Rod Dreher's Blog, page 591

Catholicism, Permissiveness, & Mercy

My pal and sometime intellectual sparring partner Damon Linker makes some good points in his latest piece, which expresses frustration with conservative Catholics (and, I would suppose, fellow travelers like me). The title of the column — “The Retrograde Intransigence Of Conservative Catholics” — tells you where he’s coming from. Excerpts:

A straightforward reformer of the church seeks to change its doctrines. A stealth reformer like Francis, on the other hand, keeps the doctrines intact but invokes such concepts as mercy, conscience, and pastoral discernment to show priests that it’s perfectly acceptable to circumvent and disregard those doctrines in specific cases. A doctrine officially unenforced will soon lose its authority as a doctrine. Where once it was a commandment sanctioned by God, now it becomes an “ideal” from which we’re expected to fall short. Before long it may be treated as a suggestion. Eventually, repealing it is no longer controversial — or perhaps even necessary.

Stealth reform ultimately achieves the same reformist goal, but without inspiring the intense opposition that would follow from attempting to change the doctrine outright.

That describes precisely what Pope Francis has done on the issue of permitting divorced and remarried Catholics whose first marriages haven’t been annulled to take part in the sacrament of communion.

Damon talks about how he was attracted to Catholicism (from secular Judaism) 16 years ago, when in the midst of a profound personal crisis. It was the Catholic Church’s solidity that made it seem like an oasis to him:

For someone who feels troubled by a culture in a constant state of instability and change, the Catholic Church can feel like a rock in a stormy, windswept sea. Finally, something is steady, permanent, unchangeable, fixed, immobile. The church’s very stability can end up looking like the strongest sign and confirmation of its divinity. Everything changes! But not God and his church.

For someone drawn to Catholicism by the promise of order and stability, any sign of change in the church will be unwelcome, threatening. The fact that social and cultural mores shift and develop around it is an argument for retrenchment and improved outreach to a world tempted by sin in new ways. It certainly isn’t a sign that the church should adjust its teachings on faith and morals, accommodating them to the latest trends. Any such adjustment would risk diluting the Truth, and (perhaps just as bad) serve as a potentially fatal concession that the church’s teachings can be fallible. Once that door has been opened, there may be no way to close it. Remove even a single brick from the foundation, and the whole edifice could come crashing down.

Damon talks at some length about conservative Catholics he respects — people like Ross Douthat and Michael Brendan Dougherty — who hold to a firmly orthodox position on marriage, re-marriage, and communion.

But I can’t do it anymore. In my own case, at least, it’s come to feel more like an expression of a personal (and unhealthy) psychological need than a genuine response to and requirement of divinely revealed Truth.

Read the whole thing. 

A reader writes:

In some respects, I would say that he makes a fair point. I just wish he would have had the intellectual honesty to say that people who agree with him ought to do like he did and leave the Catholic Church. Framing it as an issue with “conservative Catholics” is unfair and wrong, because it’s really just an issue with “Catholics.” Which is fine — I am Catholic, but I am not going to demand that Damon Linker or anyone else be Catholic — but if you’re going to be Catholic, be Catholic.

That’s pretty much my view — or, if not leave the Church, then at least quit demanding that the Church change her teaching to accommodate their personal psychological needs.

This requires some explanation on my part.

In my case, one big reason I was attracted to Catholicism myself had to do with its being a solid rock in a tumultuous sea of relativism. In particular, it was Rome’s teachings on the meaning of sex and marriage that appealed to me, precisely because I was convicted of the disorder in my own pre-conversion life. Rome offered a deep and comprehensive way to understand sex and sexuality, one that was uncompromising, Biblically sound, and because of that, merciful. Chastity was the hard teaching that I did not want to accept, but I had enough intellectual honesty back then to know that it was not an option, not for Christians who were serious about faith. The Bible, and the continuous witness of the historic Christian church, was uncontestable on this point. The world does not want to hear this, and neither did I. But the Catholic Church — particularly in the person of Pope John Paul II — proclaimed this truth.

