Rod Dreher's Blog, page 64

US Funds Queer Culture Warriors

From the Twitter feed of Kyiv Pride, the LGBT+ organization in Ukraine’s capital:

 

The full image at the top of this post follows in the tweet. And then:

The Donbass region is in far eastern Ukraine, next to Russia. It has been infiltrated by Russian troops, and is torn by war. The US Agency For International Development is using taxpayer dollars to queer Donbass, and handing pro-Russian forces a propaganda coup. Kyiv Pride is also sponsored by the US Embassy in Kiev. 

This is cultural imperialism, straight up. The American academic left loves to talk about how it’s going to “decolonize the curriculum” at universities, but of course it is completely about imposing Western cultural norms onto the unwilling people’s of “backwards” places. I wonder why the US Government gets involved actively supporting Pride in Eastern European countries, but doesn’t have much to say about, for example, Riyadh Pride? Why do they respect Arab cultural norms, but trample on Central and Eastern European ones?

And, what kind of blowback could funding culture warriors to invade Donbass and “queer” it have? It seems like a trolling move, but it’s hard to figure out what the end goal is. Does Washington really believe that the people of Donbass are eager to be queered by US-funded culture warriors? How do they think the Donbassers are likely to respond to this? These strategists are the same ideological geniuses who got us into the Iraq War, certain that inside the hearts of each Iraqi there was a liberal democrat waiting to be set free. These are the same ideological geniuses who turned Libya from a corrupt but stable and rehabilitated autocracy into a Hobbesian collection of warring city states and sanctuary for jihadists.

I am sure there are many liberals in Ukraine and in other Eastern and Central European countries who appreciate the US taxpayers’ support for queering their countries. I talk to conservatives here in Hungary and in Poland who resent the hell out of it. But let’s call it what it is: Western cultural imperialism.

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Light From The East

I’ve been in Budapest for six weeks now. I went to Warsaw late last week for a conference, and ran into a fellow American who is also living here. We compared notes, and agreed that the difference between what life in Orban’s Hungary is actually like, versus what the Western media tell us it’s like, is jaw-dropping. This man said, “It makes me wonder how much truth we are getting about other countries.” Yep.

The conference in Warsaw was to mark the launching of Collegium Intermarium, a new classical, Catholic, conservative-oriented college aiming mostly to train lawyers. The Associated Press covered the opening of the Warsaw conference; you can see Your Working Boy there on the photo. From the College’s website:

Collegium Intermarium aims to restore the classical idea of a university, creating an academic community deeply rooted in European tradition and culture. Education and research are conducted with respect for the achievements of previous generations and with hope and optimism for the future.

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Collegium Intermarium was established as an answer to the crisis of academic life. At a time when the sense of order, purpose, and meaning is fading away, our university has a fixed point of reference – unchanging ideas of Truth, Good, and Beauty. When there is less and less room for free academic debate, the Collegium is a space for scholars and students who are not afraid to pose serious questions. Taking up courageous challenges is not only a privilege, but the duty of everyone who co-creates the community of the university. When education has become mass, one-dimensional, and widespread, we remind about the true goal of education – integral human development. In the reality of the university, its condition is a direct cooperation between master and student. The Collegium brings together the elites of the Intermarium countries, whose nations were for decades deprived  of the opportunity to create their own academic institutions. It is not only a place to talk about the common culture and the diversity of traditions of our region – but above all about scientific, social, and economic cooperation both today and in the future. Our university is also a haven for all those who, in their search for freedom and order, are not afraid to refer to the achievements of previous generations, including the foundations of our civilization – Roman law, Greek love of truth, and the living heritage of Christianity. Upholding the classical idea of the university, Collegium Intermarium invites you to study and participate in postgraduate courses that develop the knowledge and skills of professionals.

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The foundation for the functioning of the university is to ensure free academic debate, without which it is impossible to fulfill the fundamental mission of science – the search for truth through unhindered exploration of the surrounding world. Collegium Intermarium will always be open to suggestions, advice, and constructive criticism from the academic world and all people of goodwill. We believe that peer review and self-monitoring contribute to the dynamic development of healthy intellectual exchange, raising the level of public debate and increasing the knowledge in society. The university is committed to actively defending its students and lecturers against harassing attacks that limit academic debate and any attempt to ideologically censor or intimidate members of the academic community. Collegium Intermarium will not compromise on the quality of teaching, professed values and search for truth. It rejects paradigms or ideologies that are contrary to reliable research and honest teaching. At the same time, the university wants to make a measurable contribution to the culture and quality of public life. The university’s mission includes broad civic engagement. We strive to ensure that social life is set in the context of the highest philosophical, historical, ethical, and legal ideals, and that public debate is based on well-established principles and values and thoughtful reflection rather than momentary, short-term, and impulsive insights.

Astonishing, isn’t it? A college that actually wants to be a real college, rooted in the Western tradition, and not apologize for it. Go Poland! This is a Benedict Option move: the building of an institution within which the life of virtue (intellectual and spiritual) can continue despite the darkness of the age.

As you might expect, there were lots of conversations over coffee about the crisis of education in the West. I had several of them in which I would relate some anecdote, and then listen as my shocked Polish interlocutor would say something like, “But that’s what happened under Communism!” Yep, I know; I wrote the book. 

(Funny side comment: I met former Czech president Vaclav Klaus. I handed him my card, he looked at it, and said, “American Conservative. You American conservatives are spending too much time fighting Brezhnev communism, and not enough fighting the communism we have today.” I told him I agreed, and wrote a book about it, which I would send to him when I got back to Budapest.)

In conversation with one Polish scholar, I brought up this recent case:

The scholar said that back in Stalinist times, entire academic fields were nearly destroyed in Poland (for example, sociology) because they were deemed “bourgeois”. This scholar mentioned a particular scientific field (I want to say “genetics,” but I can’t remember with certainty). It’s happening today, in the United States. Remember when the Nazis extolled “Aryan physics,” and two German Nobelists denounced Einstein and his “Jewish science”? Keep that in mind when you read a scientist praising “black thought” for its role in freeing us from “the white supremacist traditions of scientists.”

In the bad old twentieth-century totalitarianism days, scientists and scholars fled to the free West to work. Their contribution to knowledge is staggering. Now, in the age of soft totalitarianism (which I describe in Live Not By Lies), I wonder if scholars are going to reverse course, and head East, to places like Collegium Intermarium.

And to places like Matthias Corvinus Collegium, in Budapest. It’s a conservative-oriented university that is doing serious outreach to sympathetic American and Western European academics, bringing them over to teach and to see what academic life is like at MCC. I’ve met some really interesting people via MCC — for example, University of Dallas political theorist Gladden Pappin was just in town, and went on to Warsaw for the event — and all of us, when we talk by ourselves, rave about what MCC is doing to build a sense of community among conservative scholars, who are feeling outcast and under siege in their home institutions. Based on these conversations I’ve had with Westerners I’ve met through MCC (Budapest is a relatively small place, and we overlap), it’s hard to overstate how valuable it is to be in a physical place where you don’t have to watch every damn word you say out of fear that this is the thing that is going to get you fired, and end your career.

Two or three years ago, I was in Budapest to give a speech at a conference on religious liberty. At the last minute, an invitation came from Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s office to us speakers, inviting us over for a meet and greet at the Palace. I figured it would amount to shaking hands and having a photo made, then off we would go. It wasn’t. Orban sat with us — mostly scholars and public intellectuals, but a couple of journalists like me — for about an hour and a half, discoursing in excellent English about serious political and intellectual matters. In the end, he said to all of us that he wants us conservatives to consider Budapest “your intellectual home.” I thought those were nice words, but only that. Well, it turns out that in places like MCC and the Danube Institute (where I’m on a visiting fellowship), that’s actually happening.

And it’s not just conservatives. MCC recently invited a well-known left-wing American scholar, someone who has stood up publicly against woke totalitarianism. I don’t know him personally, but he reached out to me to ask me if this was something he should do. “Absolutely,” I said. “You will be able to have open debates and exchanges at MCC that you can’t have at your own university, and haven’t been able to have for a while. It’s not like what you’ve heard in our media.”

You will say: “It’s all very good to speak of MCC as a place for open academic debate, but don’t forget that the Orban government kicked out George Soros’s Central European University.” Yes, it did. The story, as told by Franklin Foer in a 2019 Atlantic Monthly story, is not a pretty one. It must be considered in a broader context, though. Western journalists tend to assume that what’s happening in Western universities is good, or at least neutral. Similarly with Western liberal trends. If the only thing you read are Western media reports, you would think that George Soros is a kindly liberal uncle who has been abused — antisemitically abused — by Viktor Orban and his toughs. What few Americans realize is that Soros has used and is using his billions to fund organizations intended to remake Central Europe according to the Western model. His “open society” sounds good on paper, but if you think that the atmosphere (culturally, professionally, etc.) present and emerging in the West today is “open,” you are deluded. As far as I can tell, Orban understands this. He understands that the liberalism advocated by Soros and his many allies in academia and the media is, in fact, left-wing illiberalism — and that the only way to resist it is through illiberal right-wing initiatives.

I have never interviewed Orban or any of his advisers about this — I will try to before I leave Budapest later this summer — but my guess is that they understood well that cultural and political revolution starts with elites. As I write in Live Not By Lies:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

We are in a difficult period in our culture and civilization. In my ideal world, Soros’s university would still be here, and so would MCC, and other universities, all contributing to the common good. But we live in a world in which liberal Western universities, and academic discourse, has been taken over by lunatics who proclaim things like “black thought” and “white supremacist traditions in science.” The list is legion. We live in a world in which the authentically liberal light is going out in institution after institution. One can easily imagine Viktor Orban wondering what would happen to his country if an elite trained in Soros’s unabashedly progressive values (e.g., he’s strongly pro-LGBT, supports the legalization and normalization of prostitution, etc.) emerged to run Hungary’s institutions.

Many of us, including myself, wish to believe that we are in a fight for liberalism. Alas, that fight is pretty much over, at least at the institutional level. Despite what you read in the American media, the fight now is between rival illiberalisms. In Paris recently, I had lunch with someone from Sciences Po, the prestigious Institute of Political Studies, which produces French elites. This person was in despair, saying that wokeness was conquering every department. You will not read this in the American media. You will read about Viktor Orban having driven CEU out of Hungary. The same thing is happening in many universities all over the West, from the left, but it’s happening under the cover of business as usual, and without much protest from the left. We have to fight the battle we’re actually in, as opposed to the one we prefer to be in. Conservative scholars and public intellectuals in the US and Western Europe will find resources, support, and community over here, in the former Communist countries of Europe, that are scarcer on the ground in our home countries. History has taken a surprising turn, has it not?

I’ll quote once more from the Collegium Intermarium site:

Our roots are our strength

We cannot be afraid to refer to the achievements of previous generations. Without rooting ourselves in the experiences of those who preceded us and relying on them, we are weaker when facing the challenges of today.

Today, we are almost openly trying to erase the achievements of our civilization from our consciousness – as in the “House of European History” in Brussels, which ignores entire historical epochs, including Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In this situation, we must remember the words of St. Bernard, canon of Chartres Cathedral, who used to say that, “we are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, and if we see more and farther than them, it is not through our own abilities and strength, but thanks to this, that they raised us up. ”

In experiencing academic life, we should draw from the sources of our civilization without hesitation or fear.

We must rediscover the Roman idea of ​​law that harmoniously combines the general with the specific. Recognizing the importance of the universal law of nations, it sees good in the diversity of traditions and customs of individual countries. It fully supports the concept that a permanent legal order is not only based on a one-dimensional understanding of rights, but also on the duty and responsibility of its citizens.

