Rod Dreher's Blog, page 557

The Sun Sets On White Christian America

Robert P. Jones contends that “white Christian America” is going into eclipse. Excerpts:

For most of the country’s history, white Christian America—the cultural and political edifice built primarily by white Protestant Christians—set the tone for our national conversations and shaped American ideals. But today, many white Christian Americans feel profoundly anxious as their numbers and influence are waning. The two primary branches of their family tree, white mainline and white evangelical Protestants, offer competing narratives about their decline. White mainline Protestants blame evangelical Protestants for turning off the younger generation with their anti-gay rhetoric and tendency to conflate Christianity with conservative, nationalist politics. White evangelical Protestants, on the other hand, blame mainline Protestants for undermining Christianity because of their willingness to sell out traditional beliefs to accommodate contemporary culture.

The key question is not why one white Protestant subgroup is faring worse than another, but why white Protestantism as a whole—arguably the most powerful cultural force in the history of the United States—has faded. The answer is, in part, a matter of powerful demographic changes.

More:

The American demographic, cultural, and religious landscape is being remade. These transformations have been swift and dramatic, occurring largely within the last four decades. Many white Americans have sensed these changes taking place all around them, and there has been some media coverage of the demographic piece of the puzzle. But while the country’s shifting racial dynamics alone are certainly a source of apprehension for many white Americans, it is the disappearance of white Christian America that is driving their strong, sometimes apocalyptic reactions. Falling numbers and the marginalization of a once-dominant racial and religious identity—one that has been central not just to white Christians themselves but to the national mythos—threatens white Christians’ understanding of America itself.

Whether one is sympathetic or unsympathetic to white Christian America’s demise, it would be foolish to ignore its descendants, who survive in significant numbers. There is much at stake for the country in whether these survivors retreat into disengaged enclaves, fight on as a beleaguered minority in an attempt to preserve their social values, or find a way to integrate into the new American cultural landscape.

Read the whole thing. I strongly encourage you to, because there’s a wealth of fascinating demographic information in the article.

I have no doubt that Jones describes a real phenomenon among many white Christians, but he doesn’t speak for me, and I need to say why. He writes that

It’s impossible to grasp the depth of many white Americans’ anxieties and fears—or comprehend recent phenomena like the rise of the Tea Party or Donald Trump in American politics, the zealous tone of the final battles over gay rights, or the racial tensions that have spiked over the last few years—without understanding that, along with its population, America’s religious and cultural landscape is being fundamentally altered.

The problem with this is assuming that “white Christian America,” as defined by demographic data, is the same thing as the Christian faith as held by all white people. It’s not. Me, I don’t care that the religious influence of white Christians is declining. I care that the influence of orthodox Christianity is declining.

I know white Christians who profess views that I find antithetical to small-o orthodox Christianity, and Arabs, Asians, and African-Americans who hold to a faith I recognize as authentically Christian. I prefer to stand every single time with non-white Christians who stand for the Gospel than with Christians of my own race and cultural tribe who do not.

When Jones writes of the possibility that white Christians will “retreat into disengaged enclaves,” I think: “Oh, here we go. Somebody’s going to think, ‘Ah ha! That’s the Benedict Option!'” If so, they couldn’t possibly be more wrong, and that for a couple of reasons.

First, judging by activity online and in some Catholic social media this week, I have to say once again that the Benedict Option is not “head for the hills!” It might be, if you feel called to that, but for most of us it won’t be, can’t be, and shouldn’t be. But we still have to find a way to live out authentically Christian lives, lives of flourishing and fidelity, in a post-Christian culture. How do we do that? We do as Jesus did: retreat into more contemplative settings to build ourselves up so that we will have the strength to live in the world faithfully bearing witness. At this conference I’ve been at this week, Christian academics, progressives and conservatives from both religious and secular universities, have been talking about how little anybody they deal with — other professors or their students — knows about the Bible, or the basic Christian story. The sort of stories that were not long ago basic knowledge in American life no longer are — scandalously, not even among young Christians. You must read Robert Louis Wilken on this topic, on the loss of cultural memory among contemporary Christians. Excerpt:

In my lifetime we have witnessed the collapse of Christian civilization. At first the process of disintegration was slow, a gradual and persistent attrition, but today it has moved into overdrive, and what is more troubling, it has become deliberate and intentional, not only promoted by the cultured despisers of Christianity but often aided and abetted by Christians themselves.

Do I mourn the loss of cultural influence by “white Christians” who may identify as Christian, but who have allowed and do allow the faith to wither because they have ignored or dismissed Christian culture, or fidelity to the faith as handed down to us in the Great Tradition? Certainly not. I would rather live in a truly Christian culture that was dominated by (say) Latino Christians than live in a secular culture dominated by whites.

The Benedict Option is my term for a variety of practices those Christians who wish to hold on to the small-o orthodox version of their faith must do — not can do, but must do — if we are going to endure through what’s to come, and ensure our presence in some faraway future in which people are ready again to hear the Gospel. If the people drawn to the Benedict Option are white, fine. If they’re black, great. If they’re Asian, Arab, whatever, it’s all good. The historic faith is what unites us, and must unite us.

The thing white Christians, and every serious Christian, should really care about is not which ethnic tribe and remnants of their tribal religion is dominating American culture, but the extent to which Christianity itself is making a difference in the direction of the broader culture.

Real Talk About Religious Liberty

A reader who is active at a high level in the religious liberty fight writes:

First, let me say how much I appreciate the yeoman’s work you have been doing on the religious liberty issue. Few have done as much to attempt to make clear the nature and extent of the threat to religious liberty that is now before us. While some seem to think that the sense of urgency you bring to the issue is overwrought, I think we NEED Jeremiahs on this issue. We also badly need those relatively few groups and individuals who are committed to working on religious liberty issues in the public square to coalesce around a prudent political strategy that better takes into account the cultural realities we face.

On balance the religious freedom movement is quite strong when it comes to litigation. We have a number of reasonably well funded groups with excellent attorneys that are day in and day out making the best available arguments to protect religious individuals and institutions in the courts given current law. This is far from saying they will always win, but they are pursuing a coherent strategy that maximized the likelihood of success.

Unfortunately, I do not think the same can be said of legislative strategy. At the state level in particular many of the most popular proposals presume a level of political and cultural support for religious freedom that simply does not exist (or that evaporates quickly upon first contact with particular types of opposition). My sense is that in order to overcome this it is critical that we better internalize certain core facts about America in 2016 that suggest compromise is the only path to achieving comprehensive religious liberty protections.

First and most obviously, Americans live under a legal regime in which same sex marriage has been fully implemented, and there is no plausible legislative path to undoing this reality. Furthermore, more than half of all Americans already live under sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) laws, most of which contain little or no religious liberty protection. The reality is that these laws have taken effect because they enjoy significant public support; especially when nuanced to neutralize concerns over bathroom and changing facilities issues. Proponents of vigorous protections for religious liberty must account for these realities as part of any prudent political strategy.

