the side of the road for God to bless Mr. Roy in mighty ways in the days, weeks and months to come. I prayed that we would be a people, who in the midst of great sorrow and hard work, would rise and shine and show this lost and hurting world that our joy comes from the Lord-not material things that can be gone in a matter of minutes. I prayed that God would cleanse me of my pride and give me a new zeal to go and tell about our good and gracious God.

Mr. Roy’s house is not completely finished, but our team made huge headway and hopefully he has decided to leave. Our sweet FB friend found him a furnished safe place, but he has to make the decision to go.

My story could be written hundreds of times over because I believe what we experienced yesterday is happening on every street in every flooded neighborhood all across southeastern Louisiana.

It is. A friend of mine was part of a mucking crew that went to an old man’s trailer. The place had been flooded, and needed mucking bad. The old man would not let them take out the carpet, or anything. It seemed to them that he believed that if he could hold on to everything, he wouldn’t lose any of it. The truth is, by trying to hoard it all, he was going to lose it all eventually to the mold.

The trauma here is severe. But so are the mercies.

Problems That The Other America Has

The reader who sent this in says, “I can’t even.” Nope, neither can I. Excerpt from The Atlantic.com’s piece:

When Trevor MacDonald started chestfeeding about five years ago, he didn’t know anyone who had attempted it, nor had any of his doctors ever encountered someone who had. In fact, he was shocked that his body could even produce milk. As a trans man—someone who was assigned female at birth but has transitioned to identifying as male—he was born with the mammary glands and milk ducts required for lactation, but he’d had his breasts removed. Once he had his baby, his care providers supported his desire to nurse, but it was up to him figure out how.

MacDonald began blogging about chestfeeding from his home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and soon discovered a whole community of transmasculine people around the world in the same boat, looking for guidance. For trans men and transmasculine folks, putting a baby to their chest to suckle can lead to complicated feelings about their gender. Many lactation support services are available for “nursing mothers,” which sounds unwelcoming to men and non-binary individuals. And many trans people say doctors don’t understand their bodies or experiences.

I am not interested in understanding the bodies or experiences of women who think they’re men who are bitching because nobody understands what it’s like to want to suckle your child at the breast you had cut off.

What I am interested in is trying to get inside the head of a coastal elite media that is obsessed with decadent crap like this. I think we can safely say that the people in J.D. Vance’s book aren’t readers of The Atlantic.com (one of my favorite websites, by the way), nor are most people in my part of the world who are out there mucking houses, feeding flood victims and doing their laundry. I get that. No magazine or web publication can be all things to all people all the time, nor should it try to be.

But if you read The Atlantic, The New York Times, and other publications edited by coastal elites, you would think that the travails of transgenders was the worst social problem facing America today. The bizarre degree of coverage and interest says little about transgenders and everything about the priorities of the media gatekeepers.

Last year, Gallup found that Americans massively overestimate the percentage of Americans who are gay or lesbian:

The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian, little changed from Americans’ 25% estimate in 2011, and only slightly higher than separate 2002 estimates of the gay and lesbian population. These estimates are many times higher than the 3.8% of the adult population who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Gallup Daily tracking in the first four months of this year.

Well, yeah, of course. Because the news media are disproportionately interested, even obsessed, with all things LGBT, you can hardly blame people for assuming that.

I’m not trying to pick on The Atlantic, which publishes a huge variety of articles daily, and which publishes the great Emma Green, though I imagine an LGBT person is far more likely to see himself or herself in the pages of that site than any of my neighbors here on the bayou are. And this is true of the elite media, period. I’m very sensitive to it right now because I keep hearing from readers and friends all over the country that if it weren’t for this blog and for reports from Facebookers in south Louisiana, they would have no idea how bad things are here on the ground, and what people are struggling with.

I submit to you that most people in the elite media are far more concerned about the difficulties of a breastfeeding transman than they are with the struggles of a single mom in Appalachia trying to keep her kids from falling into opioid addiction, or the flood victims from Livingston Parish who tear up when you give them a package of toilet paper (this really happened), because they have nothing, not even that. I believe that our colleges are turning out graduates who are trained in the obsessions of the professoriat, such that they cannot even see their own country anymore.

