Rod Dreher's Blog, page 622

Have We Reached Peak Latin Mass?

Monsignor Charles Pope writes that the Traditional Latin Mass (which he supports) is a boutique phenomenon among American Catholics, and looks likely to stay that way:

Some years ago (as far back at the early 1980s) we who love the Traditional Latin Mass often said (or it heard said) that if we would just return to the beautiful Latin Mass our churches would again be filled.

At first this appeared to be happening. As many dioceses (through the various indults of the 1980s and 1990s) began to offer the Traditional Latin Mass, those churches were filled, often to standing room only. Liturgical progressives were horrified and traditionalists were joyfully pleased and felt vindicated.

But as the availability of the Traditional Latin Mass has increased, it seems that a certain ceiling has been reached.

In my own archdiocese, although we offer the Traditional Latin Mass in five different locations, we’ve never been able to attract more than a total of about a thousand people. That’s only one-half of one percent of the total number of Catholics who attend Mass in this archdiocese each Sunday.

One of our parishes generously offers a Solemn High Mass once a month on Sunday afternoon, a Mass that I myself have celebrated for over 25 years. But we have gone from seeing the church almost full, to two-thirds full, to now only about one-third full.

He challenges the complacency of Latin Mass supporters:

If we who love the Traditional Latin Mass thought that it would do its own evangelizing, we were mistaken. It is beautiful and worthy of God in many ways. But in a world of passing pleasures and diversions, we must show others the perennial value of the beautiful liturgy.

The honest truth is that an ancient liturgy, spoken in an ancient language and largely whispered, is not something that most moderns immediately appreciate. It is the same with many of the truths of our faith, which call for sacrifice, dying to self, and rejecting the immediate pleasures of sin for the eternal glories of Heaven. We must often make the case to a skeptical and unrefined world.

Evangelization is hard work, but it is work that matters if we want to maintain a viable presence going forward. The lovers of the Traditional Latin Mass are not exempt.

Evangelize or else close and die. It’s a hard fact, but numbers matter. Too many in the Church today demand respect and support without showing the fruits that earn respect and that make support prudent and reasonable.

Read the whole thing.  I was not a Latin Massgoer when I was a Catholic, but I considered myself a supporter. I do recall, though, the attitude that Msgr. Pope speaks of: an unspoken belief that the Latin Mass is so obviously superior that if people simply had it around, they would naturally choose it over the Novus Ordo.

Msgr. Pope’s piece makes me think about why I never got the hang of the Latin Mass, though I was ideologically predisposed to like it. The reason was not the “ancient language” part — that was something for which I was eager — but the “largely whispered” part. I very much wanted a more reverent liturgy than what we had in standard Novus Ordo parishes, but the experience of the liturgy as mostly a ghostly silence was hard to embrace.

It’s also true, I’m afraid, that some Latin Massgoers had a way of thinking about the old liturgy and the new mass that framed the contrast in a way that posited Novus Ordo Catholics as deficient in sanctity. There was a pride there, and it was deadly. If you think that the Latin Mass is obviously superior, and those who can’t see it are aesthetically and theologically cloddish — well, it’s hard to evangelize from that stance. Plus, if someone who visits the parish doesn’t sense joy in the congregation, they’re not coming back. I’m not talking about happy-clappiness. You can be very reverent, but also radiating joy.

Here’s the thing: all these criticisms of the Latin Mass crowd could also be made of much Orthodox Christianity in this country. 

We Orthodox very much occupy a boutique niche in American Christianity, and though I hope I’m wrong, I don’t see us breaking out of that anytime soon.

If you are a convert, or in a convert-heavy parish, you know how common this experience is: you discover Orthodoxy, and are so overwhelmed by its theological and aesthetic richness that it seems right that everybody in the world would want to have this too. This year marks my tenth year as an Orthodox Christian, and I still feel that way. Once you are inside Orthodoxy, and get the hang of the liturgy, a whole world opens up to you.

In my case, it was perfectly obvious from the beginning why one would want to be Orthodox. But I know myself well enough to admit that I’m a rare type, in that I am unusually moved by beauty. (Recall, it was seeing the Chartres cathedral for the first time at age 17 that brought me back to Christianity.) Beauty alone isn’t enough, but in my particular case, it is so central to my experience of God that I can scarcely do without it. This has been a blessing to me, because it has made me deeply grateful for the role of beauty in holiness, but also a burden, as far too often I am aware of certain disdainful impulses towards low-church worship, a spirit of criticism that is spiritually harmful. (Believe me, it was very much there when I was a Catholic too).

It’s not just an aesthetic thing. Rather, the aesthetics are inextricably tied to the theology, in ways that are difficult to see from a drive-by visit to an Orthodox liturgy. If you’ve only been to one Orthodox liturgy and decided it’s not for you, I would invite you to make two or three more visits before you make your mind up.

Still, Msgr. Pope’s words about the Latin Mass ring true to me re: Orthodoxy. The bottom line is that if the superiority of Orthodox worship were obvious, we would have many more converts than we do. Many of us Orthodox — and I’m pointing at myself here — do a poor job of evangelizing. Granted, we face enormous hurdles. Yes, we say the liturgy in the language of this country, English, and Orthodox worship is incomparably more participatory from a congregational standpoint than the Latin Mass is. But mostly, we are alien to American expectations, in ways that make us seem inaccessibly exotic.

Like the Latin Mass folks, we Orthodox have got to do a much better job of evangelizing. And like the Latin Mass folks, we have particularly high hurdles to clear. Like the Latin Mass, the Orthodox liturgy will never be able to offer the kind of “plug-and-play,” seeker-friendly experience. That is a hidden strength; Orthodoxy is very “finder-friendly,” in the sense that if you commit yourself to it, the Orthodox life gives you an experience of Christianity that, in my experience, is unparalleled in its depth.

But we live in a culture in which everyone expects things to be tailored to their own preferences, and if it doesn’t suit us instantly, we move on. Most of us are like that. More often than not, when I sit down to find a movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime, I end up surfing for half and hour then decide to go read, because I can’t find anything that I’m willing to commit to. That same mentality tends to govern our decisions about everything. I constantly have to resist this tendency in myself. I’m reminded of David Brooks’s great line from Bobos In Paradise: that many of us today try “to build a house of obligation on a foundation of choice.”

So, you can be a Latin Mass Catholic or an Orthodox Christian, and be frustrated with the masses who fail to appreciate the richness, beauty, and theological profundity available within your church and/or liturgical tradition … but that doesn’t get more people into church. If we want to push past Peak Latin Mass and Peak Orthodoxy in American life, we have to figure out a better way to evangelize.

I have been to Orthodox parishes that are booming with converts. I have been to frozen-chosen parishes that are dying on the vine. And I have been to parishes that are terrific, but struggling for worshipers. Let me ask you readers: what makes the difference in these places?

Let me put the question to you Latin Mass Catholics as well: what makes the difference between a thriving Latin Mass parish community and one that’s just holding on?

Understand the spirit in which I am asking: I want both Orthodoxy and Latin Mass Catholicism to thrive in this country. 

 

SJWs Shatter Volunteer’s Idealism

This came in the mail today. I’ve altered it somewhat to protect the identity of the sender, and publish this version with his permission:

I have been an avid reader of your blog for a few months now, since moving to Texas to live and work in a volunteer organization. A disclaimer at the beginning of this email: while this story may not fit in with the loss of the academy via political correctness, it certainly does so when considering the loss of mainstream Protestantism.

I am a white man and recent college graduate. I am Catholic, and following graduation, I decided to volunteer for a year. I wanted to serve at a faith-based organization, and having found one, affiliated with [a Mainline Protestant church], I decided to apply, and was accepted. Since August, I have been working at [faith-based institution, place], and living in a community with others working at various other sites in the city.

