Rod Dreher's Blog, page 543

We Have Been Warned

Here in the flood zone of south Louisiana, you would be hard-pressed to find a single church or Christian organization (like the school community of which I’m a part) that isn’t in some way helping flood victims. I’m not talking about simply giving money. I’m talking about doing sacrificial work to help those who are helpless. I watched a report on NBC News last night about what we’re going through here, and was struck by the enormous distance between what they showed on that short clip, and the reality that people here see every day. It is much, much worse than most Americans know (see this for one glimpse, and imagine this multiplied by tens of thousands). The need is so great that there is no way this or any government could respond effectively to it on their own.

It’s also true that civil society couldn’t handle it on its own either. We need both — and that’s what we’re getting here. Istrouma Baptist Church, for example, is one of the biggest churches in the city, and has opened its campus as a staging area for relief operations (if you want to help, click here to find out what you can do). The work of the local churches, both big and small, in bringing desperately needed relief to the suffering is irreplaceable.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and thinking about how to many Americans, the thing most important to them about churches like those in this conservative part of America is that they (the churches) hold “bigoted” attitudes about LGBTs. In the years to come, those churches will be forced to pay a significant penalty for holding those views. Some people say that loss of tax-exempt status, which is what many progressives would like to see happen to dissident churches, will be no big deal. Why should their tax dollars go to subsidize bigotry? they reason.

It will be a very big deal. All contributions to churches and Christian organizations doing relief work are tax-deductible at the present time. This will likely go away, dramatically hampering the resources available to conservative churches like Istrouma to help the suffering in instances like this. Far as I know, nobody has seen crews from the Human Rights Campaign mucking out houses or feeding refugees.

Of course if they lose their tax exemption, churches will still do these things. But they will have many fewer resources with which to do so. Progressives either have not thought about this, or, as I suspect, they just don’t care. Purity on LGBT issues is all that matters.

Last year, the Baptist ethicist David Gushee was quoted by gay New York Times columnist Frank Bruni as saying that “Conservative Christian religion is the last bulwark against full acceptance of L.G.B.T. people.” Gushee has fully embraced gay rights, and doesn’t simply tolerate gay relationships, but affirms their goodness. Now he has written an extraordinarily important column laying out the future for Christians who reject the Sexual Revolution in its latest form. Excerpts:

It turns out that you are either for full and unequivocal social and legal equality for LGBT people, or you are against it, and your answer will at some point be revealed. This is true both for individuals and for institutions.

Neutrality is not an option. Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you.

By “the issue” he means those who will ferret out suspected thought criminals, interrogate them, and force them to come clean about their bigotry. Gushee lists all the kinds of people and institutions of American life that embrace homosexuality and transgenderism and, crucially, stigmatize those who do not. It is a sobering list for those who are not on it. And he’s right. He also says that the Republican Party might still be officially on the side of moral traditionalists, but it’s plain that that stance is fast eroding (he’s right about that too). More:

On the Democratic side, not only is LGBT equality now doctrine, sympathy for religious liberty exceptions is drying up quickly. If Hillary Clinton is elected president, making for twelve to sixteen straight years of Democratic control of the White House, it is quite possible that by Supreme Court ruling and federal regulation any kind of discrimination against gay people will have the same legal rights and social acceptance as any kind of racial discrimination. Which is, none.

Openly discriminatory religious schools and parachurch organizations will feel the pinch first. Any entity that requires government accreditation or touches government dollars will be in the immediate line of fire. Some organizations will face the choice either to abandon discriminatory policies or risk potential closure. Others will simply face increasing social marginalization.

A vast host of neutralist, avoidist, or de facto discriminatory institutions and individuals will also find that they can no longer finesse the LGBT issue. Space for neutrality or “mild” discrimination will close up as well.

The way he concludes the column makes it plain that Gushee believes this marginalization and demonization of traditional Christians to be a positive development. Read the whole thing.

He is absolutely right in his read on the situation in American society. There is no intention on the cultural left of being tolerant in victory, and never was. They are going to bounce the rubble and tell themselves that they are virtuous for doing so. This past week, I saw a Facebook comment in which a liberal said that Livingston Parish, where nearly everyone lost their home to the flood, was once the headquarters of the Louisiana KKK, so to hell with them, they deserve what they get. This is how it’s going to be with us.

I find that even at this late date, it is difficult to get ordinary Christians, including pastors, to understand the reality of what’s coming. You should believe David Gushee. He has done us all a favor here. He and his allies — that is, the entire American establishment — are going to do everything they possibly can to eliminate any place of retreat. When people say that if the Left has its way, there will be no Benedict Option places left to retreat to, I agree. That does not mean they will succeed, at least not at first, but it’s just a matter of time. This means that we will need the Benedict Option more than ever. The Ben Op is not about escapism; it’s about building the institutions and adopting the practices required for the church to be resilient, and even to thrive, under harsh conditions. The church will be under unprecedented pressure, legally and socially, to capitulate. But it will be possible to resist, though not without paying a high cost. I talk about how to do this in my forthcoming book.