When I finally wanted God more than I wanted myself and my own will, I submitted. It was a miserable time, dying to myself in that way. There is nothing in our popular culture to support doing what I had undertaken; in fact, exactly the opposite. The thing I did not really understand until I became Catholic is that there is very little within the culture of ordinary American Catholicism to support it either.

Now, if that’s not been your experience, count yourself lucky. It was my experience in a number of parishes and places. For example, my bride-to-be and I were committed to being faithful Catholics and observing Natural Family Planning. She found a teacher in Austin, Texas, where she was finishing her degree, and I looked for one in the Archdiocese of Miami, where I was then living. I had trouble finding one, and when I finally did locate a teaching couple, they told me that they had been forbidden from teaching NFP in a number of area parishes. The parishes simply did not want to deal with presenting an unpopular teaching.

On two different occasions I got into an argument in the confessional with the priest on the other side of the screen over what’s a sin regarding sexual morality. In one case, the priest and I agreed to drop it, he said the absolution, and let me go. But it wasn’t even close to being an honest dispute. The priest flat-out rejected authoritative, binding Roman Catholic teaching. In the other case, a priest in the confessional at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC advised me to use contraception in my marriage. I challenged him, and he gave a sigh that said oh, one of those, absolved me, and sent me on my way.

Those are some brief examples, fairly outrageous ones, from an orthodox Catholic point of view. Mostly, Catholic priests and parishes don’t even talk about this at all. Their silence says everything. What it says to Catholics like I once was, both as a single man and as a married man, struggling with chastity (= rightly ordering the gift of sexuality): You’re on your own, pal. 

Speaking only for myself here, that was enough. I knew the Egypt that had once been my dwelling place, and I preferred the desert to returning there. Still, the desert was a dry and difficult land, a place to wander all alone. In my case, I never felt all that inclined to judge fellow sinners who attempted to live by the Church’s teachings and failed. So did I! Thank God for the sacrament of confession, which was a great mercy to me. What made me really angry — really angry — was the way so many priests and lay leaders within the Church either explicitly or implicitly denied the Church’s teachings. It was one thing to deny Catholics like me the help we needed to live out the Church’s teaching. It was another to spit in our faces and call us fools for trying to do the right thing.

I have been an Orthodox Christian for ten years, and I have come to appreciate better the Orthodox approach to matters like contraception and divorce. In fact, I think Orthodoxy has a more realistic and merciful approach — and in the case of communion after divorce, Pope Francis’s recent teaching is closer to the Orthodox understanding. So why does Pope Francis’s teaching worry me on behalf of my Catholic friends?

A couple of reasons come to mind. First, Orthodoxy and Catholicism have fundamentally different approaches to understanding how marriage is understood in the sacramental economy. An Orthodox priest explains it briefly like this:

For Roman Catholics, Holy Matrimony is a binding, ostensibly an unbreakable, contract. The man and the woman marry each other with the “church” (bishop or priest) standing as a witness to it. Hence, no divorce under any conditions – no divorce but annulment of the marriage contract if some canonical defect in it may be found which renders it null and void (as if it never took place).

In Orthodoxy, Holy Matrimony is not a contract; it is the mysterious or mystical union of a man and woman – in imitation of Christ and the Church – in the presence of “the whole People of God” through her bishop or his presbyter. Divorce is likewise forbidden, but, as a concession to human weakness, it is allowed for adultery. Second and third marriages are permitted – not as a legal matter – out of mercy, a further concession to human weakness (e.g., after the death of a spouse). This Sacrament, as all Sacraments or Mysteries, is completed by the Eucharist, as St. Dionysius the Areopagite says.

There’s a lot more to it than that, obviously, but the relevant point is that within the Roman Catholic sacramental system, pastors have less room to maneuver and still stay faithful to the teaching. People say to me, “But the Catholics are becoming more like the Orthodox; why doesn’t this make you happy, as an Orthodox?” The answer is because I don’t believe in consequentialism. If the Catholics are becoming more like us for reasons that violate their self-understanding and weakens their overall strength and witness, then this is at best an ambiguous outcome.

