Rod Dreher's Blog, page 566

21 Questions With Barronelle Stutzman

This is amazing. Barronelle Stutzman is the Washington florist sued by a gay man, a friend and client of almost a decade, who was outraged by her refusal to do the flowers for his same-sex wedding. Whatever you think you know about her case, I bet you don’t know a lot of things in that short three-minute video.

#BlackLivesMatter’s Cry For Help

The truth comes out at last, courtesy of Black Lives Matter:

It is with pain and heartache that the Black Lives Matter Network extends love, light, protection, and abundance to our family in Orlando, Florida. We love you. Black people are a diverse community, and though the hate-filled rhetoric of the conservative right is currently trying to pit us against our kin — we will always stand with all the parts of ourselves. Today, Queer, Latinx, and Muslim family, we lift you up.

Despite the media’s framing of this as a terrorist attack, we are very clear that this terror is completely homegrown, born from the anti-Black white supremacy, patriarchy and homophobia of the conservative right and of those who would use religious extremism as a weapon to gain power for the few and take power from the rest. Those who seek to profit from our deaths hope we will forget who our real enemy is, and blame Muslim communities instead.

But we will never forget.

In case you didn’t notice, Omar Mateen, an Afghani-American radical gay Muslim registered as a Democrat, was really a right-wing, gay-hating, white conservative. No, Black Lives Matter isn’t crazy at all. Why would you say so? More:

Until these systems are defeated, until anti-Blackness no longer fuels anti-Muslim and anti-queer and trans bigotry, exploitation, and exclusion — we can never be truly free.

Nope, perfectly sane. By no means is this a foaming expectoration from a bunch of racist far-left crackpots.

Seriously, though. Seriously. How is it that people so given over to ideological derangement command such admiration from the media and others on the cultural heights? Who decided that to prove you really cared about black lives, you had to embrace this movement? I’m not asking rhetorically; I would love to know. You can’t just overlook these malicious Jacobin lies. To my knowledge, this is crazier than anything Donald Trump has ever said — and that takes some doing, for sure.

Imagine that white right-wing extremist Tim McVeigh blows up the Murrah Building, but some conservative group says the real criminals are black gay liberals. Anybody who said that would be instantly ridiculed, and never taken seriously again by any morally sane person. Somehow, I doubt that will happen with these sacred monsters.

Falwell, Fallen

Literally a framed pic on the wall of the candidate and a porn star, as a major evangelical leader endorses him. pic.twitter.com/ErYG57zcFb

— Nathan Lino (@nathanlino) June 21, 2016

‘Knowing Is Too Hard’

A reader e-mails about the “What? Trans? Here?” post. His e-mail was so startling I decided to give it its own separate post. I have edited it slightly to protect privacy:

I just got back from [state] visiting my in-laws and my wife’s childhood friends and we just had this exact same experience.

My wife’s friends do well. The husband is a union guy and makes more money than I do. I like him, but he’s what the progressives might consider to be… a problem. He has three kids, the oldest being a girl going into seventh grade. After a few beers he says things like, “Look. I’m OK with anything just as long as they ain’t gay. And no black guys.”

See what I mean?

Well, we were talking school stuff and the mom very casually drops the news that there is a trans kid at the seventh grader’s school. My wife and the mom went to school with the mother of the trans kid. I guess she was weird and “goth” and all the rest. They agreed that if the trans thing have been a thing back then, this mom would have been the most likely person to declare. Fair or not, I don’t know. But there it is.

At any rate, my wife’s friend sort of just mentioned that this girl came out as trans. Let’s say her name was Mary. Well, my wife’s friend sees her at a park this summer and says, “Hi, Mary.” And the former Mary very testily replied, “I am not Mary. I am Mark now.”

My wife’s friend and her union husband sort of rolled their eyes and looked mystified but left it at that. I was surprised. The “no black guys, and no gay” dad seemed to be taking it in stride. So I said, “So where is this kid showering?”

They said: “Huh?”

I said, “Where is this kid going to shower? You know the kid gets to shower wherever he/she says or the school district will lose their federal money.”

They looked at me like I had two heads.

The mom said, “I think that the school told the kid to shower in a faculty locker room and they were OK with that.”

I let her know that this will be fine as long as another kid doesn’t push it further than that. Because others have tried it and lost.  And their school will lose, too. Still, they seemed to be OK with it mostly because you know, I guess … who’s it hurting?

