Rod Dreher's Blog, page 568

View From Your Table

Col d’Ournan, near Alpe d’Huez, France

My consigliere continues his 20th anniversary tour with his lovely bride. Here’s what they ate on the side of an Alp:

Melon and jambon cru, followed by pork with mustard cream sauce, a quick break from Alp-biking.

I can solemnly promise you readers that you will never, ever see my name associated with “Alp-biking.”

Trump’s Personal Jesus

Did you read the transcript of Cal Thomas’s interview with Donald Trump? You should. Especially these parts:

CT: My grandparents used to play a parlor game. It went like this: Tell me who you are without telling me your name or what you do. We have seen your tough exterior, but who are you at your core and what is your basic philosophy and worldview?

DT: I am a person who grew up with two wonderful parents and a wonderful family and a person who has done well in life. I went to great schools. Wharton School, a lot of great places. Education is very important. I think I understand education. I think I can straighten out our mess in education. And I’m a person who has, to a certain extent, redefined where I should be. I started off in Brooklyn and Queens and I wasn’t supposed to come to Manhattan. My father didn’t want to go to Manhattan for me, and I came to Manhattan and I have done a great job in Manhattan. And then I wrote a best-seller and I wrote numerous best-sellers. I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’ and numerous other books. Some were number one best-sellers. I guess ‘The Art of the Deal’ is the best-selling business book of all time. I had a TV show called ‘The Apprentice’ and it’s one of the most successful reality shows in the history of television. And now I’m doing something else.

He doesn’t even pretend that there’s anything to him other than worshiping himself. There’s no there there, just ego. I know this is not exactly news, but it still astonishes me that he can’t even fake it.

There’s idiocy, non sequiturs, and sloganeering throughout. But here is the most glorious part:

CT: Every president has called upon God at some point. Lincoln spoke of not being able to hold the office of the presidency without spending time on his knees. You have confessed that you are a Christian …

DT: And I have also won much evangelical support.

CT: Yes, I know that. You have said you never felt the need to ask for God’s forgiveness, and yet repentance for one’s sins is a precondition to salvation. I ask you the question Jesus asked of Peter: Who do you say He is?

DT: I will be asking for forgiveness, but hopefully I won’t have to be asking for much forgiveness. As you know, I am Presbyterian and Protestant. I’ve had great relationships and developed even greater relationships with ministers. We have tremendous support from the clergy. I think I will be doing very well during the election with evangelicals and with Christians. In the Middle East — and this is prior to the migration — you had almost no chance of coming into the United States. Christians from Syria, of which there were many, many of their heads … chopped off. If you were a Muslim from Syria, it was one of the easiest places to come in (to the U.S.). I thought that was deplorable. I’m going to treat my religion, which is Christian, with great respect and care.

CT: Who do you say Jesus is?

DT: Jesus to me is somebody I can think about for security and confidence. Somebody I can revere in terms of bravery and in terms of courage and, because I consider the Christian religion so important, somebody I can totally rely on in my own mind.

Whole thing here. I hope Jerry Falwell Jr. and Mike Huckabee are proud of themselves.

The prospect of four years of this stuff. Just think about it.

via GIPHY

Benedict Option as Meanness?

Oh good, another throwdown over the Benedict Option. Greg Forster thinks it’s mean:

The overarching problem, however, is the Benedict Option’s failure to love the unholy world. The holiness of the church has crowded out its divine mission. The Benedict Option projects the same spirit of resentment and hostility toward the world outside of Christian identity. The only change is to identify “the culture” as being in the possession of those outside rather than those inside, and to adjust strategy accordingly. That may feel like a momentous change—we go from understanding ourselves as guardians of a Christian (or “Judeo-Christian”) culture that is under attack from secular invaders to understanding ourselves as victims who are under attack by a secular culture. But if we still turn a face of hostility rather than a face of grace toward the unholy world—if we still try to fight enmity with enmity—how much has really changed?

Er … what? Here’s what Alan Jacobs said about the Ben Op:

The Benedict Option, as I understand it, is based on three premises.

1. The dominant media of our technological society are powerful forces for socializing people into modes of thought and action that are often inconsistent with, if not absolutely hostile to, Christian faith and practice.

2. In America today, churches and other Christian institutions (schools at all levels, parachurch organizations with various missions) are comparatively very weak at socializing people, if for no other reason than that they have access to comparatively little mindspace.

3. Healthy Christian communities are made up of people who have been thoroughly grounded in, thoroughly socialized into, the the historic practices and beliefs of the Christian church.

From these three premises proponents of the Benedict Option draw a conclusion: If we are to form strong Christians, people with robust commitment to and robust understanding of the Christian life, then we need to shift the balance of ideological power towards Christian formation, and that means investing more of our time and attention than we have been spending on strengthening our Christian institutions.