More important, at least to me, is that the Pope is loosening a teaching that is rarely proclaimed in the first place. I can see that I was too legalistic as a Catholic, and certainly the experience of suffering helped me to understand more fully that the law was made for man, not man for the law. This is why I sympathize with Francis’s pastoral instincts in Amoris Laetitia. That said, I know perfectly well how most American Catholic parishes are going to interpret and implement this teaching: as an excuse to ignore the teaching in the first place (as if most of them needed an excuse).

(To be fair, I don’t know how this is handled in most US Orthodox churches. I have been in only a handful of parishes over the last 10 years, all of them primarily convert parishes. It may well be the case that most Orthodox parishes are just as negligent as RC ones.)

Remember what Damon Linker said:

A doctrine officially unenforced will soon lose its authority as a doctrine. Where once it was a commandment sanctioned by God, now it becomes an “ideal” from which we’re expected to fall short. Before long it may be treated as a suggestion. Eventually, repealing it is no longer controversial — or perhaps even necessary.

You can teach a lie just as effectively by declining to teach the truth. That’s what I fear is going to happen in the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of Amoris Laetitia, however well-intentioned Francis is. I don’t believe that the Roman Catholic Church has never, ever changed its doctrine, and I know, it’s no longer my church, so not really my concern. But I live in this post-Christian culture too, and it bothers me a great deal to see any Christian church weaken its standards, precisely in the area of morality where the historic Christian teaching is the greatest sign of contradiction to the age.

What is the difference between mercy and permissiveness? There is one, I’m sure. Which one is Francis preaching, in effect? I’m not sure.

All Of Us, Church Going

I have been away at a funeral for the past few hours. Mike Hughes, a lawyer who was one of the pillars of our local community, died suddenly over the weekend. It was a real shock. His son Stewart, who shared a law practice with him, is our family’s lawyer; I spoke with Mike not long ago, the last time I was in their office. He was a familiar face around town. Then again, everybody’s a familiar face in a town as small as ours.

The funeral, at Grace Episcopal Church, was rich and beautiful. The Rev. Roman Roldan preached a powerful sermon, and reminded us all that life is too short to hold on to resentments. This was no commentary on the deceased, who was widely liked and admired, but a memento mori; Mike was about to retire, and he and his wife Arlene were going to be able to enjoy being together all the time. No more. You never know.

It was standing room only in the church. Watching from the back as nearly everybody went up for communion, it was amazing to me to see how much we all have aged. It’s strange how I can understand myself getting older, but I want everybody I grew up with, and their parents, to remain the same age. But we’re all sadder, saggier, more weary than we were just yesterday. Death — which is to say, Time — is the great leveler. Father Roldan’s words struck me with particular force when looking at the faces of so many people of our town who were more real to me as young adults, younger than I am now, as a matter of fact, but who are now old people. Me and my generation, we’re now middle-aged, and starting to go to each other’s parents’ funerals.

But you know what? I will be back in Grace Episcopal Church this weekend for a friend’s wedding. A couple of years ago, I was there for her father’s funeral. The wheel turns.

I know. This is a commonplace. But the passage of time, and the entrance into eternity of which death is the demarcation, never becomes a commonplace. I was thinking as we left the church singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” how brave it is just to keep living in the face of dying. And I thought: look at all of us, here. Our town.

From Philip Larkin’s great poem “Church Going”:

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

They Still Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City

Back during the anti-apartheid era, there arose a boycott movement among performing artists to avoid Sun City, a South African resort. Little Steven (Van Zandt) organized a protest video, “I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City” to publicize the boycott.

So, now we are to understand that North Carolina and Mississippi are the latter-day equivalents of Sun City. Bruce Springsteen (whose guitarist Little Steven is) started it off by canceling his NC show to protest the new law there, and now Bryan Adams has done the same in Mississippi. Jimmy Buffett is going to keep his NC date, but says he’s seriously reconsidering anything else there. (Side note: Hey Jimmy, I guess you’re going to order your Margaritaville restaurants to implement unisex bathrooms then, or to otherwise make it clear that transgenders can use the bathroom of their choice. Right? If not, why not?)

This is going to become the thing now. 

