Rod Dreher's Blog, page 561

The New Jacobin Normal

On the Christian pessimism thread, reader Candles writes:

I was talking to a friendly acquaintance of mine a few days ago, a liberal/left professor at a R1 university. We were talking about politics broadly and the democratic race, and I was biting my tongue a lot. He’s mid-late 30’s, not married, no kids. Family was historically Russian Jewish immigrants, but he’s an atheist, for what it’s worth. Likable guy.

At some point, he meandered onto the general topic of all the things he would like to see the Federal government doing and enforcing. He mentioned that he had spent a year living in Utah, and how frustrating it was, the general lack of cultural respect for separation of church and state there, as he saw it. And this dove-tailed with his general notion that the federal government had made great progress in forcing people in places like suburbs in Utah to respect various Civil Liberties over the last half a century, but that it hadn’t gone nearly far enough, and he thought much further efforts in those directions were both morally good and inevitable.

At a certain point, I said, “You’re essentially advocating that Mormons should be forced by the coercive powers of the state and its monopoly on violence to be Unitarians in everywhere broadly conceived, by people like you, as the public, right?” And he shrugged and said, “Yeah. What’s so bad about that?”

I think this interaction gets right deep in the heart of why there’s no way for this to end in peace. As far as my friend is concerned, as long as there is anywhere in the country he could move that would make him living in accordance of his own values difficult or even impossible, America is not living up to (his vision) of its founding principles. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere etc etc.

And to be totally honest, if I were him, and I had been forced by my job like he had to move to a very heavily LDS part of Utah, I’m sure it would have been very frustrating. I’m actually pretty sympathetic to his point of view.

But a consequence of his concerns for himself and people like him is that he wants to live in a world where Mormons are forced, by the state, with its guns, to live a version of Mormonism that he and people like him have functionally colonized. He is fine with Mormonism as long as it is a properly subjugated and subordinate to his values anywhere Mormons might interact with him (or with what he would categorize as oppressed groups, which, if push came to shove, would include Mormon women and Mormon children who might be gay or transgender).

I’m no longer Mormon, and I have misgiving about the Church, but I found myself pretty frustrated with the conversation. And he’s no kind of firebrand – I don’t think he felt like anything he was saying was particularly provocative. But I think he just couldn’t recognize that “Mormons have to be Unitarians in public, and they’re not nearly Unitarian enough yet, so that state needs to do much more” is tyranny for a large amount of Mormons in exactly equal measure that it’s liberation for him.

Which is to say, I’m very sympathetic to the general thrust of your arguments.

Thank you. One of the most galling things about these arguments is the assumption by secular liberals (and their liberal Christian fellow travelers) that their own beliefs are neutral, and more, so obviously neutral that anyone who dissents only does so in bad faith, and must neither be accommodated nor taken seriously. It’s like Scientism in that way.

A few years back, veteran religion journalist Kenneth Woodward, writing on the Commonweal blog, explained how The New York Times is its own religion. It was a great piece, and said a lot, generally, about the culture of mainstream journalism, not just at the Times. If you can find a conservative who works in a major American newsroom, ask him or her what it’s like to be a dissenter there. You will learn that the homogeneous groupthink is overwhelming there, and it’s exacerbated by the conviction among the True Believers that they simply see the world as it really is. The epistemic closure is epic. And you know, I can live with epistemic closure, because all belief systems and cultures have to draw the line somewhere. What I find repulsive is the conceit these people carry that they have no biases or prejudices at all.

Reader Sean writes:

The moment I became pessimistic was not at the Obergefell decision. While I was dismayed like a lot of other people, I thought we might be able to outlast it and eventually begin to turn public opinion, like in Roe v Wade. No, the moment pessimism set in was in the fierce reaction I got from acquaintances and friends on Facebook.

I had worked in local politics for the better part of a decade, both on campaigns and working for elected officials and advocacy organizations. When I started pushing back on the gay marriage ruling on social media, I was immediately met with a tidal wave of vitriol and anger. From my acquaintances on the left I was expecting it, but what took me back was the hatred directed my way from many of my fellow Republicans, particularly the younger and college-age set.

These were people I had worked side by side with on many campaigns, who I had formed social clubs with and gone out many a time for a friendly drink. Yet after Obergefell they were denouncing me as a hate-filled bigot who might as well have wanted blacks to still be stuck under Jim Crow. The attacks were incredibly personal, and from people who knew me, not just random trolls on the internet.

What’s more, they were gleeful at the prospect of religious believers being railroaded on this issue. When the Barronelle Stutzman and the later Indiana RFRA issues hit the news, the dominant reaction of many of the young Republicans I knew was, Serves you right, that’s what happens to bigots. When I raised the prospect of churches being directly targeted for not performing gay marriages, I was met with airy dismissals. Some, alarmingly, were not even bothered by the idea.

I knew then that none of our ostensible political allies would come to our aid when the time came. It’s hard enough to ask people to sacrifice for a cause when it directly affects them. It’s extremely unlikely that people will go to the wall for a cause they only have a vague philosophical agreement with and especially when they consider the people they would be fighting for as the worst sort of bigots.

Thus we will be on our own for the foreseeable future, which was why I was so interested when I came upon your idea for the Benedict Option. We need something to help keep us together during the times ahead, otherwise we will all hang separately.

In my experience, there is nothing like the hatred that comes from the LGBT movement and its allies, even straights. Oh, do I ever have stories about this, from my life and the lives of others. Watching Barronelle Stutzman, a gentle elderly Baptist lady from a small town, break into tears last week, talking about all the people who have threatened to kill her, and to burn her house down, all because she wouldn’t arrange flowers for a gay wedding — that tells you something important about the nature of what we’re up against.

But this is the New Normal. Dig in and get ready for the long night. A reader of this blog, an academic, said to me (maybe in a comment, or in a private e-mail, I can’t remember) that he’s a conservative on a liberal college faculty. He loves his older colleagues, all of whom are liberals of the old school, meaning they are genuinely tolerant and supporters of the free exchange of ideas. But he lives in fear of his younger colleagues, who are Jacobins to the last man.

Robert Nisbet has written, in his 1953 classic The Quest For Community:

For the Philosophical Conservatives the greatest crimes of the Revolution in France were those committed not against individuals but against institutions, groups, and persona statuses. These philosophers saw in the Terror no merely fortuitous consequence of war and tyrannic ambition but the inevitable culmination of ideas contained in the rationalistic individualism of the Enlightenment. [Emphasis mine — RD] In their view, the combination of social atomism and political power, which the Revolution came to represent, proceeded ineluctably from a view of society that centered on the individual and his imaginary rights at the expense of the true memberships and relationships of society. Revolutionary legislation weakened or destroyed many of the traditional associations of the ancien régime — the guilds, the patriarchal family, class, religious association, and the ancient commune. In so doing, the Conservatives argued forcefully, the Revolution had opened the gates for forces which, if unchecked, would in time disorganize the whole moral order of Christian Europe and lead to control by the masses and to despotic power without precedent.