I have always considered myself a pretty liberal guy, though I suppose that was before being introduced in earnest to what you have termed “SJWs,” but for whom I prefer “illiberal liberals.” Since arriving, I have gotten increasingly frustrated as they have gradually grown bolder and bolder, to the point of accusing me of “microaggressions” (whatever the hell that cruel joke could possibly mean) for saying that I thought that we needed a more empathetic and effective means of curbing abortion, about which I said, “I think we can all agree that nobody wants, or actively desires more abortions, or thinks that they are a good thing.”

They accused me of trying to speak for everyone as a man, of “mansplaining” (again, whatever the hell that means), and of being blind to “the light.” When I tried to protest, and they found their argument (which was built on sand) collapsing, they grew only louder and eventually I had to just give up.

Since all of this, I find myself identifying less and less as liberal, as gradually the true “big tent party” has become the exclusive elitist proper language club. So even as I distrust Hillary and think Sanders is dangerous, I could never be a Republican, with all the idiocy on display from George W. Bush, and through this latest group of jokers. I am very passionate about politics, and our democracy, and I consider it nigh on a sin not to vote, but somehow I have found myself now on the outside looking in. An orthodox Catholic who just wanted to serve (Christ’s work), now shunned in an unhappy job–and it only looks to get worse. This Friday, we have a day in which all of the volunteers leave their jobs and get together. I have edited out the identifying information on the agenda, and attached it above. It made me sick to my stomach to read what I’m about to have to do…

I just wanted to grow in my faith, but have found instead, a brand of MTD supplemented by extreme political correctness. I hate it here, and feel like I was the victim of false advertising. The only reason I haven’t left (and sadly won’t leave), is because I made a commitment to the organization at which I am serving, and feel duty-bound to honor that, in spite of all the nonsensical lunacy going on around me. These people are PC sheep, and if that’s what it means to be a “liberal,” consider me an “independent.” Thank you for doing what you do, and I am excitedly awaiting the arrival of the BenOp book!

This stuff is insane, and the victimhood culture–not by the actually oppressed low-income Hispanic population I came here to serve, but rather that among these immature 20-something women with whom I have the misfortune to live–is real. Rather than being able to do Christ’s work, I find myself increasingly targeted as an over-privileged “man” (in the most derogatory sense imaginable, as though it was a crime) who doesn’t understand.

I have a photocopy of the itinerary the reader is about to have to undergo. He gave me permission to post his edited version (to remove names), but I’m hesitant to do that out of an abundance of caution. I will tell you that one of the sessions is about “power and privilege,” and focuses on “white privilege.” The other is a continuation of the previous days program, this one adding “oppression” and “microaggressions.” The afternoon features a workshop about gay consciousness.

This is all run by a liberal Mainline Protestant parachurch ministry. I looked into the reader’s identity, and everything checks out.

I wonder if the SJW youth and the adults that create them understand how much hatred and mistrust they sow? How cultish they are? Whenever I hear an SJW talk about “diversity,” I know that what they really mean is the imposition of rigid, intolerant, hypermoralistic left-wing ideology, and the demonization of anyone who disagrees with them. And “dialogue” is nothing more than: “You sit down and shut up and listen to us tell you how bad you are.”

A New ‘Laurus’ Thread

A number of you got the new Evgeny Vodolazkin novel Laurus for Christmas, and have been writing to tell me how great it is. Justin Ryan Lonas wrote a rave review calling the novel a “revelation.” The Financial Times published a good review the other day, and you might recall the initial review of my own, especially this:

Last night, after midnight, I read the last lines of Laurus, a newly translated Russian novel by Eugene Vodolazkin, and thought it surely must be the most perfect ending ever. There is no way it could have ended any more perfectly or profoundly. And then I did what I have done nearly every time I’ve put this astonishing novel down over the last few days: I picked up my chotki (prayer rope) and prayed, as I was first taught to do in an Orthodox parish in the Russian tradition.

What kind of novel makes you want to enter into contemplative prayer after reading from its pages? I’ve never heard of one. But Laurus is that kind of novel. It induces an awareness of the radical enchantment of the world, and of the grandeur of the soul’s journey through this life toward God. It is so strange and mystical and … well, to call a novel “holy” is too much, but Laurus conjures on every page an awareness of holiness that is without precedence in my experience as a reader. Holiness illuminates this novel like an icon lamp.

By saying that, I fear that I will make the novel sound pious and devotional. It very much is not. This is an earthy novel, filled with the sounds, smells, violence, superstition, and fanaticism of the Middle Ages. The achievement of Vodolazkin, who is a medieval historian by vocation, is to make this faraway world come vividly to life, and to saturate it with mystical Orthodox Christianity, such that even the leaves of the trees are enchanted. Most Americans who read Laurus will take it as a work with a strong current of magical realism; the handful of us American readers who worship in the Eastern Christian tradition will recognize it as simply Orthodoxy, where the border between wonder-working and everyday life is porous.

 

One of you asked if I could start a new thread to talk about Laurus, now that so many more people have read it. I think that’s a wonderful idea.

I’ll start by repeating a comment that one of this blog’s readers e-mailed me last night:

Just finished it. Holy sh*t. I have nothing to add to the kudos you have heaped upon it. Especially the ending…. Damn you Dreher, for forcing me to read this book! And thanks. For forcing me to read this book!

In a subsequent e-mail, he wrote:

I think it’s really important to note that it wasn’t tradition or faith that gained Arseny his renown. At then end, when his powers ebb, the people totally bail on him. Even in that environment, Even with their faith. When he cannot heal them, offering them real-world relief from actual human suffering, he is worthless to them.

Until people need the church for healthcare or education, they will ditch it.

Also consider the extent to which beauty played a role. In a world as dirty and desperate and filled with lice and worms and death and pus… the church was clean and beautiful. It was rich. And the average Joe was a part of that, at least in some limited way.

I’m going to cut off that comment right there, because his last two paragraphs — which I’ll post below the jump — contain spoilers. If you have read Laurus, please join in the conversation. I warn readers who have not yet read it but plan to that the comments section may well have spoilers. I’m not going to edit any out. By the way, if you’re headed to Wichita this weekend to the Eighth Day Institute shindig, I’ll be leading a discussion about Laurus and sacramentalism.

The reader continues, on beauty in Laurus:

You see the importance of that in the icon lamp Arseny was taking to Jerusalem. The defense of which costs Ambrogio his life. And on their journey he comments about his first time in a real Cathedral.

Now, the cave Laurus died near was not a Cathedral. But that was OK. At least he was still healing people. Until he wasn’t.

InterVarsity & #BlackLivesMatter, Cont’d

PathDoc/Shutterstock

Much commentary afoot over Michelle Higgins, the Black Lives Matter activist given a prime-time speaking spot at the recent InterVarsity Christian Fellowship student missions conference. I wrote about it here, critically, and also mentioned critically that a student pro-life organization was not given space to exhibit there. Over the weekend, InterVarsity vice president Greg Jao e-mailed to say (I post this with his permission):

In your article, you criticize InterVarsity’s decision not to accept Students for Life as an exhibitor, citing Chelsen Vicari’s blogpost for IRD. Any suggestion that Students for Life was not accepted as an exhibiting agency because of their pro-life goals is incorrect. If a pro-life organization met our exhibitor criteria, we would be happy to talk to them about being an Urbana exhibitor.