And, of course, that is their right. I think they are making a stupid mistake, but I believe they have a right to withhold their creative labor because to perform under these conditions would violate their consciences. Why do they get to do this, but florists, photographers, and bakers do not? Nobody is saying that florists, photographers, and bakers have the right to refuse all service to gay customers. The protection is to keep whatever minority of Christians in those professions who object to participating in a same-sex wedding from having to do so. I guess that some artists are more equal than others.

Here’s what I don’t get: if you check out the map on the Human Rights Campaign’s website, you’ll see that most of the states in the US have basically the same laws that North Carolina and Mississippi just passed. So why aren’t these artists boycotting the rest of America? It’s bizarre. But then, you are going nowhere if you expect logic and reason to guide this debate.

The fact is, it’s impossible to come up with a clean, perfectly logical, neutral position on public accommodations. I tend to be more libertarian on these matters, and would rather have to live with people discriminating against others, including myself, rather than have the power of the state force them to violate their own conscience, no matter how malformed I judge their conscience to be. I really do believe that a lesbian bar should have the right to refuse male customers, for example. I believe that a gay florist should have the right to refuse to provide flowers for the wedding of a Republican politician who campaigned against gay rights. Me, I would not want to buy a custom-made cake from a baker who was being compelled to sell it to me against her conscience, in part because I would be afraid that she might spit in the thing.

Anyway, I know that if this approach to the law were universal, anybody could claim a conscience exemption from having to provide any goods or services to anybody. That would be unworkable. I don’t believe that a Muslim cab driver, for example, should have the right to refuse to transport a woman, or a passenger carrying an unopened bottle of wine. But is it possible to draft a universally applicable, content-neutral version of this law? I doubt it.

Peter Tatchell, probably the UK’s most famous gay marriage campaigner, published a piece earlier this year saying that he had been wrong to support a Northern Ireland court’s ruling penalizing a Christian baker who refused to bake a gay wedding cake. Tatchell wrote:

However, the court erred by ruling that Lee was discriminated against because of his sexual orientation and political opinions.

His cake request was refused not because he was gay, but because of the message he asked for. There is no evidence that his sexuality was the reason Ashers declined his order. Despite this, Judge Isobel Brownlie said that refusing the pro-gay marriage slogan was unlawful indirect sexual orientation discrimination. On the question of political discrimination, the judge said Ashers had denied Lee service based on his request for a message supporting same-sex marriage. She noted: “If the plaintiff had ordered a cake with the words ‘support marriage’ or ‘support heterosexual marriage’ I have no doubt that such a cake would have been provided.” Brownlie thus concluded that by refusing to provide a cake with a pro-gay marriage wording Ashers had treated him less favourably, contrary to the law.

This finding of political discrimination against Lee sets a worrying precedent. Northern Ireland’s laws against discrimination on the grounds of political opinion were framed in the context of decades of conflict. They were designed to heal the sectarian divide by preventing the denial of jobs, housing and services to people because of their politics. There was never an intention that this law should compel people to promote political ideas with which they disagreed.

The judge concluded that service providers are required to facilitate any “lawful” message, even if they have a conscientious objection. This raises the question: should Muslim printers be obliged to publish cartoons of Mohammed? Or Jewish ones publish the words of a Holocaust denier? Or gay bakers accept orders for cakes with homophobic slurs? If the Ashers verdict stands it could, for example, encourage far-right extremists to demand that bakeries and other service providers facilitate the promotion of anti-migrant and anti-Muslim opinions. It would leave businesses unable to refuse to decorate cakes or print posters with bigoted messages.

In my view, it is an infringement of freedom to require businesses to aid the promotion of ideas to which they conscientiously object. Discrimination against people should be unlawful, but not against ideas.

Question for the room: In 2008, , the toddler child of white supremacists. I think the store should have had that right. I would not have made that cake had I been a baker. What do you think? If you’re going to compel a conservative Christian baker to make a cake for a gay wedding, by what right do you defend the right of anti-Nazi bakers to withhold their creative labor on principle?

UPDATE: St. Louisan nails it:

The North Carolina law is focusing where things stand.

If like the baker in Oregon you don’t want to provide services for a same sex wedding due to your deeply held beliefs, you are breaking the law and morally reprehensible. But if like Bruce Springsteen you don’t want to provide services for people who share a state with legislators whose law you dislike due to your deeply held beliefs, you are merely exercising your rights of conscience and of running your own business.