Until I said, “Well, yeah. The parents of that kid aren’t nuts. You throw a biological girl into a boys locker room and something bad will happen fast. The problem is going to be when there’s a biological boy who wants to shower with your kid.”

The dad looked like I hit him with a pipe wrench. “No,” he said. “That ain’t happening.”

I said sure it is. The Obama administration’s advisory says it is.

I told him about the MTF trans kid in Alaska who medaled at the state competition. I am telling you that this guy looked actively wounded. Like I was lying to him or something.

He said he couldn’t believe it. I said haven’t you heard about this and that and the other thing? He had heard of all those things but he just … never thought there would be a penis in the girls locker room. He is still having trouble believing it.

This is not a religious family. I have never, ever known them to go to church of any kind for any reason. Neither does anyone in their extended families.

It’s not like this is a huge secret. They honestly just don’t want to know. Because knowing is too hard.

And again, this is a guy who WILL police the family in terms of the kids being gay. He WILL make his views on race known to his kids. It’s not like he’s not willing to go out on a limb or say unpopular things, many of which I disagree with.

He can’t even compute the trans stuff. Even though there is one at their school. He just sits there saying, “No.”

I don’t know what they do if it hits. I bet they just live with it. I doubt they can afford a religious high school. The cheapest one in their area is like $21,000 a year. Their kids will think it’s normal, and their dad’s objections will get filed away with his retrograde views on race.

They honestly just don’t want to know. Because knowing is too hard. This is true. This is profoundly true. If priests and pastors are not speaking clearly and directly to their congregations about this, they are failing them.

Evangelicals Split On Trump

The big pow-wow in NYC today between Donald Trump and old-guard Evangelicals highlighted divisions within their ranks. Excerpt:

Even as the huge gathering in Manhattan was being prayed over by prominent televangelist Franklin Graham and moderated by former Gov. Mike Huckabee, other religious conservatives were using the gathering as a chance to speak out against Trump. One called Tuesday “a day of mourning.”

The morning event with as many as 1,000 social conservative leaders — mostly evangelical — started at 10:15 a.m. and ends at midday. There is not a vote or endorsement coming at the end, and participants say they are coming with open minds. But polls show that a majority of white evangelicals — and social conservatives in particular — are leaning toward Trump. The question is how greatly.

Erick Erickson laid into his fellow Evangelicals prior to the meeting. Excerpt:

Donald Trump is meeting with a bunch of evangelicals today, including a bunch of the prosperity gospel con artists, which is more than fitting. This comes on the heels of Ralph Reed attacking Christians for standing on their convictions against Trump. Reed called it the sin of pride. Ralph Reed actually should keep his mouth shut about Christians who stand on their convictions. If Ralph spent more time sending Republicans to church instead of sending the church into the GOP, perhaps he would not have gotten in bed with Jack Abramoff where, among other things, he fought against improving the standards of Chinese women in the Northern Marianas Islands who “were subject to forced abortions” and “were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.”

David French, another Evangelical piles on:

Access to power is a powerful drug, and there are quite a few Evangelical leaders nursing an addiction. It must be especially hard to kick the habit for those whose fortunes are on the decline. There’s a reason why Trump’s surrogates mainly represent a traveling band of the has-beens and “almost-weres”: He’s their last, best hope for relevance. But others will hold their nose and cling to him, genuinely convinced that all of his faults are outweighed — just barely — by his (kinda sorta) promise to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices. Trump’s so mendacious that one can measure his lies by the minute, but in this case they’ll believe he’s telling the truth. Because they want to believe.

This is a grave mistake. American Evangelical Christianity does not exist for the purpose of placing one or two decent judges on the Supreme Court. It — along with its Catholic and Orthodox counterparts — represents the body of Christ on this earth. It is a flawed vessel, to be sure, but its moral witness is still of incalculable worth.

I’ll update this post as reaction from those who were inside the closed-door meeting comes out. Here’s the first one I’ve seen:

Just got back from Trump’s “conversation” with Evangelicals. No mention of Jesus.

— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) June 21, 2016

UPDATE:

If you wondered why younger, theological, gospel-centered evangelicals reacted neg to the old guard Religious Right, well, now you know.

— Russell Moore (@drmoore) June 21, 2016

UPDATE.2: Matthew Lee Anderson (who wasn’t there):

There is a unity which we must seek, and a unity we cannot allow. The capitulation of the Religious Right is now complete. It is a tragically comic ending to a movement that has done far, far more harm than good.

What? Trans? Here?