With this in mind I think far too many of even the smartest folks engaged in the religious freedom movement are mistaken when they reject out of hand proposals to mitigate the harm of this existing legal regime through legislation that would extend vigorous protections for religious freedom while simultaneously codifying certain anti-discrimination protections desired by LGBT groups, particularly in the areas of employment and housing. The current way in which the debate over religious freedom is playing out bodes extremely poorly for those with traditional views on marriage, family and sexuality, and time to shift that debate is growing short. Clinging to a legislative strategy that seeks total victory as opposed to a prudential balancing of rights is simply not going to end well for religious freedom.

As Edmund Burke teaches, “To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind… Yet as all times have not been alike, true political sagacity manifests itself in distinguishing that complaint which only characterizes the general infirmity of human nature, from those which are symptoms of the particular distemperature of our own air and season.” In assessing the particular distemperature of our own air, Ryan Anderson was correct, in Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, when he wrote that, “In our own time, however, the sexual revolution has shattered the American synthesis of faith and freedom, setting religion at odds with ‘liberty’ – or more accurately, license.”

Arguments for religious liberty which presume the existence of a political consensus that has in fact already been shattered do a profound disservice to a noble cause. It was the great insight of the pro-life movement, learned through bitter experience, that small incremental reforms were important victories, not betrayals of sacred principles. In the immediate years leading up to Roe the nascent pro-life movement enjoyed a period of relative political strength; winning statewide ballot initiatives in Michigan and North Dakota, effectively blocking abortion liberalization proposals in close to 30 state legislatures, and coming within a Rockefeller veto pen of reversing New York’s 1970 abortion law which had been the last significant pre-Roe legislative victory for pro-abortion forces.

Under such circumstances, and given the profound moral questions at stake, it was understandable that many at that time viewed anything less than a personhood amendment to the United Sates Constitution as collaboration. It took years of self destructive infighting for the pro-life movement, broadly speaking, to coalesce around the principle so well articulated by Pope John Paul II, in his Encyclical letter Evangelium vitae; that it is licit to support proposals that serve as “legitimate and proper attempts” to limit the harm of an existing legal regime. Here the lessening of “negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality” was understood to be a positive good, even though the legislation in question might tacitly acknowledge the continued legality of abortion.

In the aftermath of Obergefell the political landscape for religious liberty legislation is very arguably less favorable than the political environment that faced pro-life groups after Roe. Perhaps most obviously, it is safe to say that no abortion bill in the past 40 years has engendered the kind of focused and intense opposition from corporate interests that is now common place for any stand alone religious liberty proposal that seeks to extend protections to for-profit businesses. The big business, big law and big government phalanx that unites to oppose such measures is highly effective. Indeed, only Mississippi has passed even the narrowest of for-profit wedding vendor protections in the face of such opposition – and that law is now enjoined by a federal District Court.

This is not to say that no such protections could ever pass anywhere else and be upheld, but rather that any expectation that they will do so in a proportion remotely approximating the percentage of the population already living under SOGI laws today is fantastically optimistic. Meanwhile, the path to even broader application of SOGI laws is clear; resolve the bathroom and changing facility issue and religious liberty arguments will prove little impediment to the continued steady expansion of such laws, at least at the municipality level.

It is important to note that this is not merely because of LGBT interest group money, or corporate lobbying efforts. Rather, a broad societal consensus exists that, at minimum, it is wrong for individuals to be denied housing or employment based upon sexual orientation and gender identity. Indeed, virtually everyone agrees that sexual minorities should not be subjected to unjust discrimination. Arguments, no matter how well formulated, that this does not necessitate some level of legal protection, misread an understanding of justice that has already taken hold among Americans at a pre-suppositional level.

The pedagogical effect of the law is real. Our rights focused legal culture has taught its lessons well – that a just society is one in which external constraints on individual autonomy must be circumscribed by legal sanction. This particular distemperature of our day can not be swept away by legislative fiat. Moreover, the legal reality of same sex marriage and the proliferation of SOGI laws with no meaningful religious protections, is presently teaching its own lessons. These lessons serve to reinforce the notion that the shattering of the synthesis between faith and freedom was both necessary and inevitable. The fact that this lesson is wrong is no sure guard against it taking further hold.

Those who have been on the front lines of state legislative efforts to pass religious liberty legislation and the faith groups that have the most to lose from their failure, are increasingly coming to terms with some basic facts. Among them is that in the long run it will be very difficult to sustain meaningful protections for religious rights that conflict with majoritarian social norms, unless there is some willingness to consider balanced political compromise. In our system of federalism, what these compromises will entail must necessarily differ according to a myriad of local factors.

Securing the rights of religious institutions to fill their tradition role as communicators of core cultural values, is especially critical in an age when the societal synthesis regarding the meaning of liberty has been radically altered. As de Tocqueville observed, it is ultimately “those associations that are formed in civil life without reference to political objects” that most forcefully form our social ties. Such religiously based associations face pressing threats that have real social consequences: a public square increasingly denuded of the salutatory influence the moral suasion provided by faith communities; a society in which faith groups that hold to traditional views on marriage, family and sexuality are precluded from providing mercy ministries from adoption services and homeless shelters; a culture in which those who wish to live according to the dictates of their faith find in law an impoverished notion of religious liberty limited to mere worship and belief. Absent more vibrant statutory protections of religious freedom all of the above are more than mere possibilities. Absent a cleared eyes assessment of our cultural condition and the political limitations this imposes, such protections will largely not be achieved.

The fight for religious liberty is critical first because to compel men and women to violate their most deeply held beliefs in order to enjoy the full benefits of participation in society is tyrannical. But almost as important is creating a context in which religious institutions are free to carry out their key role in rectifying, over time, the social ills discussed above. While political institutions are vital, they are ultimately of secondary importance in the monumental work of cultural renewal that lies before us. Churches, schools and all of the other faith based institutions that have long played a vital role as mediating institutions in our culture must be free to do such work, but this will require restored legal breathing space. Those who in service to abstract principle would turn their backs on politically tenable legislative proposals that would help achieve such breathing space have misread the implications of the reality of the shattering of the American synthesis of faith and freedom.

Newfound respect for and protection of religious freedom must be grounded in old principles. But we must build on those principles from where we actually are today. The protection of religious liberty and freedom of conscience is critically important, we must not indulge in the comfortable fantasy that it is achievable.

