Rod Dreher's Blog, page 558

Eye On Downtown Dallas

My friend Richard Hill from Dallas was downtown at the rally yesterday. He sent me some great photos, and permission to share them with you. I can’t post them all, but these are my favorites.

Photo by Richard Hill

Photo by Richard Hill

Photo by Richard Hill

The Dallas Atrocity

Five dead police officers, six wounded, plus one wounded civilian. And one of two suspects dead. More:

Witness Ismael Dejesus shot video broadcast by FOX and CNN that shows the ambush of several officers. One of the shootings is just off camera.

“It looked like an execution honestly,” Dejesus said. “He stood over him after he was already down and shot him three or four more times.”

This country is having a very bad year.

Many of us have been criticizing the police over shooting civilians. The mass murder of Dallas police officers doesn’t nullify the importance and validity of that discussion. We must not become “eye for an eye” people. But it is important this morning to stop and think about what police officers do for all of us — I mean, the kind of dangers they face.

Last night in Baton Rouge, near the site of Alton Sterling’s shooting, there was a triple shooting. A woman who lives in that neighborhood and who fears for her 24-year-old son’s life, had a powerful, poignant quote:

“Until our lives matter to us, no one will understand what Black Lives Matter means.’

Earlier, in that same neighborhood, four people were shot in a fight at an apartment complex.

Sandra Sterling, the aunt who raised Alton Sterling, was at the scene. A local reporter tweeted:

Outraged, a woman with Sterling tells me: “They can’t scream ‘black lives matter’ four blocks north of here & come here & take black lives.”

— Bryn Stole (@BrynStole) July 8, 2016

So, in Alton Sterling’s neighborhood, in a 24 hour period, there were seven shootings. North Baton Rouge is a violent place. Here’s a link to a map of the 2016 homicides in the city. And here’s a map of 2015’s count. It surprises no one in BR that most of them are in the same part of the city: the poor, black one. Two or three years ago, the Baton Rouge Advocate did a story tallying up the year’s homicides in the city, putting a photo of every victim in the piece, and saying where they died. They were almost all young black men shot dead in north Baton Rouge, and almost all involved with drugs and gangs. No wonder Alton Sterling carried a pistol in his pocket.

Take a look at this video by the Baton Rouge-born hip-hop star Lil Boosie. The audio is NSFW, but you really don’t need to hear the music. Just watch the images, especially the fetishization of guns and violence:

That’s the community that Baton Rouge police patrolling north Baton Rouge have to deal with. If the shooting of Alton Sterling is found by the Justice Department to have been unjustified, then the officer who did it must be held accountable by the law. No qualification on that. My only point is that if a Baton Rouge cop is going to deal with gun violence on the job, it’s almost certainly going to be in the part of the city where most of the black folks live. If a black person in Baton Rouge is going to die violently, it is overwhelmingly likely to be at the hands of a black man.

Here is a short BBC clip profiling the 70805 ZIP code in Baton Rouge — the city’s most violent. Alton Sterling died in neighboring 70806, the second-most violent:

Now, Yale law professor Stephen Carter has a good piece explaining why it matters more to black people when a cop does the shooting than when someone from their own community does. Excerpt:

The alarming rate of black-on-black crime threatens our concrete security. The killing of blacks by whites, particularly police, touches something more elemental, a sense of fragility within a race still struggling to throw off the burdens, both psychic and economic, of the nation’s tortured history.

I don’t know that I would have been able to grasp this before working with Wendell Pierce on his memoir, and talking to his family members about their history. Wendell’s uncles and aunts remember in the 1940s how the Klan rode into their neighborhood — they were all poor farmers who lived along the bayou — one night, doused a black family’s new car with gasoline, and set it afire. “Let this be a lesson to you n—gers,” one said. The family that bought that car had scraped and saved for a long time. It was the only car in the whole neighborhood. They had told all their neighbors that they would use it to take them to the doctor, to the grocery store, and such.

The Klan members were hooded and robed, but everybody knew who they were. They included law enforcement. In my own town, within living memory of the oldest people living here, the sheriff gathered a lynching party, hunted down a black man he believed guilty of raping a white woman, and when they caught him, hanged him that night without trial. It quickly emerged that he was innocent, without a shadow of doubt. You think that corrupt sheriff had to pay for his crime, or any of the deputies who helped him?

Closer to our present time, a sitting judge in our judicial district was a member of the Klan. Most of the people who lived in this district at the time were black. What kind of justice do you think they could expect in that judge’s court? These are just two small stories from a small place, but those people — the lynching sheriff and the Klansman judge — were the face of law enforcement in my parish in the pre-Civil Rights era.

This is a history that white people don’t know. But black people do.

I tell you that not to diminish unjustified police shootings, but as part of a post that adds context to this hideous situation we are all facing as a country. Police officers in north Baton Rouge every single day have to contend with a world crawling with armed criminals who kill each other at alarming rates. I can’t imagine doing that for a living. Can you? At the same time, as Carter says, there is no denying the burden of historical memory in the black community, from a time when the law could do whatever it wanted to them with impunity.

Still, if civilians start killing cops, all bets are off. That is one thing that civilization absolutely cannot tolerate.

I’m starting to wonder if this is a taste of what it felt like to live through 1968.

