Rod Dreher's Blog, page 623

The Art $800 Million Would Buy

View from my desk this afternoo

Everybody loves to think about how they would spend a lottery jackpot. If I won the $800 million jackpot this weekend, I would buy an apartment in Paris, build a church for my congregation, donate to my alma mater, endow the local arts and culture charity that sponsors the Walker Percy Weekend, found an Orthodox Christian classical school, give generously to TAC, to the Benedictines of Norcia and to the Mars Hill Audio Journal — and that’s just for starters.

Former Episcopal monk Roy Cockrum won $259 million playing Powerball, and has used in in part to commission and produce a play about Thomas Merton. I love this story! What a great way to use a portion of one’s winnings.

Let me put the question to you all: If you won the $800 million jackpot, which one art or culture-related project would you support?

Note well that I am not asking, “What would you do with the money?” Nor am I asking for a list of arts projects you would support. So please don’t give me one. What I’m asking you to do is to think about if you were able to fund only a single, one-off arts project (versus endowing an institution) with your lottery money, what would it be? I’m willing to take a runner-up project too.

Mine would be to finance a film version of the novel Laurus, no question. My runner-up would be to fund a miniseries version of Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy. 

What would yours be? Please follow the rules of the game, and limit yourself to one-off projects: a winner, and a runner-up.

Was Wheaton Wrong?

Wheaton College is getting beat up pretty badly over its decision to fire tenured professor Larycia Hawkins for having stated that Muslims and Christians worship the same god. Here is Hawkins’s public statement about the matter. Excerpt:

Wheaton College cannot hold me to a different standard, a higher standard, than they hold every other employees to.

Wheaton College cannot scare me into walking away from the truth that all humans, Muslims, the vulnerable, the oppressed, are all my sisters and brothers.

Wheaton College cannot intimidate me into cowering in fear of the enemy of the month as defined by real estate moguls, Senators from Texas, Christians from this country, bigots, and fundamentalists of all stripes.

Wheaton College will never induce me to kowtow to their doublespeak concerning the Statement of Faith, so as to appease an imaginary constituency that clearly knows little about what academic freedom or Christian love mean; or to placate platinum donors to their coffers.

Wheaton College will never hear me disavow my religious family tree—that would be the height of academic dishonesty; the nadir of historical revisionism, and a repudiation of the Christian narrative where the central figure is a Hebrew from Nazareth who was despised and rejected, from Podunk Nazareth, who nevertheless set captives free and is still doing so today.

Wheaton College cannot place me in a theological corner or a trumped up Statement of Faith Corner. The last time I was put in the corner was the 4th grade and that was undeserved. I won’t ever be put in such a corner again.

Naturally the usual liberal Evangelical suspects are taking great pleasure in the lashing that the conservative troglodytes at Wheaton are receiving. I want to put in a conditional vote of support for Wheaton.

Let me make a couple of things clear.

First, I am not passing judgment on the theological claim that Hawkins made, and whether or not it is acceptable within Evangelical theology. There is no such thing as a Magisterium for Evangelicals, a final court of theological appeal at which such questions can be decided. Matthew Arildsen, writing in the Washington Post, has a very good piece about why it is important for the trustees of Wheaton College, which is a standard-bearing institution for American Evangelicalism, to take a stand here. Whichever way Wheaton went on the Hawkins affair, it was bound to be consequential for Evangelicalism.

Second, I am not passing judgment on the procedural fairness of what Wheaton has done here. I don’t follow the ins and outs of American Evangelicalism closely. I’ve heard it speculated — but only speculated — among Evangelical friends that Wheaton may be applying a double standard to Hawkins. This may be true, and if so, shame on them. I am not impressed by Hawkins’s tying her situation to the plight of the wretched of the earth. It’s cheap, sentimental, liberal grandstanding. That said, she may well have been treated unfairly by Wheaton, by Wheaton’s own standards (see Miroslav Volf’s short essay defending Hawkins, saying that her real sin is political, not theological).

With those provisions made, I am standing up for Wheaton in principle because I think it is important for religious institutions to police their theological boundaries. Most Catholic universities in the US haven’t done so, and the result in many, many cases is this kind of embarrassment, and a radical degradation in what it means to be educated in a Catholic institution of higher learning.

Wheaton does police its margins carefully. Catholics are not allowed to teach there, not because Wheaton’s leadership think Catholics are bad people, but because they do not believe a faithful Catholic can affirm the institution’s standards. If I were a professor, as an Orthodox Christian, I couldn’t teach there either. Do I think that is excessive? Probably. But I admire Wheaton’s willingness to take a hard stand, even when they are mocked by outsiders. It requires the kind of courage and confidence that one doesn’t often see among Christian churches and institutions these days, and that will be desperately needed in the years to come, by all of us.

I commend to everyone’s attention this 2006 First Things essay by my friend and TAC contributor Alan Jacobs, who wrote it while he was on the faculty at Wheaton (he’s now at Baylor). In it, Alan takes up the case of Prof. Joshua Hochschild, who was dismissed by Wheaton when he announced his intention to convert to Catholicism. Hochschild said at the time that he, as a Catholic, could affirm the provision in Wheaton’s Statement of Faith saying that Scripture is the “supreme and final authority” for Christians — and Hochschild quoted magisterial documents supporting his position. Wheaton’s president Duane Litfin responded that the original intent of the drafters of that statement excludes the possibility that a Roman Catholic could affirm it. Alan Jacobs says that both Hochschild and Litfin are right. Excerpts:

Certainly Wheaton’s Statement of Faith is instantly identifiable to any reasonably informed person as an evangelical Protestant document: No Catholic would ever think it a sufficient formulation of core Christian belief. It arises from the disputes of twentieth-century American Protestantism and is meant to stake out Wheaton’s territory in those disputes. If the statement is meant to exclude anyone, that would be liberal Protestants or half-hearted evangelicals. I do not believe there has been any point in Wheaton’s history—until now—when the college’s board of trustees has looked at the Statement of Faith with Catholics in mind.

