Rod Dreher's Blog, page 572

Training For Resistance

Merriam-Webster’s defines winsome as “generally pleasing and engaging often because of a childlike charm and innocence.” It’s a word you hear a lot in Evangelical circles, describing the attitude Christians should have (it is said) towards the world — this, as opposed to one of anger and dourness. And they’re right about that. It is possible, even necessary, to love Jesus without being mad about it. Christians treat others, even one’s enemies, with respect because that’s what we are commanded to do.

But if anyone thinks that winsomeness is going to disarm the despisers of Christianity, they are in for a shock. They don’t hate us for our temperament. They hate us because of what we believe.

Writing in the Washington Post, Barton Swaim wonders whether the left, having won the culture war, will be merciful. Excerpts:

True, many religious social conservatives still think it’s their duty to take America back, their disposition expressed in the fierce eloquence of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). But many do not. Many have finally given up on the whole idea of a culture war or are willing to admit they lost it. They are determined only to remain who they are and to live as amiably and productively as they can in a culture that doesn’t look like them and doesn’t belong to them.

In time, this shift in outlook may bring about a more peaceable public sphere. But that will depend on others — especially the adherents of an ascendant social progressivism — declining to take full advantage of their newfound cultural dominance. I see few signs of that, but I am hopeful all the same.

I think that’s very naive. In a review of the Evangelical law professor John Inazu’s new book, Carl Trueman explains why there is little hope for the “confident pluralism” that Inazu espouses. Excerpts:

Too little, too late might well be the book’s epitaph—though not, I hasten to add, because of any intrinsic problems with Inazu’s careful scholarship, clear argumentation, or winsome vision. The problem lies with the state of the world to which the book is addressed.

More:

Nevertheless, Inazu’s work contains two potentially fatal flaws—through no fault of his own, I might add. First, Inazu fails to see—or perhaps underestimates the fact—that dialogue and tolerant co-existence are functions of a balance of power between competing groups and/or a deeper sense of shared social identity that relativizes differences in the public square. In other words, pluralism depends in large part (as Inazu’s argument in Part Two indicates) upon the existence of a healthy culture of diversity-in-unity. How we can restore that culture once it is gone is not easy to see. And that points to the real problems we face: a notion of personhood and identity in freefall, and the breakdown of mediating structures under the weight of an aggressive government allied with big business and the law courts, educational institutions where open and respectful discussion are not valued, and a pop-culture industry that sells nothing but a Puritanical amoralism.

Thus, Inazu provides no large-scale answer to the question of how we can reinvigorate a healthy pluralism when those with their hands on the levers of power—political, economic, educational, and cultural—have nothing to gain from such.

Trueman adds that Inazu’s argument for how we can live together peaceably amid great diversity — makes a lot of sense, but that availeth naught, because there is little or no public reason anymore. We reason around a shared sense of purpose, from a shared concept of human nature and human flourishing. One cannot assume that exists anymore.

Christians who have not been and refuse to be assimilated into the new American mainstream (in which their Christianity will sooner or later be dissolved) had better realize now, in their bones, that if you say that we have lost the culture war — and we have — that does not mean that we are all now going to live in peace and reconciliation. Rather, this is going to be like living under occupation. The attempt at reconstructing orthodox Christians and driving us out of the public square (the slow de-Baathification of America, if you will) is going to continue. We have a duty to resist — politically and otherwise, especially in the courts (you should direct the tithe you normally send to the Republican Party or to conservative political action committees instead to one of the organizations fighting in court to protect religious liberty)  — but we had better get straight that putting on a happy face for instrumental reasons (e.g., because it will make them treat us better) is not going to work. Conservatives who think we can turn this around by fighting the last war, with the same objectives and the same tactics, are useless, and insofar as they unintentionally mislead others about the real nature of the war upon us now, they are worse than useless.

Take a look at this web page from Political Research Associates, a liberal group. It proclaims their dedication to fighting religious liberty claims of conservatives. In it, they’ve enlisted the skills of a collaborationist United Church of Christ minister to denounce the “Religious Right” and its campaign for “oppressive religious tyranny,” that is ultimately meant “to turn America into a theocratic state.”

This is not over. In one sense, it has only just begun. Vive la résistance.

Alarmism And Transgendered Kids

As you may have read here, I was at a conference in Baltimore over the weekend. While in the city, I met a woman who identified herself as a reader of this blog. She said, “I know people accuse you of being alarmist all the time, but let me tell you that they aren’t raising teenagers in this culture.”

