Rod Dreher's Blog, page 617

The Sky Is Red

A reader writes:

One aspect I find interesting is that you have clearly felt in your bones the same things Trump supporters seem to feel. However, your intuition of the moment is more religious than political in nature, thus (I think) it produced a reaction towards the BenOp as opposed to the search for the right candidate. Whether one looks to conspiracy theorists, Trump/Sanders supporters, preppers, BenOp supporters, or any number of other groups, it seems almost everyone can tell an apocalypse of some sort is coming, though everyone is reacting differently and using different language. The last two years at church, when people will say something like, “God will judge us,” I am quick to say, “He already is – this is what judgment looks like. It is not normally volcanoes and lightning bolts, flashing in an instant. It can go on for decades, and we are experiencing it already.” I think there are many common threads running through, even causing, these strains of reaction from people that may not have much in common. But all can see that the sky is red.

The reader sent that yesterday evening, and it was the first thing on my mind this morning. All can see that the sky is red. 

Last night, at bedtime, I finished reading Mary Eberstadt’s excellent book How The West Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, which I had been meaning to get to for a long time, but finally made time for as part of my Benedict Option book research. It’s stunning. Her basic thesis is that religious belief and family formation are intimately connected — hardly a controversial claim.

She says, however, that most social scientists think that the causal process goes in only one direction: having a deep commitment to religion compels one to have bigger families. While that is undoubtedly true, Eberstadt argues that the causation process goes both ways. Having big families, and growing up in a familial context, makes one more predisposed to religion.

This is not an iron law of social determinism, she’s quick to say. Some people grow up in irreligious families, or broken families, and find their way to faith; others grow up in religious families, even in strong families, and never believe, or lose their belief. Still, as a general matter, the connection between religiosity and family formation is undeniable — and Eberstadt’s contribution is to make an argument that not only does religion cause family formation, but family formation causes religion.

Her argument is not a theological one, but one made from interpreting social science data. To me, here’s the most moving part. She’s trying to get the reader to separate his views about whether or not traditional Christian sexual morality is harsh and overly burdensome, and whether or not it is a good thing that it has been greatly loosened over the last century. She wants the reader to focus on the effect this loosening has had:

 

The point is that out-of-wedlock births institutionalized on today’s scale work against the churches in a different way. Once again, at stake here are some fundamental issues of religious anthropology, or how people come to understand, believe, and practice religion in the first place — or not. And one thing that the experience of illegitimacy does is to pit a great many people’s actual experience of the world — say, of growing up with an absent or delinquent father — against the very foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition: to repeat, the notion that God can be understood as a benevolent, protecting male parent. How can that relationship between creature and creator be understood when the very word “father” may be associated more with negative than with positive characteristics?

Similarly, how can the story of the Holy Family be understood in a world where a family is increasingly said to be whatever anyone in possession of voluntary associations wants it to be? It was one thing, say, for children to understand the figure of the adoptive father Joseph at a time when most came from traditional homes, and Joseph was easily grasped as someone “like” one’s own father. But to ask children who do not have such protectors to understand what it is like to have one, and to encourage them to build their lives and souls around a concept that some will find elusive or even incredible is a very different conceptual challenge — and one that, to repeat, has not been faced by Christian leaders of the past, because it did not exist in the past on anything like today’s scale. Once again, the realities of today’s intentionally created and often fractured family life potentially impede grasping Christianity or finding it appealing, often in subtle and unexpected ways.

A couple of weeks ago, standing at the Divine Liturgy in the Wichita cathedral, I was thinking of a question a professor in the audience asked a panel the day before, about how he can talk persuasively to his college students about sexuality. They have no basis for understanding why the traditional Christian model is right, and the others are flawed, he said.

In the liturgy, it struck me that Christian spirituality is hard to understand absent the traditional model of sexuality. Mary is our model: she was the passive and willing recipient of action proposed by God the Father, an action that generated new life within her — a Life that saved humanity, Christians believe. God proposed, and Mary, by saying yes, made herself entirely receptive to His will. The Holy Spirit’s action, and Mary’s total surrender to it, even though doing so was likely to get her killed in her culture, resulted in new life. This is how spiritual fertility works, and we understand that by analogy to the traditional family.

It’s not only sexuality, though; it’s sexuality bound by a holy covenant. Yes, new life is always a sacred thing, which is why Christians believe abortion is wrong. But the ideal, the one most fitted to our created nature, is welcoming new life into a stable family covenant of one man and one woman. Eberstadt’s book cites much social science research showing that kids who grow up in a stable two-parent family are much more likely to thrive as children and as adults than those who grow up otherwise, even controlling for income. And, it appears, they stand a greater chance of embracing the Christian faith, not only because their parents may have taught it to them, but because the family’s form made them subtly but unmistakably receptive to the Christian story.

Reading this in Eberstadt, I couldn’t help thinking back to that sad dinner conversation I had a few years ago with some Evangelical college professors, who shared their concern that few of their students would ever be able to form stable families. Why? I asked.

“Because they’ve never seen what that’s like,” one of the men said. Nodding all around the table.

“But this is a Christian college,” I responded, struggling to grasp the point. “The kids who come here come out of Christian homes.”

Yes, said one professor, but that just goes to show you how deep this problem is.

Eberstadt doesn’t bring this up explicitly, only strongly implies it towards the end, but reading her book, it is impossible to avoid taking the next step. That is, she argues that religious life and familism are inseparable; the more family you have, the more God, and vice versa. What’s the next step? That once you separate sex and sexuality from God — that is, the God of the Bible — you set yourself up to lose faith. 

The sociologist Philip Rieff, in his 1966 classic The Triumph of the Therapeutic, linked the ongoing collapse of Christianity in the West to the collapse of the traditional Christian sexual ethic. As I recall, he did not explicitly say why this is so, only that the Sexual Revolution is a revolution that strikes at the heart of the social meaning of Christianity — and, he said, so many pastors and theologians don’t understand this. Remember, Rieff was a secular Jew and a professional sociologist. He didn’t have a dog in the religious fight. He simply interpreted the data that was in front of him. As I wrote in my “Sex After Christianity” essay a couple of years ago:

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the sexual revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s death as a culturally determinative force. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture—a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct. That the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise.

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.

It would be absurd to claim that Christian civilization ever achieved a golden age of social harmony and sexual bliss. It is easy to find eras in Christian history when church authorities were obsessed with sexual purity. But as Rieff recognizes, Christianity did establish a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways.

What makes our own era different from the past, says Rieff, is that we have ceased to believe in the Christian cultural framework, yet we have made it impossible to believe in any other that does what culture must do: restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes.

Rather, in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions.

Now, with that in mind, take a look at this news:

Church isn’t the only institution Millennials are avoiding or abandoning in droves, new research by The Barna Group has found.

The institution of marriage is increasingly shunned by younger Americans who in turn view sexuality as unconnected to matrimony, Barna found in “What Americans Believe About Sex,” a survey released Jan. 14.

The research explores generational attitudes about sex and marriage and, its authors concede, leaves families and churches with some pretty tough challenges in addressing cultural trends on sexuality, marriage and faith.

Christians, unsurprisingly, are generally more traditional than non-believers, the survey finds:

But even that is changing, said Joe Beam, an internationally acclaimed inspirational speaker, best-selling author and founder of Marriage Helper, Inc.

