Rod Dreher's Blog, page 556

The Failed Turkish Coup

As of this moment, it appears that the military coup attempt in Turkey has failed. Walter Russell Mead explains why it will make Islamist strongman Erdogan much, much stronger:

The main question now in Turkey is what happens next. The most likely scenario, and it is an ugly one, is that Erdogan and his followers use the putsch to consolidate the strong man rule that Erdogan clearly hungers to build. Purges of real or accused Gülenists from the military, journalism and civil service, crackdowns on any public criticism, constitutional ‘reform’ that reduces freedom and shores up Erdogan’s personal power: these goals will all now be easier to accomplish.

Meanwhile, new UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson might have hoped that a successful coup would have spared him the awkwardness of having to meet Erdogan. Here’s why.

Too much news this year…

The Coming Christian Collapse

Michael Brendan Dougherty has a good piece on how the potential for a Trump candidacy existed in plain sight among Republicans and their conservative base for years — but establishment Republicans refused to see it because it didn’t suit their biases. Excerpt:

The truth was, the great wave of migration America experienced from the early ’90s to the middle of last decade was a history-shaping event with long-term consequences. But because it was hardly debated by official Washington, the passions it generated tended to find sensationalistic or conspiratorial outlets.

And immigration went hand in hand with anxiety about American jobs and sovereignty. There was a minor nationalist panic during the Bush presidency, with conspiracies floating around that North American governments would create a common currency, the Amero, in imitation of the European Union. Pictures of the currency still float around the internet today. They came with the theory that America would stave off bankruptcy by uniting itself with Canada’s natural resources and Mexico’s underpaid labor. With that done, an enormous new transportation network would spread across the map like a squid, the NAFTA superhighway system. The rumors were fueled by quixotic lobbying dreams. But the opposition was real and fierce, and it eventually took down the very real Trans-Texas Corridor project with it.

In other words, there were signs of an emerging Trumpism on the right for years. These political tremors were ignored during the Bush years as the GOP immolated itself on foreign policy. And so no one wanted to believe an earthquake like this was coming.

Read the whole thing.

I believe the same thing is happening now with Christianity in America, but Christian leaders simply do not want to face the reality of what’s happening. Consider:

Millennials are far more likely to have no religious affiliation than any other cohort. From Pew:

While some Millennials are leaving their childhood religion to become unaffiliated, most Millennials who were raised without a religious affiliation are remaining religious “nones” in adulthood. Two-thirds of Millennials who were raised unaffiliated are still unaffiliated (67%), a higher retention rate than most other major religious groups – and much higher than for older generations of “nones.”

It is possible that more Millennials who were raised unaffiliated will begin to identify with a religion as they get older, get married and have children, but previous Pew Research Center studies suggest that generational cohorts typically do not become more religiously affiliated as they get older. And the new survey finds that most generational cohorts actually are becoming less religiously affiliated as they age.

Millennials, even those who identify as Christian, are shockingly illiterate, both in terms of what the Bible says and more generally regarding what Christianity teaches. I trust you don’t need me to repeat again Christian Smith’s findings showing that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — a bland, undemanding, non-specific religion parasitic on Christianity — has taken over US religious institutions and has displaced authentic Christianity, especially among the young. That has had a further effect of hollowing out the moral sense of Millennials, as Smith’s further research has shown. Here’s an excerpt from a review of his subsequent book, Lost In Transition:

The four sections deal with specific moral problems faced by emerging adults. The topics include consumerism, drug abuse, sexual liberation and civic and political disengagement. All of these problems stem from the lack of awareness and commitment, the authors identify in section I. The book shows that the goal of the majority of emerging adults is to achieve material affluence; they are not critically aware of the problems of consumerism and materialism. Alcohol consumption and binge drinking are continuously increasing. Sexual liberation is greater than in previous generations, and many emerging adults are not aware of a world of hurt, regret and other negative emotions beneath the veneer of happiness. Moreover, most emerging adults are apathetic, uninformed and disengaged from political and public life. In all aspects of life, the majority of emerging adults are experiencing a lack of reflection, criticism and firm direction. This findings comports with Damon (2008)’s qualitative study, The Path to Purpose. His study indicates that the majority of adolescents and young adults do not have a clear commitment to a purposeful life. Damon describes them as “drifting”, which fits with Smith, Christoffersen, Davidson and Herzog’s analysis. The lack of purpose, goals, reflection, criticism and awareness will result in emptiness and nihilistic morality. This phenomenon might be related to the degenerative moral development of young adults. Since emerging adults will become the future leaders of society, the problem of their lack of moral development is very urgent. If not addressed, their problems may be repeated in future.

