Rod Dreher's Blog, page 621

On My Shelf

Stacks of books I’m reading now for the Benedict Option project

Last fall, I did an interview with Matt Smethurst of The Gospel Coalition for a feature called “On My Shelf,” which is about books. It’s just been published online. Excerpt:

What are some books you regularly re-read and why?

I often return to the essays of Wendell Berry, which are full of uncommon sense and integrity. It’s like they recalibrate me. To be honest, I always have such a long queue of new books to get to that I don’t do a lot of re-reading, but I find that those volumes refocus and reground me. The books I return to most often, though, are P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels. There never was a funnier writer in the English language. Most of what I read is burdened by maximum heaviosity. Sparkling Wodehouse is the perfect antidote. I took Dostoevsky to the beach last summer, finally said to heck with it, and went back to Wodehouse, which restored me to sanity.

What books have most profoundly shaped how you serve and lead others? 

You know, I can name several books that have profoundly formed me, but that’s not the question. When it comes to leadership, there’s no doubt that Ken Myers’s Mars Hill Audio Journal has been more influential than any series of books. I’ve bought many books based on interviews he’s done with guests, been inspired and challenged by them, and found a community of friends within the Mars Hill orbit (I’m looking at you Alan Jacobs, and you Ralph C. Wood). I tell every intellectually engaged Christian I know that they absolutely have to subscribe to the Journal. There is nothing else like it in equipping us how to think about and respond to the challenges of our time and place. Once you get hooked, you’ll wonder how you ever did without it.

Read the whole thing. Let me put the same two questions above to you readers. Go.

Christophobia

I’m about to walk out the door, headed to Wichita for the Eighth Day Institute’s symposium. I won’t be able to check in until tonight, so please be patient. Before I go, here’s something to think about: Kenneth Minogue’s 2003 essay on what “Christophobia” — the fear and loathing of Christianity — has to do with the West and its future. Excerpts:

Today, however, a significant change has occurred in progressive opinion: in a multicultural context, religious beliefs are taken to be part of “culture” and hence off limits to criticism, unless they are Christian, and more recently also, Jewish.

We may call this sentiment “Christophobia,” and its simplest version is the legend people got from Voltaire and others, namely, that mankind had hitherto been dominated by all kinds of strange prejudices and superstitions but that now at last (in the eighteenth century) a dawn of reason was rising in which human beings would abandon these divisive absurdities and recognize themselves as sharing a human essence with a right to happiness and the power actually to bring this about. Such was the core of belief found in Jacobinism, socialism, rationalisms of various kinds (including that of the American founders), logical positivism, and all other versions of what the nineteenth century espoused as progress and the twentieth century came to call “the Enlightenment Project.” And it is very important to observe that all other civilizations and peoples were to be incorporated within this projected earthly salvation. It was a global project.

Voltaire’s legend is, of course, simple-minded because it can give no account of why this dawn of reason should turn up in Europe, or indeed why it should turn up at all. The reason is that it is a political program unwilling to recognize its debt to a past which it is busily repudiating. It is averse to recognizing Christianity as a historical phenomenon rather than as a mere mistake.

More:

The minimal account of religion as a human phenomenon must be that it is a set of stories and beliefs human beings tell themselves to account for what lies behind the manageable world (to the extent that it is manageable) in which we live. In other words, a religion is a response to the mystery of the human condition. The going secularist account of human life is that we are part of an evolving organic life that happened to develop on the edge of a minor planet in a universe of unimaginable vastness. Beyond this, questions of meaning and significance are in scientific terms unanswerable, and we tend to follow Wittgenstein: Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. We have blocked off religious questions altogether, because they are empirically unanswerable, and people respond in a variety of ways. Some drop the questions and get on with life, others shop for a more exotic set of stories and rituals with which to respond, and many, of course, remain Christian to one degree or another. On the face of it, however, we have a culture which very largely carries on without seriously considering ultimates. We have abandoned the cathedral, and are content to scurry in and out of skyscrapers. So perhaps we are pioneering a new civilizational form in which the issues of human meaning have been recognized as essentially unsolvable, and left to one side. Or, alternatively, we may have transferred the passions appropriate to religion onto beliefs of some other kind.

Philosophers turn everything into preliminaries, and before I get to the main argument, I should perhaps declare my own position here. I am a simple child of secular times, and a sceptic, but one impressed by the grandeur and complexity of Christian intellectuality. The Voltairian and the village atheist, seen from this perspective, look a little shallow. In the vast rambling mansion of our civilization, the cobwebbed gothic wing containing our religious imagination is less frequented than previously, but it certainly remains a haunting presence.

He calls the progressive rationalist cult that seeks world dominiation “a religion that doesn’t know it’s a religion.” Minogue calls it “Olympianism.” More:

Olympianism is the characteristic belief system of today’s secularist, and it has itself many of the features of a religion. For one thing, the fusion of political conviction and moral superiority into a single package resembles the way in which religions (outside liberal states) constitute comprehensive ways of life supplying all that is necessary (in the eyes of believers) for salvation. Again, the religions with which we are familiar are monotheistic and refer everything to a single center. In traditional religions, this is usually God; with Olympianism, it is society, understood ultimately as including the whole of humanity. And Olympianism, like many religions, is keen to proselytize. Its characteristic mode of missionary activity is journalism and the media.

If Olympianism has the character of a religion, as I am suggesting, there would be no mystery about its hostility to Christianity. Real religions (by contrast with test-tube religions such as ecumenism) don’t much like each other; they are, after all, competitors. Olympianism, however, is in the interesting position of being a kind of religion which does not recognize itself as such, and indeed claims a cognitive superiority to religion in general. But there is a deeper reason why the spread of Olympianism may be measured by the degree of Christophobia. It is that Olympianism is an imperial project which can only be hindered by the association between Christianity and the West.

Read the whole thing. Minogue goes on to say that Olympianism has to despise and eradicate Christianity as a way of cleansing its intellectual bloodline. This, by the way, is why the European Union’s founding documents treat Europe as having gone straight from the end of classical civilization in the fifth century more or less to the Enlightenment. This is not an accident.

I think philosophically simpler answer is that God of the Bible must not exist, because if He does, then we can’t do whatever we like. So He either must be denied, or He must be denatured so we can enthrone ourselves while still claiming to recognize Him. (This is what Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is.)