The woman told me that at her kids’ high school, a shocking number of students are going to their parents asking to be put on hormones and asking for surgery, because they are transgender. This is the cool thing, and the school is falling all over itself to be supportive, and to encourage an “ally” culture.

“What about the parents?” I said.

“They’re going along with it,” she replied.

“Why on earth?!” I said.

“Because they don’t want to lose their kids. Because everything in the culture tells them they should. Because they think that’s how they love their child. And these parents usually become the fiercest LGBT advocates.”

She told me that the high school kids are now sorting themselves by where they are on the gender spectrum. She added that her brother is a liberal Democrat, an atheist, and a biologist. He tells her that he’s extremely worried about this trans thing. The science simply isn’t there to justify these radical interventions, but scientists are terrified to speak out because of the general atmosphere in academia around these issues now. And, considering what happened to Dr. Kenneth Zucker, one of the world’s top experts in gender dysphoria, there’s no wonder. Excerpts from the New York magazine report about Dr. Zucker’s firing from the Gender Identity Clinic (GIC):

The GIC, which operates out of CAMH [Center for Addiction and Mental Health], pronounced “Cam-H,” had been standing firm against a changing tide in the world of psychological treatment for children with gender dysphoria. The “gender-affirmative” approach, which focuses on identifying young transgender children and helping them socially transition — that is, express their gender to others through their everyday clothes, name changes, or other means — has been on the rise in recent years, and has become the favored protocol of many activists and clinicians. GIC clinicians, who saw clients between ages 3 and 18, had a much more cautious stance on social transitioning for their younger clients — they believed that in many cases, it was preferable to first “help children feel comfortable in their own bodies,” as they often put it, since in the GIC’s view gender is quite malleable at a young age and gender dysphoria will likely resolve itself with time.

Many activists see this approach as a rejection of young children’s transgender identities, and Zucker as its regressive standard-bearer. As a result, the GIC had been tarred for years as a “conversion” or “reparative” therapy clinic — terms which conjure images of outfits operated out of backwoods shacks in the Bible Belt. Responding to what felt like a surge in this line of criticism from activists, CAMH had agreed in February of 2015 to commission an External Review that would evaluate the clinic’s operations, and possibly, Zucker and his staffers knew, determine its future.

More:

For transgender activists in North America and around the world, the ouster of one of their biggest enemies in the field of mainstream sex research was a spectacular victory. Sweeter still, they found out later that day that CAMH would be “winding down” the GIC entirely, with an eye toward eventually retooling and reopening it with input from its critics. Years of activism, years of hearing and telling stories about what Zucker’s clinic did to vulnerable, gender-questioning young people, had finally paid off. The activists had won what seemed like a satisfying end to a simple, sad story. “Infamous Reparative Therapy Clinic For Transgender Youth Set To Close” trumpeted ThinkProgress. “Hooray! A Big, Bad Conversion Therapy Clinic For Trans Youth In Canada Is Shutting Down,” went the MTV headline. Good prevailed over evil, in other words. Those innocent children would never suffer again.

Zucker, his colleagues, and their many allies in the world of academic sex research see things differently. To them, the real scandal here is how CAMH responded to a sustained campaign of political pressure: by allowing a vital scientific question — vital not only to gender-dysphoric and transgender young people, but to anyone who is a parent or will one day become one — to be decided by activists on the basis of flimsy, anonymous allegations. They think the activists’ claims about the clinic are unfounded, and argue that the controversy has more to do with adult agendas than with genuine concern for gender-dysphoric children and youth. As Dr. Jack Drescher, a psychiatrist with a research focus on gender-identity issues, explained in an email, this fight resembles many other culture-war battles: “[C]hildren serve as proxies for the competing value systems of adults.” Indeed, some parents of GIC patients feel that as a result of the clinic’s closing, their children have been cut off from a place that was — despite rumors to the contrary — a safe, nurturing environment for young people to explore their emerging gender identities.

The External Review, Zucker’s allies believe, was just a sloppily executed pretense for submitting to political pressure. “There was likely a desire on the part of the [CAMH] administration to close the clinic, and the review was designed to allow them to do just that,” wrote Dr. Susan Bradley, who founded the GIC in 1975 before handing the reins over to Zucker about a decade later, in an email.

And if you look closely at what really happened — if you read the review (which CAMH has now pulled off of its website), speak with the activists who effectively wrote large swaths of it, examine the scientific evidence, and talk to former GIC clinicians and the parents of patients they worked with, it’s hard not to come to an uncomfortable, politically incorrect conclusion: Zucker’s defenders are right. This was a show trial.