Collegium Intermarium is a place where the Greek tradition of the Love of Wisdom will be maintained and replicated. The Greeks were the first to not only describe the material reality, but also systematize the knowledge about the non-material reality, which today is so often approached with reserve or indifference. Meanwhile, without openness to logos, including objective norms governing relations between people, it is difficult to talk about the real development of a person and society.

Our university will also openly draw from Christian revelation and Christian culture which has been organically developing over the centuries – they are not merely symbols of the past, but also the present and future representations of European identity.

 

Against the new tyranny

Allan Bloom, writing about the crisis of the university in the book “Closed Mind”, pointed out that true tyranny does not only mean restricting the freedom of speech by administrative or penal measures. True tyranny exists when it is possible to erase from people’s consciousness the notion that a different reality may exist.

Collegium Intermarium is established precisely to show that a different university is possible. It is to serve as a model and inspiration, to depressurize the system. It will truly be a Free University of Central Europe – not only in name but also in spirit.

The future of Western civilization, if it exists, is being born in Central Europe.

The post Light From The East appeared first on The American Conservative.

Woke Capitalism Promotes Polyamorous Parenting

I got back to Budapest late this afternoon after a few days in Warsaw at a conference, more on which later. The condition of the West came up in a number of conversations. In one of them, I was talking to a Pole about how foolish it is to think that you can permit some of the LGBT Revolution without permitting all of it. I mentioned a Hungarian liberal with whom I had spoken recently, who endorsed gay marriage, but said transgenderism and gender fluidity was not something he could endorse. This man really does believe that his country can accept one without accepting the other. I suppose in theory you could, but come on. It has been only six years since Obergefell, and nobody has yet found the ability to say, “This far, but no further.”

Back in 2003, Stanley Kurtz wrote a piece in the Weekly Standard saying that legalizing gay marriage would open the door to polyamory and polygamy. Excerpts:

After gay marriage, what will become of marriage itself? Will same-sex matrimony extend marriage’s stabilizing effects to homosexuals? Will gay marriage undermine family life? A lot is riding on the answers to these questions. But the media’s reflexive labeling of doubts about gay marriage as homophobia has made it almost impossible to debate the social effects of this reform. Now with the Supreme Court’s ringing affirmation of sexual liberty in Lawrence v. Texas, that debate is unavoidable.

Among the likeliest effects of gay marriage is to take us down a slippery slope to legalized polygamy and “polyamory” (group marriage). Marriage will be transformed into a variety of relationship contracts, linking two, three, or more individuals (however weakly and temporarily) in every conceivable combination of male and female. A scare scenario? Hardly. The bottom of this slope is visible from where we stand. Advocacy of legalized polygamy is growing. A network of grass-roots organizations seeking legal recognition for group marriage already exists. The cause of legalized group marriage is championed by a powerful faction of family law specialists. Influential legal bodies in both the United States and Canada have presented radical programs of marital reform. Some of these quasi-governmental proposals go so far as to suggest the abolition of marriage. The ideas behind this movement have already achieved surprising influence with a prominent American politician.

None of this is well known. Both the media and public spokesmen for the gay marriage movement treat the issue as an unproblematic advance for civil rights. True, a small number of relatively conservative gay spokesmen do consider the social effects of gay matrimony, insisting that they will be beneficent, that homosexual unions will become more stable. Yet another faction of gay rights advocates actually favors gay marriage as a step toward the abolition of marriage itself. This group agrees that there is a slippery slope, and wants to hasten the slide down.

To consider what comes after gay marriage is not to say that gay marriage itself poses no danger to the institution of marriage. Quite apart from the likelihood that it will usher in legalized polygamy and polyamory, gay marriage will almost certainly weaken the belief that monogamy lies at the heart of marriage. But to see why this is so, we will first need to reconnoiter the slippery slope.

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There is a rational basis for blocking both gay marriage and polygamy, and it does not depend upon a vague or religiously based disapproval of homosexuality or polygamy. Children need the stable family environment provided by marriage. In our individualist Western society, marriage must be companionate–and therefore monogamous. Monogamy will be undermined by gay marriage itself, and by gay marriage’s ushering in of polygamy and polyamory.

This argument ought to be sufficient to pass the test of rational scrutiny set by the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas. Certainly, the slippery slope argument was at the center of the legislative debate on the federal Defense of Marriage Act, and so should protect that act from being voided on the same grounds as Texas’s sodomy law. But of course, given the majority’s sweeping declarations in Lawrence, and the hostility of the legal elite to traditional marriage, it may well be foolish to rely on the Supreme Court to uphold either state or federal Defense of Marriage Acts.

This is the case, in a nutshell, for something like the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, which would define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. At a stroke, such an amendment would block gay marriage, polygamy, polyamory, and the replacement of marriage by a contract system. Whatever the courts might make of the slippery slope argument, the broader public will take it seriously. Since Lawrence, we have already heard from Jon Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle calling for legalized polygamy. Judith Levine in the Village Voice has made a plea for group marriage. And Michael Kinsley–no queer theorist but a completely mainstream journalist–has publicly called for the legal abolition of marriage. So the most radical proposal of all has now moved out of the law schools and legal commissions, and onto the front burner of public discussion.

Fair-minded people differ on the matter of homosexuality. I happen to think that sodomy laws should have been repealed (although legislatively). I also believe that our increased social tolerance for homosexuality is generally a good thing. But the core issue here is not homosexuality; it is marriage. Marriage is a critical social institution. Stable families depend on it. Society depends on stable families. Up to now, with all the changes in marriage, the one thing we’ve been sure of is that marriage means monogamy. Gay marriage will break that connection. It will do this by itself, and by leading to polygamy and polyamory. What lies beyond gay marriage is no marriage at all.

Read it all.

The reason I had been having this conversation with a Hungarian liberal was because the government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban had just added to the country’s constitution the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. Hungary permits gay civil unions, but codified marriage as something exclusively between one man and one woman. Orban and the Fidesz Party have clearly learned from America’s experience. To borrow Kurtz’s line, in a stroke, Hungarian lawmakers blocked gay marriage, polygamy, polyamory, and the replacement of marriage by a contract system.

Meanwhile, back in America, we continue to destroy our society. Now, on the verge of Pride Month (doesn’t it seem to you that every month is Pride Month?), the push for polyamory and polygamy has been taken up by woke capitalism — in this case, the largest department store chain in America:

In 2015, the gay marriage advocate Jonathan Rauch wrote a piece for Politico saying that polygamy isn’t going to follow gay marriage, because we know from history that polygamous societies are dysfunctional. That seems awfully naive now. We got gay marriage because the Supreme Court ruled that it’s a fundamental right of people to marry those they love. Fundamental rights don’t depend on whether or not it’s good for a society if people have them. About polygamy, writing in VICE in 2013, two years before Obergefell, Harry Cheadle said:

The idea that after gay marriage is legalized, polygamy will be next—and then bestiality and legal unions between lawn mowers and volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and so on—is one of the main arguments that social conservatives trot out to “defend traditional marriage.” (It’s right up there with “Think of the children!” and “the Bible says…”) Stanley Kurtz made that argument nearly ten years ago in the Weekly Standard, and it got brought up again in several briefs filed this week with the Supreme Court by anti-gay marriage advocates. It goes like this: if the purpose of marriage isn’t to produce children in traditional one-mom, one-dad homes, if it’s just a legal arrangement between folks who really like each other, what basis can there be to deny triads and quads who want legal recognition of multiple-partner marriages?

Actually, yeah—why are polyamorous marriages between consenting adults illegal?

“Kurtz was right for the most part,” Anita Wagner Illig, a polyamorous-relationships advocate who runs the Practical Polyamory website, told me in an email. “Legalizing same-sex marriage creates a legal precedent where there can be no valid legal premise for denying marriage to more than two people who wish to marry each other… We just disagree as to whether it’s a bad thing.”

Now you have the biggest department store chain in America doing its part to normalize polygamy as the next step in Love Wins.

And so, by the way, is the popular Nickelodeon show for preschoolers, Blue’s Clues — which, in this Pride Month video, features an animated drag queen singing a tribute to polymorphous perversity, and encouraging children to sing along too:

The normalizing polyamory part comes at the 2:00 mark, with the drag queen singing this line:

That line could sound benign in context, but you need to watch the whole video to see that this is about teaching preschoolers to accept chaotic sexual desire as good. Do you want your four-year-old to ask you, “Mommy, what’s ace, bi, and pan?” Then you’d better not let them watch Blue’s Clues.

(Answer: asexual, bisexual, and pansexual.)

The elites who run our culture’s institutions — including children’s media, and corporations — are breaking us down. We are allowing it. So far, Hungary and Poland (at least) have not fallen. But nobody in those countries should trust in the good sense of the people of their societies to reject this poison. Propaganda from the West is coming at them constantly. Churches, parents, teachers, and others have to explain to the young — and to grown-ups too — why traditional Christian marriage and traditional Christian sexual morals are good and necessary for the health and stability of society. And the experience of the United States in this century so far ought to be a warning to other countries for how slippery the slope is. We have gone from “How does gay marriage hurt my marriage?” circa 2002 to, within twenty years, department store advertising promoting polyamorous parenting, children’s cereal boxes promoting transgenderism to kids (read the side panel), and a popular preschoolers’ TV show teaching little bitties about the glories of “ace, bi and pan,” of non-binary families, and all the rest.

UPDATE: The depth of perversion. Making little children aware of this stuff!

Oh, and this adjacent information:

Yikes. pic.twitter.com/a6R62AB1uA

— Chief America 1st Trumpster (President Elect) (@ChiefTrumpster) May 28, 2021

The post Woke Capitalism Promotes Polyamorous Parenting appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Map Is Not The Territory

I apologize for not blogging more this week. I’m at a conference in Warsaw, and very busy. There are several news stories I want to mention, but it seems to me that the most interesting thing I can say in this space in my limited time today is a report on a conversation I had yesterday around a table with a couple of Catholics here.

I had on my mind all day the Catholic traditionalist Steve Skojec’s cri de coeur about the Church, which I blogged about here. It has caused quite a stir on the Internet (Steve’s piece); for the sake of fairness, I should point out that a couple of people in Steve’s (now former) parish wrote to say that he unjustly mischaracterized and maligned the priest. One of those people — in my comments section — suggested that I blogged about the Skojec essay for the sake of hurting traditionalist Catholics. That’s a classic defensive move (“you’re just paying attention to that because you hate people like us”), but of course it’s not true. I had to deal with it for years when I, as a faithful Catholic, kept drawing attention to the sexual abuse of children, and the lies on top of lies that the Catholic hierarchy told to avoid taking responsibility for what the institution did, and failed to do. Many Catholics engaged in vicious ad hominem attacks on me for aiding and abetting the enemies of the Church by shining a light into that particular darkness. The truth is, they were protecting themselves from having to take an honest look at the condition of the Church, and holding her ministers to account. Actual Catholic victims and their advocates were at times treated far worse, because their existence, and their unwillingness to be silent about what had been done to them, stood to falsify the story a lot of people wanted and needed to believe.

This is very human. It’s not just a Catholic thing, not by a long shot.

Failing to tell the truth, and failing to face the truth, is ultimately more harmful than the opposite. Here’s a little story about my own church, the Orthodox Church, and the Russian system of which it was a part. I tell this in Live Not By Lies, so forgive me if it’s something you already know.

A couple of years ago, when I was in Moscow researching the book, I had spent the two previous days conducting harrowing interviews with former Soviet dissidents, including prison survivors. I was having dinner one night with a Russian Orthodox family, all anticommunists, in their apartment. I said at the table that I don’t know how anybody in Russia ever believed what the Bolsheviks had to offer.

