Rod Dreher's Blog, page 634

A Surprise Early Christmas Gift

“Well,” I’ve been telling myself, “it’s frustrating that we have barely had a winter around here, but at least the snakes are gone, which is one of the best things about this time of the year in south Louisiana.”

And then a friend of ours found this sucker in his woodpile this morning. Not quite sure if that’s a young cottonmouth or a young rattler, but it’s definitely venomous.

I’m ready to move to the far north and take my chances with the Sasquatches.

‘Laurus’ Ruins An Academic Career

This came in last night from a PhD candidate in English at a prestigious American university. I have changed identifying details at his/her request:

Dear Mr. Dreher,

You should know that finishing Laurus is what finally put the nail in the coffin of my academic career. I realized, quite simply, that this is a novel that deserves to be read, re-read, and contemplated in its richness and spiritual depth but that, outside of a handful of institutions, it will never be taught at all. Or if it is, it will only be taught in a way that would instrumentalize and destroy its fundamental beauty and integrity. I thought at first that I could choose to persevere in this environment (in some sense even, appropriately, to mortify myself through this frustration!) in the hopes that I might be able to serve as a witness, to smuggle works of beauty, samizdat-like, into the hands of students who could appreciate them. However, even to cultivate such an “underground” movement within academia would require the Christian academic to give tacit consent to a set of ideologies that are fundamentally antithetical to the Gospel.

Dangerous book!

My story: I did my undergraduate work at [a well-regarded liberal arts college]. I did very well [there] and I graduated [with tip-top honors]. So, naturally, continuing on in the study of English lit seemed like the inevitable course to follow. I duly prepared my applications to five of the best schools. However, when I asked for a recommendation from one of my favorite [conservative, Christian] professors, he told me, “Look, I’ll do this for you, but you really should find something else to do. Go to law school. Get an MBA. Just don’t go to graduate school. It will be bad for your soul.” Bull-headed undergraduate that I was, I thought he was overplaying his hand a bit. Bad for my soul? Really? Worse than business school?!

So, somehow I was admitted to [his/her current university]. Looking back at the utterly naïve application I submitted (I dared submit a writing sample that actually analyzed literature!), I’m surprised I was admitted anywhere. Off I went to [city], full of hopes that, even if things were not great, at least I’d be able to cobble together an education. I’m not going to pretend that [this school] is the worst place ever; in many respects, it’s maintained an institutional identity and sense of tradition that has protected it from succumbing wholly to the nonsense.

But I’ve also encountered lots of utter stupidity and outright evil. The worst incident I’ve encountered was related to me by a close friend whose judgment and accuracy I fully trust. The story merits recounting in its entirety because it shows what we are up against.

[Note from Rod: I’m not going to publish the detailed story here, out of an abundance of caution in protecting this grad student’s identity. It is enough, I think, to say that the class in this anecdote was a large literature survey course. The lecture for this class was on the work of a particular Christian poet, and one of his best-known poems. The professor allegedly spent nearly the entire class talking about how the Annunciation, which formed the background to the poem in question, was really a narrative about God raping Mary.]



So a few of the TAs are trying to figure out what exactly to do with a lecture on [the Christian poet] that had very little to do with [the poet] and a great deal to do with the prof’s misbegotten hang-ups over Christian theology. They decide that they’ll just pull the Annunciation narratives from St. Matthew and even the Qu’ran, place them alongside St. Luke, and let the students determine for themselves what they think (a novel idea, admittedly). Word gets back to the prof (because, it turns out, he had informants in some discussion sections!), and he’s outraged that some of his TAs dared to undermine his lecture. He ends up engaging in an email exchange with one of his female TAs who also happens to be a Roman Catholic, and he expresses his displeasure at her choosing to, you know, teach rather than indoctrinate. After some back-and-forth between the two, this ends up with the prof telling his TA that she had better just “shut the f— up and do what I say” (a more or less verbatim quotation; it included the STFU).

After this email circulates among the other TAs, this all ends up with the teaching staff for the survey section meeting with the prof and the department chair for an airing of grievances. The incriminating email exchange is read, which ought by right to have caused immediate punitive action taken against this professor. Instead, as it turns out, a majority of the TAs in the room supported the professor’s actions. The essential sense of these TAs was that “we should just trust the prof.” So, of course, no action was taken against the professor. None.

Here you have a group of people, most of whom would identify themselves as ardent feminists (including the prof), most of whom have no trouble prating on for hours about the unjust dynamics of power structures, the reification of the patriarchy, the hegemonic leveraging of social forces against the marginalized. Yet a majority of them have no problem with a male professor in a position of real power telling his female TA that she just needs to shut up and sit down. Now, was this silence partly because she was a Christian student? No doubt. But it’s even more a function of the essential cowardice of most academics. Most academics long to be academics so much that they are willing to go along with basically whatever they need to in order to ensure that they get to remain within those ivy-covered precincts. Sure, talk all you want about structures of power outside those walls, but keep your damn mouth shut about what happens inside.

I don’t blame those TAs entirely: for many of them, that very professor may prove to be the difference between their getting a job, a fellowship, or even completing their PhDs and their being out several years’ worth of work. Better just to keep your head down, nod along, and do what you need to do. So, again, this story is hearsay, but I trust the source, and I know enough about academia to believe every single word of it. This is where we are. It should scare all of us because even if this is something of an outlier example, there are more insidious and less dramatic versions of this that happen every single day. And this animus isn’t directed solely against conservative Christian scholars; it’s directed at anyone who doesn’t adequately demonstrate his loyalty to the regnant ideology. (There’s a reason why Camille Paglia teaches at an art college, not an R1 university!)

Look, even if you have the most traditional, solid little liberal arts college in the world, your instructors still have to receive their PhDs from somewhere. And the problem is that every reputable PhD program is so infected with this sort of rot that the people who get hired to teach undergraduates are people who have mostly learned that they’re better off just keeping their heads down and regurgitating the garbage that their grad school program is feeding them. They won the crap shoot of academic hiring because they were very successful at the academic game. There’s no incentive to disagree; in fact, there’s a very real disincentive to thinking in a way contrary to prevailing norms. If this mentality can afflict my [relatively traditional PhD program at a major university more conservative than many others] it can happen (and has happened) literally anywhere else. And these people are the ones who are reshaping those bastions of sound thinking into outposts of trendy academic folderol. You either get a good education and are unemployable, or you get a good job but are incapable of thinking straight. I’ve yet to see evidence that there is a third option.

I don’t honestly know what this means for Christian academics or for Christian parents who are looking to send their kids to college. The situation instills a certain despondency. I admire those academics who are looking to stick things out, but I worry about the cognitive dissonance that this choice will necessarily engender. Something will have to give. I would love to work in classical Christian education, even to start a school, but I’m far too young and impecunious to do the latter and live in an area where the former is not an option. (I met and married an extraordinarily lovely, unbelievably bright woman, and we’ve relocated to [city], where she works at a law firm.) After this semester concluded, I’ve decided to give up on being an adjunct, and I’m interviewing for a position with the Boy Scouts. As an Eagle Scout, I know that the organization still has tremendous formative value for the lives of young men, and I’m hoping if we can reach a few of them before they get to college, perhaps they’ll be formed well enough to resist some of the nonsense.

But I think this is the key: we have to form kids to think as Christians who love the true, the good, and the beautiful well before they ever get to college. We have to model for them Christian lives of heroic sacrifice, radical prayer, and firm commitment to fostering and handing on what is good. Kids see that, and they pick up quickly on what is good and what is worthwhile. We can inoculate them against the nonsense; we just have to start early and make it a source of joy and even fun for them. Eventually perhaps there will be the resources to create a Christian counter-academic culture outside of a handful of places; however, this will require some tectonic shifts in the landscape of American Christianity.

[Emphasis mine — RD]

There are ways out of and beyond academia; we just need more Christian academics who are willing to take them. Because the sad truth is, I think, that we either leave now of our own volition or we’re slowly squeezed out later on. We can take some comfort in the fact that we’ll be able to return to the ashes and rebuild a real system of education on the rubble. After all, Truth wins. And so does Love (real love, not sloganeering “love”).