Read the whole thing. This is what’s happening now. The current state of scientific research says that most kids’ — 75 percent — gender dysphoria resolves (the kids are likely to end up identifying as gay or bisexual). But that is extremely politically incorrect — so much so that respected scientists lose their jobs over taking that position.

And the social/cultural structure that forms around trans kids makes it hard for them to back out of the gender identity they’ve chosen for themselves:

When kids socially transition, she explained, their parents not only become their champions to teachers and other parents, but also often start engaging in trans advocacy that comes to define them in important ways. If the child starts to sense that their dysphoria is desisting, they’re faced with either sticking with a gender identity that no longer feels like it fits or telling their parents, as the clinician put it, “This whole life that you’ve created for yourself as an advocate, I don’t want to be part of that anymore.” There’s also, of course, the fact that schools and family members are part of the process too, so de-transitioning requires notifying them as well. In this view, a too-early transition really might limit a child’s future options because of the social or familial costs of transitioning back. And eventually, as a kid gets older, the prospect of nontrivial medical procedures to help them physically transition enters the picture.

This reminds me of a great 2013 article that Margaret Talbot wrote in the New Yorker, about teenagers who seek sex changes. Excerpts:

It is common today to speak of the plasticity of the adolescent brain. A recent Health and Human Services Department memo cited research suggesting that in adolescents the brain is still evolving “in its ability to organize, regulate impulses, and weigh risks and rewards.” Because brain circuitry is still falling into place, it can be difficult for adolescents “to think critically before making choices,” and they’re more driven by impulse. In the legal realm, this research has provided a scientific anchor for the idea that juvenile criminals should be treated with leniency; in the domestic realm, it has contributed to parental hovering and an acceptance of delayed adulthood. Trans politics, however, is moving in the opposite direction, toward allowing adolescents to make profound, unalterable decisions earlier.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, in its latest guidelines, still recommends that Americans wait until eighteen for genital surgery, but says that chest surgery may be done earlier. There is some scientific grounding for this position: researchers have found that, if a young child’s gender dysphoria persists past the onset of puberty, as Skylar’s did, he or she is likely to retain those feelings into adulthood.

More:

Nevertheless, some surgeons who do gender reassignment are skeptical of early surgery. Charles Garramone, a plastic surgeon in the Fort Lauderdale area, will not perform sex-reassignment operations on minors, because, he says, “patients need to have a mature outlook in terms of being able to really understand the irreversibility of this surgery.” In addition, Garramone thinks that the skeletal structure underlying the chest of a sixteen-year-old may change enough over time so that a second surgery will be required. Kathy Rumer, a plastic surgeon outside of Philadelphia who has a large transgender practice, also declines to perform reassignment surgery on minors. “I have had parents plead with me,” she says. “And I can feel for them. But I don’t want someone coming back to me when they are twenty-five saying, ‘I didn’t really want this. It was my parents.’ Adolescents are really in flux. I wouldn’t want to make a permanent change based on that stage of life, which can be difficult, no matter what you’re going through.”

Some advocates, meanwhile, want to broaden the range of sex-reassignment surgeries available to young patients. A psychologist who sees many trans clients in Northern California told me that he wants the World Professional Association to consider loosening its guidelines for youth even further. “Here’s an example,” the psychologist, who asked to remain anonymous, said. “I see a child, a trans girl, who came out at three and is now seven. She’s clearly a female. There’s no ambiguity or inconsistency. She goes to school and presents as a girl. Absolutely the only reason to hinder it would be that you need to wait for her body to get bigger, so there is enough flesh to make a new vagina.” The psychologist used to focus on adult patients, but now he sees little kids and teen-agers as well. A strong advocate of puberty blockers, he said that cross-gender hormones should be administered to kids before they’re sixteen, adding, “I’m assuming that, down the road, we’ll be looking at ways to get surgery earlier, too.”

So, it turns out the woman who told me this is onto something.

This is where we are: a culture driven by the politics of transgender activists. Look at the “model transgender policy” for schools suggested by GLSEN, the gay advocacy group that focuses on schools. This is exactly what you see local school districts adopting. Activists are writing the policies. Activists are driving the media and academic culture. Look at this thoughtful, balanced short piece

Ten, twenty years from now, there are going to be a lot of maimed, broken people staggering around. This episode in history will be looked back on with horror. We will wonder how we gave in to such madness, and harmed so many people, or allowed them to harm themselves. Doctors, activists, celebrities, the media, and politicians will bear so much guilt, but probably little blame. It will all go down the memory hole. Progressives in the future will say of the transgender madness, “How were we to know?”