Yep, that’s pretty much it, though I would add several things. Christians have to change our practices for the sake of stronger discipleship formation. We have to adopt a more radical awareness of how different we are from the world, and act on that awareness. And we need to focus on creating the kinds of communities — in our families, our schools, our churches, and elsewhere — that produce faithful, resilient, orthodox Christians.

We need to remember our story in a time and a place which is bound and determined to make us forget. And we need to embrace that story, in all its freakiness — or we will be assimilated, as is rapidly happening.

Carl Trueman responds to Greg Forster. Excerpt:

Well, could this alternative [Ben Op] culture be resentful and hateful and revel in its victim status? It certainly could—think of that group of Klansmen holed up in the local ranch at war with the federal government—but again, I did not hear Rod advocating that on Friday night. In fact, I consider him to have said the opposite: that these new communities within the community are to be open and loving and to model what it means to be truly human.

Seriously, whatever criticisms one might wish to make of the Ben Op, it does not seem to me to be resentful or unloving. Nor, I might add, is understanding it akin to mastering rocket science.

No, it’s not. More Trueman:

This afternoon I speak at an official gathering of my denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, on the matter of sexual politics and its impact on our society. I close this brief post with the last two paragraphs of that lecture, which I believe capture Rod’s and my common vision on this point. The reader can decide how much resentment and lack of love these contain (even though the initial image I use is that of warfare):

I believe that the battle at the national level is lost and will remain lost for at least a generation or more. But I also believe that the battle can be prosecuted successfully at a local level. 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.

Therein I believe might lie our glimmer of hope. As we go about our daily business, as we make the church a community of the preached Word yet marked in practice by openness and hospitality for the outsider—indeed, as the church reflects the character of the one about whom she preaches, the one who loves the widow and the orphan and the sojourner—we may not be able to transform national legislation or the plots of sitcoms and movies. But we will be able to demonstrate to those around us in our neighborhoods that we do not fit the caricatures that the media present, that we do care for those who are in active rebellion against the God we love. And there, in that local context, we might be able to start building our counter-offensive to the dominant culture of Psychological Man and his Reichian sexual revolution.

Yep. Last night I was re-reading the great little 1989 book Resident Aliens, by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon. Man, that’s an invigorating blast. I’d say 80 percent or so of what I think of as the Benedict Option is in that book. The relentless message its authors propound is that we Christians do not live as if we really believe what we say. Our pastors don’t act like they are trying to get us from one place to the next. We are so busy trying to conform to the world that we have forgotten that we are “resident aliens” here. And it shows.

As an example, Eric Sammons at the Catholic blog One Peter Five writes about “Amy the Average Catholic,” the kind of lukewarm believer he has encountered over and over again in his evangelizing work:

From this experience, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that how the Church has been teaching and proclaiming the Gospel for decades isn’t working. It doesn’t bring people into a deep relationship with Christ, it doesn’t change their lives for the better (or at all), and it doesn’t change the world in any measurable way.

Instead of proposing the Church as an alternative to the world, Church leaders for decades have preached non-confrontation with the world. This skewed emphasis has had its impact: Amy cares more about her parish’s recycling program than she does about the eternal salvation of the person sitting in the pew next to her.

This problem isn’t confined to leaders who promote heretical beliefs. Of course hierarchs such as Kasper or Cupich cause terrible harm. The deeper problem, however, is one of emphasis. Our Lord said, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Matthew 6:33), but too often church leaders seek first earthly acceptance. They avoid topics deemed “controversial” by worldly standards, and in doing so, stick with a spectrum of subjects ranging from “be kind” all the way to “be nice.” They treat topics like sin and damnation like embarrassing relatives at a family gathering. Thus, for years Amy hasn’t heard a word about her eternal destination, or been challenged to live differently than the world tells her to live. Into that void her mind has been filled with the priorities and mores of this world.

You know good and well that this is not just a Catholic problem. It’s a problem for all American Christians.

Hauerwas and Willimon say that the best way to love the world is to be the Church, which is to say, follow Jesus, the man who was crucified for saying things the world did not want to hear. They’re right about that. I am a spectacularly mediocre Christian, but to the extent I’ve made any spiritual progress over the years, it’s because the Church challenged me to come out of myself and be transformed. Reading Dante was a revelation to me, because he made me feel in my bones what it means to order one’s life around the love of God, and service to Him. The experience of the Church is a pilgrimage through life, one in which we invite others to join us on the journey towards wholeness, towards holiness, towards redemption and transformation.

The culture war is over. We lost. But that does not mean we can give up bearing witness to the truth, in our words and in our deeds. It seems like half the Church is falling all over itself to be collaborators, and the other half is desperately trying to pretend that things are basically okay, not to worry. Neither one will do. Christianity is being routed in the West. What we’ve been doing is disastrous. The Benedict Option, in whichever forms it takes within different Christian traditions, is for Christians who intend for themselves and their descendants to make it through the long Dark Age upon us.