At The Meritocracy’s Vatican

Tonight at dinner I received a text from a friend, asking if I was okay. He hadn’t seen much blogging from me. It’s nice to be missed! I am in Cambridge, Mass., this week, at a program on Harvard’s campus. I don’t know that I have permission to blog about it, so I won’t get into detail here. It’s perfectly ordinary, but you never know. It’s been really good, and I’ve been spending time with a wonderful, diverse group of people. But I misjudged how much free time I would have during the day. I haven’t been able to blog as usual. Sorry about that. I’ll be home soon.

I have only been to Harvard once before this, on a tour of colleges with my high school class of junior, in the Spring of 1984. I remembered exactly nothing of it, except eating ice cream at a Früsen Gladjé (‘memba them?) shop near Harvard Square. Such is the mind of a 17-year-old who had his heart set on Georgetown and its School of Foreign Service. Harvard looms so large in our national consciousness, at least among a certain class of people, for whom it is the ultimate gateway to the heights of the American meritocracy. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this lovely, modest red-brick campus. When I think of academic grandeur, I think Oxbridge, but really, that’s all about the architecture. Harvard’s endowment — $36 billion — is by far the largest in the world. For what that’s worth.

The architecture and the overall feel of this place is deceptive. This does not look like the Vatican of the Meritocracy, but I suppose you would expect that in New England.

I can’t get a read on this place. I haven’t been here long enough, and won’t be here long enough, even to start. I invite you readers who live in Cambridge, or the Boston area, or who graduated from Harvard, to help me out on this point.

One thing that struck me walking around was passing a couple of old-line Protestant churches — I mean, really old-line, like, from the 17th century — and seeing what they’re passionate about, according to the banners and flags they display: gay rights and Black Lives Matter. Above, a scene outside a UCC Church (founded 1633). The photos are of victims who died in the Pulse nightclub shooting. Nothing wrong with memorializing them, but it’s telling that this is what the church wears on its sleeve, so to speak. It’s where this parish’s heart is. Around the corner is the Unitarian Universalist church, which claims the same roots as the UCC parish; they separated in the 19th century, with that parish becoming Unitarian, and the separated brethren (the conservatives!) becoming the parish that is now affiliated with the UCC.

No idea how many people go to those churches. Yesterday, somebody tweeted to me a link to Matthew Rose’s paywalled new piece in First Things, an excerpt of which you can read here. It’s about the 50th anniversary of the infamous “God Is Dead” Time magazine cover story. Excerpt of the excerpt:

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.

I feel that I walked through Rose’s point today. The religious traditions epitomized in these two historic churches at the very gates of Harvard are dead, dead, dead in American religious life. But culturally, they have won. Go inside the Vatican of the Meritocracy, and you will find far more people who believe in the values espoused by these churches that few people attend than you will find people who believe in the tenets espoused by the 15-million strong Southern Baptist Convention.

Anyway, what matters to me is that I ate two dozen Island Creeks on the half-shell last night at Russell House Tavern, after 11, when they were only a dollar. Best thing about Boston? Their glorious oysters.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Limits Of Expertise

Reader Candles, on the “Cops Are Not Our Saviors” thread:

The seed of what you’re saying here about teachers and cops is tied in with something that’s been weighing on my mind a lot, recently.

The entire promise of our secular Enlightenment system is that we can specialize, and outsource, responsibility to experts, and those experts will be so much more effective than we are, that we can just relax and breathe a sigh of a relief and just reap the benefits. The market is one way of interfacing with those outsourced experts. Our civil servants are another. So, we can let down our guard, and let go of what once were called the restrictive practices and self-discipline that build moral character, because we’ll have someone else, in a secular institution, who will just take care of all that stuff. We won’t have to all be jacks of all trades, master of none, stuck with folks remedies for nursing and sewing and policing and cooking and teaching and farming. And that will free us all up to follow our bliss, and find our true selves, and engage in a kind of vulgar existentialism. That’s the promise, right? Externalize and formalize all our natural human practices, find expert driven best practices, codify some language of rights to guide those institutions, and the watch the resulting human flourishing.

Since becoming a parent, though, it’s become vastly more clear to me the giant fault line that runs under this set of ideas, where it is radically unstable. In short, the amount I will suffer and sacrifice for my kids, just naturally, even if the odds are long, wildly exceeds anything I would ever do for a job. I am far from alone in this. Anyone who’s ever wrestled with getting a nanny after staying home with their small children understands this dilemma; no nanny is ever going to have your kids best interest at heart to the degree that you will. Same for cops, same for teachers. This is not, at all, because they are bad people. It’s because the structure of the role itself is set up that way.

So here’s the dilemma. The narrative of the system built on the secular Enlightenment, as I’ve described it above, is REALLY appealing. It’s tantalizing. Who wouldn’t want to live as a totally liberated hyperconsumer with no physical restraints and no need for self-control, with a benevolent system that just takes care of all responsibilities? But, because it’s cutting so deeply against the grain of human nature, it just can’t really deliver what it promises. Because there is no way for the externalized, abstracted incentive systems of the workers at the DMV, or the teacher in the failing school, or the cop in the neighborhood where people keep shooting each other, to cause them to keep sacrificing when its a lost cause, and the odds are long, and they have no support.

Parents, and communities, can and will do those things. But culture/religion/ideology matters tremendously in determining whether or not parents and local communities really will step up to do those things that only they can really have the muscle, and sacrifice, and invasiveness to do.

I think people are so quickly to shout about bad cops and bad teachers because facing the actual alternative is too horrible: maybe we can’t escape from being responsible, and having to work constantly to change and improve ourselves. Maybe these externalized systems can’t actually work to an acceptable degree. Maybe the secular Enlightenment fantasia, where we can just put our feet up and relax, and we can outsource most of our responsibilities, simply can’t deliver as promised, not because it is immoral, but because it actually can’t work, not with human nature. Like, can’t work, the way that faster than light travel or perpetual motion machines can’t work. Maybe we have to keep struggling, and have to change ourselves to become better people, and no intervention of experts can free of us that burden.

I think it’s this line of thinking that makes me sympathetic to Rod’s discussions about the BenOp, despite me not really being sure what I believe about theology.

Wendell Berry is right: It all turns on affection. Excerpt, talking about “Howard’s End”:

“The light within,” I think, means affection, affection as motive and guide. Knowledge without affection leads us astray every time. Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope. The factual knowledge, in which we seem more and more to be placing our trust, leads only to hope of the discovery, endlessly deferrable, of an ultimate fact or smallest particle that at last will explain everything.

The climactic scene of Forster’s novel is the confrontation between its heroine, Margaret Schlegel, and her husband, the self-described “plain man of business,” Henry Wilcox. The issue is Henry’s determination to deal, as he thinks, “realistically” with a situation that calls for imagination, for affection, and then forgiveness. Margaret feels at the start of their confrontation that she is “fighting for women against men.” But she is not a feminist in the popular or political sense. What she opposes with all her might is Henry’s hardness of mind and heart that is “realistic” only because it is expedient and because it subtracts from reality the life of imagination and affection, of living souls. She opposes his refusal to see the practicality of the life of the soul.