As I keep saying, I am not for Donald Trump, and think he does not have what it takes to be president. And I’m certainly not for Hillary Clinton, who is the epitome of what’s wrong with our Establishment. But this kind of thing — showcasing the woes of the chestfeeding freakshow — is what makes me glad that the Trump people are throwing a brick through the Establishment’s window. Elites in Washington, New York, Boston, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood spend more time worrying about whether or not a transman can get his (“his”) baby to suckle at his absent breast, and society’s shameful indifference to that, than they do worrying about most any struggle in the daily lives of poor dumb rednecks and coonasses in Jesus Land.

School Helped Trans Cult Steal Her Daughter

A reader writes:

I want to thank you for your articles on the transgender issue. As you can see by the subject line, this is something I am dealing with daily. I agree with you that there is so much detrimental influence on teenagers and children to express themselves in this way, it is completely overwhelming. It is not only overwhelming to the child, but to the parent as well. The nightmare of the situation is that the people you are supposed to trust; teachers counselors, administrators, will do nothing to inform you about what your child is doing while he or she is at school. Not only that, but they are encouraging and promoting this whole phenomenon. By the time I got a hint of what was going on with my daughter, I could do nothing to stop it. My daughter lives in a fantasy land of her own creation and the school’s continual nurturing. The advice I received from the school was to become a member of PFLAG or other similar groups so I could support my child and her decision.

I refuse to do this. My daughter is a girl. She acts like a girl when she is not consciously doing her boy act. I was very relieved to see in your article that were other parents out there who felt as I do, because according to the media, all parents should support their child’s decision to express themselves how they truly are. Case in point, the tv show ” I Am Jazz”. There is almost nothing to the contrary and I have felt very isolated.

My question to you is, in your research, have you found any groups for parents like me? Parents who refuse to give in to all of the lies? If you have would you please reply to me and send me their link or email address? I would be very grateful for support from other like parents in this very difficult time.

Readers, if you can help her, please post the information in the comments section, or send an e-mail to me (rod — at — amconmag — dot — com) that I can pass on to her.

In this heartbreaking and infuriating piece, a woman named Emily writes about how gender ideology activists and pusillanimous school administrators destroyed the charter school her kids attended. The camel’s nose is always “we have to do everything possible to stop bullying.” Excerpt:

With heavy heart, I too, pulled my children out of this school. This is the grade school that all of my children attended for the last thirteen years. We enrolled our oldest the first year the school was in operation and have made many decisions for our family based on our commitment to it. Our family is now struggling to pay private school tuition for seven children and will be doing so for the next 12 or more years. And we’re not the only family to walk away; many others have decided not to return for the upcoming school year. Applications to the school dropped precipitously for the first time in its history. The distrust runs deep and the school will be forever changed.

Of course, the entire US public school system is now facing the same gender ideology push we did last year. Obama’s transgender directive was delivered to every public school in the nation last May and ensures that this battle will play out many times over in the 2016-17 school year. Though I understand that our school was put in a difficult position and sympathize with that, ultimately I’m disappointed with their choices. Public schools have a duty to maintain a welcoming environment, which requires neutrality on some issues. An even more basic duty that was ignored by our school was to simple scientific facts and data. How ridiculous it was to hear our high school science teacher argue that biological sex is a subjective concept!

This experience has changed my life and I have committed myself to speaking out against gender ideology wherever I see it, but especially when it puts women, girls and students in danger. Going forward, I refuse to be intimidated and my resolve to speak the truth has only grown as the proponents of this lie act more and more boldly. I hope parents across this country will join me in defending our children against policies that subject them to harmful ideas and dangerous situations. Your child’s body and soul are at stake – Do not be afraid!

Note this part especially:

Students in the school were not immune to what was happening. Multiple kindergartners were pulled out of the school due to the confusion (and even trauma) they experienced from watching a boy “transform” into a girl. Five-year-old children know there are differences between boys and girls and this was beyond their ability to comprehend. Parents reported that their kindergartners were asking if they could grow up to become the opposite sex. The high school saw similar confusion. Two girls spoke out at a board meeting, claiming to be gender non-conforming. The GSA club focused its efforts exclusively on the transgender issue and papered the walls of the high school with signs stating that “Sex Does Not Equal Gender.” There was much discussion at lunch and on the playground of the transgender issue, even among the younger children. My fourth-grader chose not to talk about it all after he determined he was in disagreement with most of his friends. Parents started wearing bright purple buttons to school every day indicating their support of gender ideology. They were impossible to miss and prompted questions from many of the students.

Don’t think it’s not eventually coming to your school. And then?