Students for Life was not accepted as an exhibiting agency at the Urbana 15 Student Missions Conference because it did not meet four of the seven criteria required for Urbana exhibitors. Students for Life cannot affirm InterVarsity’s Doctrinal Basis. (You have written approvingly of InterVarsity’s decision to accept campus derecognition because we require our student leaders to affirm our Doctrinal Basis. I hope you understand why we would expect our exhibitors to affirm our Doctrinal Basis.) Students for Life does not belong to an accrediting or oversight body or network. It does not offer short- or long-term cross-cultural missions opportunities.  These are basic expectations for exhibitors at a Christian missions conference. Students for Life was aware of this when they applied and acknowledged their non-religious status in their application. We also explained that exhibiting agencies must demonstrate that they advance the Gospel in word and deed. While Students for Life advances Gospel values in their admirable pro-life work, their strategy prevents them from making evangelism an explicit core commitment. We expect that exhibiting agencies at our mission conference do both. Urbana is not a generalized Christian job fair. Urbana is a conference focused on cross-cultural missions. As a result, exhibitors must either be a Christian missions agency or a Christian seminary that provides graduate programs in mission-related topics. Imagine the criticism we would receive (probably from the same parties) if Urbana allowed a non-Christian, non-evangelistic, non-accredited agency to exhibit at the conference even if they had otherwise admirable goals.

I hope, given the above, that you understand why I disagree with your statement: “But it seems that some lives are more sacred than others, and the cause of defending them is no longer part of God’s mission, according to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.” Urbana has a limited aim: to challenge this generation of students to engage in global, cross-cultural mission. The conference cannot reflect every Christian cause or value without losing focus.

 

In your article, you also make several claims about a speaker, Michelle Higgins, that I would like to engage

 

You state that Michelle Higgins spoke as a representative of BlackLivesMatter. That is not correct. Michelle Higgins primary affiliation from Urbana’s perspective is as a minister of South City Church, a PCA congregation which engages in justice activism in St. Louis as part of its ministry. She spoke as a Christian minister (who does affirm our Doctrinal Basis) from the St. Louis area who has worked alongside the BlackLivesMatter movement. The distinction is important. InterVarsity did not invite BlackLivesMatter to provide a speaker. We did not design the evening to endorse BlackLivesMatter as a movement. (Several of their positions are incompatible with InterVarsity’s (including their inability to affirm our Doctrinal Basis.)) We did intend to invite Urbana participants to engage with the experience of the Black church in the United States, listening (thoughtfully and critically, we hope) to the challenges posed by that community to the wider evangelical church. For what it is worth, I talked to several students, all of whom said they had never really wrestled with the core concerns raised by Higgins’ talk (i.e., to protect the physical safety and dignity of the Black community). They all were able to articulate places where they disagreed with Michelle’s talk, as well as places where their thinking was challenged in helpful ways. College students have more discernment than many would give them credit for.

 

I have been asked: Why does Urbana have more criteria for exhibitors than speakers? The answer if, of course, that exhibitors are there to provide cross-cultural missions placements or cross-cultural ministry training. As a result, we expect them to fulfill that function. Speakers are not expected to provide those placements (e.g., Francis Chan or the multiple testimonies from Arab and Persian Christian ministers).

Higgins did not criticized the existence of or the goals of the pro-life movement during the talk. She critiqued the pro-life movement in the context of a larger critique of the tendency of evangelicals to engage in the “easy” activism of protest while avoiding the “hard” activism of sacrificial lifestyle change. (And, I suspect, the tendency of Millennials to engage in hashtag activism without incarnating their concerns in everyday reality.) The larger context, of course, is the tendency of evangelicals to pay lip service to “racial reconciliation.” With regard to her criticisms of the pro-life movement, her primary point was that it is easy to pressure politicians and media about defunding Planned Parenthood, but it is much harder to adopt children in foster care into our homes. You may find that to be unfair, as I do. Prolife activists often have been at the forefront of the adoption movement. But you and I would agree, I suspect, that the church could and should do more to adopt children in foster care in addition to the marching and petitioning.


You suggested that Higgins criticized missionaries for proselytizing Native Americans. I think this is a misreading of what she intended. She was engaging in a standard critique that most evangelical missiologists would affirm: far too frequently in history, evangelical missionaries did not distinguish between the Gospel and Western cultural practices. The tide has turned among most missionaries, I believe. But the historical critique is true, and it is important for potential missionaries to wrestle with. This explains, in part, why InterVarsity focuses on racial reconciliation at Urbana. We do so because it is a critical cross-cultural missions issue. North American missionaries are regularly asked: If your gospel cannot bring racial reconciliation in such a largely churched country, how can you think it would work here? (And they might be asking, “And what racial prejudices do you bring as you come?”)

I appreciate your concern that Higgins’ talk may have may have portrayed racial justice the single cause against which all parts of the church must be judged. I am concerned that your article does the same thing, just from the pro-life side. I would hope we could extend charity to one another. There are many issues the Body of Christ must address. I don’t think that any one organization can address all of them. Most of us will focus on specific issues (e.g., WorldVision on poverty; Wycliffe on Scripture translation; Compassion on children, Prison Fellowship on prisoners, etc. At Urbana, InterVarsity focuses exclusively on cross-cultural global missions, which, in our experience, includes cross-cultural issues here in the US.) It is only as the whole church works together that the whole Gospel gets proclaimed to the whole world.

I trust you and believe you when you say “I’m all for racial reconciliation” even though it may not be the dominant topic you address in your columns. I realize you have limited capacity to address every issue. I hope you would extend the same charity to InterVarsity when we explain why Students for Life does not meet the exhibitor criteria of our Christian cross-cultural missions conference and that our organization affirms the sanctity of life. There is no contradiction between the two.

I also received this from an Evangelical pastor who asks to remain anonymous:

I really appreciated your post about Michelle Higgins. I thought it was a fair-minded critique. I agree with your concerns, and as an evangelical I would point out some other items that for some reason have gotten eclipsed by the abortion discussion.

There really is no gospel in her sermon anywhere–at least not the basic framework like Paul summarizes in 1 Cor. 15:3-5. I think that almost every reference that she makes to the Bible distorts the Bible. She calls for an end to North American-based missionary efforts, which she alleges are irredeemably “euro-centric.” All of this should have been like fingernails on the blackboard for an evangelical missions conference. But for some reason it wasn’t. That concerns me deeply about Intervarsity. (Keep in mind Intervarsity’s sponsorship of the Wild Goose Festival, but I digress.)

Probably the most troubling thing to me were her remarks about gender identity. She says that evangelical diversity must embrace transgenderism. Perhaps you noticed Michael Avramovich’s comments about her sermon at the Touchstone website. He points out something that I was not aware of until recently. The official Black Lives Matter movement is unequivocally in favor of LGBT activism. From the Black Lives Matter own website under statement of priniciples:

Transgender Affirming



“We are committed to embracing and making space for trans brothers and sisters to participate and lead. We are committed to being self-reflexive and doing the work required to dismantle cis-gender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.”

Queer Affirming

“We are committed to fostering a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking or, rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual unless s/he or they disclose otherwise.”

I knew that many of the activists affirmed these things, but I didn’t know that it was explicitly spelled-out in their statement of principles.

I think this is significant, and it puts Higgins’s offhanded remarks about “trans” people into an entirely different frame. Her sermon really did sound like a progressive parade of horribles. She really gave no grounds for interpreting her remarks as if they were coming from an otherwise confessionally orthodox believer. At every turn, she gave listeners every reason to think that she is Ta-Nehisi Coates at prayer.

I think evangelicals that choose to fly the #BlackLivesMatter flag have a responsibility to make clear their evangelical commitments. Higgins did not do that. In fact, she did the opposite, and that is the problem.

Continue the discussion below. Trolling will face the curator’s knife, so be thoughtful, and do not waste your words.