In my own informal conversations with college professors — both progressive and conservative, and both at Christian and secular institutions of higher learning — this finding has been abundantly confirmed. The ignorance is so widespread and profound that most of their students don’t even know what they don’t know. Which leads us to:

If we lose the middle and upper classes, we lose the church. For various reasons, churchgoing in America is primarily something that educated middle and upper class Americans do. Charles Murray, among others, has highlighted research showing that the working class has largely abandoned church. If Christianity is to survive in the US, it cannot afford to lose middle class Americans. Of course Christianity must especially be for the poor and working classes, but at this point in its history in the US, the poor and working classes have already left, and the middle classes are hemorrhaging.College is (at least for now) a common middle class experience. If we lose these kids in (or by) college, they’re gone. According to my anecdotal information, supplemented by the research from Smith et al., this has already happened.

In 2009, Michael Spencer, who blogged as “Internet Monk,” predicted a “coming Evangelical collapse.” Spencer has since died, but his prophetic words are as important as ever. He was an Evangelical, so he addressed himself to fellow Evangelicals. But the Catholic trajectory is the same, and for similar reasons. There are so few Orthodox Christians in America that it’s hard to know where we stand, but I have no reason to believe that Spencer’s diagnosis and prognosis doesn’t apply to us as well. Excerpts:

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.

4. Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.

Spencer predicted that Catholicism and Orthodoxy would benefit from this collapse. Maybe so, but he must have had no idea how unprepared Catholicism and Orthodoxy are to react to these developments among Evangelicals. We can hardly keep our own young people, much less offer a safe, strong position for refugees from the Evangelical collapse to land. In theory, we have it. But we either don’t really believe what our own traditions teach about themselves, or we don’t care enough about it to teach it effectively to our own young.

Conclusion: Christianity in America is strong in pockets, but mostly its strength is only apparent. It is a façade that will come tumbling down when social conditions are right. This is something that most of us Christians will live to see. This is something that few of us Christians will have prepared for.

And when it happens, our bishops, leading pastors, and senior laymen will be like the GOP Establishment in the Age of Trump, left to wonder what in the hell happened.

Pence Gets Schlonged

 

This is for real. This is the Trump-Pence logo. I can’t even, and neither can you. When they write Mike Pence’s political obituary after this three-month prison stint campaign, they won’t need any words, only this logo.

Meanwhile, this Mark Hemingway piece is true and important. Excerpt:

Right now, a thousand keyboards are clacking as political reporters churn out stories saying in so many words that the selection of Pence will likely help reassure Republicans who have their doubts about Trump’s understanding of and commitment to conservative principles.

Don’t believe any of them. Recall that last year, Indiana passed a state religious freedom restoration act (RFRA), which was the state version of existing federal legislation that passed Congress and was signed into President Bill Clinton with overwhelming bipartisan support. (John McCormack has an explainer of the legislation here.) Though the Indiana law is not in conflict with other LGBT protections, it was decried as an act of bigotry. Journalists started fishing for villains, settling on the religious owners of an Indiana pizza parlor who said they would not (hypothetically) want to cater a gay wedding. Companies such as Apple and Ebay, which have no problem doing business in bastions of enlightened attitudes on gays as Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, threatened to boycott Indiana. (Curiously, they have not also threatened to boycott the existing 21 states with RFRAs.)

Once it became clear that Pence was going to have to make a stand on religious freedom, he folded. Indiana’s religious freedom law was gutted at Pence’s direction within a week of it being passed.

The only reason social conservatives have to vote for Trump is the certainty that a President Hillary Clinton would stack the Supreme Court with very liberal justices, versus the possibility that Trump-nominated justices would be more fair towards socially conservative causes, none of which is more important than religious liberty. (A side note: it is nothing short of a calamity that “religious liberty” is now seen in American political culture as a socially conservative cause, as opposed to a cause that ought to be near and dear to the hearts of all Americans. But that’s how it is.)

Trump has picked a running mate who, when confronted by alpha-male bullies in corporate boardrooms who want to impose their will, will acquiesce. Trump, an alpha-male corporate bully in his own right, must have seen what Pence did when big business ganged up on the state of Indiana over religious liberty, and then decided he was a man with whom he could easily dominate. They deserve each other. So, vote for Trump if you like — he’s still the better choice for people who only vote on the Court — but don’t do it because you think Mike Pence will be of any help to religious and social conservatives.

UPDATE: MBD nails it:

Mike Pence represents the Republican Party’s slow-witted, mercenary, and substance-free style; he embodies its mediocrity, greed, and cravenness. And his selection as Trump’s running mate is like an arranged marriage in which no one expects real happiness, but instead comforts themselves with the hope of proximity to money and a whiff of power.

‘All Lives Matters’

(Photo by Rod Dreher)

That’s what I saw when I got off the plane in Baton Rouge late last night. Mr. Mac is the sweet African-American shoeshine man at the airport.