Margaret’s premise, as she puts it to Henry, is the balance point of the book: “It all turns on affection now . . . Affection. Don’t you see?”

Cops Can’t Be Our Saviors

The more I see of Dallas Police Chief David Brown, the more respect and affection I have for him. Here’s a clip from his press briefing today:

He said:

We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. We just ask of us to do too much. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental-health funding. Let the cop handle it. Not enough drug-addiction funding. Let’s give it to the cops. Here in Dallas, we got a loose-dog problem. Let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, give it to the cops. Seventy percent of the African American community is being raised by single women. Let’s give it to the cops to solve that as well. That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems, and I just ask for other parts of our democracy, along with the free press, to help us. . . .

Serve your communities. Don’t be a part of the problem. We’re hiring. We’re hiring. Get off that protest line and put an application in. And we’ll put you in your neighborhood, and we will help you resolve some of the problems you’re protesting about.

Chief Brown tells it straight. But it’s not just cops. It’s teachers too. This line from J.D. Vance’s new book Hillbilly Elegy:

As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, ‘They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.’

I know there are bad, lazy teachers in this world, but I get tired of the way so many people are quick to blame the problems of our schools on teachers in general. I don’t know how many of you readers are teachers, or know teachers, but they are on the front lines of America’s social unraveling. We expect them to be both parents and social workers, because so many parents are functionally AWOL. No politician is ever going to blame lousy parents for the fact that their kids are doing badly in school. No politician is ever going to tell a parent that they don’t have a right to expect society’s institutions to make up for their own laziness and selfishness. Just blame the teachers.

I’m thinking tonight of something I heard a friend’s mom say a few years back when I was having dinner at their place. “The churches don’t teach these young people anything about the Bible anymore,” she said. “They don’t even teach the Ten Commandments.”

My friend, who is a practicing Christian, said, “Hey Mom, what are the Ten Commandments?” His mother managed two or three of them, but that was it. He said to her, “I’m not sure how you would know what the churches do or don’t teach kids, because you hardly ever go to church.” Oh, the old lady was mad!

Later, my friend and I were talking about that exchange. I said that his mother had a point. The research on Moralistic Therapeutic Deism proves it.

“I know that,” he said. “I just get tired of hearing my mother blame pastors for everything. You think she ever taught me anything about the Bible growing up?”

And you know, I had to reflect on how a Catholic priest friend put Catholic me and my best Catholic friend in our places back around the year 2000. We just loved to complain about all the church’s failings, especially of catechesis. Our priest friend was often murder on the church’s shortcomings, but he had had enough of our griping. He said that we had no reason to sit around waiting for the clergy and the institution to get its act together. Read! he said. Educate yourselves in the faith! What are you waiting for?

That advice has stayed with me all these years. Come to think of it, it’s part of the spirit of this Benedict Option book I’m not far from finishing. It’s about how Christians cannot outsource the religious and moral formation of our children to churches and religious schools that are in some cases overwhelmed, and in other cases too weak or unbelieving to do the job. And even if the church or school is really good at it, it’s still our job to teach our kids, and to help those religious instructors complete their mission. Just like it’s our job to raise our kids right, and discipline them, rather than let them run wild and expect the police to handle it.

One of the big lessons of J.D. Vance’s book is that so many of those poor white people — Vance’s people — were the authors of their own misery, and visited all that misery on their children, who fell into the same cycle of despair, including drug abuse. Vance speaks bluntly and persuasively about how people condemn themselves and their children to mental slavery through mind-forg’d manacles of self-pity and fatalism. His point is not that people have not suffered from injustice, economic and otherwise. He does not say that they are to blame entirely for their condition. Rather, his point is that despite the rotten hand these people have been dealt, the only way to break the cycle, if it can be broken, is to take responsibility for oneself, and to believe that one’s life can change through the decisions one makes — or it can remain the same, depending on the decisions one makes.

This is true of every single one of us, rich, poor, and otherwise. I’m not talking “think and grow rich” nonsense. I’m talking about self-control. Thank God my priest Father Matthew did not pity me when I came to him full of anger at my dad for his hard-headedness, and the way he kept hurting me. My father really was guilty of these things, and for all I knew, Father Matthew felt sorry for me having to struggle with them. But he never once let me feel sorry for myself, or settle for one second into the role of victim — this, even though I was being treated unjustly, with serious physical and emotional effects. Rather, he insisted firmly on my Christian duty to love my dad, period. That didn’t mean put up with his mistreating me, but it did mean not allowing anger at injustice rule my heart. In fact, Father Matthew told me that I’m not responsible before God for my dad’s sins, but for my own. What am I doing about them? Am I rooting them out in my heart and repenting of them? If not, why not? What’s my excuse?

I knew he was right, even though I didn’t want to hear it, and I did what he said, though I hated doing it. Because I did, six or seven months later, I was there the day that my dad said he was sorry for the way he had treated me — a day of grace I never thought would come. And I was able to be there at my dad’s bedside on his final days, even holding his hand as he drew his last breath. It was a gift — a priceless gift — I could not have imagined receiving in this lifetime. It would never have been mine had I stood on anger at personal injustice, and had I not been told by my spiritual father to turn on that anger in my own heart and root it out. What a severe mercy that all was. And what liberation. I’m serious: liberation. To have learned that if I allowed Him to do so, God would give me the strength not to succumb to my passions, and to realize my own moral agency.

Let me be clear here: my priest was not saying that we have to call what is unjust just, and what is a lie the truth. Nor was he blaming me for the pain I felt over the way my dad treated me. What he was saying is this: we cannot allow sin — sloth, wrathfulness, lust, gluttony, or any other sin — to conquer our hearts. All sin is disordered love, and to love justice more than love and mercy is, at least for a Christian, a sin. This is a battle we have to fight until the day we die: against the disorder in our souls and lives (and all sin is disordered love). There’s no other way to avoid defeat at the hands of the world.

Nobody wants to hear that. I sure as hell didn’t want to hear it when my priest spoke those hard words to me. But they were words of truth, and life. Not a soul on this earth could have fixed the problems I was struggling with then (or the ones I’m struggling with now). Only me, by God’s grace, and with the help of those dear ones willing to assist me. God was willing to help me, and so were the people who loved me, but without my firm and sustained assent, they would and could have done nothing. Because free will.

In J.D. Vance’s case, it took losing his free will as a US Marine to gain the gift of self-control that served him well when he got out, and still does. A people and a nation that lacks inner discipline will be the kind of people who need more cops and authority figures to tell it what to do, or at least expect to be taken care of by agents of the state and other institutions. That is not a healthy nation. It’s the difference between a nation of citizens, and a nation of consumers.