UPDATE: Carl Eric Scott comments:

Thanks for both these posts, Rod. The topic is very important. IVCF has long been the evangelical Christian student group noted for its simultaneous commitment to orthodoxy and to a certain strategic openness giving it trans-political character. When I joined, I was nearly a pacifist and a democratic socialist–and the great thing was that I felt I could join IVCF as such openly. IVCF was an organization that gave voice to both right-wing and left-wing Christian voices. It was careful, unlike so many evangelical organizations and churches, to not go very far into patriotic concern for America, lest it risk idolatry, and putting off lefty students like myself. It has also been on the pioneering edge of what it called “multi-ethnicity,” and not a few of its chapters now reflect this in their make-up, and not simply with respect to Asian membership, which has long been high. It is a group that should be granted some latitude with respect to the risks it takes to respect a wide spectrum of political views, and especially as these tend to correlate to ethnicity.

I must also remind readers that IVCF is the group that was DE-RECOGNIZED by UC, Vanderbilt, and a number of other craven universities, for refusing to alter its student leadership policies in ways that would permit practicing homosexuals to become officers. With respect to the threat to religious liberty posed by certain strains of LGBT activism, IVCF is on the front lines.

I appreciate the president’s letter to you. He has a number of important corrections to your original story. Maybe you should apologize a bit more for the first post. But he should know that past supporters of his organization, such as myself, are going to think twice about future support the more that things of this sort come up on our radar screens. I’m not an 19-year old leftist anymore, and it isn’t 1986 anymore anyhow… When I notice students on my facebook feed for SDSU IVCF talk about going to the “Solidarity with Mizzou” rally…well, coupled with things like Higgins’ speech, it really raises eyebrows.

What I wonder is…do student leaders and staff leaders in IVCF feel free to speak their minds about the quality of the Black Lives Matter movement? Is there a discouragement of IVCF students to take part in pro-life or conservative political activism, but an encouragement to take part in BLM-supporting activism? Beyond its suspicious Soros-funded origins, BLM’s reliance upon lies from very early on, and its willingness to implicitly threaten violence make it a very poor vehicle for IVCF’s commitment to “racial reconciliation.” No, we don’t want American missionaries importing American racism, or American refusal to talk about past (and some present) racial injustice, but we sure don’t want them INSTEAD importing the American penchant for race-grievance identity politics and trendy academic self-laceration theories like “white privilege.”

Some of us read our Shelby Steele along with our Brenda Salter-McNeil, after all.

I understand that IVCF has a tricky strategic road to follow when it comes to politics, campus politics, and ethnic politics. Part of the reason IVCF could reach me was that it did not close the door to dialogue with leftists.

Insofar as campuses become increasingly unhinged in a leftoid direction, however, and when the intimidation of contrary voices comes not simply from student groups (as in the 60s) but from entire academic establishments of diversity administrators, etc., perhaps strategy needs to be rethought. If IVCF is going to be silent about the deeply disturbing patterns of BLM, of general discouragement of free inquiry and speech on campus in recent years, and then is going to on the other hand talk up the Biblical reasons for supporting social justice and have its staff leaders tell their students that participating in events sponsored by BLM and such are healthy, fine to talk about on IVCF social media, etc., well, that’s an “apolitical” or “cross-political” stance that seems rather tilted to one side. If that’s what’s happening in most IVCF chapters now, that would be a capitulation to the spirit of the modern university, and not a witness that stands distinct from it.

Higgins’ Urbana speech, and the decisions that led up to it, require more explanation from the top leadership of IVCF. Reporting that a few students said they felt challenged by it even though they didn’t agree with it does not AT ALL suffice.

David Bowie

That’s David Bowie’s final video, above. There are tributes to him all over the web; I won’t even attempt one of my own. But my kids offered a tribute that every artist hopes to receive: they woke up to the news and are all visibly sad. They loved Bowie. Lucas, my 11 year old guitarist, taught himself “Diamond Dogs” last fall, and it has become a favorite for them all to sing. A couple of weeks ago, Matthew was calling the few vinyl record shops in our part of the world to see if any of them would have the new Bowie record when it was to be released last Friday. This 69-year-old Englishman, whose music I loved in high school, mattered to a new generation of fans, kids who liked his old stuff and his new stuff. I live with them. Really, it’s just about the best gift an artist can have.

That’s Bowie’s final video above. He had been struggling with cancer for 18 months. You can see it in his face. RIP.

UPDATE: Dang. Lucas, our little guitarist and singer, is still crying. This is real to him. First time this has happened in his life.

UPDATE.2: This is really starting to get to me. He’s been shut up in his room all morning, since getting the news. I can hear through the door Lucas working out his grief by playing and singing every rock song he knows on his guitar. Right now it’s the White Stripes, loud. He’s got a collection of guitar tabs open, and is pushing himself on songs he’s not yet learned. He will be 12 in a couple of weeks, but I’ve got a teenage boy, it seems. Matthew, his older brother, is shut up in his room playing Bowie songs. Far as I’m concerned, he can take the day off. When Jagger or Richards dies, I’m going to be in the same place.

Dissolving Nations & Peoples

In an interview in Germany’s Bild am Sonntag, the country’s Development Minister, Gerd Müller, says:

The people fleeing hunger, misery, violence, and because they see no future for themselves and their families. But we live in a globalized world. We can not build fences around Germany and Europe. When people suffer, they will come. … The biggest refugee movements are ahead: Africa’s population will double in the coming decades.

Und:

Only ten per cent of the refugee flow from Syria and Iraq has reached us. Eight to 10 million are still on their way. Those who come to us now, for several years sat in the tent cities, basements or goat stables without water and electricity. It is shameful that the international community is not able to ensure the survival on the spot.

Und:

We need a reduction. One million, like last year, we cannot successfully integrate. At the same time we have to assume our responsibility in the world in another dimension, as we do that so far all in Europe. We have built our prosperity on the back of the developing countries. That will not do any longer. These tensions are discharged.Then do not care what we define here. The people are not going to ask if they can come.

Read the whole thing.  I invite German speakers to offer a better translation from the original; I’ve cleaned up Google Translate’s version somewhat, but as I don’t speak German, it is likely that I made some errors.

So, what do you think? The German government minister says that there is no way to stop the human tidal wave about to sweep over Europe, and besides, Europe has it coming because Europeans have allegedly gotten rich by exploiting the Third World. “The people are not going to ask if they can come,” says the humanitarian. So Germany, and Europe, have no moral right to assert control over their borders, to say who can and who cannot enter into their community? This is a shocking statement from a senior official of any government: that the borders must remain open. That Europe is supposed to commit civilizational suicide in reparation for its capitalist crimes.

It’s straight out of The Camp of the Saints. It really is. It is astonishing. We are watching something of world-historical importance unfold. An entire civilization is being invaded by an army with no weapons but their poverty and their desire, and the civilization’s leaders are surrendering without a fight. Perhaps they believe they have nothing to fight for.

I read The Camp of the Saints last year, and blogged about it. ‘memba this?:

Accepting Third World migrants as an act of redemption. That is one of the main themes of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, which I finished reading this weekend. … Even a bad book may have something valuable to say to us. This is true of The Camp of the Saints. One aspect of the novel that I can’t shake off, though, is Raspail’s portrait of the migrants as not giving a damn about European civilization. It’s nothing personal; rather, they don’t believe they are coming to Europe as beggars who ought to be grateful for charity, but move as a mass that believes it is entitled to what the Europeans have. Europeans, by contrast, are, in the book, the ones who agonize over their civilization, whether it is worth defending, and what it means to be truly Western. The leaders in Camp of the Saints are not consciously surrendering, but rather they mask their cultural surrender with humanitarianism. They think that by flinging their doors open to the Third World masses, they are being good Westerners.

This is why the real villains in Raspail’s novel aren’t the migrants, but the European elites. He believes, it appears, that the Europeans ought to do whatever it takes to defend their civilization from the barbarian invasion. Raspail denounces contemporary France, though, as an exhausted civilization that is eager to be relieved of its burdens. To borrow a line from Cavafy, “those people, the barbarians, were a kind of solution.”