A friend of mine who does religious liberty litigation said to me recently that she’s often stunned by how unaware ordinary people are about what’s going on in the courts, and the serious, mounting threats to religious liberty. I concurred — and it’s not just religious liberty. Things are moving very fast on the LGBT front. People all over aren’t thinking about what’s going to hit them. Take for example what’s going on in Louisiana:

As state and federal leaders feud over whether transgender students should be able to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity, public educators in Louisiana say they are just beginning to grapple with an issue that is brand new to many of them.

Hollis Milton, superintendent for West Feliciana Parish and president of the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents, said he cannot recall a time during his six years as a superintendent educating any transgender students in his small 2,100-student district north of Baton Rouge. And it’s not something he and his fellow superintendents had been talking about.

“I don’t remember having a single conversation about this,” Milton said. “This just came out of nowhere.”

The Obama administration is prepared to hold back $1.1 billion from our cash-strapped state if we don’t let transgendered students use the bathroom and locker room of their choice.

Imagine my surprise when Your Working Boy appeared in this story, from the Baton Rouge Advocate:

Louisiana School for Math, Science, and The Arts in Natchitoches, a high school for academically gifted students who live on campus, has enrolled a handful of transgender students in the past few years.

“It’s never been an issue for us, and we’ve always been able to accommodate students,” said Patrick Widhalm, LSMSA’s executive director.

Sure, but that’s not the point. The point is whether or not your previous accommodations will be considered sufficient by the Title IX enforcers if the trans student requests to live in an opposite-sex dorm. More:

But as the Obama administration’s position on the bathroom issue became national news last month, one prominent alum, Rod Dreher, a writer for American Conservative magazine, brought up the school in an online piece called “Transgender Dorm Daze.”

In his post, which sparked a testy online debate among school alumni, Dreher singled out a current transgender student, noting that student could insist on moving into the boy’s dorm and, according to the Obama administration, the school would have to comply.

“A biological female living in a dorm full of underage teenage boys. What could possibly go wrong?” Dreher wrote.

Widhalm said so far transgender students have remained with their original roommates and haven’t sought to change dorms. He said that the school is careful on the front end in how it matches up students and forges good relationships with parents from the get-go.

The words “so far” are doing a lot of the work there. More:

“We try to be pretty upfront with parents when they are going through orientation at the school,” Widhalm said.

Dreher’s concerns are overstated, he said.

“I respect Rod Dreher a great deal, but I think there has to be counterbalance to what he said,” Widhalm said.

All of the transgender students have lived in the girls dorm, where students live in suites with three rooms to one bathroom. The boys dorm, by contrast, has much larger group bathrooms.

Widhalm expects this will become even less of an issue after a new modern dorm is built, which is likely to start construction in 2017.

Hmm. I like Pat Widhalm, whom I’ve known for years, but I don’t see how my concerns are “overstated,” nor do I see what the “counterbalance” to what I said might be. If the Obama guidelines stand up in court, and a biological girl who claims to be a transgender boy asks to live in the boy’s dorm, claiming she’s a boy, the school will have to accommodate her request or be in violation of Title IX.

I don’t fault the school for this. I fault Obama for this, for putting this and other schools in a terrible position. And I don’t see what difference a new dorm would make. You’re still going to have the same problem: must a biological girl who identifies as a boy be allowed to live in the boy’s dorm if she requests it, or biological male who identifies as female, etc.? Remember, these are all minors.

Hollis Milton, quoted in the story, is the head of my local public schools. I don’t blame him for being caught up short on this stuff. You can’t imagine that it would be an issue in a small town like ours. Until all of a sudden, it is. If somebody had told you five years ago that whether or not the federal government could or should force schools to let transgender teenage boys use the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms was about to become a national issue, you wouldn’t have believed it.

One of these days, it’s coming to your town. My religious liberty lawyer friend said in a lot of states, people are complacent, thinking these things only happen far away. They’re going to be in for a very rude shock before too much longer, said the lawyer.

If you feel like your state doesn’t really have to worry about this stuff, you are very wrong. You had better have a plan for when it comes to your kid’s school.

UPDATE: I should have pointed out that the Advocate report states something factually untrue about my blog post. It says I singled out a trans high school student. I did no such thing, and could not have done any such thing, because I don’t know any of their names. Here’s what I actually wrote in that blog post:

My alma mater is a public boarding school for gifted and talented high school students. There are several self-declared transgenders studying there now, including a female-to-male genderfluid girl (meaning she is a male or female, depending on her whim). According to the new federal directive, not only is the school prohibited from telling these students’ parents about their children’s behavior without the children’s permission, but if one of these minors decides that he or she wants to live in the opposite sex’s dorm, the school has no choice but to permit it.