Denny Burk responds to Gushee’s column here. Excerpt:

We also know that the conflicts ahead will be a proving ground for the faithful. There are many who call themselves Christian now but who will fall away when the conflicts come. When it becomes costly to follow what Jesus says about sexual immorality, some people will deny Jesus’ word in order to avoid the conflict. And that denial will not lead them to Jesus but away from Jesus. The settled conviction to deny Christ’s word is what the Bible calls apostasy (1 Tim. 4:1). Their going out from us to join the opposition will show what they are:

“They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, in order that it might be shown that they all are not of us.” –1 John 2:19

We are preparing ourselves for the heartbreak of these departures. But as they go out, the faithful are going to count the cost of staying in. That is what we are doing right now. And we are praying for the strength and resolve to stand when heat is on. It is not even on our radar screen to consider turning back, as Gushee would have us to do. We are on the narrow way with Jesus, and by the grace of God there will be no going back.

At my church, my fellow pastors and I are trying to prepare our congregation for the days ahead.

This is a time of testing. It will cost you to remain faithful. If you are not preparing for this now (or, if you’re a pastor, preparing your congregation for this), you are behaving foolishly. As Gushee says, “The issue will come and find you.” One of the hardest things that dissidents will face is that when the Thought Police show up at the door, church people like David Gushee will proudly say, “They’re in the basement, officer.”

UPDATE: Andrew T. Walker has some questions for Gushee:

There are good liberals out there that don’t think in such harsh binaries as Gushee. I know many. The question is what type of liberal is going to prevail on this debate.

I have several questions for Dr. Gushee that follow from his column. While I doubt he’ll answer them, they are questions that would offer clarity and understanding on what lies ahead for the future.

Are Christians who hold to the historical position on sexual ethics engaging in invidious discrimination?

Are Christians who hold to the historic position on sexual ethics holding the same type of beliefs and engaging in the same types of actions as avowed racists?

Can there be actual disagreement on this issue that doesn’t impute to the other side the worst possible motivations?

Can there be a state of mutual respect that allows for different people to reach different conclusions about the purposes of human embodiment?

Ben Op Reader Bleg

A reader writes:

I have been reading your blog for a few years now. I just read your article where you said that Classical Christian schools are dragging (in a good way) families and churches along behind them. I agree. We are currently homeschooling 5 children, ages 6-11. We live in an area that is a wilderness (in terms of schools and churches that think along BenOp-ish terms).

I am tracking with the stuff you have written. I think it is right on. It just isn’t to be found where we currently live. We are open to re-locating our family, but honestly, it feels a little bit like a shot in the dark.

In your research for your book, have you come across any areas/communities with schools and churches that think along Ben Op lines? We would like to stay in the Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania region, if possible. However, we would consider moving further south or east, if necessary.

The reader, by the way, is a Protestant.

Anybody have any suggestions? Leave them in the comments section. Thanks.

Exodus From Public Schooling

A federal judge has put a temporary halt to the Obama administration’s order on transgender bathroom use in public school:

Texas and a dozen other states sued in an attempt to block the federal directive shortly after it was released in May, and in a 38-page opinion issued Sunday, Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas temporarily prohibited the federal government from enforcing it as that lawsuit proceeds. The Obama administration has said that schools must allow transgender students to use the bathrooms and school facilities that match their gender identity, citing it as a civil rights issue protected under the federal sex-discrimination law known as Title IX.

O’Connor also ruled that the federal Education and Justice departments may not launch or complete any investigations based on the Obama administration’s interpretation that Title IX’s “definition of sex includes gender identity.”

The states argued that the federal government had overstepped its authority and effectively issued new regulations for Title IX without going through the proper federal rule-writing process. Opponents of the policy have argued that it abridges student privacy rights and potentially puts them at risk in the assumed safe-spaces of single-sex bathrooms.

In granting a preliminary injunction against the government’s guidance, O’Connor ruled that the states were likely to win the case on the merits of their arguments. O’Connor’s ruling takes effect just as students across the country are returning to class after summer vacation.

Meanwhile, a reader sends in this training video for administrators, teachers and staff in the Anne Arundel County (Maryland) public school system, instructing them how the system expects them to handle transgender students. The district serves 80,000 students. The reader says:

Just one more for your file of the inevitable Law of Merited Impossibility — made all the personally scarier, now that [people I know] are for the first time being affected directly. Your constant warnings, and those of your informers within “the system,” are absolutely right: this stuff is happening at lightning speed, and most people won’t know what hit ’em!

Here’s the video:

Note at around the 28:00 part, Bob Mosier, the chief communications officer for the school system, addresses “the field trip issue.” If you are chaperoning an overnight school trip, and student who is a biological male but identifies as a female wants to sleep among the girls, what do you do? “The answer is, they sleep with the females,” the administrator says. “That’s not the easy answer; it’s the right answer.”

And, he adds, because of privacy rules, teachers and others are not allowed to disclose to parents of other students what’s actually going on.

If you watch the whole video, you’ll notice that Mosier is gruff and no-nonsense in his presentation. He makes it very clear that there will be no deviation from the plan, and if you disagree with it, well, you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want what’s best for kids.

The whole thing is very instructive, though not necessarily in the way the school system intends. If you listen to the three women from the system who assist Mosier, they’re talking about things that are really crazy in a normal tone of voice, as if anyone who disagrees is the true nutcase bigot. One woman, a school counselor, talks about genderfluidity, and how some days, “I see myself more as my female side, and sometimes I see myself more as my male side. And we know that for growing up, it’s about figuring out who you are. And I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a few years down the road, questions about restrooms and locker rooms will be gone, because we’ll have structured things so that everybody can use whatever they want to.”