Meanwhile, Mein Kampf has just gone on sale in Germany again, for the first time since the war, its copyright having expired. Despite costing about $75 per copy, You-Know-Who’s manifesto quickly sold out.

This is like something from a dystopian novel. But I said that already.

UPDATE: A reader sends this link to a 1994 Atlantic essay by Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy. The subhed prophesies, Absent major changes in North-South relations, the wretched should inherit the earth by about 2025.

Excerpts:

Why revisit this controversial and nowadays hard-to-obtain novel [Camp of the Saints — RD]? The recovery of this neglected work helps us to call attention to the key global problem of the final years of the twentieth century: unbalanced wealth and resources, unbalanced demographic trends, and the relationship between the two. Many members of the more prosperous economies are beginning to agree with Raspail’s vision: a world of two “camps,” North and South, separate and unequal, in which the rich will have to fight and the poor will have to die if mass migration is not to overwhelm us all. Migration is the third part of the problem. If we do not act now to counteract tendencies toward global apartheid, they will only hurry the day when we may indeed see Raspail’s vision made real.

One of us (Kennedy) first heard The Camp of the Saints referred to at various times during discussions of illegal migration. One such occasion was in the summer of 1991, following media reports about the thousands of desperate Albanians who commandeered ships to take them to the Italian ports of Bari and Brindisi, where they were locked in soccer stadiums by the local police before being forcibly returned to a homeland so poor that it is one of the few parts of Europe sometimes categorized as “developing” countries. Apparently, one reason for this exodus was that the Albanians had been watching Italian television–including commercials for consumer goods, cat food shown being served on a silver platter, and the like. More than a few colleagues mentioned that the incident struck them as a small-scale version of Raspail’s grim scenario.

More:

If anything, Raspail’s contempt for sympathizers and fellow travelers in the West is even more extreme. The collection of churchmen who plead for tolerance of the approaching armada; the intellectuals and media stars who think this is a great event; the hippies, radicals, and counterculture people who swarm south to greet the Indians as the panic-stricken Provencois are rushing north–all these get their comeuppance in Raspail’s bitter, powerful prose. In one of the most dramatic events, close to the book’s end, the leader of the French radicals is portrayed as rushing forward to welcome the “surging mob” of Indians, only to find himself “swept up in turn, carried off by the horde. Struggling to breathe. All around him, the press of sweaty, clammy bodies, elbows nudging madly in a frantic push forward, every man for himself, in a scramble to reach the streams of milk and honey.” The message is clear: race, not class or ideology, determines everything, and the wretched of the earth will see no distinction between unfriendly, fascistic Frenchmen on the one hand and liberal-minded bishops and yuppies on the other. All have enjoyed too large a share of the world’s wealth for too long, and their common fate is now at hand.

It’s true that the groping New Year’s Eve mobs did not confirm the political sympathies of the women they assaulted. Here is the most jolting part of the essay which, remember, was written in 1994:

Let us now get to the heart of the matter. Readers may well find Raspail’s vision uncomfortable and his language vicious and repulsive, but the central message is clear: we are heading into the twenty-first century in a world consisting for the most part of a relatively small number of rich, satiated, demographically stagnant societies and a large number of poverty-stricken, resource-depleted nations whose populations are doubling every twenty-five years or less. The demographic imbalances are exacerbated by grotesque disparities of wealth between rich and poor countries. Despite the easy references that are made to our common humanity, it is difficult to believe that Switzerland, with an annual average per capita income of about $35,000, and Mali, with an average per capita income of less than $300, are on the same planet–but Raspail’s point is that they are, and that a combination of push and pull factors will entice desperate, ambitious Third World peasants to approach the portals of the First World in ever-increasing numbers. The pressures are now much greater than they were when Raspail wrote, not only because we’ve added 1.5 billion people to our planet since the early 1970s, but also, ironically, because of the global communications revolution, which projects images of Western lifestyles, consumer goods, and youth culture across the globe. Ambitious peasants no longer need a messianic untouchable to urge them to leave by boat for Europe; they see the inducements every day on their small black-and-white television sets.

Is all this gloom and doom justified? What about rosier visions of the future? What about the good news? The apocalyptic literature appears to be at odds with an equally large array of writings, chiefly by free-market economists and consultants, that proclaim a brave new world of ever-greater production, trade, wealth, and standards of living for all. In these portrayals of “the coming global boom,” a combination of market forces, diminished government interference, ingenious technologies, and the creation of a truly universal customer base will allow our planet to double or treble its income levels during the next few decades. In the view of those who believe that the global technological and communications revolution is making the world more integrated, rather than more envious, the constant modernization of the world economy is leading to a steady convergence of standards of production and living. As more and more countries open up to a borderless world, the prospects for humankind–or, at least, for those able to adapt–are steadily improving.

Yet a closer look at this cornucopian literature reveals that its focus is overwhelmingly upon the world’s winners–the well-educated lawyers, management consultants, software engineers, and other “symbolic analysts” analyzed by Secretary of Labor Robert Reich–who sell their expertise at handsome prices to clients in other rich societies. [Emphasis mine — RD] To the extent that they consider the situation in the Third World, the cornucopian writers typically point to the model minority of global politics–the East Asians. The techno-liberals pay hardly any attention to the mounting human distress in Calcutta or Nicaragua or Liberia, and no wonder: were they to consider the desperate plight of the poorest two billion beings on our planet, their upbeat messages would sound less plausible.

“Techno-liberals” — that is to say, to the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton, the Republican Party, and their journalistic fellow travelers at the editorial pages of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. To the North American and European globalist elites.

The authors say that leaders of the rich and the poor countries will have to get their acts together to avoid catastrophe in the 21st century. It concludes:

For the remainder of this century, we suspect, the debate will rage over what and how much should be done to improve the condition of humankind in the face of the mounting pressures described here and in other analyses. One thing seems to us fairly certain. However the debate unfolds, it is, alas, likely that a large part of it–on issues of population, migration, rich versus poor, race against race–will have advanced little beyond the considerations and themes that are at the heart of one of the most disturbing novels of the late twentieth century, Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints. It will take more than talk to prove the prophet wrong.

Read the whole thing. 

You could make millions doing a new translation of The Camp of the Saints today, and selling it. But it’s so racially charged that no mainstream publisher would touch it. You can read a Kindle version for $10.  As I said when I wrote about it last fall, it’s a hard book to read, because some of its passages are frankly racist. But as Paul Kennedy and Matthew Connelly indicate, you don’t have to love this book to take it very seriously as geopolitical prophecy.

German Leadership Sees Nussink

 

The truth, somehow, keeps leaking out:

Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas was the latest high-profile politician to speak out about the string of sexual assaults in Cologne on Sunday. In an interview with the popular “Bild am Sonntag” newspaper, Maas voiced his suspicions that the crimes which have the whole country reeling were not the result of an opportunistic mob mentality but a thought-out, planned attack on the city’s women.

“No one can tell me that it wasn’t coordinated and prepared,” the minister said. “My suspicion is that this specific date was picked, and a certain number of people expected. This would again add another dimension [to the crimes].”

The newspaper provided details from official police reports citing the use of social networks by some north African migrant communities to encourage their fellows to join them in the square between the Cologne train station and the cathedral, where the now hundreds of incidents of molestation and pick-pocketing took place.

But the Justice Minister added “that it is ‘complete nonsense’ to take these crimes as evidence that foreigners cannot be integrated into German society.” So there. You see nussink. 

Ross Douthat writes that Germany is “on the brink”:

How transformative depends on whether these [Middle East and North African migrant] men eventually find a way to bring brides and families to Europe as well. In terms of immediate civil peace, family formation or unification offers promise, since men with wives and children are less likely to grope revelers or graffiti synagogues or seek the solidarity of radicalism.