Beam told BNG that he routinely comes across Christian adults who share the sexuality values expressed in the Barna poll.

Beam said he regularly meets with groups of college-age adults and he teaches a course on sexuality at a Christian college. He finds their attitudes about sex revealing.

“They have the idea that sex is a way to get some relief, some sexual fulfilment, and if you like the person you can have some kind of sex with them,” he said. “Many of them have had sex with more than one partner.”

Many define sex only as intercourse, which itself is viewed as a bonding activity, Beam said.

As a result, he added, sex is viewed by many young people as a stress-relieving, feel-good activity that is not limited to marriage.

Many students tell him they’ve had sex already with multiple partners.

“And these are Christians,” Beam added.

And those attitudes are not limited to young Christians or young people in general. Beam said he regularly speaks at “Bible-based” churches where such views of sex are prevalent.

During a recent visit to a Bible-belt church, Beam said a group of adult women told him it’s OK to sleep with a man on the third date.

They told him that, he said, “with no reservations.”

Likewise, older adult men expressed their belief that using pornography, both alone and during sex, is “OK and healthy.”

Whole thing here.

The point is that the church is by no means immune to the revolutionary changes afoot in the broader culture. Many churches avoid talking about any of this, for fear of giving offense. Others — like the Greek Orthodox parish that knowingly communes an former priest-monk who left the priesthood and married a man — give tacit approval. The point is, in light of Eberstadt’s work, churches and parishes within churches that have lost an understanding of the integral connection between sexuality, fertility, family formation, and divine reality, are setting themselves up to lose God. It is no surprise that people, especially younger people, see that connection not as metaphysically real, but nominal — and if it’s nominal, then we can redefine it however we want to.

After all, if you’re an Evangelical, and you believe that the only thing that really matters is “accepting Jesus as your personal savior” — that is, achieving a subjective inner state — then why not sex before marriage? Why not gay families? Why not out-of-wedlock childbearing? Similarly, if you are Catholic or Orthodox, and you believe that simply being a “good person” and being a member of the church, and partaking in its rites, is sufficient, why shouldn’t a gay man civilly married to another man receive communion? What’s wrong with sex outside of marriage? And so forth. [UPDATE: Some of you are misreading the first line of this paragraph, assuming that I am saying that this is what Evangelicals believe. I’m not; I’m saying it’s a common contemporary distortion of Evangelical teaching, and is the Evangelical parallel to the Catholic/Orthodox distortion I cite in the next sentence. — RD]

The reason for this long, looooong digression is this: I believe that the collapse of the working classes, white and otherwise, is the most important political fact of our time. I don’t know that I would have said this before Trump’s rise, but I think it’s true now. That collapse has an economic base, definitely, but it is also a social collapse. Here is sociologist Brad Wilcox on Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart, which tracks the social decline of the white working class:

Thus, argues Mr. Murray in his elegiac book, the greatest source of inequality in America now is not economic; it is cultural.

He is particularly concerned with the ways in which working-class whites are losing touch with what he calls the four “founding virtues”—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion, all of which have played a vital role in the life of the republic.

Consider what has happened with marriage. The destructive family revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s has gradually eased—at least in the nation’s most privileged precincts. In the past 20 years, divorce rates have come down, marital quality (self-reported happiness in marriage) has risen and nonmarital childbearing (out-of-wedlock births) is a rare occurrence among the white upper class. Marriage is not losing ground in America’s best neighborhoods.

But it’s a very different story in blue-collar America. Since the 1980s, divorce rates have risen, marital quality has fallen and nonmarital childbearing is skyrocketing among the white lower class. Less than 5% of white college-educated women have children outside of marriage, compared with approximately 40% of white women with just a high-school diploma. The bottom line is that a growing marriage divide now runs through the heart of white America.

Mr. Murray tells similar stories about crime, religion and work. Who would have guessed, for instance, that the white upper class is now much more likely to be found in church on any given Sunday than the white working class? Or that, just before the recession struck, white men in the 30-49 age bracket with a high-school diploma were about four times more likely to have simply stopped looking for work, compared with their college-educated peers? By Mr. Murray’s account, faith and industriousness are in increasingly short supply among working-class whites.

Mr. Murray’s sobering portrait is of a nation where millions of people are losing touch with the founding virtues that have long lent American lives purpose, direction and happiness. And his book shows that many of these findings are also applicable to poor and working-class African Americans and Latinos. Mr. Murray notes that “family, vocation, faith, and community” have a “direct and strong relationship to self-reported happiness.” Not surprisingly, he shows that since the 1970s happiness has plummeted in working-class and poor communities—but not in affluent communities.

This is all true, but as David Frum pointed out in his lengthy, hard-hitting pan of the book, Murray (a libertarian) seems not to have noticed that economic changes have driven this cultural collapse. This blog entry has already grown way too long, so I don’t want to quote Frum’s review at length. Let it suffice to say that Frum doesn’t fault Murray’s conclusion that the white working class (and the working class, period) is in sharp decline, but he does fault’s Murray’s failure to see that economic policies — especially those favored by libertarians — have a lot to do with it. And he faults Murray for deciding that upper-class Americans, the winners, should do nothing more than hector the lower-class losers to shape up.

Whatever else happens from Trump’s rise, it has been a great thing that the Trump phenomenon is a bitch-slap across the face of the GOP Establishment and its think-tank auxiliary. That said, the most the political class can do to address this problem is change the economic equation to make it more possible for the working classes to thrive. It cannot directly change morals and customs. As Russell Kirk said, political problems are ultimately spiritual problems. But as Mary Eberstadt points out in a different context, the causal connection runs both ways. What mainstream liberals and mainstream conservatives, both committed to their own dogmas, don’t get is that economic and cultural structures cannot be separated; they rise or fall together.

The economy we have today makes it very hard to support the traditional family. The decline of the traditional family makes it very hard to form people capable of succeeding in the economy. The repudiation of age-old religious and cultural norms makes it hard not only to form a traditional family, but to hold beliefs necessary to form the kind of virtuous individuals who make strong families, and whose strong families make for resilient societies.

We live in a society unmoored from our past, our future, our God, and each other. And nobody really knows what to do about it. God knows our institutions do not. But I think most people sense, deep down, that this can’t last.

Red skies indeed. Night is falling. Time to shelter.

Pope To Commemorate Reformation

Not The Onion:

Nearly 500 years ago, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of a German church, beginning the Protestant Reformation that led millions to break with the Roman Catholic Church and ushered in more than a century of conflict and war.

On Monday, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis will participate in a joint Lutheran-Catholic worship service in Sweden this October, kicking off a series of events planned for 2017 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

The effort to mend relations with Protestants has been on the agenda of many popes before Francis, but it is a delicate endeavor. The worship service in Sweden was billed by its sponsors, the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation, as a “commemoration,” not as a “celebration,” in order to avoid any inappropriate note of triumphalism. Some Catholics have criticized the notion of a pope celebrating the anniversary of a schism.