And so it did, and will again. We are living through a contemporary version of this. The revolution is the next phase of the Sexual Revolution, the revolution that Philip Rieff called the most consequential one ever. Our own Jacobins are now attempting to separate our people, starting in early childhood, from their own masculinity and femininity. They are unleashing forces that will disintegrate what remains of the moral order, and are bringing forth despotism.

In his brilliant book How Societies Remember, social anthropologist Paul Connerton says that every revolutionary regime has to suppress, even exterminate, the symbol system that keeps the people it wishes to rule bound to old ways of thinking. The forces of revolution have to deprive the ruled of their memories:

All totalitarianisms behave in this way; the mental enslavement of the subjects of a totalitarian regime begins when their memories are taken away. When a large power wants to deprive a small country of its national consciousness it uses the method of organised forgetting. In Czech history alone this organised oblivion has been instituted twice, after 1618 and after 1948. Contemporary writers are proscribed, historians are dismissed from their posts, and the people who have been silenced and removed from their jobs become invisible and forgotten. What is horrifying in totalitarian regimes is not only the violation of human dignity but the fear that there might remain nobody who could ever again properly bear witness to the past. Orwell’s evocation of a form of government is acute not least in its apprehension of this state of collective amnesia. Yet it later turn out — in reality, if not in Nineteen Eighty-Four — that there were people who realised that the struggle of citizens against state power is the struggle of their memory against forced forgetting, and who made it their aim from the beginning not only to save themselves but to survive as witnesses to later generations, to become relentless recorders: the names of Solzhenitsyn and Wiesel must stand for many. In such circumstances their writing of oppositional histories is not the only practice of documented historical reconstruction; but precisely because it is that it preserves the memory of social groups whose voices would otherwise have been silenced.

Similarly, anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her classic work Natural Symbols, writes:

Each social form and its accompanying style of thought restricts the self-knowledge of the individual in one way or another. With strong grid and group, there is the tendency to take the intellectual categories which the fixed social categories require as if they were God-given eternal truths. The mind is tied hand and foot, so to speak, bound by the socially generated categories of culture. No other alternative view of reality seems possible. … Anyone who finds himself living in a new social condition must, by the logic of all we have seen, find that the cosmology he used in his old habitat no longer works.

This is one reason I keep tub-thumping about the Benedict Option. It is in large part a call to prepare for what is to come by grounding ourselves so deeply in our faith and our communities of faith that we can resist anything they throw at us.

We are not Solzhenitsyn or Wiesel, or Wojtyla, Havel, or Sakharov. God willing, we never will be. But to assume that the only way a system erases cultural memories is through governmental coercion is incredibly naive. Consider what Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen wrote of his own students earlier this year:

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? What are the Federalist Papers?

Some students, due most often to serendipitous class choices or a quirky old-fashioned teacher, might know a few of these answers. But most students have not been educated to know them. At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. It is not their “fault” for pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.

Over and over again, when I speak to professors who teach at Christian colleges, the story is the same: these kids come to us knowing next to nothing about the faith. Nobody at the Ministry of the Suppression of Christianity ordered their families, their churches, or their Christian schools to deprive these kids of their inheritance. They didn’t have to — and that is the epic tragedy of our time. People without a past will have whatever future those who command their attention want for them. If you think your children, and your children’s children, will be Christian in any meaningful sense of the term without you and your community fighting like crazy to swim upstream against the current of this post-Christian culture, you are living a lie. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.

You may not be interested in the Jacobins, but the Jacobins are interested in you — and your children. We must fight them every opportunity we get, but we have to know what we’re fighting for, and we have to know how to continue the fight underground if we are ultimately defeated.

Leaving aside the infinitely more important cause of the eternal fate of souls, there is the matter of making sure that there are people alive in the generations to come who can properly bear witness to the past — not just the particularly Christian past, but to Western civilization, the civilization that — I speak symbolically, of course — came from Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. We fight for Christian civilization itself, which includes what emerged from Moscow too. And therefore we must fight against the nihilistic successor civilization of New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Brussels. We fight for the Paris of St. Genevieve, not the Paris of Robespierre. Modern civilization has no past, only a future. If our civilization is to have a future, it must be rooted in our past. We must remember our sacred Story.

I believe we will have a future, and I will fight for that future by fighting to keep alive the memory of the past. I won’t stake my life on defending New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Brussels, but I will stake my life on defending Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and Moscow. That’s where the battle is. It’s a battle taking place in every city, town, and village in America. Which side are you on?

All-Nighter

Father Matthew, blessing the Mississippi River on Theophany (Photo by Rod Dreher)

Please forgive me for no posting this morning. I pulled an all-nighter, and very nearly finished the final chapter of the Benedict Option book. (That’s not as good as it seems; I have two more inside chapters to go.) Went to bed at 5 a.m., and was awakened just now by the oncoming train of a caffeine headache.

The first chapter of the book is a “Gathering Storm” introduction, laying out the problem. The final chapter of the book is a short recap of what has come before, but then one that explores the higher reasons for being a small-o orthodox Christian — what Chesterton would have called the romance of orthodoxy. If people come to the Benedict Option out of fear, that’s … well, that’s not necessarily wrong, because there is a lot to be worried about. But it’s not going to last if it’s not motivated above all by love. What I need to do in this chapter is convey a sense of the love of the historic faith, with the Christ of the Bible and the ages at its center.

The late film critic Roger Ebert held that the difficulty of writing a film review existed in inverse proportion to the quality of the film under review. The better the movie is, the harder it is to write a review of it. As a former professional film critic, I can tell you that that’s absolutely true. It’s easy to pick out what’s wrong with a film that fails, but one that is a true work of art defies easy description.

It’s that way for me in talking about my faith. Writing this final chapter has made me understand more deeply the point Pope Benedict made about the best arguments for Christianity being the art and the saints that come out of it — that is to say, the Beauty and the Goodness that bear witness to the Gospel Truth. Last night, thinking through all the ways God brought me to Himself by drawing my love towards Him, I couldn’t think of a single argument that was primary. It started with love: the love of things and people that captured the Light, and refracted it. That Light made it possible for me to grasp the arguments. But it was never about an argument. It was about seeing something there that was greater than myself, and wanting to know it, and coming to believe that that something was a Someone, and He was love itself.