Something Must Be Done — But What?

Here is the problem:

Marine Le Pen, head of the anti-immigrant National Front, disparaged the government’s efforts against terrorism.

“The war against the scourge of fundamentalism hasn’t started, it must now be declared,” she said in a statement. “That is the deep wish of the French, and I will put all my energy so that they are finally heard and the necessary fight is finally undertaken.”

A French parliamentary report released July 5 said France’s failure to prevent last year’s attack was partly due to lack of coordination between the country’s six intelligence units, and recommended the creation of a single counter-terrorism agency.

But look:

Police killed the driver of the truck, a 31-year-old Tunisian with French residency. While the government and French judicial system are treating the attack as Islamic terrorism, media reports have cited neighbors of the suspect as saying he was going through a divorce and wasn’t religious.

The BBC reports that the man, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, was not on the radar of French authorities as a terrorist sympathizer. In fact, we was a wife-beater whose wife had had enough of him:

Outside the flat in the Route de Turin where he had been living, residents of the four-storey building described the man as a loner who never responded when they said hello. He would often be seen climbing the stairs to his first-floor flat, carrying his bike, they said.

Although the attacker had a pistol, all the other weapons found in the lorry turned out to be fake, which raises questions about the extent of support he had from jihadist groups.

The story may change as police sift through the evidence they gathered in their raid of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s home, but this sounds a lot like what the Orlando shooter appears to be: a violent head case who wasn’t especially religious, but who used radical Islam as a rationale for releasing the murderous impulse held inside.

I don’t intend this to downplay the political and religious meaning of these acts; there are countless French and American men who are violent, and whose lives are falling apart, but they don’t commit mass murder in the name of jihad. What I’m saying is that even if you agree that Something Must Be Done, what, exactly, can be done to anticipate and neutralize men like Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel.

You could stop all immigration from Muslim countries, and expel all non-citizen Muslims, I suppose. Even then, you would have millions of French citizens who are Muslims. How do you prevent them from snapping like this guy apparently did? If they have no public record of Islamist sympathy, how do you read their minds? Besides, what kind of world would this create for the vast majority of French Muslims who have done and will do nothing wrong, and may even despise the jihadists as much as non-Muslims do? How can that be just?

It is true that ideal justice must take a back seat to a society that’s fighting for its life under attack. And it’s true that every attack like this pushes the French closer to the edge of concluding that they are in just such a fight. If a French family cannot go out to watch the fireworks on Bastille Day without having to worry about a Muslim running them down with a lorry, then the French will not be willing to live in that kind of state indefinitely. Nor should they.

Something Must Be Done. Really, something must. But what effective thing can be done?

There is this: Europe must close its borders to the flood from the Middle East. It only invites this kind of thing to occur infinitely over the decades to come. If Angela Merkel and the other Eurocrats won’t do that, the European publics will elect leaders who will. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was not one of the refugees, but aside from bringing in actual terrorists masquerading as refugees, Europe is important young Arab Muslim men who are unlikely to find employment, and who are highly likely to find nothing but frustration in the West. This could easily be fatal for untold numbers of Europeans.

UPDATE: This, from reader Devinicus, puts it pithily:

If there is nothing a free society can do to stop Islamic terrorism, that society will not long remain free.

That’s where France is headed, I’m afraid, not because the French want it, but because terror will make them desire it.

UPDATE.2: A European reader e-mails:

It happened again. A large attack on European soil, with close to 100 persons dead (at present count). And all I can feel (and notice from other people) is emptiness. It’s like the will to talk about resistance and fighting is suddenly broken. Sure, in some ways, the debate is in better shape now, compared to before Paris.

There is an ongoing debate about the inherent problems with radical Islam, and about the dire need to integrate/assimilate the large numbers off middle eastern/African refuges into the European states.

But when it comes to this sort of attacks, there is no longer anything to say. It’s an enemy that can hardly be fought, and that can hide practically anywhere. After Paris, we talked about striking back, and bringing the fight to them, but now, it’s just empty glances and silence. And with the growing lack off Christianity in large parts of Europe, I fear that some of our spirit in “finally” broken. I seek shelter in these words “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

The Terror In Nice

Oh god this photo… (Eric Gaillard/Reuters) https://t.co/USCYPQ2Ql0 pic.twitter.com/xcuPYjUqke

— Emily Badger (@emilymbadger) July 15, 2016

This is probably how he wins. https://t.co/64FAtBJN7X

— Tim Stanley (@timothy_stanley) July 14, 2016

BREAKING: Christian Estrosi, president of the region, says the truck in Nice was loaded with arms and grenades.