Four legs good! Two legs baa-aaa-d!

Ben Op Book Bleg

Now it can be told: the publisher of The Benedict Option will be Sentinel, the conservative imprint of Penguin Random House. The editor is Bria Sandford. Let joy be unconfined! We’re aiming to hit bookstores in Spring 2017.

I’m trying to think of a good subtitle. Something along the lines of, Keeping The Faith In A Post-Christian Age. But punchier, if possible. Any thoughts?

 

Hey, NC, No Porn For You!

O Fortuna, you have blessed me with a truly Prytanian piece of news:

XHamster just delivered a serious money shot on the North Carolina legislature.

Users from the Tar Hell State began complaining on Monday that when they tried to access the popular porn site on Monday, they were met with a blank screen.

XHamster spokesman Mike Kulich says that this is no accident, but rather a direct response to the state’s passage of what is seen as an anti-LGBT law.

“We have spent the last 50 years fighting for equality for everyone and these laws are discriminatory which XHamster.com does not tolerate,” Kulich told The Huffington Post. “Judging by the stats of what you North Carolinians watch, we feel this punishment is a severe one. We will not standby and pump revenue into a system that promotes this type of garbage. We respect all sexualities and embrace them.”

Yes, that’s the way to turn socially conservative North Carolinians against the new law: deny their local perverts access to online pornography. I love Charles C.W. Cooke’s suggestion:

One has to wonder which briar patches the bill’s opponents will throw their enemies into next. Perhaps Planned Parenthood will refuse to perform abortions until the measure is nixed?

Let us take a moment to reflect on the comic sublimity of our nation’s nitwit degeneracy: a pornographer is claiming the moral high ground. Pass the popcorn.

Walker Percy Tickets

Hey, if you’re planning to come to the Walker Percy Weekend in St. Francisville on June 3-5, please go ahead and get your tickets now. Don’t know if you saw it, but we’ve just added Father Patrick Samway, SJ, to the speaker line-up. He’s going to be speaking about Percy and Catholicism. He wrote the authorized biography of Walker Percy, and has some terrific personal stories to tell, I am informed.

I have heard from a number of you that you are planning to come, but haven’t yet bought tickets. Please don’t put it off! When the tickets are gone, they’re gone — and hotel space is limited. Keeping in mind the lodging situation, we sell only a limited number of tickets, but the longer you wait to make your plans, the fewer lodging options you have.

I’ve also kindly received permission to screen “The Seer,” the terrific new Wendell Berry documentary, from filmmakers Laura Dunn and Jef Sewell. They may be here for the festival. They’re both Percy fans, and his fiction played a role in their courtship. I can’t promise for sure that we’ll have it here — I’m going to look into how and where we can pull off the screening — but it’s looking positive. 

Y’all, come see us. The Walker Percy Weekend is always such fun. Here’s the website, where you can check out the panelists, the parties, and the food — and where you can buy tickets. The good people of Grace Episcopal Church will welcome us to a Friday night cocktail party with heavy hors d’oeuvres under the moss-strewn live oaks, in the church yard. Here’s a glimpse of the site. Hard to get more Old South than this:

Shanna Riley/Flickr

The Trumpening & The Chalkening

A group of UC San Diego students said they were deeply disturbed after anti-Mexican/pro-Donald Trump sayings were found on campus in front of a Latino community center.

The messages, some of which said “build the wall,” “deport them all,” and “Mexico will pay,” were written in chalk on a sidewalk close to theRaza Resource Centro.

According to the UCSD College Democrats Facebook page, the sentiments were written by three to five men wearing hooded sweatshirts on Friday, the night before the university’s annual Triton Day, when new students are welcomed to campus.

Hoods! There were hoods! Was it … Sataaaan the Klaaaaaan?

A Latino PhD student writes:

“If it is found that these individuals are students, we request their immediate expulsion for inciting racist hostilities on campus in violation of UCSD “Principles of Community,” wrote Aguilar. “We demand that the mental health of Latin and Black students be prioritized in the wake of persistent racist hostilities on campus.”