This took years of slow growth, with many ups and downs and trials and tribulations, but it became my reality. I find that trying to explain why I’m a Christian is like trying to explain why I love my wife. I mean, I believe that Christianity is true, but that is only part of it.

I’m going to return to last night’s chapter this afternoon and try to finish it. When I finally crashed last night, I had fallen into telling stories of theophanies — moments when God broke into the world, and I knew I was in the presence of the sacred. Very few of them happened in church. In all those moments, I knew in my bones that I was in the presence of something realer than real, and that the only proper response was to say inside, My Lord and my God. 

That’s not a narrative that persuades others, but when I think that these events in my life are pages in a big book that tells the Story of the universe, from Creation to the End of All Things, and that they are pages in a book that includes Moses and the Exodus, David and Goliath, the Hebrew Prophets, the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Passion and Resurrection and Pentecost, Paul’s journeys, St. Polycarp’s pilgrimage to martyrdom, the Cappadocian fathers (imagine growing up with St. Macrina as your mother), Constantine’s conversion, the Martyrs of Lyon, St. Augustine pondering the collapse of Rome, the Celtic fathers clinging to rocks in the sea, St. Benedict founding his order, the conversion of Prince Vladimir, the agony of the Great Schism, Thomas Aquinas’s “everything is straw” vision, Dante (Dante!), the Fall of Constantinople … well, I could go on, all the way up to my waking up at noon and sitting here writing this blog. My own story only has meaning as part of the Great Story, the one that starts with the words, “In the beginning.”

I have found no better way to describe what it’s like to be a pilgrim in this story than the Divine Comedy. The farther one goes into the story, the more one loves, and the more one knows. The capacity to know and to love is infinite. Near the beginning of Dante’s Paradiso, the poet describes the experience as akin to a Greek myth in which a fisherman tastes a magic herb that makes it possible for him to become one with the sea. That’s the Christian life of theosis, of making this lifelong pilgrimage towards total and eternal union with God. To be part of the same pilgrimage with so many others — not only the saints of old, but Christian men and women like the monks of Norcia, like Marco Sermarini and the Tipi Loschi, like Barronelle Stutzman and Chief Kelvin Cochran, and Evgeny Vodolazkin, and Father Matthew Harrington, my own priest, is a privilege and an adventure and … well, it’s overwhelming to imagine, much less put into words.

But I’m going to have to make an attempt, because I am a writer, and this is my next book.

Christian Pessimism, Christian Realism

As I mentioned earlier this week, the religious liberty conference I attended recently was marked by sobriety in the face of the severe challenges the Christian community faces. Believe me, this is far more hopeful than the false optimism so many Christians cling to. One of the most common observations I heard from those gathered was that it is very difficult to shake one’s fellow Christians out of their pollyanna daze. They really do believe that somehow, God’s going to pull off a miracle that saves us all from suffering. Because they just cannot imagine that He would let that happen to us.

Barronelle Stutzman is not that kind of Christian. She is an absolute rock of faith, as well as one of the most gentle people I have ever met. You remember how I described the monks of Norcia as luminous in their serenity? That’s Barronelle, a 70-year-old Baptist from Washington state. She told me in an interview that Christians in America had better prepare themselves for the trials ahead.

“Whatever God has in store for us, He said be thankful for everything. Regardless of what happens, that’s what we need to do,” she said. “Christ gave his life for us. He put everything on the line for us. Are we not willing do that for Him?”

Those are just words on a page, but when you hear them coming out of the mouth of a woman who has suffered as much as she had, simply because she would not do flowers for a same-sex wedding, they are something far more powerful. She bears witness. She is not an optimist. But she is filled to bursting with hope.

I find that I crave talking to Christians with hope, but have no patience for those cockeyed with optimism, because it’s not based in reality. The philosopher James K.A. Smith dismissed the Benedict Option in an appearance this past March. From the transcript:

So the “Benedict Option” is a certain response of religious conservatives who are sort of, I would say waking up to the fact that American culture, generally is not going to form them in faith. Apparently this is a revelation. And therefore, and by the way, it seems so clearly catalyzed by the Supreme Court gay marriage decision, which to me is one of the reasons why I feel like it’s suspect.

I’m not deciding either way on that. I’m just saying that there is a, certain reactionariness about it that I find narrow and uninteresting. And so what they advocate is — it comes of course from the Benedictine tradition of monastic life. It really is an allusion to the final sentence of Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous work “After Virtue,” in which he says, “We are waiting now for another Benedict to come along and give us a society that actually forms virtue and character,” and so on and so forth.

And so the “Benedict Option,” as I understand it—I do think it’s misunderstood often—is about prioritizing an intentionality within Christian communities, in this case, to be much more intentional about formation and so on, and less confident that they will be able to steer, shape, and probably dominate wider cultural conversation — so it’s actually a refusal of the culture wars as well. What I just find a bit frustrating about it, is again, the particular reactionary point about marriage that I do think is the live option. It also comes off as alarmist and despairing in ways that I find completely unhelpful.

After the break, I’m going to give you a copy of the Fall 2013 issue of Comment magazine. I got to interview Charles Taylor a couple years ago, and one of the things that just struck me is that hope is his dominant posture. And I think that’s really important. I think if you actually have the long game in perspective here, if you have the long history in perspective — I spend most of my time reading St. Augustine in the 5th Century, and nothing surprises me, like nothing surprises me today, and so I don’t feel, like oh, “my goodness, the sky is falling because the Supreme Court decision,” or something like that. There’s a different set of expectations about that.

Finally, I would say what Rod is advocating as this new thing that we should be doing, just sounds like what the Church was always supposed to be doing. It comes off as a little bit like here’s the next great thing, and it turns out it’s only because we’ve failed to do what we were supposed to be doing. Again, Rod’s a friend, and what’s odd for me, is how much he sort of draws on my own work, to sort of articulate this, and yet, I, myself feel a certain distance from it because it comes with a grumpy alarmist despair that I don’t really want to be associated with.

Well, leaving aside the fact that I tell everybody I can that yes, the Benedict Option is simply the church doing what it ought to have been doing all along, but hasn’t been, I think that if James K.A. Smith, who appears to be reconciling himself to Obergefell, were to go talk to Christian lawyers and others who are more deeply involved in the fight for religious liberty, he would find his lack of alarmism impossible to sustain. It is well and good to point out that Augustine saw worse. But the people around the country that I talk to, and hear from almost every day, including Christian academics, may wonder why they are being counseled to calm down, because at least the Vandals and the Goths aren’t sacking our cities.

