Rod Dreher's Blog, page 550

Ideas Have Consequences 2016

A reader is diving once again into the 1948 conservative classic Ideas Have Consequences, by Richard Weaver. This paragraph from Chapter Three jumped out at him:

The [Southern] gentleman was left to walk the stage an impecunious eccentric, protected by a certain sentimentality but no longer understood. Europe, after the agony of the first World War, turned to the opposite type for leadership, to gangsters, who, though they are often good entrepreneurs, are without codes and without inhibitions. Such leaders in Europe have given us a preview of what the collapse of values and the reign of specialization will produce.

Adds the reader: “Welcome Trump. Welcome Hillary for that matter.”

Total pseud that I am, this morning I was on the treadmill and watching Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation on YouTube. Ever seen it? It’s fantastic. You can watch it with your kids, though young ones will be bored. I’m on Episode 6, which covers the Reformation. At around the 30:00 point in the episode, Clark — not a religious man himself, but a high aesthete — discusses how the Reformation unleashed destructive passions that devastated religious images. As the camera pans over defaced images of saints in the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral, Clark says:

There wasn’t much religious about it. It was an instinct, an instinct to destroy anything comely, anything that reflected a state of mind that ignorant people couldn’t share. The very existence of these incomprehensible values enraged them.

In that episode, which I’ve embedded below, Clark uses concepts invented by H.G. Wells to explain the clashing worldviews in the Reformation. He says that Wells believed early history involved a clash of “communities of faith and obedience” and “communities of will.” Wells distinguishes them like this:

For thousands of years the settled civilized peoples, who were originally in most cases dark-white Caucasians, or Dravidian or Southern Mongolian peoples, seem to have developed their ideas and habits along the line of worship and personal subjection, and the nomadic peoples theirs along the line of personal self-reliance and self-assertion.

Clark brings up the Wells categories to assert that the Reformation unleashed the passions of the “communities of will” of Germanic Northern Europe, against the “communities of faith and obedience” of Latin Southern Europe.

(Interestingly, Clark leaves out the words “faith and” in his mention of Wells’s categories. As Joseph Pearce points out in his critical review of Civilisation, Clark at the time of the program was a highly cultured unbeliever, and that greatly influenced his take on civilization. Then again, the subtitle of the series is “A Personal View.” Anyway, Clark was received into the Roman Catholic Church on his deathbed, Pearce reports.)

I’ll need to look more into what Wells meant, but these categories may be useful to us today to make sense of our own time. We are plainly and overwhelmingly a community of will — and that’s why we are destroying the possibility for civilization to endure. The Benedict Option is about a return to a community of faith and obedience — faith in and obedience to a religious and metaphysical order independent of ourselves. It would have been news to the Reformers, of course, that they were inaugurating a community of will over and against a community of faith and obedience. But the seeds of voluntarism had been planted at the end of the Middle Ages by Scotus, Ockham, and other Catholics. What we are living through now is the final outworking of those ideas.

Trump & The God Vote

Noah Millman calls the religious conservative case for Trump “incoherent.” Excerpt:

Finally, I have to ask a serious question of folks like Rod Dreher who are seriously considering voting for Donald Trump because of judges. If you really believe that traditional Christian conservatives are on the brink of suffering real and substantial persecution, and you believe that electing Donald Trump so that he’ll appoint some right-leaning judges will prevent that from happening, then it seems to me you believe two contradictory things.

This country has had Democratic and Republican Presidents in recent memory. The pendulum swings this way and that. Each side periodically gets to pick a bunch of judges, and some of those judges vote more or less the way you want them to on some of your pet issues. Meanwhile, the country continues to change — and the judges often change their views along with it. Frankly, in the face of a real popular movement to stifle traditional Christian witness, a handful of additional judges would prove largely impotent. And if a handful of judges really could sway things, then how much more so could a real and substantial movement of public engagement, civil disobedience, etc.

If the political tide is running strongly against you, that’s not a reason for apocalypticism. It’s a reason to rethink your political strategy — which is the exact opposite of what a vote for Trump would represent.

After all, Donald Trump’s primary victory is the final proof that even the religiously conservative base of the GOP doesn’t really care about things like abortion and gay rights, because Trump manifestly didn’t care about these questions or was actively on the other side from religious conservatives, and yet he won plenty of evangelical Christian votes in the primaries. So voting for Trump out of religious conservative conviction sends a clear-as-day message that Republicans need do absolutely nothing on those issues in order to win religious conservative votes. It is a statement of abject surrender.

Look: there is nobody running in this election in whom religious conservatives should put the slightest sliver of hope with regard to their issues. If you really care overwhelmingly about those issues, you have a practical obligation not to vote for President. Large scale abstentions by religious conservatives would make it abundantly clear that attention must be paid to their concerns, in a way that voting for Trump never could do.

Or, if issues like abortion are just one of a complex of issues that have to be weighed in any election, then vote for the person who you think is best on balance, and fight for those other issues on another front. Maybe that means voting for Trump — in which case you’ll still need to be doing that fighting on other fronts, because trust me, Trump is not going to have your back. Regardless, don’t kid yourself that a vote for Trump will advance the cause of religious conservatism one iota. You know full well it won’t.