Ya think? This is insane — just as insane as if Lutheran leaders showed up at a worship service to “commemorate” the Counter Reformation. I’m all for efforts to make peace among our broken Christian communions as best we can, in part because we need each other more than ever.  I don’t begrudge Protestants celebrating the Reformation at all, though I think it was a terrible tragedy (as was the Great Schism separating the Roman and the Eastern churches). It is appropriate for Protestants to celebrate throwing off the yoke of Rome. But why on earth would a Pope join in an official event marking that celebration? And he really thinks calling it a “commemoration” for the sake of diplomacy matters? Send the Lutherans your regards, offer them your prayers, but good grief, man, you are the Roman pontiff! 

I’ve been reading a lot about Reformation and Counter Reformation history in the past week. It is deeply discouraging to read the way Protestants and Catholics treated each other. Nobody has clean hands. But the many sins of both sides in the Reformation do not obviate the fact that it was about very real and irreconcilable religious ideas. Protestants may regret some of the things the Reformers did to Catholics (and to each other), but to be a Protestant must require you to believe that the Reformation was on balance a good thing. For their part, Catholics may regret much of what the Renaissance Catholic Church did to provoke the Reformation, and may regret the excesses of the Counter Reformation, but if Catholicism is true, then the Reformation was a near-apocalyptic tragedy. But the new Lutheran-Catholic common prayer service approved by Lutheran officials and the Vatican commits Catholics praying it — including, presumably, the Pope when he goes to Sweden this fall — to thank God for the gifts of the Reformation. 

How can this or any Pope do this, or approve of it? It makes no sense to me. It’s as if a man and a wife got together to commemorate the occasion of their divorce. As an ex-Catholic, now Orthodox, I can see the fruits of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Roman Catholic Church and its people. I have no problem rejoicing for sanctity when I see it among my Catholic and Protestant brothers and sisters, and praying for their needs. But I cannot imagine going to an ecumenical worship service commemorating, except in unmixed mourning, either the Reformation or the Great Schism (that is, the 1054 split between East and West). Both are immense tragedies, from my point of view, and it would be deeply weird to see Orthodox and Catholic bishops saying prayers thanking God for the “gifts” that emerged from such radical brokenness and failure.

What am I missing here?

By the way, how is the Reformation working out for Sweden? It has the lowest number of Christians of any nation in the West.  The Lutheran state church’s Bishop of Stockholm will presumably participate in the event with Pope Francis. She’s a real piece of work, that one:

The Bishop of Stockholm has proposed a church in her diocese remove all signs of the cross and put down markings showing the direction to Mecca for the benefit of Muslim worshippers.

Eva Brunne, who was made the world’s first openly lesbian bishop by the church of Sweden in 2009, and has a young son with her wife and fellow lesbian priest Gunilla Linden, made the suggestion to make those of other faiths more welcome.

The church targeted is the Seamen’s mission church in Stockholm’s eastern dockyards. The Bishop held a meeting there this year and challenged the priest to explain what he’d do if a ship’s crew came into port who weren’t Christian but wanted to pray.

Calling Muslim guests to the church “angels“, the Bishop later took to her official blog to explain that removing Christian symbols from the church and preparing the building for Muslim prayer doesn’t make a priest any less a defender of the faith. Rather, to do any less would make one “stingy towards people of other faiths”.

By the way, the Archbishop of the Church of Sweden, Mrs. Antje Jackelen, says that belief in the Virgin Birth is optional.  And here is more inspiring news about Swedish Lutheranism:

A recent survey by the Church of Sweden found that about two-thirds of the country’s 9.4 million people belong to the church. Yet only 15 percent of church members say they believe in Jesus Christ. An equal percentage of Swedes call themselves atheists. And only about 400,000 of the roughly 6.6 million members of the church say they attend services at least once a month.

 

The Catholic writer Gabriel Sanchez is deeply upset, but is trying to be Stoic about it. Excerpt:

I don’t know how much control individuals have over whether or not to be scandalized by papal missteps, but to the extent that you can suppress it, please do. There’s nothing for it. While entire websites are now devoted to lamenting Pope Francis and the Church’s heterodox hierarchy, I don’t see the point in paying them too much mind. One needn’t peruse exhaustive commentaries on what some pope in the 19th Century said as opposed to what this pope is saying to figure out that something is amiss. Even the Eastern Orthodox, who are generally ill-disposed toward Catholicism (or at least their idea of Catholicism), are starting to realize that something is rotten in Rome, and it’s not just the filioque. It doesn’t take much searching to find Orthodox commentary on the fragile “Great and Holy Council” which points to the Catholic experience of the last 50 years as a dire warning against trying to adjust to the times or become more open to “the world.” The Catholic Church is a real mess and it’s only going to get messier in the decades to come. Contrary to the opinion of some, no prelate from Africa will save Catholicism at this point in history, at least not without the assistance of divine intervention.

It’s understandable that people don’t want to think about this. Life is rough or, I should say, it’s rough trying to have a good bourgeois lifestyle going while being a good Catholic. If one is so inclined to privilege the latter over the former, then it’s going to be even harder to endure the chants and taunts of the world. Why suffer for a confession that its leaders don’t appear to take seriously?

He’s right about the Orthodox Ecumenical Council they’re talking about now. I hope it doesn’t happen at this dangerous moment in history. Vatican II shows how badly things can go awry in this godless age. Anyway, faithful Catholics are going to have to dig in and realize that they are in this together, even if their earthly shepherd has gone rogue.

A follow-up post from Gabriel Sanchez advises his fellow Catholics not to be too caught up with Francis’s antics, and not to waste time and witness yelling about them. Excerpt:

If what we have heard of Vatican politics and intrigue is true (and a great deal of it most likely is), then what we are looking at is for the Catholic Church to be saved not be some “messiah pope” (the fact anybody would hope for one is a scandal) but by the lay faithful, good priests, and the holy bishops willing to lead them through dark times by the light of Truth. The return of Christendom—if it is ever to return before the eschaton—will not come by way of top-down reconfiguration and renovations, but by the same route it came before: Prayer, penance, and perseverance from all strata of the Church and society. Can it happen? Dare we hope? Or should we remain paralyzed in a perpetual state of scandal and righteous indignation? Heaven forbid.

It’s true for the Catholics, and it’s true for the rest of us Christians, I think. That is the rationale for the Benedict Option.

 

Did St. Columba Eat Oysters?

Here’s some unexpectedly good news. Mrs. D. and I are going on a pilgrimage this summer to the Isle of Mull, in the Scottish Hebrides, led by a young Orthodox priest-monk. According to the website:

We shall visit some of the most remote and authentic places connected with early Celtic Christianity. Some of these places have been uninhabited for centuries, with no touristic or religious routes linking them to other destinations. Our pilgrimages are the only way one can visit some of these isles and pray to the Saints who lived here.

Among many other places, we shall visit Iona (Iona Abbey, Martyrs’ Bay, the Nunnery, St Oran’s Chapel, the famous Celtic High Crosses, St Columba’s Bay, the Hill of the Turning Back to Ireland, the Marble Quarry and the Machair); the ruins of St Kenneth’s monastery and the ancient hermit cells; St Brendan’s monastery on his uninhabited Isle; and some of the great Celtic Christian places on the Isle of Mull (The Nuns’ Cave, the Carsaig Arches, Kilninian etc).

Mrs. D. has been reading a lot of fiction set in Scotland, and has wanted to go on this pilgrimage for a long time. And so, off we shall go.

“I’m glad we’re doing this,” I told her last night. “I’ve wanted to go to the ancient Celtic Christian sites, but you know how I am about traveling and eating. I only want to go to places where I can eat well. Nobody thinks of Scotland as a culinary destination.”