“You don’t?” said the father at the end of the table. “Let me tell you a story.” He then took me on a tour of four hundred years of Russian history, leading up to the 1917 Revolution. It was a tale of brutality and exploitation of the poor, at the hands of the wealthy and the powerful — and the deep complicity of the Russian Orthodox Church with this cruel system. At the end of his narrative, he said (I paraphrase): “I’m not saying the Bolsheviks were right. But I am saying that they didn’t come from nowhere, and that you should understand why those who welcomed them were willing to believe that they offered hope.”

I was chastened. I understood better what the Orthodox priest Father Arseny meant when, imprisoned unjustly in the gulag, he told his fellow prisoners, who were discussing who was responsible for the catastrophe of the Revolution coming to Russia, that the Orthodox Church is. Strictly speaking, that’s not true, or not wholly true, but Father Arseny was performing a very Orthodox act there: searching one’s own conscience for one’s role in a sin, acknowledging it, and repenting.

Side note, but related: yesterday in Warsaw, I was talking to a Polish friend over beer. We were talking about what educated people don’t get about why ordinary people support governments that are flawed or even corrupt. I mentioned that my father, a working-class man, used to tell me thank God for Gov. Huey P. Long of Louisiana. Huey was famously corrupt, but as my dad said, if it had not been for Huey, hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class Louisianians would not have had roads, schoolbooks, and other basics that had been denied them by a ruling class that didn’t care. Huey was a semi-socialist demagogue who stole. But people loved him, because he more than shared the wealth with those who had nothing.

I told my friend that the cleaning lady in my Budapest apartment speaks poor English, but said to me recently, in this paraphrase from her pidgin English: “My husband left me years ago with two kids. We had nothing. I had to work my fingers to the bone to keep our heads above water, until Fidesz [the ruling party] was elected in 2010. Only two people ever helped me: God, and Viktor Orban.”

My Polish friend said you can find millions of people all over Poland, especially outside the major cities, who say the same thing about the ruling Law And Justice Party, which is despised by many educated, cosmopolitan Poles. The Pole went on to tell a story from his grandmother, who was a nurse when the Communists took over in the postwar period. His is a strongly anticommunist family, but his grandmother said this in grudging respect to the Communists. In the early 1950s, the Communists sent her, other nurses, and several doctors in vans out to the countryside to visit villages. They arrived in one village, and everyone was hiding in their houses, terrified of them. They didn’t know what the people from the government were there for. The head doctor went to find the village priest, and told him that they were there to give medical care to the residents. The priest called everyone out, and told them that these were doctors and nurses here to help them. That convinced everyone to participate.

My friend’s grandmother said these peasants were all in pretty poor health, and had never before seen a doctor. It was shocking for her, as a Warsaw resident, to see all this poverty and need. When the people saw that the doctors and nurses were there to help them, many of them wept openly. None of them had money to pay (no payment was required), but they sent the doctors and nurses away with fresh eggs, butter, and live chickens and turkeys.

He told this story for the same reason his grandmother told it: because it’s important to remember that people’s lives can be very hard, and the border between good and evil doesn’t usually pass in a straight line.

Why do I bring that up here? Because my usual stance is to reject the reasons people give for rejecting Christianity. I think in most cases, people reject it because they want to do what they want to do, and Christianity tells them that they can’t. That was my own stance for years, though I rationalized my unwillingness to submit by making it intellectually respectable. This is not how everybody is, of course, but it’s how I was, and it’s how a lot of people are.

But I have also lived the other side of that, as I wrote in yesterday’s piece. I know what’s it’s like to lose the ability even to will oneself to believe. I toggle all the time between trying to figure out when people are lying to themselves about their relationship to things of God, and when they are genuinely hurting, and can’t see clearly. Quite often both are true at the same time. Point is, I have learned over the years to be more merciful, because life is hard. Sometimes, though, true mercy requires honesty about the real state of things within one’s soul. And at other times, true mercy requires honesty about the state of the world in which a soul finds itself searching.

Many years ago, a Catholic friend of mine in Austin, Texas, told me about a friend of his, a gay man who had left the faith. The gay man had been sexually abused by his priest as a boy. To this day, said my Catholic friend, the gay man begins to gag involuntarily whenever he passes by a Catholic Church. On the Day of Judgment, I trust that Our Lord will be more merciful to that poor man than to the priest who did that to him, and drove him from the Church.

Anyway, I found myself early yesterday evening sitting at a table with a couple of Catholics, one a Pole and the other a Hungarian. The Hungarian mentioned that he had looked in on a couple of churches earlier in the day — the Hungarian is here for the same conference I am — and had been encouraged to see a few people praying. The Pole said that this is actually bad news, because until relatively recently, you would have seen many more people there. I asked the Pole about the state of the Catholic Church in this country, bringing up what I learned during my last visit here, about how church affiliation among younger Poles is in dramatic decline (as is Church affiliation overall in Poland).

I mentioned to my companions last night that the late Father Wlodzimierz Zatorski, a highly esteemed Benedictine (who died last year of Covid), had affirmed to me that the young Catholics telling me that Poland could become Ireland in a decade, regarding Catholic collapse, were on to something. I had asked the Benedictine, while visiting famed Tyniec Abbey, what the main problem is. He said, “the vainglory of the bishops.”

I asked the Pole last night to explain what the late priest-monk meant. The Pole, who is in his twenties, told me that among his circle of friends here in Warsaw, he is the only one who still goes to mass. Two years ago when I first met this man, that was not the case. He went on to explain that many Poles are deeply offended by how openly political many of the clergy are, especially the bishops. He said the exposure of sexual abuse scandals in the clergy devastated many people. The harshness of the bishops’ language against gays and lesbians has put a lot of people off, even as stories about priests and bishops having secret gay lives have come to light. Too many bishops and priests, he said, rest on pious cliches and sentimental appeals to the legacy of Pope St. John Paul II, instead of bringing the Gospel to deal meaningfully with the problems and challenges of contemporary life. Overall, my Polish interlocutor said that the country’s Catholics have come to see that there is a large gap between what the Church claims to be, and what its clergy is — and that outrages people. The fact, he went on, that many in the Polish clergy, especially bishops, are so caught up in clericalism, only makes it harder for the bishops and clergy to grasp their role, and to repent.

I hated to hear that, of course. The Hungarian at the table seemed to as well, saying that the life of the Church in Poland is so much healthier and more vibrant than in his own country that it’s dismaying to hear of these problems. I pointed out that when I was in Russia a couple of years ago doing book research, I too was dismayed to hear the same kinds of complaints about clericalism, and clerics involved in politics, from Russian Orthodox laypersons to whom I spoke.

Let me be clear about something: a lot of people are angry at the Church (by which I mean here the various Christian churches) because it will not, and cannot, be what they want it to be. It cannot, for example, affirm homosexuality as morally good, or morally neutral. Some churches do, but this is in absolute contradiction to Scripture and authoritative tradition. Nor can it affirm heterosexual sex outside of marriage as good. There are other things. If the Church is going to have to suffer for being faithful to the truth, then that is one of its glories.

But the world is not wrong to fault us in the Church for our hypocrisies. The world is not wrong to call us, indirectly, to repentance. I say “us” because the faults are not just in the clergy. It doesn’t bother me anymore, because I know that it comes from a place of fear, but I have for years gotten flack from conservative Catholics who say that I should have stuck with the Catholic Church despite everything because hey, pobody’s nerfect. (I exaggerate, but not by much.) I think these are people who have never had to speak to the father of one of the five suicides of Father Larson’s victims — Father Larson, who was known to the Diocese of Wichita to be a predator, but moved around anyway. They have never had to sit quietly with the story of a young man lost to the faith, and unable to pass by a Catholic church without gagging, because when he was an altar boy his priest forced him to take the clerical penis into his mouth. You do that kind of thing for four years, and you see how much tolerance you have for the lies, and what it does to your ability to believe in what churchmen say.

The thing is, those people do have something of a point. The truth of a proposition does not depend on the moral character of the person espousing the proposition. Two plus two equals four, even if the person saying so is a Nazi or a pederast. But religious truths, as Kierkegaard discerned quite well, are the kinds of truths that can only be approached subjectively. You cannot demonstrate the existence of God as you can the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But the inability to prove the existence of God does not disprove it. There are some truths that can only be grasped and appropriated subjectively. “God exists” is a truth along the lines of “Mother loves me.” The Second Law of Thermodynamics can be proved objectively, but nobody lives or dies for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. People do live and die over truths like “Mother loves me.”

God exists, Christ is Risen, and the _____ Church is the ordinary way of salvation intended by God — all of these are truths that can be supported through the use of logical argument, but in the end, they are truths that for acceptance depend on the authority of those who proclaim and live those truths. (To be precise, I think it’s easier to defend ecclesiological claims through logical argumentation, but let’s leave that aside.) Personal authority is not the only factor. For example, I would never have considered Catholicism, and might never have considered Christianity at all, if I had not been awestruck by my experience of the Chartres cathedral when I was 17 years old. I felt very strongly that the men who built that temple had an experience of God that testified in a way that spoke to me with overwhelming subjectivity of the reality of Christ. Does beauty prove Christ? No. Any visitor to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul cannot help but be profoundly moved by the beauty of that mosque built to the glory of Allah. But the fact of Chartres awakened me to the sense that there is something that exists beyond my own limited awareness, and that I needed to search further.

In the years that followed, meeting particular Catholics, men and women who gave their lives in commitment to the ideas proclaimed by the Catholic Church, I was drawn in by their witness. I think very few Christians of any confession are converted by apologetic argument. For most of us, apologetics help by explaining and enlarging on the primary experiences we have had of God — in personal prayer or a private experience of the numinous, or in the sense of the divine and the transcendent made manifest in beauty, or by the heroic goodness of people who serve Christ.

It would be much easier for us Christians to make our case to an unbelieving world if we were all saints. We have to try, seriously try, to be saints! That is the calling of every Christian, of every confession. But few of us reach that goal in this life. We go to the next life depending on the mercy of God, by uniting ourselves to the death and resurrection of Christ. Still, the world will not come to us if they don’t first see virtue in us — not just the virtues of compassion and mercy, but also the virtues of courage and honesty.

As I wrote earlier, at the end of my time in the Catholic Church (though I didn’t see it coming then), I had become the sort of Catholic who was utterly consumed by anger and fear at the Church. Various people said to me, as they had done in the past, that all I needed to do was to find a Traditional Latin Mass parish, and all would be well. But I had visited these parishes at various times in my life as a Catholic, because I was the sort of Catholic who was primed to embrace Traditionalism. Though I knew some trads who were exemplary Catholics, mostly my experience was one of an ethos of bitterness and brittleness, and an overwhelming preoccupation with grievance and policing the boundaries for purity. The Christianity I observed in those parishes was not life-giving. Understand that I am not dismissing all Catholic traditionalists; I am only telling you what I saw over the years as I turned to them. For an outside inquirer, before I could consider the truth claims of Traditionalists, I had to first see its fruits, in the presence of those who dedicated their lives to this creed.

I have heard over the years from people who have come to visit Orthodox parishes, and been overwhelmed by the beauty of what they saw, and the feeling they had among the Orthodox. By the way, this was my own experience in 2006: the warm hospitality of the congregation of St. Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral in Dallas was a big factor in our moving to Orthodoxy. You wouldn’t think something like hospitality would be such a big deal, but in 13 years of being a Catholic, I had never seen that in a parish. My wife, who grew up a Texas Baptist, said this was, for her, like coming home. Prior to this, I had not realized how, well, Protestant I was as a Catholic, in the sense of approaching the faith as if it were just me, God, the sacraments, and the Magisterium. But I have also heard from others who made their first visit to an Orthodox parish in one that was very closed and ethnic; they felt alien, and never went back. I’ve been to a parish like that in the Northeast.