Well, look, I cannot claim to speak for all religious conservatives, so my opinion is only my opinion. At this time, I find it impossible to imagine voting for either Hillary or Trump — a fate that I am spared because I live in a state that should go pretty comfortably to Trump. But I accept that there’s the possibility that something might happen between now and Election Day that might cause me to vote for one or the other candidates, though I honestly cannot imagine what that thing might be. In either case, it would be fear of the Other Candidate taking office. I would cast my vote with immeasurable disgust, and never tell a soul for whom I voted. That’s how revolted I am by both candidates, though for different reasons.

For the record, I would happily vote for a candidate who stood for many of Trump’s positions (versus an Establishment Republican), if he were not Donald Trump, who is a volatile, thin-skinned narcissist without convictions or principles, in my view. The only unambiguously good thing Donald Trump has done with his presidential run is destroy the GOP Establishment.

That said, let me answer Noah’s points.

1. As a political force, Christian conservatives are done. Republicans have proven that they care more about what Big Business thinks than they do about what religious conservatives think. Christians should be under no illusion about this.

2. Christian conservatives are a declining political force because we are a declining force, period. We have lost the culture. In my forthcoming book, I will be making this argument using detailed studies, but the unavoidable conclusion is that we are going to become a small minority within the lifetimes of the Millennials. Why? Because most of them are either rejecting religion outright, or affiliating with it so loosely, and with such a generic version of it, that they may as well not be Christian at all. Religious progressive triumphalists ought to be careful not to gloat too much. When Millennials reject conservative Christianity, most of them don’t join a progressive church. They leave church altogether.

3. Trump doesn’t give a fig about the issues that we care about. He’s not one of us, and can’t even fake it very well. Those who believe that Trump had an authentic come-to-Jesus moment recently are fooling themselves. Whenever I see Trump talk about religion (which is rare), I’m reminded of an interview I did in the mid-1990s with Charlie Sheen, who had washed out in some awful scandal, and then declared that he had found God. When we talked face to face, it was clear to me that the “I got saved” business was a publicity ploy, not a conversion. And of course I was correct.

4. Again, I can’t speak for all religious conservatives, but I would not expect a President Trump to advocate for causes important to religious conservatives. That’s not who he is, and that’s not what will have gotten him elected. The best we can hope for is that he will appoint judges to the federal bench, especially to SCOTUS, who will interpret the law so as to give maximal protection to religious liberty. There are still some Japanese-soldier Religious Rightists hiding out on a desert island in the South Pacific, thinking that if we just elect the right people, we can overturn Obergefell. I don’t know any serious political Christian who believes that, or who expects that to happen in any plausible scenario. We just want to be left alone to run our institutions.

5. Which brings us to the only religious conservative case for Trump that makes any sense to me. Trump may not care about our issues, but that also means he doesn’t care to fight against them. There is a chance that if elected president, he would defer to his advisers on picking judges, especially for SCOTUS, and give us judges that understand the vital importance of the First Amendment. There is no chance that Hillary Clinton will do this, in my view, and an overwhelming chance that she will appoint judges and advocate policies that drive orthodox Christians further out of the public square. She will consider it a virtue to bankrupt small businesses that resist the LGBT steamroller, and consider it a good deed to unmask and exile “bigots” wherever they are — and smash their institutions. Pepperdine’s choice the other day to give up its Title IX exemptions in the wake of pressure from the State of California is a sign of things to come. Government under progressive leadership will compel Christian institutions to capitulate or die. (In the case of progressives leading Mainline Protestant churches, they are compelling their own institutions to capitulate to social liberalism and die at the same time. Progressive religion is a suicide cult.)

This is going to happen under President Clinton. It might not happen under President Trump. For some religious conservatives, this is reason enough to vote for him. Think of it this way. If you are a Jewish American whose most important issue is the survival of Israel, and you had to choose between a presidential candidate of very low character who was indifferent to Israel but not actively hostile to it, and a presidential candidate who wanted to see it weakened, and even destroyed, would the choice be so difficult? This is what it looks like to conservative Christians.

6. If Trump becomes president and judges he appoints rule favorably on religious liberty issues, this does nothing to prevent the decline of conservative religion. Why would Noah think that we believe that? We are simply trying to hold what ground me have around our institutions. We live in a post-Christian nation, and barring divine intervention, that’s not going to change anytime soon. We are fighting now to be left alone.

7. If I believed that there was a political solution to our nation’s problems in general, and to the political and cultural dilemma of conservative Christians in specific, I wouldn’t be busy at work on The Benedict Option, a book that is about how we small-o orthodox Christians should live as an increasingly despised minority. All a Trump presidency could possibly do is buy us time by protecting our right to run our own institutions, for now. I doubt this would last beyond a Trump presidency, but I could be wrong.

8. The problem with focusing laser-like on religious liberty is that you have to exclude many other things that are deeply worrying about Trump, and even offensive. I know some conservative Christians who despise Trump’s stance on immigration (for the record, I personally am an immigration restrictionist). Me, the thing I worry most about with Trump is his lack of core principles, his volatility, and his lack of self-discipline — qualities that are terrifying in a US president.

That’s not nothing. We are citizens of the City of God first, but that doesn’t mean we cease to be citizens of the USA. People who tell themselves that Trump is less likely to get us into a war than hawkish Hillary are betting that he has the inner strength of character to resist being baited by foreign leaders. I wouldn’t take that bet.