But it could also double or treble this migration’s demographic impact, pushing Germany toward a possible future in which half the under-40 population would consist of Middle Eastern and North African immigrants and their children.

If you believe that an aging, secularized, heretofore-mostly-homogeneous society is likely to peacefully absorb a migration of that size and scale of cultural difference, then you have a bright future as a spokesman for the current German government.

You’re also a fool. Such a transformation promises increasing polarization among natives and new arrivals alike. It threatens not just a spike in terrorism but a rebirth of 1930s-style political violence. The still-imaginary France Michel Houellebecq conjured up in his novel “Submission,” in which nativists and Islamists brawl in the streets, would have a very good chance of being realized in the German future.

Speaking of aging, here are some data that forecast a pretty grim century for Europe:

Animated Map: Median Age in #Europe 1960-2060 (Projection). Ping @EvanSinar @galka_max @conradhackett @MaxCRoser pic.twitter.com/OWHZkZJOyv

— Aron Strandberg (@aronstrandberg) January 8, 2016

Animated Map: Median Age in #Africa 1960-2060 (Projection). Ping @conradhackett @MaxCRoser @EvanSinar @galka_max pic.twitter.com/i7RNHXE1C8

— Aron Strandberg (@aronstrandberg) January 8, 2016

Animated Map: Median Age in the #MiddleEast 1960-2060 (Projection) @conradhackett @galka_max @freakonometrics pic.twitter.com/Nal3oEFO4i

— Aron Strandberg (@aronstrandberg) January 9, 2016

Where are all those young men going to go? There is only one answer.

Interestingly, things are evening out between the US and Latin America on this front: 

Animated Map: Median Age in the #Americas 1960-2060 (Projection) @conradhackett @EvanSinar @calestous #maps pic.twitter.com/5vg25aUptd

— Aron Strandberg (@aronstrandberg) January 10, 2016

But look at China vs India:

Animated Map: Median Age in #AsiaPacific 1960-2060 (Projection) @conradhackett @galka_max @freakonometrics pic.twitter.com/LrWDOgUxLh

— Aron Strandberg (@aronstrandberg) January 9, 2016

The Nominalist Church At Year Zero

If you missed Ross Douthat’s excellent post “Catholicism at Year Zero,” please make sure to read it now. It does a superlative job of explaining why progressive-vs-orthodox dialogue (such as it is) within Catholicism goes nowhere. There are lessons here for all small-o orthodox Christians. Excerpts:

Unfortunately in other ways I fear [a progressive Catholic professor] and I lack some of the common ground that co-religionists should share, and that his essay is illustrative of the real chasm separating the sides of the current Catholic controversy, and the difficulties involved in trying to dialogue across such a wide expanse.

This absence of common ground manifests itself in two ways. First, in discussing how we might assess biblical texts and their implications, Professor Martens seems to skip rather quickly from 50 A.D. to the 20th century, from the first apostles to the most recent pope. By which I mean that while his two models, Jerusalemite and Ratzingerian, are illuminating and important, he largely leaves out what seems like the most traditionally Catholic criteria for determining what is and isn’t “fundamentalism,” what counts as “legalism” as opposed to just fidelity, and how and whether doctrine can develop, namely: What the church has already taught on the matter.

Citing the case of the Council of Jerusalem, he proposes a kind of spiritual/sociological model for discernment of development, involving prayer, dialogue, the experience of mission work and more; citing Ratzinger, he proposes an intellectual model for discernment of development, with particular tests that might be reasonably applied. But these models, for all their potential wisdom, are also ones that any start-up Christian communion might adopt. Whereas part of the point of being Catholic — or so one might hazard — is that the church also has two thousand-odd years of prior argument, prior interpretation, and yes, prior rulings to tell us where the rough boundaries of our tradition lie.

Where matters are clearly unsettled, in other words, Martens is offering reasonable criteria to guide the church. But by only emphasizing those criteria, he seems to imply that no question is ever permanently settled, that one interpretation simply succeeds another as the church’s history unfolds.

This is the core difference between progressive Christians and orthodox ones: the nature of religious truth and authority. Ross continues:

But can you be an orthodox Christian if you believe that Jesus’s teaching was shaped and stamped by all-too-human limitations? Can you be a Roman Catholic Christian?

However they answer the first question, clearly a number of Catholic theologians think the answer to the second question should be “yes.” But then it’s hard not to see the “Roman Catholicism” being envisioned as something that’s basically Anglican except more so, in which you have your semi-Arian or Deist wing over here and your high-Christology wing over there and everybody just assumes that unity matters more than orthodoxy and agrees to muddle through.

Except, again, that Anglicanism isn’t muddling through anymore, and except that a great many Catholics, living as well as dead, would look at the above description and say “that ain’t no Catholicism, bruv.”

And of course I’m one of them. Which is why, as I said in my lecture for First Things, it’s been illuminating in the Francis era for conservatives like myself to see how, well, liberal liberal Catholicism really is — how quickly partisans of reform turn revolutionary, how quickly they move from issues that really are just about discipline, to issues that touch on doctrine, to issues that go to the heart of Catholic tradition and identity, to issues that go to the heart of Jesus’s identity. And by the end of all that movement, a Catholic center that I once thought existed often seems to be crumbling away.

Read the whole thing. 

These are the stakes facing all Christians right now. The modern, progressivist form of Christianity is suicidal, not because progressive Christians are bad people (many of them are surely more genuinely loving than I am), but because it lacks the foundation to hold on to what makes Christians distinctively Christian. If we are perpetually at Year Zero, and each generation gets to interpret Scripture as it wishes to, then what keeps Christianity from being completely assimilated by the post-Christian world? Where are its anchors that keep the faith from being swept downstream and over the falls?

Catholicism, Orthodox, and orthodox forms of Protestantism locate the anchors in somewhat different places, but they all agree that there are definite anchors. As Ross points out, (many?) progressives deny that there are anchors at all. Everything is up for re-negotiation. What was true yesterday is now false; what is true today may be false tomorrow. There is no authority binding our own judgment; it is all up to us.

As Charles Taylor has said, there is no escaping awareness of the power of choice all modern people have. This is a tremendous burden. It can be quite difficult to accept some things as given. I know this intimately, given my own unsettled religious pilgrimage. I do believe, however, that there is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference between Christians who believe that Truth exists independent of ourselves, and can be known (however imperfectly), and those who do not share that confidence. At the risk of offending philosophers, I would say that the difference is between Realist Christians and Nominalist Ones.

This distinction has nothing to do with the depth of their commitment. It has to more to do with their metaphysics. Here’s an interesting (I hope) way to demonstrate what I mean. Bear with me, this is a bit convoluted, but I want to get at this in a different way than the usual method, a juridical argument about authority.

Here’s a great new review of the novel Laurus; the reviewer is Justin Ryan Lonas. Excerpts:

The way time moves (or doesn’t) in Laurus is reminiscent of Slaughterhouse-Five, with Arseny “unstuck” in time. Whereas Vonnegut’s clock-play evokes an underlying banality to life, what Vodolazkin achieves is more akin to prophecy—unfolding reality with a rising spiral of metaphysics.

Events and themes seem to reverberate through the book and beyond. What occurs is never in isolation from everything else in the story, but reaches across time and space to give significance to what comes before and after. Like biblical prophecies, which so often have immediate, intermediate, and ultimate fulfillments as they ripple out from their proclamation, the phases of Arseny’s story rhyme, often with repeated phrases and mirrored scenes. For example, early in the book, Arseny sees his older self staring back at him through a fire; the same few paragraphs are retold from the perspective of the old man some 200 pages later, as they behold one another and weep together.