To a large extent this is because, throughout much of American history and late into the twentieth century, evangelicals and Catholics had little to do with one another. They came, by and large, from different ethnic groups; they lived in different neighborhoods and even in different regions of the country; they went to different schools—in short, they were socialized into American culture in dramatically different ways. Throughout much of its history Wheaton College’s leaders would have reacted with horror at the thought of Catholics on the faculty—but they would have been highly unlikely to entertain that thought in the first place. Catholic scholars would have been equally unlikely to think of teaching at Wheaton. Duane Litfin is right to say that Wheaton is getting hammered for taking a position that, as recently as thirty years ago, scarcely anyone on either side of the Reformational divide would have questioned.

But times have changed. And here is where the correctness of Hochschild’s position comes in. He is not the only Catholic to look at Wheaton’s Statement of Faith and think, “Yes, that suits me very well.” Having served on hiring committees a number of times in Wheaton’s English department, I have seen dozens of applications from Catholic scholars who see nothing in Wheaton’s self-description that would rule them out.

Now, in some cases these Catholic applicants fail to understand what kind of school they are applying to: They think Wheaton is a Christian college in the way that Notre Dame is a Catholic university—that, to borrow terms favored by President Litfin in his book Conceiving the Christian College, Wheaton is an “umbrella” institution rather than a “systemic” one. Umbrella institutions welcome all sorts of people, with all sorts of beliefs, onto their faculty, as long as those people can support the principles on which the institution is founded. (Thus Notre Dame in no way compromised its mission as a Catholic university when, some years ago, it hired Nathan Hatch—an evangelical Protestant who both graduated from Wheaton and served on its board of trustees—as its provost.) But Wheaton is in fact a systemic institution which asks all of its faculty—and indeed its other employees—to affirm, not merely to support, its core beliefs.

Still, in any given year several Catholic scholars apply for jobs at Wheaton, not because they are ignorant of Catholic doctrine or of Wheaton’s institutional purpose but precisely because they do understand the systemic nature of Wheaton’s faith commitments and are genuinely enthusiastic about teaching in such an environment. If such problems did not arise thirty years ago, they are certainly arising now and will do so for the foreseeable future—unless Wheaton’s board of trustees revises the Statement of Faith to render unmistakable its commitment to a specifically Protestant and non-Catholic theological stance. Certainly either clarification or change is called for. The current situation creates a great deal of unnecessary friction, confusion, and pain in the hiring process.

But what principles or concerns should guide Wheaton’s leaders as they reflect on the options before them? It is easier perhaps to say what should not guide them. First on that list would be the all-too-common assumption that religious particularity is always a bad thing, that it amounts to “sectarianism” or violates the gospel of “diversity.”

Jacobs, an Anglican Evangelical, goes on to explain why, if Wheaton’s trustees enlarged the institution’s understanding of its Statement of Faith to include Roman Catholics, it would unavoidably “change the DNA” of the college. The concern is completely reasonable, especially, as Jacobs points out, that compromising on orthodoxy has never worked out well for the orthodox within Christian higher education:

What happened at Harvard, and then happened at Oberlin, is now being completed at Davidson: The history of American higher education indicates that such sequences of events run one way only. So any school that has a distinctively Christian character and wishes to retain it had better take great care before “opening up” the institution to the previously excluded.

Yet Jacobs goes on to say that times have changed so much, and so quickly, for Christians, that Wheaton would do well to open itself to fellow travelers from Rome (and presumably Orthodoxy):

At this juncture in the history of Christianity in the West—when it is besieged in so many ways by so many opponents—I am not sure that a school like Wheaton can afford to go it alone much longer. Even if we could, would it be wise and charitable to do so?

Jacobs concludes that it would not. Read the whole thing. It serves as a model on how to think through things like the Hawkins case, no matter which side you come down on — this, much more than the “Yoicks! Bigotry!” caterwauling from progressive Evangelicals.

An Orthodox Jewish university that excluded Gentiles from its faculty has good reason for doing so, though the day may come when those reasons no longer outweigh other concerns. Similarly, it is by no means wrong for Al Azhar, the most prestigious university in the Islamic world, to restrict its faculty to believing Sunni Muslims (if it does so; I don’t know). Doctrine matters, and doctrinal identity matters. To recap: none of this means that Dr. Larycia Hawkins was treated fairly by Wheaton in this case. I am not in a position to say. But the issue of doctrine and doctrinal identity is not clear cut. It matters very much who we say God is.

One way or another, this is a very important moment for the future of American Evangelicalism.

 

 

Walker Percy Weekend 2016

Save the date: it’s happening on June 3-5, 2016, in St. Francisville. We had our first organizational meeting last night, and have some pretty great programming ideas. This year will be Walker Percy’s centenary, and this year, for the first time, we will have both of Walker and Bunt’s children, Mary Pratt Percy Lobdell and Ann Percy Moores, in attendance. What an honor. If you love Walker Percy, you won’t want to miss this very special weekend.

Watch this space for more information. If you know for sure you want to come, you would do well to make your hotel or B&B reservations NOW, because space is limited, and the town fills up pretty quickly. We will have the old favorites — the front porch Bourbon Tour, and hot boiled crawfish and cold Louisiana craft beer from Hot Tails — as well as some new things.

The Inconvenience of Rapey Refugees

Well, well, well: Deutsche Welle reports something ‘politically awkward':

City authorities identified some suspects in the Cologne New Year’s Eve attacks as asylum seekers from Syria, detaining or questioning some of them, according to reports by local newspaper “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” and national daily “Die Welt,” which published an online preview of investigations by its “Welt am Sonntag” Sunday paper.