Progress.

The reader who sent that said that the person he’s close to in the Anne Arundel School System is a devout Christian who is faced with a question of conscience that could end their career there. What other public school system could this person work for? This gender insanity is not everywhere, yet, but it’s coming. Mark that. If you’re a teacher, administrator, or staffer for a public school system anywhere in the United States, you are going to find yourself sitting in a seminar just like this one day, if you haven’t already. And if you object, you’re a bigot

I was texting about this issue with another reader, an Evangelical whose family is taking a very hard hit to the family budget to put their child in a Christian school in their city, to escape this stuff. He said he just doesn’t get fellow Christians living in public school districts where this trans culture is taking over, leaving their kids in those schools when they can afford a Christian alternative, just so these kids can “be salt and light” and “transform culture for Christ.”

The culture is going to transform their kids, is what’s going to happen.

Your public school district may not be part of this movement yet. But do not be fooled: it’s coming. Are you ready?

Why The Great Flood Is Not Katrina

I have described the Great Flood as “Katrina.2″ to others, because that’s the only comparison available to describe the scope of the disaster. But a New Orleans friend and reader of this blog writes to say, “Er, no.” I post this with his permission:

Ways that B.R. area flooding is worse:

No warning. I always say I’d rather live on the Gulf coast than in tornado or earthquake country.  We’ll usually get four or five days of warning about a storm’s path.  We can evacuate if there’s a flood risk, or we can shelter in place if we’re on higher ground.  Evacuating?  Take a box of your most valuable stuff with you – family photos and important papers – and grab the checkbook, credit cards, and some cash from an ATM.  Staying?  Buy jugs of drinking water, food, batteries, ice, gasoline, fill the tub with water for bathing and flushing the toilet, raise stuff off of the floor in the lowest rooms, etc.  Apart from Katrina, my 50-odd years in the Great State have not been badly affected by hurricanes.  Before 2005, they were even kind of fun. But in BR, people were swamped without much notice.  There were flash flood warnings, but frankly, the weather service gives those about once a week in the summertime – there are some crying wolf issues here.  Not only was there no opportunity for people to grab their wedding pictures, a lot of folks left barefoot and in pajamas.  That was also true for people where the federally designed levees broke in New Orleans, but that was for a major hurricane, not some heavy rain that freakishly refused to dissipate or move along.

No flood insurance.  In N.O., mortgage lenders require flood insurance in most places, and always have.  Even before Katrina, even on the relatively high ground in the city, we knew that there was a risk of some flooding from once-in-a-lifetime hurricanes or from rainstorms that might occur once every 10 years.  No one thought the feds’ levees would collapse, but ordinary flood insurance covered the extraordinary damage.  But the BR flood was a once-in-a-thousand-year probability.  Even for the risk-averse, those odds are long enough that it is a rational option to decline flood insurance.  Times are going to be very tough for homeowners.  Grants and SBA loans are very helpful, but they’re as bureaucratic as you’d imagine.

No name.  I don’t know what to call this nameless event.  It’s hard to focus the nation’s attention on something like “Flooding in Louisiana,” which sounds like “Heat in Arizona.”  Rainstorms don’t have names.  If you’re in a major media market, they make one up – “Polar Vortex” or “Snowmageddon.”

How B.R. and Katrina are exactly the same:

Floodwater in your house is floodwater in your house.  Almost anything you own will be destroyed if it is submerged in flood waters for more than a few minutes.  In a one-story house, you lose everything below the water line.  This includes the walls themselves and maybe your electrical wiring, too.  In some ways, there’s not much difference between six inches of water and seven feet of water.  You’ve lost everything, you’ll be pulling out carpet, drywall, insulation, furniture.  (You’d be surprised how many bookcases and other sturdy-looking pieces of furniture are made of particleboard that will disintegrate if the very bottom gets wet.  The furniture sort of crumbles, so all that stuff you think is safe on high shelves can end up in the water, too.)

Ways that Katrina was worse, in ways that are hard to get across:

Body count.  There are about a dozen tragically lost in the B.R. area, and for those families there’s no difference if the total number of dead is one or 1800+.  But there is something different when there are 1800+ dead, as with Katrina.  It’s not just a different magnitude, but a different kind.

Drainage.  There is still floodwater in many places around B.R. now, but I’ve been seeing Facebook photos of friends’ homes that have been drained and gutted already.  Some are gutted to the ceilings, but for others, the water was only a few feet deep.  Those folks were able to remove sheetrock and insulation up to the point where the materials are dry.  They’re ready to make repairs now.

In New Orleans, the floodwater sat for a month in some areas, trapped in by the levees that couldn’t keep it out.  Even in places where the water drained within a few days, the houses sat unopened for weeks before the owners could come back.  (It was something like martial law here, and roads into town were shut off for a long time.)  The mold comes within a few days to the wet areas.  And soon, everything is a wet area as water wicks its way up the insulation and drywall, and condenses on the ceiling every night.  Even the things that do not get flooded are destroyed by mold.