If they say anything at all.

View From Your Table

Lyon, France

Writes the reader:

Quenelles et Camembert rôti.

That is, fish dumplings and baked Camembert. Ahhh, Lyon.

I have a treat for your readers. The guy who sent this in is an old and dear friend from New Orleans. In fact, he’s the friend who went with me last summer to Siena for the Palio. A fellow Francophile (was a French major at Tulane) and foodie, we stopped off in Lyon on the way back home, met James C. there, and ate and drank well. My friend loved it so much that he has taken his lovely bride there for the next couple of weeks, to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. That’s why they can’t come to Walker Percy Weekend this year. But, you and I will have a series of terrific VFYTs in the days to come.

Here’s something neat. I knew they were headed to France sometime this week, but wasn’t sure when. Yesterday, I was going up the escalator, away from the train platform, to Concourse D in the Atlanta airport. Lo, on the opposite side, there my friends were, headed down to catch the train to the international concourse, and their flight to France. As we passed, we high-fived each other. “Vive la France!” I said. So I will be living vicariously through them for the next two weeks.

The Memory Of America

Denny Burk is having a melancholy Memorial Day. After reading the Gettysburg Address, he reflected:

I read this speech with heaviness of heart this year. It seems like the nation that Lincoln describes is slipping away. It seems less a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” than it is a people of the government, by the government, for the government. As the people decrease, the state increases. And the people have decreased in virtue, historical awareness, and commitment to ordered liberty “under God.”

The 2016 race for the presidency is a direct reflection of our current malaise. As a nation, we seem to have embarked on a Commodus-like decline. Out of all the people who campaigned for president this year, the two major parties have selected candidates that are not qualified for the office they seek. Both of them have disqualified themselves on moral grounds. As such, neither of them represents the best of our traditions, but they do seem to reflect what the nation has become. And this is much more distressing than the candidates themselves.

It is the conceit of great nations to think that things will always be as they have been–that national greatness is automatic and assured. But this is alas only a conceit.

Burk, a friend and a Southern Baptist pastor and theologian, adds:

Perhaps we are in the twilight of a great Republic, but perhaps not yet. But if it is, I won’t let it go without a fight. I hope and pray you won’t either.

Read the whole thing.

Man, that gets to me, this short piece of his. It’s sobering, and captures my own sadness. What does it mean to be a patriot when the country is going mad? I wrote a while back about the words of UVA political scientist John Owen IV, from 2004. Denny’s piece sent me back to them. Owen wrote back then that 9/11 served to bring a fracturing America back together to some extent. But he added:

September 11 has clarified matters. Though American society may deploy many corrupting influences against the Church and its members, the American state, by the grace of God, mostly continues to allow the Church to do its thing. The state, being the supreme coercive power in any country, is capable in theory of forcing the Church (and other communities) to change their practices or suffer punishment. America’s religious toleration is a reason why America not only deserves our loyalty, but also merits our continuing involvement. [Emphasis mine — RD] In a democracy the state is in principle responsible to the society it governs. Were Christians to cease being Americans in any meaningful sense, to withdraw completely from society, the state would be less responsible to us, and maybe less hospitable. God may use state persecution to purify His Church, but it is a perverse and unbiblical ethics that teaches that the Church should try to force God’s hand by enabling the state to become more oppressive.

When I cited Owen’s 2004 essay, I also cited the highly controversial 1996 First Things symposium, “The End of Democracy,” which speculated on whether or not judicial oligarchy had fatally compromised US democracy. I wrote:

Nearly twenty years on, concern about the judicial usurpation of politics remain, but the situation has become more radical. What happens when democratic politics itself produces results that orthodox Christians find not simply morally disagreeable (as happens all the time), but morally unacceptable? If memory serves, Father Neuhaus concluded in the End of Democracy symposium by saying that as long as we retain the capacity to work effectively for change within the regime, we must give it our moral assent, however grudgingly.

I wonder what Neuhaus would say today, though, if he were here. Is it possible for orthodox Christians to work meaningfully for change when the demos has become so post-Christian? After all, it won’t do to blame five unelected judges for imposing same-sex marriage on America. It’s true, but it’s also true that had the Court ruled the other way, we would have had same-sex marriage from coast to coast within 20 years, via democratic vote. The situation is far more radical than Neuhaus and his First Things cohort faced in 1996.