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 14, 2016

From The Guardian:

Minutes ago the president of the Nice region, Christian Estrosi, held a press conference. He said:

This is the worst catastrophe our region has seen in modern history. We now have to mobilise all of our services, all the psychologists, volunteers who are trained to help fellow human beings.

We will work with the imams, priests and rabbis who will also join us to help the victims and families who are suffering and will probably never heal their wounds … I want to thank people who welcomed passersby and those people who show us tonight that hopefully, solidarity still exists in a world that is too egoistical and individualistic.

He added that a “high figure of the police forces” had been killed during the attack.

Early press reports emphasize that many dead bodies along the road in Nice are of Muslims. Of course we know that Islamic radicals don’t have any compunction against killing Muslims.

I don’t have time to post anything long; I’m in Atlanta about to catch a connecting flight to Baton Rouge. This news from France is unspeakable. At what point will the French people have enough, and demand radical action by their government against these evil men? I’m asking that in a straightforward way, not a rhetorical one. Sooner or later, there will be a tipping point.

Forgive me for thinking out loud about how this terrorist incident stands to affect the US presidential race, but I think Tim Stanley is probably right. Frank Beckwith, definitely not a Trump fan, said to me a few months ago that a terror attack this fall could drive people to Trump, who, as we know, will say anything. Not sure how French people can look at that photo above, of the dead child with her wubby, and resist the urge to destroy something. I remember that feeling after 9/11. It’s a very dangerous, volatile emotional state. I hope and pray that France will strike back hard and devastatingly against her enemies, but that she will not act in haste.

One of the happiest memories of travel I have is from Nice. I have been on that very promenade where those people were murdered. It is … well, I have no words. I’m sorry, I don’t. Not right now. Maybe you do. Let’s hear them.

UPDATE: From The Guardian:

Both the French TV station BFM and the local newspaper Nice-Matin are reporting that the driver is a 31-year-old with dual French-Tunisian nationality.

BFM is quoting a police source via Agence France-Presse who said an ID card had been found inside the truck. Reports say the man was a Nice resident.

We stress that none of these details are confirmed.

Shocked, shocked.

Here’s a video of the truck at the beginning of the attack. It’s not graphic, but you can see how fast he was going. The driver gunned it like this for 2 kilometers, mowing down people:

‘Here They Fell’

Photo by Rod Dreher

(Note: This is the text of something I posted to this blog in October 2012, on the day I visited this garden. I post it again today in honor of the victims of the French Revolution. Vive la France éternelle!)

The same afternoon another small gang of armed men burst into the garden of the Carmelite Convent off the Rue de Vaugirard where about 150 priests who had been held prisoner for the past fortnight, were gathered under guard, several of them reading their office. The men advanced upon them, calling out for the Archbishop of Arles. One of the priests went forward to meet them, demanding a fair trial for himself and his fellow-prisoners. A shot was fired and his shoulder was smashed. The Archbishop, after praying for a moment on his knees, then went towards the men himself. “I am the man you are looking for,” he said, and was immediately struck across the face with a sword. As he fell to the ground a pike was plunged through his chest. At that moment an officer of the National Guard appeared and managed to get the priests away to the nearby church where they gave each other absolution. While they were saying prayers for the dying, the armed gang broke through the door and dragged the priests out in pairs to slaughter them in the garden. After several had been killed a man with an air of authority arrived at the church calling out, “Don’t kill them so quickly. We are meant to try them.” Thereafter each priest was summoned before a makeshift tribunal before being executed. He was asked if he was now prepared to take the constitutional oath and when he said that he was not — as all of them did — he was taken away to be killed. Some bodies were removed in carts, the rest thrown down a well from which their broken skeletons were recovered seventy years later.

— Christopher Hibbert, “The French Revolution”

I took the image above today in the Garden of the Carmelites, behind the church in Paris. The monument to those martyrs — killed on September 2, 1792 — is the simple plaque behind the church’s back door. It reads, in Latin, “Here they fell.” As each priest was marched to the bottom of that staircase, he was executed amid shouts of, “Long live the Nation!”

That place on earth is where over 100 bishops and priests were murdered for their faith, in an orgy of bloodletting that you cannot quite imagine happening in a garden as peaceful as this one is today.

In Praise Of The Evangelical Style

I’m in the Boston airport headed home after a surprisingly good week at Harvard. I say “surprisingly” not because I expected anything bad, but because it was good in a way that surprised me.

I was here talking about journalistic writing with a group of Christian academics. Most of them were Evangelicals, though there were a couple of Catholics too. The ethos and the style of the meeting was very Evangelical. To be honest, that made me a little nervous, not for theological reasons, but because the Evangelical style is a poor fit for me. I don’t like to pray in public the way they do. That is, aside from liturgical or formal prayers, I keep my prayers to myself. Evangelicals don’t. That’s fine by me, but it’s not my way. I find Evangelical personalism to be off-putting.