A biological female living in a dorm full of underage teenage boys. What could possibly go wrong?

If I had named a high school kid, that would have been outrageous and morally indefensible. But I did no such thing.

Trump Is Nearly Broke

Well, this is news. From NPR:

His poll numbers are sinking. His TV blitz is nowhere to be seen. Big donors aren’t flocking to him.

And if Donald Trump needed more tangible evidence of problems in his campaign, it’s in reports filed Monday at the Federal Election Commission.

As of the end of May, Trump’s campaign account held just $1.3 million compared to Clinton’s $42 million. Ben Carson, whose bid for the GOP nomination ended in early March, had $1.8 million in his campaign fund. Many Republican senators facing tough re-election fights this fall have considerably more money on hand than their party’s presumptive nominee for president.

More:

Clinton’s campaign is capitalizing on the financial disparity. Her campaign now has hundreds of field staffers across the country who are busy organizing voters while Trump’s organization has yet to crack 100 paid employees.

Oh, and look at this from New York magazine:

And he paid $35,000 in advertising to a mystery firm called “Draper Sterling,” which might ring a bell for Mad Men fans and which may or may not actually exist.

This is going to be a political catastrophe we will tell our grandkids we lived to see.

Progressive Religion, Orthodox Religion

Richard Rodriguez is a gay California Catholic, and a very fine writer, even when I disagree with him (such as in this entry). His reaction to the Orlando massacre captures the core difference between left and right among the religious, and why we will never be able to agree on some things:

Here is the plain and dangerous truth facing the cosmopolitan world: In the opinion of many millions of Jews and Christians and Muslims, the Abrahamic God of the desert is a homophobe.

More:

The desert religions of Abraham — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — were shaped by an encounter with a God who revealed himself within an ecology of almost lunar desolation. In such a place, the call to belief was tribal, not individualistic. Sexuality was an expression of faith to increase the tribe. Allegiance to God and to one’s ancestors was fulfilled by giving birth.

Here’s the whole thing.

You see the logic: According to the holy writ of Abrahamic religion, God says gay sex is wrong. But we believe, in God, and we believe gay sex is not morally wrong. Therefore, God believes gay sex is not wrong. 

And he explains away a very deeply ingrained teaching of Abrahamic religion — one that, at least in Judaism and Christianity (I don’t know Islam well enough to say) by asserting that we’re more advanced than those desert savages.

This is not reasoning. This is rationalization.

The orthodox approach to revealed religion is to accept it as a statement of reality, and go from there. Of course these teachings always get sorted through an interpretive community, whose judgments are considered authoritative. What doesn’t happen, though, is that one gets to decide on the attributes of divinity based on what one wishes God were like. Otherwise it’s self-worship.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m taking a long flight today (I wrote this post on Sunday and scheduled it), and am not going to be able to approve most comments till much later. I will not approve comments on this thread that are debating homosexuality, either from a progressive or orthodox point of view. So please don’t waste your time writing one.

What I do want us to talk about is hermeneutics, which is to say, the way texts are interpreted. To oversimplify, progressives believe religion primarily (but not exclusively) concerns what man says about God, while conservatives believe religion primarily (but not exclusively) concerns what God says about man.

The lines are not clearly drawn, and can’t be. Doctrine and theology does change, even under conservatives, while progressives really do take some religious truths as axiomatic. The crucial difference, as I see it, is that conservatives (or, if you prefer as I do, the small-o orthodox) believe that there is an objective, real, transcendent order that exists outside of us and prior to us, and truth claims are usually claims about it, and how we must relate to it. Any changes in what has been received or thought must be accomplished through a valid authorities within the interpretive community. If the authorities try to stretch the tradition too far too fast, they risk schism.

Progressives generally believe that the individual is allowed to decide for himself what constitutes religious truth — something an orthodox believer cannot do, even if he wants to.

Here’s how it shakes out with Richard Rodriguez’s claims. He obviously believes that the Christian prohibition against homosexuality is a relic of a primitive stage of religious development, and says nothing about the nature of God. Me, I would genuinely like to believe that Christians are free to decide what they like about homosexuality. It would make my gay friends think better of me, and it would make my professional life easier in many ways. But as a matter of intellectual integrity, I can’t rationalize away the prohibition within Christianity (nor can I rationalize away Biblical ethics binding heterosexual conduct).