I don’t know what the definitive answers are. But I know it is time for serious orthodox Christians to start asking ourselves these questions. Both the Iraq War debacle and Obergefell — in their particulars, and in what they symbolize — are game-changers for Christian conservatives.

At the conference I was at this past weekend, law professor Bruce Frohnen touched the third rail of the Benedict Option: if the Ben Op critique is correct, does that require us Americans to abandon belief in liberal democracy? I think this, in the end, is why the idea of the Ben Op unsettles so many conservatives. And it really is unsettling. I don’t like where the logic of all this is taking me, and I confess that I’m resisting it. But the structures of our secular liberal democracy are such that given the tectonic cultural change now under way, and the abandonment of traditional Christianity by the masses (not just the liberal elites, as conservative mythology holds), means that the constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, may soon be used to oppress Christians in substantial ways.

If it were just that — just something affecting my own tribe — that would be horrible, but tolerable, if there were some hope of reform. I think of the loyalty black Americans had to this country when its laws in many places still oppressed them terribly. They had faith that America would live up to the promises of its founding and its Constitution — and because America was still a Christian nation in the sense of Christian teaching having authority, however attenuated, in the public square, the Civil Rights movement used the rhetoric of the Bible to press their case.

Now, America is post-Christian. Even Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, concedes this in an NPR interview:

“Conservative Christians in America are undergoing a huge shift in the way we see ourselves in the world,” Mohler says. “We are on the losing side of a massive change that’s not going to be reversed, in all likelihood, in our lifetimes.”

It’s not a case of “now that we’re not in charge, we’re going to take our football and go home.” It’s far deeper and more serious than that. It has to do with John Adams’s statement that our Constitution can only work for a religious and moral people. By this he meant that people must have inner order to live in the liberty our Constitution grants them. There’s no question that Christians will have less and less influence on the social order from here on out. The greater question — a question that involves every American — is whether John Adams was right: can liberal democracy be sustained without religion?

In any case: May God bless our beloved war dead. May their memory be eternal.

At Holy Cross In Baltimore

Frederica Mathewes-Green and Your Working Boy

I spent Saturday night with my old friends Frederica Mathewes-Green and Father Gregory M-G, her husband and the pastor of Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox Church. Went to the Divine Liturgy this morning at Holy Cross, which is always a bit (more than a bit) like coming home to me — a strange experience, because I’ve only been to liturgy there a handful of times in my life, but as a reader of Frederica’s books, and as a close friend and almost daily correspondent of hers for over 20 years, Holy Cross feels like my own.

As I stood behind her in the line for Communion, I realized that if it had not been for her, I would almost certainly not be Orthodox today. She never preached to me about Orthodoxy (I was a fairly new Catholic when we first met, and she respected that). All she did was be my friend. And in that friendship, over the years, I learned about Orthodoxy. When, in 2005, I found myself shipwrecked and shattered by the collapse of my Catholic faith, I found shelter and solid ground in Orthodoxy, not because Frederica suggested it, but because she had borne such effective witness to Orthodox Christianity in her life, particularly in our friendship. She and our pal Terry Mattingly came down to Dallas, ten years ago next month, for our chrismation.

So, after communion, I prayed and thanked God for our friendship, which I depend on even more after all these years. Funny to think about, but if she had ever tried to evangelize me directly, I would have been really put off by it. She didn’t tell; she showed by her love and steady fidelity. And that made all the difference.

After the liturgy, I went to the M-G manse around the corner for a meeting with the Dante reading group. Our dear pal Emily Lowe, who became friends with Julie and me something like 18 years ago, when she was a new college student in NYC, up from Holy Cross, made an impromptu dessert for the meeting: a representation of the scene from Inferno XIX, in which the pilgrim Dante encounters the damned Pope Nicholas III, head down in a hole in the ground, with only his legs sticking out. Here’s how Gustave Doré imagined the scene:

And here’s how Emily envisioned it. I love my Holy Cross friends!

Happy Birthday Walker Percy

Today is the centenary of Walker Percy’s birth. I can’t decide if it’s a shame or a mercy that he did not live to see the political year 2016. Here’s a comment from 2009’s The Limits Of Liberal Democracy: Politics And Religion At The End Of Modernity, by my friend Scott H. Moore, a Baylor University professor of philosophy:

Walker Percy’s 1971 novel Love in the Ruins is set “in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A…” Narrator Dr. Tom More begins with his delightfully disturbing description of life in the Paradise Estates suburb, just before the “end of the world.” More tells us that:

…the scientists, who are mostly liberal and unbelievers, and the businessmen, who are mostly conservative and Christian, live side by side in Paradise Estates. Though the two make much of their differences — one speaking of “outworn dogmas and creeds,” the other of “atheism and immorality,” etcetera, etcerera — to tell the truth, I do not notice a great deal of difference between the two.