Kill Your Megachurch Worship

Jonathan Aigner says that the “contemporary worship” style is in decline, and ought to be pushed off the cliff.Why is it declining? Here are a couple of reasons:

Millennials are seeking old ways of doing things. This (thankfully) doesn’t mean a return to the church of the 1950s, but it (thankfully) means an increasing rejection of the church of the 1990s and 2000s. More emphasis is being placed on liturgy and community, and less on using corporate worship chiefly as a contrived evangelistic tool. Also, as I’ve cited before, most millennials (and I’m one of them, by the way) grew up not knowing anything other than contemporary worship, and we’re leaving the church faster than any generation before us. Even by its own standards (i.e., number of butts in the seats) contemporary worship is a failed experiment.

Contemporary worship is an unstable and non-theological movement. To be thoroughly contemporary necessitates a slavish allegiance to the new, the current, the hip, the cool, and the commercial. It requires a thorough rejection of what is old, passe, not current, not cool, and what doesn’t make money. The bright shiny objects that get butts in the seats must continue becoming brighter and shinier. This holy bait-and-switch tactic is wearing thin. This constant need to reinvent yourself is a pretty tough row to hoe for any church, and few besides the largest and wealthiest are able to keep butts in the seats with any continued success.

And how can Evangelicals help send contemporary worship styles to their grave? Excerpt:

Stop attending contemporary services. I received this comment yesterday:

I grew up in a church, back in the sixties, that only sang hymns. At the time I wasn’t for or against the hymns. But then came the contemporary praise movement in the seventies and I thought wow this is better than the old hymns. And we all know the rest of the story. I have an eight year old daughter who will never know the hymns like I do. And to be honest that infuriates me. – Brian

I hear these kinds of things a lot, actually. If you’re in a place where you fundamentally disagree with something so important, isn’t it time to move on? Isn’t it that simple? I don’t know. There are plenty of churches that sing hymns. But don’t just stop at hymn-singing. Look for liturgy, not entertainment. Worship is supposed to be the work of the people, not the jesusy entertainment of the masses. Look for new hymns and songs being sung, too. Music in worship isn’t supposed to be a vehicle for emotional manipulation, sensory gratification, or hooking an audience. Find a church where music serves the liturgy, not the masses. It may mean looking outside your denomination. It may mean going to a more theologically, politically, or culturally diverse congregation. It may mean leaving friends. It may even mean singing songs you don’t like sometimes. I’m not a fan of church-hopping, but worship is important. It’s not just another program, another ministry area. And if your church doesn’t get this, and if they won’t listen, it may be time to go elsewhere.

One more excerpt:

This issue has been framed poorly.

It’s not about old vs. new.

It’s not about old vs. young (especially these days).

It’s not about taste.

It’s not about what kind of music God likes more.

It’s not really about music.

It’s about the very purpose of gathered worship.

It’s about unity, not choice.

It’s about Holy Scripture, not self-help.

It’s about theology, not experience.

It’s about participation, not consumption.

It’s about liturgy, not jesusy entertainment.

It’s about being a church for the world, not getting butts in the seats.

It’s about ancient and future, not just now.

Read the whole thing. 

Naturally this hits my sweet spot, and I’m glad to read it. Last October, when I was out in Colorado Springs, I was amazed to spend time with Millennial Evangelicals and hear them talk about a deep frustration with the shallowness and transience of contemporary megachurch worship, and a longing for liturgy. Of course I welcome that news!

On the other hand, I worry about the bricolage approach to traditional worship — you know, the sensibility that says we can pull a little bit from here and a little bit from there, and cobble together something that seems ancient, and is pleasing to our tastes. Not sure how that works over time, cut off from a long tradition. I welcome the thoughts of Evangelicals and others who have experience with these questions.

One great value of traditional worship is that you never have to worry about going out of style, because you are always out of style — and that is a strength! When I was a Catholic, I groaned over the hymns we usually had to sing at mass, in particular the St. Louis Jesuit stuff that sounded like it was forever stuck in 1972. That kind of thing becomes dated very quickly, and sends a signal that Christianity itself is the kind of thing people whose minds are stuck in a particular time period and its culture cling to. Plus, changing music and worship style radically from generation to generation serves to cleave the worshiping community. A Southern Baptist friend of mine who loves Baptist hymns has stopped attending his church because he cannot bear that they’ve thrown out all the Baptist standards, and substituted it with vapid praise music, the sort of thing that is instantly forgettable, and that will be forgotten ten years from now.

Along these general lines, here’s a wonderful letter I received from a reader, and publish with his permission (with some identifying details removed at his request):

Rod, thanks as always for a great article with the “Of Stars and Gods” piece. I’m a long time reader and have almost written you several times, but finally couldn’t resist this time. At the risk of being accused of talking up my own tribe, I believe that any sacramental way forward for believing Protestants, at least in the English-speaking world, would benefit greatly from a strain of orthodox Anglicanism.

I am, of course, a small-o orthodox Anglican, in [place]. Our dean and rector took what was a dying parish and has injected an incredible amount of life into it. He is evangelical, as Anglicans evaluate such things, but I wouldn’t call him “low-church”, because he also has a wonderful reverence for the sacraments.

We have three services on Sundays, each with a different style, but all deeply rooted in Anglican liturgical tradition. One of them has contemporary-style music…but not of the “Our God is an awesome God” variety; many of the songs are traditional hymns arranged for guitar, mandolin, etc. by some very talented musicians. There is also a traditional service with a full choir, and a short, said service using the more traditional Anglican liturgy (if you know the lingo at all, a “’28 Prayer Book” service).

You are probably aware that liturgy is “cool” right now in wider evangelical circles, but in many cases it is a strange mishmash, sort of a “choose-your-own-adventure.” I think this is a reflection of a deep desire in people to have the kind of sacramental experience which you write so eloquently about and which Orthodoxy has so richly.

What Anglicanism has to offer–if it can get its act together–is a chance for Protestants to experience a sacramental way of worship with a rich history that is theologically comfortable for them. Our church seems to appeal to a lot of ex-megachurch types who are looking for the kind of sacramentalism those places don’t have. All the turmoil among Anglicans is sadly preventing more from discovering it, but I am optimistic that with God’s help, prayers, and some hard work, that will change.

Anglicanism has a long tradition of looking back to the Church Fathers for guidance; to that pre-rationalist period that your article describes. The good Anglican seminaries (the ones that aren’t totally given over to MTD–and there are a couple in the US) are very strong on patristics.

Those who accuse Anglicanism of being wishy-washy sometimes do have a point, but in many instances Anglicans are trying to avoid over-rationalizing. One of my favorite poems is this little verse by John Donne, which sums up Anglican view of the Eucharist:

He was the Word that spake it;

He took the bread and brake it.