According to the newspapers’ reports, citing officers on duty on New Year’s Eve, officials checked the IDs of at least 100 people present at Cologne’s central station on December 31 after their behavior became conspicuous. Seventy-one people were identified, 11 people were remanded into custody and 32 criminal complaints were registered, according to the Welt am Sonntag (WamS) report.

“There were, quite to the contrary of what was said publicly, identity checks on numerous people,” the WamS quoted an unnamed officer as saying. “Most of them were recently-arrived asylum seekers.”

The first internal police report on the event – a so-called “wichtige Ereignis Meldung” (“important event announcement”) – spoke of a crowd mainly of “North African and Arab” origin. According to the Kölner Stadt-anzeiger, the officer leading the team at the station wanted the report to include mention of the Syrians and asylum seekers, but the senior officer writing the “WE-Meldung” decided not to, saying it would be “politically awkward.”

It is still unclear whether the same persons were involved in the assaults.

More:

WamS also received information contradicting another official statement by the city police, which said the main intention of the men in Cologne was to steal from passengers and that assault was secondary. However, “what actually happened was the exact opposite,” a police officer said on condition of anonymity.

“For the mostly Arabic offenders, sexual assault was the priority, or, to express it from their point of view, their sexual amusement was thepriority. A group of men would encircle a female victim, close the loop, and then start groping the woman,” WamS quoted the officer as saying.

The deputy chief of the trade union for police employees (the GdP), Ernst Walter, suggested that the Cologne police’s mishandling of the case could cost city police chief Wolfgang Albers his job: “I’m asking myself this,” Walter said. “How could the police publish a message on January 1, saying that New Year’s celebrations had been peaceful?”

So the authorities lied because the truth was “politically awkward.” And not just the authorities. Maajid Nawaz writes:

Though this all occurred on New Year’s Eve, the absolute scandal is that we only found out about it five days later. Amid accusations that it deliberately covered the incident up in order not to spark panic, the public broadcaster ZDF was forced to issue an apology for failing to include the assaults in its main evening news broadcast. It appears that, as the authorities and the media were choosing between stirring up racial tension and these women’s rights, we were faced with a conspiracy of silence.

Eventually, this was bound to happen. Recent mass migration patterns across Europe have meant that misogyny has finally come head to head with anti-racism, multiculturalism is facing off against feminism, and progressive values are wrestling with cultural tolerance.

Yes, it is racist to suspect that all brown men who look like me are rapists. It is bigoted to presume that all Muslim men who share my faith advocate religiously justified rape. It is xenophobic to assume that all male refugees are sexual predators awaiting their chance to rape. But let me be absolutely clear: What will feed this racism, bigotry, and xenophobia even more is deliberately failing to report the facts as they stand. Doing so only encourages the populist right’s rallying cry against “the establishment.”

If liberals do not address such issues swiftly, with complete candor and courage, the far-right and anti-Muslim populist groups will get there first. They have been doing so for a while now.

This is how it happens, though, in Europe, in America, everywhere: mainstream parties, institutions, and figures cannot bring themselves to deal with difficult truths, so they ignore them and dismiss people who pay attention to these things as racist, or otherwise bigoted. But the contradiction between observable reality and the Official Story may finally cause things to snap.

This, reported by the BBC, via Steve Sailer, only heightens the contradictions:

Ralf Jaeger, interior minister for North Rhine-Westphalia, said police had to “adjust” to the fact that groups of men had attacked women en masse.

Three suspects had been identified, he said, but no arrests had been made.

Scores of women say they were robbed or sexually assaulted by men, reportedly of Arab or North African appearance.

Mr Jaeger also warned that anti-immigrant groups were trying to use the attacks to stir up hatred against refugees.

“What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chatrooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women,” he said. “This is poisoning the climate of our society.”

Right. Noticing what happened and drawing the “wrong” conclusions about it is “at least as awful” as actual rape and sexual assault. If Ralf Jaeger and the local authorities have any credibility at all with the German people, it is a miracle.

Writing at The Grauniad, Gaby Hinsliff bravely counsels her fellow liberals not to be afraid to ask questions about the sexual assaults, as long as the answer is always, “More immigration.” And:

Liberals shouldn’t be afraid to ask hard questions. Young German women thankfully enjoy historically unprecedented economic and sexual freedom, with their expensive smartphones and their right to celebrate New Year’s Eve however they want. The same isn’t always true of young male migrants exchanging life under repressive regimes, where they may at least have enjoyed superiority over women, for scraping by at the bottom of Europe’s social and economic food chain. It is not madness to ask if this has anything to do with attacks that render confident, seemingly lucky young women humiliated and powerless. But even if it does, the answer wouldn’t be to halt immigration – even if that were possible, which it isn’t regardless of whether Britain leaves the EU – just in case a few immigrants are sexually aggressive, any more than the answer to Savile is to keep all men away from children.

Think about what you just read: a liberal woman columnist at the left-wing Establishment newspaper in the UK has just said that it is “not madness” to see the Arab immigrant rapists as victims of political oppression at home and economic oppression in Europe. Anything — anything — to protect the Narrative. European liberals would do much better to pay attention to their Maajid Nawazes than their Gaby Hinsliffs and Ralf Jaegers. But they won’t.

UPDATE: Chancellor Merkel says the assaults will have far-reaching consequences. Chancellor Merkel is also refusing to put a cap on the number of refugees Germany will take in this year. As long as the right hand doesn’t notice what the left hand is doing, hey, no problem!

Is ‘Commitment Pluralism’ the Answer?

David Brooks writes about our age of anxiety:

Fear is an emotion directed at a specific threat, but anxiety is an unfocused corrosive uneasiness. In the age of small terror this anxiety induces a sense that the basic systems of authority are not working, that those in charge are not keeping people safe.

