Rod Dreher's Blog, page 583

Donald Trump, Reaganslayer

Ross Douthat says the results of this GOP primary process are “a defeat for True Conservatism™” — that is, the idea that all defeats of GOP candidates can be explained by their lack of ideological purity. Excerpt:

But it turned out that Republican voters didn’t want True Conservatism any more than they wanted Bushism 2.0. Maybe they would have wanted it from a candidate with more charisma and charm and less dogged unlikability. But the entire Trump phenomenon suggests otherwise, and Trump as the presumptive nominee is basically a long proof against the True Conservative theory of the Republican Party.

Trump proved that movement conservative ideas and litmus tests don’t really have any purchase on millions of Republican voters. Again and again, Cruz and the other G.O.P. candidates stressed that Trump wasn’t really a conservative; they listed his heresies, cataloged his deviations, dug up his barely buried liberal past. No doubt this case resonated with many Republicans. But not with nearly enough of them to make Cruz the nominee.

Douthat is right, and it’s hard to overstate the historic nature of Trump’s hostile takeover of his party. Well, okay, that’s a bit overstated. Trump hasn’t really taken over the party, in that a true takeover would involve gaining control of the institution. That clearly has not happened, and it’s very unlikely to happen. But what Trump has shown is how weak the GOP Establishment is. Even if Trump loses in November, they will never be restored to their former position.

I once interviewed a Dutch historian, asking him why his country, which used to be quite conservative, shifted so suddenly in the early 1960s. He said that the Second World War had shattered Dutch institutions. After the war, their leaders regathered themselves and tried to resume life as it had been before. It didn’t work. When the first strong countercultural forces asserted themselves, the institutions cracked.

I expect that whatever happens in the fall, this is going to be the fate of the GOP. The structure will be there, and so will the people, but it will be extremely vulnerable.

This is not a bad thing, in some ways. Trump, the crude destroyer, almost certainly has demolished barriers to new ideas getting a serious hearing in the GOP. A return to foreign policy realism, for example. Reformist economic policies. That sort of thing.

On the other hand, this may well be the end of social conservatism, except in the law-and-order sense. The GOP business class doesn’t want it, nor do the young. And Trump has shown that it’s possible to win without it.

Overall, though, True Conservatism™ — aggressive foreign policy, aggressive pro-corporate policy, and Christian-ish social conservatism — has been shown by Trump to have been hollow. It is interesting to contemplate what this will mean for the DC infrastructure of Conservatism, Inc. What will the activist groups do now that they are shown to be much less effective than we previously thought? Trump’s victory is not a good thing, but if it means the end of this mentality, as described back in January by Tucker Carlson, then Trump’s victory is not the worst thing:

American presidential elections usually amount to a series of overcorrections: Clinton begat Bush, who produced Obama, whose lax border policies fueled the rise of Trump. In the case of Trump, though, the GOP shares the blame, and not just because his fellow Republicans misdirected their ad buys or waited so long to criticize him. Trump is in part a reaction to the intellectual corruption of the Republican Party. That ought to be obvious to his critics, yet somehow it isn’t.

Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted.

Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents “an existential threat to conservatism.”

Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal.

It turns out the GOP wasn’t simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism (he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal too.

Hey, trying to stay positive here. You know how hard that is for me to do. Scott McConnell’s analysis helps. Excerpt:

Republican voters, told for months that Trump was not a real Republican, not a real conservative, not whatever National Review, the Wall Street Journal, or theWeekly Standard thought a Republican nominee ought to be, have said they didn’t care. Every important national pundit predicted Trump would, eventually, lose. The voters disagreed. Record Republican turnout in one state after another. Trump wins. Last night, a long resistant GOP establishment acknowledged the fact.

The first point to make is that the Republican establishment deserved to lose. Honestly, it is impossible to point to one single thing that the national Republican party has done this century for the mostly middle class voters who regularly support it. It has no legislative accomplishments, nor shown evidence of successful pushback on social issues. A large segment of its regular voters have experienced a massive sociological decline in wages, life chances, and life expectancy. The only significant thing the national GOP has accomplished since the millennium is starting the Iraq war. If ever a defeat was richly deserved, it was this one.