Hillbilly America: Do White Lives Matter?

Yesterday I read J.D. Vance’s new book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture In Crisis. Well, “read” is not quite the word. I devoured the thing in a single gulp. If you want to understand America in 2016, Hillbilly Elegy is a must-read. I will be thinking about this book for a long, long time. Here are my impressions.

The book is an autobiographical account by a lawyer (Yale Law School graduate) and sometime conservative writer who grew up in a poor and chaotic Appalachian household. He’s a hillbilly, in other words, and is not ashamed of the term. Vance reflects on his childhood, and how he escaped the miserable fate (broken families, drugs, etc) of so many white working class and poor people around whom he grew up. And he draws conclusions from it, conclusions that may be hard for some people to take. But Vance has earned the right to make those judgments. This was his life. He speaks with authority that has been extremely hard won.

Forgive the rambling nature of this post. I’m still trying to process this extraordinary book.

Vance’s people come from Kentucky and southern Ohio, a deeply depressed region filled with hard-bitten but proud Scots-Irish folks. He begins by talking about how, as a young man, he got a job working in a warehouse, doing hard work for extra money. He writes about how even though the work was physically demanding, the pay wasn’t bad, and it came with benefits. Yet the warehouse struggled to keep people employed. Vance says his book is about macroeconomic trends — outsourcing jobs overseas — but not only that:

But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it. The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man [one of Vance’s co-workers] with every reason to work — a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way — carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America.

This is the heart of Hillbilly Elegy: how hillbilly white culture fails its children, and how the greatest disadvantages it imparts to its youth are the life of violence and chaos in which they are raised, and the closely related problem of a lack of moral agency. Young Vance was on a road to ruin until certain people — including the US Marine Corps — showed him that his choices mattered, and that he had a lot more control over his fate than he thought.

Vance talks about how, in his youth, there was a lot of hardscrabble poverty among his people, but nothing like today, dominated by the devastation of drug addiction. Everything we are accustomed to hearing about black inner city social dysfunction is fully present among these white hillbillies, as Vance documents in great detail. He writes that “hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.”

This was one of many points at which Vance’s experience converged somewhat with mine. My people are not hillbillies per se, but I come from working-class Southern country white people. Many of the cultural traits Vance describes are present in a more diluted way in my own family. That fierce pride, a pride that would rather see everything go to hell than admit error. This, I think, has something to do with why Southern Protestant Christianity has traditionally been more Stoic than Christian. Real Christianity has as its heart humility. That’s not a characteristic Scots-Irish people hold dear.

Vance talks about the hillbilly habit of stigmatizing people who leave the hollers as “too big for your britches” — meaning that you got above yourself. It doesn’t matter that they may have left to find work, and that they’re living a fairly poor life not too far away, in Ohio. The point is, they left, and that is a hard sin to forgive. What, we weren’t good enough for you?

This is the white-people version of “acting white,” if you follow me: the same stigma and shame that poor black people deploy against other poor black people who want to better themselves with education and so on.

The most important figure in Vance’s life is his Mamaw (pron. “MAM-maw”), Bonnie Vance, a kind of hillbilly Catherine the Great. She was a phenomenally tough woman. She knew how to use a gun, she had a staggeringly foul mouth, she smoked menthols and stood ready to fight at the drop of a hat. And she saved Vance’s life.

Vance plainly loves his people, and because he loves them, he tells hard truths about them. He talks about how cultural fatalism destroys initiative. When hillbillies run up against adversity, they tend to assume that they can’t do anything about it. To the hillbilly mind, people who “make it” are either born to wealth, or were born with uncanny talent, winning the genetic lottery. The connection between self-discipline and hard work, and success, is invisible to them. Vance:

People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown [where Vance grew up]. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.

Vance was born into a world of chaos. It takes concentration to follow the trail of family connections. Women give birth out of wedlock, having children by different men. Marriages rarely last, and informal partnerings are more common. Vance has half-siblings by his mom’s different husbands (she has had five to date). In his generation, Vance says, grandparents are often having to raise their grandchildren, because those grandparents, however impoverished and messy their own lives may be, offer a more stable alternative than the incredible instability of the kids’ parents (or more likely, parent).

Vance scarcely knew his biological father until he was a bit older, and lived with his mom and her rotating cast of boyfriends and husbands. Here’s Vance on models of manhood:

I learned little else about what masculinity required of me other than drinking beer and screaming at a woman when she screamed at you. In the end, the only lesson that took was that you can’t depend on people. “I learned that men will disappear at the drop of a hat,” Lindsay [his half-sister] once said. “They don’t care about their kids; they don’t provide; they just disappear, and it’s not that hard to make them go.”

This is what happens in inner-city black culture, as has been exhaustively documented. But these are rural and small-town white people. This dysfunction is not color-based, but cultural.

I could not do justice here to describe the violence, emotional and physical, that characterizes everyday life in Vance’s childhood culture, and the instability in people’s outer lives and inner lives. To read in such detail what life is like as a child formed by communities like that is to gain a sense of why it is so difficult to escape from the malign gravity of that way of life. You can’t imagine that life could be any different.

Religion among the hillbillies is not much help. Vance says that hillbillies love to talk about Jesus, but they don’t go to church, and Christianity doesn’t seem to have much effect at all on their behavior. Vance’s biological father is an exception. He belonged to a strict fundamentalist church, one that helped him beat his alcoholism and gave him the severe structure he needed to keep his life from going off track. Vance:

Dad’s church offered something desperately needed by people like me. For alcoholics, it gave them a community of support and a sense that they weren’t fighting addiction alone. For expectant mothers, it offered a free home with job training and parenting classes. When someone needed a job, church friends could either provide one or make introductions. When Dad faced financial troubles, his church banded together and purchased a used car for the family. In the broken world I saw around me — and for the people struggling in that world — religion offered tangible assistance to keep the faithful on track.

Vance says the best thing about life in his dad’s house was how boring it was. It was predictable. It was a respite from the constant chaos.

On the other hand, the religion most hillbillies espouse is a rusticated form of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. God seems to exist only as a guarantor of ultimate order, and ultimate justice; Jesus is there to assuage one’s pain. Except for those who commit to churchgoing — and believe it or not, this is one of the least churched parts of the US — Christianity is a ghost.

About Vance’s father’s fundamentalism, I got more details about what this blog’s reader Turmarion, who lives in Appalachia, keeps telling me about that region’s fundamentalism. Even though I live in the rural Deep South, this form of Christianity is alien to me. When he went to live with his dad for a time as an adolescent (if I have my chronology correct), Vance was exposed for the first time to church. He appreciated very much the structure, but noticed that the spirituality on offer was fear-based and paranoid. “[T]he deeper I immersed myself in evangelical theology, the more I felt compelled to mistrust many sectors of society. Evolution and the Big Bang became ideologies to confront, not theories to understand … In my new church … I heard more about the gay lobby and the war on Christmas than about any particular character trait that a Christian should aspire to have.”