The smell of death.  In New Orleans, there was no electricity in most places for a month, and owners were hundreds of miles away, so they could not come in and start cleaning.  Where roads were not flooded, the cops or military had them closed so you couldn’t get home if you wanted to.  There was no electricity anywhere in the city or suburbs for several weeks.  You cannot imagine the smell of a single residential refrigerator after its contents have stewed at 90 degrees for a month.  (Hint: the shrink-wrapped pieces of chicken and beef and fish in your freezer are just dead chickens and dead cows and dead fish.  You’ll never forget that smell.)  One famous restaurant’s freezer made an entire city block in the French Quarter smell like dead bodies for a month.  You cannot imagine the smell of 300,000 refrigerators full of rotten animal meat, and you can’t shake the knowledge that some of the smell, in some parts of town, is not coming from refrigerators.

The scope.  This is what no one in the Northeast understood after Superstorm Sandy.  In New York and New Jersey, waterfront areas were devastated, just like in Louisiana and Mississippi.  But after Sandy, some streets a block or two uphill from the water were undamaged.  When it came time to rebuild, the Home Depots and Lowe’s and local hardware stores were open, with electricity and employees and material to sell.  Baton Rouge will be similarly situated – some of the home improvement stores were flooded, but others will be open.  It’s not going to be a picnic, but it is possible to start rebuilding today for some people.

Katrina wiped all of that out in the New Orleans area.  The nearest home improvement store was probably 90 miles away in Baton Rouge.  The local Ace Hardware had no power for a month, and no suppliers of materials.  You want gasoline for a generator?  Drive 90 miles and hope the power’s on at the gas station, and hope the gas has not been sold out like it was the last time you drove that far for gas.  You want an extension cord?  90 miles.  Groceries?  A shower?  Garbage bags?  Sorry, 90 miles.

And this is going not going to sound like much with all the death and destruction, but there was no normalcy to life. 

Nothing was normal after Katrina, not a single neighborhood.  In New Orleans, there was no power downtown for about three weeks, even on the high ground.  The tap water was not drinkable for over a month anywhere in town.  You could not get a meal, or a cup of coffee, or a cold drink for months and months.  There was nowhere to escape the effect of the storm.  We didn’t have regular mail service for six months in the areas that were NOT flooded.  Roads were opened, but UPS and FedEx did not deliver to most areas for at least as long – so forget about sourcing anything and having it shipped.  Every minute of every day just wore you down, because everything was difficult.

By contrast, last Monday, I had a meeting scheduled in downtown Baton Rouge, as waters were still rising in parts of the city.  The meeting was cancelled because two of us could not get there, because our respective roads to Baton Rouge were closed.  Baton Rouge was an island.  But the downtown office where the meeting was to be held?  It was open.  Business as usual for people who could get there.  If you wanted a sandwich or a hot meal or a cup of coffee, you could walk to your favorite place and get one.

Of course, that’s not the case in the flooded areas, and I don’t want to minimize the inundation of entire towns like Denham Springs.  But you cannot underestimate the restorative value of being able to do something, anything, that’s normal.  Like going and grabbing a po-boy for lunch, where you can sit in the air conditioning and recover a bit.  Or you, sitting in a functional apartment with utilities.

Anyway, I ramble.  It’s weird how I get flashbacks of this stuff, when I was not in the city during the storm, did not lose everything, and generally made out extremely well.  I can’t imagine how people like my parents feel when they think about the storm, with my mom evacuating TO New Orleans and riding the storm out a block from the Convention Center, living in a B.R. apartment for months, and then going home to deal with the effect of water that got halfway up the walls on the second floor, no electricity for over six months, and every lifelong neighbor and family member relocated an hour away.

I don’t want to seem insensitive, or like I’ve had it worse than people in your neck of the woods.  I surely have not.  And my parents and I have resources that most people don’t in Livingston Parish.  But when I hear “this is as bad as Katrina,” I have a little trouble, on behalf of N.O.

When I wrote to ask his permission to publish this, he responded yes, but added:

I want to be clear about a couple of things. One, it’s not meant to be a contest over whose disaster is worse. That’s not my intent at all, although it is so early in the process I think that might be what it sounds like. I know from experience that any kind of comparison is going to come off as an offense to the victims who are struggling from minute to minute right now.

Two, I think my point is that they should count their blessings not to be in the condition New Orleans was in after Katrina. Katrina was truly an existential threat to the city of New Orleans and surrounding areas. But there’s no question that the areas flooded in and around Baton Rouge are going to rebuild.

Meanwhile, my wife reviewed what I wrote to see if it was offensive. She reminded me that every time we ate food outside for six months after Katrina, the food would be surrounded by “coffin flies.” I’ve never seen those before or since, but they were absolutely everywhere after Katrina. There was just so much rotting stuff for them to eat.

And it’s hard to explain how dead all of nature was around here, too. The trees had been stripped of their leaves, and there were no birds anywhere in the city. Where we usually have songbirds, tropical birds, wildlife sounds of all kinds, there was only silence. The trees finally resprouted in October or November, only for the leaves to turn brown almost immediately. But instead of falling off of the trees like in a normal year, all of the dead brown leaves stayed attached to the trees until the following spring, when green growth finally came back. It’s like the whole city was a haunted house set for almost a year.

Comparing anything to Katrina is like comparing anything to 9/11.

I think this is a bad time of year for me to talk about this stuff. The 11th anniversary of Katrina is in a few days.

You know, I was living in Dallas during Katrina, and my family, who lives north of Baton Rouge, was not affected. All my understanding of Katrina was from the media; I didn’t actually visit New Orleans until two years or more after the storm.

Reading the details in this e-mail, and knowing how terrible the destruction in the Baton Rouge area is, leaves me slack-jawed to consider the horror of Katrina. This poor state.