Here, according to More, “everyone gets along well.” It is a “paradise indeed, an oasis of concord in a troubled land. For our beloved old U.S.A. is in a bad way. Americans have turned against each other; race against race, right against left, believer against heathen.”

In More’s account, the Republicans, who had changed their name to the Christian Conservative Constitutional Party and even printed campaign buttons in support of their new CCCP [Note: the Cyrillic letters for USSR — RD] became the “Knothead Party” for the “most knotheaded political bungle of the century — which the conservatives, in the best tradition, turned to their own advantage, printing a million more buttons reading ‘Knotheads for America.'”

The Democrats became the new Left Party and also accepted a nickname, “LEFTPAPASANE,” an acronym which stood for what the Left believed in: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia.”

Novelist Percy has his fictional character Dr. More observe: “The center did not hold. However, the Gross National Product continues to rise.”

My dears, it will be a perverse pleasure to eat crawfish, drink beer, and talk Trump with you who are coming to Walker Percy Weekend on Friday. Last I heard, there were still some rooms available at the haunted plantation house at the north edge of town. If you’re interested in coming to town, drop me a note at rod – at – amcon — dot — mag and I’ll find out for sure who still has rooms open.

Matthew Sitman of Commonweal, and formerly of Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish blog, is coming down from NYC to give a talk about Love In The Ruins, one of his favorite novels. That means we’re going to be hearing about Percy, politics, and the Year Of Our Lord 2016. I think everybody’s going to be good and ready for the Front Porch Bourbon Tour after that. In fact, here is the whole schedule of talks (not included: the addition of a screening of The Seer, the new Wendell Berry documentary, 4pm on Friday June 3 at the West Feliciana Parish Library; you can come without having to buy a ticket to the entire festival; five dollars admission at the door). Go to the lecture schedule and see the great people coming in to give some interesting lectures. There will be the opportunity to talk to them to, over cocktails, Louisiana craft beer, and crawdads. The mighty, mighty Hot Tails is once again boiling the crawfish this year. If you came to the festival in 2014 or 2015, you know how damn good those mudbugs are.

Here is the whole schedule of drankin’ and crawfish-eatin’ social events. You can buy separate tickets just to the social stuff if you are so inclined.

If you’re having second thoughts about not coming — and I bet you are — there is still time. Get your tickets here. 

And if you can’t come but want a t-shirt, poster, etc., order here. 

Whether you can come or not to this weekend’s festival, please raise a glass tonight in honor of Walker Percy, and if you’re the praying sort, say a prayer for him.

British Christianity Death Watch

This is grim:

A landmark in national life has just been passed. For the first time in recorded history, those declaring themselves to have no religion have exceeded the number of Christians in Britain. Some 44 per cent of us regard ourselves as Christian, 8 per cent follow another religion and 48 per cent follow none. The decline of Christianity is perhaps the biggest single change in Britain over the past century. For some time, it has been a stretch to describe Britain as a Christian country. We can more accurately be described now as a secular nation with fading Christian institutions.

There is nothing new in the decline of the church, but until recently it had been a slow decline. For many decades it was possible to argue that while Christians were eschewing organised religion, they at least still regarded themselves as having some sort of spirit-ual life which related to the teachings of Jesus. Children were asked for their Christian name; conversations ended with ‘God bless’. Such phrases are now slipping out of our vocabulary — to wear a cross as jewellery is seen as making a semi-political statement. Christians are finding out what it’s like to live as a minority.

Just 15 years ago, almost three quarters of Britons still regarded themselves as Christians. If this silent majority of private, non-churchgoing believers really did exist, it has undergone a precipitous decline. Five years ago, the number of people professing no religion was only 25 per cent.

Read the whole thing.

In March, the American Journal of Sociology published research and analysis by David Voas and Mark Chaves, showing that the United States, because of its high levels of religiosity compared to other Western nations, can no longer be considered an exception to the secularization thesis. From the study:

We have established three central empirical claims. First, religiosity has been declining in the United States for decades, albeit slowly and from high levels. Second, religious commitment is weakening from one generation to the next in the countries with which the United States has most in common, and generational differences are the main driver of the aggregate decline. Third, the same pattern of cohort replacement is behind American religious decline. This decline seems to have begun with cohorts born early in the 20th century. At least since then, strong religious affiliation, church attendance, and firm belief in God have all fallen from one birth cohort to the next. None of these declines is happening fast, and levels of religious involvement in the United States remain high by world standards. But the signs of both aggregate decline and generational differences are now unmistakable.