9. Furthermore, there is strong reason to believe that Trump is scamming his religious conservative backers like he scams everybody else. Michael Brendan Dougherty has a good piece up today on this point. Excerpts:

One of Trump’s few proven and consistent traits is making whatever outlandish promises he has to make to close the sale, and then leaving his creditors and business partners in the lurch later. He creates scam businesses, and he does so by selling his marks on a fantasy. Come to Trump University and become a real-estate billionaire. Finance Trump Taj Majal with junk bonds, and I’ll save Atlantic City. I’ll sign your pledge, but I won’t be held by it. Make me president, you’ll get four more Scalias. Subject to terms and conditions, of course.

[Pro-Trump Reformed theologian Wayne] Grudem’s argument for Trump only makes sense if you make a strong effort to avoid the evidence about what kind of man Trump is. Trump has been serially unfaithful to his wedding vows, to his creditors, to his political personas. He doesn’t just back away from extreme positions, he runs away from his campaign promises even during the campaign. The one believable statement Trump has made about himself is that he “doesn’t bring God” into his life such that he would ask for forgiveness for his sins.

MBD, talking about a public statement Grudem signed in 1998, during the Clinton impeachment scandal, saying that character in our political leaders counts, and that’s why Bill Clinton must be made to answer for his immoral behavior, including lying under oath:

And what does it say about the quality of our convictions if we argue in 1998 that “the moral character of a people is more important than the tenure of a particular politician or the protection of a particular political agenda,” but then, as soon as our political agendas are threatened, find a handy excuse for installing a “flawed” man in the same office? It says that our convictions come with a political out-clause.

But I’m not an expert. I suppose it takes a celebrated systematic theologian to construct an argument so dizzying that you temporarily forget the words that are printed in red letters: By their fruits, you shall know them.

Read the whole thing. 

So, in conclusion, the religious conservative case for Trump comes down to gambling. That Hillary would be a disaster for religious conservatives is one of the safest bets you can make in American politics. Betting on Trump is a long-shot gamble, but as I tell myself when I buy lottery tickets, hey, you never know. Even if Trump were to come through on religious liberty protections, voting for him is still taking an incredible gamble on so many other things, both domestically and internationally.

Still, it might be worth it to some. If a religious conservative takes all of this into consideration and still chooses to vote for Trump, I won’t judge him. I suppose it is possible that I may be that man come November. I don’t see how, but maybe I will be. (I also might be the man who votes for Hillary Clinton, though it’s even more unlikely.) But I do not understand religious conservatives who enthusiastically support Trump, as opposed to supporting him in fear and trembling, knowing what a bad man he is. They are no better than the feminists who rallied to Bill Clinton’s side during the Lewinsky scandal because no matter how much Bill’s actions and character went against the things they believe in, it was more important to deny the Right a victory than to stand on principle. Similarly, many conservative Christians involved in politics this fall are not covering themselves with glory, to put it charitably.

J.D. Vance Fan Club Letters

Here’s an example of the kind of letter I get every day since publishing my interview with J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, which has shot up the sales charts since the interview appeared. J.D.’s good fortune has also been TAC’s. This site has never seen anything remotely like the popularity of this piece, which has gone viral, and will soon cross a million page views.

J.D. Vance has struck a deep nerve in America. With this suddenly (and deservedly) red-hot memoir, he has emerged as one of the most important new voices in American politics and culture. This letter from a reader explains why:

I found the above-referenced article on a progressive “blue” Facebook site. I work as a public defender and my political leanings are to the left of the Democratic Party. I also supported Bernie Sanders.

Words cannot express how much I appreciate your interview. This is the kind of political discourse we need — honest, grounded, non-judgmental, and compassionate. This is the kind of dialog “liberals” need to hear. I’m tired of all the tippy-toeing around, and I’m tired of the liberal tendency to think that change can be imposed from the outside.

In my line of work, I bounce back and forth from one pole to the other – one moment I am cursing intractable institutional problems, and the next, I rail against the seemingly incomprehensible choices made by my clients. But, even with my strong middle-class upbringing, I can see how we “elites” are a mess too, so it’s really hard to blame people for making choices I have never had to make.

Mr. Vance, by being “neither fish nor fowl,” might be just the person to help us come to some real consensus regarding what can, or should, be done (or not done) — in a way that simply creates the opportunity for alternative choices and respects and preserves cultural differences and preferences. I ordered the book, and I have shared the interview. Thank you again.

J.D. Vance is in his early 30s. What I want to know is, When is he going to run for office so I can vote for him. If he moves to Louisiana, I can probably vote for him three times, and get all my dead relatives to vote for him too. But seriously, it would be a great thing if people whose life trajectories have been like J.D.’s would run for office and try to change things by challenge the shibboleths of both the Democrats and the Republicans.

Annals Of Progressive Self-Hatred

I found this on the Gates Of Vienna website. It’s a clip from a German news documentary in which a German woman of Turkish descent who describes herself as a “socialist, anti-fascist, feminist” tells the story of how she was gang-raped by men she believes were refugees. They were speaking Arabic or Kurdish, she can’t be sure. She went to the police to report that her purse had been stolen (which was true), but did not mention the rape, and lied about the offenders (she said one of them was a German). As an activist, the woman had demonstrated in favor of refugees, and didn’t want to bring them into disfavor. Watch the clip to find out what happened next.

Such is progressive Europe today. It’s quite astonishing. She now feels guilty for having filed police reports on the men who raped her, because it encouraged anti-immigrant rightists in their negative opinions about the refugee influx.