And what that Word doth make it,

I do believe and take it.

I don’t think this is just an effort to paper over transubstantiation. I think it is an effort to get at that pre-rationalist way of thinking about the sacraments. What mattered to the average person in the pews then, and what should matter now, is not whether you can write volumes about the Eucharist, but how you experience it. It cannot be reduced to a doctrine defined on a page.

Looking internationally, Anglicanism is growing by leaps and bounds in the global south. Its appeal seems to be its combination of evangelical and sacramental tendencies; it allows people to experience Christ in both Word and Sacrament. Thoughtful orthodox Anglicans in the United States have taken note, and I think they see that as the way forward for us, too.

The other thing that orthodox Anglicanism in America is slowly doing–and this is painful–is recognizing and repenting of its “the elites at prayer” image. Breaking away from the Episcopal Church to follow God’s call has not been not easy. Many parishes have gone from beautiful old buildings to gymnasiums and borrowed facilities. People who care about being Episcopalians for status reasons, who sadly do exist, are not inclined to take that kind of step. The result is in many cases a self-selected group who have, in a way, created their own Benedict Option.

I appreciated your “Anglican Benedict Option” piece a while back very much as well. As you explore the Ben Op, are you seeing anything else like what I’m describing?

Not yet, but then, I’ve barely started research. That changes starting next week. By the way, I’m in touch with Prior Andrew Litzell, who leads the Ben Op experimental community in Lambeth Palace, and I may be going over next month to see what they’re doing and what they’re learning.

There And Back Again

I strongly commend to your attention Marc Fisher’s interview with David Brooks. There’s so much in it that I find consonant. After I cut-and-pasted all the passages I wanted to talk about, I found that I had swiped about half the interview. That’s not fair. So let me sum up what I liked, then quote a bit.

The interview focuses in large part on the evolution of Brooks’s thinking and writing from politics to science, then morality and spirituality. When Brooks lists the reasons for this, he says that first, he’s achieved great worldly success, and isn’t satisfied. He also has been troubled by what he’s seen teaching at Yale, “where everything’s so achievement- and résumé-oriented.” He adds:

Fourth, I just read a book from Carl Jung, of all people, who said that every single one of his middle-aged clients was mourning the loss of a religious sense and was searching for that religious sense. And there’s some element of that in me.

That’s really interesting. I came across that same bit from Jung just the other night. Anyway, Brooks goes on to say that when he writes about religious and spiritual themes, “the reader interest is just off the charts.” Similarly, when he does public speaking, he only talks about this stuff, not politics, and finds that “there’s an intensity of listening that’s greater than anything I’ve ever experienced. There’s a hunger across all ages.”

More on this:

Did you need to reach a certain age or maturity to shift into this focus on morals?

No, I don’t think so. At 14 or 15, you discover profundity. And from then on, you’re hungry. I was having coffee with one of my students at Yale and he said, “We’re so hungry.” Because they’ve been raised with so little moral vocabulary and so much achievement orientation. They feel they’re humans, they have souls. I don’t have to tell them how to be good. I just have to name the categories. If we use a word like “grace,” what does that mean? Or “sin,” what does that mean? I don’t have to say, “Don’t be sinful.”

Did you become frustrated by our culture’s inability to focus on bigger questions?

Universities and a lot of institutions became very amoral because they didn’t know what to say. We became such a diverse society that it became hard to know what to say without insulting somebody. And then we became a very individualistic society. If there’s something I’ve been frustrated with, it’s our excessively individualistic society. That’s led to a belief that everyone should come up with their own values and no one should judge each other. That destroys moral conversation and becomes just a question of feelings. That, to me, was the big wrong turn.

He says this is equally true of the left and the right, and it has destroyed the commons. Brooks adds that we all need to find community again (and he includes himself in that number):

I think our problem is too much freedom. The great challenge for me is tying myself down, and that involves maritally, that involves defining what I’m doing with the column. The thing I have not done is tie myself to a community.

Have you found examples in history of societies that have rediscovered or rekindled community?

Totally. In Ephesus, when the Roman Empire was at a stage of late, high decadence, there was a little guy in the market, who everyone probably considered a weirdo, named St. Paul, and he was preaching. Within 300 years, Ephesus was a ruin and Paul’s religion had taken over the world. There are other cases, closer to home. In 1830, in this country, it was totally acceptable to go to work, drink all day, drink afterwards, go home and beat your wife. By 1840, that was completely unacceptable. There was an awakening, and people said no, we don’t tolerate that. The year Judaism was most unpopular in America was probably 1913—all these immigrants’ kids wanted to renounce their parents’ culture, their parents’ religion, so they went totally secular. And then they snapped back, because human nature doesn’t change. These are all cases where what we thought was the modern trend has been reversed. People want community. They want their traditions.

Read the whole thing. You won’t regret it.

Boy, this interview speaks to me deeply. I find so often that David Brooks and I are going on similar tracks. Our last books — The Road To Character and How Dante Can Save Your Life — were published on the same day last year, and were eerily similar in theme (though not, alas for Your Working Boy, in sales). Reading this interview late this morning made me reflect on how much my own interests have moved over the years from politics to deeper religious and cultural matters.

In my case, it was always there, but what burned away from the years 2004 until about 2010 was the sense that politics as we practice it — and for that matter, religion as we are accustomed to observing it — could do anything meaningful to solve our problems, or even to help us bear them. This is not to say that politics (or economics) are unimportant. Not at all. It is only to say they are of relative importance.

The central insight of traditionalist conservatism was articulated by Russell Kirk: “At heart, all political problems are moral and religious problems.” They are this because they are about how we live together in peace and justice, and the transcendent vision that sustains our lives together, and across the generations.

In his interview, Brooks says when he talks about things like this in places like suburban Connecticut, the women in the audience love it, but the men get antsy, tell him that he’s making them uncomfortable, and that they would rather talk about Chris Christie’s prospects. There’s something important in that response. We are a people, broadly speaking, aware of our deep lack, but we are also unwilling to sacrifice the time and the liberty to invest in the ways of thinking and living that could deliver us from our decadence. Walker Percy, in 1987, said that his greatest concern was:

Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom—“Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A.,” and so on—gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the communist movement, demonstrably a bankrupt system, but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems.

We are helpless in part because there are great forces at work on us and on our communities that make us feel helpless. And yet, the answer for us is the same as the answer Marco the Lombard gave to the pilgrim Dante in Purgatorio XVI. I wrote about it like this in How Dante Can Save Your Life:

In the heart of that darkness, at the midpoint of the entire Commedia, Dante meets a man who gives him the secret of deliverance. He is Marco the Lombard, a nobleman who agrees with the pilgrim that the world is in a terrible state. Dante begs Marco to tell him why this is so, so that he can return to earth and tell all the others.