In Laurus, time is sacramental. What does this mean? As you know, I’ve been reading Evangelical theologian Hans Boersma’s terrific book on sacramental ontology, Heavenly Participation. Citing the Catholic nouvelle theologian Fr. Yves Congar, Boersma says that in “sacramental time

past, present, and future can coincide. As a result, people from different historical eras can participate or share in the same event. Congar maintains that it was the Holy Spirit who effected this transcending of ordinary temporal limits: ‘It is the characteristic work of the Holy Spirit to effect a communication between realities despite their limits and the distances separation them …” When chronological time opens up, as it were, eschatological realities themselves are able to enter into it.

More Boersma:

Perhaps the most important reason modernity has made it difficult for us to acknowledge any kind of authoritative role for tradition is the fact that we look at history rather differently from the way people interpreted it throughout the millennium of the Platonist-Christian synthesis [the first thousand years of Christianity — RD]. In nominalist fashion, we tend to look at time as a simple succession of distinct moments, unrelated to one another; we regard event X, which took place ten years ago, as no longer present, and thus in principle as unconnected to event Y, which is taking place today. This is not to say that we deny historical cause and effect. We realize quite well that, through a number of traceable historical causes, event X gives rise to event Y. The point, however, is that we regard the two events as separate. Going back to our discussion about analogy and univocity, we could say that we view the two events as univocal moments in time: they have the same kind of reality or being, and are not intertwined in any real sense. As Charles Taylor puts it: “We have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done.” Univocal time gives us the control that we desire in the secularity of modernity.

… Augustine’s conception of time was sacramental: time participates in the eternity of God’s life, and it is this participation that is able to gather past, present, and future together into one.

Boersma says that the entering of the eternal, infinite God into time and finitude, in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, allows “time to participate sacramentally in eternity.”

What does this have to do with the impasse between the orthodox Catholic Douthat and his progressive Catholic interlocutors? Boersma is on it, saying that both Protestants and many Catholics have come to accept nominalist metaphysics, which occasion a loss of the sacramental dimension of time:

Evangelicals have largely abandoned a sacramental view of time (as have many Catholics), and this desacramentalizing has impacted the way we have decided on doctrinal issues. Because we tend to regard the time period of the biblical author and our own small moment under the sun as two distinct or separate moments, (univocally) identical in kind, we believe that it is our job simply to find out what exactly the biblical author meant in any given biblical text in order then to proclaim it as authoritative. ..

The sacramental understanding of the Platonist-Christian synthesis shakes up this modern evangelical model. If the various historical moments of the church’s tradition sacramentally participate in each other in and through the Christ event, theological or doctrinal convictions of the Christian past are much more than interesting ways Christians throughout history have dealt with the biblical text. If the church today shares, by means of a real participation, in the church’s earlier tradition, that earlier tradition genuinely lives on in us and we have a sacred responsibility to it Earlier periods of the Christian tradition and our present time are connected via a common sacramental participation in the eternal Word of God.

A desacramentalized view of time tends to place the entire burden of doctrinal decision on the present moment: I, in the small moment of time allotted to me, am responsible to make the right theological (and moral) choice before God. The imposition of such a burden is so huge as to be pastorally disastrous. Furthermore, to the extent that as Christians we are captive to our secular Western culture, it is likely that this secular culture will get to set the church’s agenda. If we do not see ourselves sacramentally connected to the tradition (and thus to Christ), we sense no accountability to the tradition, and we are are likely to accommodate whatever demands our culture places on us and capitulate them. By contrast, when we are faced with a theological and moral conundrum, a participatory approach to tradition will always ask how the catholic, or universal, church throughout time and place has dealt with the issue. The widespread assumption that Christian beliefs and morals are to a significant degree malleable has its roots in a modern, desacralized view of time.

Thus, Catholicism Year Zero — and Christianity Year Zero. This goes a long way to explain why regaining a traditional Christian sacramental view (or, as Boersma puts it, “sacramental ontology”) is key to the Benedict Option. We will be completely shattered and washed down the river of time and over the falls if we do not. I’m convinced of it.

To that end, let me share with you a column from the Catholic website Crux, sent to me by a reader. The author is Kathleen Hirsch, and she’s writing about a crisis of anxiety among the young:

Two years ago, Psychology Today published an article describing what the author deemed a mental health “crisis” facing today’s college students. “Evidence suggests that this group has greater levels of stress and psychopathology than any time in the nation’s history,” wrote Gregg Henriques. Stress, anxiety, and depression top the list.

To those who spend time in close contact with young adults, this came as no news. College counseling offices are overwhelmed. Today’s students are gifted, well-educated — and worried sick. They are dogged by the demands of achievement that often feels disconnected to meaning. They experience a vertiginous gap between their hopes and ambitions, and a belief that they can make a difference. Few of the young go to church. Few can name flesh-and-blood role models. Creatively self-destructive, they fill their schedules to the breaking point, over-eating or starving, over-exercising, cutting, over-committing. In a pinch, they overmedicate.

The young may be our harbingers. We see them more clearly than we see ourselves because they are the last cohort observable in aggregate by a bevy of adults on the lookout for their well-being. In truth, those who come to me for spiritual direction, a decade or more out from college, battle the same worry and self-doubt, the sense of being suspended somewhere in mid-journey with an insufficient grasp of where they have come from or where they are going — literally or metaphysically. In free floating, angst-driven flight.

I believe that they can find what they’re looking for in the Christianity of the Great Tradition (to use another Boersma phrase, referring to the Platonic-Christian synthesis of the first millennium). I intend to show how in my Benedict Option book. Hirsch writes:

Irenaeus, the 2nd-century Church Father, in a commentary on the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel, writes that the work of Jesus was not to save us from our nature, but rather, to restore us to our nature, and in the process of doing so, to bring us back into relationship with the deep interconnectedness of all things. [Emphasis mine — RD]

It may well be that this is the consciousness we must work to restore today. To offer communities of return as an alternative to flight, giving our young and one another experiences that suggest that there is far more that is trustworthy and good beyond one’s well-fortified self.

As the reader who sent me this suggests, this is a great way to articulate the goal of the Benedict Option: to leave the anxious, fluid world of Christianity Year Zero, embrace a way of living and worshiping that restores our understanding and our participation in the sacramental reality of life in Christ, and return into the world to bear witness to it.

Siri Fixes The Humanities Factory Faculty

I’ve been reading theology this week, preparing for my talks next weekend in Wichita. I came across a basic concept that clarified my thoughts: a symbol is something that both points to something greater, and participates in it.

With that in mind, this Inside Higher Education interview with Sidonie A. Smith, a “noted humanities professor” who has written a new book about the crisis in the humanities, is a symbol of that crisis. Observe how she talks:

Q: What is the “possibly posthuman humanities scholar” and how does this idea relate to doctoral education?

A: Writing this book, I came to see the new scholar subject as a performative of passionate singularity, hybrid materiality and networked relationality. This is one sense in which the humanities scholar that is becoming is possibly posthuman, and a posthumanist scholar. The locus of thinking, for the prosthetically extendable scholar joined along the currents of networked relationality, is an ensemble affair. It involves the scholar, the device, the algorithm, the code. It involves the design architecture of platform and tool, the experiential architecture of networks, and the economy of energy. It involves the cloud, the crowd and the “rooms,” bricks and mortar and virtual, in which scholarly thinking moves forward. Ultimately, thinking is a collaborative affair of multiple actors, human and nonhuman, virtual and material, elegantly orderly and unruly.