Who can plausibly deny it? The agony of it, though, is that it came at the hands of a man like Trump.

Pinhead Nation

So … are we having fun yet?

I’ve been eating jambalaya and drinking with old friends visiting from the Netherlands tonight. We spoke of Ignatius J. Reilly. My No. 1 Son came to the table at some point and told us that Ted Cruz had dropped out of the race, and that the Republican Party belonged to Donald Trump.

We all looked at each other as if Mama June from Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo had walked over to the table and squeezed out a massive fart.

But you know, I don’t feel nearly as bad as most of my conservative friends do tonight. It’s been clear for a long time that this was coming. The Republican Party brought it all on itself; read this if you wonder why. If you are the sort of conservative who has given up political hope for this country, the Trumpening goes down much easier than it might otherwise.

The only question is, which fate will be worse for America: President Trump, or President H. Clinton? Honestly, I don’t know. But I think back to my own opinions last summer, laughing snottily about the idea that Trump could be the GOP nominee, and I think: you pinhead. You had no idea what was happening in your own country.

Buy Zippy comix and get ready for the Benedict Option, is what I’m telling you.

UPDATE: More seriously, Matthew Sitman, on his way to visit his folks in Pennsylvania, pondered David Brooks’s recent column in which Brooks conceded that he needs to get out and see what’s going on in America more. Excerpt:

Most of all, though, what’s so striking about Brooks’s column is that he never reflects on the policies that have led us to this place. There is no reconsideration of “free trade,” no pondering our Forever War in the Middle East, no questioning what kind of healthcare system might reduce the risk of financial catastrophe for downscale Americans. Brooks talks about needing a “new national story,” but that will do precisely nothing to help those who are hurting and whose prospects have been most damaged by the economic trends of the last few decades. Brooks also claims we “need to rebuild the sense that we’re all in this together.” But why just the “sense” that this is the case? Why not have public policy reflect that we actually are all in this together?

In this, Brooks is like so many other #NeverTrump conservatives. They have joked about the size of Trump’s hands, laughed at his spray tan, and indulged a series of fantasies about how he might be stopped (“Rubio’s third place finish actually was a smashing victory!” “Trump has a ceiling of 28 percent!”). What Brooks and his fellow conservatives have not done is reconsider how their ideology and policy agenda have helped deliver us to this moment, or ask themselves how they might improve the material circumstances of those who have now turned to Trump. All the understanding Brooks can muster will prove meaningless if these deeper questions of policy are ignored.

Brooks can pay a visit to my family and friends in central Pennsylvania if he’d like—the people are friendly, and the mountains beautiful—but what they need is a political and economic system not arrayed against their interests. Until he and the elites he serves are willing to consider that possibility, the anger and frustration of so many will remain.

Yeah, that’s probably right.

View From Your Summer

First snoball of the summer. Flavor: butterbeer. “I told you I love Harry Potter,” my client said.

What Indiana’s RFRA Wrought

When I give talks about the Benedict Option, I tell people that the signal event was not Obergefell, but the Indiana RFRA debacle a couple of months earlier. That was when Big Business took sides in the culture war in a very big way — and did so against social conservatives, who lost massively.

A reader sends in this Politico piece about how the RFRA loss shattered the GOP coalition in the Hoosier State. The hook? Ted Cruz’s failure to connect with locals regarding his socially conservative message. Excerpts:

It was not supposed to go this way for Cruz. Indiana seems to be, at least from 30,000 feet, a barn-red bastion of Bible-believing IndyCar social conservatives—a place where a Washington Wiseman like Senator Richard Lugar can lose a primary to a bomb-throwing conservative like Richard Mourdock 60 to 40 percent.

But over the past year, the state’s Republican landscape has shifted. Last March, when conservative Gov. Mike Pence signed the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) into law, the once-lockstep Republican coalition here fractured, putting daylight between the state’s social conservatives, who backed Pence, from the fiscal conservatives, who have become squeamish over divisive social issues—and who long for the days when the state was ruled by pragmatic, coalition-building Republican Mitch Daniels.