Let me say that again: refugees raped this progressive German woman on a playground, yet she feels guilty for telling the police about it. About her rape. The narrator of the documentary says that the woman feels like “an offender” now.

The old joke has it that a liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in a fight. Now we see that a European multiculturalist is someone who won’t take her own side in a rape.

See, this is what I was talking about with Pope Francis yesterday. The fear of calling a thing what it is because of what right-wingers might think of it is crippling them.

L’Option Benoît

From an interview with French political philosopher Pierre Manent:

Il Foglio: What do you think and feel about the recent attack at a French church? No priest had been killed in odium fidei (out of hatred for the faith) since the Second World War.



Pierre Manent: Imagine this scene: a mid-week mass, an almost empty church, two parishioners, three nuns, a very old priest with a mild, fine face who is immolated at the foot of the altar on which he has just celebrated the memorial of Christ’s sacrifice. This heart-wrenching scene sheds light on the state of Christianity in Europe.

More:

Il Foglio: France looks exhausted. … What are France’s mistakes, especially those of the elite media and intellectuals, and what is the nature of its malaise?

Pierre Manent: The French are exhausted, but they are first of all perplexed, lost. Things were not supposed to happen this way. … We had supposedly entered into the final stage of democracy where human rights would reign, ever more rights ever more rigorously observed. We had left behind the age of nations as well as that of religions, and we would henceforth be free individuals moving frictionless over the surface of the planet. … And now we see that religious affiliations and other collective attachments not only survive but return with a particular intensity. Everyone can see and feel this, but how can it be expressed when the only authorized language is that of individual rights? We have become supremely incapable of seeing what is right before our eyes. [NFR: Ahem! — RD] Meanwhile the ruling class, which is not a political but an ideological class, one that commands not what must be done but what must be said, goes on indefinitely about “values,” the “values of the republic,” the “values of democracy,” the “values of Europe.” This class has been largely discredited in the eyes of citizens, but it occupies all the positions of institutional responsibility, especially in the media, and nowhere does one find groups or individuals who give the impression of understanding what is happening or of being able to stand up to it. We have no more confidence in those who lead us than in ourselves. It is neither an excuse nor a consolation to say it, but the faults of the French are those of Europeans in general.

One more bit from Manent:

I believe that, amid the crumbling of Western civilization, which has begun, the supernatural character of the Church will become, paradoxically, more and more visible. The hatred of the world will turn against it more and more clearly. More clearly than ever the fate of all will depend on the “little flock” of Christians.

Read the whole thing.

Europe is only one generation ahead of the US. The hatred about to come against the Church in Europe is coming to the Church in the US too. Open your eyes. If one of the most distinguished political philosophers in the world can see it coming, so had we better. The Benedict Option is the only path open to us orthodox Christians in the West. We are living through dramatic historical times. We Christians in the West had better hope that we can live up to what it demands of us.

The Size Of The Ask

In his column yesterday, Ross Douthat explored why the new Hillary Clinton is so hard for even Trump-hating Republicans to get behind. Excerpt:

But on social issues, Clinton and her party aren’t even offering the fig leaf of her husband’s “safe, legal and rare” formulation. They’re for abortion rights without exception and for public funding of abortion, a maximalist stance that thrills pro-choice activists but is nowhere near the muddled middle on the issue. So any pro-lifer inclined to cast a vote for Hillary has no cover; to stop Trump, they have to cast a baldly pro-abortion vote.

Or again, imagine that you’re one of the many Americans conflicted about immigration policy — you view immigrants favorably, you find Trump’s rhetoric toxic, but you also favor limits on migration, and you want to make sure that the law is respected and enforced.

You would be happy to vote for the Hillary Clinton of the early 2000s, who talked a lot about border security and workplace enforcement. But that Clinton is long gone. Her party is evolving toward the position that illegal aliens, save criminals and terrorists, should never be deported once they’ve reached our soil, and Clinton herself is committed to a unilateral amnesty even more expansive than the one that President Obama attempted. Which for our conflicted voter isn’t really a middle ground compared to Trumpism; it’s closer to the opposite extreme.

Clarifying his point in a tweetstorm this morning — read the whole thing here — Douthat says, in part:

3/ There are plausible arguments that they’re right. BUT: I think liberals could profit from imagining how they themselves would react …

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 1, 2016

5/ Some amalgam of Sharpton, Jeffrey Epstein, Jill Stein? Yes, hard to come up w/analogue, but try: Imagine a clearly unfit Dem nominee.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 1, 2016

6/ Okay. You don't want to support them. But the Republican nominee is … Rick Santorum.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 1, 2016

He’s saying that liberals who believe that it’s perfectly obvious that anti-Trump Republicans should vote for Hillary aren’t taking seriously how much her Great Society 2.0 liberalism violates so much of what they hold dear.

15/ But in their quest to woo conservatives into a popular front, liberals just need to recognize the scale of the "ask."

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 1, 2016

I feel this way about HRC and the Court. In my circle, there are some very serious conservative Christians who cannot abide Trump, but who genuinely fear for what would happen to the country if Clinton were elected. Their fears (I share them) are real and valid. One of my law professor friends e-mailed over the weekend to say that this problem is a very, very big deal. Conservative Christians like us are non-factors in mainstream politics now and going forward, he said, but at least we can now count on the courts to protect our right to be “wrong”. Under a left-wing SCOTUS of the sort HRC would appoint, to say nothing of four more years of a Democratic president filling the federal judiciary with liberal judges, everything is up for grabs.