Yes, the mode of doing humanities scholarship in the academy has commonly been described as that of the isolated scholar producing a long-form argument in the shape of the book, and faculty needs have commonly been described as individual study, computer screen, archive and time. In this time, however, possibly posthuman humanities scholars are accumulating new skills, including that of design architecture and algorithmic literacy. They are at once multimediated self-presenters; self-archivers; bricoleurs of intellectual inquiry, individual and collective; anonymized databases; networked nodes of a knowledge collaboratory involving scholars, students, laypeople, smart objects, robots. Networked scholars are not only connected to knowledge communities close at hand — in the room, so to speak — but also connected across the globe in an interlinked ecology of scholarly practices and knowledge economies. But even as we shift our notion of the scholarly subject, it is necessary to recognize the less salutary aspects of the transformation of the humanities scholar. That subject is already captured in the big quantification engine of higher education. How these working habits and scholarly subjectivities will evolve in the midst of future technologies and cultures of sociality can only be dimly glimpsed. That is a subject of inquiry the posthumanist scholar can pursue in thinking about what thinking is now.

Read the whole thing. I dare you to find anything that sounds human in that interview. With a noted humanities professor. Who is trying to address the crisis in graduate humanities education. It’s like asking Siri how to fix a factory.

If the future of humanities education depends on people who think and talk like this, as a technician of arcana studies, it is doomed.

Steven Hayward mined excellent comedy out of this claptrap, comparing Prof. Smith’s discourse to Prof. S.K. Hammerhead III, Jr.’s evaluation of the Rutles.

Do #UnbornLivesMatter to InterVarsity?

At its recent missions conference, the big Evangelical ministry InterVarsity Christian Fellowship hosted Michelle Higgins, a speaker from the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Why? According to a press release from InterVarsity:

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA has a 75-year dedication to the gospel, orthodox doctrine, and missions while also sharing the message in a way that resonates with the current student generation. Scripture and the gospel are non-negotiables for us. Some of our chapters have been denied access to campuses because of our dedication to core, orthodox Christian doctrines.

We chose to address #BlackLivesMatter at Urbana 15, InterVarsity’s Student Missions Conference, because it is a language and experience of many college students. Many Black InterVarsity staff and students report that they are physically and emotionally at risk in their communities and on campus. About one-half of those at Urbana 15 are people of color, including more than 1,200 Black participants. InterVarsity chose to participate in this conversation because we believe that Christians have something distinctive to contribute in order to advance the gospel.

InterVarsity does not endorse everything attributed to #BlackLivesMatter. For instance, we reject any call to attack or dehumanize police. But – using the language of Francis Schaeffer and Chuck Colson – we are co-belligerents with a movement with which we sometimes disagree because we believe it is important to affirm that God created our Black brothers and sisters. They bear his image. They deserve safety, dignity and respect. InterVarsity believes all lives are sacred – born and unborn. Interim president Jim Lundgren says, “Scripture is clear about the sanctity of life. That is why I’m both pro-life and committed to the dignity of my Black brothers and sisters.”

We see racial reconciliation as an expression of the gospel (e.g., Ephesians 2:14-18), and as an important practice in preparation for global missions. The need for reconciliation is obvious in the Middle East and other global mission fields. It is just as obvious in the United States. InterVarsity has been involved in this conversation for decades. We believe it is important to stand alongside our Black brothers and sisters.

That same #BlackLivesMatter activist, addressing the 16,000 students present, said that the pro-life movement is “a big spectacle.” At about the 13:30 mark in her presentation, she began denouncing pro-life Evangelicals as hypocrites:

“We could end the adoption crisis tomorrow. But we’re too busy arguing to have abortion banned. We’re too busy arguing to defund Planned Parenthood,” charged Higgins. “We are too busy withholding mercy from the living so that we might display a big spectacle of how much we want mercy to be shown to the unborn. Where is your mercy? What is your goal and only doing activism that is comfortable?”

Her entire talk was more or less progressive boilerplate, some of it worthwhile, some of it absurd (e.g., praising pro-Soviet radical Angela Davis as an apostle of “hope,” accusing white Evangelical churches of being racist if they don’t embrace exuberant African-American worship styles), some of it bizarre coming from a confessing Evangelical (e.g., blaming missionaries to North America for “proselytizing” Native Americans), all of it intended to convince her audience to be ashamed of themselves if they have not joined #BlackLivesMatter.

Here’s something especially interesting: Students for Life, a college pro-life organization, was refused permission to exhibit at that same event because, according to Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America:

Students for Life and Rock for Life were denied the chance to exhibit at the conference because, according to an email from the Exhibits Manager, “… Students for Life does not align with Urbana’s exhibitor criteria. One of our key criteria for exhibitors is to have advancing God’s global mission as the vision and purpose of their organization.”

Chelsen Vicari of the Institute for Religion and Democracy contacted the events manager for an explanation:

 

To be fair, I reached out to the Urbana15 team for greater context. And I will say that the Urbana15 team responded quickly and obligingly. They pointed me towards their exhibitor’s criteria page.

But from the list of seven prerequisites, including being a reputable agency registered with the IRS, I found no cause to deny SFL while highlighting #BlackLivesMatter. SFL promotes diversity, provides training, builds coalitions with parachurch ministries, works with Christian college campuses, and advances key components of God’s mission: every life is precious. SFL does all those things, just not in the typical churchy way. That’s a good thing.

So why then did Urbana15 deny SFL a booth in the lobby yet devote an entire evening to #BlackLivesMatters, whose keynote never once addressed abortion’s innate racism? This, I believe, is because among faithful student ministries we have a Millennial generation moving into leadership positions who prioritize leftist political policies over traditional teaching to make themselves feel more compassionate.

Millennial readers, does Vicari have a point?

Remember, the interim president of InterVarsity said that Scripture is clear about the sanctity of life, and “that is why I’m both pro-life and committed to the dignity of my Black brothers and sisters.” That’s what he says. But it seems that some lives are more sacred than others, and the cause of defending them is no longer part of God’s mission, according to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

Why does one negate the other? It doesn’t make sense to me. If you want to have Black Lives Matter, fine, do it — but why not pro-lifers?

And look, I’m all for racial reconciliation, but I fail to see how a half-hour harangue by a left-wing church lady who tells white Evangelicals in the audience that they ought to be ashamed of their pro-life activism, and of their ancestors for evangelizing Native Americans, is going to build bridges. But that’s me. I just don’t get what’s so reconciling about the message, “Here are a hundred ways you people suck, but you will be absolved of your suckiness if you join my movement.”

UPDATE: Thought of Michelle Higgins’s diatribe when I read Damon Linker’s latest column, which is about the pathologies of identity politics. Specifically this:

And there you have it: the identity-politics-addled mind at work. Its first thought is always an ethnic, racial, gender, or ideological category, like “white privilege,” which it uses to size-up the world in an instant. Next comes judgment, usually quick and severe, using a single measure: relative power among the various ethnic, racial, gender, or ideological groups. And then there is the final ingredient: the moralistic edge tinged with grievance that makes the American style of identity politics so potent and distinctive, an obsessive fixation on justice understood as equality.

Put it all together and we’re left with the only form of moral evaluation that identity politics can manage: the indignant denunciation of double standards.

That’s very good — and it describes the Higgins speech perfectly. There is nothing in the talk to invite others in. It’s all about rage and public shaming, along with some manipulative self-praise, along the lines of, “I know this is going to make a lot of you uncomfortable, but I have to tell the truth.” If you’re the kind of Evangelical who masochistically likes this kind of identity politics display, then this is the kind of thing you like.

Seriously, though, I don’t know why people think this kind of rhetoric is successful. I mean, it is plainly successful, to a point. But then you run into people who aren’t swayed by moral harangue (as opposed to moral suasion), and eventually, they will push back. If you’re lucky — if we’re lucky — they will not rely on the same tactics. I wouldn’t count on it. One legitimizes the other. But #BLMers and progressives are so caught up in the rapture of their own righteousness that they don’t see the risk.

(And by the way, if I heard a pro-life speech using the same rhetoric, I would find it very off-putting and counterproductive, even if I agreed with the point being made.)