Rod Dreher's Blog, page 647

The View From Pluto

Richard Grant, an Englishman, and his girlfriend Mariah moved from Manhattan to the rural Mississippi Delta. Culture shock? It was more like culture electrocution — but he likes it there. Excerpt from the short essay he wrote in the New York Times about it:

Mississippians were generally puzzled by our arrival, but warm and welcoming. As we were unpacking, an African-American tractor driver stopped by and talked for an hour. On the second day, a white family from Pluto came over with a bottle of wine and a selection of guns to shoot. Cathy Thompson, a labor and delivery nurse, had bought an AK-47 for stress relief during menopause. “I don’t know what women in New York do,” she said in a fast-paced drawl. “Probably see a therapist, or get on meds. I got my AK and a T-shirt that said, ‘I’m Out of Estrogen and I Have a Gun.’”

It soon became apparent that a) we held very different political views and b) this was not going to be a problem. Noting our lack of furniture, Cathy went through her storage areas and produced two beds, a couch, a kitchen table and chairs, two armchairs and two wingback chairs. “Y’all can have this stuff on permanent loan,” she said. “And I noticed y’all just have the one vehicle. That’s going to get inconvenient out here, so I want you to drive our Envoy whenever you need to, and think of it as your second vehicle. I’ll show you where the keys are.”

Another neighbor showed up with a cord of split firewood, a bottle of Glenlivet and an engraved silver ice bucket as housewarming gifts. A third insisted on keeping our grass cut for the rest of the summer. This is an aspect of Mississippi that usually gets lost in translation. Because the state is so infamous for its vicious past — Mississippi had the most lynchings, and the most violent resistance to civil rights — it’s hard for outsiders to accept that it’s also a place of extraordinary warmth, kindness and hospitality.

He says that it is very difficult to understand the racial dynamics of the Delta:

Contradictions are like oxygen here, part of the air itself. The Delta is arguably the most racist, or racially obsessed, place in America, and yet you see more ease and conviviality between blacks and whites than in the rest of America. It’s not uncommon to find close, loving, quasi-familial relationships between black and white families who have known one another for generations. They weep together at one another’s funerals, and sometimes name their children after one another. But they still feel awkward about sitting down to a meal together, and both sides enforce the old taboo against interracial dating.

That’s true where I live too. It really is hard to explain — but if you live here, you live the contradiction. You had better be able to accept paradoxes in everyday life, or you will go crazy living here. And you had better be able to accept that life in the Deep South is in some ways like living in another country, not America. You have to read the whole essay to encounter Grant’s tales of Delta eccentricity. This is one of them:

After nearly three years here, it still feels like we’re scratching the surface. Even for a native like our friend Martha, it’s hard to say what accounts for the Delta’s eccentricities. Maybe it’s the strain of living in a dysfunctional third world society in the heart of America. A white pseudo-aristocracy maintains genteel airs and graces amid crumbling towns and black rural poverty reminiscent of Haiti. It’s all stirred up with whiskey, denial and fire-breathing religion. In a blistering exit speech, the outgoing police chief of Greenwood, who is black, denounced the mayor, a white woman, as “Antichrist, Beelzebub, deceiver, destroyer, liar, seven heads and 10 horns on Satan, the Devil himself.”

This was not irony. This was not sarcasm. This was a heartfelt howl from the most Southern place on earth, as one historian described the Delta.

Trust me, you’ll want to read the whole thing. He says they ain’t moving.

Now, treat yourself to the song stylings of Mississippi’s own Mr. Bobby Lounge, singing one of his greatest hits, “I Remember The Night Your Trailer Burned Down.” You’re welcome.

Oh, and here’s a clip of the greatest Southern Baptist who ever was, Mr. Jerry Clower of Yazoo City, Miss.:

(The Grant essay courtesy Prof. Ralph C. Wood, who says Mississippi is “first in literature, last in literacy.”)

‘Hare Krishna’ in a Catholic Church?

Jesus wept! That’s a group of Hindu devotees chanting “Hare Krishna” this fall in Our Saviour Roman Catholic Church in New York City. They chanted for an hour as part of an “interfaith prayer service.”

Our Saviour used to be pastored by Fr. George Rutler, who was transferred out by Cardinal Dolan. The new pastor, Fr. Robbins, removed much of the iconography that Fr. Rutler had installed. This is definitely a video taken inside Our Saviour, where I have been on several occasions. It was uploaded on November 6. The description says:

Published on Nov 6, 2015

Devotees conduct kirtan in a Christian church, New York (1 min video)

In late September, a few friends and I were asked to organise and participate in an interfaith prayer session in New York City. Members from The Bhakti Center led kirtan for an hour.