I often think that progressive Christians judge us orthodox Christians to be bigots because they assume that we read Scripture and relate to Tradition in the same way that they do. For orthodox believers, Scripture and Tradition are like maps; if you don’t follow them, you won’t get where you are supposed to go. Maps are only a representation of the real world, it is true, but we have to hew as close to what we have been given as we can. The one thing we cannot do is redraw the map to make it take us where we wish to go, because we judge it to be a more pleasant place.

The orthodox says: “We can’t diverge too far from this map, or we’ll get lost.”

The progressive says: “What? That map is way out of date. We’ll redraw it. It was just somebody’s opinion. We know better now.”

The orthodox says: “What’s ‘better’? You have no way of knowing if your new coordinates are accurate. How do you know if they correspond to reality?”

The progressive says: “Huh?”

This is why we cannot resolve things between us.

Hungry For Socialism

Oh, socialism, is there anything you cannot do?:

With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.

Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.

Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.

And they showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food.

More:

Economists say years of economic mismanagement — worsened by low prices for oil, the nation’s main source of revenue — have shattered the food supply.

Sugar fields in the country’s agricultural center lie fallow for lack of fertilizers. Unused machinery rots in shuttered state-owned factories. Staples like corn and rice, once exported, now must be imported and arrive in amounts that do not meet the need.

In response, Mr. Maduro has tightened his grip over the food supply. Using emergency decrees he signed this year, the president put most food distribution in the hands of a group of citizen brigades loyal to leftists, a measure critics say is reminiscent of food rationing in Cuba.

Read the whole thing. Nine out of 10 Venezuelans say they do not have enough money to feed themselves.

Islam & The Benedict Option

Readers, I’ve got a very long flight today, and won’t be able to approve comments for some time. I want to share with you the transcript of an interview I did with a longtime reader of this blog who posts under the name “Jones.” I know his real name, and we’ve been corresponding for a while. He is a Pakistani-American lawyer of the Millennial generation, and a practicing believer in Islam. I think — I know — you will find a lot to mull over in his answers. I interviewed him as part of my research for my Benedict Option book — for the religion chapter, as I consider the question of Ben Op Christians finding common ground with Muslims and Orthodox Jews who are also resident aliens in this decadent post-Christian culture.

I mean, devout Muslims and Orthodox Jews would always be resident aliens here, in a sense, but increasingly, faithful small-o orthodox Christians will come to share their sense of being in this culture, but very much not of it. And in that we have an opportunity for fellowship, even mutual support. Here is the transcript, which I post with Jones’s permission:

How have cultural and political events in recent years changed your political views as an American Muslim (you were born and raised here, the son of immigrant parents from either India or Pakistan, right?)?

I was born in Pakistan, but came here when I was very young (less than one year).

Recent events in the United States have made me much more apprehensive about the future of Islam in America. I think Islam has a good, and even exciting, future in America, but recent years have made clear what sort of challenges we are going to face.

For many people on the right, including but not limited to the far right, the proposition that Muslims are an absolute enemy is a given; it no longer needs to be debated. And thanks to the Trump campaign, this contingent on the right has probably formed into an enduring force. Somewhere between 67% and 71% of Republicans support Trump’s ban on all Muslim immigration. 40% of Republicans, and 57% of conservative Republicans, believe that Muslims should be subject to more scrutiny than others merely because of their religion. Peter Beinart nicely sums up the situation on the right.

Meanwhile, as the Left starts asserting itself more and more as holders of a comprehensive ideology for governing all aspects of life, they are increasingly turning on Muslims, especially on the point where we most starkly conflict: sex and gender. A series of articles in The New York Times on Muslim women portends the future there, I think.

There are many different factions on the Right and Left, and only some of them hold strongly anti-Islam views. But those factions do exist, on both sides. I think Muslims are probably going to be treated as a political football, kicked around by both sides whenever it seems advantageous. That said, I was deeply heartened and even moved by the way the public, especially but not only liberals, reacted to Trump’s announcement of his Muslim ban. Even people like Dick Cheney were coming out of the woodworks to say that it was beyond the pale. Superficial politics aside, I believe that Americans at their heart are an open and inclusive people, perhaps more so than any other in the world. In many ways, you could say that there is no better place to be a Muslim—and more than once I have heard Muslims say just that.