Such is my holiness.

“Maybe they have oysters there,” she said. “It is an island, after all.”

So, to Google I went, in search of oysters on the Isle of Mull. Well, well, well, my dears, what have we here:

It turns out that not only does the Isle of Mull have a significant oyster industry, it also produces all kinds of seafood. I’ll be in heaven! I mentioned this to Father Seraphim, who leads the pilgrimage, and he responded:

Mull DOES have oysters and they are amazingly delicious. I am so happy I shall no longer have to hide when I buy them; no-one else in past pilgrimages wanted to even taste them, and I absolutely love them. They are so fresh they are still covered in seaweed; they wash and open them just there, in front of you, ten metres away from the boat.

Yes, yes, YES! An Orthodox monk who is a fellow lover of oysters! We will eat them dockside. Yes, it’s summertime, the worst time for oysters in Louisiana. But on Mull, the high doesn’t get above the low 60s.

I am quite sure that St. Columba must have been an oyster-eater. He must have. I won’t hear otherwise.

There are no more slots left in the summer pilgrimage we will take (Fr. Seraphim limits the group to 10), but there are a few more on one of the two earlier ones, if you’d like to go. Don’t you dare eat all the oysters before I get there.

This summer, I will be reading about Celtic Christianity, once I’m done with the revisions to the Benedict Option book. Please feel free to make book recommendations.

(Photo above from www.mullmonastery.com)

UPDATE:

@roddreher don’t vote for trump and you can have them for free.

— Isle of Mull Oysters (@gturnbull1) January 26, 2016

Donald Trump, Holy Fool?

In Orthodox Christianity, a “holy fool” is a type of saint, someone who appears to be absurd, but who embeds the truth in his or her own apparent madness. Is Donald Trump a political version of this? Eric Levitz points out that if Trump weren’t saying true things — things that Republicans aren’t supposed to say — he wouldn’t have gotten this far in the GOP primary. Excerpts listing what Levitt, who derides the candidate as a “narcissistic reality star,” says are Trump’s “truth bombs”:

The world would be safer if Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi were still in power.

Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi were brutal dictators. But the world would probably be a safer place if they were both still brutally dictating.

In Iraq, hundreds of thousands of people died in the wake of the American invasion. For its part, the United States lost thousands of soldiers and trillions of dollars. And the result was a decimated economy and civil society, an Iraqi government aligned with Iran, and a fascist death cult carrying out a theocratic fever dream along the country’s Syrian border.

In Libya, 400,000 people have been forced to flee their homes because of pervasive violence. The nation’s biggest cities routinely go without power for up to 18 hours a day, while oil output — and, consequently, the nation’s economic well-being — has fallen drastically from where it was during Gadhafi’s reign.

But the idea that overthrowing morally odious leaders does not always make the world a better place is irreconcilable with the Manichean fairy tale that is Republican foreign policy. So no one clapped when Trump summarized the failures of those interventions at November’s GOP debate:

“Look at Libya. Look at Iraq. Look at the mess we have after spending $2 trillion dollars, thousands of lives, wounded warriors all over the place — who I love, okay?”

And:

If we topple Bashar al-Assad, he could be replaced by something worse.

Admitting the failures of past interventions is uncouth. But suggesting that such failures should be considered when contemplating new overseas adventures is outright blasphemy. Back in November, Trump pressed that big red button:

“I don’t like Assad. Who’s going to like Assad? But, we have no idea who these people, and what they’re going to be, and what they’re going to represent. They may be far worse than Assad.”

NAFTA hurt blue-collar workers.

When the United States lowered its trade barriers in the mid-’90s, much of the GOP’s donor class benefited, while a portion of the party’s voting base was hurt. But to acknowledge this would be to acknowledge that there are instances in which the economic interests of the “job creators” and those of low-income white workers diverge — a notion distressingly evocative of the “class warfare” that the Republican Party exists to oppose. And so even though economic research has established that NAFTA drove down the wages of blue-collar workers in the industries affected, Republican presidential candidates rarely criticize the agreement. But back in September, Trump pulled the pin off a truth grenade and told 60 Minutes that the deal was “a disaster.”

And:

If the government stops subsidizing poor people’s health care, poor people will be dying in the streets.

If the government doesn’t subsidize the health care of very poor people, those people are more likely to suffer from preventable health problems. When poor people’s preventable health problems become severe, they go to hospitals, where they rack up bills they can’t afford to pay. That leads hospitals to increase charges to those who can pay, like the government. Thus, in many cases, it costs more over the long term to withhold health-care subsidies than to provide them. The only way for the government to completely wash its hands of sick poor people would be to deny the indigent access to hospitals and allow them to die in the streets. But Republicans rarely acknowledge this reality, because most of their budgetplans require cuts to health-care spending for the poor.

So when Trump said the following to Iowa radio host Simon Conway back in October, the radio station exploded in a hot white flash of truth.

“I don’t want to see people dying in the streets, Simon, and neither do you … and neither do great Republicans. I mean, the Republicans don’t want people dying in the street. There are gonna be some people that aren’t gonna be able to have — they don’t have any money!”

Whole thing here. Whatever else you think of Trump, he has liberated future conservative candidates from having to stick to the same old script, and tell the same old lies. Unfortunately, it’s no gain to trade in one set of lies for another.

‘The Revolution Is At Hand’

New poll out from CNN shows that 41 percent of Republicans nationwide favor Trump — a new high for him. Says CNN:

That more than doubles the support of his nearest competitor, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who notches 19% support in the poll. No other candidate hit double-digits. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio landed at 8%, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 6%, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 5%, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at 4%, and the rest at 3% or less.

Turns out that Trump leads in every demographic category. The only two in which he doesn’t blow everybody else out of the water is among Tea Party enthusiasts and college graduates — but even with them, he leads the pack. And nobody else can touch him when it comes to enthusiasm among voters:

And the prospect of a Trump candidacy generates more enthusiasm overall (40% of Republican voters say they would be enthusiastic about a Trump nomination) than the possibility of Cruz (25% enthusiastic) or Rubio (18% enthusiastic) at the head of the ticket.

Finally, look at this:

Trump’s dominance continues when voters assess which of the GOP candidates would best handle top issues.

Trump holds his widest advantage on handling the economy: 60% of GOP voters say Trump would best handle it, a 48-point lead over Ted Cruz. Likewise, Trump has a 55% to 16% edge on handling illegal immigration.

Read the whole thing. Here’s a good companion piece: Ryan Lizza’s long report from the campaign trail, following Trump and Cruz. These passages jumped out at me when I read it last night:

Trump’s fans tend to express little regard for political norms. They cheer at his most outlandish statements. O’Reilly asked Trump if he meant it when he said that he would “take out” the family members of terrorists. He didn’t believe that Trump would “put out hits on women and children” if he were elected. Trump replied, “I would do pretty severe stuff.” The Mesa crowd erupted in applause. “Yeah, baby!” a man near me yelled. I had never previously been to a political event at which people cheered for the murder of women and children.

This is barbarism. It really is, and it’s disgusting. That’s the kind of thing lots of people point to and dismiss the Trump people as a mob of rabble. But there’s a lot more to the Trump phenomenon:

“We’re just tired of the actions of the government nowadays,” Karon Stewart, who is fifty-nine years old, told me after a rally in Mississippi. “The simple people pretty much have been forgotten.”