Anyway, my apologies for the length of this. I really needed to clear my mind, and I value immeasurably the work that you do. I just wanted to give you some confirmation that things out there truly are as bad as you think. If you for some reason choose to excerpt any part of this for your blog, I’d appreciate your omitting my institutional affiliations and using a pseudonym for me. I’m still writing my dissertation, so I’d at least like to get that done without any fear of retribution (although I’m not going to pretend that the motivation to finish is really there anymore).

How often do you hear about a work of literary art whose truth and beauty convince people to abandon the teaching of literature?

To be fair, a conservative Christian friend who is an academic in this letter-writer’s field (though not at his/her university) has told me good things about the environment at that school’s English department. I have no way of knowing independently. I did check out verifiable details of the correspondent’s e-mail, and they were accurate. This person really was a student publicly celebrated for his/her academic performance as an undergraduate, and is currently a grad student at the university about which he/she tells the story.

UPDATE: A reader e-mails:

First off, thank you for chronicling higher ed’s cultural crisis in the way that you have. The first-hand accounts you publish are harrowing and have confirmed me in my choice to not pursue graduate work in the humanities. As an educator in a classical Christian school, I tell anyone who will listen (especially parents in the congregation where I worship) that they must find alternatives to the mainstream schools if they are at all serious about discipling their children in Christ. We’re discovering more and more that we must also find alternatives for ourselves for the same reasons that we must find them for our children, which, if I understand it right, is basically the point of the BenOp.

Obviously, part of the reason that we discipline ourselves is so that we can better disciple our children. I’m glad that the person who wrote you about leaving academic work has committed to volunteering with the Scouts and otherwise being active with our children. One thing caught my attention, though, that occasioned my email to you: “I would love to work in classical Christian education, even to start a school, but I’m far too young and impecunious to do the latter and live in an area where the former is not an option.” I don’t know this person or his situation, so I don’t want to judge him or to call what he wrote a “cop-out,” but it at least strikes me as a little too dismissive of his options and his potential for working in classical Christian education. The movement started ex nihilo with just a handful of people who, like the writer, had come to realize that our mainstream institutions are no longer an option for us. I would recommend he read about Doug Wilson’s experiences in starting Logos School (whatever else we want to say about Wilson). I would also advise him to start asking around in local churches. He would probably find that he’s not the only one in his area thinking to himself, “Gee, I wish we had a classical Christian school around here.” He will likely find parents who want their children to receive a distinctly Christian education and who are willing to sacrifice time and money to see it happen. He might also find Christians who are able and willing to fund it. It’s at least worth his time to inquire, and even if the initial inquiry goes nowhere, it might plant a seed that sprouts later on in his city.

I wish I could say this to him personally: I started teaching at a classical Christian school when I was 23, and I had no idea what I was doing. Neither did Doug and Nancy Wilson or anyone else who got into this movement. We’ve all had to educate ourselves over the years. The movement is starting to bear fruit, and we have several alumni who have come back as teachers, but most of the work is still being done by us neophytes. I’m almost 29 now, and my wife and I have two children under five. If we had to move to an area that didn’t have a school, we would be doing exactly what I’ve recommended he do: asking around and trying to get something started. I still don’t know as much as I’d like to know, and I’m not nearly as good a teacher as I’d like to be, but I’ve definitely made progress over the past six years. If a lug like me can do it, I suspect the man who wrote you can do it as well.

Keep doing what you’re doing, Rod. The things you write and the things that you publish from other Christians around the country are all a solace. Thank God for his Church. It’s good to know one’s not alone.

UPDATE.2: A young Christian academic working in the literature field writes:

The story recounted by this grad student is horrifying, and I have no doubt of its veracity.  That the system spectacularly failed in this incident, privileging a professor’s blatant verbal abuse in the name of ideological correctness (or, more pragmatically but perhaps even more tragically, in the name of simply not wanting to ruffle feathers) is indisputable.  If I were the TA on the receiving end of this kind of injustice, or even in the position of the letter writer, I’d be turning my papers in too (no academic pun intended).

The letter writer is correct, too, insofar as the groupthink inside today’s crop of academes is saddening and soul-crushing.  I just read the Lisa Ruddick piece you posted last week, and she absolutely nails it.  I don’t necessarily think there’s anyone at the top with a nefarious conspiracy to brainwash grad students into evacuating their selves and becoming compliant, theory-spouting drones.  (I’d love to see a sequel to Office Space set in a graduate English department, btw.)  But I’m sure that the vogue for intellectual sadism, for punishing the rubes who still believe in all the fairy tales that we enlightened moderns have moved beyond, is only a step away from the very real sadism of punishing a TA for refusing a prof’s anti-Christian bias.

That being said, I want to make a last ditch plea to this person not to give up the fight, not to simply accept that Christians in secular academia must “give tacit consent to a set of ideologies that are fundamentally antithetical to the Gospel” – not, in short, to flee Babylon.

I invoke Babylon deliberately because the prophet Daniel has been my model since the beginning of my academic career.  Daniel was selected, along with a few other exiles, to “learn the literature of the Chaldeans,” which was pretty much the equivalent of high culture paganism.  The king wanted him in his court Daniel had to soak in reams of myths that most of his fellow Israelites would have found blasphemous, and not without cause.  He was in a messy situation, but God appointed him to work with Nebuchadnezzar himself avatar of the spiritual forces arrayed against the nation of Israel.

Did Daniel have to make hard choices?  Absolutely, including, eventually, risking his life for the sake of his own version of the Benedict Option.  Did he decide that the answer was to make his escape from the king’s palace and flee for the theological purity of the wilderness?  Absolutely not.  Would a lot of Christians accuse Daniel of complicity with the godless pagans if he were alive today?  Probably.  Did Daniel learn a lot from his pagan overlords, such that the king found him superior in learning and wisdom to “all the enchanters” in the kingdom?  Absolutely.

We who persist in the academic underground live in Babylon, no doubt about it.  Through my time in academia I’ve encountered people who instinctively cast the persecution of Christians as a non-category, a phenomenon best described in strictly economic or cultural terms.  I’ve had to deal with assumptions that I am anti-Muslim, and I’ve had to sit in meetings where professors (whom I like) talk about The Lord’s Prayer like it’s an antiquated relic that “no one sitting in this room ACTUALLY takes seriously.”  But I’ve also had advisors to whom I am profoundly grateful, from whom I have learned a ton about the intersection of literary texts and political oppression, which has renewed my understanding of Christianity’s genesis as a faith against the Imperium.  I’ve had to wrestle with what I really think about things in a way I wouldn’t have been forced to otherwise. And I’ve met atheist and agnostic friends who are genuinely searching for truth, and pursue their studies because, against all odds, they want to find it.  Am I to believe that the risks of ideological pollution are not worth the reward of forging these friendships, and being perhaps the only person of faith (imperfect and messy and constantly failing though it may be) in their lives?

If I believe that, then perhaps I have to believe that Daniel made a mistake in not making a suicide run when the Chaldeans came for him.

Regarding cowardice – Jesus Himself said that spreading the evangelion required the innocence of doves AND the shrewdness of serpents.  In this context, one has to make a distinction between shrewdness and cowardice.  The TA’s in this situation should have said something (though I will add that this is a selective account that does not include the “back and forth” culminating in the STFU comment).  But am I obligated to state my theological understanding of marriage, which wouldn’t fit well on a bumper sticker, anytime someone mentions their live-in partner?  It seems like a lot of Christians would say “yes, you coward.”  I have to disagree.

Finally, I will say that, after spending seven years in [first-rank universities], I am teaching at a radically different (secular) institution.  My students literally cannot afford to worry about micro agressions.  I don’t know if I will stay a professor in the long haul, but if I leave, it will be for reasons that I share with my non-believing colleagues – the economic burdens that higher learning faces today, and the increasing reluctance of many universities to hire long-term faculty.