In the mainstream debate, these issues often get discussed under the heading of “Islamophobia,” but I dislike the term and never use it myself. It’s disreputable as a debating tactic: it psychologizes the opponent, in a condescending way, and also fails to capture the essence of his view.

Why have I not mentioned any of the political issues that conservative Christians care about as a substantive matter, like gay rights, abortion, transgender rights, and so on? I think that Muslims are already at the end of the road that the Benedict Option leads down. In Islam, drinking alcohol is forbidden. But we all go to college and binge drinking is the primary—sometimes it seems like the exclusive—form of recreation there. In Islam fornication is forbidden. But in this society fornication is nearly universal, celebrated, and fiercely defended. I don’t think the idea of convincing our fellow citizens to think and behave like us even occurs to Muslims. Far more pressing is the question of whether we will be allowed to live the way we prefer to live, and to maintain our communities in relative peace. Therefore it’s much more urgent to try to prevent governments from banning mosques; to protect against massive intrusions against our civil rights through surveillance, illegal detention, and more; to allow schoolchildren to be taught about Islam; to reduce the rate at which Muslims are discriminated against in employment; etc.

What would you like Benedict Option Christians to know about Muslim Americans regarding these issues, given our mutual suspicion of each other, coming after 9/11?

Before I answer your question—

First, I don’t think the suspicion is mutual. I don’t think most Muslims bear any real hostility to Christians. To the contrary, I think they usually respect them, especially insofar as they adhere to traditional religious practices. Muslim Americans have respect for people who care about family, who live according to traditional values, who take care of their parents, who act and dress modestly, and who respect marriage. And the actual doctrines of Islam command respect for Christianity, recognizing the prophethood of Jesus and the virginal conception of Mary, after whom a whole chapter of the Qu’ran is named. In Islamic doctrine, Christians and Jews belong to the Ahl-al-Kitab, the People of the Book, who make up a privileged group.

I have to confess that my perspective is particular; it’s based on the part of the country that I live in. In truth, I very rarely interact with the kinds of conservative Christians your book (and blog) is aimed at. I live in the liberal Northeast, where practicing Christians are few and far in between. When we look around us, “Christianity” is not what we see. It’s true that, when I was growing up, my parents would distinguish between “us” and the people around us, who were different. What they meant is that “we” would not drink; we would not watch lewd things in TV and movies; we would not socialize casually with the opposite sex; we would go to the mosque, read the Qu’ran, pray, and fast. In short, Christianity was never the “other” for us in a practical sense; secularism was.

My only experiences with Christians have been in the university setting, where we Muslims would very often organize and cooperate with Christians and Jews to hold interfaith programming. My sense had always been that there was great respect and cooperation between people of different faith groups. I only realized later that this might have something to do with the highly liberal setting of the university.

Anyway, those were the expectations I brought with me when I first encountered your blog. I had started to discern that conservative Christians were among the few people around who lived like we did. I felt completely on my own in trying to figure out how to live according to traditional values in this society, so discovering that Christians were thinking about these same questions was very exciting to me—and it was a great source of moral comfort. Thus I always had a sense that Muslims and conservative Christians had common cause. Ironically, it was only after reading your blog that I started to appreciate how many Christians felt hostility toward Islam, as Christians. You could say I had a naive view until then.

What do I want Benedict Option Christians to know?

By far my most important message is: get to know us. Before you decide that you know who Muslims are and what they are about, go out and find actual Muslims and talk to them. Ask them about their lives, their communities, and their faiths. Visit a mosque and listen to the sermons for yourself. If you approach in good faith and with an open mind, I am certain that you will receive a warm welcome.

Do you think that, say, the average Manhattanite has a positive impression of conservative Christians? Do you think they view you the way you view yourself? If not, then why is that? If all I knew about Christians came from reading The New York Times and the Huffington Post, would I have an accurate sense of who Christians really are, what they are really like, what they really stand for? Probably not.

In a similar vein, I was educated at liberal institutions where the consensus was that “conservative thought” was an oxymoron. I decided that I owed it to myself to find out whether that was actually true. And if I wanted, I could have stopped after looking at the major conservative media outlets, which merely confirmed all of my worst impressions. If you want to find bad people and bad ideas, those are always out there, in any group. What you find will often be shaped by the spirit in which you seek.