She said that she has followed Trump’s tabloid life on TV, and last year, when she heard him speak about politics, she registered to vote for the first time. She was not persuaded by arguments that Trump has been disrespectful to women and would have trouble running against Hillary Clinton. “I am a woman,” she said. “I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if she was the last person on the face of the earth. She is a disgrace to womankind.”

Stewart said that Trump supporters were misunderstood. “We’re not racist,” she told me. “We’re not prejudiced. We just love everybody. But we’re tired of being run over.”

She added, “My husband is in his fifties. He’s got one leg. But he gets out there and works two almost-full-time jobs, seventeen hours every day, Monday through Friday. And he works on the weekends. But there are people out there that we’re paying welfare who’ve got two perfectly good legs, and they just won’t get up off of their tushies to get a job.”

“That’s pitiful,” her husband, Bob, who lost his leg in a construction accident, said. “I think Trump will change that.”

Let that sink in. Remember, according to the CNN poll, Trump’s strongest suit by a long shot with voters is their trust in him, above all his competitors, to handle the economy. More from Lizza’s report:

Rather than deliver ideological lectures, the G.O.P. needs to find a candidate and an agenda that can realistically address the economic anxieties of its base without succumbing to Trump-style bigotry.

After Trump’s rally in Biloxi, I talked to Joanna Patterson, who is forty-four years old. She said that she and her husband, Paul, who is forty-five and used to watch Trump on “The Apprentice,” are deeply religious Pentecostal Christians who follow the teachings of Christ’s Twelve Apostles. “We don’t believe that a woman should cut her hair. We’re like Kim—”

“The one that wouldn’t do the marriage licenses,” her husband interjected.

“Kim Davis?” I asked, referring to the Kentucky official who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses last year.

“Yes,” Patterson said. “We’re the same thing as her.” Patterson said she can pick out other Apostolics, especially women, by the way they dress—long skirts, no makeup—and she was pleasantly surprised to see that there were many at the Trump event. She conceded that Trump was not religious and hadn’t shown a commitment to any of the social issues she cared about. But she liked him because he showed “strength” and says “whatever he wants to say without having someone buffer it for him.” She explained that forthrightness, more than any particular issue, was at the foundation of her own religion.

“We like raw truth,” Patterson said. “Tell us what we need.”

Again, I refer you to the political career of Edwin W. Edwards, the four-term Louisiana governor who was wildly popular, even though he was widely known to be a womanizer, and believed to be corrupt. For decades, this frustrated Louisiana Republicans to no end. Edwin — who is a teetotaler and a non-smoker — would go to the big summer camp meeting of the Pentecostals, among the most conservative of all Louisianians, and rally them. One of this blog’s readers, citing the late Louisiana political journalist John Maginnis’s work, pointed out the other day the time in the early 1980s when both Edwards and his incumbent GOP opponent, the decent but dull Gov. Dave Treen, appeared before the camp meeting in an election year. Treen told the crowd, essentially, “I believe in the same things you believe in.” But Edwin, the womanizing crook, told them, “I am one of you.” Guess who won the crowd, and the election?

Joanna Patterson could have been at that camp meeting.

If you wonder how in the world a self-identified conservative could identify with a crude, much-married billionaire who is not particularly conservative in any conventional sense of the term, well, consider how a Louisiana Pentecostal could identify with a tomcatting gambler widely believed to be corrupt. This is what Huey P. Long did too, though he certainly had a philosophy and policies. He (accurately!) posited himself as an outsider hated by the political Establishment of his day, and rallied those who believed that that same Establishment did not have their best interests at heart.

David Brooks is freaking out, and can’t bring himself to face that this is actually happening. Excerpt:

[S]ooner or later the candidates from the governing wing of their parties will get their acts together. Marco Rubio has had a bad month, darkening his tone and trying to sound like a cut-rate version of Trump and Cruz.

Before too long Rubio will realize his first task is to rally the voters who detest or fear those men. That means running as an optimistic American nationalist with specific proposals to reform Washington and lift the working class.

If he can rally mainstream Republicans he’ll be at least tied with Trump and Cruz in the polls. Then he can counter their American decline narrative, with one of his own: This country is failing because it got too narcissistic, became too much like a reality TV show. Americans lost the ability to work constructively to get things done.

Is that a compelling narrative? Is it even a plausible one? Is it more plausible than the narrative that for a generation, the ruling elites — the Clinton Democrats and the Republicans — have presided over the systematic destruction of the working class and its culture for the sake of making very rich people even richer. The Democrats today care more about making it safe for women with penises to change in your high school daughter’s locker room and to empower liberal activists to destroy your small business and your institutions if you object to their cultural agenda. And the Republicans don’t care — they pander to religious conservatives, but the truth is otherwise, as I learned from GOP Congressional sources last fall, who told me there is zero chance that the Republican Congress will do a thing to protect religious institutions in the post-Obergefell legal environment. They are too afraid of being called bigots, and besides, big business is now on the other side. What really matters is that the world stays safe for tax cuts, free trade, and foreign wars.

David Frum’s analysis of the GOP crack-up is worth a second read. This, especially:

The angriest and most pessimistic people in America are the people we used to call Middle Americans. Middle-class and middle-aged; not rich and not poor; people who are irked when asked to press 1 for English, and who wonder howwhite male became an accusation rather than a description.

You can measure their pessimism in polls that ask about their expectations for their lives—and for those of their children. On both counts, whites without a college degree express the bleakest view. You can see the effects of their despair in the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and substance-abuse fatality among this same group, in middle age.

White Middle Americans express heavy mistrust of every institution in American society: not only government, but corporations, unions, even the political party they typically vote for—the Republican Party of Romney, Ryan, and McConnell, which they despise as a sad crew of weaklings and sellouts. They are pissed off. And when Donald Trump came along, they were the people who told the pollsters, “That’s my guy.”

And:

Yet even as the Republican Main Street protested Obamacare, it rejected the hardening ideological orthodoxy of Republican donors and elected officials. A substantial minority of Republicans—almost 30 percent—said they would welcome “heavy” taxes on the wealthy, according to Gallup. Within the party that made Paul Ryan’s entitlement-slashing budget plan a centerpiece of policy, only 21 percent favored cuts in Medicare and only 17 percent wanted to see spending on Social Security reduced, according to Pew. Less than a third of ordinary Republicans supported a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants (again according to Pew); a majority, by contrast, favored stepped-up deportation.

As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. One of the more dangerous pleasures of great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are completely wrong.

Frum says that the question facing the GOP Establishment (in whose number I would include think-tankers, professional conservatives, and sympathetic media figures) is: “What happens to an elite whose followers withdraw their assent?”

The WaPo asked Pat Buchanan why the themes he sounded in his 1990s presidential campaigns are finally mainstream, thanks to Trump. He said:

What’s different today is that the returns are in, the results are known. Everyone sees clearly now the de-industrialization of America, the cost in blood and treasure from decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the pervasive presence of illegal immigrants. What I saw at the San Diego border 25 years ago, everyone sees now on cable TV. And not just a few communities but almost every community is experiencing the social impact.

The anger and alienation that were building then have reached critical mass now, when you see Bernie Sanders running neck and neck with Hillary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire and Trump and Ted Cruz with a majority of Republican voters. Not to put too fine a point on it, the revolution is at hand.