UPDATE: According to the Dallas police chief this morning:

The suspect, who has not been named, was cornered for several hours by officers and was killed by an explosive device deployed by a police bomb robot after extensive negotiations failed, said Dallas police chief David Brown.

Brown told reporters at an early morning news conference: “The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter,” during negotiations. “He said he was upset about the recent shootings, he was upset at white people. The suspect said he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

“The suspect said that he was not affiliated with any groups and he stated that he did this alone. The suspect said other things that are part of this investigation,” Brown said.

A further three suspects are in police custody, but authorities declined to provide any further details.

Stone-cold racist mass murder of police officers.

Exiting The Public Schools

The Rev. Chad Vegas, a Bakersfield, Calif. pastor and longtime school board member, recently announced he was not going to run for re-election. He’s a very popular politician locally. When he made his announcement, the board president:

“Trust me, Chad (Vegas) will not disappear even if he’s not on that seat,” Williams said. “Just because Chad’s not a trustee doesn’t mean he won’t have great influence in the community whether he sits in a public seat or not. He’s a highly respected leader in his community, and he’s earned that.”

Pastor Vegas has made public two letters he sent to his church congregation. Here is the link to those letters. I reproduce them below, in chronological order. The first one is dated June 2:

I am sitting here in my home having just returned from a Kern High School Board of Trustees meeting. I have almost never discussed my role on the board with you. I intend to change that with this letter.

You are a congregation that has graciously endured my often well-known public disputes regarding political issues. You have graciously allowed me to attempt to love my neighbor through that public service, while also being your pastor. You have done me the great service of not bringing up my board responsibilities at church and left me free to be a pastor. I am sure there are times you believe I represented you well. I am sure there are times when I have not represented you well. You have been gracious on all occasions. You have corrected me graciously when necessary. You have encouraged me greatly when needed. I am deeply thankful for the incredibly mature and kind way you have stood with me as a brother in Christ and as a pastor. The 12 years I have served on the board have been made bearable by you.

Today, I sat in a meeting as our board voted to bring into our district policy the full spectrum of the LGBTQ agenda. I realized as I listened to the numerous legal justifications and requirements that board members uphold these deeply offensive and immoral laws that I can no longer serve in this role. I am a Christian pastor above all else. I could not vote for these policies. I can not remain on a board to enforce these policies. I spoke out against the board voting for this. I called on them to realize that they will answer to God on this vote, and they should fear Him more than the state. I did not prevail.

I plan to address further my own personal realization that government education has been hijacked as a cause for the indoctrination of your children in nihilism, hedonism, and atheism. I will also address more my realization that I was naive not to think this was the only direction government education could go. I am not calling Christian teachers to abandon their posts. By all means, please keep being a light in a dark place as long as you ethically can. I am encouraging you to find other means to educate your children. Please know that this is my advice and not God’s law, nor an official declaration of our church. We believe in Christian liberty. However, I can tell you after 12 years of sitting through meetings that public education means to indoctrinate your children in anti-Christian ideology.

With that said, I will not be seeking reelection to the Kern High School District Board. I will give all my time and effort to being a pastor in our church. I will also be helping look for alternatives for Christian parents to educate their kids. I am called to preach the gospel. I am called to pray for you and minister to you. My time as a public school board member has come to an end. I am very much at peace with this decision. While I am not optimistic about the future of our country, I am deeply optimistic about the future of Christ’s church. Jesus will build his church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.

He posted a follow-up today:

Ever since I penned the letter [above] I have been asked by thousands of people to reconsider my decision to not seek reelection. It has been incredibly overwhelming to hear the response. I have deeply appreciated how many people have expressed to me that they believe I have been their voice on the school board. I do not take that responsibility lightly. As a result, I have been weighed down for the past month as I pray through these requests to reconsider. I have sought counsel from numerous quarters. I have gone back and forth in my own heart and mind.  I have asked many to pray for me.

I want you to know that I have decided to stand by my original decision to not seek reelection. My wife and elders concurred with my original decision. I continue to hold the conviction that my original decision is the correct one.

I know many of you will not understand why I am “giving up the fight.” I am not giving up the fight. I am redirecting my time and effort. I am exhausting myself in preaching the gospel. I am spending my time equipping parents and their children to be godly witnesses of Christ in an increasingly hostile society. [Emphasis mine — RD]

This is what the Benedict Option will require in particular instances. Vegas did what he could in the public square, and was defeated. If he stayed and kept fighting, there was no chance of his winning, and he would open himself up to personal lawsuits. He is not giving up, as he puts it, but rather is taking that same energy and commitment and working to prepare the church for the hostile present and the even more hostile age to come.

This is a great illustration of what I talk about when I say a “strategic retreat” from the public square is going to be necessary for the Benedict Option in many places. It’s a redirecting of one’s resistance efforts to battlefields where one can plausibly find success. The church has got to wake up and listen to prophetic leaders like Pastor Chad Vegas. California public schools are lost, and state lawmakers are working hard to ensure that private Christians colleges that don’t kowtow to the LGBT agenda meet their demise. America is fast becoming a different country than most Christians think it is. Chad Vegas gets it. Do you? More from his letter (emphases mine):

As I considered the many requests I became increasingly dogged by the concern that staying on the board would be giving Christian parents false hope. Why? I do not believe this battle can be won at the school board level. It is lost. The State and Federal governments have co-opted your local schools. They mean to indoctrinate your children in their radical secularism. They mean to cause your children, and Christian teachers and administrators, to bow to their sex gods. I simply can’t be part of enforcing that.