One more thing: yeah, the name “Benedict Option” is faddish, but it’s what we’ve been using for over a decade to talk about this general idea. Besides, it has a point: to compel believers to face the truth about our time, and what it requires of us. Pope Benedict XVI himself said in 2012 that the West faces a crisis unlike any it has seen since the fall of the Empire in the fifth century — a calamity that produced St. Benedict. That’s the historical reference. If we are in a similar situation today — and I believe we are — then what would a new and very different St. Benedict do in response? The “option” is there to press the point with readers: you have to choose — either continue living as you are, or take radical steps to build a community within your parish, your schools, and so forth, in which authentic Christianity can be lived under these conditions. In truth, I believe the Benedict Option is the Benedict Mandate, but the fact remains that nobody can compel anybody to choose to live this way. The choice is theirs.

Recognizing that one has to build a boat in which to ride out the coming flood does not mean that one hates water.

Found: A College With Backbone

Lo, I did not think I would live to see anything like this:

On an afternoon in May, 34 protesters breached the locked doors of the administration building at the University of Chicago and dashed upstairs to the fifth-floor lobby of the president’s office. Sprawling on chairs and on the floor, equipped with food and chant sheets, they settled in for a long sit-in. The protesters, who were mostly students, demanded, among other things, a “living wage” for campus workers, more accountability from the campus police and disinvestment from fossil fuels.

It was part of a school year of student demonstrations across the country, often tolerated or even celebrated by members of the faculty or administrators. But this one was different: Days later, the student body president, Tyler Kissinger, who had allowed the protesters into the building, was threatened with expulsion the day before graduation.

Kissinger knew what he was doing:

On the day of the sit-in, Mr. Kissinger got past security by saying he was on official business as student body president. He hid in a bathroom for a few minutes, he recalled, then used his backpack to prop open a door so everyone else could get in.

… Mr. Kissinger, whose mother is a food service worker at Wake Forest University, said he let the protesters into the building because he thinks that the university should be an open place, run in a collaborative way. “I think students, faculty and staff should have uninhibited access to administrators on their campuses, administrators who are making decisions about their lives,” he said. “So I kind of reject the premise that an administration building should be locked and cordoned off.”

Read the whole thing. These SJWs don’t seem to think they should have to pay a price for their activism — and in most schools, they have not. I hope the University of Chicago hangs tough. Expel one, teach a thousand.

View From Your Table

New Orleans, Louisiana

A Walker Percy Weekend enthusiast has not yet left the Great State:

Shrimp philly, roast beef poboy, Miller High Life, PBR, and Zapp’s chips.

Verti Marte in New Orleans. Convenience store in the front, incredible sandwiches in the back.

Islam vs. Liberal Democracy

Here’s another great piece by The Atlantic’s Emma Green. This time, she interviews author Shadi Hamid, a liberal Muslim who argues in his new book that we’re getting it all wrong if we try to understand Islam through the model of Western secularism. Excerpt:

Perhaps his most provocative claim is this: History will not necessarily favor the secular, liberal democracies of the West. Hamid does not believe all countries will inevitably follow a path from revolution to rational Enlightenment and non-theocratic government, nor should they. There are some basic arguments for this: Islam is growing, and in some majority-Muslim nations, huge numbers of citizens believe Islamic law should be upheld by the state. But Hamid also thinks there’s something lacking in Western democracies, that there’s a sense of overarching meaninglessness in political and cultural life in these countries that can help explain why a young Muslim who grew up in the U.K. might feel drawn to martyrdom, for example. This is not a dismissal of democracy, nor does it comprehensively explain the phenomenon of jihadism. Rather, it’s a note of skepticism about the promise of secular democracy—and the wisdom of pushing that model on other cultures and regions.

From the Q&A portion of Green’s piece:

Green: You emphasize the importance of taking the “metaphysical” propositions of Islam seriously, over and above the material circumstances of violence. What is lost in focusing on the material rather than ideological factors in the politics of Muslim countries?

Hamid: As political scientists, when we try to understand why someone joins an Islamist party, we tend to think of it as, “Is this person interested in power or community or belonging?” But sometimes it’s even simpler than that. It’s about a desire for eternal salvation. It’s about a desire to enter paradise. In the bastions of Northeastern, liberal, elite thought, that sounds bizarre. Political scientists don’t use that kind of language because, first of all, how do you measure that? But I think we should take seriously what people say they believe in.

It’s interesting that we’re having this conversation at a time when many people, including outside the Middle East, are losing faith in technocratic, liberal democracy. There’s a desire for a politics of substantive meaning. At the end of the day, people want more than economic tinkering.

I think classical liberalism makes a lot of sense intellectually. But it doesn’t necessarily fill the gap that many people in Europe and the U.S. seem to have in their own lives, whether that means [they] resort to ideology, religion, xenophobia, nationalism, populism, exclusionary politics, or anti-immigrant politics. All of these things give voters a sense that there is something greater.