Here is Marco’s reply. For me, this discourse is the crown jewel in a poem heavy laden with treasure:



First he heaved a heavy sigh, which grief wrung To a groan, and then began: “Brother,

The world is blind and indeed you come from it.

“You who are still alive assign each cause only to the heavens, as though they drew all things along upon their necessary paths.

“If that were so, free choice would be denied you, and there would be no justice when one feels

joy for doing good or misery for evil.

“Yes, the heavens give motion to your inclinations. I don’t say all of them, but, even if I did,

You still possess a light to winnow good from evil,

“and you have free will. Should it bear the strain in its first struggles with the heavens,

then, rightly nurtured, it will conquer all.

“To a greater power and a better nature you, free, are subject, and these create the mind in you

that the heavens have not in their charge.

“Therefore, if the world around you goes astray,

in you is the cause and in you let it be sought.”

[Purgatorio XVI:64–83]



Marco’s words hit me like a bolt of lightning. The Lombard whose wrath had blinded him in the mortal life delivered the same message that Mike Holmes had on the first day of my therapy: You can’t change the world, but you can change the way you react to it.

I had understood Mike’s words, but their meaning had not sunk in. Now, standing within a black cloud of wrath, spite stinging my eyes, I heard the same message from the penitent Marco—and I got it.

That cloud had descended upon me the moment Hannah told me the ugly truth about our family on the Boulevard St-Germain, and it had never left. It was as hot as the fires of Dis. It was as heavy as the boulder of pride. It was as tormenting as the swarm of stinging wasps leaving the faces of the sinners in hell’s vestibule dripping with blood.

Marco helped me feel its malignant power. And he told me how to dispel it: stop blaming my family, my dead sister, my nature, or anything else for my sickness and depression. In me is the cause, and in me let it be sought.

My wrath at my family was keeping me from seeing the love that is truly there, however bent and tangled by our fallen human nature. My sin of wrath would only let me see their sins against me. I could not open their eyes—but I could open my own.

It was a matter of deciding to do it. It was a matter of will. All these things I had seen on the journey, all I had learned about myself and others—it was all useless unless I did something with these insights.

That was the answer for me in my specific personal crisis. In our cultural crisis, the answer is the same: yes, there are forces that drive us, but in the end, we all have free will, and we can choose to resist these forces. If we keep resisting, and do so intelligently, with the strength of others, who knows, we may prevail. Nothing is fated. In Laurus, an abbess says that after all, a miracle may be just effort multiplied by faith.

What I want to do with this Benedict Option idea is explore what our rediscovering our traditions and practicing them in community can do to midwife a spiritual rebirth. Remember David Brooks’s words: “These are all cases where what we thought was the modern trend has been reversed. People want community. They want their traditions.” They do! We do! I am convinced of it. Not everybody does, but most of us do, I believe — though many of us don’t yet know it. We are like the Rich Young Ruler of the Gospel, or the hedge fund managers in Connecticut: this makes us uncomfortable, and we don’t like it.

We can have it, but it’s going to cost us something. It may cost us nothing less than everything.

The surprising joy I felt when my father died, his hand in mine, and the harmony between us as we lived that last week of his life on earth together, came only through the grace of God. I was able to receive the blessing of his life and death because I finally got tired of running away, and walked a harrowing pilgrimage with Dante. That made me strong enough to bear his passing, and to receive it as a mercy.

There is a great mystery here, one that I can intuit, but don’t well understand. I can say this: if we religious believers are going to make it through what’s here and what’s to come, we are all going to have to go on a pilgrimage back to our roots. If we want to have a future, we are going to have to reclaim the past, and make these bones live again. Our anxiety and our lack of faith prevents us from seeing what is really there, always has been, and always will be.

But how do we get there, to the living past, from here, and come back again? That is what I will be spending the next six months exploring in depth. And you will have my answer in a book, a book that will be for people who do not wish to surrender to the darkness, to the fragmentation, to the chaos, to the meaninglessness, to the forgetting.

Perpetual Culture War

 

Well. A reader did this screen grab before Dan Tynan, editor-in-chief of Yahoo! Tech, thought better of it and removed his contribution. You expect this sort of thing from Sam Biddle, who writes for Gawker, but the editor-in-chief of a major tech website?

It is not surprising that someone in Tynan’s senior position in the tech world thinks that about conservative Christians. What is so revealing is that he didn’t think before tweeting it — as if it were such a normal thing to think and say that it was no big deal to tweet it.

Remember that Brendan Eich was forced from the company he helped to found not because he tweeted abusive and vulgar insults about gays and lesbians, but because he made a small private contribution to the Prop 8 campaign. A Dan Tynan can tweet something incredibly bigoted, and … you watch, nothing. Of course Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has bigger problems to worry about than the public fatmouthing of an anti-Christian bigot who runs one of her failing company’s sites. Still, if you are a believing Christian who works for Yahoo!, especially at Yahoo! Tech, you will either resign, or go deeper into the closet, because to be out in the workplace is to identify yourself as a target for discrimination by management.

Don’t tell me, “Oh, not all liberals believe this!”, as if that is supposed to make us not notice. Of course not all liberals believe this. That’s not the point. The point is that this is an example of stunning, casual bigotry that exists at a senior level in tech. This is the kind of thing that no one in his position could ever say about, say, Black Lives Matter activists, and hope to remain employed.

There is a double standard. Christians — at least the orthodox ones — cannot afford to forget it, no matter how much they think that practicing personal “winsomeness” is going to keep them safe. This is not going away. Dan Tynan’s expectoration counts as virtue in that world.

Bunt Percy, Saint And Martyr

Found this last night in Walker Percy’s 1987 interview published in The Paris Review:

Mine has been a happy marriage—thanks mainly to my wife. Who would want to live with a novelist? A man underfoot in the house all day? A man, moreover, subject to solitary funks and strange elations. If I were a woman, I’d prefer a traveling salesman. There is no secret, or rather, the secrets are buried in platitudes. That is to say, it has something to do with love, commitment, and family. As to the institution, it is something like Churchill’s description of democracy: vicissitudinous yes, but look at the alternatives.

I read that out loud to Mrs. Dreher last night, as we were in bed reading, and she began to convulse with laughter. She wouldn’t stop, either, going on for about five minutes. I was ruffled, I tell you what.