If you are an orthodox Christian and aren’t alarmed, you are not paying attention. That alarm should not paralyze you with fear, but it should tell you that it’s time to take action, to prepare yourself, your family, and your community spiritually and otherwise, for the trials ahead.

Michael Brendan Dougherty writes about Mary Eberstadt’s latest:

In her new book, It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, Mary Eberstadt finds a dark pessimism settling over many American Christians when they contemplate the future. They perceive a foreboding shift in public attitude. Once there seemed to be a broad and liberal respect for the free exercise of religion, even in public life. But now, the very cultural forces promoting tolerance and diversity treat Christians and their institutions with broad suspicion, and demand absolute conformity with an egalitarian ethos that has only recently even announced its own existence.

Believers see the recent battles over religious liberty in the courts and in public opinion as a desire to purge orthodox Christian views, particularly about sex and the two sexes, from the public-facing institutions that they have built: their schools, hospitals, and adoption agencies. Instead of their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion, Christians are being offered, with a great deal of bitterness, mere “freedom of worship,” narrowly defined to thinking your own thoughts in your head and participating in ceremonies behind closed doors.

Eberstadt documents in exhaustive detail this widespread social urge to rob Christians of their livelihoods and their good names, merely for believing what their churches have always taught, and acting on those beliefs. This is not just a handful of bakers who refused to make gay wedding cakes.

Dougherty is darker than Eberstadt:

Eberstadt argues that the way to end the moral panic about Christians and their institutions is for the two camps in the culture wars to acknowledge their differences and then agree to disagree.

But I can’t help but wonder if the analogy that is more appropriate to our times is to the English Reformation. There, a new rising faith, led by Henry VIII and his daughter Queen Elizabeth I, confronted an institutionally powerful set of church institutes. There were many elements of moral panic around this conflict, particularly the fear of subversive Jesuits sent from the Continent to destroy England’s state power and ruin the morals of her people.

But this wasn’t a moral panic that just subsided. The new faith was part of a state-building and state-reforming project, and that meant the continued prosecution of the old one for centuries. Instituting the new faith meant crushing those institutions, robbing them of their wealth, and taking over their social functions for the new faith. Driving the old faith underground made Catholics lest trustful of the state, and in turn obedient citizens became more distrusting of them. English anti-Catholicism meant the banning of Catholics from many vocations, especially those in public life.

Read the whole thing.  I bought Eberstadt’s book yesterday, so I’m going to read it and make up my own mind. David P. Goldman, in a friendly but critical review in First Things, says similarly that Eberstadt is too optimistic.  Eberstadt, he says, calls what the left is doing to traditional believers a “witch hunt,” which understates and mischaracterizes matters:

By contrast, the purge of traditional Christians and Jews is a heretic hunt, an Inquisition, whose objective is to isolate and punish individuals who actually profess opinions contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy. There can be some overlap between an Inquisition and a witch-hunt, to be sure. But today’s liberal Inquisitors are not searching for individuals secretly in communion with God—yet.

This is a critical distinction. Witch-hunters eventually discover that burning a few old hags does not prevent cows’ milk from souring. Inquisitions, by contrast, usually succeed: The Catholic Church succeeded in stamping out broadly held heresies, as in the Albigensian Crusade of 1220-1229, which destroyed between 200,000 and 1,000,000 inhabitants of Cathar-controlled towns in Southern France. In many cases a town’s entire population was killed, just to make sure. For its part, the Spanish Inquisition eliminated all the Jews, Muslims, and Protestants, although it sometimes drove heretical opinions underground, with baleful consequences for the Catholic faith.

Because Eberstadt confuses the present persecution with mere witch-hunting, she hopes that the witch-hunters will realize their error and do the decent thing.

They’re not gonna, says Goldman (an Orthodox Jew and a friend of mine, I should say), because they perceive traditionalists as a threat to the social order. This is not going to end anytime soon. Goldman says that the only alternative is for Christians to counterattack. They have nothing to lose that won’t be taken from them anyway, so they might as well fight.

He also says that the Benedict Option is “impractical,” because, as he explains in the comments, he thinks it’s about going Hasidic. Um, no. If I had to live with Christian Hasidim, I would be the world’s worst at it. I’ll make sure my friend gets a copy of the galleys when they’re out. He’ll see that I’m up to something broader and more ambitious. Frankly, there is nothing un-Ben-Op about counterattacking. But unless we are committed to the Masada Option, we had better be busy with long-term plans for resistance.

Anyway, read the whole thing. 

Overreacting and falling into paranoia and loathing is a temptation. But so is assuming everything’s going to be okay in the end, and believing that you can avoid trouble by being nice. Sooner or later, you are going to have to take a stand — and if you stand on Christian orthodoxy, you are going to be knocked flat. Can you take that? You had better be able to. They’re coming for the pharmacists and florists and cake-bakers now, but if you think they’re going to stop at the fringes, you are out of your mind. If you’re a teacher in the Fort Worth public schools, and you refuse to teach gender ideology to your elementary school students, you will be fired under the new policy there. In Texas. 

Hope is the sure conviction that suffering has meaning in God’s inscrutable will, and that it can be redemptive. That’s not optimism. Be hopeful, but not optimistic. It’s later than you think.

Trump’s Silence

.@CNN is all negative when it comes to me. I don't watch it anymore.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 27, 2016

Lots of Trump tweets this week, including the one above, but not a single one about the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling, or today’s Court decision not to hear the Washington state pharmacy case, which has profound consequences for religious liberty. He cannot be bothered to type 140 characters about either issue.

Evangelicals who have boarded the Trump train have to be wondering right about the wisdom of that decision. Trump cares more about how he looks on CNN than he does about abortion and religious liberty. Again, I can understand why religious conservatives would vote for Trump over Clinton because they would rather take a chance on the devil they don’t know than the devil they do. But they had better not have any illusions about what they’re doing.

Christians Can No Longer Be Pharmacists

The US Supreme Court today denied to hear a case involving pharmacists in Washington state who, for religious reasons, declined to dispense RU-486Plan B, the “morning-after pill,” which causes abortion. Effectively this means that Christian pharmacists who refuse to sell drugs that intend to exterminate life in the womb cannot work in the new society. More:

The Supreme Court will not review Washington state’s requirement that pharmacies dispense emergency contraceptives to women, prompting a complaint from conservative justices that it was an “ominous sign” for religious liberty.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. issued a sharp dissent Tuesday to the court’s decision not to review a lower court’s ruling upholding the regulations. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Alito said the case raised important First Amendment claims by religious pharmacists but that “this court does not deem the case worthy of our time. If this is a sign of how religious liberty claims will be treated in the years ahead, those who value religious freedom have cause for great concern.”