Because the mental health of Latin and Black students is so fragile that they cannot endure someone writing chalk messages in support of a political candidate on the sidewalk at a university. Agreed, “Deport them all, Mexico will pay” is provocative, but come on, this is a college campus. A college provost felt compelled to issue a statement that included these lines, making it into a federal case:

Students have every right to protest against this latest attempt to roil the campus, but it is also well to recall that we have learned from similarly repugnant incidents before. ERC therefore urges the campus at large to reframe this incident as an occasion to acknowledge the persistence of gross insensitivity in American society and insist on greater multicultural understanding on campus.

UCSD has long had a problem dealing with speech its student leaders dislike. Late last year, when The Koala, apparently a historically obnoxious student publication, came out with offensive content, the Student Government responded by cutting all funding of campus media rather than risk a lawsuit for targeting that particular publication. Excerpt:

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education intervened, as it has in other Koala controversies, and funding was restored to all 33 student-funded media organizations by the following month. Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of FIRE, said the student government’s new attempt to cut funding will likely end in a similar fashion.

“It’s become something of a pattern that has repeated over the years at UCSD,” he said. “And it’s almost certainly unconstitutional. It’s difficult to claim your decision to cut funding was content neutral when it’s really clearly about a particular magazine and its viewpoint. It’s wrong and foolish to cut all media funding, and ironic because by cutting funding to all publications, you’re getting rid of the funding that allows for some of the best counterspeech.”

One of the affected publications is the Muir Quarterly, the Koala’s rival humor publication. Over the years, the Muir Quarterly has used some of its funds to produce issues parodying and critiquing the Koala and its questionable attempts at humor. The publication and its staff received no advance notice about the decision to cut its funding.

Clearly the answer is to ban chalk at UCSD.

Forgotten Chastity

My traditionalist Catholic friend Michael Brendan Dougherty, like several other Catholic friends of mine, really did not like Pope Francis’s letter Amoris Laetitia. From MBD’s column:

Pope Francis’ document justifies people receiving communion in a public state of sin by saying that the Eucharist is “not a prize” for good behavior. That is true. But instead the Church has turned it into a participation trophy, something so perfunctory and ultimately meaningless that it seems just too cruel to deny it to anyone.

Perhaps worse than Pope Francis’ official invitation to sacrilege is the document’s cowardice, cynicism, and pessimism. The Church can no longer even bring itself to condemn respectable sins such as civilly approved adultery. It can barely bring itself to address a man or woman as if they had a moral conscience that could be roused by words like “sin.” Instead, it merely proposes ideals; ideals cannot be wounded by your failure to realize them. And it promises to help you out of your “irregular” situation.

This supposed paean to love is something much sadder. A Church so anxious to include and accept you that it must deny the faith that transforms and renews you. It admits that God’s commands are not just beyond our reach, but possibly destructive to follow.

But a reader of this blog sends in this fascinating take. I’ve read it, and re-read it:

Amoris Laetitia isn’t the lost battle on the grounds of communion for the divorced and remarried. It is a recognition of what we have lost. It truly acknowledges that we have lost the truth in family and marriage and because of this, we have completely seen the meaning of sex and marriage shattered in an entire generation.

I look at this as a 24 year old female who was born into this generation where marriage and sexuality has been so shattered. I can tell you, even in my traditional and conservative state of Nebraska and the Diocese of Lincoln, that I don’t know a single woman or man in a proper relationship in regards to the Christian understanding of marriage and sex. All of the women I know in my circle of friends and my younger family members practice sex before marriage. I’m not saying I have never met or read of anyone who practiced chastity but I am saying that I don’t know anyone intimately who does. The majority of my friends and family, with few exceptions, come from a practicing Christian household. Most of my female friends go to church regularly. This is the same group of women who did not disagree at dinner last week when one friend said, “Not having sex before marriage is unrealistic.”

I now embrace the virtue of chastity but I agree with them that it will be a sin that the majority of people will fail in. The effort to abstain from premarital sex would be Herculean. It is an effort that would be undermined by family, as we see with the case most parents don’t comment on their children’s relationships and have no problem moving them in together. It would be undermined by friends because very few would understand and none would support it. It is undermined by nearly everything in society.