But … but … free trade is always and everywhere good, right? It’s what the Republican Party Catechism says. It’s what the Democratic Party has said since the era of Bill Clinton. Both parties have favored deregulating Wall Street — Robert Scheer, writing from the Left, reminds us of what the Clinton-led party did for its Wall Street funders — though there are signs that Hillary is defecting from Clintonian orthodoxy.

The most shocking thing about Trump’s rise and rise is what it tells us about the crash of the conservative intellectual establishment. One more bit from Lizza:

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Trump’s rise is that the arguments from people like Kristol, Wehner, Gerson, and Will, who have spent their lives trying to define conservatism, have had so little impact. “Republicans Have Overestimated the Conservatism of the Base,” blared a recent headline in National Review bemoaning the victory of Trump’s populism. In The Week, conservative columnist Michael Brendan Dougherty recently wrote, “What so frightens the conservative movement about Trump’s success is that he reveals just how thin the support for their ideas really is.”

Just like that, it’s evaporating. Back in ’02, I learned in doing interviews and research for a story about the Netherlands that the conservatism of the country’s institutions collapsed virtually overnight in the 1960s, because pressure from the rising counterculture revealed that most people simply didn’t believe in them and their values anymore. The trauma of World War II and the Nazi occupation had shattered the social conservatism of Dutch society, and its belief in the pre-war order.

Could it be that the events of the last decade are finally taking their toll on the GOP Establishment, which gives little indication of having learned any lessons from the twin disasters of the Iraq War and the economic crash? The other day I was talking to a friend, a working-class white guy who is an Iraq War vet. When I asked him years ago what his judgment on the war was, he said simply, “A waste.” He’s a Republican. I asked him who he was backing this year. “Cruz,” he said. I didn’t have to ask why.

“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation,” said Edmund Burke. It’s true of political party establishments as well. It would have been helpful to the Republicans and to Conservatism™, Inc. to have heeded Burke’s wisdom seven or eight years ago. It’s too late now, as each day’s news cycle reveals.

Frustration & Forbearance

A reader writes:

I am a conservative Catholic and want to give you my take on Trump and conservative attacks as embodied by the National Review. I am 61 and have witnessed the 1960s counterculture march through virtually every institution in the country. Since then Republicans have won more than their fair share of Presidencies and governorships. At best these political victories have merely slowed the march of liberalism, much less defeated it or changed the trajectory (or should I say decline) of the country. The changes that have occurred in the country during my lifetime have been astonishing. I liken the Obama administration as the beginning of the final ground assault of a triumphant liberalism.

Speaking for myself I am quite ready to vote for Trump if that is what it comes down to. He may be the political equivalent of a Hail Mary pass in football, but in my view there is 5 minutes left in the fourth quarter and the country is down by three touchdowns. Running off tackle to pick up 7 yards, picking up a few first downs (what Republicans like to describe as governing) is not what the historical moment calls for. That is why I have no inclination to vote for any of the other candidates (excepting  perhaps Cruz, though he has issues of his own) whether they are more electable or not. As the past 50 years has shown, winning is not all that matters.

Trump has his faults no doubt. I cringe at his insults and low blows and given his past he is something of a crapshoot. Nonetheless, he is singularly admirable in his courage in the face of the liberal media and political correctness, and his instincts are sound on the central importance of immigration to the security, national identity (such that it still exists) and fortunes of the working class, the rot and incompetence of the federal government, and the folly of conservative military adventurism. Plus, his personality and strength of character leads one to hope that he won’t go native should he take up residence in the White House.

Lastly, I have this to say to those missionary conservatives who want to export our values and back it up with military force. Conservatives are fond of saying to older democratic voters that the Democratic party is no longer the party of Franklin Roosevelt. Conservatives need to realize that the US is no longer the country of Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart. Fight for and protect our country when attacked or truly threatened when we must, but let’s practice some humility and restraint,  realizing that our culture and politics are marbled with decadence, that we are a country with a Supreme Court that in Planned Parenthood VS Casey enshrined nihilism as the essence of liberty, and that many of us trying to raise kids feel like we are living in enemy occupied territory.

There is much work to be done to restoring that shining city on a hill. Let’s focus our efforts there.

Contrast that sentiment to Alan Jacobs’s piece about our society’s impatience. Excerpt:

That is to say: firing coaches is how professional sports franchises deal with conflict. And athletes know that this is how professional sports franchises deal with conflict: so when a team hits a bad patch, and the players are underperforming, and the coach is getting angry with them, and relationships are fraying… why bother stitching them up? Why bother salving the wounds? If everyone knows where the situation is headed — sacking the manager — then isn’t there rather a strong incentive to make things worse, in order to hasten the inevitable, put an end to the frustrations, start afresh, get a do-over? Of course there is.

And precisely the same tendencies are at work in many of the key institutions of American social life. This is one of the chief reasons why so many marriages end quickly; this is why so many Christians church-hop, to the point that pastors will tell you that church discipline is simply impossible: if you challenge or rebuke a church member for bad behavior, he or she will simply be at another church the next week, or at no church at all.

More:

This belief breeds impatience with everything, and that impatience in turn breeds immense frustration with any situation that doesn’t lend itself to the discard-and-replace approach. I think even our recent university-campus controversies can be explained in these terms. Students don’t want to deal with administrators who don’t see things their way, or speakers who say things they find offensive, but they realize that an immediate opt-out isn’t possible. You can’t walk away from Oberlin on a Friday and show up for class at Carleton on Monday morning. At least for a time, you’re stuck. But what if you’re stuck in a situation and have never been taught how to negotiate, how to work things out, how to be patient in the midst of conflict? Well, then, you make demands. You are very insistent that “These are demands and not suggestions”. And often those demands are that administrators or faculty be fired — like football coaches who haven’t won enough, basketball coaches who manifest “a lack of fit with our personnel and our vision” — because that, they think, can be done right now.

What most troubles me about these pathologies is that I don’t see any way back from the current level of impatience and the inability — indeed, refusal — to persist through difficulties.

More:

People want to be able to trade in old models of anything and everything, and profoundly resent any social or political structures that inhibit instantaneous action.

In such an environment, it’s no wonder that a great many people applaud a Presidential candidate who believes that he can “see Bill Gates” about “closing up that internet.” (The old internet is messed up — let’s trade it in for another one.) I suspect they overlap pretty significantly with the folks who demand, after every losing streak, that their favorite team’s coach be fired; and with the more aggressive of the student protestors. Trump supporters may not seem to have much in common with people demanding that racially insensitive university administrators be fired, but there’s a deep temperamental affinity. They’re all enthusiastic adherents of the trade-in society.

Read the whole thing. 

How can you tell the difference between something that needs to be treated with forbearance and a reforming spirit, and something that needs to be abandoned for something new? I think both can be true, depending on the context. But they can’t both be true at the same time.

Thoughts?

Re-Sacramentalizing My Life

A reader writes:

You write the following: “It has taken me almost a decade of being Orthodox to retrain my own way of seeing the world, to re-sacramentalize it.”

Could you perhaps just give me a paragraph or so on how you were able, in one decade, to ‘resacramentalize’ the world?  I’d be in your debt.