Today, vast swaths of the state’s Republican electorate, from Indianapolis to West Lafayette, have retreated from the culture wars. And like the 50s-era diner itself, Cruz’s dogged socially conservative message seems anachronistic—and perhaps a little tin-eared—to these fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republicans, the kind Cruz has to win over in the state’s crucial, populous and well-heeled “doughnut” counties surrounding Indianapolis (if you remove Marion County, the remaining surrounding counties form a doughnut-shaped ring) in order to have a shot at beating Donald Trump in the primary on Tuesday.

More:

Perhaps sensing Cruz’s weakness in Central Indiana, Trump scheduled his penultimate rally on Monday night at the The Palladium, a $126 million sweeping structure built in the Italian Renaissance style in Carmel—tellingly in the heart of the doughnut counties. There, Karen Field, 50, a registered nurse, flocked to see the billionaire real estate mogul on her day off. On her blouse, she wore no fewer than five Trump buttons. In her yard, there are four Trump signs. Still for her, Trump was her second choice—behind none other than Daniels. “He was a people person,” she said of the former governor and Eli Lilly executive. “He was a business guy. I wish he would have run for president.” Field, too, turned up her nose at Cruz’s social conservative pitch on issues such as transgender bathrooms.

“Talk to me about something that’s important,” she said.

Whole story here.

Karen Field doesn’t understand why this is important, probably because Republicans haven’t been able to explain it. Then again, when you get to the point where you have to explain why it’s a bad idea to let men use the women’s restroom, you’ve already lost something big.

 

How Kulturkampf Works

Two examples, from new releases of young people’s books, sent in by two different readers this morning. First, from the YA shelf:

Amanda Hardy is the new girl in school. Like anyone else, all she wants is to make friends and fit in. But Amanda is keeping a secret, and she’s determined not to get too close to anyone.

But when she meets sweet, easygoing Grant, Amanda can’t help but start to let him into her life. As they spend more time together, she realizes just how much she is losing by guarding her heart. She finds herself yearning to share with Grant everything about herself, including her past. But Amanda’s terrified that once she tells him the truth, he won’t be able to see past it.

Because the secret that Amanda’s been keeping? It’s that at her old school, she used to be Andrew. Will the truth cost Amanda her new life, and her new love?

Meredith Russo’s If I Was Your Girl is a universal story about feeling different—and a love story that everyone will root for.

See that? It’s not enough to tolerate transgenderism, or even to affirm it. You have to be willing to date them, or you’re a bigot.

For younger readers (ages 10 and up), Lily and Dunkin, a heartwarming story about puberty, transgenderism, and disability:

Lily Jo McGrother, born Timothy McGrother, is a girl. But being a girl is not so easy when you look like a boy. Especially when you’re in the eighth grade.

Dunkin Dorfman, birth name Norbert Dorfman, is dealing with bipolar disorder and has just moved from the New Jersey town he’s called home for the past thirteen years. This would be hard enough, but the fact that he is also hiding from a painful secret makes it even worse.

One summer morning, Lily Jo McGrother meets Dunkin Dorfman, and their lives forever change.

By the way, if you’re headed to the American Library Association convention in Orlando this summer, be sure to check out featured speaker Jazz Jennings, the famed transgendered teen, who will be promoting her new autobiography. Says the ALA:

Making the journey from girl to woman is never easy—especially when you began your life in a boy’s body. Throughout, her family has supported her and stood against those who don’t understand the true meaning of tolerance and unconditional love.

This, relentlessly, is how you win a culture war.

Political Discontent In Our Time

Interesting column today from Damon Linker, talking about the forms political discontent is taking in our contemporary society. He mentions Your Working Boy here:

The anti-modern tendency also comes in a more quietistic mode that doesn’t so much seek a total revolution as respond to the impossibility of such a revolution by advocating withdrawal into an insular community that is somehow in but not of the modern world. Blogger Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” for the religious right (inspired by the work of Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre) takes this form, holding out hope that traditionalist Christians might manage to overcome their deep dissatisfaction with aspects of modern life by a severing of ties with secular trends they consider the source of their unhappiness.