In other words, Britain is way ahead of us, but we are on the same downward course.

As you may know, I’ve been at a conference this weekend in which the Benedict Option was the theme. I learned a lot, and got some good, constructive criticism from some of the panelists. Some others, though, seemed to me to be determined to reject the thesis without ever really grappling with it or (more to the point) without recognizing the problems it tries, however badly, to address. Stuff along the lines of:

Me: “I’m not saying that we have to all head for the hills. I’m not saying that we have to all head for the hills. Head for the hills? I’m not saying that. Some might feel called to do that, and God bless them, but I think that is neither feasible nor desirable for all of us. To repeat: I’m not saying that we all have to head for the hills.”

Critic: “You’re saying we have to head for the hills, and that’s just crazy.”

Leaving aside the legitimate criticism of the Benedict Option concept, made in good faith — and there is plenty of it, and I’m grateful for it because it helps me learn and refine the model — my guess is that a lot of people who fiercely, even angrily, reject the very idea of the Ben Op find it unthinkable that things in America are not always going to be more or less okay for us Christians. And/or, they cannot accept the possibility that whatever goes wrong cannot be fixed within the system we have now. If my analysis is correct, then a lot of things that they believe are true about the way we Americans live no longer are true, and the response required is a radical one along the lines of what I propose in the Benedict Option. Because that is emotionally and conceptually repulsive to them, the Benedict Option must be nonsense. That damn fool building the ark over there ought to wise up and realize the rain is bound to stop, and besides, it has never flooded in these parts.

Well. First, even if religious liberty jurisprudence were to freeze in place today, and we orthodox Christians were able to hold on to the liberty that we have, we would still need the Benedict Option, because the government is far from our biggest problem. We live in a culture that has shattered, and is shattering to religious truth. In other words, we live today in what Zygmunt Bauman has described as “liquid modernity”:

Liquid Modernity is sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s term for the present condition of the world as contrasted with the “solid” modernity that preceded it. According to Bauman, the passage from “solid” to “liquid” modernity created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organize their lives.

Bauman’s vision of the current world is one in which individuals must to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don’t add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like “career” and “progress” could be meaningfully applied. These fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. Liquid times are defined by uncertainty. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty. The time it takes to fully consider options and make fully formed decisions has fragmented.

This is a very different Dark Age than the one that followed the fall of the Western empire, but a Dark Age it is, insofar as you can describe a Dark Age as an Age of Chaos and Mass Forgetting. And it will require a new, and quite different, St. Benedict for Christians to resist it, and ride out the flood.

The story above about faith in Britain, taken from the Spectator, reminds me of an English friend here in America who, with her husband, left her native land to settle here, in part because she wanted to give her children a better shot at remaining Christian than they would have if they stayed in Britain. She chose to go into exile from the country of her birth, the country she loves, because she recognized that some things are more important. From the long view, she has bought her family line some time — a generation, probably two — before the same flood that has drowned Christianity in Britain reaches catastrophic levels here. We had all better make good use of the time we have been given to prepare. Voas and Chaves, who are among the world’s leading scholars on this kind of thing, say that this process, which is carried along by very deep cultural currents, starts, it is very difficult to reverse.

I would add that yes, the United States has gone through periods in its past (e.g., the Colonial period) in which religious observance was not particularly robust, and those periods were reversed through revival (Great Awakenings). Britain has had the same experience. But the condition of liquid modernity, I argue, makes it highly, highly unlikely that we are going to see a repeat. God may send us this great grace, but we must prepare for much worse. As the poet Terence addresses his jolly critic in the well-known A.E. Housman poem (cited by Hope College’s Jeff Polet in his remarks at this weekend’s conference):

Therefore, since the world has still

Much good, but much less good than ill,

And while the sun and moon endure

Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,

I’d face it as a wise man would,

And train for ill and not for good.

I am eager to hear in this thread from UK readers of this blog who are observant Christians. How do you regard the present and the future, in terms of your faith? How are you preparing your children for it?

View From Your Table

Linthicum, Maryland

Reader, I ate both of those crab cakes, the size of cat heads. With some Old Bay. Happy.

Latino SJWs For Trump

If you’re Donald Trump, you can’t buy publicity like this from his enemies in San Diego yesterday:

As hundreds of protesters outside his rally here Friday afternoon chanted obscenities, waved Mexican flags and clashed with police, Donald Trump reveled on stage in the drama his candidacy has created.