Solitary funks and strange elations. Why, I have no idea what that means. Heh.

We had our first official planning meeting for Walker Percy Weekend 2016 this morning. (Tickets go on sale sometime in March.) I was able to share with my confrères this bit from that same interview. The interviewer tells Percy that he most reminds him (the interviewer) of Saul Bellow. Percy responds:

I take that kindly. I admire Barth, Pynchon, Heller, Vonnegut—you could also throw in Updike, Cheever, and Malamud—but perhaps Bellow most of all. He bears the same relationship to the streets of Chicago and upper Broadway—has inserted himself into them—the way I have in the Gentilly district of New Orleans or a country town in West Feliciana Parish in Louisiana.

That town is ours, St. Francisville.

One more tidbit from that interview, hugely relevant here in 2016, given where American culture and politics are:

Love in the Ruins was a picnic, with everything in it but the kitchen sink. It was written during the Time of Troubles in the sixties, with all manner of polarization in the country, black vs. white, North vs. South, hippie vs. square, liberal vs. conservative, McCarthyism vs. commies, et cetera—the whole seasoned with a Southern flavor and featuring sci-fi, futurism, and Dr. More, a whimsical descendant of the saint. After the solemnities of The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman, why not enjoy myself? I did.

… INTERVIEWER:

Is there any concrete issue that engages your attention most in connection with what is going on in America at the moment?

PERCY

Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom—“Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A.,” and so on—gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the communist movement, demonstrably a bankrupt system, but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems. Probably the greatest is the rise of a black underclass. Maybe Faulkner was right. Slavery was America’s Original Sin and the one thing that can defeat us. I trust not.

INTERVIEWER

In connection with what is going on in the world?

PERCY

Ditto: the West losing by spiritual acedia. A Judaic view is not inappropriate here: Communism may be God’s punishment for the sins of the West. Dostoyevsky thought so.

Hmm. Seems to me that we have to do something at this year’s Percyfest about LITR, given that it’s an election year, and Donald Trump, and Black Lives Matter, and the rest. Yes? Who would be some commenters you’d like to hear talk about Love In The Ruins and Walker Percy, Prophet?

There will be gin fizzes in my Benedict Option bunker. Just FYI.

Songs For The Benedict Option

Radu Razvan / Shutterstock.com

A couple of you have sent me this song by a singer/songwriter named Bill Mallonee, suggesting it as a theme song for the Benedict Option:

Winnowing (CD, Vinyl or Digital Download formats!) by Bill Mallonee & The Darkling Planes

Here are the lyrics:

IN THE NEW DARK AGE (the only lamp burning bright is you)

All the dominoes fell

we went under a spell

and all hell. broke. loose.

Everything you held dear

when the dust finally cleared

it was just as you feared

Chorus:

In the new dark age

Nobody puts up a fight

In the new dark age

You’ll see no flares in the night

The only lamp burning bright…is you

All the mask came off

All disguises were dropped

The game was declared over

Love was escorted out

There was hardly a shout

I’ll take the crimson & clover

We’re all mystics & freaks

With the spirit beneath

Deeper than any ocean

Let the string section “riff”

Seal it up with a kiss

Honey, we are all golden

In the new dark age

no one trusts anyone

In the new dark age

they forget to have fun

The only light from the sun…is you

In the new dark age

nobody puts up a fight

In the new dark age

you’ll see no flares in the night

The only lamp burning bright…is you

The only lamp burning bright…is you

Nice. If I were writing it, I would only tweak it to say that the only lamp burning bright is us, and then put a verse in about Christ as the light of the world, and the only reason we burn in the darkness is that He burns within us. Then it would be truly Ben Oppy, though I would have to get over my reflexive, irrational prejudice against contemporary Christian music in order to listen to it.

And then there’s this 2004 standby, “Dégenération,” from the Quebecois band Mes Aïeux, which wouldn’t take much alteration — a verse about the loss of faith and Christian tradition — to be a perfect Ben Op song:

One great thing about that song is the final verse tells the listeners not just to mourn, but to get off their butts and do something about it.

If you have any song suggestions for the Benedict Option playlist, let’s hear them.

Love Across Borders Between Islam and Christianity

I was disheartened (more than usual) to hear of today’s bomb blast in Istanbul. I once stood on or near the exact spot where the suicide bomber detonated himself. Had dinner at a Turkish restaurant directly across from the place. Poor Istanbul. God have mercy on the city and its people.

I offer you this long, somber, thought-provoking address by Navid Kermani, a German Muslim writer who received a prestigious Peace Prize from German booksellers. He began by talking about Father Jacques Mourad, a Catholic priest-monk living in a Syrian monastery, who was ultimately abducted by ISIS:

Two phrases are striking in these few lines of a simple e-mail, no doubt written in haste, phrases which are both characteristic of Father Jacques and a standard for all intellectual integrity. In the first phrase, Father Jacques writes, ‘The threat from IS, this sect of terrorists who present such a ghastly picture of Islam’. The second phrase, referring to the Christian world: ‘We mean nothing to them.’ Father Jacques defended the community he does not belong to, and criticised his own. A few days before his abduction, when the group that pretends to represent Islam and claims to apply the law of the Quran was already an immediate physical danger to him and his parish, Father Jacques still insisted that these terrorists were distorting the true face of Islam. I would take issue with any Muslim whose only response to the phenomenon of the Islamic State was the worn-out phrase that their violence has nothing to do with Islam. But a Christian, a Christian priest who could expect to be expelled, humiliated, abducted or killed by followers of another faith, yet still insisted on defending that faith – such a man of God displays a magnanimity that I have encountered nowhere else, except in the lives of the saints.

A person like myself cannot and must not defend Islam in that way. The love of one’s own – one’s own culture, one’s own country and also one’s own person – manifests itself in self-criticism. The love of the other – of another person, another culture and even another religion – can be far more effusive; it can be unreserved. It is true that the prerequisite for love of the other is love of oneself. But one can only fall in love, as Father Paolo and Father Jacques did with Islam, with the other. Self-love must be a struggling, doubting, constantly questioning love if it is to avoid falling prey to narcissism, self-praise, self-satisfaction. How true that is of Islam today! Any Muslim who does not struggle with it, does not doubt it and does not critically question it does not love Islam.

(By the way, last October, Father Jacques escaped from his captors.)