So you can imagine how I seized up when, on the first day, members of the group were asked to introduce themselves to the others by giving their testimony (= Evangelical speak for “the story of how you came to believe in Jesus, or to discover a mature faith in Him). I would have been able to have told my story had the faculty been required to do so, but I was glad that self-disclosure in front of a group of strangers was not required.

All I knew of any of these academics was their CVs, the papers they had turned in before the workshop started, and, in one case, the academic’s professional reputation. I had an idea who in the group were the liberals, and who were the conservatives. That first session knocked me over. People got really intimate and vulnerable, really fast. I thought I had a pretty good bead on the people I would be working with over the course of the week, but it turns out they were really complex — and most of them had suffered in some serious way.

Never in a million years would a meeting I had anything to do with have started with testimonies (well, maybe a spiritual retreat, but this was a writing workshop, yes?). But it was an incredibly effective way to break down barriers. I’m not sure if anybody came into the meeting feeling defensive in any way, but that session disarmed people.

This turned out to be an effective writing strategy. As academics, most of them were given to writing in a stilted voice. The ice having been broken, we found that the next day, they were able to talk more personally about the passion that caused them to write about the topic they had chosen for their op-ed essay. This helped us coaches a great deal, because we learned that these issues weren’t merely, well, academic to them.

Each morning started out with a “devotional.” Don’t laugh, Evangelicals: I didn’t know what that was, and apparently neither did the two Catholics in the group, because after the first one was over, a Catholic said, “Hey, that devotional stuff is pretty good.” Then the other Catholic and I wisecracked about how different that kind of thing is from what we do in our traditions. But it was really us poking fun at ourselves, because we really had loved the devotional we had just heard. They were great all week, in fact. Who knew?

I can’t say much more than that here, out of respect for their privacy. There were no scandalous revelations or anything, but what was said at Harvard stays at Harvard. The point is, by the time we had our last session today, and were asked to pray for each other, I … prayed out loud for people. I had come to care for these people and their struggles. This wasn’t just business anymore. I had seen how much of themselves these scholars poured into their work, the kinds of professional defeats and professional challenges they carried with them, and how hard they struggle to do the right thing when it is by no means clear what that is in their particular situation.

In the cab to the airport, it occurred to me that for all the criticism I might offer of this or that thing about Evangelicalism, I really appreciated being pried out of my own formalism. Again, I wasn’t asked to share anything here, though I ended up doing so, when I felt it appropriate to a point about writing I wanted to make. What I mean is that I expected to be headed home after a satisfying week engaged in talking about writing and how to do it more effectively. What happened was something so much richer. Had I known it was going to be so spiritually intense, I might not have agreed to participate on the faculty, but boy, am I glad I did. It was great, really great.

So: yay Evangelicals. I learn so much from y’all. Thank you. I’m not going to change the way I pray, necessarily, but I appreciate you.

UPDATE: Forgot to say that in the cab on the way to the airport, I was saying all this to one of the event’s directors, a prominent Evangelical, who replied genially: “I hate to tell you, Rod, but you’re an Evangelical.” I took it as the compliment that he intended.

Deicide and the Protestant Deformation

Matthew Rose’s great First Things essay about the infamous 1966 “Death Of God” cover story in Time magazine is only available online to that magazine’s subscribers, but I think I can quote enough of it here to give you its gist.

Rose discusses the tenets of “Death Of God” theology — that is, how a group of liberal Protestant theologians in the 1960s came to believe and to proclaim that being faithful to Christ meant teaching that God is dead. The Time cover story was hugely controversial in its day, but, says Rose, has been vindicated. Rose:

Elson and his editors at Time, however, were prophetic in giving Death of God theology such attention. The United States today looks a lot like the society van Buren, Altizer, and Hamilton wished to midwife. Their ideas about the relationship between Christianity and secularization express, in exaggerated form to be sure, some of the most deeply felt religious intuitions of our culture. They also anticipated a crucial but under-examined phenomenon of our time: the institutional defeat and cultural victory of liberal Protestantism.

And so, fifty years on, to revisit the Death of God movement is not to witness the absurd apotheosis of sixties-era religion. It is to encounter a moment, at once traditional and radical, when liberal Protestantism sought a new dispensation to justify the moral supremacy over American life that it continues to enjoy to this day.

“God is dead” — the phrase is one of Nietzsche’s most famous — means here that man has no need of the concept of God. As Rose puts it, “God is dead in the way Latin is dead.” What made Death of God theology so controversial is that its advocates believed this was good news that Christians should embrace. Rose tells me something I never knew about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, disclosed in his writings from prison prior to his execution by the Nazis:

Bonhoeffer was not an atheist, but near the end of his life he rethought the nature of Christian belief. “We are moving towards a completely religionless time,” he wrote his close friend Eberhard Bethge in the summer of 1944. “People as they are now simply cannot be religious.”