I think the importance of abstract beliefs is overstated. The most important thing is to look at how people actually live. The truth is that the vast majority of Muslim Americans live by the same values that you do. If you spend time with them, you might be surprised at how much you find in common. That has certainly been my experience in dealing with Christians. Much of the essential work of any religion is in teaching its adherents how to be good people, capable of forming and living in good families and communities. As our respective traditions teach us, that work is hard enough. And I think Muslims and Christians share far more in common in their vision of the good life than either of us do with the secular mainstream.

I would say to people that if you accept Rod’s vision of where our country stands and where it is headed, then you have to conclude that the greatest threat to our well-being is a secular mainstream that is increasingly hostile to any religious ideas whatsoever, and certainly to the traditional core of the Abrahamic faiths. In the face of such an assault, it would be foolish for Muslims and Christians to let themselves be played against one another. We are likely to need all the help we can get in maintaining an America that hews close to its long, proud history of religious tolerance and liberty.

What’s more, our communities may have a great deal to learn from one another. Muslims may be able to teach you new things, just as I have learned a great deal from listening to Christians. We have to look for guidance and support in whatever forms we can find them.

After learning more about Christianity, I realized that there is another potential source of great confusion Christians might have regarding Islam. Islam in America is far less organized and coherent than Christianity. Most people pray at mosques that are little more than a bunch of people in the same area gathering together to pray. There is no formal hierarchy in Islam. Anyone who wants to get up and put themselves forth as an imam can do so. Being an imam is very different from being a priest: in many places, different members of the community perform the function every week. I have never been to an American mosque with a formal membership. If I want to pray at a particular mosque I simply walk in the door.

In short, there are no great national councils debating the minutiae of theology and deciding what policy stances to take, as I gather there are in Christianity. Moreover, American Islam is very diverse—there are Arabs from several countries, Egyptians, Pakistanis and Indians, Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Malaysians, African-Americans, Iranians, and more. There is little interaction or coherence between these groups thus far. Most of these groups speak completely different languages. Many people seem to conflate Muslims and Arabs, but only 20% of Muslims in the world are Arab.

I encourage people to learn more about Islam by looking to scrupulously neutral, authoritative academic sources. Don’t put the cart of ideology before the horse of understanding. It would also help to know the basics of Western foreign policy in the Middle East in the postcolonial period to the present, to understand a little bit about where Muslims are coming from politically.

I like this passage from a post on your blog, quoting someone else:

Ironically, I am reminded at this point of a criticism the late New Left intellectual, Edward Said, made of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. Said’s point was simple: At the local level, where people live next to each other, where they speak to each other, where they have to make their communities work because perpetual street fighting is not an option, the situation is always more complicated and hopeful than a collision of ideologies. Indeed, I might add to Said’s thoughts this paraphrase of something George Orwell said in another context: It is much harder to hate a man when you have looked into his eyes and seen that he too is a human being as you are.

How do you think about your own future as a Muslim lawyer, and perhaps as a husband and father in the United States, with regard to the social and moral environment, and the status of religious liberty? In that regard, do you think Christians and Muslims in this country need each other? And if so, what practical ways can we begin the engagement? What I’m thinking here is that US liberals think of themselves as allies of Muslims against conservatives, especially conservative Christians, but that is about a millimeter deep; most are not going to stand up for Muslims when it means choosing them over LGBTs and sexual liberty more generally. Right now, whether they realize it or not, Muslims are used by them as a way to beat up on conservatives. On the other hand, US conservatives, especially Christians, think of American Muslims warily at best, and as the enemy at worst. But is that the right way to see things? 

To be a practicing Muslim in this society is to be constantly rowing against the tide. Observing my faith is my personal moral responsibility, and not anyone else’s. But there is no doubt in my mind that environment affects how hard it is. And it’s easy to end up resenting the society around you when it feels needlessly hard.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure if this is a valid complaint: living a life of faith is never easy, and these kinds of obstacles often provide an important moral clarity. It’s common in Muslim circles to observe that American Muslims are often more committed practitioners of their religion than those “back home,” because you have no choice but to take personal responsibility for your faith. In these respects, the lives we live already resemble the ones that you envision for Christians after the Benedict Option.

In any case, it is not national politics, but this day-to-day struggle to stay true to faith that will decide the future of our religions in America. We reject materialist hedonism in favor of an ethos of moral self-discipline. We reject the cult of the autonomous individual in favor of fidelity to family and community. In these respects, there is a great deal of overlap in what Christians and Muslims want from modern society. We both confront a society that adheres to an increasingly aggressive and comprehensive secular materialism. And we both have an interest in preventing that ideology from unduly burdening our communities’ way of life.