People are more likely to have a background sense that life is nastier and more precarious — red in tooth and claw. They pull in the tribal walls and distrust the outsider. This anxiety makes everybody a little less humane.

In country after country this anxiety is challenging the liberal order. I mean philosophic Enlightenment liberalism, not partisan liberalism. It’s the basic belief in open society, free speech, egalitarianism and meliorism (gradual progress). It’s a belief that through reasoned conversation values cohere and fanaticism recedes. It’s the belief that people of all creeds merit tolerance and respect.

Emphasis mine. Brooks goes on to say that “the surge of anti-liberalism has meant one of the most important political fissures is now between those who support an open society and those who support a closed society.” And he says this anti-liberalism has been most notable on the Right. More:

It’s up to us who believe in open society to wage an intellectual counterattack. This can’t be done be repeating 1990s bromides about free choice and the natural harmony among peoples. You can’t beat moral fanaticism with weak tea moral relativism.

You can only beat it with commitment pluralism. People are only fulfilled when they make deep moral commitments. The danger comes when they are fanatically and monopolistically committed to only one thing.

The pluralist is committed to a philosophy or faith, but also to an ethnicity and also to a city, and also to a job and also to diverse interests and fascinating foreign cultures. These different commitments balance and moderate one another. A life in diverse worlds with diverse people weaves together into one humane, multifaceted existence. The rigidity of one belief system is forced to confront the messiness of work relationships or a neighborhood association.

Read the whole thing.  I have a few comments on it.

First, it is certainly true that anti-liberalism has been most prominent on the Right, but if Brooks is interested in defending a belief in “reasoned conversation,” and “tolerance” as fundamentally liberal values, I would love to see him make that case on college campuses — in particular at Yale, where until recently he taught a class. It is fine to speak critically of the illiberalism of someone like Donald Trump, but the illiberalism of college students and the administrators who encourage it, either actively or passively, is bound to have far more serious consequences for the country than a long-shot presidential candidate.

Similarly, it is hard for me to think of a more illiberal movement in our cultural politics than the gay rights movement and its fellow travelers in politics, law, media, academia, and big business. I’ve been writing about this for a long time, and in great detail, so I won’t walk into those weeds here. Conservative Christians individuals, business owners, and institutions know perfectly well what the advance in gay rights and the retreat of religious liberty means for them, and will mean for them, in post-Christian America.

“They pull in the tribal walls and distrust the outsider. This anxiety makes everybody a little less humane,” says Brooks, of the anxious. Well, why shouldn’t they? Last year, I had conversations with several law professors and administrators at Christian schools, all of whom said that the fast-advancing jurisprudence on gay rights is forcing Christian institutions to draw and defend hard doctrinal lines.

One headmaster with whom I spoke told me his school is struggling over whether to follow the advice of their lawyers and adopt a hardline policy on accepting homosexual students, or students with gay parents, or to take a more “pastoral” line within the theologically conservative framework of the school. The headmaster and the school’s leadership clearly wanted to take the pastoral path, but they had been told by their lawyers that doing so opened them up to lawsuits that could result in losing control over the overall direction of the school.

The point is, conservative Christians are right to be fearful and anxious about this stuff, because it’s going to cost them their institutions, their livelihoods, and even their jobs.  There is going to be very little tolerance and no respect for them in the fast-emerging order. Pulling in the tribal walls is plain common sense when the tribe is under attack.

Similarly, when working-class people are losing their jobs and their financial security because of de-industrialization and the kind of policies promoted by liberals (= classical liberals, Republicans and Democrats alike), why shouldn’t they “distrust the outsiders” who are attacking their sense of stability? Being mistrustful of the people who will do you and your tribe harm if they have their way is not a character flaw.

Since the first of the year, the stock market has staggered downhill. In 2007-08, when the economy crashed, there was an immense amount of widespread economic pain. Did people see the Wall Street bigs who made hundreds of billions building a “heads we win, tails you lose” system pay for what they did? Of course not. Why, exactly, should ordinary people trust the financial and political leaders of this country to be good, just stewards of the common good?

And while we’re at it, of all those who led us into the Iraq War, whose career has suffered? Who has been held responsible? In the Catholic Church, whose failure of leadership led to incalculable spiritual damage, to say nothing of a dramatic degradation of the Church’s moral authority, how many bishops were held to account by the Church for their failures? Do you really trust the police and the courts? And on and on.

Look, I’m not asking these things to be a noodge. My point is simply that people’s anxieties these days are often (but not always!) justified by the facts on the ground. I have proposed the Benedict Option — a pulling-inward — in part because I am convinced that the coming decades are going to be very hard for small-o orthodox Christians in the West, and we will need each other for support — and I have reason to believe this.

I have proposed the Ben Op mostly because fundamental forces stand to eliminate orthodox Christianity. These forces include radical individualism, globalism, hedonism, materialism, skepticism, and … well, the forces that created the modern world, and in so doing brought us many wonderful things. The forces of liberalism, which have the effect of depriving us of our past for the sake of freeing us to make our own future. But we are at a time in which that liberalism, and the radical autonomy upon which it is premised, appears unsustainable. As political theorist Patrick Deneen has written:

Liberalism thus begins a project by which the legitimacy of all human relationships—beginning with, but not limited to, political bonds—becomes increasingly subject to the criterion of whether or not they have been chosen, and chosen upon the basis of their service to rational self-interest.

…

Liberalism often claims neutrality about the choices people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,” not of any particular conception of the “Good.”