More:

The vast majority of Muslims certainly reject terror, violence and oppression. This is something I have experienced directly on my travels; it is not an empty slogan. On the contrary: those who cannot take freedom for granted know its value best. All of the mass uprisings of recent years in the Islamic world have been uprisings for democracy and human rights: not only the attempted, although mostly failed revolutions in almost all the Arab countries, but also the protest movements in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and, not least, the revolt at the ballot box in the last Indonesian presidential election. The streams of refugees likewise indicate where many Muslims hope to find better lives than in their home countries: certainly not in religious dictatorships. And the reports that reach us directly from Mosul and Raqqa attest, not to enthusiasm, but to the panic and despair of the population. Every relevant theological authority in the Islamic world has rejected the claim of IS to speak for Islam, and explained in detail how its practices and ideology go against the Quran and the basic teachings of Islamic theology. And let us not forget that those who are fighting on the front lines against Islamic State are themselves Muslims – Kurds, Shiites and also Sunni tribes and the members of the Iraqi army.

All of this needs to be said to expose the illusion that is being propounded in unison by the Islamists and the critics of Islam alike, namely that Islam is waging a war against the West. More accurately, Islam is waging a war against itself; that is to say, the Islamic world is being shaken by an inner conflict whose effects on the political and ethnic map may well come close to matching the dislocations that resulted from the First World War. The multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multicultural Orient, which I studied through its superb literary achievements of the Middle Ages, and which I came to love as an endangered, never whole yet still vital reality during long stays in Cairo and Beirut, as a child during summer holidays in Isfahan and as a reporter at the monastery of Mar Musa – this Orient will have ceased to exist, like the world of yesteryear which Stefan Zweig recalled with nostalgia and sorrow in the 1920s.

What happened? Islamic State was not founded yesterday, nor did it begin with the civil wars in Iraq and Syria. Though its methods meet with abhorrence, its ideology is none other than Wahhabism, which exerts its influence in the remotest corners of the Islamic world today and, in the form of Salafism, has become attractive especially to young people in Europe. Since we know that the schoolbooks and curricula of Islamic State are 95 per cent identical with the schoolbooks and curricula in Saudi Arabia, we also know it is not just in Iraq and Syria that the world is strictly divided into what is forbidden and what is permitted – and humanity divided into believers and unbelievers. A school of thought that declares all people of other religions heretics, and berates, terrorises, vilifies and insults them, has been promulgated for decades, sponsored with billions from oil production, in mosques, in books and on television. If you denigrate other people systematically, day after day, it is only logical – how well we know this from our own history, from German history – that you will end up declaring their lives worthless. That such a religious fascism has become conceivable at all, that IS is able to recruit so many fighters, and still more sympathisers, that it has been able to overrun entire countries and capture major cities with hardly a fight – this is not the beginning, but rather the endpoint to date of a long decline, and I am referring not least to the decline of religious thought.

One more passage:

We read so often that Islam must be cleansed by the fire of Enlightenment, or that modernity must win out over tradition. But that is perhaps too simplistic when we consider that Islam’s past was so much more enlightened, and its traditional writings at times more modern, than the current theological discourse. Goethe and Proust, Lessing and Joyce were not out of their minds, after all, to have been fascinated by Islamic culture. They saw something in the books and monuments that we no longer perceive so easily, brutally confronted as we often are by contemporary Islam. Perhaps the problem of Islam is less its tradition than its nearly total break with that tradition, the loss of its cultural memory, its civilisational amnesia.

All the peoples of the Orient experienced a brutal modernisation imposed from above in the form of colonialism and secular dictatorships. The headscarf – to name one example – the headscarf was not abandoned gradually by Iranian women: in 1936, the Shah sent his soldiers out into the streets to tear it from their heads by force. Unlike Europe, where modernity – in spite of all the setbacks and crimes – was ultimately experienced as a process of emancipation and took place gradually over many decades and centuries, the Middle East experienced it largely as violence. Modernity was associated not with freedom, but with exploitation and despotism. Imagine an Italian president driving his car into St Peter’s Basilica, jumping onto the altar with his dirty boots and whipping the Pope in the face: then you will have a rough idea of what it meant when, in 1928, Reza Shah marched through the holy shrine of Qom in his riding boots and responded to the imam’s request to take off his shoes like any other believer by striking him in the face with his whip. And you will find comparable events and pivotal moments in many other Middle Eastern countries which, instead of slowly leaving the past behind, demolished that past and tried to erase it from memory.

 

Kamani makes the familiar but still insufficiently appreciated point that fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon, and indeed is the religious version of secular modernism. Both reject tradition, though at least the secularists are aware of what they’re doing. Kamani says that authentic Islamic culture has not survived the shocks of modernity — both secularism and the fundamentalist reaction:

Certainly Muslim countries are still producing outstanding works, as we can see at biennials and film festivals, and once more at this year’s Book Fair. But this culture has hardly anything to do with Islam. There is no Islamic culture any more; at least, none of quality. What we now have bursting all around us and raining down on our heads is the debris of a massive intellectual implosion.

Read the whole thing. It’s very moving.

I wonder if you could say this about the post-Christian West:

There is no Christian culture any more; at least, none of quality. What we now have bursting all around us and raining down on our heads is the debris of a massive intellectual implosion.

Of Stars and Gods

“Thy nativity, O Christ our God,

has shown to the world the light of wisdom;

for by it, those who worshipped the stars

were taught by a star to adore Thee

the Sun of Righteousness,

and to know Thee, the Orient from on high.

O Lord, glory to Thee.”

— the Nativity Troparion (hymn) of the Orthodox Church

I love that line about the Magi, men who worshipped the stars, but who were directed by the Star to worship the True God. I was thinking about it yesterday afternoon when I finished Evangelical theologian Hans Boersma’s 2011 book on sacramentalism. If you missed it over the weekend, I invite you to read my blog post “The Nominalist Church At Year Zero,” which quotes from the book. I could not possibly do justice to this book in a blog post, but let me quote this bit from one of the final chapters. By “Great Tradition,” he means Christianity before the Late Middle Ages, which did away with the Platonic-Christian synthesis that was the basis for Christian metaphysics of the first millennium of the church:

Throughout this book we have seen that the sacramental tapestry of the Great Tradition had tremendous regard for mystery. The church fathers and medieval theologians were much less interested in comprehending the truth than in participating in it; and participating in the truth meant to be mastered by it rather than mastering it. The supernatural was not a distinct or seperate realm of being that superimposed itself onto an independent and autonomous realm of nature. Instead, the supernatural was simply the divine means to bring created realities of time and space to their appointed end in Christ. Therefore, created realities participated in the heavenly mystery of Christ as their sacramental reality. Access to truth meant sacramental participation in the unfathomable mystery of Christ.