The Need Is So Great

Julie got home from the first day back at Sequitur Academy today. She said the need among the students and their parents wiped out by the flood is much greater than we anticipated.

Said Julie, “A mom came up to me and said, ‘The water got up to the ceiling of our house. We will never be able to live there again.'”

Over and over, stories like this. The other day I wrote about a woman from within the community whose child goes to the school. (I said she was a grandmother, but I mixed up two stories.) She had a heat stroke while a team from the school was gutting out her house, and she nearly died. She is all alone in the world, only her and her son — and whatever help the school community can give her.

This is where money you give to the Go Fund Me for Sequitur Academy goes: helping people like her.

If there is so much destruction, and so much need, in our little school, it staggers me to think about what’s going on all across the region.

Two weeks ago today, everybody showed up for the first day of class and the fall semester, and everything was sunny-day-everything’s-A-OK. And now this. Family after family who lost everything they have.

A big THANK YOU to all who have given already. It is hard to emphasize how urgent the need is. If you prefer to donate directly to Sequitur (a 501c3 entity, so your contributions there are tax-deductible), go here, and designate your gift for flood relief.

Donna Brazile Steps Up

Sent in by reader DancingGirl, a Democrat, this e-mail went out to everyone on the DNC’s list. Good for Donna Brazile! You don’t have to be a Democrat to follow her lead:

I grew up in Kenner, Louisiana, right outside of New Orleans. I went to LSU and served as a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority after Hurricane Katrina. I have family and friends stretched from the mouth of the Mississippi River all the way up — Louisiana is my heart, and right now, my heart is breaking.

The unprecedented rains and subsequent flooding that has hit the state is the worst natural disaster our country has seen since Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Over the course of the last week, Louisiana was hit with almost 7 trillion gallons of rain — to put that into perspective, that’s enough to fill more than 10 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

So far, this has left more than 40,000 homes damaged and more than 100,000 residents affected. Unfortunately, while the rains may have stopped, the flooding hasn’t, so those numbers can and will continue to rise.

This is a critical moment for my home state, and many people have asked how they can make a difference. Click here to visit the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and find out more about what you can do to help.

Louisiana has a great Governor in John Bel Edwards, who is working tirelessly with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to make sure his state gets the resources it needs. I’m so grateful to have him there, understanding that moments like these are the moments when good government is at its best — working from the federal level right on down to local parishes.

That’s something we understand to our core as Democrats. But we also know it’s moments like these when the support from folks all over the country for our brothers and sisters in Louisiana can make the biggest impact. So if you can, please visit the Baton Rouge Area Foundation for more information on how you can support those who have been affected by this disaster: http://www.braf.org

Thank you so much for everything you do.

Donna Brazile

Chair

Democratic National Committee

Louisiana Needs You!

Urgent call for volunteers – https://t.co/WHLfKbW0kK @WAFB pic.twitter.com/Sx585enrIg

— Matt Stanley (@sgt_stan) August 22, 2016

He Can’t Help Himself

Tried watching low-rated @Morning_Joe this morning, unwatchable! @morningmika is off the wall, a neurotic and not very bright mess!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2016

Trump supporters must want to put their heads on the table at this kind of thing. Here is a man who stands a chance of becoming President of the United States, but he cannot stay focused enough on the campaign to do what’s necessary. Instead, the media have gotten inside his head.

Somebody inside the Trump campaign apparently twisted his arm to get him to quit reading his Twitter feed long enough to get down to Louisiana with some relief supplies. He handled himself well while he was here, and even won praise from the Democratic governor, and our former US Senator, also a Democrat. He did well! It ought to have been the occasion for a campaign reset, however small. The fact that Hillary Clinton has been attending fundraisers with the superrich instead of visiting the suffering here is a golden campaign issue that reinforces his themes about the elites being out of touch.

But no. Here he is on Monday morning, being Trump at his Trumpiest, bitching and moaning about the hosts of a low-rated morning television show, and doing so in language that does not demean them, but demeans himself. See, this is a good example of why he’s unfit for office. Can you imagine being on President Trump’s staff and having to get him to put down his smartphone and listen to the daily briefing? Sad!

At just about every turn, Trump steps on his own chances, through his egotism, his lack of self-restraint, and his inability to focus on the long game. Yes, the media are biased, but at some point, he’s got to realize that his greatest obstacle in the task of being elected president is himself.

UPDATE: I mean, look. Here’s how easy this would be.

Right now in south Louisiana, everybody who can get time off of work to go help gut flooded houses is taking it. It’s a race against time, because if mold sets in, the houses may end up uninhabitable, or at least it will be a lot more difficult and expensive to make them livable again than if you had been able to get the soaked drywall, insulation, and carpet out onto the curb. Plus, there is widespread anger here over the lack of media coverage of what we’re going through. We keep hearing from volunteers coming in from around the country that they had no idea it was as bad down here as it is. TV had not told them. Bob Mann, an LSU professor who was Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s communications director during Hurricane Katrina, wrote:

If it’s not on television, it didn’t happen

Shortly after the storm passed, Louisiana National Guard helicopters and state Wildlife and Fisheries boats rushed to New Orleans to rescue stranded citizens. I asked if a few reporters and photographers could tag along. The leaders of both agencies told me there was no room for the press. One official even told me, “Every spot on one of those boats that we give to a reporter is one less person we can save.” At the time, I thought that was a compelling argument, so I didn’t press the matter.