This was yet another reminder of why so many Evangelicals react strongly against the Benedict Option. As I often say, I have no experience of this extreme siege mentality in Christianity. In fact, my experience is entirely the opposite. I believe that some Christians coming out of fundamentalism may react so strongly against their miserable, unhappy background that they don’t appreciate the extent to which there really are people and forces out to “get” them. When you have lived almost all your Christian life among highly assimilated Christians who generally don’t pay attention to these things, their complacency can drive you crazy. But Vance helps me to understand how someone who grew up in its opposite would find even the slightest hint of siege Christianity to be anathema.

One of the most important contributions Vance makes to our understanding of American poverty is how little public policy can affect the cultural habits that keep people poor. He talks about education policy, saying that the elite discussion of how to help schools focuses entirely on reforming institutions. “As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, ‘They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”

He continues:

Why didn’t our neighbor leave that abusive man? Why did she spend her money on drugs? Why couldn’t she see that her behavior was destroying her daughter? Why were all of these things happening not just to our neighbor but to my mom? It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith. During my junior year of high school, our neighbor Pattie called her landlord to report a leaky roof. The landlord arrived and found Pattie topless, stoned, and unconscious on her living room couch. Upstairs the bathtub was overflowing — hence, the leaking roof. Pattie had apparently drawn herself a bath, taken a few prescription painkillers, and passed out. The top floor of her home and many of her family’s possessions were ruined. This is the reality of our community. It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value exists in her life. It’s about children who lose their toys and clothes to a mother’s addiction.

This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper class. And when the dust clears — when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity — there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn’t spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway.

More:

Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs — sometimes the father, sometimes both. At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children; much of the time, the neighbors hear what’s happening. A bad day is when the neighbors call the police to stop the drama. Our kids go to foster care but never stay for long. We apologize to our kids. The kids believe we’re really sorry, and we are. But then we act just as mean a few days later.

And on and on. Vance says his people lie to themselves about the reality of their condition, and their own personal responsibility for their degradation. He says that not all working-class white hillbillies are like this. There are those who work hard, stay faithful, and are self-reliant — people like Mamaw and Papaw. Their kids stand a good chance of making it; in fact, Vance says friends of his who grew up like this are doing pretty well for themselves. Unfortunately, most of the people in Vance’s neighborhood were like his mom: “consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.”

As I said earlier, the two things that saved Vance were going to live full time with his Mamaw (therefore getting out of the insanity of his mom’s home), and later, going into the US Marine Corps. I’ve already written at too much length about Vance’s story, so I won’t belabor this much longer. Suffice it to say that as imperfect as she was, Mamaw gave young Vance the stability he needed to start succeeding in school. And she wouldn’t let him slack off on his studies. She taught him the value of hard work, and of moral agency.

The Marine Corps remade J.D. Vance. It pulverized his inner hillbilly fatalism, and gave him a sense that he had control over his life, and that his choices mattered. This was news to him. Reading this was a revelation to me. I was raised by parents who grew up poor, but who taught my sister and me from the very start that we were responsible for ourselves. Hard work, self-respect, and self-discipline were at the core of my dad’s ethic, for sure. There was no more despicable person in my dad’s way of seeing the world than the sumbitch who won’t work. I doubt that I’ve ever known a man more willing to do hard physical labor than my father was. Knowing what he came from, and knowing how any progress he made came from the sweat of his brow and self-discipline on spending, he had no tolerance for people who were lazy and blamed everybody else for their problems. This is true whether they were poor, middle class, or rich (but especially if they were rich).

Anyway, Vance talks about how the contemporary hillbilly mindset renders them unfit for participation in life outside their own ghetto. They don’t trust anybody, and are willing to believe outlandish conspiracy theories, particularly if those theories absolve them from responsibility.

I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.

Hence the enormous popularity of Donald Trump among the white working class. Here’s a guy who will believe and say anything, and who blames Mexicans, Chinese, and Muslims for America’s problems. The elites hate him, so he’s made the right enemies, as far as the white working class is concerned. And his “Make America Great Again” slogan speaks to the deep patriotism that Vance says is virtually a religion among hillbillies.

Trump doesn’t come up in Vance’s narrative, but in truth, he’s all over it. Vance is telling his personal story, not analyzing US politics and culture broadly. It’s also true, however, that the GOP elites set themselves up for their current disaster, by listening to theories that absolved themselves of any responsibility for problems in this country from immigration and free trade (Trump is not all wrong about this).

The sense of inner order and discipline Vance learned in the Marine Corps allowed his natural intelligence to blossom. The poor hillbilly kid with the druggie mom ends up at Yale Law School. He says he felt like an outsider there, but it was a serious education in more than the law:

The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. … It was at this meal, on the first of five grueling days of [law school job] interviews, that I began to understand that I was seeing the inner workings of a system that lay hidden to most of my kind. … That week of interviews showed me that successful people are playing an entirely different game.

What he’s talking about is social capital, and how critically important it is to success. Poor white kids don’t have it (neither do poor black or Hispanic kids). You’re never going to teach a kid from the trailer park or the housing project the secrets of the upper middle class, but you can give them what kids like me had: a basic understanding of work, discipline, confidence, good manners, and an eagerness to learn. A big part of the problem for his people, says Vance, is the shocking degree of family instability among the American poor. “Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability. Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly.”

Vance is admirably humble about how the only reason he got out was because key people along the way helped him climb out of the hole his culture dug for him. When Vance talks about how to fix these problems, he strikes a strong skeptical note. The worst problems of his culture, the things that held kids like him back, are not things a government program can fix. For example, as a child, his culture taught him that doing well in school made you a “sissy.” Vance says the home is the source of the worst of these problems. There simply is not a policy fix for families and family systems that have collapsed.

I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. … But are we tough enough to do what needs to be done to help a kid like Brian? Are we tough enough to build a church that forces kids like me to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it? Are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children? Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.

Voting for Trump is not going to fix these problems. For the black community, protesting against police brutality on the streets is not going to fix their most pressing problems. It’s not that the problems Trump points to aren’t real, and it’s not that police brutality, especially towards minorities, isn’t a problem. It’s that these serve as distractions from the core realities that keep poor white and black people down. A missionary to inner-city Dallas once told me that the greatest obstacle the black and Latino kids he helped out had was their rock-solid conviction that nothing could change for them, and that people who succeeded got that way because they were born white, or rich, or just got lucky.

Until these things are honestly and effectively addressed by families, communities, and their institutions, nothing will change.

Is there a black J.D. Vance? I wonder. I mean, I know there are African-Americans who have done what he has done. But are there any who will write about it? Clarence Thomas did, in his autobiography. Who else? Anybody know?