Read the whole thing.  I find myself sympathizing with Hamid a lot more than I would have a few years ago, not because I have developed a new attraction to Islam, but because I have thought more deeply into the problems of liberal democracy in a post-Christian context.

Today I’m finishing up a chapter in my forthcoming Benedict Option book about sex and sexuality, and in light of the way premodern Christians saw sex, erotic love, and, well, the cosmos, modern hedonism seems like such a paltry thing. Spend enough time reading about the premodern era and you come to a realization that people today not only have no understanding of it (they think people of that time are just like us, only with worse dentistry and more church), but they have an utterly unjustified belief that the way we live today is far better than what our ancestors had.

From a material point of view, they’re certainly right. And they’re also right from the point of view of individual freedom. But what if those ends are not the most important thing to a person? What if freedom and prosperity are not enough? What if people crave meaning?

Liberal democracy says, “That’s fine. We’re here to facilitate the choices that give your life meaning.” What’s the problem with that? Theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in a 1995 essay, explains:

The moral threat [to Christianity] is not consumerism or materialism. Such characterizations of the enemy we face as Christians are far too superficial and moralistic. The problem is not just that we have become consumers of our own lives, but that we can conceive of no alternative narrative since we lack any practices that could make such a narrative intelligible. Put differently, the project of modernity was to produce people who believe they should have no story except the story they choose when they have no story. Such a story is called the story of freedom and is assumed to be irreversibly institutionalized economically as market capitalism and politically as democracy. That story and the institutions that embody it is the enemy we must attack through Christian preaching.

I am aware that such a suggestion can only be met with disbelief. You may well think I cannot be serious. Normal nihilism is so wonderfully tolerant. Surely you are not against tolerance? How can anyone be against freedom? Let me assure you I am serious, I am against tolerance, I do not believe the story of freedom is a true or good story. I do not believe it is a good story because it is so clearly a lie. The lie is exposed by simply asking, “Who told you the story that you should have no story except the story you choose when you have no story?” Why should you let that story determine your life? Simply put, the story of freedom has now become our fate.

Consider, for example, the hallmark sentence of the Casey decision on abortion: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This is exactly the view of freedom that John Paul II so eloquently condemns in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor. A view of freedom like that embodied in Casey assumes, according to John Paul II, that we must be able to create values since freedom enjoys “a primacy over truth, to the point that truth itself would be considered a creation of freedom.”

In contrast, John Paul II, who is not afraid to have enemies, reminds us that the good news of the Gospel, known through proclamation, is that we are not fated to be determined by such false stories of freedom. For the truth is that since we are God’s good creation we are not free to choose our own stories. Freedom lies not in creating our lives, but in learning to recognize our lives as a gift. We do not receive our lives as though they were a gift, but rather our lives simply are a gift: we do not exist first and then receive from God a gift. The great magic of the Gospel is providing us with the skills to acknowledge our life, as created, without resentment and regret. Such skills must be embodied in a community of people across time, constituted by practices such as baptism, preaching, and the Eucharist, which become the means for us to discover God’s story for our lives.

The very activity of preaching—the proclamation of a story that cannot be known apart from such proclamation—is an affront to the ethos of freedom. As the Church, we stand under the word because we know we are told what we otherwise could not know. We stand under the word because we know we need to be told what to do. We stand under the word because we do not believe we have minds worth making up on our own. Such guidance is particularly necessary for people like us who have been corrupted by our tolerance.

In other words, “freedom” is not the same thing as “truth,” and freedom as conceived by modernity is not the same thing as freedom proclaimed by the Bible.

Muslims, obviously, have their own story. The point is that all these stories cannot be true. Liberal democracy is meant to make it possible for people who believe competing, contradictory stories to live together in peace. It has done a good job of that. But it is being stretched past the breaking point, because it provides no satisfying answer to the question, What is life for? 

If you have not read Paul Berman’s 2003 essay about the Islamist philosopher Sayyid Qutb, you really should. Excerpt:

In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely — the feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds. But Qutb evoked this feeling in a specifically Muslim fashion. It is easy to imagine that, in expounding on these themes back in the 1950’s and 60’s, Qutb had already identified the kind of personal agony that Mohamed Atta and the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 must have experienced in our own time. It was the agony of inhabiting a modern world of liberal ideas and achievements while feeling that true life exists somewhere else. It was the agony of walking down a modern sidewalk while dreaming of a different universe altogether, located in the Koranic past — the agony of being pulled this way and that. The present, the past. The secular, the sacred. The freely chosen, the religiously mandated — a life of confusion unto madness brought on, Qutb ventured, by Christian error.

What is life for? Islam has firm answers. They are mostly the wrong answers, I believe, and heaven knows I would rather live in Western liberal democracy than under an Islamist government. But it is not hard for me to see why it is more compelling to many people than the dead-end liberal nihilism under which we godless Westerners live.