Law professor Hugh Hewitt is completely on board for Trump. Excerpt:

If Hillary Clinton wins, the Left gavels in a solid, lasting, almost certainly permanent majority on the Supreme Court. Every political issue has a theoretical path to SCOTUS, and only self-imposed judicial restraint has checked the Court’s appetite and reach for two centuries.

That restraint will be gone when HRC’s first appointee is sworn in. Finished.

This is not hyperbole. I have the advantage of having taught Con Law for 20 years, of having argued before very liberal appellate judges like Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the very liberal Ninth Circuit, of practicing with the best litigators in the land, and I know what a very liberal SCOTUS means: conservatism is done. It cannot survive a strong-willed liberal majority on the Supreme Court. Every issue, EVERY issue, will end up there, and the legislatures’ judgments will matter not a bit.

So vote for Hillary Clinton (or sit it out) and then prepare for the deluge of court-ordered solutions to every social problem, bench-drawn congressional districts and extraordinary deference to every agency of the federal government combined with a sweeping away of federalism.

This is the size of the ask, liberals. In the spirit of Ross Douthat’s thought experiment, let’s consider that the hypothetical candidate Santorum promised to nominate judges that would overturn Roe, overturn Obergefell, strengthen corporate interests, give Christian businesses the right to turn away gay customers, and basically reject all that you most value. What if you were confident that President Santorum would likely be able to replace the late Antonin Scalia, the aged and ailing Ginsburg, the aged Breyer, and the aged Kennedy, with younger justices from the cream of the Federalist Society, creating a 7-2 conservative majority that would last a generation. Would you still be able to vote for Santorum because he wasn’t Al Sharpton?

This is the choice conservatives are facing this fall. To many of us, either Clinton or Trump would be disastrous for America. It’s only a question of what kind of disaster we are more willing to endure. And it’s not at all an easy question.

What Is Wrong With Pope Francis?

Honestly. Just honestly:

 

Pope Francis said the inspiration for terrorism wasn’t Islam but a world economy that worshiped the “god of money” and drove the disenfranchised to violence.

“Terrorism grows when there is no other option, and as long as the world economy has at its center the god of money and not the person, “ the pope told reporters late Sunday as he returned to the Vatican from a five-day visit in Poland. “This is fundamental terrorism, against all humanity.”

Speaking on his flight from Krakow, the pope was responding to a question about links between Islam and recent terrorist attacks, particularly the killing on Tuesday of a priest in northern France by followers of Islamic State.

Pope Francis suggested that the social and economic marginalization of Muslim youth in Europe helped explain the actions of those who joined extremist groups. “How many youths have we Europeans left empty of ideals? They don’t have work, and they turn to drugs and alcohol. They go [abroad] and enroll in fundamentalist groups,” the pope said.

His own experience in interreligious dialogue had shown him that Muslims seek “peace and encounter,” he said. “It is not right and it is not just to say that Islam is terroristic.” And he said no religion had a monopoly on violent members.

“If I speak of Islamic violence, I should speak of Catholic violence. Not all Muslims are violent, not all Catholics are violent,” Pope Francis said, dismissing Islamic State as a “small fundamentalist group” not representative of Islam as a whole.

“In almost all religions there is always a small group of fundamentalists,” even in the Catholic Church, the pope said, though not necessarily physically violent. “One can kill with the tongue as well as the knife.”

Read the whole thing.  That was the WSJ’s report. They left out this Francis gem, via Crux:

Pope Francis on Sunday defended his avoidance of the term “Islamic violence” by suggesting the potential for violence lies in every religion, including Catholicism.

“I don’t like to talk about Islamic violence, because every day, when I read the newspaper, I see violence,” Francis said, when asked about why he never speaks of Islamic terrorism or fundamentalism when condemning attacks such as the murder of a French priest last week, who had his throat slit by an Islamic terrorist as he was celebrating Mass.

The pope said that when he reads the newspaper, he reads about an Italian who kills his fiancé or his mother in law.

“They are baptized Catholics. They are violent Catholics,” Francis said, adding that if he speaks of “Islamic violence,” then he has to speak of “Catholic violence” too.

This — all of this — is not just stupid, it’s offensive. Or rather, it’s offensive because it’s so stupid, and does nothing but sow confusion.

Where to begin? Let’s start with the bit from Crux. The parallel between baptized Italian Catholics who kill family members and Muslim terrorists who slaughter Christians and others (including other Muslims they deem heretics) in the name of Allah is crazy. Guess what, Francis? All across the Islamic world, Muslim men steal, they beat their wives, they cheat their neighbor, and so on, not because Islam tells them to, but because they are human beings. Same in Christian countries, and in every society on earth. At issue is Muslim slaughtering priests at the altar, turning non-Muslim girls into sex slaves, blowing up churches, and carrying out all manner of barbaric evil explicitly and unapologetically in the name of their religion. You can call it a twisted interpretation of Islam, or condemn it for other reasons. In the cases of the baptized Catholic who kills his mother-in-law, or the believing Muslim who does the same, in neither instance is their religion a motivating factor in the crime. It is incidental to their violent acts. The terrorism that ISIS and its supporters carry out is done openly in the name of Islam, motivated by their interpretation of the religion.