When it comes to raising children, the problems become even more acute. A central task for any value system is to transmit its values to the next generation. This is where environment becomes really important. The one thing most crucial to intergenerational transmission is the formation of new families and the preservation of marriage. I probably don’t need to belabor the reasons why we face unprecedented challenges in this area. It may be a life and death issue for all of us. Traditionalists of nearly all cultures in nearly all times and places used to share a few basic understandings in this area. Now, in America it’s only a small number of traditionalist Christians, Muslims, and Jews that hew to those understandings.

I’ve been surprised by how quickly Muslims are adapting to contemporary America. What worries me is not that we will fail to adapt, but that the next generation will precipitately abandon or minimize any feature of Islam that is not cut to the measure of contemporary liberalism. All the young Muslims I know are educated in American universities, and in my eyes too many of them are eager to shear away the aspects of their faith that don’t fit neatly with current liberal attitudes. It’s as if they take the unerring truth of contemporary liberalism completely for granted. How long can such an amputated faith last?

I worry that the ranks of nominal Muslims will swell, and that the truth and beauty of the Islam that I love so much will fade from view. Much of what’s valuable about Islam to me is not how compatible it is with modern life, but how it challenges modern life on behalf of higher and deeper things. If we fail to hold on to these things, not only Muslims, but other Americans as well will suffer, having lost the opportunity to learn some things that only we can teach. I want us to occupy the middle ground, learning from the best of Western culture while preserving the essence of the Muslim way of life.

I don’t want to deny the differences between Christianity and Islam, nor am I asking you to endorse our theology. What we should both want is that America return to its best traditions of pluralistic liberalism. The American conception of liberty is that adherents of all religions should be able to freely exercise their faiths, and that the “free and open encounters” that result will be our best guide toward the truth. I was aghast when, not long after studying the Constitution’s Religion Clauses in law school, I saw The New York Times putting the term “religious liberty” in scare quotes every time it was used. The liberalism of the U.S. Constitution dictates that the state must be scrupulously neutral between competing worldviews and ways of life, equally protecting the rights of all.

Christianity and Islam are different, but in the eyes of atheists all religions are essentially the same: ungrounded superstitions standing in the way of social progress. If you are right, and the numbers of authentic Christians are rapidly dwindling, then neither of us can afford to go it alone. Adherents of different faiths should band together to defend the classical liberal compromise.

Right now, the movement for religious liberty is viewed as an opportunistic guise for the re-assertion of Christian domination. It would greatly enhance the credibility of Christians interested in religious liberty if they stood up for adherents of all faiths. And Muslims face many of the most severe, outright challenges to their ability to freely exercise religion: whether it is being under suspicion of terrorism for any outward display of faith, being pulled off of an airplane for speaking Arabic, having our mosques and even restaurants under extensive, multi-year surveillance that yields no actionable intelligence, nationwide movements to prevent the building of mosques, being subject to arbitrary detention and torture without due process, etc.

In practice, I think Ben Op Christians should try to find and reach out to local Muslim communities. Hold events together, serve the poor together. I have no doubt that Muslims would welcome such outreach. Of course I think Muslims should do the same, and have been personally involved in numerous interfaith efforts. I think the most valuable thing would be for us to develop personal relationships with each other. Recognizing and appreciating our common humanity is the first step, and I have faith that everything else will follow naturally from that.

Speaking for myself, I am rooting for Ben Op Christianity to succeed. I would much rather there be strong, functional Christian communities in the United States than that we all descend together into the morass of materialist hedonism. I personally regard the Christian tradition as a great source of spiritual insight, having been moved many times by Bach’s Mass in B Minor and the St. John’s Passion. I also revere the tradition of Western humanism, and my studies have taught me that it would be difficult to extricate this tradition from the background of Christian culture. If you tried to tell me that I, as a Muslim, cannot benefit or learn from these traditions, I would simply ignore you and keep going. I also think that America is destined to play an important role in global Islam. America might be the site of a world-historical turning point, a rich theological dialogue that has not been possible for centuries. There are things that are possible here that possible nowhere else. Who knows what the fruits of cooperation could be? Why don’t we just try and see?

[End of interview]

Note From Rod: I want to give my deep thanks to Jones for answering these questions at length, thereby giving me more than I hoped for. I want to also thank him and this blog’s other regular Muslim commenters, Alexander Valenzuela and “Mohammed,” who reads us in Iran. Their comments, both publicly and in private e-mails, have been challenging and edifying, and have opened my mind to things I had not considered before.