Leviathan Vs. The Cajun Navy

A friend who has been doing flood relief work in the Baton Rouge area writes, “Remember when I said there was never an emergency the state couldn’t add a layer of bureaucracy to?” He points to a news story showing a Louisiana state legislator wanting a law to regulate the Cajun Navy, the impromptu collection of citizen boatmen who rushed into the flooded areas to save people. From the story:

Jonathan Perry, a Republican state senator is working on legislation that could require training, certificates and a permit fee for citizen-rescuers to bypass law enforcement into devastated areas, according to a report from WWL-TV.

Perry represents Senate District 26, comprised of Vermilion Parish and portions of Acadia, Lafayette and St. Landry parishes.

“At the end of the day, there are going to be two things that are going to be the hurdle when you approach it from the state’s standpoint,” said Perry in a radio interview, per WWL-TV. “Liability is going to be number one for them. They don’t want the liability of someone going out to rescue someone and then not being able to find them (the rescuers) and, secondly, there’s a cost.”

Some who took part in the rescue parties have spoken out against the proposal, including Dustin Clouatre of St. Amant.

“How can you regulate people helping people? That doesn’t make sense to me,” said Clouatre to WWL-TV.

This is ridiculous. If this law passes, it will be widely disregarded in the next flood, as it should be. The Cajun Navy represents the best of Louisiana’s civil society, because it’s the outward sign of an inward state that Louisiana people carry within them. That law would be like Mayor Giuliani’s trying to ban jaywalking in New York City. It’s trying to go against the Tao. Won’t work.

Caleb Bernacchio, a Baton Rouge native who has family rescued by the Cajun Navy, writes about how there’s no way to bureaucratize this kind of thing. Excerpts:

[Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre] envisions relationships that exist between friends, family, and total strangers, that are active in a more subtle way in daily life but which are most apparent in strong communities when disaster strikes. In Baton Rouge and Denham Springs, total strangers gave of their time and resources, sometimes putting their own lives at risk, to help those in need. And in similar communities around the world, on a daily basis communal bonds are evidenced by the way in which fellow community members give assistance to those in need in a manner that extends beyond economic calculations. This type of virtuous care is vital to the well-being of community members, yet it often goes unnoticed.

MacIntyre argues that as human beings we are always vulnerable to threats that make flourishing precarious and that we can only really flourish by relying on the virtuous care of friends, family, and often total strangers to give to us when we are in need. The response to the recent floods gives ample evidence of the strength of of virtuous networks spanning the communities of southern Louisiana. But maybe not surprisingly, the localism of the relatively rural population of southern Louisiana also offers an example of the parochialism and “irrationality” derided by elites in the wake of the Brexit vote. While economic models can largely capture increased economic efficiency stemming from globalization, economists struggle to explain the type of widespread cooperation, apparent in southern Louisiana, and described by MacIntyre in terms of networks of giving and receiving.

More:

Mainstream economist often dismiss the type of virtuous behavior on display in southern Louisiana as irrational, or attempt to reduce it to some sort of utilitarian calculation, as if members of the “Cajun Navy” were tacitly performing cost/benefit analyses each time they came across someone in distress. MacIntyre argues that the economic theory is unable to account for the role of genuinely common goods that transcend the distinction between egoism and altruism. The failure of economic theory to explain the virtuous behavior exemplified in the wake of the floods in Louisiana is directly related to the bankruptcy of political discourse in the United States and Europe.

What many pundits, economists, and gleeful proponents of globalization fail to understand is that relationships of gratuitous giving and receiving that form the basis of virtuous communities are often threatened by disintegration and marginalization as a result of globalizing economic policies. These virtuous relationships and personal bonds are required for local communities to subsist and for individuals to flourishing, especially when they are in need. MacIntyre, in Dependent Rational Animals, points to threats to communal integrity stemming from consumerism and reduced job stability, both making virtuous relationships, and therefore actual human flourishing, more precarious.

Read the whole thing. It’s an important short essay that deserves wide distribution.

It sounds petty to people outside the state for us to be irritated by things like the Red Cross not letting people come into shelters to pray with folks (pray, not proselytize), but prayer and religious observance is part of the natural, organic way of life in south Louisiana. Telling people they can’t go into shelters to comfort people with prayer is one the spectrum of a legislator wanting to regulate the Cajun Navy.

Say, if you want a t-shirt with the Cajun Navy logo of the photo illustrating this post, go here to order. All proceeds go to the Louisiana Red Cross.

