Rod Dreher's Blog, page 559

Pence Gets Schlonged

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: MBD nails it:

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

‘All Lives Matters’

(Photo by Rod Dreher)

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

Something Must Be Done — But What?

Here is the problem:

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

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

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

But look:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE.2: A European reader e-mails:

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

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

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

The Terror In Nice

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

— Emily Badger (@emilymbadger) July 15, 2016

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

— Tim Stanley (@timothy_stanley) July 14, 2016

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

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

From The Guardian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: From The Guardian:

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

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

We stress that none of these details are confirmed.

Shocked, shocked.

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

‘Here They Fell’

Photo by Rod Dreher

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

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

— Christopher Hibbert, “The French Revolution”

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

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

In Praise Of The Evangelical Style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deicide and the Protestant Deformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonhoeffer! Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discuss.

Cop Land, Teacher Nation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.