This might end up being longer than my initial email but I had to respond to this letter writer.  Teaching in Christian colleges and teaching in Babylon don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

The Homintern

Reader Blog Goliard said in a comment about the New Yorker profile of Jill Soloway, the radical creator of the award-winning transgender series Transparent:

I don’t know if anyone has remarked on this bit from the New Yorker piece yet (I didn’t get any hits searching the comments for “vetted”), but it stopped me in my tracks:

“Every decision on the show is vetted by Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker, trans activists and artists whose work about their relationship appeared in the most recent Whitney Biennial. ‘We monitor the politics of representation—if we catch things in the writing stage, it’s kind of optimal because then there’s time to shape it…’”

What’s astounding is how plainly and openly they lay this out: their show has political officers whose explicit function is to keep everything perfectly in line with ideological goals.

(Can you imagine how the average artsy person would react if these two people were, say, traditionalist Catholic activists rather than trans activists?)

This is a powerful factor in the shifting of opinion in this country. The average person is marinated in our entertainment media, and that media has been working steadily to construct an alternate reality of their own devising. And unlike the old physical Potemkin village, the digital Potemkin village has the power to not just fool people about present reality, but bend future reality towards its fantasy.

Speaking of LGBT commissars, another reader sent this piece from Slate in which a gay writer brands Caitlyn Jenner a traitor to the cause because she has been trans for over six months now, and still has the gall to think and speak for herself. Jenner, who began presenting himself as a woman at the age of 65, sold out the team by saying that she works hard on her presentation to look like a woman. Said Jenner, unforgivably, “If you’re out there and, to be honest with you, if you look like a man in a dress, it makes people uncomfortable.”

Well, yes, that’s true. But J. Bryan Lowder of the Homintern is not having it:

In response to criticisms of these comments, Jenner has penned (undoubtedly with oversight) yet another apology lamenting that she has “still so much to learn.” But here’s the thing. These screw-ups? They are not a matter of some tricky point of terminology or deep theory that you can only access after unlocking Queer Level 5. (Indeed, Jenner herself noted elsewhere in the Time interview that she has been “learning” for six months now—enough time to actually take in some hardcore queer theory if she wanted to!) These mistakes are basic. They are ideas and truths that any moderately compassionate, halfway curious cisgender or otherwise non-queer person could learn in a focused hour or two. That Jenner is still making statements like this as a trans woman—and again, a trans woman who came out with the support of a well-informed team rather than the typical case of struggling through the process isolated and confused—is, at this point, suspicious. Whether it is an offensive media game or a truly concerning display of ignorance, I can’t say for sure. But I am certain of one thing: I cannot take it seriously anymore.

We may not have hit Peak Trans yet, but I am sure that after the campus unrest this fall, and now this kind of thing, we are very close to hitting Peak Insufferable Progressive. I hope so. Elizabeth Nolan Brown, reporting for Reason from last week’s Atlantic LGBT Summit, said of the foofarah preceding one discussion, “By the time panelists had sorted out who was micro- or macro-agressing against whom, there was little time left for the planned topic of the panel, trans civil rights.”

What misery it must be to be around such people, having to watch every syllable that comes out of your mouth. What misery it must be to be such people, obsessively monitoring the lives and words of others.

Religious Right Pandering on Gay Rights

You readers know that religious liberty is a big issue for me, and that I am very concerned about what the new political, legal, and cultural order is going to mean for individual Christians and Christian institutions. I am also very concerned that Republican presidential candidates haven’t been talking about it much — and most recently, concerned that those who have started talking about it are doing so in a way that’s so unrealistic that it amounts to pandering.

Let me explain.

Scott Shackford at Reason blasts Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio for the way they’re going after social conservative voters on the issue. He points out that Cruz, who has been working this beat for a while now, and Rubio are telling Christian voters that they will work to roll back same-sex marriage, including the Obergefell ruling. The truth is, they will not do this, or if they try, they have no hope of succeeding.

There is no meaningful constituency for it. As a socially conservative Christian, I may not like it, but same-sex marriage is here to stay. Our side lost this battle in the culture war. We could not even get a Constitutional amendment to protect traditional marriage out of the Senate in 2005 and 2006, when most Americans still opposed gay marriage, and when we had Republicans running the Senate and in the White House. George W. Bush ran for re-election in part on protecting traditional marriage, but after he was returned to office, he spent zero political capital pushing for the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Neither will Cruz or Rubio, given how vastly more difficult it would be to get an FMA passed now, or to get through Congress a Supreme Court nominee who would overturn Obergefell. I’ve told you readers that Congressional Republicans aren’t going to touch any of this. I’m not predicting that; I know it, because I’ve been told this by sources on Capitol Hill. When Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio tell you otherwise, they are either lying to you, or lying to themselves.

And here’s the most frustrating thing about it, from Shackford:

This should have been or could have been an opportunity for conservatives to shift to a differentiation between how the government treats gay people as a legal matter and how private individuals treat gay people. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted after attending a summit about the future of LGBT activism, there is very little interest among these leaders in discerning between public and private discrimination. Unfortunately, it looks like conservatives aren’t willing to recognize the difference either. They want to tie demands for private individual expression of religious beliefs (by being able to decline to provide goods or services for gay weddings, for example) with the public issue of how the government treats same-sex couples.

It’s frustrating because this could have been an opportunity for the GOP to look at what comes next and figure out how conservative politics could adapt to a shift in legal recognition while still preserving individual liberty.

Yes, exactly. For background, read Shackford’s long piece in Reason talking about the emerging clash between gay rights and individual liberties favored by libertarians. Shackford, like many libertarians, favors gay marriage, but is troubled by the threat the gay civil rights movement is posing to religious and individual liberties. Excerpts:

Now that government discrimination is largely tamed, gay activists are going after private behavior, using the government as a bludgeon. After a long alliance with libertarians, the two camps could be settling into a new series of conflicts.

Libertarians and gay activists were aligned in the pursuit of ending government mistreatment, but libertarians draw a bright line between government behavior and private behavior, arguing that the removal of state force is the essential precondition for private tolerance. Many gay activists believe that government power is a critical tool for eliminating private misdeeds. What many activists see as righteous justice, libertarians see as inappropriate, heavy-handed coercion.

Now that gay marriage is a settled matter, it’s worth taking an inventory of political issues frequently raised within the LGBT activist community to see where the two groups’ values line up and where they conflict.

Among them:

Another major divide between libertarians and many gay activists—with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and state-level civil rights commissions coming down on the latter side—involves religious business owners who don’t want to provide their goods and services for gay weddings. We’re now seeing additional concerns that religious colleges could be punished for not accommodating gay couples, and some have floated the idea that churches that pursue such policies shouldn’t have nonprofit status anymore.

Another major divide between libertarians and many gay activists—with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and state-level civil rights commissions coming down on the latter side—involves religious business owners who don’t want to provide their goods and services for gay weddings. We’re now seeing additional concerns that religious colleges could be punished for not accommodating gay couples, and some have floated the idea that churches that pursue such policies shouldn’t have nonprofit status anymore.

The freedom to choose with whom to associate is a fundamental human right. The ability to engage freely in commerce is another one. As such, libertarians have always defended the ability of religious businesses and individuals to say “no thanks” to potential customers.

This is not just about faith. Religion happens to be the framework for this debate because the people who want to discriminate against gay customers are doing so while citing their religious beliefs. But any regulation that inhibits individuals’ right to choose with whom they trade or do business needs to be treated as suspect. To justify restrictions on this freedom, the government has to prove that inaction would produce a significant amount of harm.

That’s obviously not the case when it comes to the provision of marketplace goods. Nobody has presented a credible argument that gay couples are unable to buy wedding cakes or hire photographers. There is no actual “harm”—at worst, just inconvenience and insult.