More:

One poster referenced Trump’s wife, who immigrated to the United States from Slovenia: “The Art of the Deal. Deport Melania. Legalize 11 million.” Another: “Trump, Shame of America.” Another: “Jesus would not vote for Trump.” And: “Racist, go home.”

As the rally progressed inside, a few protesters — including two women not wearing shirts — were escorted out of the convention center by police officers and cheered by the protesters. As a yellow helicopter circled above, a speaker blared a expletive-filled song about Trump. The crowd’s most popular chant was: “F— Donald Trump! F—Donald Trump!”

Dozens of local police officers and sheriff’s deputies carrying riot gear stood guard outside the convention center. As the crowd became more and more agitated, one officer said to his colleagues: “Hats on, guys, hats on.” With helmets on, the police formed long lines across from the barricaded protesters. At one point, a handful of protesters tried to rush out of their protest area and were beaten back by half a dozen police officers with batons. At least one protester then spit at a police officer and others threw water and small objects.

The crowd then started chanting: “F— the police!” One woman tried to change the vibe by chanting: “Keep the peace!”

These foul-mouthed, Mexican flag-waving, anti-police protesters are doing Trump’s work for him, more than making up for his deficits as a candidate. What did Trump talk about in his actual San Diego rally? Look:

The Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee gave a fiery speech in San Diego and sought to leverage the power of his pulpit to shame one of this city’s federal judges, Gonzalo Curiel, who is hearing a class-action lawsuit against Trump University.

Trump delivered a lengthy monologue about the years-old case involving students who claim they were defrauded by Trump’s real estate “university.” He delved so deeply into details of the case — at one point, he talked about the origin of the name of the law firm representing him — that he seemed to lose the attention of his crowd.

Trump is utterly self-involved, and lacks discipline. We know this. But what will people who weren’t at that rally know about what happened there? Threats of violence, riot police, Mexican flags waving, cursing mobs.

If I were a Democrat, I would be very, very worried about this kind of thing. I completely understand why Latinos and others would be enraged by Trump. But your emotion does not justify this kind of reaction, not if you want to defeat Trump. This is something that the SJW left never understands: how they look from outside their passionate, self-involved circles. They are as solipsistic in their own way as Trump is — but in their case, they are helping elect the man they hate.

The SJW militants are not going to be able to help themselves this summer in Cleveland. It’s going to all redound to Trump’s benefit, you watch. I’m not saying I want this to happen. I’m saying that it will happen.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I was at the rally (not a Trump fan to put it mildly, but 2 grandkids wanted to go). From what I could observe at the rally itself, on the way out afterwards, and on local TV when I got home at about the time that confrontation was escalating, the ones determined to make trouble were Anglos, not Mexican Americans. The latter, like the Trump supporters, seemed quite civil. On both sides there was some jeering back and forth, and some of the signs were offensive, but that’s about it.

Same Potties, Different Worlds

A Quartz dispatch from the front lines of the bathroom wars:

For the tens of thousands of refugee women trapped in Greece, daily life is made that much more treacherous by a very basic problem: unsafe bathrooms.

Refugee camps tend to have too few bathrooms, which are often mixed and unprotected, making them hotspots for sexual attacks on women and girls. While there are no hard statistics, reported cases include German guards at a reception center peeping at women in the bathrooms and attempted rapes at bathrooms along the refugee trail.

At Idomeni, Greece’s largest informal refugee camp, which the authorities started clearing this week, there were just 193 bathrooms and 84 showers for over 12,000 people, according to Emmanuel Massart of Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Women there told me they wouldn’t go to the bathroom alone, and not at all at night.

The lack of of safe, private washrooms feeds into a host of daily indignities, women told me.

Sounds truly horrible. How would one fix this, Quartz?

But not far from Moria there is an example of how to do it right. In Kara Tepe, an open facility for nearly 1,000 vulnerable people who have been moved from Moria, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has built a washing area with signs that clearly designate well-lit, gender-separated washing areas.

 

Wait — you’re saying that gender-segregated bathrooms make women safer and more secure? Gosh, that’s news to me, especially because I was just reading in Quartz the other day about what a great thing it is to have non-gendered, unisex bathrooms in high schools, so trans students feel safe.

So it seems that we should have gender-segregated bathrooms for the safety and comfort of women at risk of being sexually harassed or assaulted by men … except when transgendered people say their safety depends on … oh, to hell with it.

(H/T: Reader M.B.)