Well … yes, to a point. But it’s more complicated than this, because I also agree with Damon here:

A second tradition, represented in different ways by ancient Greek tragedy, the Hebrew Bible, and Christian civilization, views discontent as an understandable response to the human condition. We are victims of fate, exiled, fallen, broken, lost, wandering through a vale of tears; no wonder we often feel confused about how to live and what would fulfill us. For the Greek tragedians, the only adequate response is resignation through the mediation of tragic drama. For the monotheistic traditions, we can find a modicum of contentment by turning our eyes to God — living according to his law (in the case of Judaism) or following Jesus (in the case of Christianity) — while we await the only thing that will relieve our suffering for good: the divine redemption that awaits us with the arrival or return of the Messiah.

The Benedict Option is a catch-all term for Christian attempts to adopt practices that make it possible to hold on to the Christian religion, and to be faithful to its precepts, in a hostile, anti-Christian culture. Because we are Christian, we know that the human condition is one of exile. There will be no utopias before the Second Coming, and the attempt to build them can only end in catastrophe. Benedict Option Christians are those who have come to understand that modernity, particularly in its current stage, poses an existential threat to traditional Christianity.

If modernity is not successfully resisted, Christianity will ultimately be assimilated and dissolved, just as modernity has done and is doing to all non-Orthodox Judaism. Here’s Jonathan S. Tobin writing about that phenomenon:

[T]his exodus of non-Orthodox Jews is largely the function of free society in which Americans have a choice as to whether they will retain their faith and the breakdown in barriers between faiths that has caused non-Jews to be willing to marry Jews. But it is exacerbated by a societal trend in which the overwhelming majority of American Jews have lost all sense of what it means to hold onto a viable Jewish identity that can be handed down to subsequent generations. If you believe, as most do, that Judaism can be summed up in the phrase “tikkun olam” — a concept about repairing the world that has become a tired cliché and been stripped of its particular Jewish meaning or, as the old quip goes, the Democratic Party platform with holidays thrown in, why be a Jew at all?

The answer from all too many liberal Jews is that there is no real reason to stick with Judaism and the result are the numbers that the Pew Center published. Sadly, both the leaders of the Conservative movement and Bachmann’s Reform movement, have taken a blasé attitude toward the Pew statistics, claiming that their impact is either being exaggerated or misinterpreted rather than raising an alarm. That sort of complacence is on display in the quotes in the Times article from both Bachmann and Reform leader Rabbi Rick Jacobs. They urge Jews not to “build a wall around their Judaism in an effort to preserve it. But it’s difficult to view the catastrophic numbers in a context other than one in which the consequences of not preserving distinctions or viewing Judaism as religious liberalism are becoming apparent. As scholars Jack Wertheimer, Steven Cohen and Steven Bayme have pointed out, the only way to preserve non-Orthodox Jewry is to emphasize both Jewish particularity as well as seek to promote endogamy.

Emphasis mine. Look, we have lost the culture for the foreseeable future. We are now fighting for our faith. The political form of that battle is fighting for the right to be left alone, but the political form is less important than the cultural form. That is, we may hold on to the right to be left alone, but if the next generations reject the faith, it’s over.

The complacency of orthodox Christians has to end. David French writes today about how wanting to avoid trouble is a disastrous strategy for us. Excerpt:

This is how culture wars are lost: through the slow accumulation of individually defensible but collectively unjustifiable decisions not to resist. It’s the decision that objecting during diversity training simply isn’t worth the hassle. It’s the decision not to say anything when you see a colleague or fellow student facing persecution because of their beliefs. It’s a life habit of always taking the path of least resistance, keeping your head down, and doing your best to preserve your own family and career. The small fights don’t matter anyway, right?

I recently spoke to a mid-level executive at a major corporation who had been forced to sit through mandatory “inclusivity” training. The topic was transgender rights, and the trainer proceeded to spout far-left ideology as fact, going so far as to label all who disagreed with the notion that a man can become a woman “transphobic.” I asked if anyone objected to any part of the training, and the response was immediate. “Are you crazy? No one wants to deal with HR.”

Hey, I get that! The wise man has to choose his battles. I’ve done it plenty of times. The problem is, you get used to compromising over and over, and finally you’ve forgotten what it is to resist evil, or why you should do so in the first place.