I’m not saying everything Pope Francis wrote in Amoris Laetitia (I prefer the careful thinking of Benedict XVI) is perfect but I think it is needed because it recognizes that many people, especially the people of my generation, have lost the truth in regards to sexuality and God and marriage to the degree that it reduces our culpability in sin. Is it a sin if no one has any idea that it is a sin?

Neither the right or the left should be acting as they do. This exhortation is truly a letter for mourning and renewal. I think, especially for the attitude of the left, there should be no cause for celebration because this exhortation was only necessary because we have so lost the truth that an entire generation have basically become pagans and is now left with no idea or example on how to form a relationship according to Christ. That is a tragedy and we should all mourn it.

But the right is wrong as well. The truth is still the truth and the exhortation is a call for us to renew Christian education and formation in our lives. Even in the darkest night, there is still hope and the Church is Christ’s Church for now and eternity.

It reminds me of something that G.K. Chesterton wrote his book on St. Francis. He spoke of the Dark Ages as a purgation, a necessary expiation for the sins of the pagan world. I would say we are at the gate of another Dark Ages, another necessary purgation for another generation of pagans.

“Chastity” is not total abstinence from sex, as many people wrongly believe. Rather, it is the right use of the sexual instinct. As the young female reader avers, we have lost the idea that sex has meaning, and that marriage has anything to do with the right use of the gift of sexuality.

(By the way, an Eastern Rite Catholic theologian explains here why it’s simply not true that Orthodox Christianity regards second marriages as the equivalent of first marriages. It’s more complicated that you might think.)

The Weakness Of Reason

Jones, a reader of this blog, wrote this in response to the arguments here about pornography:

I’m starting to feel a familiar pattern across a lot of areas, just something I’m realizing personally. The longer you pay attention to these controversies, the more you start to understand history — why civilizations collapse, empires decay, wars get started. Reason is such a pathetically weak force. Our grasp on reality is so thin, and so filtered through ideology, through our own psychological needs . . . that’s all an aside (bound to sound somewhat hysterical, to those who come here to decry hysteria . . .) It doesn’t matter, in history, who has the “right answer,” or even whether anyone does. Our culture produces a lot of hyper-intellectual froth, to very little effect.

I agree. The other day at the Canadian conference where I spoke, a pastor rose during Q&A and said that he thought Peter Leithart and I were giving rational apologetics too little credit today. I responded that it’s simply not possible to reason with people who don’t share a common source of authority. But it’s even worse than that. These days, it’s quite possible to find oneself drawn into arguments with people who will share your premises, but reject your conclusion for no reason other than they don’t wish to accept what follows from those premises. Believe me, I’ve had those arguments.

People aren’t terribly interested in truth, because at worst it frightens them, and at best it makes them feel uncomfortable. Which is about the same thing.

Another reader writes:

If you missed All Things Considered on Friday afternoon because of your travels, then you missed a sterling example of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism-cum-emotivism in relation to the Pope’s new exhortation. Here is a link:

http://www.npr.org/2016/04/08/473557153/u-s-catholics-divided-over-pope-francis-family-life-guidelines

And here is the relevant quote, after a lead-in from Tom Gjelten, from a teacher at a Catholic school:

GJELTEN: Metz says she made clear that church doctrine is not changing, but she highlighted the inclusive tone of the document. She thinks it may help young Catholics consider what relationship they will have with their church.

METZ: Is this something I really want to be a part of? Is this something that resonates with my understanding of what I believe Jesus Christ taught, of what I believe this church is about? They’re asking the question in order to see where they fit in.

“Is this something that resonates with my understanding of what I believe Jesus Christ taught? Of what I believe this church is about?” Here we see MTD-emotivism at its finest: all that matters is my personal interpretation of something and how that something makes me feel, even if I am nominally a part of a religious institution with a millennia-old understanding what what Jesus Christ taught.

So now if we’re not constantly flattered, constantly entertained, constantly reassured, constantly told that our North Star should always and only be our own subjective emotional response to a thing, then we are free to leave it behind. I have no idea how you form a society or culture — much less a religious body — with this kind of attitude. And what’s troubling is how difficult it is so see any other attitude in contemporary American life.