When Mark Silverstein, ACLU legal director in Colorado, helped a gay couple sue a bakery that had declined to provide them a wedding cake, he asked: “If a business owner is allowed to simply cite personal beliefs as a basis for turning away same-sex couples, then what stops a doctor from denying medical care to the child of same-sex parents or a police officer from refusing to defend a church or a synagogue?” The proper response is that cops are prevented from discriminating by law, and doctors by professional oath. But beyond that, we have little reason to believe that most people want to discriminate against gay, lesbian, or transgender customers. The burden created by those who do is remarkably small and can be remedied without government intervention.

There was a time—and it was not so long ago—when many businesses and individuals who supported gay rights felt the need to contribute to the cause as secretly as possible so as to avoid adverse reactions from their straight customers. Flipping the switch on who gets punished for their beliefs, especially when the penalties are administered by the always-domineering state, is not justice.

Read the whole thing. Shackford, a gay libertarian, also talks about workplace discrimination, adoption, trans rights, and bullying in school. He concludes that now that government-sanctioned discrimination is ending, “I’d much rather see my peers embrace a world where we are all equally free to decide the terms by which we deal with each other, not one where we seize the same government powers that were once used to abuse us and use them to pummel our ideological opponents.”

What I wish my own side would understand is that what Shackford and those like him offer is the best that social conservatives can hope for today. Aligning with libertarians on this issue is the best way to protect churches, religious schools, parachurch organizations and other religious institutions from the government and gay rights organizations out to crush opponents. We have to hope that despite what the loudest voices on the left say, there are enough Americans who want to leave religious groups alone to run their organizations as they see fit, and who recognize the bullying of gay rights activists as a threat to the common good. This is all we have left. 

The only defensible battle line left to social and religious conservatives is exactly where Shackford identifies it: at the divide between how the government treats gays and private expression of religious belief. Republican politicians who take the Cruz and Rubio approach are not serious, and should not be taken as serious by Christian voters. Talk to the conservative Christians who are working deep in the movement to protect religious liberty in the new order, and you’ll hear a very different story than what Cruz and Rubio and the professional religious conservatives (always eager to raise more money and increase their status within the Republican Party) are telling voters in the pews.

As you know, I believe that we religious traditionalists should take the Benedict Option, which is a strategic withdrawal into our churches and local communities, thickening our religious belief and practice and strengthening our ties to each other — this, for the sake of creating institutions and communities that will be strong enough to endure the long post-Christian night. In order to create the private space to be left alone, we have to engage politically. There’s no doubt about it. But we have to engage with strategic intelligence, and not satisfy ourselves with sacrificing our achievable liberties for a lost cause.

This is not Wilberforce Option-style acquiescence, but rather an attempt to use politics and the law to shore up defenses around private spaces and the First Amendment. Even if it overturning Obergefell were possible — a very long shot! — doing so would only temporarily halt same-sex marriage in some states, and the fight to obtain that goal would be so destructive that it would devastate any goodwill towards conservative Christians.

Cruz, Rubio, and these other Christian conservative political generals are fighting the last war. Whether they are doing so cynically or with misguided sincerity, I cannot say. I don’t know their hearts or their minds. What I do know is that they are wrong: the gay marriage cause has been definitively lost. I also know that libertarians are right that the threat to religious liberty is real. We traditionalist Christians have neither the time, nor the money, nor the political capital to waste on lost causes, when there remain some that we might yet gain.

Church as Holy Cave

Gregory Wolfe, editor of  the arts and faith quarterly Image Journal, has just published The Operation of Grace, a new collection of his essays on, well, art and faith. The first one is called “The Cave and the Cathedral,” and in it, Wolfe reflects on the 30,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings discovered in France, and what they tell us about the nature of humanity. Excerpts:

The heart of our humanness is not merely the capacity for adaptation but the ability to perceive and make meaning, to experience the world as an altar upon which the divine enters flesh. From the proverbial dawn of time we have felt the need to withdraw from the bright glare of sunlight and enter into a dark space where we can re-imagine the world, drawing it on cave walls and embedding it in stained glass, where it can be contemplated by torchlight and candlelight. To truly encounter what is to be found in Chauvet, even vicariously through film and photographs, is to suddenly realize that words like art and religion are clumsy, ham-fisted abstractions that violate something whole and ultimately inviolable. It also tends to make the word primitive, with all the connotations that have grown up around it over the centuries, seem almost laughable, if not obscene.

… What’s at stake here is nothing less than the nature of consciousness itself. Owen Barfield, one of the most incisive thinkers on this subject, once said: “Before the scientific revolution the world was more like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved.”

I smiled at that line, because that is the world of Dante’s Commedia, and that is the world of Vodolazkin’s Laurus — and that is the world of Orthodox Christianity. Barfield, Wolfe goes on to say, called the primal, unselfconscious unity early humans experienced with nature “original participation.” More:

In his book Saving the Appearances Barfield notes that Greek philosophy and the religion of Israel profoundly changed the dimensions of participation. Both of these cultures pulled back from mythic consciousness, one through reason and the other through monotheism. For example, while the golden calf could be said to represent original participation, the Israelites felt they had to reject it. But this only changed the shape of participation: for them the discovery that God is not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire meant that he must be perceived as the mystery behind all of creation—that the mystery in some sense was more truly like each one of them, singular and personal.

Barfield holds that this new phase, far from eliminating participation, made it more inward. The synthesis of Greek reason and Hebrew monotheism in the Christian era (both stressing the need for human participation in a divine order through prayer and contemplation) continued through the Middle Ages. But with the scientific revolution, man separated himself from nature and embraced an abstract way of thinking. The modern West, Barfield says, exchanged meaning for literalism, turning the things of this world from signs into idols. Creation became a series of objects which operated like a machine. He illustrates this by imagining a clever child who is put inside an automobile. If he plays around with the instruments long enough he will be able to drive the car, but he will have only “dashboard-knowledge,” not true knowledge of the car.

This could be taken as nothing more than a narrative of decline, but Barfield believes that even as modern, self-conscious individuals we can still experience what he calls “final participation.” Ironically, this is where those clumsy abstractions “art” and “religion” return, because for Barfield final participation comes through the creation of metaphor.

Read the whole thing. Better yet, buy the essay collection from which this one comes. 

I read that essay last night after completing the thoroughly depressing task of watching the GOP presidential debate, which was horrible. I know, I know, it’s easy to dismiss these events as horrible, but trust me, this one was. There has to be a better way to choose a president. Two hours of barked talking points and promiscuous stupidity. I thought last night about how, when I was in high school and early on in college in the 1980s, I had so much enthusiasm for politics, and wanted to get into the game doing political communications. Having seen last night’s display, I found it hard to imagine young people as I was back then, watching that debate spectacle and concluding that national politics is a meaningful and exciting vocation that they can’t wait to take up.

Were things just as moronic and dispiriting back then, only I didn’t see it? Or have things gotten objectively worse?

Reading the “Cave and the Cathedral” essay, from The Operation of Grace, righted and restored me. It reminded me of the things that matter, and the questions that count. Who are we? Where are we going? Where have we been? What is beyond us? Can we know it? Is it a person, and if so, does that person love us? What does He want from us?

Glimpsed from the imaginative perspective of the Chauvet caves, the event onstage in Vegas last night was the barest flicker, like a fragment of tissue paper glowing brightly for a half-second before rising as ash up the chimney. There was a time in my life — the early 1990s — when I lived on Capitol Hill, and worked as a Washington journalist. It was something I had been dreaming about doing for years. Walking by the Capitol building and the Supreme Court most every day, I felt immense gratitude for the opportunity to live at what I considered to be the center of the world.

There I sat in my East Capitol Street apartment, six blocks from the Capitol, watching the first Clinton inauguration on TV (I was a TV critic then, and was working), and seeing the now former President George H.W. Bush leave the building, get into a Marine chopper, lift off and head into his future. As I saw the televised images of the helicopter rising, I leapt off the futon couch, ran to the window, and turned the adjacent TV a bit to the left so I could see the screen while sitting in the window frame. I opened the window and poked my head out into the bracing January chill, and saw that chopper lift itself over the trees. I toggled anxiously between the real image and its televised version, and felt a rush of exultation that there I was, participating in this historical event, because I was blessed to live in Washington.