It is now law in CA that your children must be taught how to have safe homosexual sex, how to obtain an abortion, and that gender does not correspond to biological sex. Think of that! It is legally required to teach your children the LGBTQ sexual mores while simultaneously illegal to mention God. I can’t and won’t enforce that foolishness.

I do not know how long Christian teachers and administrators can ethically continue. They will certainly need to increase in their wisdom as they navigate this new legal reality in our state. Please pray for them. I also do not know how Christian parents will afford to find other options for their children. I know they will need to make sacrifices their parents likely didn’t have to make. Please pray for them. 

We must wake up to the reality of where our state has headed. We must prepare the church to live as sojourners in a foreign land, a land that feels more foreign by the day. We need to help parents find alternatives to public schools as they disciple their children. We have to shepherd our public school teachers and administrators through wisely and faithfully working in this new legal environment. There are many challenges that face us. I have not given up the fight. I have chosen to direct my efforts fully to these pastoral responsibilities.

Thank you for 12 years of trust. I am deeply grieved that our state has moved us to this point. In the midst of all of this, I am deeply encouraged that Jesus is in his temple and on his throne. 

Mene, mene tekel upharsin. The handwriting is on the wall. California is only the start. The time to prepare for what’s coming is now. Fight in the public square as long as you can, but understand that sooner or later, we will all have to make a decision like Chad Vegas’s, on whether or not to cooperate with our faith teaches us is evil. If you think it won’t eventually come to your school district, you’re deceiving yourself. What is your plan for yourself and your kids then? Do you have an alternative when public school is no longer viable? If not, start building them now — and if you have the resources, work so that as many children of faithful poor and working-class Christians can be taken aboard that educational ark.

This is why I am writing the Benedict Option book: to prepare for days like the ones Chad Vegas is living through now. Pastor Vegas is living the future of all small-o orthodox Christians in America.

 UPDATE: Carl Trueman knows Chad Vegas, and reflects:

It reminded me of my review of John Inazu’s new book on confident pluralism and his response. Essentially, I argued that confident pluralism depended upon a balance of cultural and political power. As that no longer existed, pluralism was effectively dead. John responded that I was too pessimistic and that my own tone in my review was not entirely conducive to promoting pluralism.

Well, the fate of Chad Vegas in Bakersfield is a great example of precisely my point. He is a popular member of the schoolboard, perhaps the most popular. Even his liberal opponents acknowledge that and want him to stay. But he cannot. He has already broken the law by voting his conscience. He could be sued for that. And how many of those who want him to stay would be willing to stand shoulder to shoulder during a long, exhausting and punitively expensive legal action?

More:

Power is not a function of numbers any more, if it ever was. It is a function of organization and of having one’s hands on the levers of cultural and legal power. Expect no quarter in the conflicts that are already upon us, however many of your neighbors initially express sympathy with you.

The long Gramscian march of the activist bien pensants through the institutions is reaching its conclusion. It really is. And it is time to face that fact and abandon the myth that the world is run by people who respect difference and diversity, and that all we need to do is behave decently in order to win their respect and earn their favor. They do not think that way. They will never think that way. And they will crush those who do. By any means necessary.

Read the whole thing.  So much for winsomeness as a cultural strategy.

UPDATE: Got this from John Inazu:

@roddreher to be clear, I do not argue for "winsomeness," nor is that my disagreement with Carl's review of my book.

— John Inazu (@JohnInazu) July 7, 2016

I appreciate it. For the record, when I made the winsomeness remark, I wasn’t thinking about John, but about my Christian friends and acquaintances who think that being winsome will somehow make their opponents more tolerant. Not gonna happen. A friendly bigot, in their eyes, is still a bigot, and must be destroyed.

The Deconversion of a Social Justice Warrior

From the Political Deconversions thread, this recently posted account from Mountain Feist is kind of amazing. It’s about a deconversion from a certain kind of cultural politics:

My parents had a self conscious, socially respectable sort of conservatism that they attempted to pass on to me. We were nominally Lutheran, and as a child it seemed less a real faith then just belonging to the right club (the respectable people). My dad was an American success story. He went from poor West Virginia logger to wealthy upper management. Our family paid the price with a near absent dad, a perpetually stressed mom, and no real relationship with extended family. I do not have a hometown to speak of– my family sacrificed that in pursuit of the American dream.

I rebelled against what I felt was the superficiality of the religion, against my mother’s perpetual anger, and against being uprooted so much as a young person. Much of that rebellion came from the worst parts of me, but it was inspired by a genuine rejection of the materialist values and lukewarm nominalism of my parents. I became as far left as I could be. I spent my twenties in increasingly confrontational left wing activism, much of which I am ashamed of today. I was also battling alcoholism and an extreme depression (largely existential) at the time. This didn’t exactly help my judgment.

I do know, from my time on the radical fringe, that the hatred of the left justifies itself completely. In my circles there were reasoned debates about the use of violence– from property destruction to personal violence. My mental condition worsened from the activism. You have to hold in a lot of anger and generate a lot of outrage to be in the streets. My feelings of hatred led me to consider a lot of alternative lifestyles that ultimately did more psychological damage then not. I met many psychologically damaged people too.