My point is simply this: that a number of things that are non-propositional prepare us to receive the faith. We are not disembodied brains. If I speak in church Latin, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of beautiful liturgy, and a church festooned with gorgeous icons, and can fathom the spirituality of the Desert Fathers, and if I have a congregation with a faith that can fill the pews and the nave every Sunday, but do not have love, I am nothing as a Christian. If I fast faithfully, and keep the holy days and the commandments, no matter how hard, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

And if I am expert at picking out all the faults in the Church, and diagnosing the ways it falls short of the glory of God, but I don’t have love, then I am a fraud, and I will sooner or later find myself shattered. If I am spiteful towards those who have lost their faith because of the sins and failings within the Church, I had better pray especially hard that I never be put to the test. If I treat the faith like a series of logical propositions, a social club, or a test of tribal loyalty, I am in more spiritual trouble than I realize.

Like I said, I’ve never met Steve Skojec, but I’ve told him privately that God had to shatter me in order to break my intellectualism, so I could really know Jesus. It is extremely painful. But it’s the only thing that would have begun my healing. Steve Skojec is undergoing a severe mercy. Maybe you are too. I had to fall out of love with the Church to fall in love with Jesus. It’s not an either-or, to be clear, but it is a matter of rightly ordering our loves. I had to discover the difference between the map and the territory, and boy, did that hurt like hell. But I had been living in a lie.

 

The post The Map Is Not The Territory appeared first on The American Conservative.

Steve Skojec Has Had Enough

This personal essay by the traditionalist Catholic blogger Steve Skojec is one of the most searing things I’ve ever read.

Some background: Skojec is a prolific writer and the founder of One Peter Five, a popular traditionalist Catholic website (by “traditionalist,” I mean conservative Catholics who are skeptical of the Second Vatican Council, and who worship in the Tridentine (Latin) Mass. He was for years a lay member, or at least affiliate, of the cultish Legionaries of Christ religious order, which left him badly shaken. He details that experience in the essay. Steve, whom I know a bit from correspondence, has been struggling epically with the Catholic Church over its failures to be what it says it is. He has also — this is in the essay too — been struggling more recently with fellow traditionalists; I’ll quote him below as to the reason.

He finally hit a breaking point when his priest, who sounds like a stone-cold legalist, denied his children the sacraments. That’s what prompted this essay. Let me quote generously from it — but don’t for a second think that just these quotes do justice to the cry from the heart that is this piece. Steve begins with this quote from Jordan Peterson; emphases in Steve’s original:

[T]he consequences of having your rational intellect divorced in some way from your being—divorced enough so that it actually questions the utility of your being. It’s not a good thing.

It’s really not a good thing because it manifests itself not only in individual psychopathologies, but also in social psychopathologies. That’s this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, and I really do think of them as crippled religions. That’s the right way to think about them. They’re like religion that’s missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along. It provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it’s warped and twisted and demented and bent, and it’s a parasite on something underlying that’s rich and true.

I think it’s very important that we sort out this problem. I think that there isn’t anything more important that needs to be done than that. I’ve thought that for a long, long time, probably since the early ‘80s when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health. You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems. Why the hell do they care, exactly? What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100 percent correct?

People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak, and it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why. There’s a fundamental truth that they’re standing on. It’s like they’re on a raft in the middle of the ocean. You’re starting to pull out the logs, and they’re afraid they’re going to fall in and drown. Drown in what? What are the logs protecting them from? Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system? These are not obvious things. I’ve been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time.

Steve goes on to describe a certain kind of Catholicism as a “crippled religion.” More:

As I sit down to write this, I’m so unbelievably angry.

I’m angry because I’ve spent my life trapped within various ideological subsets of Catholicism that subvert autonomy, critical thinking, and reason itself.

I’m angry because I can’t take another second of clericalism — and by that I mean, “I’m a member of the ordained clergy, so you can never speak a negative word about me and I get to order you around and do whatever I want to you because of my God-given authority.”

I’m angry because I bought into this stuff like my eternal life depended on it for most of the past 40 years, and it did damage to me over and over again. It was used to manipulate me, it was used to make me feel guilty, it was used to make me fall in line, it was used to capitalize on my fear of offending God, and ultimately, of eternal punishment. It, along with some other issues stemming from my childhood, made me afraid. And perpetual fear often manifests as chronic anxiety and constant anger. The anger I’m talking about isn’t the righteous sort I’ll be discussing today, but the sort of aimless, destructive rage that seeks to inflict our inner pain on others, or helps us to overpower our fear of others being angry with us. Think of the child who is so afraid to express his feelings to his parents that he can only do it when he’s so angry that he’s screaming. Multiply that times a lifetime.

The relentless presence of those emotions in my life, seemingly without connection to any immediate cause, hurt me psychologically, damaged my health, and worst of all, caused me to treat people I love very poorly. Inexcusably so. I lashed out at them. I have existed in a constant state of pain avoidance for as long as I can remember, and that makes you incredibly selfish. It’s a miracle that I have received so much forgiveness. I didn’t deserve it, but I am grateful.

I’m angry because this isn’t just an abstract conversation for me at this moment. It’s concrete. I was spiritually abused as a young man by priests in the Church, and I suddenly find that it’s happening again, when I thought it was far behind me. My young, inexperienced, and frankly arrogant pastor has overstepped his canonical authority and denied sacraments to my children — a Baptism for my soon-to-be born son, and a First Holy Communion for my 8-year old. Why? Because my family hasn’t been physically present at our parish enough during COVID for his liking, even though there’s a dispensation in place. His reasoning, reached entirely without a second of consultation with me, is that he’s not sure my children are getting a “good Catholic upbringing.” He has never so much as once reached out to myself or my wife to express this alleged concern, and had to be chased for months to get an answer about sacraments in the first place. He knows nothing of our observance at home, or why we’re not there. He’s merely taken it upon himself to issue declarations, based solely on his own rash judgment.

If Steve’s account of what happened here is accurate — and I have no reason to believe it isn’t — then it really is outrageous. But it’s exactly the kind of thing one would expect from a certain kind of ultra-legalistic cleric. People like me (religious conservatives) tend to focus on the distortions and errors of loosey-goosey liberal clerics, but you can find the same kind of thing on the theological Right, and it can be just as destructive, as the Skojec essay testifies.

Steve writes:

I’m angry because this isn’t some “modernist” priest, but a priest of the FSSP, an order I have promoted for many years. People love to tell you, “Just find a TLM community if you want to escape the madness in the Church!” But that’s a lie, as many people have found out in various ways.

TLM = Traditional Latin Mass. What he says here is really interesting, given that he is a traditionalist. When I was a Catholic at the end of his rope over the abuse scandal (but also from some of the general moral and theological corruption that infuriates Steve), I heard this a lot. I did visit a handful of these communities. I’m glad they exist, and I support them in principle, but I also saw a deeply off-putting toxicity there. Here’s Steve, in what I think is the most insightful part of the essay. He’s talking about the refuge he found 17 years ago in Catholic traditionalism:

It was historical. It was reverent. It was liturgically and theologically sound. I started reading, and not only did I become compelled, I got angry. I saw what had been stolen from us. Saw the bad actors swoop in and change everything. Saw how the problem went right up to the papacy, and how the faithful had been incredibly damaged by what followed.

And so, finding solace at last, I’ve spent the past 17 years of my life as an apologist for traditionalist Catholicism — the most recent seven of which have been devoted to founding and running 1P5, which was, for a couple of years at least, the most-read traditionalist Catholic website in the world.

I thought I had, at long last, found my place.

But during that time, I have gradually come to realize that if the post-conciliar Church I grew up in isn’t really Catholicism, traditionalism isn’t either. Instead, it is an ideological mask more identifiably in the shape of true Catholicism. It is, in some respects, a long-running Live Action Roleplay — a LARP — in which participants act out what they think Catholicism looked like in “the good old days” while perpetually running down any kind of Catholicism (or Catholic who practices it) that isn’t traditionalism. But it is essentially an affectation; an attempt to reconstruct and live within a historical context that no longer exists. Traditional Catholicism does exist, in the sense that all history exists. The Traditional Catholic liturgy exists not just historically, but even now. But traditionalism, as a “movement,” as an ideological oxbow lake, is a novelty. It’s not a historical reality, because it is merely a reaction to a modern innovation.

Let me try to explain it another way: no matter how many old movies you have in your DVD collection or how often you watch them, you can’t go back to the time and cultural context that forged them. Any attempt in the present to make something like Casablanca or The Manchurian Candidate or [insert your favorite here] will essentially fall short. It will be a reproduction that apes the signature characteristics — dress, décor, modes of speech, vehicles, and so on — of another time. Similary, a Civil War re-enactor’s club may help keep the memory of that history alive, but it doesn’t make that history present. At the end of the day, the actors put away their muzzle loaders, change back into their normal clothes and drive home to their modern dwellings with electricity, indoor plumbing, and internet.

Without a present-day Church that not only allows but actually lives the traditional Catholic ethos, traditionalism remains akin to that DVD collector or civil war re-enactor: a recreation out of place and time needing to justify its own existence in the present as a nostalgic aberration. It no longer has a context that gives it a place at the heart of the Church, which is the only place it could ever truly belong. It cannot exist as a “preferential option” and be still what it once was: essential.

And so traditionalism, though it retains real treasures from the past that enliven the faithful today, becomes predominately ideological. A version of Catholicism that remains in constant tension with and sometimes open rebellion against the only institution that can give it life: the very Catholic Church that discarded it.

It’s paradigmatic crippled religion. And that is a problem.

This is deep. It helped me to understand what I found so unattractive about Catholic traditionalism, even as I affirmed it as a viable alternative. I had always thought it was just the pockets of bitter reactionary factionalism that were everywhere. I was sensitive to this because reactionary bitterness is a constant temptation of mine, given my character. I saw people — not everybody, and not even most people, but enough to give me pause — who seemed to thrive on anger and spite towards Catholics who weren’t trads. I realized, I think, though it never came to mind as a fully formed thought, that I was looking at my future self if I gave myself over to my darkest impulses.

What I mean is that back then, my inner life was focused heavily on the Catholic Church, and what was wrong with it. I really did think that I was being a faithful Catholic by constantly diagnosing her problems, and talking about them endlessly with my like-minded Catholic friends. Looking back at it, I don’t think we were wrong about a single thing. Where we erred — or at least where I erred — was in thinking that because I thought about the Church all the time, and really wanted her to be better, that I was a good Catholic.

Bitter traditionalism would have been the end game for me, on the path I was following. I was not a trad, but I was plenty bitter — because there is plenty to be bitter about! Read Skojec. But here’s the thing: you can’t build a spiritual life on that — or rather, you can, but if you do you will become deformed and toxic. Understand that I’m not talking about the Catholic trads who live ordinary lives of piety and reverence, and who don’t get caught up in the controversies. I’m here in Warsaw this week to mark the founding of a new Catholic traditionalist university. The fact that they invited a schismatic like me to talk here indicates that they aren’t the kind of people I’m talking about in this essay, or, I think, that Skojec is talking about. My guess is that they invited me here because they recognize in Orthodox me a brother in Christ who understands the critical importance of founding institutions like this in these post-Christian days, and of building ties of solidarity across confessional lines. In other words, they are not obsessive puritanical factionalists (who you can also find in Orthodoxy, if you look).