Now I know I should have urged the governor to order both agencies to make room for reporters and photographers on just a few boats and choppers. Rescuing people was clearly the priority, but public confidence in government is also essential during times of crisis. The public deserves to know that public servants are working effectively on their behalf — and showing them is far more effective than merely telling them. If I had told reporters, “You can go, but you might have an evacuee on your lap for a hour,” most would have eagerly accepted the arrangement.

While the US Coast Guard did a heroic job of plucking many people from rooftops, there are people today who think that federal agency made all the rescues. In truth, there were more people saved by state employees on Wildlife and Fisheries boats and National Guard helicopters. The Coast Guard, however, had cameras mounted on its choppers and captured dramatic rescue video. We had no pictures and no video — just statistics and anecdotes.

If I were Ivanka Trump, I would frog-march my father to his plane, send him down here to spend a little time gutting houses, and let him use that to complain about how the media ignore the little people. Nobody gives a rat’s rear end about whether or not morning TV hosts are mean to Donald Trump. A lot of people care about whether or not media attention, or its lack, is hurting the relief effort. Even Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said on TV over the weekend that he’s surprised by how few contributions have come into the Red Cross for Louisiana disaster relief.

It is breathtaking that this should have to be explained to a man who wants to be President of the United States, and is running on populist themes. Hillary Clinton will be at a huge Hollywood fundraiser tonight. The contrast between Trump being on the bayou gutting houses and Hillary being in Beverly Hills picking pockets, would be stunning. But no, Trump can’t stop thinking about how mean Joe and Mika are being to him. For pity’s sake, Hillary was at a $50,000 a ticket fundraiser at Lady Rothschild’s beach house on Martha’s Vineyard on Saturday night!

If I were a Trump supporter — and I’m not — I would be so angry at him for blowing this, over and over. The Democrats are handing him a great issue, and he doesn’t know what to do with it.

UPDATE.2: And no, my liberal readers, it’s not that we’re asking for more government help. This job is beyond the ability of government to handle alone.

Lessons Of The Great Flood

The following is a guest post by Brian Daigle, headmaster of Sequitur Classical Academy, the classical Christian school in Baton Rouge. As I wrote last week, from the beginning of the flood, Brian has been in action to help flooded-out families from Sequitur, and others. (And not only Brian: Thomas Achord, head of the logic school at Sequitur and teacher of ancient Greek, took his bass boat out as part of the Cajun Navy, and rescued people from their rooftops.) Brian has led a team of boys from the school in mucking out people’s houses. They were even present to save the life of a Sequitur grandmother, who was overcome by a heat stroke while they were mucking out her house. The team used ice to help keep her cool, while some of them took a boat across the floodwaters to pick up paramedics, and ferried the paramedics with their patient back across the water to the ambulance. She survived.

My sons were part of that group. St. Benedict, in his Rule, calls the monastery “a school for the Lord’s service.” In our time, I believe that classical Christian schools, at their best, serve this same purpose. I knew that by sending my kids to Sequitur, they would not only be getting a good education per se, they would also be getting a good education in virtue. I could not have known that the first lesson of the year would be so vivid.

If we’re looking for “a new — and quite different” — St. Benedict for our age, as Alasdair MacIntyre said we should be, I suggest that we look to folks like Brian Daigle and others in the classical Christian school movement. As I’ve found in my research for the Benedict Option book, classical Christian schools are leading the way forward through this new Dark Age, often dragging local churches and Christian families along in their wake. Something very important is happening in this country in the classical Christian school movement. If you’re looking for a Benedict Option, there it is!

Here’s Brian Daigle’s essay:

Over the past four months, Baton Rouge has seen its fair share of storms, social and natural. First, there was the Alton Sterling shooting. Then there were the protests which set the stage for the fatal police shootings. After that came water. Lots of it. If this were a well-written classic, water would mean what water always means: rebirth. There is an Author to this all; we need to watch the kind of cleansing that will occur from this historic flood. Still, all this loss, tension, and disaster has made me reflect more deeply on my work as a classical Christian educator, a proponent of great literature and the resurrection of curricula long since forgotten.

Of course, you have the practical questions: when do we go back to school? How many of our families were affected by the floods and how greatly affected? Then you have the philosophical questions: should our students be studying right now or serving hot meals to refugees? In a community with this much need, what is the purpose of a great education? While tearing out dry wall from a flooded home, I got to thinking: classical Christian education is one of the only places in our society where students will truly be equipped to deal with these kinds of disasters, to be a calm in the manic and an able and willing hand in the reconstruction of the city, both literally and metaphorically, locally and nationally.

Consider for a moment those institutions in our society. Consider even the “religious” ones. Not one of them, including our academic institutions, have the moral fabric, rigorous demands, and goals required to raise future men and women, truly matured from adolescence and able to serve something greater than themselves. Our modern youth group model doesn’t challenge students to think well, communicate clearly, or work hard, despite the extemporaneous and helpful service projects done a few times a year. Think for a moment of our present definitions and modes of shaping masculinity, shaping future men who love, understand, and pursue courage. It’s gone, flooded and crumbled worse than any house here in South Louisiana.