Things that deconverted me in short: getting sober, taking care of my depression, involvement in the queer community, and a religious conversion. When I got sober, I had to distance myself from the debauchery and drunkenness that is ever present in radical circles. That alone did wonders for my mental health. I began to see how unhealthy polyamory and the like were, and I got tired of paying lip service to my friends who believed it was a sign of an enlightened status. I also saw that by championing sexual freedom in this way, I was having to condone a whole lot of mental agony. It felt wrong to do that.

I had a good friend who transitioned from male to female. This person and I became extremely close. We lived together with their child from a failed marriage (as friends). I saw some insanity close up that I can’t forget. My friend was tortured. I knew many in the queer community and at one time identified so myself. Many of us struggled. However, seeing the way my trans friend struggled broke me of my gender delusions. They were a sexual abuse survivor with severe gender confusion as a result. Like many trans people, my friend had spent a few years homeless. We bonded over our shared experiences of mental pain, as we met in a support group for depression. I stayed up with them many nights when the flashbacks came. All of this mental torturedness made them wildly popular in the queer community, and a lot of cis-women wanted to date a transwoman, I suppose to get the cool cache of being queer without having to sleep with someone of the opposite sex. (My friend never had SRS) It was disgusting to witness how popular their trans status made them, and it made me see how much of the new gender activism was ignoring the person, and setting new social ideals. My friend ended up de-transitioning back to male eventually, along with another trans person in the community. I took a permanent break from the community after that, rethinking what I’d been trained in college and through the “radical scene” to think about gender and sex. I can not help but see a sickening dischord between the psychological suffering of many trans people and the valorization of trans and gender variant people, as if they were empancipatory heros. I knew many other people who identified gender queer etc. A tortured group. I stop believing it was all due to society. No sweeping social change will help if you vehemently hate your physical body. I feel great compassion fot those who suffer with dysmorphia of any kind, but no longer feel the answer is in transitioning.

With my worldview crumbling and the crutch of alcohol and drugs gone, I ran to the (cliche liberal) spiritual solution. I started meditating. I dove in. I took months off in spiritual retreat. I converted to Buddhism at one of them. I facilitated groups, went to conferences. It did me a lot of good: I pulled my life together with the stability I found. I started working in a job where I could give back to the society I’d spit on. I was agnostic during this time and met a Catholic man at a Buddhist retreat. He was going through a rough patch in his marriage and I think he was just looking for a place to be in silence. I know, I know. Readers of this blog will think it’s ridiculous and heretical that a Catholic Christian would be at a Buddhist retreat center, but I thank God that he was. His faith was inspiring to me. I picked up a book on Christian monasticism, intrigued. I began reading about ancient Christianity. My heart was opened.

I had planned a three month pilgrimage to Nepal, and went despite my waning Buddhist faith. Spending three months there changed my life. I saw a culture bound by tradition to the past and present, and troubled as things are in Nepal, I could not help but see they had something we do not. I saw something I had always longed for, I suppose– embeddedness. Connectedness. I felt funny as an American Buddhist, with liberal values, coming face to face with a traditional Hindu (and, in the mountains, Buddhist) culture. In the West, these traditions are adapted to suit secular values. They are psychologized and politicized. I guess, seeing it that way, I didn’t want the liberal religion. I was spending time in a monastery there and began to think that going to a church would be nice. So I came home and started seeking the church in earnest. I haven’t stopped.

So having had these experiences, I began to see the contradictions in my liberal worldview. I loved local food, but hated local custom. I nearly made an idol of community, but I embraced community destroying practices (look, polyamory just doesn’t work. It’s selfish and sows division). I believed everyone was interconnected, that that the weak and vulnerable should be protected– I was a strict vegetarian for a decade. Still, I was rabidly pro-choice.

Politically, I don’t know where I am. I am not a democrat nor do I identify as liberal. Dostoyevsky’s political thought is appealing to me. He’s not running anytime soon – or ever – so I stay out of politics. I am not entirely comfortable with the conservative label because of what it means in the popular imagination. I cheered Brexit. (I spent a good deal time protesting globalization on the other side, so..) I am much more socially conservative these days, but feel that is due to my religious beliefs. I fear that society is heading in the direction I once wanted and pushed for. This is something I feel I share responsibility for. If it’s true, we are all in for some dark times. Hence my enjoyment of this blog. The alarmism can feel a bit much at times, but then I remember my not-so-distant past…

That was something. Thank you, Mountainfeist. I’ve had several stories readers have sent me this week to post, and you’ve given me a reason to gather them all in one place.

ITEM: The taboo against incest may soon fall:

Governments have long used two arguments to criminalize consensual incest — risk of inbreeding and damage to the family — but societal changes may be chipping away at both of these stances. While couples who are close relatives do have a higher chance of having children with severe birth defects, today there are many effective ways to avoid pregnancies, or to get pregnant using a third person’s genetic material. The need to protect the traditional family structure may also become less relevant as society changes. When one case of consensual incest between a stepfather and stepdaughter was brought to the Supreme Court in 2007, the judges ruled it should remain illegal because it harmed the family. But J. Dean Carro, the lawyer who defended the incestuous couple says, “We were ahead of our time, but legalization will happen because such cases will become more common.”

More in this pullquote:

“We need to start asking if it’s OK to limit someone’s freedom just because we have a ‘yuck’ response to it.”