Yet it is not neutral about the basis on which people make their decisions. In the same way that courses in economics claiming merely to describe human beings as utility-maximizing individual actors in fact influence students to act more selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments and adopt flexible relationships and bonds. Not only are all political and economic relationships fungible and subject to constant redefinition, but so are all relationships—to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to religion. Liberalism tends to encourage loose connections.

The second revolution, and the second anthropological assumption that constitutes liberalism, is less visibly political. Premodern political thought—ancient and medieval, particularly that informed by an Aristotelian understanding of natural science—understood the human creature to be part of a comprehensive natural order. Man was understood to have a telos, a fixed end, given by nature and unalterable. Human nature was continuous with the order of the natural world, and so humanity was required to conform both to its own nature as well as, in a broader sense, to the natural order of which human beings were a part. Human beings could freely act against their own nature and the natural order, but such actions deformed them and harmed the good of human beings and the world. Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—thus, natural law—places upon human beings, and each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits, through the practice of virtues, in order to achieve a condition of human flourishing.

Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It first displaced the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and thereafter the very notion of human nature itself. Liberalism inaugurated a transformation in the natural and human sciences, premised on the transformation of the view of human nature and on humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

Could it be that liberalism has run its course? That it is unsustainable because it does not suit human nature? And/or, could it be that we cannot run a stable society that is radically pluralistic without a widely-shared basic set of assumptions that bound our choices? As I understand it, that is the gist of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism.

To be clear, I agree with David that we must figure out how to get along in a condition of pluralism. That is what we Americans live in now, whether we like it or not. Besides, as a Christian, I am a believer in a religion that obliges me to love others, not to hate them, even if they are hateful. This is very, very hard to do, especially in an age of anxiety — and it is one reason why we Christians need strong communities committed to the orthodox, Biblical faith, versus the weak-tea theological and moral relativism of the Moralistic Therapeutic Deist churches. The Civil Rights marchers didn’t find the strength to face down Bull Connor, and to return hatred with love, from the pseudo-Christianity we call MTD. I want to be strong enough to stand up for what is right, and to stand against my own temptations to give in to fear and hatred — and I know I am not strong enough to do it on my own. As I see it, churches and Christian communities that practice the Benedict Option will do so to remember their (our) own stories, and to strengthen each other through the present and coming trials, which will wipe out all the MTD churches — but also be there to welcome those escaping the maelstrom and the plague. Because that’s what Christians do.

But I digress. The main point I wanted to make in answering David’s column is to say that it’s all well and good to talk about recommitting to classical liberal values, but people like me hear that kind of talk and think it’s language that cloaks an agenda that disempowers us, and tells us that we deserve it, that really, there could be no other reasonable way to live.

Here’s what I mean. The Catholic lawyer James Kalb wrote a very good book a few years ago, called The Tyranny of Liberalism. Despite the talk-radio-ish title, it’s a philosophically serious book. Again, by “liberalism,” he is not talking only about the general philosophy of the Democratic Party, but rather the rationale governing our politics and culture since the Enlightenment. Here is an excerpt of an excerpt:

Tyranny is not, of course, what liberals have intended. They want government to be based on equal freedom, which they see as the only possible goal of a just and rational public order. But the functioning of any form of political society is determined more by the logic of its principles than the intentions of its supporters. Liberals view themselves as idealistic and progressive, but such a self-image conceals dangers even if it is not wholly illusory. It leads liberals to ignore considerations, like human nature and fundamental social and religious traditions, that have normally been treated as limits on reform. Freedom and equality are abstract, open-ended, and ever-ramifying goals that can be taken to extremes. Liberals tend to view these goals as a simple matter of justice and rationality that prudential considerations may sometimes delay but no principle can legitimately override. In the absence of definite limiting principles, liberal demands become more and more far-reaching and the means used to advance them ever more comprehensive, detailed, and intrusive.

The incremental style of liberalism obscures the radicalism of what it eventually demands and enables it always to present itself as moderate. What is called progress—in effect, movement to the left—is thought normal in present-day society, so to stand in its way, let alone to try to reverse accepted changes, is thought radical and divisive. We have come to accept that what was inconceivable last week is mainstream today and altogether basic tomorrow. The result is that the past is increasingly discredited, deviancy is defined up or down, and it becomes incredible that, for instance, until 1969 high school gun-club members took their guns to school on New York City subways, and that in 1944 there were only forty-four homicides by gunshot in the entire city.

Human life is harder to change than are proclaimed social standards. It is easier to denounce gender stereotypes than to make little boys and little girls the same. The triumph of liberalism in public discussion and the consequent disappearance of openly avowed nonliberal principles has led the outlook officially established to embody liberal views ever more completely and at the same time to diverge more and more from the permanent conditions of human life. The result has been a growing conflict between public standards and the normal human understandings that make commonsense judgments and good human relations possible.

The conflict between public standards and normal understandings has transformed and disordered such basic aspects of social life as politics, which depends on free and rational discussion; the family, which counts on a degree of harmony between public understandings and natural human tendencies; and scholarship, which relies on complex formal rules while attempting to explain reality. As a consequence, family life is chaotic and ill-tempered; young people are badly instructed and badly raised; politics are irrational, trivial, and mindlessly partisan; and scholarship is shoddy and disconnected from normal experience. Terms such as “zero tolerance” and “political correctness” reveal how an official outlook deeply at odds with normal ways of thinking has become oppressive while claiming to have reached an unprecedented level of fairness and rationality.

In a society that claims to be based on free speech and reason, intelligent discussion of many aspects of life has become all but impossible. Such a state of affairs is no passing fluke but a serious matter resulting from basic principles. It is the outcome of rationalizing and egalitarian trends that over time have become ever more self-conscious and all-embracing until they now make normal informal distinctions—for example, those between the sexes—seem intolerably arbitrary and unfair. Those trends have led to the politically correct managerial liberal regime that now dominates Western public life and makes demands that more and more people find unreasonable and even incomprehensible.