Islam Vs. Liberal Democracy

Here’s another great piece by The Atlantic’s Emma Green. This time, she interviews author Shadi Hamid, a liberal Muslim who argues in his new book that we’re getting it all wrong if we try to understand Islam through the model of Western secularism. Excerpt:

Perhaps his most provocative claim is this: History will not necessarily favor the secular, liberal democracies of the West. Hamid does not believe all countries will inevitably follow a path from revolution to rational Enlightenment and non-theocratic government, nor should they. There are some basic arguments for this: Islam is growing, and in some majority-Muslim nations, huge numbers of citizens believe Islamic law should be upheld by the state. But Hamid also thinks there’s something lacking in Western democracies, that there’s a sense of overarching meaninglessness in political and cultural life in these countries that can help explain why a young Muslim who grew up in the U.K. might feel drawn to martyrdom, for example. This is not a dismissal of democracy, nor does it comprehensively explain the phenomenon of jihadism. Rather, it’s a note of skepticism about the promise of secular democracy—and the wisdom of pushing that model on other cultures and regions.

From the Q&A portion of Green’s piece:

Green: You emphasize the importance of taking the “metaphysical” propositions of Islam seriously, over and above the material circumstances of violence. What is lost in focusing on the material rather than ideological factors in the politics of Muslim countries?

Hamid: As political scientists, when we try to understand why someone joins an Islamist party, we tend to think of it as, “Is this person interested in power or community or belonging?” But sometimes it’s even simpler than that. It’s about a desire for eternal salvation. It’s about a desire to enter paradise. In the bastions of Northeastern, liberal, elite thought, that sounds bizarre. Political scientists don’t use that kind of language because, first of all, how do you measure that? But I think we should take seriously what people say they believe in.

It’s interesting that we’re having this conversation at a time when many people, including outside the Middle East, are losing faith in technocratic, liberal democracy. There’s a desire for a politics of substantive meaning. At the end of the day, people want more than economic tinkering.

I think classical liberalism makes a lot of sense intellectually. But it doesn’t necessarily fill the gap that many people in Europe and the U.S. seem to have in their own lives, whether that means [they] resort to ideology, religion, xenophobia, nationalism, populism, exclusionary politics, or anti-immigrant politics. All of these things give voters a sense that there is something greater.

Read the whole thing.  I find myself sympathizing with Hamid a lot more than I would have a few years ago, not because I have developed a new attraction to Islam, but because I have thought more deeply into the problems of liberal democracy in a post-Christian context.

Today I’m finishing up a chapter in my forthcoming Benedict Option book about sex and sexuality, and in light of the way premodern Christians saw sex, erotic love, and, well, the cosmos, modern hedonism seems like such a paltry thing. Spend enough time reading about the premodern era and you come to a realization that people today not only have no understanding of it (they think people of that time are just like us, only with worse dentistry and more church), but they have an utterly unjustified belief that the way we live today is far better than what our ancestors had.

From a material point of view, they’re certainly right. And they’re also right from the point of view of individual freedom. But what if those ends are not the most important thing to a person? What if freedom and prosperity are not enough? What if people crave meaning?

Liberal democracy says, “That’s fine. We’re here to facilitate the choices that give your life meaning.” What’s the problem with that? Theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in a 1995 essay, explains:

The moral threat [to Christianity] is not consumerism or materialism. Such characterizations of the enemy we face as Christians are far too superficial and moralistic. The problem is not just that we have become consumers of our own lives, but that we can conceive of no alternative narrative since we lack any practices that could make such a narrative intelligible. Put differently, the project of modernity was to produce people who believe they should have no story except the story they choose when they have no story. Such a story is called the story of freedom and is assumed to be irreversibly institutionalized economically as market capitalism and politically as democracy. That story and the institutions that embody it is the enemy we must attack through Christian preaching.

I am aware that such a suggestion can only be met with disbelief. You may well think I cannot be serious. Normal nihilism is so wonderfully tolerant. Surely you are not against tolerance? How can anyone be against freedom? Let me assure you I am serious, I am against tolerance, I do not believe the story of freedom is a true or good story. I do not believe it is a good story because it is so clearly a lie. The lie is exposed by simply asking, “Who told you the story that you should have no story except the story you choose when you have no story?” Why should you let that story determine your life? Simply put, the story of freedom has now become our fate.

Consider, for example, the hallmark sentence of the Casey decision on abortion: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This is exactly the view of freedom that John Paul II so eloquently condemns in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor. A view of freedom like that embodied in Casey assumes, according to John Paul II, that we must be able to create values since freedom enjoys “a primacy over truth, to the point that truth itself would be considered a creation of freedom.”