It was a very Walker Percy moment. Had I been on the street below watching the Bush chopper, I wouldn’t have felt that excitement. Nor would I have felt it had I only seen the event on live television. It took the Percian concept of the “certification” of reality by its broadcast on live national television to turn the moment into a kind of sacrament for me.

The recollection of that episode, and that time in my life, makes me laugh, not because I look down on the work that I did then, and that people in Washington continue to do. I laugh at the enthusiasm of my younger self, and the sense of reverence and meaning I had for my life in Washington. I realize now that it really wasn’t politics that interested me, but media, and the way media packaged the business of politics and made it seem far grander and more glorious than it really was. I suppose you could say of me in those days that Washington was more like a garment I wore around myself than a stage on which I was a bit player. Living in Washington and working in the Washington media made me feel certified too. Television had raised me to think that Washington was the most important place in the world, and now, I participated in it.

Of course disenchantment came, as it was bound to. You can’t be starry-eyed forever, about anything. In Washington, even if you learn to love it there, you love it like you love a game, not like you love a church. Mystery dries up. It’s just sausage-making.

Hey, you’ve got to have sausage! Sausage-making is important. Then again, all of life eventually strikes us as sausage-making. W.H. Auden has a very fine poem about the disenchantment of the world with the passage of time, “As I Walked Out One Evening.”  We come to see the ordered beauty of the world as a façade for chaos and ugliness, its truth a cover for lies. This can be true of the man disenchanted with institutional politics, disenchanted with institutional religion, disenchanted with the academy, and so forth.

But here, says Auden, is how you recover:

‘O look, look in the mirror,

O look in your distress:

Life remains a blessing

Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.’

You must face your own poverty, and recognize that you are not all that is. There is a mystery far greater than yourself, and you can participate in it, if you will consent. Turn from the mirror — that is, from egoism — and look out the window at the broken old world, and submit to the mystery. You shall love it in spite of its brokenness, because you too participate in its brokenness. All the corruption in the world does not extinguish the mystery. And that mystery is love. That is how we know the mystery, and participate in it.

I finished the Greg Wolfe essay and returned to my re-reading of Laurus, which on this second reading, seems even more mysterious and fable-like. The words themselves can seem like an incantation, purifying the inner vision, and re-sacralizing the world. I can’t explain it, but it happens to me. It happened to me with the Commedia. God used art and religion to bring me to the place of which Auden wrote, staring without illusion into the mirror, and then turning to the window. The Mystery called to me through art, and through faith, and somehow, this time, I responded. And it made all the difference.

In his interview with me for TAC, Vodolazkin, who is a believing Orthodox Christian, spoke about why he wrote Laurus: “In the Nineties, reality in Russia, and in Russian literature, was filled with a blackness that exhausted me. A few years ago, it occurred to me to write about something good.”

Laurus is the story of an orphaned boy in medieval Russia who grows up to be a healer, and eventually a holy man. He is broken early in his life by a trauma that haunts him for the rest of his days, but he emerges from that brokenness to become a vessel of love and healing for the world. He loves his crooked neighbor, with his crooked heart, and does so in an extraordinary way. Vodolazkin has done one of the most difficult things for a writer to accomplish: to make goodness real, and convincing. Reading Wolfe, then a couple of chapters of Laurus, made the unpleasant two hours I had spent watching the Republican candidates fade away.

As I drifted off to sleep, I thought about the cave I enter every week to commune

Our bishop in liturgy

with the Mystery: St. John’s, my little Orthodox parish church in Starhill.  It is at its best on Saturday night vespers in the late fall and winter, when it seems most cave-like. You enter a room lit only by candles, and you bow before icons of the holy. The priest, wearing priestly vestments, chants praises to the All-Holy. He censes the room with the fragrance of the sacred. The next morning, you will enter the cave a second time, and after long prayers, the ancient words of the liturgy, composed 1,500 years ago, invite the All-Holy to descend onto the altar, to transform the wine and bread into Himself. The God who cannot be contained, the Source of all that Was, Is, and Ever Shall Be, gives Himself to us through the art of the liturgy, and in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Nobody sees us. Few people are present. We are poor. Cars pass up and down Highway 61, their drivers indifferent to the mystery manifesting itself behind the row of trees and bushes veiling the temple.

That church, that cave, is the center of the world.

I am grateful to the teaching of Greg Wolfe and to the art of Evgeny Vodolazkin for reminding me of that last night.

Trump & Weimar America

UK conservative columnist Peter Hitchens openly despises the National Front in France, but he says that the mainstream media are taking the wrong lesson from the Front’s loss Sunday in the French elections. Excerpts:

My attitude towards such parties of the so-called ‘Far Right’ (How far is far? Who measures it? Who decides when to apply this epithet?) is that their existence and strength is a reproach to cultures which have expelled responsible and civilised conservative opinion from their parliaments, academies and media, dismissing them as ‘fascists’ . Such cultures have created a large and gormless class of frustrated, voiceless people who will, if provoked long enough, vote for almost anyone who is not the establishment.

It’s a sort of Weimar Republic problem. The liberal left have the upper hand, and use it so carelessly and arrogantly, so totally despising those who disagree with them,  that they risk losing not just their own superficial gains, but the whole of free society. I believe this to be true, and have tried arguing it with members of the new elite, quite often. They haven’t been interested.

Hitchens points out that even though the FN did not win the presidency of any region, the “Maginot Line” against them held only because the woebegone Socialist Party withdrew its candidates from regions where the FN was riding high, and urged its voters to vote for Sarkozy’s Republican Party, as the only effective means of stopping the FN. It worked. Nevertheless, the FN represents one-third of the French electorate. As Hitchens points out, if the only way the Establishment can keep the FN from taking power is by showing itself as essentially the same party, it only confirms the FN’s diagnosis of the Establishment’s corruption. More:

But in any case I have little doubt that the growing success of the French National Front (FN) has been made possible by the collapse into social liberalism, and EU worship, of the old French Left. It is in the former dominions of the old French Left that the FN flourishes.

To describe the FN’s results as a rout, as some media did, is absurd. The FN ended the battle in good order and well-prepared for the 2017 Presidential election, where it may well force the two establishment parties to combine against it once again.

This tactic obviously works, in that it stops the FN from winning – for now. But it also completely confirms the FN’s (perfectly justified) propaganda, that the official parties of Left and Right are really the same thing.  And the more this realisation takes hold, the more defectors, in the long term, the FN will get from the old parties. Both are wholly committed to the EU, open borders, the Euro and all the other disasters which liberal dogmatists have visited on the Continent over the past 20 years. How will things look in 2020? And, once tactical voting has failed to stop the NF capturing regions and seats, what defence will France’s ‘centre’ have against the Le Pen revolt? Certainly it has no ideas. My suspicion is that, once the FN is big enough to get round this new Maginot Line of centrism , it will do so.

Read the whole thing. 

Hitchens speculates what this might have to do with the British political system. Neither France nor the UK have quite the same problems that we do, nor the same political structure and dynamics. Still, I think we would be foolish to ignore the lessons here.

Donald Trump comes from somewhere. His biggest issue has been immigration. David Frum explains why Trump has been so effective:

Donald Trump’s noisy complaints that immigration is out of control are literally true. Nobody is making conscious decisions about who is wanted and who is not, about how much immigration to accept and what kind to prioritize—not even for the portion of U.S. migration conducted according to law, much less for the larger portion that is not.

Nor is there much understanding of what has happened after it has happened. A simple question like, “How many immigrants are in prison?” turns out to be extraordinarily hard to answer. Poor information invites excessive fears, which are then answered with false assurances and angry accusations.

Nervous about Syrian refugees in the wake of the Paris massacre? How dare you! Would you turn away Jews fleeing Hitler? Oh, you think that analogy is hyperbolic? Tell it to the mayor of New York City.