What defines that regime is the effort to manage and rationalize social life in order to bring it in line with comprehensive standards aimed at implementing equal freedom. The result is a pattern of governance intended to promote equality and individual gratification and marked by entitlement programs, sexual and expressive freedoms, blurred distinctions between the public and the private, and the disappearance of self-government. To implement such a program of social transformation an extensive system of controls over social life has grown up, sometimes public and sometimes formally private, that appeals for its justification to expertise, equity, safety, security, and the need to modify social attitudes and relationships in order to eliminate discrimination and intolerance.

The last are never clearly defined, but in practice they turn out to include all attitudes and distinctions that affect the order of social life but cannot be brought fully in line with market or bureaucratic principles, and so from the standpoint of those principles are simply irrational. “Discrimination and intolerance” are thus held to include those attitudes, habits, and ties—sex roles, historical loyalties, authoritative cultural understandings, religious commitments and teachings—on which independent, informal, traditional, and nonmarket institutions and arrangements normally rely in order to function and endure.

And:

Many people find something deeply oppressive about the resulting situation, but no one really knows what to say about it. Some complain about those general restrictions, like political correctness, which make honest and productive discussion of public affairs impossible. Others have more concrete and personal objections. Parents are alarmed by the indoctrination of their children. Many people complain about affirmative action, massive and uncontrolled immigration, and the abolition of the family as a distinct social institution publicly recognized as fundamental and prior to the state. Still others have the uneasy sense that the world to which they are attached and which defines who they are is being taken from them.

Nonetheless, these victims and their complaints get no respect and little media coverage. Their discontent remains inarticulate and obscure. People feel stifled, but cannot say just how. They make jokes or sarcastic comments, but when challenged have trouble explaining and defending themselves. The disappearance of common understandings that enable serious thought and action to be carried on by nonexperts and outside formal bureaucratic structures has made it hard even to think about the issues coherently. The result is a system of puzzled compliance. However ineffective the schools become, educators feel compelled to inculcate multicultural platitudes rather than to promote substantive learning. No matter how silly people find celebrations of “diversity,” they become ever more frequent and surround themselves ever more insistently with happy talk.

Attempts to challenge the liberal hegemony occasionally emerge but always fail. No challenge seems possible when all social authorities that might compete with bureaucracy, money, and expertise have been discredited, co-opted, or radically weakened. When populist complaints make their half-articulate way into public life they are recognized as dangerous to the established order, debunked as ignorant and hateful, and quickly diverted or suppressed. Proponents of the standards now current always have the last word. Freedom, equality, and neutral expertise are the basis of those standards, and when discussion is put on that ground it is difficult to argue for anything contrary. Rejection of equal freedom and of expertise is oppressive and ignorant by definition, so how could it possibly be justified?

At bottom, the problem with the standards that now govern public life is that they deny natural human tendencies and so require constant nagging interference in all aspects of life. They lead to a denatured society that does not work and does not feel like home. A standard liberal response to such objections is that our reactions are wrong: we should accept what we are told by those who know better. Expertise must rule. Social attitudes, habits, and connections, it is said, are not natural but constructed. They are continually revised and reenacted, their function and significance change with circumstances, and their meaning is a matter of interpretation and choice. It follows that habits and attitudes that seem solidly established and even natural cannot claim respect apart from their conformity with justice—which, if prejudice and question-begging are to be avoided, can only be defined as equality. All habits and attitudes must be conformed to egalitarianism and expertise. To object would be bigoted or ignorant.

This. Exactly this. And this too:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognizing fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.

I sort of agree with David Brooks about “commitment pluralism,” as a practical way to live together in the condition of pluralism. But given the actual realities of who holds power and how they wield it, being the sort of person President Obama once derided as a “bitter clinger” as a rational response to those who want to take away things that are very dear — faith, family, livelihood, among others — and call it progress. What happens when your commitment to one belief or institution radically conflicts with your commitment to another, or others? Something’s got to give. In my own case, my faith, my family, and my local community will always and everywhere take precedence — and if not, may I repent.

The problem in America today is that we have made it impossible for the center to hold, and complain that people will not hold on to the center.

The Church of Jesus Christ, Nationalist

From a remarkable interview with Sergei Chapnin, until his recent firing a senior layman in the Russian Orthodox Church. Chapnin says that Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Moscow Patriarchate’s embrace of nationalism has set in motion a series of disasters for the Russian Orthodox Church. Excerpts:

What about the realm of ideas? There is great geopolitical patriotism and fervor in our country today, which seems to be expressed even more strongly in the Church.



The main thing that happened in the ideological sphere in recent years is that Russia came to grips with its own history, so to speak. It decided that we can be proud of the history of the Soviet Union. The thought is: this is a mighty history, and we are its heirs, so we value that great and victorious history.

What does this mean? Today the Church—without any outside pressure—recognizes the general secretaries of the Communist Party as great rulers of the Soviet era. Whatever atrocities Stalin committed, it is thought that his great accomplishments cannot be diminished, since Russia won the war under his guidance. It’s as though that makes up for his crimes.

I see a serious spiritual and theological problem in the fact that the Church openly talks like this. In honoring Stalin as a “great leader,” we insult the memory not only of the saints who suffered during the years of persecution, but all those who fell victim to the Stalinist regime. The Church was virtually destroyed by Stalin, and now it recognizes his service to the nation. It’s an incredibly fragile position, and I would say, a spiritually unhealthy one. And now, Igumen Evstafii calls for Lenin’s remains to stay in their Mausoleum. Communists in various cities erect busts of Stalin, and the Church remains silent.

This is the first I’m hearing of this. It’s beyond shocking. More:

Well, then, what is the fate of the “liberal” wing? How does one go about being an “Orthodox European” in today’s Russia and its Church?