I can’t decide whether it’s more disturbing if the Pope really cannot see the fallacy here, or if he is just saying what he figures is diplomatically correct.

Second, this idea of Francis’s that economics, not religion, is behind Islamic terrorism, is materialist claptrap that one would think a Pope is beyond falling for. The world is full of desperately poor people who do not slaughter priests. The world is also full of desperately poor Muslim people who do not slaughter priests, shoot up nightclubs, mow down people with trucks, and so forth. In fact, poverty is not much of a factor at all in who becomes radicalized by Salafi Islam. A decade ago, The Guardian looked at the kind of people joining al-Qaeda:

A typical volunteer is a well-educated, upwardly mobile man in his mid-to-late twenties – European volunteers are on average aged 25 – from a middle-class background and a stable family, and without a strong religious upbringing. Many spoke several languages and were technologically literate. Almost two-thirds – including Europeans – were married.

The most common route to joining the jihad is through groups of friends – often experiencing similar feelings of isolation. There is a suggestion that several volunteers from central Europe appear to have have been brought up as Christians.

More recently, there was this 2014 British medical study of UK Muslims:

New research from Queen Mary University of London has found youth, wealth, and being in full-time education to be risk factors associated with violent radicalisation. Contrary to popular views – religious practice, health and social inequalities, discrimination, and political engagement showed no links.

The pioneering research assessed population prevalence of sympathies for terrorist acts – a key marker of vulnerability to violent radicalisation – and their relationship with commonly assumed causes of radicalisation. The community study surveyed over 600 men and women of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Muslim heritage in London and Bradford, aged 18-45.

A small minority of people (2.4%) expressed some sympathy for violent protest and terrorism, whilst over 6% remained neutral – i.e., they did not show sympathies but nor did they condemn such acts. However, sympathy levels increased among those under 20, those in full time education rather than employment, those born in the UK, and high earners (£75,000 per year or more).

What is Francis doing? Is this just the usual progressive Catholic see-no-evil dingbattery, or is there something else happening here? Again, how very odd for a world religious leader to deny the power of religion to mold the minds of men and to motivate their behavior. You would expect a vulgar Marxist to say all things are motivated by class and economic struggle and nothing but, but you wouldn’t expect a Roman pontiff to take that ridiculous and easily disproven line.

At a time when the world needs strong, realistic religious leadership to deal with the realities of Islamic terrorism (realities, I should say, that include the fact that most Muslims are not terrorists), Francis is offering jelly-brained liberal nonsense.

Speaking of which, did you see this disgraceful op-ed in The New York Times denying that Father Jacques Hamel was a martyr? Its author, Paul Vallely, is a biographer of Pope Francis. He wrote, in part:

Some leading Catholics immediately compared Father Hamel to Thomas Becket or Oscar Romero, other priests killed in their places of worship. But there are important differences. Fathers Becket and Romero knew the dangers they were facing, taking a stand against the civil powers of their day. Their martyrdoms were ones of defiance.

By contrast, Father Hamel was going about his lifelong business in St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray as an everyday exemplar of quiet holiness, kindness and love for the people in his community. That devotion was not confined to serving other Catholics: A local imam, Mohammed Karabila, paid warm tribute to the priest for his role in promoting interfaith dialogue. The town’s mosque was built on land donated by Catholics to the Muslim community.

More:

Some will react to that threat by unwittingly accepting the terrorists’ agenda, as the archbishop of Rouen appeared to do when he described the killing of Father Hamel as an “assassination” — as though a provincial priest would be a target. But others reject the Islamic State narrative. “This is not a war of religions,” said a Parisian churchgoer. “It’s not a Muslim who killed a Catholic. It is simply evil.”

Reciprocal talk of martyrdom is unhelpful. The impulse to canonize Father Hamel, however sincere and well intentioned, feeds the idea of retaliation — our martyr for yours — that gives the jihadists the war of religions they seek. As to sainthood, let history judge rather than us making it a proxy for a political response.

So: an elderly Christian priest is slaughtered like a sheep at his altar during mass, by two Muslim men who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, and who shouted “God is great!” as the murdered the old curé. But the priest was not a martyr because to call him what he is would be politically undesirable?

Alan Jacobs lets him have it:

But worse than the incoherence is this: the question of whether Fr. Hamel is genuinely a martyr is one that Vallely desperately wishes to avoid. For him, the Church is not to acknowledge its martyrs unless such acknowledgment serves what Vallely believes to be the proper political calculation of the moment. For him this is the key: “we must resist the notion that a fundamental clash of civilizations is the issue.” Nothing can be done that stands a chance of feeding a political narrative which Vallely finds tasteless. Thus: “The real problem is the pathology of a perverse minority of extremists with distorted notions of holy war and martyrdom.” Ah yes, thereal problem at last! This is moral equivalence at its most loathsome: those who would seek Fr. Hamel’s canonization are morally indistinguishable from his murderers, because both belong to that “perverse minority of extremists with distorted notions of … martyrdom.”

So let not the Church call its martyrs martyrs, lest by doing so she fall into “extremism.” Let not the ancient commitment to honor the martyrs of Christ get in the way of political convenience. Let not Fr. Hamel be honored, lest some political benefit accrue to Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. God forbid!

Preach.