The case involved the Stormans family, who fell victim to a regulation imposed in 2007 by Washington’s pharmacy regulatory board, denying pharmacists the right to refer customers to other pharmacies for religious reasons. Pharmacies generally have the right to send customers to nearby pharmacies to acquire a drug they don’t stock — and that was the case with the Stormans’ pharmacy. There were other nearby pharmacies that were willing and able to stock the abortifacient drug. Besides, pharmacists retain the right of referral for any other reason — except religious ones.

The Stormans are Christians. They chose to fight. Here’s a short clip introducing them:

One of the family members was at the ADF religious liberty conference I attended last week. He spoke about the harassment the family has endured over this, and how they have struggled to keep their business alive, and not to have to fire anyone. Theirs is a family business.

And now the State of Washington — the same state government that is trying to destroy small-town florist Barronelle Stutzman — as well as the liberal Supreme Court justices, have left them in ruins. Didn’t even think their case was worth a hearing. All because the Sexual Revolution must be defended at all costs. I tell you, that family will not burn its pinch of incense before Caesar. These people are fearless. Some of the family was in the room listening to Russell Moore’s powerful sermon on Friday night. They are now living it. If you’re a Christian, you had better read it too, because chances are you will be living it sooner or later.

It is interesting to think about the Stormans in relation to Pfizer and other drug manufacturers, who refuse to provide drugs they manufacture to states for use in capital punishment. If you believe that the government has a right to force pharmacists to sell RU-486 Plan B to a customer, despite strong conscience objections, then you must agree that Pfizer et alia must violate their consciences and sell drugs intended to kill convicted prisoners.

I believe the Stormans should have the right of refusal. And I believe Pfizer should as well. This is life and death we’re talking about.

What has happened today to the Stormans is only the beginning. They fought the good fight, all the way to the Supreme Court — but they lost. You need to get over the idea that if we only fight hard enough and pray hard enough, that we will certainly win. Don’t misunderstand: we have to fight with everything we have. But we have to recognize that as the darkness grows and thickens, we are going to be losing these cases. We live in what Pope St. John Paul II called the Culture of Death. We need what I call the Benedict Option for a moment such as this for the Stormans, and for every Christian pharmacist who lives in a state that compels them to sell poison to expectant mothers who wish to exterminate the lives in their wombs. The Stormans will need help. They will need the spiritual and moral support of their community, both locally and beyond, and they will need financial help, because their family business has just been destroyed by the government. All because they would not sell a baby-killing pill that is widely available in pharmacists all over the state.

In fact, it emerged in lower court trial that over 30 pharmacists within a five-mile radius of the Stormans’ pharmacy sold RU-486. It is easy to get RU-486 Plan B in that part of Washington, and indeed all over the state. But that wasn’t enough for the State of Washington. ADF, which represented the Stormans and others in this case, said:

All Americans should be free to peacefully live and work consistent with their faith without fear of unjust punishment, and no one should be forced to participate in the taking of human life. We had hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would take this opportunity to reaffirm these long-held principles. The state of Washington allows pharmacists to refer customers for just about any reason—except reasons of conscience. Singling out people of faith and denying them the same freedom to refer is a violation of federal law. All 49 other states allow conscience-based referrals, which are fully supported by the American Pharmacists Association, the Washington Pharmacy Association, and more than 34 other pharmacy associations. Not one customer in Washington has been denied timely access to any drug due to a religious objection.

Washington is the only state that has this specific regulation on pharmacies. Now that the Supreme Court has greenlighted it, look for Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion radicals to start lobbying friendly state legislators across the country to pass similar legislation.

Welcome to the new age. It is real, and it is happening.

I would not be surprised if legislatures in conservative states passed laws requiring drug companies who do business in those states to provide drugs used in executing prisoners. I hope they do not, because in my view, it would be gravely immoral to compel a drug maker or dispenser to violate their conscience to participate in a killing they consider to be wrong. But it would make an interesting test case. Capital punishment is still legal in this country, after all, just like abortion.

I want you to notice something. The Left always accuses the Right of advancing the culture war, even though it is usually the Right playing defense. The pharmacists’ situation is a classic example. Nobody in Washington state had the slightest problem finding RU-486 Plan B. If they couldn’t get it at the Stormans’ pharmacy, there were plenty pharmacies nearby where they could. Conscience exemptions are standard nationwide, and state and national pharmacy professional associations filed amicus briefs supporting the Stormans. Nobody wanted this regulation, except the Jacobins of the Sexual Revolution.

And now they have it. If there is a backlash in capital punishment states that results in drug manufacturers being forced to provide drugs used to kill prisoners, get it straight in your head right now that it’s because Planned Parenthood and these other Jacobins decided to create a problem where there was none, just to destroy Christian pharmacists.

The illegitimacy of the regime grows by the day.

UPDATE: Post corrected re: Plan B. Thanks to readers who alerted me.

UPDATE.2: From a lawyer:

With respect to your post this morning on Stormans, to be fully depressed and, more importantly, fully aware of what is going on, it helps to compare the Supreme Court’s refusal this week to take that case with its decision this week in Whole Women’s Health. They cannot be bothered to consider a claimed violation of the explicit right to free exercise of religion by a law that serves no need and is a blatant pretext, but they will consider and go out of their way to strike down a claimed violation of the Casey abortion right by a law that, in their view, serves no need and is a pretext.

UPDATE.3: A number of you claim that Plan B is not abortifacient. You may be right. But even if it is not, why should any pharmacy be required to dispense it if its owner’s conscience is deeply offended for whatever reason? Let’s say RU-486, the pill that everybody agrees causes abortion, were mandated by the Washington state authorities. Would you support the conscience exemption then? Even if the Stormans are wrong about Plan B being abortifacient, they have a sincere belief that dispensing it is a conscience violation. I do not see why this is such an overwhelming public health necessity that it justifies compelling those people to violate their consciences. The Becket Fund reports that in an earlier court proceeding, the state of Washington conceded that ten times as many Washington pharmacies refuse to stock Plan B because they don’t make enough money on it than refuse to stock it for conscience reasons. But the state only made it an offense to refuse to stock it for conscience reasons. How is that fair?

Russell Moore: A Time For Choosing

At the ADF conference last week, Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission delivered the closing address. It was powerful, a clarion call to Christian repentance and resistance. I asked for and received his permission to write about the speech — well, sermon — here. It was extraordinary, and I would hate for the only people to have received its message to be we who were in the room to hear it.