As I’ve said, I believe that my side has lost the culture wars decisively. The fact that the Republican Party is about to nominate Donald Trump is just one sign that social and religious conservatives have been thoroughly routed. It’s important to give up false political hope, because trying to defend ground that we have already lost blinds us to what we might yet successfully defend (such as, concentrating our efforts behind groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom and The Becket Fund For Religious Liberty, upon which everything about our future as religious dissenters depends).

False political hope also blinds us to preparing for the long siege ahead, and mounting an effective resistance. To continue the culture war metaphor, we are going to have to live for some time under occupation, but that only means that we have to find within ourselves courage, creativity, and new reserves of fidelity.

If you are the kind of conservative Christian who is used to staying quiet and hoping that this will past, you are not going to make it through what’s coming with your faith intact, and neither will your descendants. This is no time for complacency. Whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is elected this fall, orthodox Christians are facing a difficult and challenging future. The signs of the times are there, whether you want to see them or not. The more you try to convince yourself that there’s a place for you in the emerging post-Christian order, the harder it is going to be to do what you have to do for the sake of your faith and family when the time comes.

The Tuesday The Rabbi Saw Red

A reader who describes himself as a “pretty left-wing guy, a Bernie-voting vegan” who is also a rabbi has hit the wall with his liberal co-religionists. He sends in this statement by Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Reform Jewish community in the US, saying that one of the lessons of the Holocaust is that cross-crapping must be permitted. Excerpt:

The coming days will see somber commemorations, as we remember the six million Jews who died in the Shoah. The pain we feel as we remember all those unfinished lives is still numbing. The Jewish people have learned well that intolerance and bigotry undermine the sacred core of our communities, and so, wherever we see bigotry and hatred in our world, we are commanded to stand for acceptance and love.

Jewish stars contain within them two triangles, which can awaken us to awareness and activism. This year especially, let us remember all the victims of hatred and intolerance by speaking out against the many efforts underway to legally restrict the freedom and dignity of God’s LGBTQ children. Let our remembrance lead us to act courageously and consistently as we partner with the Holy One in shaping a more just, compassionate, and inclusive world for all. Our God demands nothing less.

The rabbi reader who sent this in says:

At a time when Israel is both unsafe and tearing itself apart, Judaism is on the decline in all but the ultra-Orthodox sectors, there’s vast , real problems in America. . . the largest Jewish denomination in the USA passes a Trans inclusion resolution at its Biennial and that’s what makes the news.

The rabbi also sends in this statement from a gay rabbi in North Carolina, who says that opposing LGBT is just like Jim Crow, and the NC legislation is un-Jewish because “we are all created in the image of the divine, lending each of us, in whatever bodies, genders, and expressions we choose, a spark of godliness. ”

Finally, the rabbi sends along this hathotic announcement of an upcoming Jewish human rights awards banquet in NYC, hosted by the actress who plays the rabbi in the TV series Transparent. Says the (real) rabbi:

T’ruah (name of rabbinic human rights group- great folks, do great work, name is the sound of the shofar), which does work on labor rights, Israel-Palestine, anti-torture- good stuff- apparently can’t imagine that not every rabbi who would agree that religious leaders who oppose labor exploitation and torture and solitary confinement think it’s cool that the non-Jewish actress who validates transgender ideology on TV would host the gala.

Please note: in no way am I saying that a non Jewish person shouldn’t host a Jewish fundraising gala. My point is that this actress’s sole claim to representing rabbinic or human rights values is that she plays a rabbi on TV, one who validates the left-wing cause of the day and is explicitly written to be the modern rabbi who critiques all traditional religious values.

I have been a lefty since birth, and yet every year I wonder more and more why it is that these people can’t understand how they come across to anybody outside the bubble.

This brings to mine a 2014 blog entry at Commentary by Jonathan S. Tobin, remarking on the decision by a prominent Reform rabbi to leave the rabbinate to become a social worker. Excerpt:

His decision to leave doesn’t mean that Beth Elohim will collapse. But it does show that when you start treating Judaism as merely a vehicle for liberal social activism, it’s difficult to resist the impulse to eliminate the middleman. Bachmann may not be renouncing his faith or even his calling as a rabbi but, as we learn in the Times account of his decision making process that he has discovered that he’s a lot more interested in spending his life advancing the anti-poverty agenda than in teaching Judaism to a generation of Jews who are desperately in need of leaders able to reach them.