Bonhoeffer expressed surprise at the direction of his thinking and feared it would alarm others. (It did just that when his prison writings were published in 1951.) He wrote that it was wrong for Christians to lament or oppose the liberation of human beings from the “tutelage of God.” Intellectual honesty should compel Christians to acknowledge that modern people no longer need religion, and perhaps no longer need God. “Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the ‘working-hypothesis’ called ‘God,’” he conceded. Bonhoeffer’s views grew more radical, as well as more cryptic, as the summer wore on. In letters written in July, he declared that Christians must learn to live “as if God does not exist” and that “God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along without him.”

Bonhoeffer called this way of life “religionless Christianity,” an explosive idea for his most radical interpreters. It suggested that the theological oppositions that had fractured modern thought could be overcome. Modern theology has been largely concerned with reconciling competing commitments: the value of human freedom with obedience to divine commands; the scientific account of the natural world with the doctrine of creation; the necessity of critical inquiry with the authority of revelation. Bonhoeffer hinted that these were false dichotomies. He even considered the possibility that the most intransigent of oppositions—between belief and unbelief—was perhaps not so intransigent after all. Denying what seem like core Christian claims about God could be a way of affirming Christianity, perhaps the proper way for modern man. Thus the paradox of a theology without God.

Bonhoeffer! Wow.

Rose discusses how the Death of God theologians in the 1960s expanded on this principle. Not all the DoG theologians reached their conclusion from the same premises. It’s too complicated to get into the different strands of it here. For our purposes, the most important thing to understand is that “the sacred has collapsed into the profane,” and that being a Christian today allows us to develop our lives from a position of moral autonomy. Rose summary here of a particular theologian’s views makes him sound shockingly contemporary re: the mainstream of liberal Christianity in 2016:

Hamilton’s most important contribution to the Death of God theology was to contrast faithfulness to Jesus with belief in the Christian doctrine of God. They are, on his view, incompatible. Belief in God requires Christians to affirm “absolutist” truth claims, but such claims are divisive, establish relations of authority, and encourage rigid distinctions between right and wrong. This outlook encourages dispositions in us that conflict with following Jesus, “the man for others,” who calls us to live in selfless service to all humanity. “To say that Jesus is Lord,” ­Hamilton explained, “is to say that humiliation, patience, and suffering are the ways God has dealt with man in the world, and thus are also the ways the Christian is to deal with the world.” The Death of God is good news, because it means the end of a coercive moral regime based on authority rather than autonomy.

In the end, the Death of God theologians argued that the most authentically Christian thing any Christian could do would be to accept that God doesn’t exist. This is the only way to create the world that Jesus told us we should seek:

In building this inclusive community, the Protestant Church plays a vital, if provisional, role. It is called to serve as a model for a society founded not on metaphysical truth claims but on the overturning and transgressing of all such claims for the sake of harmonious and loving coexistence. Hence the Church is a people ahead of time, a morally enlightened community that now knows through conscience what it once knew through faith. The Church’s vocation is to employ its historical teachings “to shape new kinds of personal and corporate existence,” as Hamilton put it. Are the Church and her historical teachings therefore necessary? Only so long as the wider culture has not yet adopted its message of tolerance, pluralism, and individual freedom. Once it does, the Christian mission is complete, and secular society itself becomes the kingdom of God.

In this we see the larger ambition of Death of God theology—and its enduring relevance. The Gospel forms a community that, following the biblical injunction to die in order to live, extinguishes itself so as to spread its message into the secular world. And has not exactly that come to pass? The central fact of American religion today is that liberal Protestantism is dead and everywhere triumphant. Its churches are empty, but its causes have won. In 1995, the sociologist N. J. Demerath observed that mainline Protestantism has a paradoxical status in American life. It has experienced both “institutional defeat” and “cultural victory.” Mainline Protestantism has succeeded in communicating its progressive moral and political values to the surrounding culture. On virtually every issue that consumed its postwar energies—from civil rights to feminism and gay rights—the mainline churches have been vindicated by elite opinion. At the same time, their membership has evaporated. The institution that once brokered the postwar cultural and moral consensus for America has now almost vanished.

Read the whole thing, if you have a subscription — and if you don’t, get one.

If you missed it a while back, the historian and Presbyterian layman James Kurth’s essay on “The Protestant Deformation and American Foreign Policy” is fascinating reading. Here’s the gist of his argument that Protestantism degenerates into secular liberal humanitarianism:

1. Salvation by grace. At the personal level the original Protestant (and the original Christian) experience is that of a direct, loving, and saving relationship between the believer and God. This direct relationship and state of salvation is brought about by God, through his sovereign love or grace, and not by the person, through his own efforts or works. This is the experience of being “born-again” into a new life.