Moore began by describing the difference between conserving and hoarding. To conserve something means to preserve it with the coming generations in mind. To hoard, said Moore, is to hold on to whatever you have, without discerning whether or not it’s worth keeping.

Moore said that for Christians, the thing that must be preserved above all is the Gospel. Today, as in the early church, we are confronted by the question of Scriptural authority: Is the Bible truly the binding word of God?

“The debates we are having about human sexuality now are really not about sexuality. They are about whether the word we have is from God,” said Moore. “If the Word of God has been delivered by God through his apostles to us, and says you must submit your creatureliness, even your sexuality, to the Lordship of Christ.”

That’s one claim, he said. Another is that we know so much more about sexuality than the authors of Scripture did, and we therefore don’t have to take their teachings on it seriously.

Moore, citing St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, said we had all better fear the judgment of God, not other men.

“You will not have the courage and confidence to stand in whatever moment you face simply because you have better ideas and arguments,” he said. “I’m all for talking about the common good, and human flourishing [but] those are all secondary means to get to the main conversation. And the main conversation is, has God spoken, and what has God said?”

Moore declared that we will not be able to defend religious liberty if we are embarrassed by Jesus Christ. We have to be willing to suffer mockery and scorn for the sake of our faith. This is not a matter of intellectual conviction. This is about the heart. And that is why it is folly to think that we will best prepare the next generation to stand firm in the faith solely by giving them solid intellectual arguments.

“The way you prepared the next generation is to shape and form moral intuitions,” Moore said.

We do that by immersing young people so deeply in Scripture that they learn how to respond as authentic Christians to challenges in the world today. That is, they don’t look to the Bible as a rulebook, but rather they allow the Bible to be sedimented into their bones.

(Moore, as most of you surely know, is a Southern Baptist preacher — and oh, how Southern Baptists can preach! Catholics and Orthodox will have somewhat different answers to the question of how to form the moral imagination. Ours is shaped also by the liturgy, by the tradition, and by the authoritative teaching of the Church. But that’s why we are Orthodox and Catholic, not Protestant. There is nothing Moore said about Scripture that we would reject. In fact, I found myself wondering that night if he knows anything about the traditional Benedictine practice of lectio divina, a way of praying Scripture.)

Moore said we must teach our children to recognize themselves in the Biblical narrative, so that when they encounter a contradictory narrative, they will know in their hearts that the false story must be resisted. And not just children — we have to train ourselves as well. We may face the loss of a job, of opportunities for professional advancement, of personal and career standing, of family relationships — all because of our faith. The only way to be steadfast is if you truly believe that God has spoken, and that you know what He has said.

In short, one of our key tasks is to train up a community capable of still perceiving Gospel truths.

To do so, we have to remember that we are fighting for what we were given so that future generations will be able to receive it as we did. Moore:

If you’re fighting for religious liberty simply to win arguments for secular progressives, there are better things to do,” Moore said. “If you’re doing it to carve out special places for your own rights and privileges, there are better things to do. We fight for religious liberty only so the Gospel can go forth freely.

We are not simply standing up for our own people and our own tribe. We are standing up for potential future Christians, for people who are not part of the church right now.

Nice. He went on to say that Christians have to be very clear about what they believe and why they believe it. They have to know what sin is, and what it means to turn away from it. And they have to know what it means to hate sin but to love sinners.

And Christians cannot be the people who “pride themselves on not being around gays, transgenders, Muslims, Hindus and everybody else, when their own churches are convulsing with sin, including pornography.” Christians betray the Gospel, he said, when they fall all over themselves to denounce secular leftists, but stay silent about “prosperity gospel heretics” in their own midst.

“Are we willing to be associated with our brothers and sisters in Christian in prison?” he said. “Are we willing to be associated with our brothers and sisters who are grappling with addictions? Are we willing to be associated with those who are same-sex attracted and who are wondering what it means to live within the church if I don’t have a family like the other people on this pew do?”

Moore laid into the idea that if Christians can only capture the ear of the powerful, they can change the culture. Mentioning no names (though most people knew who and what he was talking about), Moore said that Christians who chase the rich, famous, and powerful are running after false idols.

“We know that those things are temporary, and so temporary that they are pathetic,” he said.

By contrast, those who can see Christ in the faces of the poor know that they are dealing with those who are likely to hold eternal power. He said, “That woman who can barely speak English, who cleans toilets in a hotel throughout the week, but who knows the Gospel, is a future ruler of the universe and a joint heir with Jesus.”

If Christians don’t care what the world thinks, and cease to believe that the way to change the world is to speak soothing words to power instead of speaking truth to it, then “we will not be the people that give in to fear or panic. We will not be the people that are cowed into silence for fear of the disturbance it will cause.”

Moore brought up a pastor he once spoke to who declined to talk about human sexuality from the pulpit because it would cause too much discord in church. Moore says he told the man that for one, he didn’t get to choose which parts of the Gospel to preach, and for another, it wouldn’t work. In the eyes of the world, if you don’t perform same-sex weddings, you are a bigot, full stop. If they’re going to hate you anyway, you might as well tell them the Gospel truth.

Then Moore arrived at the crescendo of his sermon. He said that if Christians come across as shrill and panicked in the face of these challenges, that reflects a loss of confidence too:

You and I are not on the wrong side of history.The worst thing that has happened to us has already happened to us. We were crucified [with Christ] outside of Jerusalem. But the best thing has happened to us too. That’s not a Supreme Court victory. That is walking out of a hole in the ground in Jerusalem and being seated at the right hand of God in heaven. … If we truly believe that, we can patiently bear with those who disagree with us, because we have intel on them. We know they are made in the image of God … and we know that they are once like we were, that deep down, they are cowering inside themselves, hiding from the voice that says ‘Adam, where are you?’

More:

The Gospel that you preserve is not meant to end with you. It’s meant to go forward. If we recognize that and know that, we work for the common good, we work for human flourishing, and all good things. But we hold them with a certain looseness, because we know that the United States of America is temporary, but the Gospel goes on.

If Christians truly believe that Jesus was who He said he was, said Moore, then they will be willing to lose their friends, their jobs, their families, their freedom, and even their lives if that’s what it takes to bear witness to the truth.

This, he concluded, is what it means to conserve the Gospel. To save it for yourself, for the world, and for future generations, you have to be willing to lose everything else.

It’s almost as if Russell Moore was saying that those who wish to save their lives will lose them, and those who are willing to lose their lives will save them. Who speaks in such paradoxes, anyway?