He goes on to say that in the modern era (= starting in the Renaissance), and particularly since the 17th century, “truth was equated with certainty — not the certainty of faith, but the certainty based on a neutral and universally shared human reason.” Boersma makes a case that Western Christianity, both in its Protestant and Catholic versions, shifted its focus

from a sacramental entry into the mystery of God to a syllogistic mastering of rational truths. … Whereas the earlier sacramental symbolism had regarded truth as participation in divine mystery, the new rationalist dialectics maintained that truth meant complete rational comprehension of propositional statements.

This resulted in a Christianity that is fundamentally different from the faith as it was lived and understood for the first thousand years. Boersma only mentioned the Eastern church once, and that’s to say that it has never suffered from this problem (though certainly the Eastern church has had many other problems); he speaks of Roman Catholics and Protestants, and says, quite rightly, that even though Catholics still have a sacramental ontology (= seeing the world sacramentally), very many modern Catholics are just as afflicted as Protestants are with the flattening-out of their vision. In other words, very many of us, no matter how pious we are, have ceased to see the world through sacramental eyes.

What does this mean practically? Through sacramental eyes, everything in reality points toward the ultimate reality, which is God. The stars disclose something of God’s nature to us, because in traditional Christian metaphysics, God is Being itself (as distinct from the Supreme Being). The stars are not God, but God participates mysteriously in their reality. The same is true of the forests and the rivers. It is true of the breakfast you had, of your co-workers, of the city in which you live. It is true of the hours in which you draw breath, and in the words you write, and I write. This past weekend, I watched the wonderful movie The Book Thief with the family. Max, a Jew hidden from the Nazis by the family of a little German girl, Liesel, tells her:

“Write. In my religion we’re taught that every living thing, every leaf, every bird, is only alive because it contains the secret word for life. That’s the only difference between us and a lump of clay. A word. Words are life, Liesel.”

The divine Logos is in all. The Incarnation has made all of it holy, but none of it holy in quite the same way as the Eucharist. But that’s a topic for another day.

To the ancients like the Magi before their enlightenment, the stars may have been gods. To us moderns, the stars are just physical phenomena that have nothing special to do with God, aside from His having made them. There is no connection; what you see is what you get. This mindset, Boersma argues, makes us sitting ducks for radical skepticism of the present day. He contends that Western Christians must return to the robust sacramentalism of the Great Tradition if they are going to hold on.

Notice he does not say “Evangelicals must become Catholic” or even “Evangelicals and Catholics must become Eastern Orthodox.” I think Boersma is right, for reasons I will explain briefly in my talk in Wichita this weekend, in which I will talk about sacramentalism and the Benedict Option. When I get started writing the Ben Op book, I am going to work especially hard to articulate a case for sacramentalism in an Evangelical mode. I would very much appreciate any help you Evangelical readers can give me.

The other night, I dipped into my copy of anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann’s 2012 book, When God Talks Back, in which she reports on the years she spent within the Vineyard Church movement, observing with great specificity how they teach their congregants to practice the presence of God, to talk to him like He is a friend, and to listen for His words back to them. The problem is that many (most?) people struggle to believe that a God who cannot be touched, felt, seen, or heard is truly there. Here’s Luhrmann:

To deal with this problem, the churches like the Vineyard invite congregants to pretend that God is present and to make believe that he is talking back like the very best of buddies. It is a suggestion straight out of C.S. Lewis. In Mere Christianity, Lewis entitles a chapter “Let’s Pretend.” If you have read this far, he writes, you probably pray, and whatever else you pray, you probably say the Lord’s Prayer. Our Father, who art in Heaven … “Do you now see what those words say? They mean, quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ.” We are, Lewis points out, human bundles of self-centered fears, wants, and small-mindedness. But in speaking this prayer, one plays at being a child of the divine. Lewis approves of this: he thinks that if you pretend that you are with God, God will become more real for you. “Let us pretend in order to make the pretence into a reality.”

She cites the work of psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott:

Winnicott’s deepest insight was that play occurs in the boundary between the mind and the world, in what he called, with characteristic simplicity, the “intermediate area of experiencing.” This intermediate area exists between an external reality, which wishing will not change, and the child’s inner reality of hope and fear. Winnicott coined the term ‘transitional object’ for the toy that often becomes so special to a child around the toddler years — the bunny that cannot be left behind, the blanket that cannot be washed. He argues that these objects stand for what is good and emotionally real within the relationship with the mother in a concrete form that is neither the child nor the mother.

More:

Play helps people to internalize the concept that God is not just a bunch of rules and propositions, but is alive and present. And they learn to read the Bible sacramentally, seeing the Old Testament as filled with signs pointing to Jesus … and to themselves and their own lives, and their way through life.

Hmm. Is “play” — that is, by engaging the imagination — a way humans open themselves up in a sacramental way to divine realities? “Play” as the imaginative mediator between the Eternal and the Temporal? Luhrmann talks about how Vineyard congregations read the Bible:

This is not about scholarship. You do not, in this method, learn about when the scripture was written or which other scriptures it cites — not that there would be anything wrong with that, but it simply isn’t the goal of the method. The method asks you to put yourself in the story and then to make the story true for your own life.

Luhrmann talks about a particular woman who had been following the Vineyard’s prayer method, and had made spiritual progress:

In other words, she talked as if she had progressed from a childlike discovery of an externally existing God into a stage in which she carried an internal representation of God’s love that sustained her in the absence of specific moments of recognizing God’s presence.

Finally, Luhrmann says:

This is play, but it is a serious play: a play that cultivates the imagination for a serious end, precisely because congregants presume the basic claim of Christianity to be unbelievable, even foolish, in a modern, secular society. And the function of the emphasis on play is to make the player’s commitment to the serious truth claims embedded in the play more profound.

I don’t know what to say about this, exactly, but I think it could be a fruitful avenue. Luhrmann writes from an anthropologist’s perspective, not that of a religious believer, but she still makes it very clear that for the Vineyard folks, orthodoxy is not much of a concern. The authenticity of the experience is all that matters — and that could be hugely problematic. You can’t do this outside the grounded traditions of the church and not expect to go awry.

Anyway, I’m just throwing it out there for feedback. Help me out here.

Even More About Christians & Black Lives Matter

PathDoc/Shutterstock

A reader writes about the recent controversy at the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship gathering at Urbana (see here and here for background):

My son recently attended the Urbana missions conference and he had not mentioned anything to me about Michelle Higgins’ presentation.  A friend of mine sent me the links to your articles and I had a chance to talk to my son about what happened.  This deserved the press coverage you provided as it was very controversial at the conference.