In contrast, John Paul II, who is not afraid to have enemies, reminds us that the good news of the Gospel, known through proclamation, is that we are not fated to be determined by such false stories of freedom. For the truth is that since we are God’s good creation we are not free to choose our own stories. Freedom lies not in creating our lives, but in learning to recognize our lives as a gift. We do not receive our lives as though they were a gift, but rather our lives simply are a gift: we do not exist first and then receive from God a gift. The great magic of the Gospel is providing us with the skills to acknowledge our life, as created, without resentment and regret. Such skills must be embodied in a community of people across time, constituted by practices such as baptism, preaching, and the Eucharist, which become the means for us to discover God’s story for our lives.

The very activity of preaching—the proclamation of a story that cannot be known apart from such proclamation—is an affront to the ethos of freedom. As the Church, we stand under the word because we know we are told what we otherwise could not know. We stand under the word because we know we need to be told what to do. We stand under the word because we do not believe we have minds worth making up on our own. Such guidance is particularly necessary for people like us who have been corrupted by our tolerance.

In other words, “freedom” is not the same thing as “truth,” and freedom as conceived by modernity is not the same thing as freedom proclaimed by the Bible.

Muslims, obviously, have their own story. The point is that all these stories cannot be true. Liberal democracy is meant to make it possible for people who believe competing, contradictory stories to live together in peace. It has done a good job of that. But it is being stretched past the breaking point, because it provides no satisfying answer to the question, What is life for? 

If you have not read Paul Berman’s 2003 essay about the Islamist philosopher Sayyid Qutb, you really should. Excerpt:

In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely — the feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds. But Qutb evoked this feeling in a specifically Muslim fashion. It is easy to imagine that, in expounding on these themes back in the 1950’s and 60’s, Qutb had already identified the kind of personal agony that Mohamed Atta and the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 must have experienced in our own time. It was the agony of inhabiting a modern world of liberal ideas and achievements while feeling that true life exists somewhere else. It was the agony of walking down a modern sidewalk while dreaming of a different universe altogether, located in the Koranic past — the agony of being pulled this way and that. The present, the past. The secular, the sacred. The freely chosen, the religiously mandated — a life of confusion unto madness brought on, Qutb ventured, by Christian error.

What is life for? Islam has firm answers. They are mostly the wrong answers, I believe, and heaven knows I would rather live in Western liberal democracy than under an Islamist government. But it is not hard for me to see why it is more compelling to many people than the dead-end liberal nihilism under which we godless Westerners live.

Beat Up Trump Supporters, Says Leftist

The Huffington Post publishes today an op-ed from a leftist justifying violence against Trump supporters. One reason? Trump and what he stands for must be stopped by any means necessary. For another, violence sometimes makes good things happen:

Violent resistance matters. Riots can lead to major change (*note the irony of that hyperlink going to a Vox article). It’s not liberal politicians or masses that historians identify as the spark underlying the modern movement for LGBTQ equality. Nor was it a think piece from some smarmy liberal writer. It was the people who took to the streets during the Stonewall Uprising. It was the Watts Rebellion, not the Watts Battle of Ideas, that exposed the enduring systemic neglect, poverty, inequality, and racism faced by that community. Similarly, it was the LA Uprising, not the LA Protests, that led to significant changes in the Los Angeles Police Department. More recently, the Ferguson and Baltimore Uprisings both helped prompt the Justice Department to investigate their corrupt police forces. And since we’re talking about fascism, it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t the election of a moderate centrist (hello, Hillary) or a sanguine protest that stopped its ascent in Europe. It was, primarily, the Russian military, and to a lesser extent the US military; neither of which practiced nonviolence if memory serves.

Whole thing. Remember this when right-wing mobs shut down Democratic events. Remember this when President Trump gets elected on a law and order platform, positioning himself as the only thing standing between law-abiding Americans and these violent left-wing hysterics.

What’s going to happen to these Social Justice Warriors when they find that the general public is not as spineless as college administrators?

Brock Turner’s Privilege

You’ve no doubt heard about Brock Turner, the former Stanford undergraduate and swimmer convicted of raping an unconscious woman, but only sentenced to six months by the judge. Turner’s father had pleaded with the court for leniency, saying his son’s life shouldn’t be ruined over “20 minutes of action.” Excerpts:

Oakwood, Ohio, is about as idyllic a Midwestern community as one could imagine. The streets are tree-lined, the houses charming. The kids walk to school and go home for lunch. The schools are nationally recognized. In fact, the nickname for Oakwood is “The Dome,” so sheltered are its residents from violence, poverty and inconvenient truths. I have lived here for over 20 years.

Communities like this one have a dark side, though: the conflation of achievement with being “a good kid;” the pressure to succeed; the parents who shrug when the party in their basement gets out of control (or worse yet, when they host it) because “kids are gonna drink;” the tacit understanding that rules don’t necessarily apply. The cops won’t come. The axe won’t fall.

Yet now it has.