Yes.

A Nation Within A Nation

Roger Cohen on “the Islamic State of Molenbeek,” the Brussels district that is home to Islamic terrorists:

It is hard to resist the symbolism of the Islamic State establishing a base for its murderous designs in the so-called capital of Europe at a time when the European idea is weaker than at any time since the 1950s. A jihadi loves a vacuum, as Syria demonstrates. Belgium as a state, and Belgium as the heart of the European Union are as close to a vacuum as Europe offers these days.

More:

As Julia Lynch noted recently in The Washington Post, Molenbeek’s radicalism is not new. It was “home to one of the attackers in the 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid and to the Frenchman who shot four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in August 2014. The Moroccan shooter on the Brussels-Paris Thalys train in August 2015 stayed with his sister there.”

This is an outrage. Splintered Belgium had lost control of Molenbeek. A heavily Muslim district of Brussels had in effect seceded. If this were the extent of the problem, it would be grave. But Molenbeek is just the most acute manifestation of a European failure.

Newsweek reports:

The former head of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Trevor Phillips, has admitted he “got almost everything wrong” regarding immigration in a new report, claiming Muslims are creating “nations within nations” in the West.

Phillips says followers of Islam hold very different values from the rest of society and many want to lead separate lives.

The former head of the U.K.’s equalities watchdog also advocates the monitoring of ethnic minority populations on housing estates to stop them becoming “ghetto villages.”

Phillips was the author of a 1996 report denouncing “Islamophobia” in Britain. Now he’s on the other side, saying that there’s still a lot of Islamophobia, but there’s a lot of concrete reason to be afraid of Islam in Britain. Kind of late for that, innit? There’s a new shock poll out in Britain, in advance of a documentary, reporting in part that:

• One in five Muslims in Britain never enter a non-Muslim house

• 39 per cent of Muslims, male and female, say a woman should always obey her husband

• 31 per cent of British Muslims support the right of a man to have more than one wife

• 52 per cent of Muslims did not believe that homosexuality should be legal

• 23 per cent of Muslims support the introduction of Sharia law rather than the laws laid down by parliament

The documentary will portray the U.K.’s Muslims as a “nation within a nation” that has its own geography and values.

In a piece for the Daily Mail, Phillips (who, by the way, is black) says:

Four per cent – the equivalent of more than 100,000 British Muslims – told the researchers that they had sympathy for people who take part in suicide bombing to fight injustice.

Asked if they knew that someone was involved with supporting terrorism in Syria, just one in three would report it to the police.

There is one truly terrifying finding. Muslims who have separatist views about how they want to live in Britain are far more likely to support terrorism than those who do not.

And there are far too many of the former for us to feel that we can gradually defeat the threat.

Liberal-minded Muslims have been saying for some time that our live-and-let-live attitudes have allowed a climate to grow in which extremist ideas have flourished within Britain’s Muslim communities.

Our politicians have tried to reassure us that only a tiny minority hold dangerous views.

All the while, girls are shipped off to have their genitals mutilated, young women and men are being pressured into marriages they do not want, and teenagers are being seduced into donning suicide vests or becoming jihadi brides.

We have ‘understood’ too much, and challenged too little – and in doing so are in danger of sacrificing a generation of young British people to values that are antithetical to the beliefs of most of us, including many Muslims.

How strange it is for me to read this as an American who feels like a religious minority in my own country, and who is advocating more of a separatist mentality, for the sake of our own religion. Then again, not all religions are the same. This piece brings to mind the story I’ve told in this space several times before: about an Egyptian Muslim, an immigrant to Britain, who told me a decade ago that she and her husband worried a lot about their daughters. The decadence of secular Britain, especially the pornification of the morality of young people there, appalled them, but just about every religiously observant school they turned to was run by Islamists who pushed a hardcore religious ideology they, as practicing Muslims, rejected.

It is hugely significant that Trevor Phillips, given his prominent role in denouncing “Islamophobia” and promoting multiculturalism, is now saying that his side got it almost entirely wrong. But what does that mean going forward, both for Britain and for Europe? How are they supposed to prevent Molenbeek when they keep taking in more Islamic immigrants?