 

The Salvation Of Sodom

Ever heard of Bishop Nunzio Galantino? Crux’s John Allen reported on him back in May. Excerpts:

If you’re seeking the prototypical “Pope Francis bishop,” you need look no further than Nunzio Galantino.

Francis overlooked all 500 Italian bishops to pluck Galantino out of obscurity and name him head of all Italian bishops. Galantino, appointed by Benedict XVI in 2011, was very last of all the bishops in a poll of the Italian episcopate requesting their input in who should govern them — yet Francis went to the back of the line to elevate him. Why? Allen writes:

What did Francis see that he liked?

Well, probably for one thing the fact that when Galantino was named a bishop in 2011 by Pope Benedict XVI, he asked that whatever money people would have spent buying him gifts for the occasion be used instead to serve the poor.

For others, Galantino opted to live at the diocesan seminary rather than the bishop’s palace in Cassano all’Jonio, he didn’t want either a secretary or a chauffeur, and he asked people to call him “Don Nunzio” rather than “His Excellency.”

In other words, he was the “Pope Francis of Calabria” before Francis was even elected.

Since Galantino stepped onto the national stage, he’s stirred the waters repeatedly.

In May 2014, he riled conservatives by saying, “My wish for the Italian Church is that it is able to listen without any taboo to the arguments in favor of married priests, the Eucharist for the divorced, and homosexuality.”

Prior to the pope’s first Synod of Bishops on the family, Galantino appeared to align himself with progressives seeking to open the door to Communion for the divorced and remarried, saying, “The burden of exclusion from the sacraments is an unjustified price to pay, in addition to de facto discrimination.”

Galantino irritated cultural conservatives again in June 2015 by appearing to throw cold water on a lay-organized rally called “Family Day,” staged to protest a draft civil unions law.

Allen concluded his report with these lines:

Nevertheless, there’s no doubt on one point: Without Pope Francis, few people outside of southern Italy probably ever would have heard or seen Bishop Nunzio Galantino, while today he’s become one of the most consequential Catholic prelates in the world.

In that sense, to find the “Francis effect” in action, he’s about as clear an example as we’ll ever get.

Got that. OK.

At World Youth Day, Bishop Galantino gave a homily to Italian youth present, in which he taught that God saved Sodom from destruction. Here’s a link to the homily in Italian. Reader Giuseppe Scalas has translated the key passage:

“The intense dialogue between God and Abraham in the first reading tell us about prayer. And it’s about prayer that Jesus is asked in the Gospel. A prayer which is not an escape from troubles and responsibility, but a live experience made of listening and answering, through which God creates an authentic relationship and pushes us to be daring. As daring as Abraham’s intercession prayer in favor of Sodom. A city upon which nobody would have bet a dime. His intercession prayer and his will to dare save Sodom. The city is saved because some righteous ones are there, even though a few of them. But the city is saved above all because Abraham, a man of prayer, is not a relentless accuser, he doesn’t speak against but in favor. Abraham, man of prayer, doesn’t point to the misdeeds, but he announces the possibility for something new. Abraham, man of prayer, announces and invites to look at the positive possibilities. Abraham, man of prayer, is a tireless searcher for sign of hopes to present to the Lord for Him to give them value.”

Bishop Galantino is talking about the dialogue between God and Abraham recorded in Genesis 18. God was planning to destroy Sodom for its wickedness, but Abraham pleaded with God to spare the city. God agreed that if ten good men could be found there, he would spare Sodom.

Had the story ended there, Bishop Galantino might have had a point. But in Genesis 19, two angels enter the city, and Lot has to barricade them in his house because men from all over Sodom, both young and old, surrounded it and demanded that Lot turn them over to be raped. The angels order Lot and his family to leave the city, because they are going to destroy it on God’s orders. And that’s what happens. The clear implication is that there were not even ten righteous men in Sodom, aside from Lot’s family. Sodom was not saved, as Bishop Galentino lied preached, but was in fact destroyed. Abraham may well have been a “tireless searcher for signs of hope” in Sodom, but the Biblical story makes it clear that there were none to be found. God was willing to extend mercy to the city were there any righteousness in it at all, but aside from Lot and his family, there was none.

Giuseppe comments:

I’m by no means challenged in my Catholic faith, but It’s becoming harder and harder to put up with this hierarchy, whose main care seems to spread confusion among the faithful.

The Francis effect in action, I guess.

J.D. Vance on CNN

This interview from this morning is the first time I’ve seen author J.D. Vance. He’s great on TV.

Eight days after it was published here on TAC, my interview with J.D. Vance is still going strong. On a normal day, the number of page views we’ve had today, Day 8, would have set a huge record for this site. Thank you! And thanks to reader Surly Temple, whose gift to me of J.D.’s book set this whole thing in motion. He’s been burning up Amazon’s ranking since the interview appeared (though I think you’d get your copy quicker if you’d go through Barnes & Noble’s online store; Amazon has been overwhelmed by orders). I haven’t seen the latest NYT list, but I expect J.D. will be on it. Well-deserved success, for sure. Here’s a five-star customer review from BN.com:

Much like the boy who calls out the emperor for not wearing any clothes, JD Vance’s memoir has the audacity to suggest (and back up with statistics), that the woes of the white, working-class are deeply rooted in what is happening in the home.