Seriously, now is a time for choosing. To refuse the choice, to deny that it is upon us, to insist that the burden of the choice will pass us by if we keep smiling, saying nice things, and being satisfied with the state of our souls — that is also to choose. So choose well now, in small things, so that you will be strong enough and clear-headed enough to choose rightly when it will cost you plenty. Don’t lie to yourself, that day is coming, and coming soon, for every single one of us who calls ourselves Christian.

Russell Moore — my idea of a Benedict Option Baptist — can read the signs of the times. Can you?

Pinkshirts Vs. The First Amendment

Last week I was at a big religious liberty conference sponsored by Alliance Defending Freedom, the public interest legal organization that fights in court and elsewhere for religious liberty. I have been saying at least since the Indiana RFRA rout that organizations like ADF, The Becket Fund, and others like it are pretty much the last line of defense for Christians in this post-Christian culture. Having spent a week listening and talking to lawyers, law professors, and others on the front lines of religious liberty battles, I’m convinced of it.

Conference proceedings were off the record, so I can’t write specifically about what was said there (except for one case, which I’ll get to in a moment). But I can say in general that this was not an optimistic crowd. Observers who had been to this same event in past years told me the 2016 gathering was far more sober — which is to say, realistic. Obergefell, as well as the rapidly-changing cultural conditions around transgenderism and related questions, have been game-changers. From what I could tell, that decision and these realities have, if anything, increased their determination to fight in court with all we have to protect religious liberty. But we must be honest about the reality of the gathering storm.

I met two people who have been very much at the tip of the spear: small-town Washington florist Barronelle Stutzman, sued by a longtime gay customer whose wedding she could not do flowers for because of her faith, and former Atlanta fire chief Kelvin Cochran, fired from his job by the city’s mayor for a book he wrote for his Sunday School class (one that contained a few paragraphs critical of homosexuality). I talked to both of them personally, and listened to them both give presentations about their experiences. These are both deeply good, humble people who have been done a terrible injustice. And there weren’t the only ones there.

Barronelle may be the gentlest person I’ve ever met, period. But she is an absolute rock. Watch her on this short clip. She stands to lose everything she owns in this case, and to face her final years (she is 70) bankrupt. The state Attorney General offered her a deal that would have dropped the case in exchange for her paying a $2,001 fine and agreeing henceforth to do flowers for gay weddings. She said no:

“Washington’s constitution guarantees us ‘freedom of conscience in all matters of religious sentiment.’ I cannot sell that precious freedom,” Stutzman’s letter asserts. “You are asking me to walk in the way of a well-known betrayer, one who sold something of infinite worth for 30 pieces of silver. That is something I will not do.”

Stutzman’s letter added that Ferguson continues to prove that he does not understand the true meaning of “freedom.”

“Your offer reveals that you don’t really understand me or what this conflict is all about. It’s about freedom, not money,” Stutzman wrote. “I certainly don’t relish the idea of losing my business, my home, and everything else that your lawsuit threatens to take from my family, but my freedom to honor God in doing what I do best is more important.”

Barronelle told me in an interview that Christians all over this country had better understand that they are not safe. “If they can come after me, they can go after anybody,” she said.

And she’s right.

I got to spend time with Kaeley Triller, a young single mom from Seattle who was fired by the YMCA for objecting to its new transgender locker room policy. Kaeley is a survivor of childhood rape. She tells her story here. Excerpt:

I am not saying that transgender people are predators. Not by a long shot. What I amsaying is that there are countless deviant men in this world who will pretend to be transgender as a means of gaining access to the people they want to exploit, namely women and children. It already happens. Just Google Jason Pomares, Norwood Smith Burnes, or Taylor Buehler, for starters.

While I feel a deep sense of empathy for what must be a very difficult situation for transgender people, at the beginning and end of the day, it is nothing short of negligent to instate policies that elevate the emotional comfort of a relative few over the physical safety of a large group of vulnerable people.

Don’t they know anything about predators? Don’t they know the numbers? That out of every 100 rapes, only two rapists will spend so much as single day in jail while the other 98 walk free and hang out in our midst? Don’t they know that predators are known to intentionally seek out places where many of their preferred targets gather in groups? That perpetrators are addicts so committed to their fantasies they’ll stop at nothing to achieve them?

More:

There’s no way to make everyone happy in the situation of transgender locker room use. So the priority ought to be finding a way to keep everyone safe. I’d much rather risk hurting a smaller number of people’s feelings by asking transgender people to use a single-occupancy restroom that still offers safety than risk jeopardizing the safety of thousands of women and kids with a policy that gives would-be predators a free pass.

She has also written, about how this experience gave her, a practicing Christian, a new appreciation for feminism:

I didn’t believe in rape culture until a 6’3”, 250-pound grown man stared angrily into my eyes and proclaimed to me how hurtful it was that I did not want to see his penis. And people agreed with him. (Because men forcing themselves on women is something new and different?)

I didn’t believe in victim shaming until I received death threats for sharing my experience of sexual trauma in hopes of protecting women in their most vulnerable places. “Stay at home if you’re uncomfortable,” they jeered. “You’re so ugly that no one would want to rape you anyway.”

I didn’t believe in systemic misogyny until I was told that my hard-earned boundaries were actually just bigotry and that my red flags were irrelevant. I guess “My body, my choice” doesn’t include my right to determine who gets to see it? “An erection in the shower next to you is no cause for alarm,” they explained. “It’s a normal bodily function. Use this as an opportunity to ‘educate’ yourself.”

Kaeley is part of the Just Want Privacy campaign, which is trying to get a proposal on the ballot to keep biological males out of women’s locker rooms in the state of Washington. The other day, I featured a video of transgenders no-platforming members of Just Want Privacy — including feminists — who were trying to give speeches advocating their position. Watch the clip here. These trans bullies are a pack of pinkshirts, trying to intimidate and silence their opponents using fascist tactics.

Someone with the campaign told me that one of their members approached 120 individual churches asking them to join their effort. Only seven said yes. Seven churches out of 120. I asked why so few. The answer? “They’re afraid to be seen as unloving.”

Let me tell it to you straight: there is no place for that kind of cowardice in this fight. None. The battle is here, and it is now, and there are ordinary people who never sought a fight, but the fight came to them. You spend any time in the presence of these people, and hear their stories, and come to understand what they are suffering for their faith (Barronelle wept when talking about the people who have threatened to burn her house down), and if you have a shred of decency or honor or courage within you, you will stand up with them.

You had better. Barronelle is right: if the pinkshirts can come for her, a small-town florist, and can do so with the ACLU and the Washington state Attorney General on their side, as well as the media, nothing but dedicated lawyers stand between those powerful bullies and you. You think you’re safe, but you’re not. You think that appearing winsome and loving will protect you. It won’t.