One needs to be careful about going too far with this line of reasoning, but, it’s difficult to criticize the Times for assuming that there is a connection between the rapid decline in affiliation and synagogue attendance and the way many non-Orthodox Jews believe their faith is synonymous with liberal activism rather than a civilization and a people that transcends the particular political fashion of our own time.

Enter Tyrant

Andrew Sullivan is back, with a long reflection on how Plato predicted the rise of a figure like Donald Trump:

As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”

This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.

The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher … is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.

And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

Read the whole thing. The section of the Republic to which he refers is here, in Book VIII.

Freedom! Equality! Diversity!

The SexRev Tipping Point

Last week I was on the phone with an academic who studies family policy, and he mentioned that this new phase of the Sexual Revolution is moving much faster than he anticipated. I thought about that last night when I read the note from the NYC reader who said that her teenage daughter and the girls on her swim team were confronted with a middle-aged man walking out of the shower in the public gym the other day.

Andrew T. Walker of the Southern Baptist ERLC has also been thinking about how fast things are moving, especially at the legal and policy level. He has some sobering words for Christian parents with kids in public school. Excerpts:

Parents cannot be caught flat-footed. Action taken by the courts will inexorably work their way down to every local district and school. Given the nature of the government tying federal education funding with compliance to federal law, this “trickle down” effect will be gradual and incremental, but certain. Schools that believe themselves surrounded by a conservative community may think themselves insulated from cases like the one mentioned above, but funding in exchange for compliance will ensure that, barring a change in administration and court rulings, every school will be made to care and comply in the long-term.

Some parents may think to themselves “We live in a conservative area. The majority of teachers at our schools are Christians.” These facts will not matter. [Emphasis mine — RD] Because the federal government plays a heavy hand in public education in America, the federal government will work to make sure that its values and laws are followed. The nature of government is to ensure uniformity. And uniformity is achieved through coercion, a power that only governments possess. While the government believes its policies are merely a reflection of society’s changing views on sexuality and gender, the adoption of this secular orthodoxy will put Christians in public schools in a precarious position.

We have to see the action taken by the government for what it is: secular orthodoxy that puts Christians in a minority. Not only is the integrity of the Christian worldview at stake, but also the integrity of what it means to be made in the image of God. The idea that human nature is plastic, pliable, and subject to re-definition-at-will is a direct assault on the common good and the norms that make human flourishing possible. Christians must declare, with both compassion and respect, that re-making ourselves in our own image is the very undoing of humanity, for the disavowal of creational limits results in its own form of judgment and human misery (Rom. 1:18-25).

I find that this is something that’s nearly impossible for many Christians to grasp. They literally cannot imagine such a thing coming to their school. If this is what you think, take it from Andrew Walker, who studies this stuff for a living: you are wrong.

What’s more, this is not simply about accommodating minors who think they are transgendered. It is about radically changing the meaning of what it means to be a man, a woman, and a human being. We have gay marriage today because the meaning of sex and marriage has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. Considered one way, gay marriage is only an attempt to bring marriage laws into line with the way society’s thinking about sex and marriage has changed in the ongoing Sexual Revolution. Transgenders and their advocates are getting out ahead of society now, and trying to alter the way we think about the meaning of gender, of human nature, indeed of reality itself. Transgenderism is far more radical than homosexuality. But it’s already passing into the culture very quickly, driven by federal courts, the Obama administration, and popular media.

Trans activist Riki Wilchins, writing in the gay magazine The Advocate, says that the real goal that fellow gay and trans activists should be pushing for is “blowing up the binary.” Excerpt:

What really needs to be contested here is not just our right to use bathrooms with dignity (which would personally be very welcome), but the entire underlying hetero-binary structuring of the world queers must inhabit.

This is the real struggle, and queer activists have been talking about it at least since the 1970s of Gay Liberation, even as the movement it spawned has continued to nudge it aside.

All of which is to say, transgender advocates and their allies are doing incredible work. But they have finally and perhaps unwittingly opened the gender Pandora’s Box, and over the next few years all sorts of unexpected non-binary things, like Maria, are about to come popping out. This is going to be interesting.