Of course, the “tentatively liberal” wing hasn’t gone anywhere. By the way, you should avoid this artificial dichotomy between “liberals” and “patriots.” The first are better called Christian democrats, and the second, followers of the post-Soviet civil religion. Christian democrats are those who do not see themselves as isolated from European Christian civilization. Many have been to the West and have seen how the Orthodox live in Greece, the Catholics live in Italy and France, and the Lutherans live in Germany. There are aspects of crisis there as well, but Christianity in Europe is much more rooted and vigorous.

Those Orthodox who participate in global Christian culture are not especially visible. For them the profession of faith is foremost a personal choice, an action. They do not feel the need for declarations, for public demonstrations, to fight for traditional values. The source of faith is Christ Himself, not fighting for values.

And plenty of Orthodox dioceses in Russia have long-standing and positive relationships with those very same Catholics. Orthodox priests easily visit them in Europe, befriend them, and arrange student exchanges; one receives a grant, another collaborates on social projects. It just goes unpublicized in order to fend off accusations of “betraying Orthodoxy.”

There are those who want to pick fights and find enemies, and there are those who just want to labor on the Church’s behalf. People who believe in Christ are peaceful.

Read the whole thing. Chapnin predicts major upheaval ahead for the Church, and says that all the money that has filled the Church with pomp and pride is running out. Says Chapnin, of his fellow Orthodox Russians,, “The ones who will remain are those who lived peacefully and prayed.”

UPDATE: You know, that last line is so very true of us American Christians, in a somewhat different context. But not all that different.

Merry Old Calendar Christmas

Photo by Rod Dreher

Pretty great coffee cup friends at church gave to the choir director, eh?

Institutionalizing Anti-Christianity

I received this e-mail from a small-o orthodox Christian reader whose identity I have confirmed. The reader really did graduate from one of the top American universities, one that produces elites who populate government, law, industry, and academia. I publish this with the reader’s permission:

This quote from your “Benedict Option Omnibus” post is even more accurate than you know:

“This is not about the church losing political power; this is about the Christian story having become not only unbelievable to many, but, increasingly, a menace to what a growing number of people believe to be the Good. And it is about the churches losing their own stories, and with them, their own people. It is about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism embraced as an ersatz substitute for Christianity — MTD being exactly the kind of pseudo-faith that late modernity, or post-modernity, requires as psychological support for its vanities and indulgences. “

During my studies at a very prominent American university, this attitude of growing hostility toward small-o orthodox Christianity was very thinly veiled.  Some of my classmates have worked in the White House under President Obama, and others have held positions in various parts of his administration.  Others still will rise farther if Secretary Clinton wins the presidency.  Whatever the case may be, many of them live in DC, and they are not planning to leave.  Moreover, most of them have not yet reached their thirtieth birthdays.  I say this to illustrate how rapidly this hostility will be institutionalized.

During our time in school, I was able to dialogue fruitfully with some of them, but not all.  And, even then, I suspect it was because we had spent time together in and outside of the classroom without immediately arguing about these things–they knew before these debates happened that I was not a bigoted homophobe.  How much more difficult, then, will it be to conduct these debates charitably when a) these men and women have actual power to implement their worldviews, and b) they will not have had the opportunity to get to know their intellectual/political opponents beforehand.

I do not wish to be fatalistic about it: many of them are good and smart people, and older age may moderate or change their views, as it does for many of us.  Hope, but not optimism . . .

One point I very much want to emphasize is that the most trenchant critics are either those who are themselves nominally religious (many putative Catholics) those raised in devout environments who are bitter, or those who are still religious but whose actual churches have effectively accommodated to MTD.  The hardcore atheists are far from what I fear most; it’s those who claim to speak in Christ’s name whom I most fear.  I believe these people act with the best of intentions, but it speaks to your point: we have forgotten our story.  That 20 centuries of Christian history and ethics can be forgotten in 1-2 generations may be horrifying, but it is a horror we must acknowledge and work to remedy, primarily but not exclusively in our education system.

This is why your idea of an “economic sequel” to the BenOp book is interesting.  We need to explore the public policies of which we avail ourselves and of which we may need to become more independent if we wish to maintain our communal integrity.  I hope the need for this exploration will speak to the importance not only of individuals assuming the burden of their own liberty (which Republicans already say they love, of course), but PARTICULARLY of communities and the strategies they can pursue to make themselves more robust.

Note well the reader’s expectation that the worst will come not from lifelong atheists, but from embittered ex-Christians and those who consider themselves Christians, but who have been assimilated into MTD churches.

KIG Ben Op Bleg

Readers, I’m off to the Nativity liturgy momentarily, but I have a bleg for you. Do any of you know anything about the Catholic Integrated Community (Katholische Integrierte Gemeinde), an international lay-clerical community founded by German Catholics in the wake of the Second World War? According to Catholic Online:

The Catholic Integrated Community was established in Munich in Germany, under the name “Junger Bund” immediately in the wake of the Second World War and the tragic events linked to it.

Under the leadership of Herbert and Traudl Wallbrecher, a group of young people began to reflect on the reasons why Christians fail to oppose the emergence of ideologies and dictatorships that sow death, or to contribute to solving social injustices affecting men and women; in other words, why baptized Christians are unable to become a people whose existence and lifestyle make God’s project for the world visible.

Communities like this would become the place in which the Christian faith is lived as history in which we can always play a part, based on the conviction that God is acting among us today as he did at the time of Abraham.

In 1968 the group changed its name to “Integrated Community,” and in 1996 it was given its present name. It was approved in 1978 by the archbishop of Paderborn and recognized that same year by the then archbishop of Munich and Freising, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Identity: In a world estranged from God and where people no longer believe in his saving presence in history, KIG sets out to retrace the biblical experience of the covenant between God and his people and to recover the substance of the Catholic faith.