Anyway, Skojec’s piece brought to mind Jaroslav Pelikan’s great lines:

“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”

There you go. Skojec’s essay made me realize that traditionalism is parasitic on corrupted modern Catholicism, which lives rent-free in their heads. To be fair, the brokenness of the Catholic Church today is so thorough and so deep that it’s hard for it not to focus on it all the time. The mistake I made, which I did not fully understand until I had lost my ability to believe as a Catholic, was that I had mistaken the Church for Christ himself. Instead of seeing the Church as a sign that pointed to Christ, I thought the Church — the institutional church — was the thing itself. It is important that I emphasize that this was my own fault; the error was mine. But it would be dishonest if I didn’t say that there are many in the Church, especially on the Catholic Right, which was my home for the 13 years I was a Catholic, who encourage that way of thinking.

Steve writes:

When I was told last week that my young children would be denied sacraments for totally unjust reasons, something inside me finally snapped. I have fought for this absurdly broken, self-contradictory, overly-bloated, irretrievably corrupt religion since I was old enough to know how to think. I studiously avoided the hedonistic pleasures of youth enjoyed by my peers. I devoted my life to spreading and defending its teachings. I have been driven to the brink of leaving on multiple occasions, only to swallow my pride, stomp on my doubts and come back again, ready for another beating.

Worst of all, I have allowed myself to be cowed by the message of the Church when it presents itself in the language of an abuser: “You don’t like how I treat you? Well tough shit. You have nowhere else to go. You think you can find salvation somewhere else? Ha! You’ll go to hell without me. You have no choice but to stay here and do whatever I tell you. You’ll put up with whatever I do to you, and if you complain it will only make you look like a fool. A deserter. An ingrate. You’re stuck with me whether you like it or not. You can never leave!”

Some of you may have endured much worse abuse than I have. I have little doubt you’ve heard this insidious voice as well.

Yes, I did. It was what kept me Catholic for the last two years of my life as a Catholic. It was the only thing I was holding on to after discovering that a priest my family and I were going close to, and to whom I had referred a friend who wanted to convert to Catholicism, was a liar, a manipulator, and an accused molester.Something broke in me then. I lost the ability to trust the institution, at all. I subsequently found out that the pastor of the consciously conservative parish where we met Father Chris had known all about the accusations against him back in Pennsylvania, but because he didn’t believe them, let Father Chris into parish ministry off the books, and did not tell his bishop! This was after the 2002 Dallas Charter that supposedly made that kind of thing possible. We learned that rules mean nothing if you have churchmen who don’t feel bound by them. After I exposed Father Chris publicly, a layman involved in leadership in that parish rebuked me, saying that the parish council had known the truth about Father Chris when he showed up asking to help out in ministry, but they had not told the congregation that they (the parish council) had welcomed a formally accused molester into their midst because it wasn’t any of their business. This is how I learned that the problem is not just with the clergy, but with the laity too.

The day came when I woke up and realized I no longer believed that my salvation depended on being in communion with these people. In other words, I no longer believed the things I had to believe in order to put up with the lies upon lies, the corruption, and the danger to my children. I no longer wanted to be pushed around by these creeps. The important thing, the thing that I struggle to get Catholic conservatives to understand, is that this was not the result of logical deliberation. I woke up one day, finally, to find that I couldn’t believe it anymore. This was desolating. I had always believed that my faith would be untouchable if I placed it inside a fortress of dogma and syllogism. It wasn’t true. All the syllogisms that kept me Catholic might still be true, but I could no more perceive that possibility after a certain point than I could perceive the claims for the Mormon church, or Zen Buddhism, as true. More to the point, I could not perceive them as true for the same reason someone whose palms have been badly scarred and blistered from holding on the the red-hot handle of a cast-iron skillet over a flame can pick the skillet up again. This is why I tell people — Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants — to never, ever believe that your faith is unshakable, and to never, ever believe that an intellectual conversion is sufficient.

My heart goes out to Steve Skojec so much because like him, I had built an identity around my Catholicism (though his Catholic identity is far, far deeper and broader than mine ever was, for reasons that are clear to readers of his essay). Steve writes in his piece:

I’m angry because I feel as though we’ve all been abandoned and left to the wolves, and it’s incredibly frustrating to watch as people turn to this increasingly uncritical tribalism to feel safe, or conspiracy theories to “explain” things, or even in some cases an explicit desire for the end of the world so that the madness will finally cease.

I’m angry because my entire identity, my entire life, has been inextricably intertwined with Catholicism, and as all of this collides and comes apart, I feel as though that identity is being flayed from me, one strip of flesh at a time.

I’m angry — but perhaps even more sad — because I have begged God to help me find my way through all this mess, to do the right thing, and to hold on to my faith, but I get no perceptible answer, and I don’t know where to go from here.

The Toxic Trad thing to do is to turn on a fellow Catholic who says that, and to treat them as heretic scum. But I read that essay and thought, “That poor brother in Christ, I know what that feels like.” If you are the kind of Catholic whose response is to hate on Steve Skojec for that piece, then you are part of the problem, and you will be held responsible by God for it.

Steve goes on:

A good friend of mine who has also been struggling with the faith said to me yesterday:

I hate to say this, because it risks sounding trite, but I don’t think you have ever really been Catholic.

And peeling off this false thing, made of false things, is the first step to finding out who you really are.

I actually am discovering that I do believe in God, and all that, and I think He’s trying to fix you.

Maybe He is. I hope so, because I cared about all of this so much I made it my whole life. I put it before family and friends. I was so invested, I thought it was my dream job. I risked everything I had, in a material sense, to rush to the defense of the Church when I thought she was at her darkest hour.

And I lost everything I had anyway — in a spiritual sense. Which was not at all what I expected.

I look at photos and videos of myself when I started in 2014, versus photos now. I looked like a kid then. But now, I’ve gained a lot of weight. My beard has turned white. I’ve lost a lot of hair. My face looks so much older. My voice has deepened. I suddenly have high blood pressure. I’m unbelievably tired and stressed out all the time. I’ve lost my sense of meaning and purpose.

And I’m left standing here holding the broken pieces of myself, older and more brittle and less resilient and unable to put myself together again to take yet another beating.

I’m done with crippled religion. Crippled religion will ruin you.

Read the whole thing. It is one of the most powerful pieces of spiritual writing that I’ve read in a long time. And I am certain that in it, Steve Skojec doesn’t just speak for burned-out Catholics, but for all people broken by ideological religion. He is offering a solidarity of the shattered.

The way out God offered to me when I was more or less in Steve’s place was in Orthodox Christianity. My wife and I back then could not go back to Protestantism. Cardinal Newman once said, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” That’s not strictly true; if it were, all Protestant church historians and other Protestant intellectuals would all be Catholic or Orthodox. But for us, it was true, in the sense that we had learned so much about church history, especially the early church, that we simply could not affirm what Protestants affirm. But we could not be Catholic either, because we could not tolerate the spiritual abuse any longer, the debilitating fear (for our children), and the corrosive anger.

From a Catholic point of view, the Orthodox churches are in schism, but still have valid priestly orders and (therefore) sacraments. My wife and I took our little kids and started going to the Orthodox cathedral in our city, not intending to become Orthodox, but simply wanting to be in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist (though we couldn’t receive) without being savaged by a swarm of doubts and spite, like a swarm of biting flies. The liturgical worship was extraordinarily beautiful — something I had long been craving as a Catholic, even when I went to the Traditional Latin Mass, but never found — and it was a wonderful experience to step into a church that didn’t feel like a combat zone. Eventually we knew we had to become Orthodox.

As I’ve said in this space many times, I became Orthodox in the way that Orthodoxy regards second marriages: as a penitent. As angry as I was at the Catholic Church for the things that drove me out of it, I tried to focus on the things I did wrong myself — chief among them, making an idol of the institutional Catholic Church, and an ideology of Catholicism. I had to make a clear vow to myself not to do the same in Orthodoxy. Fortunately, it’s harder to do in Orthodoxy, because — and this is something I could not have perceived from the outside — Orthodoxy is much less a set of doctrines and much more a way of life. I’m still not exactly sure how Orthodoxy pulls this off, and knowing my own weaknesses, I have refused to dissect it to find the answer, but the stability of the tradition is something within which I could rest, and pursue my salvation. In Orthodoxy I found the spiritual and intellectual depth I had in Catholicism, with an incomparable liturgical beauty, and the focus on individual salvation that I believe is one of the best parts of Evangelicalism. Orthodoxy is not an individualistic form of Christianity, to be sure, but the Orthodox do hold front to mind the principle that the conversion of individual hearts is the main thing. The goal of each and every one of us is not to have all our legal papers in order to make it through passport control in Paradise. It is theosis — to become so filled with the Holy Spirit that we are changed, made like God. (Theosis, by the way, is the model that the late medieval Catholic poet Dante Alighieri presents in his Divine Comedy. It was once much more present in Catholicism than it is today.)

When I realized that theosis was the thing, not being legally correct, and when I realized that because of my own brokenness, and because of the Catholic Church’s brokenness in this time and place, I was trapped in a dark wood as a Catholic, and could not reach theosis — then I made the decision to become Orthodox. But let me repeat this so you hear me clearly: when I became Orthodox, I knew that I could not allow myself to be the kind of Orthodox that I was a Catholic. I could not put the Church on a pedestal. I also knew that the kind of triumphalism I indulged in as a Catholic — We’re the oldest church and the smartest church and the best church, so everybody needs to join us! — could not be part of my Orthodox life. You can find Orthodox people who engage in it, especially converts and ethnonationalist types, but I could not let myself be one of them. I had also been the kind of Catholic who, less obnoxiously, tried to lead people to the Catholic Church. By losing my Catholic faith so publicly, I knew too that I had lost what authority I had to try to convince people to become Orthodox. So I never have.

This bothers some Orthodox Christians, who wish I would be more engaged in apologetics. Sorry, I can’t. God was very generous to me as a Catholic burnout, giving me a second chance in Orthodoxy. He showed me my own severe weaknesses and flaws, and I know that my job is to focus on my own repentance, not to get into the arena and mix it up in apologetics. If that’s your calling, may God bless your efforts. It’s not mine. And, I can’t get heavily involved in Church controversies. I tried that a few years after I became Orthodox, and got myself into a mess. Not going to do any of that again if I can help it. It’s not at all that I think the Orthodox churches are free of corruption. Wherever you have people, there you will have corruption. It’s that I know that I am spiritually not strong enough to confront corruption in the Church without risking my salvation.

In Dante’s Purgatorio, the pilgrim Dante learns on the terrace of Wrath (where the sin of anger is purged) that anger is like a hot fire that produces blinding smoke. That is precisely what happened to me as a Catholic facing the abuse scandal, which was just the most appalling facet of a many-sided scandal. I think the things I confronted and called out ought to have made any honest soul furious. But my anger eventually mastered me, and blinded me to the good and holy things in the Catholic Church. In a way it was a fortunate fall, because I am grateful to be Orthodox. But my conversion was messy, was that of a man being swallowed by quicksand grabbing a rope at the last second, and being pulled to safety. I firmly believe that if my children make it to heaven after they die, it will be in part because their father and mother took them out of the Catholic Church (our youngest was baptized Orthodox, I should say), because had we stayed, they would have experienced Catholicism as the thing of God that made Mom and Dad anxious and angry all the time.

Leaving Catholicism was an occasion of sorrow for me, in part because I loved, and do love, Pope Benedict XVI, and I did not want to be separated from him, but mostly because I had loved Catholicism. It was where I first met Jesus. I felt when I became Orthodox in 2006 that I had accepted exile from my home country as the only way to save my life. In time, the joy of Orthodoxy overtook my grief over losing Catholicism, and not feeling responsible anymore to fight for abuse victims in the Catholic Church, I was able to regain love for the good things of Catholicism. When I write about, say, the Monks of Norcia, I do so with true admiration and affection, considering them brothers in Christ who have a lot to teach all of us Christians. But I am firmly Orthodox, and I thank God for what He has given me in Orthodoxy.