More:

There is an Oakwood in every city; there’s a Brock Turner in every Oakwood: the “nice,” clean-cut, “happy-go-lucky,” hyper-achieving kid who’s never been told “no.” There’s nothing he can’t have, do, or be, because he is special.

If you haven’t read the long victim impact statement that “Emily Doe” made in court to her attacker, Brock Turner, you really should. It’s incredibly powerful. I never imagined that I would give a trigger warning to anything on this blog, but if you have been the victim of sexual assault, this might be hard to get through. For the rest of us, though, it’s essential reading. Excerpts:

The next thing I remember I was in a gurney in a hallway. I had dried blood and bandages on the backs of my hands and elbow. I thought maybe I had fallen and was in an admin office on campus. I was very calm and wondering where my sister was. A deputy explained I had been assaulted. I still remained calm, assured he was speaking to the wrong person. I knew no one at this party. When I was finally allowed to use the restroom, I pulled down the hospital pants they had given me, went to pull down my underwear, and felt nothing. I still remember the feeling of my hands touching my skin and grabbing nothing. I looked down and there was nothing. The thin piece of fabric, the only thing between my vagina and anything else, was missing and everything inside me was silenced. I still don’t have words for that feeling. In order to keep breathing, I thought maybe the policemen used scissors to cut them off for evidence.

Then, I felt pine needles scratching the back of my neck and started pulling them out my hair. I thought maybe, the pine needles had fallen from a tree onto my head. My brain was talking my gut into not collapsing. Because my gut was saying, help me, help me.

I shuffled from room to room with a blanket wrapped around me, pine needles trailing behind me, I left a little pile in every room I sat in. I was asked to sign papers that said “Rape Victim” and I thought something has really happened. My clothes were confiscated and I stood naked while the nurses held a ruler to various abrasions on my body and photographed them. The three of us worked to comb the pine needles out of my hair, six hands to fill one paper bag. To calm me down, they said it’s just the flora and fauna, flora and fauna. I had multiple swabs inserted into my vagina and anus, needles for shots, pills, had a Nikon pointed right into my spread legs. I had long, pointed beaks inside me and had my vagina smeared with cold, blue paint to check for abrasions.

After a few hours of this, they let me shower. I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don’t want my body anymore. I was terrified of it, I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.

On that morning, all that I was told was that I had been found behind a dumpster, potentially penetrated by a stranger, and that I should get retested for HIV because results don’t always show up immediately. But for now, I should go home and get back to my normal life. Imagine stepping back into the world with only that information. They gave me huge hugs and I walked out of the hospital into the parking lot wearing the new sweatshirt and sweatpants they provided me, as they had only allowed me to keep my necklace and shoes.

More, in response to Turner’s saying he wants to spend the rest of his days warning people that one night of drinking can ruin a life.

A life, one life, yours, you forgot about mine. Let me rephrase for you, I want to show people that one night of drinking can ruin two lives. You and me. You are the cause, I am the effect. You have dragged me through this hell with you, dipped me back into that night again and again. You knocked down both our towers, I collapsed at the same time you did. If you think I was spared, came out unscathed, that today I ride off into sunset, while you suffer the greatest blow, you are mistaken. Nobody wins. We have all been devastated, we have all been trying to find some meaning in all of this suffering. Your damage was concrete; stripped of titles, degrees, enrollment. My damage was internal, unseen, I carry it with me. You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.

See, one thing we have in common is that we were both unable to get up in the morning. I am no stranger to suffering. You made me a victim. In newspapers my name was “unconscious intoxicated woman”, ten syllables, and nothing more than that. For a while, I believed that that was all I was. I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am. That I am not just a drunk victim at a frat party found behind a dumpster, while you are the All­ American swimmer at a top university, innocent until proven guilty, with so much at stake. I am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt, my life was put on hold for over a year, waiting to figure out if I was worth something.

My independence, natural joy, gentleness, and steady lifestyle I had been enjoying became distorted beyond recognition. I became closed off, angry, self deprecating, tired, irritable, empty. The isolation at times was unbearable. You cannot give me back the life I had before that night either. While you worry about your shattered reputation, I refrigerated spoons every night so when I woke up, and my eyes were puffy from crying, I would hold the spoons to my eyes to lessen the swelling so that I could see. I showed up an hour late to work every morning, excused myself to cry in the stairwells, I can tell you all the best places in that building to cry where no one can hear you. The pain became so bad that I had to explain the private details to my boss to let her know why I was leaving. I needed time because continuing day to day was not possible. I used my savings to go as far away as I could possibly be. I did not return to work full time as I knew I’d have to take weeks off in the future for the hearing and trial, that were constantly being rescheduled. My life was put on hold for over a year, my structure had collapsed.

I can’t sleep alone at night without having a light on, like a five year old, because I have nightmares of being touched where I cannot wake up, I did this thing where I waited until the sun came up and I felt safe enough to sleep. For three months, I went to bed at six o’clock in the morning.