This frequent invocation of the refugee trauma of the 1930s shuts down all discussion of anything that has happened since. Since 1991, the United States has accepted more than 100,000 Somali refugees. Britain accepted 100,000 as well. Some 50,000 Somali refugees were resettled in Canada; some 40,000 in Sweden; smaller communities were settled in the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark.

How’s that going?

It’s a disaster, Frum shows. And in this quite good essay, Frum talks about how complicated and messed-up our immigration policies are. Then:

Americans talk a lot about the social difficulties caused by large-scale, low-skill immigration, but usually in a very elliptical way. Giant foundations—Pew, Ford—spend lavishly to study the problems of the new low-skill immigrant communities. Public policy desperately seeks to respond to the challenges presented by large-scale low-skill immigration. But the fundamental question—“should we be doing this at all?”—goes unvoiced by anyone in a position of responsibility. Even as the evidence accumulates that the policy was a terrible mistake from the point of view of the pre-existing American population, elites insist that the policy is unquestionable … more than unquestionable, that the only possible revision of the policy is to accelerate future flows of low-skill immigration even faster, whether as migrants or as refugees or in some other way.

Even as immigration becomes ever-more controversial with the larger American public, within the policy elite it preserves an unquestioned status as something utterly beyond discussion. To suggest anything otherwise is to suggest—not merely something offensive or objectionable—but something self-evidently impossible, like adopting cowrie shells as currency or Donald Trump running for president.

Read the whole thing. 

Trump has lately been in the news for his harsh opinions on Islam and Muslims. I think it’s fair to ask to what extent Trump’s views find support because the political and media establishments have discouraged a full, frank airing of the very real challenges contemporary Islam poses to the Western political and social order. Over the last day or so, I’ve had a fruitful, private e-mail exchange with an American Muslim reader of this blog who writes under the pseudonym “Jones”. I’ve learned things about the diversity and complexity of the American Muslim community that I didn’t know from the news media, fixated as it has long been on managing the news audience rather than searching for and revealing difficult truths.

And Jones tells me he has learned things from me about the leadership of American Islamic institutions that he did not know either — things that neither he nor anyone else would have learned had they only depended on the liberal media for their information. I’ve asked him to write an essay for this blog, and he’s agreed to do it. I look forward to reading it and publishing it. I don’t know if he agrees with me or not, but I think the news media’s deep reluctance to ask and attempt to answer troubling questions about the American Muslim community makes it much easier for we who are outside that community to project our own hopes or fears onto it. We conservatives are too quick to believe panicky claims about American Muslims, but it’s also true that the mainstream media has little to no credibility with us on this issue because we believe it has a vested interest in telling only one side of the story.

This is a problem for all of us, conservative and liberal, Muslim and non-Muslim. The absence of a real and well-informed public discussion, even a politically incorrect one, gives space for demagogues to operate.

Donald Trump has not made the gay rights/religious liberty conflict part of his campaign, and I doubt he ever will. Same-sex marriage is a settled issue in America, and despite the stupidity of GOP presidential candidates chasing the religious right vote (more on which tomorrow), gay rights in general are close to it. But I do wonder if the trans thing is going to end up as the spark of an illiberal backlash — not from Trump, necessarily, but in the near future. Recall this Peter Hitchens quote:

The liberal left have the upper hand, and use it so carelessly and arrogantly, so totally despising those who disagree with them,  that they risk losing not just their own superficial gains, but the whole of free society.

For “liberal left,” in America, think “Establishment”. Frum has already said how anathema questioning immigration policy is to both parties. The Democrats are already deep in the tank for whatever the LGBT lobby wants, and the Republican elites either agree with them, or are too afraid to say anything meaningful in defense of religious liberty. Probably because they live and move and have their being in the rarefied air of elite opinion, they are also too timid to defend schools against the Obama administration’s order that they must allow transgenders to use locker rooms without any modification for privacy, or anything else. The Houston business elites, not a liberal Democratic constituency, were behind the recent gay rights ballot proposal in the city, and had their heads handed to them by a majority-minority electorate. It was widely observed that had the proposed law covered only gays and lesbians, it probably would have passed. There is something about transgender that is a bridge too far for many people — and the way the Establishment news and entertainment media keep pushing it, the greater the backlash may well be.

Or not. You know how pessimistic I am about the social order in this country when it comes to sexuality and individualism. But the Houston vote surprised me. Some libertarians are already considering bailing on the gay rights movement because of its emerging illiberality. Should the cultural liberalism of the Democratic and Republican elites overreach on immigration, LGBT rights (including religious liberty), or other hot button issues, leaving masses of working class and middle class people (not all of them white; see Houston) alienated, another Trump may well emerge, a populist more electable than the reckless billionaire.

I’m not saying that liberals of the cultural left and right have to abandon their principles to accommodate the rest of us. I am saying that we are in a period of political instability, and if we were to have an economic meltdown … well, let me simply repeat Peter Hitchens on the UK/Europe situation, and say again that with a few modifications, we are facing something similar here:

The liberal left have the upper hand, and use it so carelessly and arrogantly, so totally despising those who disagree with them,  that they risk losing not just their own superficial gains, but the whole of free society. I believe this to be true, and have tried arguing it with members of the new elite, quite often. They haven’t been interested.

(H/T: Niall Gooch.)

Social Media & ‘Toxic Workers’

The “Status Update” episode of of This American Life was one I almost didn’t listen to. Why? Because the first segment is a discussion of among the most annoying people on the planet — young teenage girls — talking about the most boring subject on the planet: their social media habits. But I’m glad I kept listening, because it was actually pretty interesting. It was also pretty horrifying, and cemented my resolve to keep my kids off of social media for as long as I can.

If you don’t want to listen to the segment, you can read the transcript. In it, three ninth-grade girls give host Ira Glass a glimpse into how they exist on social media. What looks like mindlessness to fuddies like me is actually a highly sophisticated, crazy-making form of communication. It emerges that these girls, like their friends on social media, monitor it constantly, intensely aware of who is offering them affirmations (“likes,” etc.) and who is commenting on their posts in ways that convey subtle loss of status. Finally, this from the host a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of it all, and its exhausting demands:

Ira Glass: I have to say, like, oh my god, this is such a job.

Girls: Yeah.

Julia: It’s like I’m– I’m a brand, and I am like–

Ella: You’re trying to promote yourself.

Julia: The brand. I’m the director of the–

Ira Glass: And you’re the product.

Jane: You’re definitely trying to promote yourself.

Julia: To stay relevant, you have to–

Jane: You have to work hard.

Ella: Relevance is a big term right now.

Ira Glass: Are you guys relevant?

Ella: Um, I’m so relevant.

Jane: In middle school. In middle school, we were definitely really relevant.

Ella (SARCASTICALLY): We were so relevant.

Jane: Because everything was established. But now, in the beginning of high school, you can’t really tell who’s relevant.

Ira Glass: Yeah. And what does relevant mean?

Jane: Relevant means that people care about what you’re posting on Instagram. People–

Julia: Care about you.

Can you imagine being formed by a cultural environment in which you felt obligated to monitor a machine that measures your popularity, and therefore your sense of self, in real-time? Can you imagine what that would do to you, and your sense of self-worth? Can you imagine the kind of person that would turn you into?When I heard that segment, I thought, “Well, yeah, that’s where all these campus snowflakes come from. Anything that troubles them or challenges them they take as a threat to their identity. Social media has trained them to be terrified of microaggressions.”

I’m wondering this afternoon if character-formation via social media has anything to do with these new findings by Harvard. Excerpts from the WaPo study:

In a provocative new Harvard Business School working paper, researchers Michael Housman and Dylan Minor crunched data from 50,000 employees at 11 companies to come up with what may be the world’s most detailed personality profile of a “toxic worker.”

[snip]

The study’s findings aren’t exactly what you might expect.

First, a toxic worker isn’t necessarily a lazy worker. In fact, they tend to be insanely productive, much more so than the average worker.