UPDATE: The Louisiana state senator who proposes the regulation says he has been misunderstood. He explains it from his point of view in this video.

Walter Olson isn’t really buying it. Excerpt:

I’m trying to give Perry’s explanation a charitable reading — I guess he hopes something like a TSA preclear process will give police or authorities more confidence than they now have in letting licensed/approved amateurs past barricades and perimeters. But it’s pretty easy for me to imagine that this will change the incentives in a future emergency so as to give the police/authorities reason to be more aggressive in creating and enforcing barriers/perimeters than they currently are.

Norcia Earthquake!

Screen grab from CNN

CNN reporting catastrophic earthquake in central Italy.  The epicenter is very close to Norcia. The monks are reportedly okay, and in the piazza with people. This tweet shows damage inside the basilica at the Norcia monastery:

@monksofnorcia #norcia #basilica #terremoto #earthquake pic.twitter.com/rl0COMs12T

— Part Time Monk (@parttimemonk) August 24, 2016

Here’s a shot I took last time I was there of the statue of St. Benedict in the piazza there, with the basilica behind him. I will update this post once I’ve heard from our friends there. I have also put out a line to Marco Sermarini to see how the people of San Benedetto del Tronto have made it through the night.

Cross With The Red Cross

I cannot believe that the Red Cross did this to Capt. Clay Higgins, a folk hero here in south Louisiana:

(UPDATE: Can’t get that Facebook video to embed. Go watch it here.)

A Red Cross spokeswoman confirms that the agency does have rules governing praying in its shelters, but says managers would have accommodated Capt. Higgins if he had approached them. Her response comes in a Baton Rouge Advocate story about how a lot of people in Louisiana, even the governor, have complaints or at least concerns about the way the Red Cross has been handling things here.

From the American Red Cross blog:

Is it true that the Red Cross doesn’t allow people to pray in shelters?

We have been so moved by the outpouring of care and kindness we’ve witnessed among Louisiana residents. At the Red Cross, our priority is also providing comfort to all that reside at our shelters. We recognize and are sensitive to the fact that hundreds of people from different backgrounds are often sharing a large space with limited privacy. It is of the utmost importance that we respect people’s individual needs, backgrounds and beliefs in accordance with our Fundamental Principles, which state that we bring assistance without discrimination as to nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinion. With this in mind, and for the privacy of our shelter residents, we do have policies in place on who can enter shelters to ensure that people have a private, secure place to stay as much as possible. Please know people in the shelters are also welcome to pray and gather among themselves.

So much for the “Cross” in Red Cross. No wonder south Louisiana people are pissed off at them.

By the way, here’s Captain Higgins on a street in front of his daughter’s flooded-out house. This is uncut Higgins. The scene you’re looking at here is very common around here these days:

Obama: ‘America, Please Help Louisiana’

President Obama said today, in Louisiana, in part:

To give you a sense of the magnitude of the situation here, more than 100,000 people have applied for federal assistance so far. As of today, federal support has reached $127 million. That’s for help like temporary rental assistance, essential home repairs, and flood insurance payments.

FEMA is also working with Louisiana around the clock to help people who were displaced by floods find temporary housing. And any Louisiana family that needs help, you can find your nearest disaster recovery center by visiting FEMA.gov, or calling 1-800-621-FEMA. I’m going to repeat that: FEMA.gov, or 1-800-621-FEMA.

Now, federal assistance alone is not going to be enough to make people’s lives whole again. So I’m asking every American to do what you can to help get families and local businesses back on their feet. If you want help — if you want to help, Governor Edwards put together some ways to start at VolunteerLouisiana.gov. That’s VolunteerLouisiana.gov.

And the reason this is important is because even though federal money is moving out, volunteer help actually helps the state because it can offset some of its costs. Obviously, private donations are going to be extremely important, as well. We want to thank the Red Cross for everything they’re doing, but there are a lot of private, philanthropic organizations, churches, parishes around the state and around the country who want to help, as well. And that how we’re going to make sure that everybody is able to get back on their feet.

So let me just remind folks: Sometimes once the floodwaters pass, people’s attention spans pass. This is not a one-off. This is not a photo op issue. This is, how do you make sure that a month from now, three months from now, six months from now, people still are getting the help that they need. I need all Americans to stay focused on this. If you’re watching this today, make sure that you find out how you can help. You can go to VolunteerLouisiana.gov, or you can go to FEMA.gov. We’ll tell you, we’ll direct you — you can go to WhiteHouse.gov, and we’ll direct you how you can help.