The Bhakti Center is an ISKCON (Hare Krishna) establishment in lower Manhattan.

Does anybody have anything more on this? If this really happened with the approval of the pastor, he ought to be sacked, and the church reconsecrated. If he were a Russian Orthodox priest, he would be defrocked too. This is really an unspeakable desecration. An hour-long prayer service to a non-Christian god, in a Catholic church! You aren’t surprised anymore when you hear of such abominations in an Episcopal Church (the Cathedral of St. John the Divine held a praise service for pagan gods back in 1993). But a Catholic parish?

I hope there’s a good explanation for this. Readers?

SJW Of The Year

I can’t even. I just can’t even. Read this Yale Herald cri de coeur from an undergraduate who is going to pieces because the master and associate master of her college house have failed her. Excerpts:

As a Silimander, I feel that my home is being threatened. Last week, Erika Christakis, the associate master of Silliman College, sent an email to the Silliman community that called an earlier entreaty for Yalies to be more sensitive about culturally appropriating Halloween costumes a threat to free speech. In the aftermath of the email, I saw my community divide. She did not just start a political discourse as she intended. She marginalized many students of color in what is supposed to be their home. But more disappointing than the original email has been the response of Christakis and her husband, Silliman Master Nicholas Christakis. They have failed to acknowledge the hurt and pain that such a large part of our community feel. They have again and again shown that they are committed to an ideal of free speech, not to the Silliman community.

Today, when a group of us, organized originally by the Black Student Alliance at Yale, spoke with Christakis in the Silliman Courtyard, his response once again disappointed many of us. When students tried to tell him about their painful personal experiences as students of color on campus, he responded by making more arguments for free speech. It’s unacceptable when the Master of your college is dismissive of your experiences. The Silliman Master’s role is not only to provide intellectual stimulation, but also to make Silliman a safe space that all students can come home to. His responsibility is to make it a place where your experiences are a valid concern to the administration and where you can feel free to talk with them about your pain without worrying that the conversation will turn into an argument every single time. We are supposed to feel encouraged to go to our Master and Associate Master with our concerns and feel that our opinions will be respected and heard.

But, in his ten weeks as a leader of the college, Master Christakis has not fostered this sense of community. He seems to lack the ability, quite frankly, to put aside his opinions long enough to listen to the very real hurt that the community feels. He doesn’t get it. And I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.

Oh, it gets better. Are you ready for this? Here it comes:

I have had to watch my friends defend their right to this institution. This email and the subsequent reaction to it have interrupted their lives. I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns. I feel drained. And through it all, Christakis has shown that he does not consider us a priority.

If Yale had any sense of self-respect and intellectual responsibility, it would send all of these pampered crybabies home, and tell them not to come back. Honestly, it is time for this to stop. Think of all the kids in this country who would give anything for a chance to have a Yale education. Kick these mewling neurotics out and give those kids a chance. Come on, Yale, stand by your professors, stand by your staff, and stand by the students who come there to get an actual education, and not be subject to abuse by crazy people who have never been told “no”.

Ben Carson’s Pyramids

Actually, they were built to hold Little Debbie Swiss Creme Rolls (Waj/Shutterstock

Have you heard that Ben Carson believes the pyramids were built for grain storage? I had not until yesterday, listening to a caller to a public radio show, who went to pieces over what a freak like that might do if he got into the White House. Tyler Cowen tells everybody to calm down. Excerpt:

Besides, our Founding Fathers had some pretty strange notions about pyramids.  Most of them did a pretty good job in office.

What Ben Carson has done is to commit the unpardonable sin of talking about his religion as if he actually takes it seriously.

Loyal MR readers will know that I am myself a non-believer.  But what I find strangest of all is not Ben Carson’s pyramids beliefs, but rather the notion that we should selectively pick on some religious claims rather than others.  The notion that it is fine to believe something about a deity or deities, or a divine book, as long as you do not take that said belief very seriously and treat it only as a social affiliation or an ornamental badge of honor.

Bully for Ben Carson for reminding us that a religion actually consists of beliefs about the world.  And if you’re trying to understand his continuing popularity, maybe that is the place to start.

Read everything Cowen said about Ben Carson’s pyramids here.

He’s right. Cowen, I mean.