— Debra Lieberman, assistant professor, University of California, Santa Barbara

That’s exactly right. If consent/harm is the only standard, and there is no chance of conceiving a child from an incestuous union, why should the law bind the freedom of others? Don’t misread me: I absolutely believe this should be against the law, and people should be prosecuted for it. My point is simply that liberalism, as currently constituted, has virtually no defenses against this.

ITEM: The Belgian state orders Catholic nursing home to kill:

Judges in Belgium have fined a Catholic nursing home for refusing to allow the euthanasia of a lung cancer sufferer on its premises.

The St Augustine rest home in Diest was ordered to pay a total of €6,000 after it stopped doctors from giving a lethal injection to Mariette Buntjens.

Days later, the 74-year-old woman was instead taken by ambulance to her private address to die “in peaceful surroundings”.

Buntjens’ family later sued the nursing home for causing their mother “unnecessary mental and physical suffering”.

This likely means the closing of Catholic nursing homes across Belgium. The Church says it will not comply with what it believes is murder. This is a harbinger of the kinds of decisions US Christians are going to have to make in the years and decades to come.

ITEM: Liberal Canadian couple who vowed to let their newborn decide his or her own gender reflect on the decision five years later (the child, born a girl, has “chosen to identify” as a female; their older child has been “trans-identified” since age six):

Why do you think this story blew up so big?

All sorts of reasons. There’s a fairly ingrained adultism. We don’t largely believe that young people have the right to make their own decisions, which can be different from their parents and guardians. [We live in] a culture where adults tell kids what to do all the time – dress this way, go to this place, eat this thing. So I think that played a certain role. To say my kid can go into Value Village and select their own clothes as long as they fit and are functional, pick whatever you want.’

Or my kid can decide what pronoun they are happy with. It was so new to people.

“Adultism.” These are crazy people.

ITEM: UK woman wins right to bear her dead daughter’s child:

A woman who wants to use her dead daughter’s frozen eggs to give birth to her own grandchild has won a Court of Appeal battle.

The 60-year-old woman was appealing against the UK regulator’s refusal to allow her to take her only child’s eggs to a US clinic.

Her daughter, who died in 2011, was said to have asked her mother to carry her babies.

The mother lost a High Court case last year.

She was subsequently granted permission to challenge the decision at the Court of Appeal in London, before a panel of three judges.

Utterly perverse. But this is what a technopoly means. Neil Postman’s term refers to a society in which the values of technology are deified. Technopolies don’t ask “should we do this?”; the only relevant question is, “do we have the ability to do this?” You might remember that in Brave New World, all reproduction had been separated from the sexual act. If you haven’t read it, or haven’t read it in a while, you really should. It’s stunning how much our world today is as Huxley foresaw.

 

 

The Shooting Of Philando Castile

My God, this video below of the immediate aftermath of Philando Castile’s shooting by a suburban Minneapolis police officer leaves one speechless. His girlfriend, Lavish Reynolds, started uploading the video to Facebook live, moments after the officer shot him in a traffic stop for a busted tail light. In the video, you see a wounded, bleeding Castile in what were the last moments of his life. Do not watch this if you are not prepared for it! It is NSFW! But I hope you will watch the horror that this woman and her seven-year-old daughter endured, to say nothing, obviously, of the dead man:

From the Washington Post account of the video:

As Castile moans and appears to lose consciousness, the officer can be heard in the background shouting expletives in apparent frustration.

“Mam, keep your hands where they are,” the officer shouts at Reynolds. “I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his hands up.”

“You told him to get his ID, sir, his driver’s license,” Reynolds responds. “Oh my god. Please don’t tell me he’s dead. Please don’t tell me my boyfriend just went like that.”

More:

From her video, Reynolds appears to have begun recording seconds after her boyfriend was shot, just after 9 p.m. local time. (The footage appears to have been flipped when it was uploaded to social media sites, mistakenly suggesting Castile was the passenger in the car when, in fact, he was the driver.)

More:

In the video, Reynolds tells the police that her boyfriend is “good man” who works for St. Paul Public Schools.

“He doesn’t have no record or anything,” she says. “He’s never been in jail or anything. He’s not a gang member or anything.”

A website for J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School lists Phil Castile as its cafeteria supervisor.

Clarence Castile, Philando’s uncle, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that his nephew had worked in the school’s cafeteria for 12 to 15 years, “cooking for the little kids.” He said his nephew was “a good kid” who grew up in St. Paul. Philando Castile’s Facebook page says he attended the University of Minnesota.

And finally:

“He was reaching for his license and registration. You told him to get it sir! You told him,” Reynolds says. “He tried to tell you he was licensed to carry and he was going to take it off. Please don’t tell me boyfriend is gone. He don’t deserve this.”

The screen goes black.

“Please Lord, you know our rights Lord,” Reynolds says, apparently praying. “You know we are innocent people, Lord. We are innocent people.”

Read the whole thing.

Keep in mind that we don’t know what happened in the moments before the shooting. Why would a police officer approach a car stopped for a busted tail light with his weapon drawn? The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that Castile had only misdemeanors on his criminal record. Did the cop order Philando Castile to keep his hands up, and did Castile defy him by foolishly reaching into his coat to remove the gun that, according to Reynolds, he told the cop that he had? Was the gun licensed and legally owned, as Reynolds said? Does that matter?