He asked me this the other day, and I had to think about it before answering. I should start by saying that it has been a long, ongoing process, and it is a process that continues, day by day. The main highlights are the following, in no particular order; they all have worked together:

1. Art and the saints. Pope Benedict XVI said that these are the greatest apologists for the Christian faith, and I’ve come to believe from experience that he’s right. Over the years, I have come to experience the presence of God in works of art and architecture. Famously, for me, my turn to serious Christianity first happened in the Chartres cathedral, where the lines, the glass, and the stones shattered my callow skepticism. I did not leave that cathedral on that summer day in 1984 as a Christian, but I did leave convinced by the power of the revelation effected by the lines, the glass, and the stones, that there was Something More than what is merely apparent. They pointed to a greater reality, and opened my heart and soul with wonder.

Over the years, I have experienced this time and time again. Seeing and experiencing the holiness and compassion of other people, in various situations, from women like Mother Teresa, from afar, to women like my late sister Ruthie, up close. The film Babette’s Feast is a secular catechism regarding sacramentality. More recently, reading Dante’s Commedia overwhelmed my imagination, and unveiled the hidden reality of God and His transcendent order. And Evgeny Vodolazkin’s astonishing novel Laurus worked on my imagination with the same power, leading me to see all the world as a kind of sacrament, a theophany.

So, observing how the divine manifests itself in holy people, holy places, and holy works of art is training my imagination to see sacramentally.

2. Living the Orthodox Christian life. A core spiritual problem of mine, of longstanding, is that I live so much in my head, in the realm of ideas. Always have. As longtime readers know, standing in the ruins of my Catholic faith, I was able to see how my excessive intellectualism led me into a dark wood. It’s not that intellection is bad, not at all. Rather, it was that my faith was primarily an intellectual thing, and I did not see it at the time. I trusted far too much in reason as my stronghold, and neglected the conversion of the heart.

When I was making my way into the Catholic church in the early 1990s, a co-worker invited me to join me one Saturday afternoon helping out at the Missionaries of Charity soup kitchen. I peeled potatoes and washed pots and pans that afternoon. It was fine, but I concluded that for someone like me, so interested in ideas, I would be better off spending my time reading theology. I never went back.

That was a big mistake, as it turns out. Again, it’s not that reading theology is bad, not at all. But the faith was not fully incarnate within me, and within my heart. Over my years as a Catholic, I was faithful to the mass, went to confession frequently, and all that … but it was mostly a matter of living in my head, despite the fact that Catholicism is more sacramentally inclined than Protestantism. I was still able to keep it just me and Jesus in the Sacrament. Until I could not any longer. All that abstraction was not able to save me when my heart was too battered.

Orthodox Christianity was a great gift to me. It’s hard to convince people who have never worshiped as Eastern Christians (including Eastern Catholics) do, but the Eastern form of worship is much more intense and sacramental-feeling than most of what you’ll find in the West. The kissing of icons, the chants, the Psalms, the prostrations — all of it involves the body far more than Western Christian worship. And the overwhelming sense of timelessness and sanctity that comes to you through the Eastern liturgy — well, there’s nothing like it in the West. That began to pull me out of my head.

Plus, looking around me on Sunday morning and seeing portraits of holy men and women from many cultures and ages, on the wall and ceiling, reminded me that I am intimately connected to the communion of the church universal, across time. Every time I walk into my own parish now, I pray most intensely before a tiny bone fragment of St. Genevieve of Paris, the fifth century abbess who was a great ascetic, healer, and wonder-worker. I ask her nothing other than to pray for me, to ask God to make me courageous and steadfast, as she was, in walking the way of Jesus Christ. It is as if she were standing before me, because in heaven, she really is interceding for me, and for others. Having the relics and the icons present trains the imagination to experience what we Christians believe by faith is true: that the communion of holy men and women transcends time, and that the souls of those saints reside in heaven, and pray for us to our God.

3. The Jesus Prayer and fasting. Maybe it’s unusual to separate this from “Living the Orthodox Christian Life,” but I will, and here’s why. I have been Orthodox since 2006, but I didn’t fully engage with the Orthodox life beyond Sunday liturgy and the Lenten fast until we began our tiny mission in Louisiana in early 2013. I was very sick then with chronic mononucleosis, and our new priest, Father Matthew, assigned me an intense prayer rule involving the Jesus Prayer. In the Orthodox tradition, one clears one’s mind, and keeps it clear, while one slowly, meditatively, says quietly some version of, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” The number of prayers Father Matthew assigned to me meant that I was praying silently and contemplatively an hour each day.

It was very, very difficult it first. I used to pray the rosary from time to time as a Catholic, and enjoyed it. In the rosary, you fix your imagination on particular events from the lives of Jesus and Mary. Orthodox prayer, though, takes the opposite approach: you clear your mind entirely, focusing only on the words. My mind races constantly, so you can imagine how hard it was to get myself into the proper mental place for this kind of prayer. There’s no way to learn how to do it but by doing it.

Later, after I was free of the disease and the spiritual and emotional anxieties that triggered it, I asked Father Matthew why he had given me such a strict prayer rule. “I had to get you out of your head,” he said. Suddenly, the deep healing wisdom of that approach became clear to me.

Mind you, it didn’t happen through prayer alone. I was also living a regular Orthodox life, which included listening to Father’s Sunday sermons. The theme of every single one of them is, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” That is, he teaches that only when we humble ourselves in front of our own passions, repenting of them and denying them for the sake of life in Christ, can we know freedom and true life. It’s true. You don’t get Moralistic Therapeutic Deism in that church, nor do you get hellfire-and-brimstone. You get repentance, and you get theosis, the Orthodox term for being filled with the Holy Spirit and slowly transformed.

Fasting played, and does play, a big role in this. No meat and no dairy on most Wednesdays and Fridays, and for long stretches throughout the year. This is hard stuff, but for most of Christianity’s existence, this is what Christians have done. We in the West have lost this sensibility. The point is not doing without meat and dairy for the sake of abstaining from those things. The point is to discipline the body’s passions for the sake of the Spirit. It is about rightly ordering our bodies and our desires, reminding ourselves through our practices of the words of Jesus: “Man does not live by bread alone… .” It’s one thing to read that in the Bible, but it’s another to feel an intense desire for a hamburger, and to tell yourself no, that serving God requires abstaining now.

Once you get used to telling yourself no in small things, it becomes easier to do so in larger things. More to the point of the reader’s question, you come to understand the connection between matter and spirit viscerally, because you learn to feel it in your gut.

We live in a world in which we have lost the reflexive sense of God’s presence in all things — what the Evangelical theologian Hans Boersma calls “sacramental ontology”. All Christians used to believe in this. We began to lose this vision in the 13th and 14th centuries, and it is all but gone now. We won’t start to recover spiritually and morally until we begin to recover this ancient Christian vision to some significant degree — though how we Christians in postmodernity do so out of our own traditions is a very difficult question. It’s still there, fully, in Orthodoxy, and though the struggle is never-ending, I am blessed to have recourse to it — but it’s sadly clear that not all those baptized into Orthodox Christianity accept the great gifts on offer in their church. I did not until fairly recently, but it has made a tremendous difference in my life. And this is my personal answer to the reader’s question.