There is no escape anywhere from modernity and its disorders. Not in Orthodoxy, or in any other church. This cross must be borne by all of us Christians. It is easier in America not to see the problems within Orthodoxy, because we are such a small church, poor and powerless. This is not the case in Russia and Greece, for example, and I imagine there are Steve Skojecs within the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches. Whether you are Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, the point is to allow God to throw down the idol of the institutional church. Be careful, though: the institutional church is not irrelevant! (This is an ecclesiological point that might not seem true to Protestants). It is only that being a member of the Church is not an end in itself; the Church exists to proclaim the Way, the Truth, and the Life, not to be God’s bureaucracy, or, like the Communist Party, the guardian of an ideology. It took me a long time within Orthodoxy to understand that, and I don’t know if I can explain it intellectually — again, I cut off the thoughts that lead me to deep analysis of these ecclesial things — but I have seen it. I think it’s why clericalism is far, far less of an issue in Orthodoxy than in Catholicism. But then, I imagine Russians and Greeks have plenty of stories… .

I have been in touch with Steve Skojec over the years to offer prayer and support as I’ve read in his work about his suffering. I have never tried to convert him to Orthodoxy; it is hateful to me to consider taking advantage of a man who is in pain, to proselytize him. I told him then, and I say publicly, that Jesus is the only thing that matters — that his ability to find ultimate unity with Christ, in theosis, is what salvation means. I believe more than ever, and say for the first time publicly or privately, that that suffering man needs to find Christ in Orthodoxy. But whether he remains a Catholic, or whatever path he takes, he remains a brother in Christ who has carried a terrible cross, and who needs mercy, not judgment. My own spiritual life — my walk with Christ — did not become real until God allowed me and my idolatry of Church to become broken. There is life after being shattered. My solidarity with Steve, whom I’ve never met in person, is the solidarity of the shattered.

The post Steve Skojec Has Had Enough appeared first on The American Conservative.

Political Purge Of The Armed Forces

Well, well, well:

The Pentagon official tasked with leading efforts to crack down on extremist views among military servicemembers once asserted that backers of former President Donald Trump were also supporters of racism, misogyny and extremism.

The official, Bishop Garrison, is a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and head of the Pentagon’s Countering Extremism Working Group. Garrison expressed his view in a series of tweets on July 27, 2019.

“Silence from our Congressional leaders is complicity,” Garrison tweeted. “He is only going to get worse from here, & his party and its leadership are watching it happen while doing nothing to stop it. Support for him, a racist, is support for ALL his beliefs.”

“He’s dragging a lot of bad actors (misogynist, extremists, other racists) out into the light, normalizing their actions,” he added. “If you support the President, you support that. There is no room for nuance with this. There is no more “but I’m not like that” talk.”

It is important to note that Garrison tweeted this in 2019, not recently. Nevertheless, it is clear that he believes anyone who supported President Trump — who was at the time Commander In Chief — is a racist. The man who believed that is now the Grand Inquisitor tasked with purging the US armed forces of wrongthinkers.

This is deeply shocking. Garrison must be removed. It is impossible to have confidence in this man to do anything other than lead a purge of Trump supporters. If this is where the woke US military is headed, our country is in deep trouble. There will be millions who will not serve in a politicized military. They shouldn’t. I say that as someone who was for the most part not a Trump supporter.

This is not something happening in isolation, I believe. There is going to be a broader purging of wrongthinkers, even in private life. Woke capitalists will keep it quiet, but they will use the information they gather from mining legally available data to carry out the purge.

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The Woke Fed?

They can ruin our universities, our media, our corporations, and our sports. But when they come for our money, they’ve gone too far. Right? Look:

Regional Federal Reserve Banks are taking an increasingly “alarming” stance on politically charged issues like racial justice, according to Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania who is the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee.

Federal Reserve banks in Atlanta, Boston and Minneapolis recently dedicated resources to social policy, reflecting the political leaning of officials who are neither elected nor confirmed by the Senate.

The Federal Reserve’s mission statement mandates the central bank to achieve maximum employment and stable prices while being free from political influence. Experience has shown that countries with independent central banks achieve better outcomes for their citizens.

Pursuing a highly politicized social agenda unrelated to monetary policy is inflicting “reputational damage” on the Minneapolis, Atlanta and Boston Fed banks and the Federal Reserve as a whole, Toomey said.

More:

The three banks recently spearheaded a series that was participated in by all 12 regional banks, which centered on the belief that “racism forms the foundation of inequality in our society.”

The “Racism and Economy” series highlighted a number of topics, including structural racism in housing, education and labor markets.

Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic, who is the first Black Fed president, on Monday told Axios that should he become Fed chairman, he would steer the central bank toward economic inclusivity and equity.

Earlier this year he said there are “definitely merits” to reparations and called the changes to Georgia voting laws “troubling.” That came after last year he published a letter titled “A Moral and Economic Imperative to End Racism.”

The Minneapolis Fed, meanwhile, in its 2020 Annual Report renewed its commitment to dismantling systemic racism. Additionally, a report published by the Boston Fed in December 2020 said the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others were the result of the “racist roots of this country.”

This is jaw-dropping stuff. The green-eyeshade banking elite in charge of fiscal monetary policy are being captured by the woke. They are not supposed to be political, but they’re becoming political. They’re going to run this country into the ground in pursuit of their racist ideology. The moment the Federal Reserve starts talking seriously about reparations is the moment people start thinking and acting radically to protect themselves from their own government.

We are actively forgetting how to run a civilization. I was at a big dinner in Budapest tonight where people were talking about the gathering global storm. “Where can we go hide and be safe?” someone asked. The sense around my end of the table was: nowhere.

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Bishop Stika’s Sticky Wicket

Here’s a heck of a long read at The Pillar about Bishop Rick Stika of Knoxville, Tenn., and his troubles. Writer J.D. Flynn plainly goes out of his way to be fair to the embattled bishop of the small Diocese of East Tennessee, but man, what a portrait. And it was invited by Stika himself! Read on:

I went to Knoxville at Bishop Stika’s invitation. The Pillar reported last month that the Congregation for Bishops in Rome had received complaints about Stika’s leadership in the Knoxville diocese, and was considering initiating an apostolic visitation, or investigation, in the diocese.

The complaints, which came from both priests and laity in the diocese, focused on an investigation into sexual misconduct on the part of a diocesan seminarian. Priests alleged the bishop had an unusually close relationship to the seminarian, and had interfered with the investigation.

Stika at first said the complaints were untrue; that procedures and policies had been followed completely. Eventually he told me that he had removed an investigator looking into the case, because, he said, he’d asked too many questions and caused confusion. The bishop replaced the investigator with a retired police officer whose investigation consisted only of interviewing the accused seminarian.

But Stika said some priests who complained had personal biases against him. That they didn’t understand the whole story. And that, he explained, is why he invited me to Tennessee. To tell the whole story.

I told him I would do my best.

Stika sees “the whole story” as a well-run diocese, which is growing the faith in a missionary part of the country, building vibrant Catholic schools and thriving apostolates. The bishop pointed out to me the presence of religious sisters in the diocese, and pointed out support for the diocesan annual appeal. And he mentioned, often, that his diocese is one of few in the country with its “own” cardinal: Stika’s longtime friend and mentor, retired Cardinal Justin Rigali, lives with the bishop, in a stately house purchased for them, the bishop told me, by a California foundation.

But priests, lay leaders, and former employees told me a different story.

While in Knoxville, I talked with about 10 diocesan priests, all of whom said their diocese is in “crisis,” and described their bishop with words like “bully,” “narcissist” and “vindictive.” Some described a pattern of relationships they characterized as “grooming” — not necessarily sexually inappropriate, several told me, but seemingly disordered, and publicly embarrassing. When I asked them to suggest a priest who might support the bishop, none did. One priest laughed at the question.

Priests and one former employee also raised concerns about financial administration. One senior priest expressed concern that debt is snowballing, and that the diocese could soon become bankrupt. And several expressed concerns about undistributed pandemic relief funds.

Priests in the diocese asked to speak with me anonymously, because, they said, they feared the bishop’s response to their remarks. They mentioned a whistleblowing priest threatened with canonical penalties last month. In light of their concerns, I granted the request.

Read it all. It’s full of details. This bishop, a St. Louis native, really, really, really is disliked by his priests. Here’s something said by a now-laicized priest:

Dickerson said during that year, the bishop’s behavior was erratic — at times aggressive toward him, at times possessive, at times gossiping with him, at times gossiping about him.

On one occasion, he said, the bishop made him sexually uncomfortable.

While Stika and Dickerson were visiting a parish, they had some downtime, and the bishop took the car to get gas. He returned to the parish, and they talked with the pastor a while, before he and Dickerson went back to the car — Dickerson would make the drive home.

“So I turn on the car and on the [satellite] radio is the Playboy channel. I look over at him and he’s gauging my reaction. And I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ And then he turns it off. He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know what happened there.’”

“I think he just wanted to see what I would do,” Dickerson said, “but it was just weird, man. I still don’t understand it.”

“But a lot of priests were telling me he was grooming me. I don’t know if it was for a physical relationship. Or just, you know, he wanted power. Or if it was an emotional thing, you know?”

“The guys would jokingly — they saw the dynamic, and they would joke about it at presbyteral meetings. They’d say: ‘You’re the BB,’ you know? The bishop’s bitch. So it was getting hard.”

Dickerson said he thought the bishop manipulated and coerced him, and said he was hurt that Stika had told other priests about his moral failures.

“I personally believe he’s a clinical narcissist,” Dickerson said.

That’s what Bishop Stika comes off as in this piece. He appears to be a guy who is super-chummy, in that Midwestern way, homosocial, at least, and if he’s homosexual, he’s probably the last person in the world who would figure it out. Stika seems completely oblivious to his affect on others. Emotionally stunted. Some bad things have gone down in the Diocese of East Tennessee, and they can be laid at Stika’s feet. How did a man like that become a bishop? According to the piece, he was picked years ago by future Cardinal Justin Rigali, who shepherded this pliant man’s career. Rigali, retired as cardinal archbishop of Philadelphia, is very old, and shares quarters with Stika.

What stands out to me from the piece is how much damage a bishop can do to a diocese. Stika is not a monster or anything, but he comes off as a total mediocrity who has spent the diocese into the ground to build the cathedral, and who has allowed his own flaky personality quirks to compromise the running of the diocese — especially the way he treats priests. He might well be a fine fellow, but from the portrait painted here, Stika comes off as an emotionally stunted and extremely needy man who was tapped for episcopal leadership because he was tame.

I have to hand it to J.D. Flynn for this piece. It’s an extraordinary portrait of clerical culture within a troubled diocese, one painted by a writer who seemed to like Bishop Stika, but who found such an overwhelming number of testimonies against him, as well as facts against his favor, that the piece Stika asked for in an attempt to clear his name makes him look much worse. It occurred to me after I finished it that only a narcissist who truly did not understand how others saw him would have thought it a good idea to invite a journalist in to take an in-depth look at the diocese on the eve of a major Vatican investigation.

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Viktor Orban Was Right

I have been busy for the past week in Paris doing interviews to support the release of Live Not By Lies in French, so I haven’t been able to be as attentive to this blog as I would like to have been. I’m back in Budapest now at the beginning of the week, and I have a busy day of blogging ahead of me, getting caught up on the things that happened while I was distracted.