Vance’s book sends me back to Kevin D. Williamson’s stunning National Review piece on “The White Ghetto” — Appalachia, he means. This is the world J.D. Vance came out of, though he saw more good in it that Williams does in his journalistic tour. It also brings to mind Williamson’s highly controversial piece earlier this year (behind subscription paywall; David French excerpts the hottest part here) in which he said:

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.

Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

I criticized Williamson at the time for his harshness. I still wouldn’t have put it the way he did, but reading Vance gives me reason to reconsider my earlier judgment. Vance writes from a much more loving and appreciative place than Williamson did (though I believe Williamson came from a similar rough background), but he affirms many of the same truths. If white lives matter — and they do, because all lives matter — then sentimentality and more government programs aren’t going to rescue these poor people. Vance puts it more delicately than Williamson, but getting a U-Haul and getting away from other poor people — or at least finding some way to get their kids out of there, to a place where people aren’t so fatalistic, lazy, and paranoid — is their best hope. And that is surely true no matter what your race.

The book is called Hillbilly Elegy, and I can’t recommend it to you strongly enough. It offers no easy answers. But it does tell the truth. I thank reader Surly Temple for giving it to me.

The Left’s Hypocrisy On Race Rhetoric

My old Dallas Morning News colleague Mike Hashimoto nails it:

Strikingly, investigators were still bagging evidence when Black Lives Matter and their many supporters sought control of the narrative. The protest march in Dallas, they stressed, was peaceful. Although a cornered Micah X. Johnson referenced Black Lives Matter in ultimately failed negotiations with police, there was no evidence he had any real connection to the group.

No argument here. He appears to have acted alone, or certainly outside a wide support system.

In a statement condemning the Dallas attack, Black Lives Matter said it “was the result of the actions of a lone gunman. To assign the actions of one person to an entire movement is dangerous and irresponsible. We continue our efforts to bring about a better world for all of us.”

That’s progress, says Hashimoto, because that sure wasn’t BLM’s point of view after Omar Mateen massacred people in the Pulse nightclub and said he did it for ISIS. Hash:

But winning the award for casting the widest possible net in the Mateen attack was, in fact, Black Lives Matter from its actual website:

“Despite the media’s framing of this as a terrorist attack, we are very clear that this terror is completely homegrown, born from the anti-Black white supremacy, patriarchy and homophobia of the conservative right and of those who would use religious extremism as a weapon to gain power for the few and take power from the rest. …

“Homegrown terror is the product of a long history of colonialism, including state and vigilante violence. It is the product of white supremacy and capitalism, which deforms the spirit and fuels interpersonal violence.”

Read the whole thing. Hashimoto’s point about BLM’s hypocrisy is superb. It was happy to cast insane aspersions on all its enemies, with no evidence at all. I don’t believe it’s fair to blame BLM for the murders of Dallas police officers, but according to the (black) police chief of Dallas, the killer told police who cornered him that Black Lives Matter got him riled up about white cops. Again, that’s certainly not enough to blame BLM, but it’s more than the BLM loudmouths had when they blamed everyone to the right of Pol Pot for Orlando.

What a difference between the reaction The New York Times editorial board had to Micah X. Johnson’s racist anti-cop massacre in Dallas, and its reaction to Omar Mateen’s mass murder at the Orlando gay nightclub. In its Dallas editorial, the Times struck a note of somber grief, but didn’t take a stand one way or the other:

In the aftermath, possible motives will be ticked off for the killer and any accomplices. But the police and protesters alike could only wonder what might truly account for such a level of atrocity.The police quoted the main suspect — Micah Johnson, a black Army veteran with service in Afghanistan, who was killed after being cornered — as intent on killing white people and avenging the innocent deaths of black citizens in police encounters elsewhere.

Wonder? The suspect said himself what it was: racism, anger, and a spirit of vengeance — as the Times notes in the very next sentence!

Ah, but the Times editorial board wasn’t so reticent in pointing fingers in the wake of the Orlando killing:

While the precise motivation for the rampage remains unclear, it is evident that Mr. Mateen was driven by hatred toward gays and lesbians. Hate crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur where bigotry is allowed to fester, where minorities are vilified and where people are scapegoated for political gain. Tragically, this is the state of American politics, driven too often by Republican politicians who see prejudice as something to exploit, not extinguish.

It got worse, of course, even though there was not then and still has not emerged one shred of evidence to suggest that Republican politicians had anything to do with Mateen’s decision to attack a gay club. Mateen slaughtered those gay people in the name of a terrorist organization that routinely executes suspected homosexuals by throwing them from tall buildings. The Times editorial board, like Black Lives Matter, engaged in a vicious, disgusting smear of the people it hates.

This is particularly galling when one thinks about the way the left, broadly, has busied itself policing speech on campuses, treating so-called microaggressions as if they were war crimes.

It’s just the appalling dishonesty of the way some on the left with very big megaphones frame these debates. I’ll say it once more so you don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think it’s fair to blame Black Lives Matter for the Dallas shootings. But I’m not sorry they’re taking a big hit to their reputation. Those bullies deserve a taste of their own medicine. As for the Times, hey Liz Spayd, the new public editor, what say you about this double standard on the editorial page? Eh?

The ugly truth is that too many people on both the left and the right are being completely irresponsible with their rhetoric, stoking the flames of race hatred. It feels good to hate with everything in you. It’s addicting.

What Is Going On In Baton Rouge?

this is currently going on in baton rouge, this is terrifying. #BatonRouge #BlackLivesMatter #AltonSterling pic.twitter.com/sYvrQzSteW

— greg (@n9viv) July 11, 2016

I’m out of town tonight, but semi-obsessively checking Twitter to see what’s going on down the road from where I live (a city to which I’ll be moving later this month). I am unsympathetic to Black Lives Matter as an organization, but I am sympathetic to the cause of uncovering and resisting police brutality, racially motivated or otherwise. By now, we all should have learned to be wary of video clips, because they don’t tell the whole story.

That said, this looks terrible for Baton Rouge police. It’s hard to imagine the context that makes turning out dressed like combat troops, and behaving so aggressively, understandable. Maybe readers who were there or who are better informed can shed light. If so, speak up, whatever your opinion.

After the Freddy Gray situation in Baltimore, a white conservative Baton Rouge friend of mine in a position to know things like this told me that BR had a police brutality problem, and that the city was “one police shooting away from blowing up like Ferguson.”

I pray that it doesn’t come to that, because riots do nobody any good, and most harm those who can least afford to lose. Still, the fact that my friend, a law-and-order white conservative, said that to me a few months back has made a difference in how I see events in Baton Rouge. When I get back to town, I’ll try to touch base with him and see what he thinks of what’s happening.

View From Your Table

Cashton, Wisconsin

Now that’s living.