One more thing: reading philosophy and theology still plays an integral role in re-sacramentalizing my vision. The (totally secular) book by philosopher Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head has been helpful recently, as has Boersma’s Heavenly Participation, though written for the Evangelical reader. Even if you are Catholic or Orthodox, if you are an American, you grew up in a nominalist, non-sacramental culture, and this has affected your Christian faith more than you probably realize. It’s true for me.

‘Oppression Studies’ Liberates Trump

Robby Soave highlights a perfectly horrible proposal that may become policy at American University. Excerpt:

Members of the Washington, D.C.-based private university’s faculty are engaged in the process of “reimagining” the university’s core curriculum: the courses that all students, regardless of major, must take in order to graduate. Core curriculums are a way for universities to make sure that everyone on campus absorbs a common set of skills and values deemed fundamental to a liberal arts education—they often include basic instruction in writing, history, and mathematical reasoning, for instance. American plans to modernize its curriculum by 2017, and has convened a task force of professors to complete the process. A draft of their proposed curriculum is available here.

Under the proposal, the new core curriculum would require students to enroll in several worrisome courses that the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson has astutely labeled “oppression studies.” The task force calls them “Complex Problems” and “AU Experience,” but “oppression studies” is certainly the more fitting name. From the draft:

Although many Complex Problems courses will draw heavily on the social sciences (in the analysis of such issues as inequality, social violence, and health care access), others will be grounded in the sciences (climate change, dementia) or arts and humanities (art and politics, post-colonial expression).

The AU Experience courses are similarly one-note, and will pay “special attention to issues of diversity, inclusion, and community.” Reading assignments, according to the draft, will focus on “oppression and resistance,” “historical violence, such as the early slave trade and genocidal conquests,” and the “experiences of marginalized groups and struggles for human rights.” For good measure, course materials will fixate on “how entrenched systems of inequality marginalize some groups and privilege others.”

This is not to say these aren’t important and fascinating topics—they are, and students should study them, if they want to. But it’s one thing to make these courses available to students who have an interest in explicitly left-wing topics. It’s quite another to require the study of a specific viewpoint and subjugate all other academic concerns.

And that’s just the beginning. The proposal also calls for a dramatic—and mildly terrifying—transformation of life in the residence halls. No longer will students shack up together at random: instead, AU would assign students to particular housing based on which “oppression studies” courses they are taking.

Read the whole thing. Seriously, you need to. This has a lot to do with why people support Trump. They know that the academic elites despise them and their culture, and are going to try to educate their children into hating themselves and their culture. Can Trump stop AU or any other university from doing this? Of course not, and we would not want to live in a country where POTUS has that kind of power. But a vote for Trump is a vote against the class that’s doing this p.c. indoctrination. They know that Trump doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about p.c. — and they love that about him. Shoot, when I read the Robby Soave piece, my knee-jerk response was, “Give ’em hell, Trump!”

Understand: that is not a good reason to vote for Trump, but put it in context of a new AP poll showing that over 60 percent of Americans have little or no confidence in the political establishment’s ability to solve the nation’s problems. How much confidence do you have in the educational establishment’s ability to solve our educational problems? That is, how much confidence do you have in them to deal effectively with the runaway cost of higher education, plus the quality of education undergraduates and graduates are receiving. I have confidence in particular institutions — Baylor, for example — but in general? No. And this AU initiative, as well as the administrative capitulation on college campuses last fall to left-wing cultural radicalism, leaves me with little to no confidence in our institutions of higher education.

Again: this is not a justification for voting Trump. But if you think that the various establishments in this country aren’t working in your interests, and indeed may be working against your interests (as in the Orwellian AU program, in which students indebt themselves to the tune of over $40,000 per year to be educated into why they should despise themselves or others along racial and cultural lines), this is all fuel for the, “Screw it, I’m voting Trump” bonfire.

It is breathtaking how the elites are tearing this country apart. If you find it impossible to understand how anybody would support Trump, think of AU, and think of that fatmouthing kid screaming and cursing at the professor on the square at Yale this fall. That professor, Christakis, stood there and took it. They all do. Trump would not. You think that’s a crude analysis. Maybe. But if you don’t understand why it makes emotional sense to many people, you are deluding yourself.

UPDATE: Please spare me the accusations that I’m trying to justify a vote for Trump. For one thing, you don’t know who I’m voting for, and you won’t know. I’m not even a registered Republican, so I can’t vote in my state’s GOP primary. I find it incredible that Trump has gotten as far as he’s gotten, and I am trying very hard to learn the lessons of why people like me have been so out of touch with why so many Republican voters like Trump, despite what many of us see as his grave flaws. I’m not asking anybody to support Trump; that’s not my business. I am asking you to try to see things through the eyes of Trump supporters. That’s what I’m trying to do, so I can better understand my own country, and where it’s headed, for better and for worse. It wouldn’t really have occurred to me prior to now that the p.c.-driven chaos on campuses these days, which I’ve been denouncing for some time, would have translated into a vote for Trump. I think I get it now.

View From Your Table

Paris, France

This blog’s Paris bureau chief took this shot from the field, where he is working hard bringing the news that matters to you. This was taken in the café La Frégate, at the top of the rue du Bac. That is the Pont Royal in front of you, and it leads to the Louvre in the background. It was over that bridge that Marie Antoinette’s carriage traveled in her escape from her revolutionary captors holding her and her family in the Louvre. Her coachmen took a wrong turn. He eventually found his way back, got her out of the city, and reunited her with her husband, the king. As you know, they were captured by soldiers loyal to the revolutionary government at a checkpoint some distance from the capital. Some historians speculate that the delay caused by Marie’s coachman screwing up the escape led to their capture and subsequent execution.

Anyway … Paris! Our bureau chief earlier in the day sent me the following image, to bolster my spirits here in the bleakness of winter. He passed the holy place on the rue Montfaucon, and reassured me that all is well there:

Donald J. Trump = Edwin W. Edwards

This just in:

Donald Trump boasted Saturday that support for his presidential campaign would not decline even if he shot someone in the middle of a crowded street.

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump said at a campaign rally here.

Oh my gosh, can you believe Trump said that? Well, I never!

Well, maybe you never, but we in Louisiana damn sure have. Compare:

“The only way I could lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.” — Edwin W. Edwards, 1983.

People in Louisiana loved Edwin Edwards back in the day. It confounded the hell out of us conservatives. Couldn’t they see what a crook he was? What a showboating fraud? It was hard for us to grasp his appeal, because his lack of appeal was so freaking obvious. 

But he kept winning. His last race was for Congress a couple of years ago. He lost. But EWE is 88 years old, and his time has passed. It’s safe to say that even his enemies today find him endearing. I couldn’t stand the man back in the day, but today? I would rather spend the afternoon with him than any other politician in Louisiana, or in the entire country. Even though he didn’t win his final race, something EWE said to New York magazine in 2014 captured the essence of his lifelong political appeal:

“With me, the people know the butter might be rancid, but it’s going to be spread on their side of the bread.”

That’s Trump for you, ain’t it? I bet he’ll win the GOP primary in Louisiana going away.

UPDATE: Reader Ben H., referring to a bumper sticker popular in Louisiana when Edwin Edwards was running for governor against blowdried Klucker David Duke:

Ironically, the mass of Hillary support seems to be along the lines of “vote for the crook, its important”

That’ll be what a lot of Republicans will be saying to justify voting for Hillary against Trump if he’s the GOP nominee.