Many people ask if classical Christian education is practical. “It sure is philosophical and heady,” they say after looking at a little less than half the curricula. There is no better test for the practicality of this kind of education than to see how classical Christian education is building a generation of men and women who will be best equipped as leaders and workers in the most practical situations.

I am not at present using this flood as an opportunity to ax grind, to find yet another crease we may pry open and say, “Aha! Classical Christian Education. Told ya!” My goal here is to make some very important connections between what our communities need at various times and how classical Christian academic institutions are some of the only institutions poised to provide for those needs:

Defining tragedy and disaster. In learning logic and rhetoric, our students are taught to think clearly through all topics. This doesn’t go out the window when the ant hill is kicked. That is, when a society goes into panic mode, thinking clearly is needed more than ever. As Rudyard Kipling said, “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” Requiring our students to think and hear well in all their courses means we train them to consider a proportionate emotional response in all situations, arguments, and relationships, and not just the emotional response required of them by their neighbor or the media, or even the circumstances. This means they can see beyond the immediate frenzy. They know the police shootings are difficult; they know the flood damage is hard and painful. They also know these events are neither tragic nor “Mother nature’s wrath,” because our students know history, and they should know the difference between a tragedy and a comedy. They know what man has gone through before and the context of these events to all others. By studying widely and deeply, they have a wide view of society and our place in the human story. Our students can then consider the right words to describe the current events, without simply repeating what the news anchor or politician says.

Rigor. True learning is difficult. It is enjoyable. It is natural, but it is not easy. I often tell my students, especially Rhetoric School students, “It’s easy to look smart; it’s hard work to be smart.” Schools who get education right will not shy away from mental sweat, late study hours, or academic stress. We want men and women with a work ethic, and that means a child’s studies ought to build a proper and rigorous work ethic into them each and every week. As was once said, not all rigor is mortis.

Love your neighbor. From sexual identity to choosing literature, the twittery academic trends right now all point to the glorification and affirmation of the individual student. These are the times, and these are the prevailing winds in our age. Nearly every institution our children visit, from Sunday School to Pre-school and Kindergarten to College, tell them one loud creed: you are the most important being in the universe. This is the exact opposite of what a classical Christian education teaches both explicitly and by its pedagogical choices. “You are far less important than you think,” we say. “We don’t quite care about you expressing yourself; we want you to beautifully express the truth,” we teach. A true education will teach the student that proper and right studies are not for beefing college transcripts or proving one’s intellectual worth but rather for serving one’s neighbor. When that is instilled on a weekly basis and in every class, something as practical as disaster relief becomes yet another extension of the academy.

Communicating and problem solving. One thing disasters teach is that intelligent and wise people are needed in all vocations—law enforcement, first responders, mothers at home, carpenters, etc. When we give our children a great general education, they may walk into any number of vocations and be prepared mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to use their gifts to the glory of God and service to their neighbor.

Those who mourn with hope. A distinctly Christian worldview, as encompassed in the Psalms, has no room for stoics. It likewise has no room for pessimists. The balance in the Psalms is lamentation in hope. If that is not instilled when there is no disaster surrounding our children, it will not be available when there is disaster. If we raise our children as God has called us to, we will find a generation who are truly human yet truly redeemed. They may weep with their neighbor over the loss of all earthly belongings, but they will say in the same breath, “Yes, but you will be having Christmas dinner again in this home before you know it.” Or to put it more theologically, “You may have lost all material goods, but God incarnate will soon be celebrated again in this brick and mortar.” Along this same vein is the incessant joy and value for humor provided by a classical Christian education. Laughter and joking trivialities are only reasonable in a world God declares good; we may then haul sewage-soaked insulation to the curb while singing a ditty and not a dirge.

Academic work by nature is contemplative work. It likewise is the kind of work which gives our children a mind to understand, eyes to see, and a heart to love. So, what do we do when we see so many practical needs around us? Hear Chesterton: “There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.” (What’s Wrong with the World, pg. 19)

Sequitur goes back to school today, just one week after the floods hit our city, and our goal is to raise a whole bunch of unpractical men and women, but not because we don’t think our kids should be a part of meeting our city’s needs. Quite the opposite. My colleague Thomas Achord recently reminded me of an excellent essay by C.S. Lewis. Without giving too much of the backstory, World War II hit England and many of the professors at Oxford were debating the question, “What hath Athens to do with Germany?” Should students continue their studies during war time or not? Should we fiddle while Rome burns? England declared war on Germany the 3rd of September, 1939; Lewis preached a sermon entitled “Learning in War-Time” on the 22nd of October of that same year. In order to answer the question whether or not we should tinker with learning while our city or country is on the brink of destruction, Lewis goes broader:

“[The Christian] must ask himself how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such contemplative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology. If human culture can stand up to that, it can stand up to anything. To admit that we can retain our interest in learning under the shadow of these eternal issues, but not under the shadow of a European war, would be to admit that our ears are closed to the voice of reason and very wide open to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions.”

The whole essay is worth reading over and again. Its applications to our own situation in Louisiana are important:

1) We must think upon something other than the flood, and that means we must continue to be human while avoiding a kind of localism. As Lewis says, often times the closer we get to the front lines, the less we talk about the war. Intellectual and aesthetic activity will not sink, even with trillions of gallons of water.

2) If we don’t continue to have our children read good books and think rationally during these times, they will read bad books and think irrationally.