Obviously, anything that could stand in the way of this direct relationship, e.g., any intermediaries, traditions, or customs, must be swept aside. The original Protestant and born-again Christian experiences his new life as an open field, a blank slate, a tabula rasa. This enables him to also experience a release of previously-constrained energies and an intense focus of them upon new undertakings. This in part explains the great energy and efficacy of some newly-Christian persons. When the number of such persons is greatly multiplied, as it was at the time of the Reformation, it also in part explains the great energy and efficacy of some newly-Protestant nations (e.g., the Netherlands, England, and Sweden).

2. Grace evidenced through work. However, a serious problem soon arises, within a generation and indeed with the next generation. The children of the original born-again Protestants are born into a Protestant family and church, but they themselves may not be born-again Protestants, i.e., they may not have personally experienced grace, and the direct relationship with God and the state of salvation that it brings. As Max Weber famously discussed in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, this can give rise to great anxiety about just what kind of state that the second generation Protestants are in.

For persons in some Protestant churches, especially the Anglican and Lutheran state churches of Europe but even the Episcopal and Lutheran churches in America, there was something of a solution close at hand. These churches had remained hierarchical (but with the Pope removed and replaced with the state monarch) and even somewhat communal. Perhaps, in some way that was not theologically – clear but was psychologically – reassuring, the state of salvation could be reached by participation in the rituals and works of the church. In these churches, therefore, the focus upon grace gradually shifted in practice to a focus upon works, as had been the case in the Roman Catholic Church before the Protestant Reformation.

However, for persons in other Protestant churches, especially those known at the Reformed churches — the Calvinist churches of Europe but also the Presbyterian and Congregational churches in America — the solution to the dilemma of the Protestants who were born-in but not born-again had to be a different one. The stricter Reformed theology of these churches did not easily permit the fading-away of the necessity for grace. Further, their relative absence of hierarchical and communal features meant that they had a less developed structure for the exercise of rituals and works. And yet, without the personal experience of grace, what evidence was there that the second-generation or birth-right Protestants had received it?

As Weber discussed, the evidence for grace became a particular and peculiar kind of works, not the performance of works in the church, but the success of work in the world. This was how the Protestant ethic became the capitalist spirit. Because the Reformed churches had reformed away the legitimacy of hierarchy, community, tradition, and custom, this work in the world could be unconstrained by these obstacles. Thus, this second-generation and later-generation version of Reformed Protestants also could experience worldly life and worldly work as an open field, a blank slate, a tabula rasa. This enabled them also to experience a release of previously-constrained energies and an intense focus of them upon new undertakings. Indeed, this version of Protestantism in its worldly work was so focused that it became methodical and systematic in ways that previously had never been seen. This also in part explains the great energy and efficacy of some second-generation and later-generation Reformed Protestants. Again, when the number of such persons was greatly multiplied, it also in part explains the great energy and efficacy of established Protestant nations, not just for the second generation, but for several generations thereafter (e.g., the Netherlands and Sweden until the eighteenth century; England, Scotland, and America until the nineteenth century).

3. Salvation by works. After several generations of this kind of Reformed Protestantism, a certain Protestant culture, even traditions and customs, developed. The number of Protestants who had experienced the culture, but who had not experienced the grace, greatly increased. Finally, even in the Reformed churches (Calvinist, Presbyterian, Congregational), the idea of the necessity of grace began to fade. Work in the world no longer was seen as a sign of grace but as a good in itself; work as a good became a new version of good works.

4. The unitarian transformation. As the focus on grace faded, so too among some was there a fading of the focus upon the agencies of grace, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, the second and the third persons of the Holy Trinity. Thus Reformed Protestantism, with its highly-articulated trinitarian doctrine, turned into unitarianism, with its abstract concept of a Supreme Being or Divine Providence. Unitarianism was an actual denomination, complete with its own churches, but it was also a more widely-held theology and philosophy. This was the stage in the Protestant declension that some of the American political elite, including some of the Founding Fathers, had reached by the beginning of the nineteenth century. At least the public documents of that time frequently made reference to the Supreme Being or Divine Providence and rarely to Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit.

5. The American Creed. The fifth stage in the Protestant declension was reached when the abstract and remote God, the Supreme Being or Divine Providence, disappeared altogether. Now the various Protestant creeds were replaced by the American Creed, which reached its fullest articulation in the first half of the twentieth century. The elements of the American Creed were free markets and equal opportunity, free elections and liberal democracy, and constitutionalism and the role of the law. The American Creed definitely did not include as elements hierarchy, community, tradition, and custom. Although the American Creed was not itself Protestant, it was clearly the product of a Protestant culture and was a sort of secularized version of Protestantism.