I’m in the airport this morning, traveling again. I deliberately chose not to blog this weekend on the protests, race, politics, or anything like it. Emotions are too raw, and I don’t want to say anything in haste that I might regret at leisure. I’d like to share some VFYTs with you, as perhaps a balm before what is sure to be a rough week.

Dunster, Somerset, England

The vacationing American reader writes:

We are in Dunster, a medieval village in Somerset, England. Today, we visited Cleeve Abbey, a ruined Cistercian abbey that is close to Dunster: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/vi.... The Abbey church was destroyed completely at the time of the Dissolution, but the sacristy, the monks’ dormitory, and the refectory survived in amazingly good condition, as did (to some extent) the cloister, so it is well worth visiting. They have the Rule of St. Benedict for sale in the gift shop. I attach views of the Abbey gatehouse from our picnic table for your consideration. We bought our picnic food at the Dunster Village Shop and Deli, including their “cheese of the week,” Pendragon Buffalo Cheese from the Somerset Cheese Company:

http://www.somersetcheese.co.uk/produ....

After visiting the Abbey, we went to Mass in nearby Watchet, where the Catholic Mass takes place in the Methodist church. We met the friendliest people you could imagine at the Mass and the coffee hour. Our children were invited to bring up the gifts at the Offertory.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

The reader, whose taste in monkish beer is to be esteemed, writes:

An aperitif with friends from our Episcopal church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Two of us, one from each family, are regular readers of your blog, and one other has read and appreciated “Crunchy Cons”.

For an extra little bit of Dreher-ness, I set up the audio system in the background to be playing James MacMillan’s choral anthem “After Virtue” — a setting of that famous paragraph of Alasdair MacIntyre’s.

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dw.asp?dc=W14454_GBAJY1397010

These below are not strictly VFYTs, because there’s no table involved, but there’s food, and wow, what a view!

The Admiralty Inlet, Whidbey Island, Washington

The reader writes:

The Admiralty Inlet, Whidbey Island, WA, where vessels — cruise ships, Trident subs, barges — head out to sea to Alaska, Canada, and beyond.

11 years we’ve been returning to this spot. Although salmon, mussels — nearby Penn Cove is the oldest mussel farm in the country — is the norm, I’m grilling steaks on Puget Sound tonight, watching the ferry cross to Port Townsend and back.

The Admiralty Inlet, Whidbey Island, Washington

How To Avoid 1968

Dateline: Bristol, Tenn.:

A man accused of shooting indiscriminately at passing cars and police on a Tennessee highway told investigators he was angry about police violence against African-Americans, authorities said Friday.

One woman died and three others, including one police officer, were injured in the rampage.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said in a news release that initial conversations with the suspect, 37-year-old Lakeem Keon Scott, revealed he was troubled by several incidents across the U.S.

Scott, who is black, was wounded in the shootout with police, remains hospitalized and has not yet been charged. All those shot were white, police confirmed.

Dateline: Valdosta, Georgia:

A man who called 911 to report a car break-in Friday ambushed a south Georgia police officer dispatched to the scene, sparking a shootout in which both the officer and suspect were wounded, authorities said. Both are expected to survive.

The shooting in Valdosta, just north of the Georgia-Florida state line, happened hours after five police officers were killed Thursday night in an ambush in Dallas. Despite saying the officer was lured to the scene by the gunman, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said there was no immediate evidence the shootings were related.

The cop is white; the shooter is Asian.

Dateline: Ballwin, Missouri:

A Ballwin Police officer was in critical condition after he was shot in the neck during a traffic stop late Friday morning, police said.

The officer had stopped the car for speeding on northbound New Ballwin Road about 11 a.m., police said. As the officer went back to his car, the driver got out, “advanced quickly” and fired three shots at the officer, police said.

Said St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar: “Make no mistake, we believe that Ballwin officer was ambushed.”

The gunman fled north on New Ballwin Road and was captured in Manchester several miles northeast of the shooting scene, after jumping out of the car and running, police said.

A semiautomatic handgun was recovered, according to St. Louis County Police, who are taking over the investigation.

The male officer was taken to Mercy Hospital St. Louis, in Creve Coeur, where he was in critical but stable condition, “fighting for his life,” Ballwin Chief Kevin Scott said at an emotional press conference Friday afternoon.

No information yet on the races of the officer or the suspect.

I was talking to an older friend today, someone who had been a college student progressive activist in the 1960s. I asked her if this felt to her like 1968. Yes and no, she said. There was the matter of the war, which was a much bigger deal than we face today. The biggest difference, she said, is that back then, people had hope that if they could just end the war, or do this or that thing, then a better day would come. Now, people don’t have that hope, and they are a lot more atomized than they were back then.

It was false hope — so much so that for many of us, the French term soixante-huitard (sixty-eighter) used to describe the left-wing activists of that year has become a term of abuse. We are, happily, far away from the convulsions of that accursed year, in which RFK and MLK were assassinated, but none of us want to find out how much more the body politic can absorb before it loses its collective mind.

Everybody go now and read this David French column. Excerpts:

Stop lying and distorting facts for your own short-term political gain. It has been extraordinary to watch so many on the left and the right disregard the truth for the sake of “larger purposes.” A known lie such as “hands-up, don’t shoot” became the slogan of an entire movement. Scaremongers refused to deal with actual statistics and instead perpetuated the claim that police officers had declared “open season” on black men.

Comprehensive reporting shows that police overwhelmingly use force when they are “under attack or defending someone who [is].” Despite the millions of interactions between police and citizens (including black citizens), the number of controversial or contentious shootings is low. It’s so low that in a nation of more than 300 million citizens, we can rattle off individual names – Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner – rather than consider the horror of mass death, of a true “open season.” The problem will never be solved if we refuse to acknowledge its complexities. No debate that so reflexively distorts reality will ever be productive.

At the same time, it’s just as dishonest to pretend that police abuse is a fiction or that official racism has been vanquished. It is a simple fact that some police departments have covered up police misconduct (McDonald’s case comes immediately to mind) or, typically at the behest of their political masters, systematically abused the citizens they’re sworn to protect, turning them into ATMs for the state through excessive and burdensome fines and citations. While the Department of Justice’s investigation of the police shooting of Michael Brown exonerated officer Darren Wilson, for example, it painted an extraordinarily disturbing portrait of the use and abuse of official power in Ferguson, Missouri. Police made Ferguson a hell for its residents, a place where, as I wrote at the time, “a small class of the local power brokers creat[ed] two sets of rules, one for the connected and another for the mass of people who are forced – often at gunpoint – to pay for the ‘privilege’ of being governed.”

No American man, woman, or child should have to live under such a regime. But the problem will never be solved if we refuse to acknowledge its complexities. No debate that so reflexively distorts reality will ever be productive.

Read the whole thing — and pass it on.