Housman, a workplace scientist at an analytics firm, and Minor, a visiting assistant professor at Harvard, explain that this may explain why these workers tend to persist in an organization despite their questionable ethics and morals: “There is a potential trade-off. … They are corrupt, but they excel in work performance.” They cited as an example a rogue trader who is making millions. A firm might be tempted to look away when he’s found to be overstepping legal boundaries. And then there’s this maddening fact: At least one previous study has found that unethical workers actually have longer tenures at companies than ethical ones.

The second characteristic is a bit more obvious. They tend to have what’s known as high “self-regard” and a lower degree of “other-regardingness.” Or put more simply, they’re selfish. “All things equal, those that are less other-regarding should be more predisposed to toxicity as they do not fully internalize the cost that their behavior imposes on others,” the researchers wrote. This characteristic was teased out in the job screening program by asking applicants questions like this one that makes them choose between two statements: “I like to ask about other people’s well-being” or “I let the past stay in the past.” Selecting the first would give them a higher other-regarding score.

Third, the toxic employee also has an tendency to be overconfident of his or her own abilities — a trait believed to lead to unreasonable risk-taking. “Someone that is overconfident believes the expected payoff from engaging in misconduct is higher than someone who is not overconfident, as they believe the likelihood of the better outcome is higher than it really is,” the researchers explained.

Read the whole thing.

Am I reading too much into this? Do you think social media use has something to do with this phenomenon? Granted, this sort of person has existed since time immemorial, but my sense is that social media encourages this way of thinking, exacerbating the overall problem. Thoughts?

 

Magnolia Thunderpussy, Weimar American Hero

Think of the high-low awesomeness of that headline, and how much Ignatian (as in, Reilly) fun I had writing it. Magnolia Thunderpussy, you may recall, is the vulgar nom de drag of one Kricket Nimmons, né Jerome, an impoverished ex-con and HIV-positive prostitute who recently achieved his lifelong dream of having a sex change operation, thanks to taxpayer financing. Last year, Jerome moved from his native South Carolina to New York state, where the state’s Medicaid program will pay for sex change operations for the poor. The New York Times paid tribute to Kricket in a massive story this past Sunday, which started on the front page, above the fold.  The Times is now doing the same kind of cheerleading for trans that it did for gay marriage. Plus ça change. 

In related news, the TV series Transparent, about which I wrote yesterday, has reached new heights of greatness, it is reported, by airing an episode in which an elderly male-to-female transgender masturbates his ex-wife to climax in a bathtub. The Daily Beast reporter is overcome with glee:

For [actress Judith] Light (66) and [actor Jeffrey] Tambor (71), both of whom just picked up Golden Globe nominations for their performances in Amazon’s series, it wasn’t a typical day on set, to be sure. But neither could have expected how meaningful shooting it would become.

When asked about the scene in an interview with The Daily Beast, Tambor perks up and immediately looks at Light, who is beaming with pride.

“We’ve known each other for many years and we texted each other afterwards,” Tambor says.

After they shot the bathtub sequence, “He texted me…” Light jumps in, her voice cracking as her eyes well with tears. “I always get emotional when I talk about it,” she apologized. “He texted me: ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’”

No, I guess it doesn’t.

If the Republican Party can’t make Magnolia Thunderpussy the It Girl of contemporary liberalism, it should just go out of business. In all seriousness, though, Magnolia T. is what social anthropologist Mary Douglas called a “condensed symbol” — shorthand for an entire worldview. She is poor, black, gay, transgendered, unemployed, welfare-dependent, an ex-con who migrated from the benighted South to the compassionate North, where the State, which supports her entirely, also paid for her sex change. It’s hard to invent a character more emblematic of the American liberal worldview, 2015.

It might sound to you like a remark you’d hear on conservative talk radio, but I’m actually serious about this. In my 2013 TAC essay “Sex After Christianity,” I quoted a 1993 cover story in The Nation, praising the contemporary gay rights movement at its outset:

All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis—have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.

It did. But understand, transgender is more radical than homosexuality itself, which in most cases affirms gender difference. Magnolia Thunderpussy is a condensed symbol because she represents the essential outsider from the American social order, a figure who achieves her dream through the agency of the State, and is honored as the apotheosis of Progress by the most powerful newspaper in the world, the journal that both epitomizes and leads elite cultural opinion. It is the content of the dream, of MT’s absolute telos, that most essentially defines her as a condensed symbol of American liberalism:

“When I lay down and when I wake up, I’ll be a whole new creature, a whole new being,” Ms. Nimmons declared. “Out with the old, in with the new.”

Novus ordo seclorum! As Patrick Deneen has pointed out, liberalism is based on two foundational principles: the sanctity of individual choice, and the liberation from natural limits. You

Magnolia T.’s celebrated odyssey epitomizes the belief that nothing should stand between a person and his desire to liberate himself from unwanted limits. George Bailey was the symbol of the liberal American dream of an earlier era. Now, it’s Magnolia Thunderpussy.

That fact may be politically inconvenient for liberals, and certainly annoying. But as theologian Carl Trueman points out, with reference to Stefoknee Wolscht, the Canadian trans crackpot who left his wife and children and now lives as a six-year-old girl, this is where the logic of the cultural left takes us:

If everything else which shapes our identity can now be determined by mere personal preference, why single out age as an exception? After all, the way we measure time is a human invention. For example, we arbitrarily build our calendar around the earth’s orbit of the sun. I have always thought that this is a somewhat imperialist imposition of heliocentrism on our lives. We also assume that time moves forward, one moment following another, but that too is really a linguistic construct. “Time” is a floating signifier, a patriarchal myth. To coin a term, the old-fashioned idea of linear chronology now represents a somewhat heterotemporal approach to existence, methinks.

So when it comes to transgender people mewling and puking about how Wolscht is trivializing their cause, let me put this as simply and gently as I can: When you decide that categories of identity are merely psychological and that reality is constituted by language, you consequently have neither the right nor the ability to call a halt to the Promethean process which you have unleashed just because some of the results prove to be distasteful to you and unhelpful to your political cause.  Indeed, whining like a bunch of, ahem, six year old girls is not going to help you at this point.

You do not believe me?  Then perhaps it is time to call the spirit of Nietzsche’s Madman once more from the grave: You who have so derided any notion of human nature and external authority, do you now have the courage to face the world for whose birth you yourselves were the midwives? You who have “unchained the sun from this earth,” can you now live with the consequences of your own actions—where all things, even chronological age, must surely give way before the will to power?  Face the reality you have made, where Mr. Wolscht is  the Nietzschean Übermensch—or, to be precise,  the Überkleinesmädchen—of the new order.

Magnolia Thunderpussy, Weimar American Hero.

The Vacant Commons

Wesley J. Smith writes about speaking on a panel at an international bioethics conference. The subject was euthanasia. Smith:

My co-panelist was a Dutch ethicist who supported his country’s liberal legalization regimen. We sparred courteously for an hour, and although the discussion remained cordial, we found no points of agreement, either on means or ends.

At the end of the convention, one participant—a UN bureaucrat—told me angrily that many people were upset because I was not willing to engage in “conversation.” I was surprised. “I flew 6,000 miles to engage in conversation,” I replied. “I have respectfully listened to opposing views and been civil in presenting my own opinions.”

“But you refuse consensus,” he complained. That’s when I realized that I hadn’t been invited to discuss and defend my viewpoint. Instead, I was brought there to reach an agreement, to find a compromise, by accepting “a little euthanasia” as the middle ground. But that was a fool’s errand—for me, a little euthanasia is still euthanasia.

Smith goes on to say this is an example of “why the West is increasingly incapable of engaging in true debate, achieving broad consensus, and reaching compromises about our most important controversies.” We have grown too far apart in our basic moral visions.

Citing Smith’s column, a reader of this blog said in a comment on the Next Culture War Front thread:

 

In short, Smith shows that the pro- and anti-euthanasia camps share so little common moral ground, so little cultural connective tissue, and speak “two different moral languages,” that there is quite frankly nothing for the two sides to talk about.