I think there are a few additional important points to what you presented.

First, the attendees were strongly encouraged earlier in the day Higgins gave her talk to avoid using the words “us” and “them” at Urbana when talking about any racial or ethnic groups.  Ms. Higgins apparently “didn’t get the memo” on that stated expectation, which should have been enough for InterVarsity to quickly issue out a disclaimer in response to her criticism of White people as a racial group.  Whether or not she was trying to present history, provide her interpretation of current events, or for any other reason, she was disrespectful to the conference and to the expectations which were laid out for everyone and the attendees deserved a response from InterVarsity.

Secondly, it is important to note that Higgins received twice as much time to speak to the general assembly as did the various individual speakers from the Middle East.  Why her situation was considered more important to get more time than her counterparts in ministry around the “world” is disrespectful to the Church and the global community at large.  Their stories are as important as anyone else’s stories and deserve equal time, especially in the light of the current situation with ISIS and the Muslin community.  The reality is that radical Islam is way more dangerous than the Ferguson Police Department, and deserves more attention on what to do in response.

Thirdly, as my son stated it well, getting a traffic ticket due to the color of one’s skin has no comparison to losing your life for stating that you believe in God and not Allah.  Also, if InterVarsity was encouraging attendees to mobilize and address social injustice in the name of Christ, they should mobilize people to respond mercifully and passionately to all situations and not just the one in Higgins’ community.  Riling up the crowd as Higgins did was disrespectful and in stark contrast to those speakers from the Middle East who were asking attendees to pray and be merciful towards those who persecute the church.

Lastly, my son mentioned that he was criticized and insulted when he asked those around him in the assembly how Higgins’ presentation had any clear relevance to the conference.  He explained that this was a global conference and that the political debates that are uniquely American are not appropriate to be debated on the Urbana stage.  Why Urbana is promoting political debate that is American-centric is a great question that deserves an answer – is InterVarsity committed to being an organization focused on promoting liberal, cultural change to the world?

As for your points, I agree wholeheartedly with them.  I thought it would be unimaginable to think that someone could condemn the work of missionaries in Native American tribes and groups, condemn people for working with pro-life groups, and condemn of people for the color of their skin at an Urbana conference.  Not only has it happened, but what is more unimaginable is the sound of silence coming from InterVarsity in response.  If any of my children choose to attend the next Urbana conference, it appears that I need to prepare them to defend their Christian worldview and to potentially be insulted for their beliefs.

What the reader’s letter points to are some difficult aspects about #BlackLivesMatter, contemporary race relations, and Christianity.

Evangelical pastor Steven Wedgeworth writes at Mere Orthodoxy:

The Evangelical supporters of BLM believe that BLM should be understood as a general sentiment of love and sensitivity towards African Americans. They are not attempting to pair institutions or even official organizations. These defenses are clear that we should not assume that they agree with everything associated with BLM. But what none of these responses seem to have considered is whether or not BLM wants them to use the slogan if they are only prepared to endorse some of the program. According to BLM’s website, they emphatically do not want this kind of support.

Wedgeworth points out that the founders of BLM are emphatic about the movement being inseparable from sexual liberation — gay rights in particular. To the extent Evangelicals ignore that, they are disregarding the stated intentions of BLM founders.

Wedgeworth has a broader point about Evangelical engagement on racial reconciliation matters:

Beyond qualified language, however, I would think that Evangelicals would want to eventually call for an alternative discourse on race and justice, one which was not founded on identity politics or revolutionary ideology. In fact, the very notion of “liberty” needs to be distinguished from individual autonomy and license, and the love for the imago dei in our Black brothers and sisters must be united with the creational integrity that God intended them to have. Evangelicals can and should be sympathetic to Black critiques of power structures in contemporary America, but alongside such a critique, we must also promote a prudent understanding of the common good and an unambiguous definition of “justice.” In other words, a Christian theory of justice can be revolutionary, but in order to be so properly, it should be united with a Christian theory of creation, anthropology, and statecraft, or, in plainer words, of nature, people, and society. While Black lives really do matter, “Black Lives Matter” cannot create such a theory, and it will eventually emerge in contradiction to it.

Whole thing here.

Derryck Green, an African-American Evangelical, is far more blunt in arguing that Christians and Black Lives Matter are not on the same team:

Ok, let’s face facts and tell the truth.

Here’s a fact. There are racial disparities in education and the criminal justice system. And there is a case to be made, at least in education, that the disparities are partially the result of substandard education intentionally delivered to poor black and Hispanic children. Deliberately giving poor children less access to quality education is a partial predictor of future dependency, contributing to a growing underclass. Chicago, Detroit and New York are perfect examples. This cause should be taken up by Christians, but #BlackLivesMatter has nothing to do with it.

Further, if the goal is to reduce the racial disparities in education, people should not only advocate that poor children receive better quality education, they should also encourage the redemption and reconciliation of the black family. Not only would that contribute to the mitigation of academic disparities suffered by blacks, increasing the number of intact black families would also mitigate the racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Blacks aren’t locked up disproportionately simply and only because they’re black. Blacks are imprisoned disproportionately because of the disintegration of the family and the collapse of the Christian moral value system.

Speaking of criminals, here’s another fact: #BlackLivesMatter valorizes black criminality and sanctifies black criminals. The lives of everyday blacks don’t matter to this movement, including the lives of blacks tormented by black criminals. This is why #BlackLivesMatter is a misnomer. The only black lives that matter to these social agitators are the ones killed by (white) cops, largely the result of the actions of the criminals themselves. Defending and honoring the lives of black criminals over the lives of blacks that aren’t criminals, but in need of our attention, is despicable and unworthy of being called or legitimized by Christianity.

Read it all. It’s very strong stuff.

I don’t have time today to get too deeply into this — I will be spending much of the afternoon doing initial planning for the Walker Percy Weekend 2016 programming — but I want to continue the conversation with y’all in the comments section. These pieces I quote here articulate many of my concerns. The way the movement appears from the outside, the only opinions that matter are certain black ones, and the non-black ones that entirely assent. As an orthodox Christian, I don’t believe that we white Christians have the moral right to ignore racial injustice or to be indifferent to the legacy of racism, both in our churches and in our society. Having said that, any reconciliation must be honest, and, for Christians, authentically Christian. If we’re going to talk about Our Common Problem, then we have to talk openly and without judgment about the whole set of problems that are the legacy of slavery and segregation.