Read the whole thing.

Here’s the letter Brock Turner’s father filed with the court. He says Brock’s a good boy who doesn’t deserve jail, and is so upset over what’s happened to him that he can no longer enjoy steak, like he used to. Yes, he really wrote that. I can sympathize with a father trying to spare his son jail time, but this is unspeakably callous toward his son’s victim. Note that he doesn’t believe in his son’s innocence, but only that the star athlete should get probation for raping a woman.

These are people, the Turners, who don’t know what moral responsibility is.

Trump’s Identity Politics Audacity

Yesterday in a comments thread here, the reader Elrond wrote:

As always, what’s missing in these discussions is any acknowledgement of white interests. It’s all about the good for blacks and people of color. The good for white families doesn’t even enter the picture.

In case you don’t follow the comment threads, Elrond thinks that I am a total squish on racial issues. I post his comment here because it is an example of the Right using the Left’s identity politics against it.

Rusty Reno blasts Trump’s ethnicity-based criticism of the judge overseeing his Trump University case as “bullying,” but points out that it’s common on the Left to say that the personal qualities and backgrounds of a judge affect his or her jurisprudence. In 2001, for example, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who would later sit on the US Supreme Court, said in a speech:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Says Reno:

The identity politics of the last generation, a politics formulated and promoted by people in institutions run, financed, and endorsed by American liberals, has become extraordinarily influential. It provides Trump with a ready toolkit to draw from in his ongoing improv populist politics of punching and kicking adversaries.

Trump has a kind of genius. He takes his enemies’ weapons, blunts them, and then uses them as bludgeons. He even takes a curse word from the Left’s playbook, calling Judge Curiel a “hater” (in this case “a hater of Donald Trump”).

For years I’ve warned that the Left is playing a dangerous game by embracing illiberal identity politics. Last week, the liberal writer Jonathan Chait wrote about the “ideological fissure” on the Left:

Liberalism sees political rights as a positive good — rights for one are rights for all. “Democracy” means political rights for every citizen. The far left defines democracy as the triumph of the subordinate class over the privileged class. Political rights only matter insofar as they are exercised by the oppressed. The oppressor has no rights.

Why is it wrong for Trump to gripe about how a Latino judge is bound to be unfair to him by virtue of his ethnicity, but okay for Sonia Sotomayor to assert that a Latina judge could be more fair as a result of her ethnicity? Why is it wrong for white people to look out for their interests as a racial group, but okay for blacks, Hispanics, and others to do the same?

You can’t have it both ways. The Left laid the groundwork for Trump, and for his brand of race-based resentment. Many on the Left embraced that kind of politics so long as it advanced their cause. Now, not so much. I take no pleasure at all in the rise of Donald Trump, but I do find it enjoyable to observe folks on the Left expressing shock and outrage that a blustery white guy is using their own tactics against them.

It is also pleasurable to observe how Trumpism exposes the rottenness in certain institutions. Take DePaul University, for example. Recently, the pro-Trump provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos visited campus at the invitation of the College Republicans, and had his event shut down by Black Lives Matter and other Social Justice Warriors — one of whom struck him. Look:

The Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, president of the university, initially apologized in a letter to the College Republicans over the incident:

“Yesterday’s speaker was invited to speak at DePaul, and those who interrupted the speech were wrong to do so. Universities welcome speakers, give their ideas a respectful hearing, and then respond with additional speech countering the ideas. I was ashamed for DePaul University when I saw a student rip the microphone from the hands of the conference moderator and wave it in the face of our speaker,” he wrote.

He also apologized to College Republicans, writing that, “they deserved an opportunity to hear their speaker uninterrupted, and were denied it.”

But facing protest, Holtschneider walked back his apology, and subjected himself to abuse by leftist students in a town hall meeting:

“What a lot of us realize from that shocking moment last week is what we haven’t done a good job at is preparing for the divisions that can appear (from the Yiannopoulos event),” Holtschneider said. “The same dynamics that affect all of humanity can appear in the community too. That be can be transphobia to sexism to racism … all the things that we see in the world, and that we hoped as a university that we could have an all around good quality, is we’ve discovered that’s not what we’ve done.

“The message I most want to say today is one of apology,” he said later. “I’m incredibly sorry that our university wasn’t prepared in advance for the kinds of questions that are now being raised.

“Whether that’s your safety, whether that’s how we actually hold events, how we think of the creation of events, how we create the community that people feel safe long term where people are actually telling us there’s racism among us … how do we do that community better? Clearly, we haven’t done that good enough. I apologize on the behalf of DePaul.”

The gutless Father Holtschneider has given a bunch of campus left-wing thugs a great victory. They managed to shut down by force a campus political speech, and compelled the university’s president to grovel, seeking their forgiveness for allowing the event to proceed, and for initially defending the right to free speech on DePaul’s campus.

And people wonder where Trump comes from…