Its members endeavor to make the Gospel present in all the dimensions of daily life in a way that enables even the most distant to find or rediscover access to the Church. The specific dimensions of the formative process for its members are the experience of the Christian message lived in unity, theological reflection on history, on the Old and the New Testaments and the history of the Church, and the proclamation of the Gospel message in contemporary society.

Formation covers a period of six years, of which three are the catechumenate, in which members and associates play an active part in the life of the community.

The preferred spheres of action are the world of labor, education, politics, health care, art, crafts, and missionary commitment. KIG is subject to the authority of the local churches in whose parishes it operates. Individual communities are established at the diocesan level and taken together they constitute the Confederation of Catholic Integrated Communities. In the pursuit of its objectives, KIG cooperates with the community of priests and the community of unmarried women and unmarried men that place themselves at its service.

Organization: Membership of KIG is open to members, co-workers, aspirants and friends. Each community elects a management council which coordinates and is responsible for the life and for the pursuit of the objectives of the community.

Each community is under the spiritual direction of a diocesan priest who is a member of the community of priests at the service of the Catholic Integration Communities, appointed by agreement with the local bishop.

Membership: KIG has about 1,000 members in seven countries, in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.

Works: Members or groups of members of KIG have taken the initiative under their own personal responsibility to set up Catholic schools, a small clinic and nursing activities. In 2003, KIG inaugurated The Academy for the Theology of the People of God at Villa Cavalletti (Grottaferrata, Rome).

I will be traveling next month to Norcia for a short retreat with the Benedictines, on which I will be interviewing some of them for the Benedict Option book. A reader of this blog has tipped me off to the KIG, which sounds very much like what I conceive of as a Benedict Option community. Anything you readers can tell me about the KIG would be much appreciated. Perhaps I will have time to visit one of them while I’m abroad. I need to know soon, though, because I’ve got to buy plane tickets next week.

Off to church. Merry (Slavic) Christmas!

Grad School: No Christians Need Apply

At the Inside Higher Ed site, a review of an eye-opening new book about how academic elites weed out conservative Christians and other undesirables. Excerpt:

Ph.D. programs are one of the few parts of higher education where admissions decisions are made without admissions professionals. Small groups of faculty members meet, department by department, to decide whom to admit. And their decisions effectively determine the future makeup of the faculty in higher education. Politicians, judges, journalists, parents and prospective students subject the admissions policies of undergraduate colleges and professional schools to considerable scrutiny, with much public debate over appropriate criteria. But the question of who gets into Ph.D. programs has by comparison escaped much discussion.

That may change with the publication of Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity and Faculty Gatekeeping, out this month from Harvard University Press. Julie R. Posselt (right), the author and an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Michigan, obtained permission from 6 highly ranked departments at three research universities to watch their reviews of candidates, and she interviewed faculty members at four others. All the departments were ranked as among the top programs in their disciplines. To obtain this kind of access (not to mention institutional review board approval), Posselt had to offer complete anonymity. While her book identifies comments as coming from people in particularly disciplines, she reveals nothing about where the departments are, and she also hides most details about the applicants they reviewed.

More:

In most cases Posselt observed, the committee members used banter and “friendly debate” when they disagreed with one another. They didn’t attack one another or get too pointed in criticizing colleagues. She describes one discussion she observed — in which committee members kept to this approach — that left her wondering about issues of fairness.

The applicant, to a linguistics Ph.D. program, was a student at a small religious college unknown to some committee members but whose values were questioned by others.

“Right-wing religious fundamentalists,” one committee member said of the college, while another said, to much laughter, that the college was “supported by the Koch brothers.”

The committee then spent more time discussing details of the applicant’s GRE scores and background — high GRE scores, homeschooled — than it did with some other candidates. The chair of the committee said, “I would like to beat that college out of her,” and, to laughter from committee members asked, “You don’t think she’s a nutcase?”

Other committee members defended her, but didn’t challenge the assumptions made by skeptics. One noted that the college had a good reputation in the humanities. And another said that her personal statement indicated intellectual independence from her college and good critical thinking.

At the end of this discussion, the committee moved the applicant ahead to the next round but rejected her there.

But they care about “diversity”:

When Posselt probed on diversity, she found that many professors said they felt an obligation to diversify their graduate student bodies and thus — eventually — the collective faculty of their fields.

Diversity, of course, is only about race, gender, and sexuality, never about diversity of thought. Whenever you see an academic talk about “diversity,” you should assume that they mean “the homogeneity of people we like.”

Read the whole thing.  Prepare yourself to read in the comments section of this blog post a hundred explanations from liberal readers as to why this is just one instance, and we shouldn’t draw any conclusions from it, blah blah blah. And they’re right: this is one example. Still, it reinforces what the reader who wrote to me earlier said about the increasingly dire situation for dissenting Christians in post-Christian America. Excerpt:

Well, what happens when you pay $$$ for your kid to go to a small religious college (because the secular ones are more and more hostile) and then there’s no work afterward, and no hope of paying back those loans? I already hear stories from people in this sort of position, and it’s just going to get worse.

What happens when your kid can’t get into graduate school because she has attended a Christian college identified by educational elites as a bigot factory? It’s not persecution, of course, but these are the kinds of choices that orthodox Christians are going to face very soon. Will they, and their kids, be strong enough to give up dreams of reaching the top, because it’s not worth compromising their faith?

UPDATE: Additional thoughts on this from Denny Burk, including:

We already knew that this kind of discrimination was going on at elite universities. It is nevertheless jarring to see it described in such candid detail. It is discrimination based on a religious test, and it is the kind of thing that happens all the time without controversy or fanfare.

And the ones doing the discriminating think they are being virtuous.