That is to say, they want to destroy the concepts of male and female entirely. This is what they’re after, and they’re not going to stop until it is accomplished. If you think the federal courts or Democratic administrations are going to stop it, you have a lot more faith than I do in the moral sanity of American elites.

In his piece, Walker gives some things that Christian parents (and other moral traditionalists) with kids in public school should be thinking about. For example:

1. Christians should take stock of the cultural moment, which sounds harder than one would imagine. With parents busy being employees, spouses, and parents, it is easy to overlook the thousand and one ways that children are being morally instructed and habituated in local schools. Parents should take active roles in discovering what their children are learning and combatting errors where necessary. Christian parents will also need to pay closer attention to ways in which government works to enforce moral norms.

2. Christian parents need to establish a tipping point. This may be the most important response to consider. What actions taken by your local school will be sufficient for you to re-evaluate public education? Is having a teacher reprimand your child for his or her belief about marriage, sex, and gender acceptable? Will you allow them to be in schools where bathroom policies are based on gender identity rather than biological sex? Not establishing a tipping point could leave your child over-exposed to environments they shouldn’t be in. Not thinking about a tipping point is irresponsible and will communicate carelessness about a child’s education and Christian formation. This is not a call to exit the public schools; it is a call to vigilance. It is advisable that spouses have a candid conversation and establish a line in the sand.

 

Read the whole thing. I think it’s simply going to be a matter of time before people who want to hold on to their faith, and want their kids to be able to get an education in a morally sane environment, are going to have to take the Benedict Option. But you knew that.

Everything Walker says is important and necessary, but I would like to add something to it. I was reading this weekend a 1978 essay by theologian Stanley Hauerwas, called “Sex In Public,” a copy of which I found online here (please don’t mind the lousy formatting). In it, Hauerwas talks about how impoverished and unimaginative contemporary Christian teaching about sexuality is. He’s not defending the secular status quo, but his remarks in this nearly 40-year-old essay give us Christians today some things to think about, particularly this: Hauerwas’s contention that making Christian sexual ethics plausible to contemporary people “requires a recovery of the political function of marriage in the Christian community.”

What does he mean by this? Excerpt:

The recovery of a political vision of marriage and appreciation for the public character of sexuality are conceptually and institutionally interdependent. By calling attention to the public context for sexual behavior and ethics I am not simply reasserting the traditional concern that sex should only take place in a publicly recognizable institution, though I certainly think that is important, but 1 am making the stronger claim that any sex ethic is a political ethic. This is particularly true of Christian marriage. The vision of marriage for Christians requires and calls forth an extraordinary polity for the very reason that Christian marriage is such an extraordinary thing.

William Everett has recently argued that, in spite of what appear to be immense differences between “biologists” and “personalists” concerning sexual ethics, they share more in common than is usually noticed. For both theories are individualistic, since they focus primarily on how persons should deal with their bodies and private actions and thus fail to give adequate attention to the institutional context of sex. In contrast, Everett argues that we must see that sexuality is shaped by humanly created institutions and that this formation works for good as well as for evil. But the question is not whether “the social formation of our sexuality is good or bad, but whether the institutions in which we live are rightly ordered. An ethics of sex must, therefore, be coordinated with an ethic governing the relations among institutions familial, economic, ecclesial and political.”

What Hauerwas is saying here is that we cannot think of sex as somehow separate from the society in which we live. The problem (or, a problem) we Christians today have is ecclesiological. That is, many of us think of the church as a voluntary association of individuals who come together for their own spiritual benefit. That ecclesiology cannot possibly hope to compete with the Sexual Revolution, and with the economic forces that capitalize on it. Hauerwas:

How we order and form our lives sexually cannot be separated from the necessity of the church to chart an alternative to our culture’s dominant assumptions.