3) Our children must not surrender themselves to temporal claims “of a nation, or a party, or a class,” or a flood. We must offer all we do to God, no matter what we do. This is the difference between those working for good and working against good in this flood, whether or not you serve ten-thousand meals or no meals. To appropriate what Lewis says, if our parents have sent us to school and “our country allows us to remain there, this is prima facie evidence that the life we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life.”

4) Most schools will return this week in vain, but that is because their work has always been in vain. They return this week or next week or next month in vain because their academic work has always been about their own glory. In that sense, flood or not, they are wrong to return to school. As Lewis states, “An appetite for [seeking knowledge and beauty] exists in the human mind, and God makes no appetite in vain. We can therefore pursue knowledge as such, and beauty, as such, in the sure confidence that by so doing we are either advancing to the vision of God ourselves or indirectly helping others to do so…The intellectual life is not the only road to god, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road for us. Of course it will be so only so long as we keep the impulse pure and disinterested. That is the great difficulty. As the author of the Theologia Germanicai says, we may come to love knowledge — our knowing — more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation they bring us. Every success in the scholar’s life increases this danger. If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work. The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived.” If we return to a school which seeks neither truth nor beauty, we are not returning to any worthy education; we are not returning to education at all.

5) By returning to school, our students may not let their “nerves and emotions lead you into thinking your present predicament more abnormal than it really is.” Baton Rouge is a disaster zone right now, but so is the whole world each day. Our communities each day are ravished by the floodwaters of unbelief and sin. We are simply seeing now, more locally, the manifestation of what is a daily spiritual reality apart from Christ.

6) We return to our studies with societal sympathy. Because Sequitur is a half-day academy four days a week, we will severely limit our homework load in the coming weeks, encouraging our students to spend the afternoon in the community. Their morning will be devoted mainly to their studies, and their afternoons devoted largely to helping in the community. In this way, we recognize our studies are not obsolete in this kind of climate and we recognize there is likewise a need.

I type this as I sit in a CC’s Coffee Shop, right before I head out to another house with a team of students and parents to move rotten furniture, tear out dry wall, and pull insulation. At the table next to me sits a young man whose face is plastered to his phone. He’s playing a racing game. I don’t know if he will be doing work later, but I do know he is currently an all-too-familiar image, the image of a generation self-absorbed in their incessant demand for self-pleasure and entertainment while their community crumbles around them. This is all too often the pursuit of our schools, of college and career readiness, of standardized tests, of pedagogy and learning in general. When we raise that kind of generation, when our schools raise those kinds of men and women, we shouldn’t expect them to be able and willing to help in times of disaster. If we don’t daily do the work in our schools, our homes, and our churches, we can’t possibly expect to reap the fruit of a mature and Godly generation, especially in the most obvious times of need.

As Lewis states, “The best defense is a recognition that in this, as in everything else, the war has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable.”

Classical Christian schools are among those few institutions daily doing the work to raise a mature and Godly generation. May our gratitude be shown by our ongoing work in and support of these institutions, even if the conditions are unfavorable. Let’s get to work.

— Brian G. Daigle, headmaster, Sequitur Classical Academy 

I hope you will re-read Brian’s essay, contemplate it, and send it on to your friends. This is what classical Christian education is, at its best. I have a chapter in my forthcoming Benedict Option book dedicated to education, and integrating it into a fully Christian life, in the Benedictine sense. I hope that chapter expresses this vision even a fraction as well as Brian has done.

Not all education occurs in the classroom. Not all education helps you get into Harvard. All education, if it is truly education, forms not only the mind, but the heart. We are so lucky to have that in Sequitur. And I should say here that we are grateful to the Istrouma Baptist Church for letting our school use its empty classrooms during the week. Sequitur is four years old now, and still has no permanent building. The good people at Istrouma Baptist are an integral part of building our school community. This is how it works.

Finally,, Brian Daigle sent out a letter Saturday night to Sequitur parents. Looks like for the foreseeable future, service to those suffering from the flood will be part of the educational experience at Sequitur. The school does not have its own building, and meets in classrooms donated by Istrouma Baptist Church. Well, Istrouma, which is a very large church, will be from now till the crisis is over a distribution hub for supplies for flood victims. This means Sequitur will be moving to upstairs classrooms there. It also means that Sequitur’s leadership has decided that students will bring a change of clothes every day from now on, and after classes end at midday, will take off their uniforms, put on their work clothes, and go downstairs with their class to do whatever relief work Istrouma has for them to do.

I deeply love this. Hands-on service as part of the classical Christian educational experience. Part of the formation of the students’ character. I am so grateful that my children are part of this school!

Incidentally, readers, someone in the classical Christian school movement set up a Go Fund Me to aid Sequitur families who lost everything in the flood. We’re all throwing in together to replace school uniforms and books, but also to help beyond that. The need is enormous. The donations are not for Sequitur itself, but only for the direct aid of the families who lost things in the flood. We estimate that one-third of our students were profoundly affected by the flood. If you would like to help our community, please do.

Here Comes The Crimson Tide

How about that! Two different Alabama readers sent me these images of folks today filling up the University of Alabama football team truck with supplies for Baton Rouge area flood victims.

There may be no fiercer rivalry in college football that that between the LSU Tigers and the Alabama Crimson Tide. But it’s at times like this that you learn what people are really all about.

Thank you, Alabama. Thank you Coach Saban. Thank you all for your generosity to us. We might even let y’all win this year.