6. Universal human rights. The sixth and final stage in the Protestant declension was reached only in the 1970s, i.e., in the last generation. Now the American Creed was replaced by the universal conception of human rights or, more accurately, the elements of the American Creed were generalized into universal goods. Finally, in the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and communist ideology, with the stagnation of the German social market and Japanese organized capitalism, and recently with the debacle of the newly industrializing Asian countries and their developmental capitalism, all of the alternatives to the American economic and political conceptions have been discredited, at least temporarily.

Back to Matthew Rose’s essay for a second. It seems to me important that not only has that mentality captured liberal Protestantism, but that it also has a Catholic version: one that wants to hold on to the outward forms of the Roman Catholic tradition while denying that tradition’s authority when it conflicts with the individual’s moral autonomy.

Discuss.

Cop Land, Teacher Nation

A reader’s response to the “Cops Can’t Be Our Saviors” post:

I work in a police department in California (as a civilian) and my wife is a professor at a local community college. We both see a lot of what you talk about.

One of my common refrains to people outside of law enforcement is that cops are just people. Yes, there are some extraordinary cops (such as Chief Brown in Dallas) just as there are extraordinary soldiers, nurses, teachers, bus drivers, and American Conservative Writers. But being a cop or a teacher or a bus driver or an American Conservative Writer doesn’t make you extraordinary. You’re going to have a mix of exemplary, terrible, and just average.

With that in mind, the types of tasks given to law enforcement are often outside of the realm of their core competency – or at least what people believe their core competency to be.

When I first started at my department (some 13 years ago), I went on a ride-along with one of the officers. At the time, there was some pressure from coworkers to enroll in the academy and become a cop. I figured this was a really good look at what they do every day.

After half a day, I was done. I could easily tell that years of doing THAT job would break something in me. It would rob me of my optimism and faith in people (though just age has done a lot of that too). It wasn’t that I saw cops being disrespected or criminals flouting the law. It was going along on a domestic disturbance call to see a woman and her daughter who were fighting because the daughter had just found out she was HIV positive and was threatening to kill herself while her mother berated her and bemoaned the fact that she was doing drugs and “prostituting herself” (I’m not clear on whether she meant literally, but that was the impression I got).

After that call, I knew I couldn’t do the job. The calls I went along on that were criminal – those were fine for some reason, but the fact that peace officers were being asked to mediate this type of intensely personal and intimate problem smacked me in the face.

If you want a broader example of police being asked to work in their communities in ways that are an unfair burden, ask how your city handles the homeless. I guarantee you that in almost every city the agency doing the most work with homeless is the local police department. If there was ever an argument for the fact that we’ve criminalized poverty, it is probably that. More than half of the staff meetings I sit through are filled with debates and reports on how the department is handling the homeless. This is a complicated social issue that requires compassion and well-thought-out policy, but instead is being thrown over the fence to law enforcement to figure out. And the drive isn’t to help these people, it’s to ensure the City Council members that people won’t see vagrancy in their fair city because it’s bad for business. In the face of such work, it’s hard to not understand how so many officers’ hearts harden. They have to to be able to cope.

The same is very true of teachers. As I said, my wife teaches at a community college. She teaches English from the Honors Level to the “you probably shouldn’t have been allowed out of High School” level. Some of the stories she brings home just break your heart. Students come to her for help because they’re being abused at home, because their families throw them out of the house for going to class instead of opting to “help the family” by staying home to watch siblings – so much of it again driven by poverty traps and the chaotic values that the younger students swim in. These students often feel completely out of control over anything in their lives and don’t know how to assert control. I’d say a good half of my wife’s work with students in non-transfer level classes is educating them on how to function as an adult in society and as a student paying for college than actual reading and writing.

And there are traps for the middle class as well, of course. In the desperation to not fall into the lower class, parents want to ensure that their kids have activities and schedules and demand more and more of the systems around them to buoy their children against potential class slippage. Add to that the fact that what is considered a “middle class” lifestyle today almost presupposes a dual-income household, which means expensive child care where we literally end up outsourcing a significant amount of the child-rearing, as my wife and I are set to do once her semester starts. Not to say that people shouldn’t use daycare, but rather that the fact that these days it’s almost required to use one establishes the pattern of “someone else is responsible” pretty early on in the lives of our children, and if we aren’t vigilant against it, we allow that attitude to infect us; seep through us and into our kids.

All of these issues are intertwined. The lack of community creates a dearth of social support structures that we used to be able to depend on, so people start leaning on institutions that were never meant to provide that type of support, and those institutions bend and creak and eventually will break because of it.