To be clear, the only people who saw what Castile did in the seconds before the shooting are the cop, Lavish Reynolds, and perhaps her daughter. I want to be careful here and not judge the cop based only on partial information. But this is a horrible situation, and … what can you even say at this point, other than may God comfort those suffering people, keep the peace, and bring forth justice. 

Question for the room: should we be grateful that technology brings us videos like this, because it tells us the true story with vivid immediacy? Or should we regret it because the imagery is extremely emotional, and obscures the search for truth?

Me, I’m grateful that we have this technology now, because police can’t get away with abusing their authority. But I’m writing this as someone who just watched this video, and who is in an emotional state, shocked and grieving for Castile, Reynolds, her daughter, and those who loved Castile. I know that emotion conditions the way I regard this killing. We watch a man die on video, shot to death by a cop at point-blank range. We hear the sobbing and the pleas of his girlfriend, and the cries of her daughter, who may have seen it happen too (this isn’t clear from the video). The humanity of this scene tears your heart out and, if Reynolds’ account is accurate, infuriates you. That is a black man, a school cafeteria worker, who was pulled over because he had a busted tail light. And now he is dead.

The video is so emotionally direct that it’s hard to keep straight the fact that we don’t know what happened in the moments before she started recording. The partial truth is so vivid and shocking that it may obscure our ability to take in the whole truth. This is the problem with video: it makes us think we’re getting the whole story, when that may not be the truth.

How Lavish Reynolds kept her cool and recorded this I will never know. However this comes out, that woman showed grace under pressure that is heroic.

I will update this post throughout the day as more information becomes available.

 

Conservative Silence On Religious Liberty

I realize what a small intellectual world I inhabit whenever I talk about religious liberty to people I’m not in touch with online. Very few people — I’m talking Christians here — have any clue about what’s happening on that front. When I bring up cases, and talk about the direction of jurisprudence and legislation, inevitably they evince shock. Really? That’s happening in this country?

Yes, that’s happening in this country. Right under your noses, Christians, without a peep from you. Did you know that the California legislature may be about to pass a law that will either compel the state’s many Christian colleges and universities to violate their consciences on LGBT matters, or, in effect, shut them down. Do you care? You had better, because what happens in California does not stay in California.

Last night a theologian friend shared with me news about someone close to him who is a senior local school official in one of the most liberal, hostile states to religious liberty. He is on the verge of resignation, because the law there now compels him and every orthodox Christian in the school district to violate their consciences, in part by teaching and implementing gender ideology. If he remains and fights, he has been advised by lawyers that he opens himself up to personal lawsuits, and that the school system won’t defend bigots like him. He worries about losing everything to fight for the right of conscience. Among his worries is not just that continuing to fight will ruin him financially, but that his presence as a faithful Christian known to hold the views he does will give other Christians in his district a false idea about the threat the new order in public schools pose to their children and their beliefs.

I told the theologian who shared this story with me that the man ought to resign, because the state will grind him down, and LGBT activists will find a way to use the courts to take every penny he has and destroy his reputation. But what he should do is resign with a detailed public letter saying exactly what has happened there, and what the stakes are for religious liberty and coercion in this country. Because people — especially Christian people — don’t know, and, I fear, don’t want to know, because they don’t want to disturb their own peace and complacency.

Pete Spiliakos has a great short piece about this in First Things, decrying Christian silence as their own liberties are seized. He talks about how difficult it is to talk about religious liberty in the US media, because the media are so over-the-top hostile to this kind of thing. Easier to just shut up. And conservative politicians do.

Spiliakos talks about how foolish Christian donors are to give money to useless Republican politicians like Ben Carson and the usual crowd of right-wing PAC hucksters. More:

The crime is not the wasted money as such. The crime is the wasted opportunity—an opportunity to improve the media ecology experienced by the average American. For the 100-plus million dollars that were wasted by conservative scamPACs, tens of millions of Americans could have learned—in one-minute or thirty-second clips—what the Little Sisters of the Poor do and how the Obama administration is harassing them. They could have learned about the Gosnell murders and the horror of late-term abortion.

A campaign of this sort would have a cumulative effect on electoral politics. Since apolitical Americans would have more (and better) context for contested social issues, conservative-leaning politicians would be more inclined to talk about them. This new media ecology would place every discussion of religious liberty, every discussion of abortion, in the context of liberal extremism. Improving our media ecology would make conservative political activism easier and raise the political cost of liberal extremism.

Read the whole thing.  I’m not sure which organizations would be best to donate to, or even if the right organization exists (nota bene, we at TAC would love to receive your donations to fund our journalism; your generosity pays for posts like this one). If they don’t exist already, conservative Christians need to invent them. Don’t give your money to right-wing politicians and PACs who want to do nothing more than maintain the status quo. Spiliakos is right: we need people, either within existing credible organizations or in new ones, to spearhead an information campaign to tell the real story about what’s happening to religious liberty in America.

How can we tell our urgent and important story to Americans of good will when we can’t even tell it to our own people?

From The ‘Spite Wins’ File

All together now, from your catechism:

Q: What is the Law of Merited Impossibility?

A: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots deserve it.”

Q: When do we see evidence of it?

A: When the advance of LGBT rights and privileges crosses a line that advocates previously said would never be crossed, at which point those same activists insist the line must be crossed in the fight against bigotry.