I saw an interview with Mr. Vance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” and knew I had to read his book. As a veteran teacher in the Rust Belt, the story of his youth describes a growing number of my students and their home lives. While I witness firsthand why these children are not making it academically and exhibiting increased behavioral issues, it is more politically correct to blame the educators, schools, the government and their failed public policy for the decline in our students’ abilities to compete in this global economy. JD Vance does not offer a solution to these problems, but he does suggest “It can start when we stop blaming others and ask ourselves what can we do to make it better.”

J.D.’s book achieves something rare: speaking critically about where he comes from (and from his hard, hard personal experience of poverty and family dysfunction) while also speaking from a place of genuine love and affection for the good qualities of his people. I said in an earlier post that he does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates did for poor black people: put their plight into the national conversation. But his book is better than Coates’s book in at least one significant way: he ascribes moral agency to the white poor from which he comes. Many, though not all, of the wounds on poor white bodies are self-inflicted, and J.D. has the moral courage to face that hard fact.

Gold Star Father Clobbers Tin Pot Politician

I didn’t see Khizr Khan’s speech at the Democratic National Convention this week, but I heard it was powerful. Khan, a Muslim and Pakistani immigrant to the US, lost his son, US Army Capt. Humayun Khan, in a 2004 roadside bombing in Iraq. After hearing today on the radio that Trump had criticized Khan and his wife Ghazala, who stood by his side as he delivered the scathing anti-Trump address, I watched the Khan speech. Here it is:

Indeed, it is a very powerful speech. This, from the transcript, is its highlight:

He vows to build walls, and ban us from this country. Donald Trump, you’re asking Americans to trust you with their future.

Let me ask you: have you even read the United States constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. [he pulls it out] In this document, look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of law’.

Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America.

You will see all faiths, genders and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one.

Whatever your beliefs on Muslim immigration are, you cannot deny the reality of the Khan family’s immense sacrifice for this country, and it is indecent to try. Now, if Donald Trump had the instincts of a normal human being, he would have responded to this speech something like this:

I cannot imagine the pain of what Mr. and Mrs. Khan have been going through since losing their son. I honor their patriotism, and regret that they have allowed the Clinton campaign to exploit their heroic son’s death and their own grief. What I would tell them is this: as Commander in Chief, Donald Trump will not send any more sons and daughters of America to fight and die in unnecessary wars.

Something like that. Normal, decent human beings do not attack Gold Star mothers and fathers. Even though the Khans did enter the political fight with their endorsement of Hillary Clinton, if you have any sense of humanity in you, you just do not attack Gold Star mothers and fathers. Period. The end.

Of course, Donald Trump’s gotta Donald Trump. Here’s what he said to George Stephanopoulos in an interview to air Sunday:

In his first response to a searing charge from bereaved Army father Khizr Khan that he’d “sacrificed nothing” for his country, Donald Trump claimed that he had in fact sacrificed by employing “thousands and thousands of people.” He also suggested that Khan’s wife didn’t speak because she was forbidden to as a Muslim and questioned whether Khan’s words were his own.

“Who wrote that? Did Hillary’s script writers write it?” Trump said in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard.”

More:

Pressed by Stephanopoulos to name the sacrifices he’d made for his country, Trump said: “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.”

Trump also cited his work on behalf of veterans, including helping to build a Vietnam War memorial in Manhattan, and raising “millions of dollars” for vets.

Watch the interview here.

The man is contemptible. For the record, he never served in Vietnam, having received a student deferment to complete his Ivy League business degree, and later a medical deferment, supposedly over bone spurs in his feet. He lied to the press about his deferment status. This became an issue after he criticized John McCain as a loser for being captured and tortured by the North Vietnamese. I had forgotten about Trump’s trashing McCain’s service. I am very glad McCain, a hawkish hothead, did not become president, but Trump’s making fun of him as a POW and torture victim is, well, contemptible.

It’s not even August. Can you imagine what else is going to come out of Trump’s mouth before November? It would have been so very easy to have compassionately deflected Khizr Khan’s criticism. But that’s not how Donald Trump rolls. He sure is making it easy for people who fear or loathe Hillary Clinton to withhold their votes from him.

UPDATE: What Ezra Klein said. Excerpt:

Trump also wanted the Khans to know that, like them, he had sacrificed for this country.

“I’ve made a lot of sacrifices,” Trump said. “I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.”

I honestly do not understand how a human being can respond to a family that lost their son for this country by saying that he has sacrificed too, he’s worked really hard, he’s built “great structures,” he’s had “tremendous success.”

This is not a question that needs to be asked in most elections, but it needs to be asked in this one: what kind of person is Donald Trump? What kind of person says these things? And is that really the kind of person we want to be president?

UPDATE: Commenter “Hector” is a Christian convert from a Hindu background in India, and doesn’t have a particularly favorable view of Islam. But I liked what he said here:

Donald Trump could have easily said, “Humayun Khan was a hero, but immigration policy can’t be based on individual heroes or villains, it has to be based on statistical trends.” He could have said nothing. He could have said “Humayun Khan was a hero, and his death is too much of a tragedy for me to tarnish it with political arguments.” He could even have said “Humayun Khan was a hero, but I don’t necessarily want to live in a country of heroes: I want to live in a country with which I share a cultural heritage.” All of those would be better than what he actually did say. And I say this as someone quite skeptical of Muslim immigration in general, as well as the ultimate success of the American experiment in religious liberty.