It was gutting, to put it mildly, to see the outburst of violent anti-Semitic attacks on the streets of American cities by Arabs wishing to punish American Jews as a way to get at Israel. Peter Savodnik wrote a slashing essay on Bari Weiss’s Substack, which began like this:

The furies have been unleashed. They were everywhere you looked these past two weeks, though you won’t read about them much in the papers.

We saw them on Thursday, when pro-Palestinian protesters threw an explosive device into a crowd of Jews in New York’s Diamond District.

We saw them on Wednesday, when two men were attacked outside a bagel shop in midtown Manhattan.

We saw them on Tuesday, at a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood, when a group of men draped in keffiyehs asked the diners who was Jewish, and then pummeled them. And in a parking lot not far away, when two cars draped in Palestinian flags roared after an Orthodox man fleeing for his life. And in the story of the American soccer player Luca Lewis, cornered by a band of men in New York demanding to know if he was a Jew.

Then there was the caravan careening through Jewish neighborhoods in North London carrying people screaming: “Fuck the Jews! Rape their daughters!”

And the rabbi, outside London, who was hospitalized after being attacked by two teenagers.

And the demonstrator in Vienna shouting, “Shove your Holocaust up your ass!” — the crowd of young people, mostly women, cheering.

The synagogue in Skokie that was vandalized. The synagogue in Tucson that was vandalized. The synagogue in Salt Lake that was vandalized.

The pro-Israel demonstrators in Montreal pelted with rocks. And the pro-Palestinian agitators in Edmonton driving around in search of Jews.

The teeming crowds in Washington, D.C., Berlin, Bangladesh, Philadelphia and Boston and San Francisco and, of course, across the Arab world. The seemingly ubiquitous accusations of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”

The Turkish president, reaching all the way back to the Middle Ages, accusing Israelis of “sucking the blood” of non-Jewish children.

Every hour on the hour, the celebrities posted their memes and the elected officials and the influencers — it’s hard to tell the difference — called Israel an “apartheid” regime. Apartheid regimes, like regimes guilty of genocide and ethnic cleansing, are meant to be overthrown. Violently, if need be. So bloodshed is warranted, yes?

The silence-is-violence people — those who are quick to “call out” anyone deemed inadequately antiracist, experts at digging up any dusty book passage — have been remarkably quiet when it comes to Jews being dehumanized and hunted down.

In Paris, I was talking to a senior French journalist about this, and said to him, “You know one Western capital where this isn’t happening? Budapest. I live next to the Jewish quarter, and walk through it to get to my office every day. When the violence started, I expected to see police guarding the synagogues and Jewish businesses. None showed up. I saw men wearing kippahs walking down the street looking unworried. Then it hit me: it doesn’t happen here.”

The French journalist said that a few years ago, he had been in Budapest, and had been influenced by the constant media propaganda against Hungary depicting it as an antisemitic, fascist state (this, for having demonized George Soros). He paid a call on the chief rabbi, and asked him if he was afraid of being attacked by antisemites.

“He just laughed,” recalled the journalist. “He said, ‘We are not afraid here.'”

This is not just a dinner party anecdote. Look at these results from a 2018 survey of antisemitism in the European Union, conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights:

Hungary is at the bottom of the list! The bottom of the list. Look who is at the top: France, followed by Germany, the Belgium.

It is, alas, no doubt true that manifestation of residual anti-Semitism occurs among ethnic French, Germans, and Belgians. But everybody who knows anything about this phenomenon in contemporary Europe knows that the great majority of it comes from Muslim immigrants and immigrant communities.

This is not a simple story about Bad Immigrants and Innocent Europeans. In 2017, The New York Times Magazine ran a long, interesting story about young Muslim politicians in the violent Islamic suburbs of Paris, trying to find a way to integrate the alienated Islamic masses into the values of the Republic. It seems to me impossible to deny that many European countries and societies have made it difficult for Muslim immigrants to integrate over the decades since immigration began. But the truth is, even with the best of intentions on the part of the Europeans, it was always going to be.

Because assimilation is vastly easier in the United States, it is hard for Americans to grasp why it is not so in Europe. We Americans are a young society by European standards. We were born from an act of revolution against the Old World. We have defined ourselves against tradition. It pains some of us American conservatives to say so, but the US is the premier modern nation: capitalist, dynamic, individualistic, relatively rootless. It is much easier for people from other countries to integrate into our society, because we are so fluid, dynamic, individualistic, and rootless.

Europe is not this. Europe cannot be like this without ceasing to be Europe. As a Europhilic American, I don’t want European countries to be like America; I want them to be European, and more to the point, I want France to be French, Hungary to be Hungarian, Sweden to be Swedish, and so forth. It offends our American universalist sensibilities, but I’ve been coming here for over half my life now, and I believe it to be true. If I was granted Hungarian citizenship (or French, etc), and lived the rest of my life here, there is no way I would be Hungarian except on paper. This is not because the Hungarians, or the French, are unkind to foreigners (though they might well be). This is because they are all heirs to a fathomlessly old culture, which one cannot take on and take off like a jacket. It is very, very hard for Americans to grasp this, though we who come from the South tend to fare better, as many of us hail from towns where people say they moved there fifty years ago, and are still thought of as newcomers.

Still, if a European country is going to bring in migrants, it has a moral and a practical responsibility to make it possible for them to leave peaceful, productive lives. A case can be made that various countries have failed to do that, or at least have not done as much as they could have done. But a case can also be made — and you hear this a lot from French people on the Right — that most of the migrants despise France and her culture, and want to be in France — with all the benefits that living in a modern welfare state provide — without being French, a culture they hold in contempt.

In France last week, I heard a lot of talk about impending “civil war.” The term came up because of an open letter some retired French generals published in the French conservative magazine Valeurs Actuelles, warning that the suburbs were about to explode. They called the coming catastrophe “civil war,” but from what I could tell in my various conversations last week, they’re talking about something more like The Troubles in Northern Ireland: long, sustained, urban guerrilla conflict. One source with whom I walked through the rain and across the river put it like this; this is very close to what I heard from other informed observers, so I’ll let this paraphrase stand for the rest:

If the suburbs all go off at the same time, France does not have enough police and military personnel to restore order. Everyone in power, both in the military and the civil government, knows this. So do the thugs of the suburbs. Anything could spark this conflagration. Anything. It could go off any day. This is what accounts for a lot of the deep anxiety in French life today. That, and the fact that there is no clear solution, and maybe no solution at all.

Perhaps because we had a longer talk than I did with other sources with whom I discussed the matter, this source said something I did not hear from the others (to be fair, I didn’t ask): that he would favor rounding up the Muslim troublemakers of the suburbs and shipping them all back to where they (or their parents) came from, without flinching, and without apology. This man — with an advanced degree, very cosmopolitan — doesn’t see any other way. He told me that this next presidential election, and possibly the one after it, will seal France’s fate. That is to say, by 2030, we will know if France will survive intact, or will collapse, one way or another. If this source is correct, France faces a terrible choice: either to cease to be a liberal democracy, or to cease to be French.

After enough of these conversations, and in reading about the antisemitic violence plaguing streets of American and European capitals as the result of war in Israel and the Palestinian territories, it hit me hard: in 2015, Viktor Orban was right. He infuriated Hungary’s EU partners by refusing to take Muslim refugees in the mass migration sparked by the Syrian civil war. From the New York Times in 2015:

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, was criticized online and in person on Thursday for writing in a German newspaper that it was important to secure his nation’s borders from mainly Muslim migrants “to keep Europe Christian.”

“Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims,” Mr. Orban wrote in a commentary for Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper. “This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity.”

“Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian?” Mr. Orban asked. “There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders.”

More:

Before meeting with Mr. Orban on Thursday in Brussels, Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, which represents European Union leaders, thanked him for securing Europe’s borders, but took issue with the argument of Mr. Orban’s opinion article.

“I want to underline that for me, Christianity in public and social life means a duty to our brothers in need,” Mr. Tusk said as he stood alongside Mr. Orban.

“Referring to Christianity in a public debate on migration must mean in the first place the readiness to show solidarity and sacrifice. For a Christian it shouldn’t matter what race, religion and nationality the person in need represents.”

Mr. Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, drew attention to his rebuke of the Hungarian leader on social networks, and his office posted video of his comments on YouTube.

Mr. Orban waited until the end of the day to respond to Mr. Tusk. At a separate news conference in which he faced reporters alone, he reiterated the theme of his article, that Europe was at risk of being “overrun” and had to shut its borders. The Hungarian prime minister argued that European countries had no obligation to accept most of the migrants, as “the overwhelming majority of people are not refugees because they are not coming from a war-stricken area.”

“Our Christian obligation is not to create illusions,” he said.

And:

Viewed from Hungary, Mr. Orban continued, the experience of multicultural living in Western Europe did not look appealing.

“We don’t want to criticize France, Belgium, any other country,” he said, but “we think all countries have a right to decide whether they want to have a large number of Muslims in their countries. If they want to live together with them, they can. We don’t want to and I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country. We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries, and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see.”

This is something American and European liberals cannot tolerate — even though in Europe, the large number of Islamic migrants are not only making it hard for Christians and Jews, but also for secular liberals. This is the thing they cannot bring themselves to talk about in public, especially in the media. The mobs of the suburbs have less regard for the secular liberal values of the Republic than they do for Christianity.

Jews in Paris are terrified of Islamic antisemitic violence. So are Jews in other European capitals. Despite what the European media would lead you to expect, they’re not terrified in Budapest, Why is that, do you suppose?

This went out on Twitter in the past few days. Watch the short interview clip; it’s in English:

“We have been a Christian country for a millennium. Why is it bad news that we don’t want to change that?Why is it bad that a country wants to stick to its history, heritage, culture, and religion? Please let’s leave it to the sovereign decision of a nation.” Min. Peter Szijjarto https://t.co/L0CeHJTiuu

— Anna Wellisz (@Anna_unbound) May 23, 2021

Again, this is a normal human feeling, a universal one (what the Foreign Minister says, I mean) — but globalists like Amanpour cannot abide it. She goes on to say that Hungary doesn’t have a migration problem, because it has no migrants — as if that is some kind of rebuke to the Hungarian Foreign Minister, rather than the vindication of Hungary’s policy!

If you could wind back the clock fifty years, and show the French, the Belgian, and the German people what mass immigration from the Muslim world would do to their countries by 2021, they never, ever would have accepted it. The Hungarians are learning from their example. It is impossible to look westward from Hungary, and to see a desirable future in the models elsewhere in the European Union. Hungarians are European, but they see among the European left, and among the European establishment figures (of left and right), a death wish. They seem to believe that the only way to live in harmony with these imported peoples and cultures is to train new generations of European children to despise their own culture and traditions. In this sense, secular liberalism has become a suicide pact for Western nations.

So, we go back to the Jews. Hungary under Viktor Orban is constantly slandered in the European and American media as antisemitic for its attacks on Soros. Soros, who was born in Budapest, has dedicated many of his billions to support his Open Society Foundations, international NGOs that promote political and cultural liberalism. (I wrote last month about how OSF is engaged in campaigns to legalize and valorize prostitution.) Back in 2015, with migrant waves streaming from the Middle East into Europe, Soros wrote in an op-ed:

First, the EU has to accept at least a million asylum-seekers annually for the foreseeable future. And, to do that, it must share the burden fairly — a principle that a qualified majority finally established at a Sept. 23 summit.