Hauerwas cites a book advocating “open marriage,” written by Nena and George O’Neill. He does not think much of the book; emphases below are mine:

Yet, ironically, the O’Neills’ account of “open marriage” requires a transformation of the self that makes intimate relationships impossible in or outside of marriage. Many conservative critics of proposals like “open marriage” tend to overlook this element, because all their attention is directed to the sexual implication – namely, that premarital and extramarital sex is not condemned. But that element has long been written into the very structure and nature of romanticism. What the “conservative” must recognize is that prior to the issue of whether premarital or extramarital sexual intercourse is wrong is the question of character: What kind of people do you want to encourage? Hidden in the question of “What ought we to do?” is always the prior question “What ought we to be?” The most disturbing thing about such proposals as the O’Neills’ is the kind of persons they wish us to be. On analysis, the person capable of open marriage turns out to be the self-interested individual presupposed and encouraged by our liberal political structure and our capitalist consumer economy.

More:

I am content at this point simply to suggest that the “romantic” assumption that sexual expression is a “private” matter in fact masks a profound commitment to the understanding of society and self sponsored by political liberalism. Thus, more and more, human relations are understood in contractual terms and the ideal self becomes the person capable of understanding everything and capable of being hurt by nothing.

Read the whole essay. What I take from it is Hauerwas’s connecting sexual individualism with both capitalism and political liberalism. Under conditions of sexual individualism, sustaining marriage becomes very difficult — and a country that cannot sustain the fidelity that makes marriage possible is a country that will throw away its capacity for social solidarity.

This is something important for Christians to think about as we prepare for the post-Christian era now upon us. We are not accustomed to pondering the connection between sexual mores and political values, as well as economic practices. But Hauerwas shows how they are related. The Church (= followers of Christ) is called to be a different society than the one in which we find ourselves embedded. If we are going to teach our children how to live by Christian sexual morality, we are going to have to teach them more comprehensively how different the City of God is from the City of Man, so to speak. It will be very difficult to teach our children to live by Christian sexual morality if we do not teach them how being a Christian requires them (us) to live by a different political and economic code within our society. We can’t catechize them one way about sex, and allow the broader culture to inculcate within them its values about how to regard ourselves as political and economic actors. Sexual individualism is the eroticization of political and economic liberalism. The post-Christian world understands this better than we Christians do.

A Country’s Slow Suicide

This reflection by Joel Hirst on Venezuela’s agony under socialism has been making the rounds. Excerpt:

I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does.

Let me tell you, there’s nothing epic about it. We who have the privilege of travel often look down in satisfaction at the ruins of ancient Greece; the Parthenon lit up in blues and greens. The acropolis. The Colosseum in Rome. We walk through the dusty streets of Timbuktu and gaze in wonder at the old mud mosques as we reflect on when these places had energy and purpose. They are not sad musings, for those of us who are tourists. Time has polished over the disaster. Now all that is left are great old buildings that tell a story of when things were remarkable – not of how they quietly fell away. “There was no reason, not really,” we tell each other as we disembark our air-conditioned buses. “These things just happen. Nothing is forever; and nobody is at fault. It’s just the way of the world,” our plastic wine glass in hand. Time ebbs and flows, slowly wearing away the foundations of a civilization until it collapses in upon itself – at least that’s what we say to comfort ourselves. There’s nothing to do about it. These things can’t be stopped. They just are.

This is what people will say in a hundred years, a thousand years about Caracas, Venezuela. Or Maracay, or Valencia, or Maracaibo. Those great sweltering South American cities with their malls and super-highways and skyscrapers and colossal stadiums. When the archeologists of the future dredge the waters of the Caribbean and find the remains of sunken boats; putting them on display in futuristic museums to tell of the time when this place had hosted a civilization. Ruins of great malls filled with water and crocodiles – maybe the ancient anaconda will have retaken their valleys; maybe the giant rats that wander the plains will have made their abodes in the once-opulent homes of the oligarchs – covering the tiles and marble with their excrement. “There was nothing that could have been done,” the futuristic tourists will also say. “The country declined – and vanished – it’s the way things go.”

We tourists are wrong.

Read the whole thing.  This was not an accident of fate or of nature. This was because of Hugo Chavez’s socialist dictatorship. More on that here. It has also been reported that Chavez’s daughter has $4 billion stashed away in foreign bank accounts, and other Chavez intimates have even more.

This is a reminder that no matter how badly screwed up our capitalist system is, it could always be worse. Much worse. I mean, it takes real skill to destroy the country with the world’s biggest oil reserves. But Chavismo has done it.