The same thing is happening around sexuality, particularly transgenderism. Rod Dreher (our stand-in for a cultural conservative) and Jill Soloway (our stand-in for a cultural radical) share so little moral common ground that there is no point in a conversation of any kind, except on the basis of a secret hope that one’s opponent will somehow spontaneously see the light and come over to the other side.

So what do we do? A key element of the historic American solution to such problems of social cohesion is federalism and privacy. But the Obama administration and the Supreme Court have eliminated this pathway to toleration and co-existence. So on the two sides fight, as “neither can live while the other survives”.

“My name is legion” indeed.

A reader wrote to me yesterday, saying that the Benedict Option will not be possible because ultimately the State will not leave us alone. I told him that in my view, we have to fight as long as we are able, and fight hard — but we also must plan for the day when we lose. What then? At the moment, I don’t see many culturally conservative Christians planning for enduring the long night. They seem paralyzed by the thought that it could happen, and seem to believe that by keeping it out of mind, they make it less likely. This is magical thinking.

We Christians on the whole are doing a bad job of raising our children to understand what it means to be a Christian; this is why so many of them profess Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which is perfectly compatible with the kind of assimilationist, civic Christianity that the Establishment (including but not limited to the State) will allow. Our children, if they still profess the faith as adults, will offer no objection to the state oppression of our institutions, and the demonization of traditional Christianity, because they will have come to understand that being a Christian means little more than being nice. And bigots are mean.

But you know this is my thing. The main point here is that the public square is being vacated as the idea of the common good withers. I think this is a terrible thing, but I don’t know how to stop it, or if it can be stopped. The politics professor Patrick Deneen gets to the heart of the matter in this essay. He begins by saying that liberalism as we know it — “liberalism,” that is, as the political order we live under, not merely the political tendency of the Democratic Party — depends for its success on certain pre-modern assumptions that contemporary liberalism either ignores or attacks. More:

Many of what are considered liberalism’s signal features—particularly political arrangements such as constitutionalism, the rule of law, rights and privileges of citizens, separation of powers, the free exchange of goods and services in markets, and federalism—are to be found in medieval thought. Inviolable human dignity, constitutional limits upon central power, and equality under law are part of a preliberal legacy.

The strictly political arrangements of modern constitutionalism do not per se constitute a liberal regime. Rather, liberalism is constituted by a pair of deeper anthropological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particular orientation and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature. These two revolutions in the understanding of human nature and society constitute “liberalism” inasmuch as they introduce a radically new definition of “liberty.”

These are foundational questions — and, as Wes Smith discerns, like Alasdair MacIntyre before him, we have reached a point at which on more and more of these vital questions, compromise is impossible, because the competing visions are too radical. When Americans of both the left and the right find the “common good” cannot include the Other, because the threat to Goodness the Other poses is too great to be accommodated, then the idea of the common good dies.

Europe at the moment is struggling with the question of whether its Islamic immigrants can ever truly be European while remaining faithfully Islamic. A number of Christians in this country watch this conflict from afar, and conclude that no, the Muslims can’t. And they may be right. But what traditional Christians ought to consider is that the day is fast coming, and in fact I believe will come in my own lifetime, when traditional Christians are seen as bones in the throat of the American body politic as Muslims are in Europe today. They will be asking the same questions about us: can we really be good and loyal Americans, given how we obviously hold to “un-American values”? (See David Cameron’s proposal to monitor all religious organizations in the UK, policing against “un-British values.”)

Power will pass back and forth between Republicans and Democrats in the years to come, but the general drift will be against traditional Christians and their religious liberties, at first because that’s where the elite culture is, but also because the popular culture is following them, more and more. In many cases, our own children and grandchildren won’t want us in the public square, seeing us as a menace to the common good. Because, as Wesley J. Smith says, “we have grown too far apart in our basic moral visions.” Damon Linker has written, of the reason why people like me have such a pessimistic vision:

Unlike the French model, the American approach to adjudicating conflicts between politics and religion has favored accommodation. This, in turn, persuaded devout Christians that they were free to live out their faith in public and even to seek political power, provided they didn’t try to set up an established church. But now, with the solicitor general of the United States musing before the Supreme Court about the possibility of stripping religious colleges of their tax-exempt status for upholding the sexual teachings of historic Christianity, these accommodationist hopes have been exposed as a ruse. All modern states follow a logic of laïcité, we can now see, even the United States — and even if it did so with a relatively light touch for much of the last few centuries.

Understand: my argument is not simply that the institutions of the Establishment — pre-eminently the State — are going to enforce the “logic of laïcité” against Christians individuals and institutions. It is also that in the next few decades these will be popular, even with people calling themselves conservatives, because for most Americans, Christianity will have either been abandoned, or will have become so thin and attenuated that it will offer have given its adherents no substantive basis for resisting. And much of the fault for that will be our own, for having not shored up our own foundations against the flood we all saw coming, and for having wasted time fighting for political solutions to cultural problems.

UPDATE: Reader Jonathan Scinto comments:

I’m a liberal utilitarian materialist atheist, which is about as far from an orthodox religious believer/social conservative as you can get. For a long time, I’ve dismissed Rod’s fears over the collapse of Western civilization as paranoia.

Now?

I’m beginning to believe the West has gone mad. Starting with the condemnation of Brendan Eich to the ranks of the unmentionables, to the insistence that men and boys confused about their gender, be allowed to use women’s’ restrooms. My fellow liberals have all lost their minds. Jill Soloway is a self-absorbed narcissist who would abandon her young child and her husband, to take up with a lesbian poet. Caitlyn Jenner is a man in his sixties, who thinks he’s a woman. A canadian man in his forties, is delusional and believes he’s a six year old girl. Pathetic little twits on college campuses, are determined to avoid any opinions that challenge their beliefs about the world.

I have a very high tolerance for behaviors that most social conservatives would find to be repulsive and disgusting. I operate from radically different first principles than religious believers. Yet, I’m finding myself agreeing more and more with Rod Dreher. If liberals and conservatives have lost the ability to speak to each other in meaningful ways, I’m going to say it’s because liberals have gone insane.

I mean, even on the issue of abortion, as much as I disagree with the Pro-Life side, I canunderstand why Pro-Life people believe the way they do. It might not be an issue where compromise is possible, given the assumptions involved, but at the very least Pro-Life people speak in a language I understand. The Jill Soloways of the world don’t speak in a language I understand. The Jill Soloways of the world, make me afraid for the future of Western civilization.

Invest in the Future of American Conservatism

For at least a decade, I have been writing off and on about what I call the Benedict Option: that idea that religious conservatives should respond to the rapid de-Christianization of our culture by taking philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s prophetic advice (invoking the 5th-century St. Benedict) and building forms of community within which the life of virtue can withstand assaults of the Dark Age upon us. The idea never really went anywhere—until this past spring. The national debacle over the Indiana legislature’s failed attempt to strengthen the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act in response to gay rights advances was where religious and social conservatives met our Waterloo. For the first time ever, big business intervened in a contentious culture-war issue, taking sides with the cultural left, and forcing GOP politicians to back down. It was now clear who really called the shots in the Republican Party—and how little religious liberty means to them.

A short time later, the U.S. Supreme Court mandated same-sex marriage in its Obergefell decision. Since Indiana, and certainly since Obergefell, concerned Christians from coast to coast are talking urgently about the Benedict Option as we try to discern our future in post-Christian America. And the center of the discussion is The American Conservative. In a column in The Week, liberal pundit Damon Linker wrote, “This may be the first time in American history that devout Christians have been forced by events to accept without doubt that they are a minority in a majority secular nation. We have entered uncharted territory.”

TAC is leading the way in charting that terra incognita for the American right. Your support of this magazine makes research and writing about the Benedict Option possible, and is seeding the culture of conservatism with fresh new ideas, not yesterday’s stale conservative pieties. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the foundation that supports our work. You will be literally investing in the future of American conservatism.