Now: In Iowa, a church has filed suit against the state’s Civil Rights Commission and the city of Des Moines, asking a federal judge to prevent the state and city from enforcing its interpretation of a gendered restroom law, and its views on harassment, which the church said could put churches in jeopardy if the pastor preached a sermon that offended the commission. More:

The church says the commission has published a brochure that says the state law sometimes applies to churches when they operate a child care facility or when church services are open to the public.

The church said since services are always open, the commission’s interpretation of the law could stop the church’s minister from preaching sermons addressing God’s design for human sexuality. It could also force the church to open its restrooms and showers to persons of the opposite sex violating its deeply held religious beliefs and several constitutional rights including free speech and freedom of religion.

The principle at stake here is whether events at a church count as “public accommodation” for the purposes of anti-discrimination law. Here are relevant portions of the brochure the Iowa Civil Rights Commission published giving instructions in how to interpret the law:

As distinct from all those church services that are NOT open to the public?

More:

According to the Commission — here’s a link to the whole brochure — illegal harassment includes “verbal, physical, or written conduct.”

Watch what you say or publish, preacher. That’s a nice church you have there. Wouldn’t want to take it from you. Oh, and by the way, Love Wins!

This is what you call a “pre-enforcement challenge.” This stuff has been on the books in Iowa for some years, but no church has been brought to court over it. The church is not waiting to be dragged through a lawsuit. It wants to force a federal judge to draw a clear First Amendment line between the Iowa Civil Rights Commission and the church.

This is smart. It has become clear that LGBT activists and their allies are not going to rest until every bit of resistance has been wiped out. It is foolish to hope for the best. Churches, religious schools and religious institutions will be fighting these fights for the coming decades. Count on it. If you think this is not going to affect you, you’ve got your head in the sand.

Political Deconversions

Here’s a good essay by Matthew Sitman, native of small-town Pennsylvania, born into a working-class family of Reagan Democrats turned Republicans, on why he left conservatism. He describes his mom and dad’s conservatism, and how it affected him:

This was a conservatism of the heart—less a set of political and economic doctrines than fierce patriotism and an instinctive suspicion of cultural change, and I made it my own.

This was partly because, despite this blue-collar background, there was a real sense that I would inherit a country that provided more opportunities than my parents had. Neither of them had gone to college, but it was taken for granted that I would. My father’s small business was very small indeed—just him working in a converted garage in our backyard. He never made much money, but he made enough to keep going, and he craved the freedom of being his own boss. And because most of his clients were scattered across the country, and my mother worked for the local public school, my family didn’t directly suffer from the deteriorating economy we saw all around us. It all amounted to a not-quite-implausible story of upward mobility, however tenuous and incremental our gains. We certainly were not middle class, and not even lower-middle class; but in the singular way the nearly-poor take pride in not being genuinely poor, we attributed the distinction to our own thrift and virtue—especially the latter.

The Sitmans belonged to a fundamentalist Protestant church:

This vision of the spiritual life was based on an exalted understanding of human freedom. Our wills were not bound and our ultimate fate was dependent on nothing but our own decisions. Sanctification came through individual effort and personal reform. It should be no surprise that this Christianity of the altar call proved a ready ally of all the fantasies and political and economic pieties we nurture about America: our belief in our capacity for self-invention and our trust that nearly limitless rewards could be gained through toil and travail. Suffering was ultimately the result of bad choices. You were, in the most profound sense, on your own.

The Bush years broke his conservatism:

This deductive quality of the conservative mind is its most distinctive feature. Certain axioms are true—about the Constitution, about morality, about economics, about our aspirations as human beings—therefore particular policies and courses of action should be pursued. Despite their vaunted claims to grappling with the world as it is, of being mugged by reality, conservatives in America practice a determined anti-empiricism. This is what holds together all the myriad failures of conservative politics: a devotion to first principles that simply must be true, whatever the consequences, and whatever the human suffering left in their aftermath.

The Bush years, then, were not an aberration but a culmination. What mattered to me were not finally the particular instances of bad behavior or misguided political ideas on the right in the early 2000s, but their cumulative force. I came to reject conservatism—fitfully, and without a coherent alternative at hand—because I understood it to be an ideology willfully resistant to reality. The misery caused by George W. Bush and the movement that enabled him mattered both in and of itself and because it revealed the fundamental limitations and failings of conservatism.

Read the whole thing, especially to the end.

I found a lot in this essay resonated with me, though I did not quit identifying as a conservative. Going further back, it reminded me of why, in the early 1990s, I stopped calling myself a liberal. Liberalism didn’t describe the real world, as I saw it once I graduated from college and started having to pay my own bills, and lived in a house that was not far from a high-crime area. As a liberal, I had sorted the world into Good and Evil, and I was willing to find any excuse for the failings and behavior of those I deemed good, and was in turn willing to find nothing but fault in the Evil ones. I don’t know what it was, exactly, that caused me finally to lose faith in the story Liberalism tells about itself, but lose it I did.