There is a reason why the Hungarian government demonizes Soros, you know. To be clear, I don’t read Hungarian, and I would not dream of defending the Fidesz supporters’ treatment of him in every instance. What I would say, though, based on reading about Soros in English-language media, and examining the websites of his foundations, and their values, is that Soros is a true secular liberal globalist whose interests are diametrically opposed to those who want Hungary to remain Hungary. The fact that he is Jewish is a canard that allows his supporters to explain away all criticism of him and his work to undermine European national traditions that he finds objectionable. A few years back, I wrote about how Soros’s OSF were spending a lot of money, some of it coming from the US Agency For International Development, to liberalize the country of Macedonia. Part of the expenditure was translating Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals into Macedonian, printing it, and distributing it there. This is not a conspiracy theory; follow the link to my pieces, which had the goods.

If you call critics of Soros antisemites, it is easy to distract people from what him and his foundations are actually doing in these countries where the only way most people in the West have of knowing what’s going on is through the reporting of journalists like Christiane Amanpour.

Yet ask yourself: why are the Jews in Viktor Orban’s Budapest unafraid during this period of antisemitic violence, but the Jews in Macron’s Paris, Merkel’s Berlin, and many other Western capitals — including Washington, and America’s cultural capital, New York City — are afraid, and have reason to be? European antisemitism is not strictly a matter of Muslim hatred of Jews. Hungary’s Jobbik political party — now part of the opposition coalition — has in the past been openly antisemitic, though it has moderated its views in recent years, and is now led by a young Jewish descendant of a Holocaust victim. The point is, you can find antisemitism in Hungary. Plus, in that same survey I quoted at the start of this piece, Jews in Poland, where Islamic migration scarcely exists, also said they were afraid of antisemitism, and had experienced it.

Nevertheless, Poland is the outlier; in most of Europe, despite the shameful Jew-hating of remnants of the old Right, antisemitism is predominantly a Muslim thing.  In fact, this long piece from the New York Times in 2018 reported the truth that the European left and establishment leaders don’t want to face:

Nearly 40 percent of violent acts classified as racially or religiously motivated were committed against Jews in 2017, though Jews make up less than 1 percent of France’s population. Anti-Semitic acts increased by 20 percent from 2016, a rise the Interior Ministry called “preoccupying.”

In 2011, the French government stopped categorizing those deemed responsible for anti-Semitic acts, making it more difficult to trace the origins. But before then, Muslims had been the largest group identified as perpetrators, according to research by a leading academic. Often the spikes in violence coincided with flare-ups in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, according to researchers.

For the French government, the issue is deeply complicated, touching on the country’s rawest political nerves, as well as ethnic and religious fault lines. France has Europe’s biggest population of both Jews and Muslims, and Muslims face both discrimination in employment and in their treatment by the police.

French leaders fear pitting one side against the other, or even acknowledging that a Muslim-versus-Jew dynamic exists. To do so would violate a central tenet of France — that people are not categorized by race or religion, only as fellow French citizens, equal before the law.

“We are all citizens of the republic, one and indivisible. But this doesn’t correspond to reality,” said a pollster, Jérôme Fourquet, who along with a colleague, Sylvain Manternach, wrote a recent book, “Next Year in Jerusalem, French Jews and anti-Semitism,” published by the respected Fondation Jean-Jaurès, a think tank associated with the Socialist Party.

“All the politicians speak of living together,” Mr. Fourquet said. “And yet, instead, we have de facto groupings based on culture and community. Yet to recognize this is to recognize the failure or breakdown of the French model.”

Gunther Jikeli, a German historian at Indiana University who conducted a meticulous study of Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe, called the phenomenon “blindingly obvious” in a recent opinion piece in the newspaper Le Monde.

In 16 surveys conducted over the last 12 years in Europe, “anti-Semitism is significantly higher among Muslims than among non-Muslims,” Mr. Jikeli wrote.

“There is a kind of norm of anti-Semitism, of viewing Jews negatively,” he said in an interview.

Three years on, what’s happening to the Jews these days in Western European capitals is a pretty clear sign that regarding migration and national identity, Viktor Orban was right in 2015, and he’s right today. You won’t read anything like that in the major Western media. You’re reading it here.

In 2013, Orban gave a speech to the meeting in Budapest of the World Jewish Congress, and took a hard line against antisemitism. Take a look at this new clip from a Jewish organization talking about the revival of Jewish life in Budapest today. This clip reflects what I’ve seen with my own eyes in walking through the Jewish quarter almost daily over the past five weeks. It might open some eyes:

The post Viktor Orban Was Right appeared first on The American Conservative.

Creating Monsters & Summoning Demons

Last night I returned to my hotel from a fun dinner at a private apartment near the Champs-Elysees. On the midnight ride back to my apartment on the other side of the Seine, I marveled at the Eiffel Tower, the Invalides, and other monuments that make Paris the world’s most beautiful capital. The genius of it all, and the glory of a civilization that can create such beauty and complexity.

Got back to room, logged on, and read an e-mail from a friend who was telling me about a group of guys he’s gotten involved with who are teaching themselves how to be men. From what he said in his letter, it sounds like they are sick and tired of the decadent society around us, and are trying to save themselves. They are reacting to something vile, immoral, and destabilizing, and I was glad to learn of at least some practical pushback from these rebels.

But then there was a letter from a reader who sent me this ad from a San Francisco surgical center. Excerpt:

You need a strong stomach to view the gallery. The nullification patients have had all sign of genitalia of either sex removed; they are as smooth as a Barbie doll. There are also images of people who have been given a pseudo-vagina beneath their penis. “Phallus-preserving vaginoplasty” they call it. You can have both a penis and a pseudo-vagina — and people get that (there are pictures). And there is this:

Why not? The ideology driving this clinic is that people should be able to have anything done to their bodies that they want. Desire, imagination, and medical technical skills are the only limits they recognize. They call this freedom. How many Americans would agree? More than many of us think.

Radical mutilation to one’s generative organs for the sake of personal liberation is a service offered by this fancy clinic in the world city most associated with the technological innovation that is at the core of the world’s wealth. Richer than the capitals of kings, pharaohs, and emperors, and so technologically advanced that what comes out of this city and its region is hard to distinguish from magic, this city is where they mutilate healthy people and turn them into monsters. And the elites of this decadent civilization, of which that golden city on the bay is an apex, are spreading the psychotic ideology that causes men and women to monster themselves throughout the entire society. Look at this:

From the Kellogg’s press release:

“Together With Pride cereal marks the latest chapter in a years long partnership with GLAAD and is the evolution of the much-loved All Together cereal, which previously was only available online,” said Doug VanDeVelde, General Manager of Kellogg U.S. Cereal Category. “Our delicious new recipe features berry-flavored, rainbow hearts dusted with edible glitter. We can’t wait for fans to try our latest limited run.”

Together With Pride cereal is now available at select major retailers nationwide while supplies last.

More:

“Boxes are for cereal, not people” is the embodiment and celebration of Kellogg Company’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, not just within Kellogg Company, but also at the tables of our cereal fans coast to coast. As Kellogg has grown its multiyear allyship with GLAAD, the company hopes to spread the word on allyship and show its support for the transgender and gender nonconforming communities.

“Kellogg has a long-standing commitment to Equity, Diversity & Inclusion to our employees, our consumers and communities,” said Priscilla Koranteng, Vice President, Talent and Diversity. “New Together With Pride cereal is our latest effort aligned with our purpose to create better days and a place at the table for everyone.”

Did you notice the place on the side of the cereal box encouraging children to write their own pronouns? This is absolutely indoctrination. The cereal giant is undermining a basic truth about reality, biological and psychological, among little children, and teaching them to embrace this ideological construct through changing the meaning of language. Put more darkly, this is woke capitalism trying to convince little children to exchange truth for a lie, and to destroy themselves within.

I know there are some of you who are sick of hearing it, but this is totalitarian. It’s not gulag-totalitarian, but it is soft totalitarian. Totalitarianism is a system in which only one ideology is allowed political power, and in which everything in life is political. The cultural politics of the woke movement is everywhere, even turning children’s cereal and toys (Legos, as of last week) into icons of propaganda. I have adapted a well-quoted passage of Live Not By Lies to fit this soft-totalitarian model:

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

Infusing every aspect of life with ideology was a standard aspect of Soviet woke totalitarianism. Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer) Kellogg’s vice president of talent and diversity, steamrolled over chess players cereal eaters who wanted to keep politics out of the game breakfast bowl.

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess cereal,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ ‘cereal for cereal’s sake,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players cereal eaters, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess cereal.”

This is all ideology, all the time. Once you know how totalitarianism functions as an ideology, you have no problem recognizing the same process at work in our culture. There is a line between cereal boxes propagandizing children over gender ideology at breakfast, and the Doctors Frankenstein of San Francisco who create bespoke genitals to advance the Revolution.

It is absolutely vital for people within institutions and countries that have not given themselves over to this madness yet to understand that this ideology recognizes no limiting principle. There is no point in which it will accept “this far, and no farther.” Not long ago in Budapest, I interviewed a liberal university professor (I’ll be making a separate post on this tomorrow) who is a well-known critic of the Orban government here. In particular, he said he opposes the government passing into the country’s Basic Law (constitution) the definition of marriage as one man plus one woman. And, he favors gay adoption. But about transgenderism, and the polymorphous forms of gender identity, that’s too much for him, he said (all on the record, by the way).

When later in the interview he acknowledged that here in Hungary, he can say anything he wants to in his classroom without having to worry about being bothered by the state, I pointed out to him that that’s true in the US too, but if this man — a pro-gay liberal — were to say in his classroom what he said to me about trans and gender-confused people (simply that he can’t accept it), he would be immediately denounced by his students, reported to the administration, which would fire him, and render him unemployable in academia. The agents of totalitarianism are private institutions and entities, which carry out the cancelling work that the state used to do in hard totalitarian countries. And yes, losing your job and your career is not the same thing as being sent to the gulag, but it is still totalitarian! What that professor had to say about LGBT was the standard American liberal position in the first Obama administration. Now it is so intolerable among liberal-led institutions that you would risk your livelihood for holding it publicly.

Ask yourself: if you think that that San Francisco clinic’s procedures are medically unethical and should not be legal, or at least discouraged, would you have the courage to say so on Facebook, on Instagram, or Twitter? Be honest. Could you be confident that you wouldn’t lose your job for publicly holding that opinion? If you can’t, what does that say about the power that that ideology holds in our society?

We Americans are lucky to have a First Amendment. If not, we would no doubt be like the people of Scotland, whose speech and beliefs are criminalized because they offend against the Sacred Victims:

Totalitarians. Straight-up.

So look, going back to the beginning of this blog post. Western civilization is in an advanced state of decay. Those young men who are teaching themselves how to be men are trying to live, not to succumb to the deathworks of the progressives. More power to them! But the history of 20th century totalitarianism shows us where this kind of reaction can go, if not reined in and channeled by spiritual and religious teachings. But where will those teachings come from? Massive percentages of young Americans are rejecting religion, and many of those who don’t profess a Moralistic Therapeutic Deism incapable of standing up to militants of either the Left or the Right.

As with Critical Race Theory fanaticism, these woke maniacs working their ideological sorcery to transform society according to their malignant ideologies are creating monsters and summoning demons. I’m speaking both literally and figuratively. This is going somewhere very, very bad — and very quickly. When I was in Paris, I spoke with two young Catholics who believe that now is the time to get out of the cities and move to the countryside to live near monasteries, and they’ve put together a business plan and an organization to make this a reality. I’ll be writing more about them soon. The point is, there are people who can read the signs of the times, and are acting based on what they see. Many more will lie to themselves, and say that it’s really not so bad, that they thought Elvis was bad in his time too. In Live Not By Lies, I quote this from Hannah Arendt, in her The Origins of Totalitarianism:

There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.

Your children’s cereal box teaching them the ABCs of transgenderism, and inviting them to invent their own gender pronouns. Come on, people!

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