But we’re going to need to stay on this, because these are some good people down here. We’re glad that the families I had a chance to meet are safe, but they’ve got a lot of work to do, and they shouldn’t have to do it alone.

I have criticized him hard on this topic, but I will not say anything today other than to thank him for saying these things today, and to strongly, even desperately, encourage you all to listen to his words, and help as you can. I watched a national news report on the clean-up last night, and if that’s all I knew about what the situation in Louisiana was like, I would have assumed that people here have everything well in hand.

It’s not true. It’s not remotely true. Folks here are working very, very hard, in scorching heat and humidity. But we need help.

To give you an idea of the scope of this thing, a National Weather Service meteorologist said that 11,000 square miles of the state had at least 15 inches of rain within 48 hours (some had more). That’s more than the entire state of Massachusetts. Imagine every square mile of Massachusetts underwater. That’s the scale we’re talking about here.

I’m working on a very tight and immovable deadline to finish my Benedict Option book, and unfortunately, all the stress of the closing of our church, the move, and now the flood appears to have reactivated my chronic mono. I’m hoping that it’s just a flare-up and not the real thing, but the past few days have been hard. I’m hoping, though, that things improve, and that next week I can go out into the field and do some reporting for this site.

Pre-Order The Benedict Option

 

 

There you have it — the final cover, thanks in large part to the great advice of all you readers. And as of today, you can pre-order The Benedict Option on Amazon.com.  Publication date is March 14, 2017. Here’s the Amazon page copy:

In a radical new vision for the future of Christianity, NYT bestselling author and conservative columnist Rod Dreher calls on American Christians to prepare for the coming Dark Age by embracing an ancient Christian way of life. 

The light of the Christian faith is flickering out all over the West, and only the willfully blind refuse to see it. From the outside, American churches are beset by challenges to religious liberty in a rapidly secularizing culture. From the inside, they are being hollowed out by the departure of young people and a watered-down pseudo-spirituality. Political solutions have failed, as the triumph of gay marriage and the self-destruction of the Republican Party indicate, and the future of religious freedom has never been in greater doubt. The center is not holding. The West, cut off from its Christian roots, is falling into a new Dark Age.

The bad news is that the roots of religious decline run deeper than most Americans realize. The good news is that the blueprint for a time-tested Christian response to this decline is older still. In The Benedict Option, Dreher calls on traditional Christians to learn from the example of St. Benedict of Nursia, a sixth-century monk who turned from the chaos and decadence of the collapsing Roman Empire, and found a new way to live out the faith in community. For five difficult centuries, Benedict’s monks kept the faith alive through the Dark Ages, and prepared the way for the rebirth of civilization. What do ordinary 21st century Christians — Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox — have to learn from the teaching and example of this great spiritual father? That they must read the signs of the times, abandon hope for a political solution to our civilization’s problems, and turn their attention to creating resilient spiritual centers that can survive the coming storm. Whatever their Christian tradition, they must draw on the secrets of Benedictine wisdom to build up the local church, create countercultural schools based on the classical tradition, rebuild family life, thicken communal bonds, and develop survival strategies for doctors, teachers, and others on the front lines of persecution.

Now is a time of testing, when believers will learn the difference between shallow optimism and Christian hope. However dark the shadow falling over the West, the light of Christianity need not flicker out. It will not be easy, but Christians who are brave enough to face the religious decline, reject trendy solutions, and return to ancient traditions will find the strength not only to survive, but to thrive joyfully in the post-Christian West. The Benedict Option shows believers how to build the resistance and resilience to face a hostile modern world with the confidence and fervor of the early church. Christians face a time of choosing, with the fate of Christianity in Western civilization hanging in the balance. In this powerful challenge to the complacency of contemporary Christianity, Dreher shows why those in all churches who fail to take the Benedict Option aren’t going to make it.

Pre-order your copy today, won’t you?

UPDATE: I just realized that March 14 is the Feast of St. Benedict on the Western calendar and Orthodox New Calendar. I had forgotten, because I’ve been observing the Old Calendar for the past few years. Stunned by this, I contacted my editor at the publishing house (secular) and asked if they had any knowledge that the book was going to be published on the Feast of St. Benedict. They had none whatsoever. It was just a coincidence.

A “coincidence.”

UPDATE.2: My mistake — March 14 is the Feast of St. Benedict on the ORTHODOX calendar, which, of course, I follow. Still, very cool, I think.