Matt’s loss of his conservatism is a lot like my own realization that I don’t believe the story the Republican Party tells either. When the colossal blunder that was Iraq became clear to me, and when it began to emerge that the Bush administration had deceived the people about the war, and when I then became aware of how I had allowed myself to be manipulated because the story Bush told about why we had to go to war made sense given my prior conservative convictions — well, that’s when it began to fall apart for me. If I had to pick a specific moment, it would be Bush’s second inaugural speech, when he boldly proclaimed a messianic role for America, spreading liberal democracy worldwide. Something in me thought: hubris. Which, of course, it was.

The Katrina response was another blow. I’m not one of those people who blames the whole thing on Bush. There was plenty of local governmental incompetence to go around. The specific thing about Bush that got to me was his “Hell of a job, Brownie” moment, in which he praised his grossly incompetent FEMA director, Michael Brown, despite FEMA being unprepared for the disaster. Turned out that Brownie was a Republican Party hack with no disaster management experience. Realizing that despite 9/11, President Bush treated FEMA’s leadership like a patronage prize, and installed someone like Brownie, and that now, people were suffering who didn’t have to suffer because Brownie didn’t know what he was doing — something snapped in me.

The first thing to go was my faith in the GOP as the party of competence. Its foreign policy had led America to disaster. The cronyism revealed by Katrina was a further blow. These guys — my guys — were no different, despite the narrative they wanted to believe about themselves and the world. I lost faith in that narrative, especially the Reaganesque foreign policy narrative. I lost faith that the GOP was the party of common sense. Then, after the economic crash, what little faith I had left disappeared. If a catastrophic dose of reality didn’t force the GOP to reconsider its foreign policy and its economic policy, then I wanted nothing to do with a party that preferred comforting lies to the hard truth.

This is what I had come to believe about the Democratic Party years before, and why I left it, and liberalism: that they preferred the Narrative to reality. Now I saw that Republicans were the same.

Had Republicans decided to learn from their mistakes, we probably would not have Trump today.

Unlike Matt, I did not find a home in liberalism. How could I? The Democrats have their own Narrative, and I find it to be wildly implausible too. The Democrats’ insistence that we all have to call humans with penises “women” if they say so, or else be punished by the law, is, to me, the perfect symbol of the ludicrous Democratic narrative. So I have been politically homeless since at least 2008, and expect I will be for the rest of my life.

So why do I still call myself a conservative? Because I am not a progressive, and I mostly reject liberalism (in the sense that both mainstream parties are liberal), though any reader of this blog knows that I have a lot of internal contradictions around this that I need to work out. Basically, I believe in Russell Kirk’s Ten Principles of Conservative Thought. I identify with a strain of rightist thought Philip Blond has called Red Toryism. I don’t see them instantiated in either party. It is fairly silly to call oneself a conservative but to feel no particular affinity for the more conservative of the two parties. Perhaps it’s more accurate to call myself a traditionalist, or a Red Tory, though nobody in America not named Drew Bowling knows what that means.

I would be interested in hearing from you readers about how you became disillusioned with your previous political views, if indeed you have become disillusioned. In other words, I want to hear your political deconversion story.

Killing Alton Sterling

That video makes for disturbing viewing. It shows two Baton Rouge police officers trying to subdue Alton Sterling, a black man, outside a convenience store. He resisted arrest. When the cops had him down, one of them (also black) screamed, “He’s got a gun!” (Sterling had a pistol in his pocket.) You see the white cop unholster his pistol, make a profane threat to Sterling, then start firing.

Sterling died on the scene. The Baton Rouge Advocate reports that the store owner, an eyewitness, said Sterling’s hand was nowhere near his pocket (where his gun was) when the officer started firing.

This happened only two days ago, so it’s early in the investigation. It is hard to imagine any information that may come out that would exonerate that officer’s conduct here.

Sterling, as has been reported, was no gentle giant. He’s got a criminal record, including a conviction for simple battery, and is a registered sex offender. But that has nothing to do with the way he was treated by the police here. Pray for justice and for peace. Forecast today is for the hottest day of the year so far in Baton Rouge, with the heat index pushing 105 to 110 degrees. And people’s tempers will understandably be even higher.

Pray for justice and peace here.

UPDATE: A second video has emerged of the shooting. Apparently Sterling was not face down when he was shot. He was still resisting arrest. And both cops are white. You can’t see what Sterling is doing with his arms in this second video. From the first, it appeared to me that he was face down on the pavement. This one, shot from more close up, and at a different angle, shows that he was not. It is not clear if he was reaching for the pistol he had in his pocket when he was shot.

(god bless) AMERICA!

Fourth of July, First Baptist Church, Dallas.

This is very far from my experience. I didn’t even know churches did this kind of thing until I met my wife, who explained to me that her native Texas is a whole ‘nother country. (She grew up in this particular church, by the way.)

I am genuinely curious about what Christians aged 40 and under think when they see this in a church. Will churches in 10 years be doing this, as the state turns ever more anti-Christian? Should they? Are the people of this congregation going to be prepared for what’s to come i this country?

It disturbs me deeply, this kind of worship of the state/nation in a Christian church. Nothing at all wrong with loving America, but in church? In worship? I can’t hold to that, but I would like to hear the case for it from some of you readers. Again, I’m not asking in a sarcastic or demeaning way. I genuinely do not get it.

By the way, the pastor of this megachurch is a big Donald Trump supporter.

Please don’t use your comment to mock. I won’t publish it. Be as critical as you like, but stay serious. I think about what the changes in the coming decades are going to do to people who have bought in to this ultra-patriotic Christianity.