Abortion Forever

The Supreme Court has struck down some Texas state regulations on abortion clinics:

The justices voted 5-3 Monday in favor of Texas clinics that protested the regulations as a thinly veiled attempt to make it harder for women to get an abortion in the nation’s second-most populous state.

Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion for the court held that the regulations are medically unnecessary and unconstitutionally limit a woman’s right to an abortion.

More from the NYT:

One part of the law requires all clinics in the state to meet the standards for ambulatory surgical centers, including regulations concerning buildings, equipment and staffing. The other requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

“We conclude,” Justice Breyer wrote, “that neither of these provisions offers medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens upon access that each imposes. Each places a substantial obstacle in the path of women seeking a previability abortion, each constitutes an undue burden on abortion access, and each violates the Federal Constitution.”

The clinics challenging the law say it has already caused about half of the state’s 41 abortion clinics to close. If the contested provisions take full effect, they say, the number of clinics would again be cut in half.

See, this is the thing. A number of traditionalist Christians like to compare LGBT rights to abortion in an effort to be hopeful about our cause. “It has taken a while, but people are more pro-life now than they were when Roe was decided,” the argument goes. “We’re winning the argument.”

That’s not really true, or at least isn’t as true as we would like to think Americans may be more willing to believe that abortion is immoral, but most want it legal to some degree. The Texas law only required that abortion clinics be regulated like other outpatient centers — hardly an unreasonable restriction. But that’s not how SCOTUS sees it. A monster like Kermit Gosnell is a price they are willing to pay to keep abortion as available as possible.

The bottom line, it seems to me, is that the Supreme Court will never let any state restriction stand meaningfully in the way of the Sexual Revolution. Ever. No federalism, no democracy, not when it comes to defending the Sexual Revolution.

One does wonder at what point in the future Americans in certain parts of the country will have had enough of this kind of thing, and will spark a constitutional crisis. If Trump is elected president, I expect California to do this. But at some point, I don’t know when, a liberal president or Supreme Court is going to trigger this from a state like Texas. Increasingly, I can’t say this is going to be a bad thing. When you realize how rigged the game is, you wonder why we play.

The Brexiteers

A reader writes:

The main reason why the majority of UK voters voted to divorce from the EU has to do with the ordinary working people being left out of economic prosperity. The elites have forgotten that without the janitors, warehouse workers, waiters, dog groomers and other non tech workers, they wouldn’t be where they are. The same goes for the US.

Millenials are like the Bynars from one of the early episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation. They are so merged in with their technology that one does not know where the human begins or ends and where the technology is. Their memories, both short and long term, have been altered. They have no idea of what community is because in the real world it does not exist. And changing genders is part of high tech. Shape shifting is part of this generation. Look at the popular media. If you don’t like who you are, you can change yourself by being a super hero, or zombie, or become something else. So, in a way it is not surprising that this is happening. Alot of the changes in society are here because of technology and how it has become a master over us.

I think this is true. The Technology chapter of The Benedict Option explores this insight.

Along those lines, via The Browser, here is a fascinating essay on “the sociology of Brexit.” Author Will Davies observes that voters in Labour’s historical heartlands voted to Leave; Labour’s metropolitan elites thought that the working class would be happy to be bought off with wealth redistribution. It turns out that this election was also about cultural dignity:

This cultural contradiction wasn’t sustainable and nor was the geographic one. Not only was the ‘spatial fix’ a relatively short-term one, seeing as it depended on rising tax receipts from the South East and a centre left government willing to spread money quite lavishly (albeit, discretely), it also failed to deliver what many Brexit-voters perhaps crave the most: the dignity of being self-sufficient, not necessarily in a neoliberal sense, but certainly in a communal, familial and fraternal sense.

Davies says, “Knowing that your business, farm, family or region is dependent on the beneficence of wealthy liberals is unlikely to be a recipe for satisfaction.” Yes, I can well imagine that.

Davies highlights evidence that downscale Labour voters who went for Leave did not do so because they believed that their future would necessarily be brighter with Britain out of the EU. More:

This taps into a much broader cultural and political malaise, that also appears to be driving the rise of Donald Trump in the US. Amongst people who have utterly given up on the future, political movements don’t need to promise any desirable and realistic change. If anything, they are more comforting and trustworthy if predicated on the notion that the future is beyond rescue, for that chimes more closely with people’s private experiences. The discovery of the ‘Case Deaton effect’ in the US (unexpected rising mortality rates amongst white working classes) is linked to rising alcohol and opiate abuse and to rising suicide rates. It has also been shown to correlate closely to geographic areas with the greatest support for Trump. I don’t know of any direct equivalent to this in the UK, but it seems clear that – beyond the rhetoric of ‘Great Britain’ and ‘democracy’ – Brexit was never really articulated as a viable policy, and only ever as a destructive urge, which some no doubt now feel guilty for giving way to.

Thatcher and Reagan rode to power by promising a brighter future, which never quite materialised other than for a minority with access to elite education and capital assets. The contemporary populist promise to make Britain or American ‘great again’ is not made in the same way. It is not a pledge or a policy platform; it’s not to be measured in terms of results. When made by the likes of Boris Johnson, it’s not even clear if it’s meant seriously or not. It’s more an offer of a collective real-time hallucination, that can be indulged in like a video game.

The Remain campaign continued to rely on forecasts, warnings and predictions, in the hope that eventually people would be dissuaded from ‘risking it’. But to those that have given up on the future already, this is all just more political rhetoric. In any case, the entire practice of modelling the future in terms of ‘risk’ has lost credibility, as evidenced by the now terminal decline of opinion polling as a tool for political control.

I heard the other day from a reader who lives in an Appalachian region that is massively pro-Trump. The reader says unemployment is very high, as is opioid addiction. There’s no hope there. They’re all going to vote Trump.

In that essay, Davies points out that all the snobbish mockery of Nigel Farage by UK media and cultural figures probably won him more votes. Same with Trump? What do you think?

Read the whole thing. There’s much more than what I’ve indicated here, including a lengthy commentary on how what we call “facts” no longer matter.

View From Your Table

San Francisco, California

I’m about to catch a red-eye to Houston, and then on to Baton Rouge in the morning. I normally wouldn’t post an airport meal, but I was delighted to have a kale salad here in SFO. Strikes me as very San Francisco. It was delicious, too — something I don’t know that I’ve ever had occasion to say about a meal in an airport.

Oh, and hey, look what I found around the corner:

Your international airport has a chapel. San Francisco’s has a yoga room. No kidding, I find this charming. Local color and all.