Benedict Option Mailbag

The mail I receive from readers is gratifying in part because it helps me understand what life on the ground is like elsewhere. A reader writes:

Virtually everything relayed to you by the guy in your blog post “Benedict Option Baby Steps” applies to me. Mid 30’s, young family, southern evangelical upbringing (I live in SC)…Piper, Keller, Dostoevsky etc…I would add Bonhoeffer and Lewis as well.

This is how I am implementing the BenOp in my own way. After months of following and reading all I can on the subject (both pro and con) I think I get the gist of where we will be going with this.

Example 1: Talking about it. I am the Men’s Director at my (very large, and I say that only to stress its influence) church here in town and the one thing that baffles me is how little Christians, and men in particular, actually read the Bible. In a complete departure from what is normal for us on Wednesday nights, I took the last 3 meetings and simply read aloud from the Bible. Week 1, Philippians; Week 2, I and II Timothy and last night I John; each in their entirety.

“How is this the BenOp?” one might ask. Well, for evangelicals who typically read very little and rely heavily on being “fed”, it was a very strange time. Not strange bad, but strange as in a higher sense of gravity. I didn’t elaborate, I didn’t prompt discussion, we simply read. Paul instructed us, via Timothy to commit to the public reading of Scripture. This reading was a new experience for them, but the ironic part is that this practice isn’t new, its simply forgotten. It is actually one of the oldest things we as Christians have ever done together. Our group used this as a time, not only to hear God’s Word, but to look at it as an opportunity to connect to those who have gone before us. The history of Christianity doesn’t start and stop in 2015. Making a connection with those saints that have gone before and those that will come after simply begins by sharing and cherishing the one Book that we’ve all used to guide and direct us. Scripture shouldn’t be a jumping off point for a lecture on money management or on how to fix your relationships, it is sufficient on its own.

Example 2: Taking the BenOp into prisons. I teach at our county detention center every Thursday night. If there ever was a group that needs a positive sense of fellowship and community, it’s these men. Gangs, drifting from place to place, drugs and the like are all manifestations of the attempt to fill a void left by their lack of community/family. (I realize that this is a generalization, but stick with me here). Giving them a sense of membership in something older, bigger and longer lasting than themselves actually seems to give hope. Jails can be the new monasteries…

Yes, there is more to the BenOp than that and I am anxiously awaiting the book. But I am not inclined to wait, we are to be the hands and feet now.

On another note, I am inclined to punch the next evangelical leader to use the word “winsome”.

Ha! The thing I love most about this post is the correspondent is “not inclined to wait.” Nor should he be! Like Leah Libresco in DC, there’s no reason not to start doing something right now. Something is better than nothing.

Another one:

I am a pastor of an evangelical church in New Jersey. Here’s what it’s like “on the ground” in my evangelical church. For background, I grew up in this church, went away for college and seminary, and then came back on staff in 2013. I was thrust into the role of Youth Pastor about a year and a half ago. I had no desire or intention of doing youth ministry. But, lo and behold, here I am!

Working with the students, I am not sure their parents really understand the crisis that we are in as a church (both locally and nationally). Very few students know the Bible. They don’t even know where to locate certain books of the Bible. There is a “core” of students who grew up in the church who know Scripture well, but I would say it’s less than half the group.

One of the main problems is sheer busyness. The Northeast lies under the dominion of Mammon. In one family, the father makes a ton of money as an executive of some business and works about 80 hrs. a week. The mother is in a medical school and is never home either. The parents don’t come to service on Sunday but just drop off the kids for Youth Group. I am trying my best to teach them the Bible, but I am sorely overmatched due to my other pastoral responsibilities. Teenagers are so emotionally and spiritually needy, but I am so relationally burnt out with caring for the rest of the flock, they definitely get my third or fourth best.

In an attempt to disciple men, I also meet with a group of young married men (25-35). How often do we meet? The only commitment they could make is once per month! And often, at least one or two men don’t come because of work responsibilities…yes, that’s right…work responsibilities…on a Sunday morning.

It sounds sexy to try to call people to a “higher commitment” for Christ, but I am often greeted with skeptical looks when I talk like that to people.

Furthermore, some men do want to commit more, but they are totally dominated by work since they commute to New York City.

I bet these parents, in the years to come, will be shocked and saddened when they find out they have raised Nones. I keep banging on the point here of how wrong it is for parents to outsource the spiritual formation of their children to the church (or to religious schools). Yes, parents should be able to count on their church and, if applicable, their children’s religious school to be partners in the serious formation of their children, but no institution can hope to be as effective as parents themselves. I’ve mentioned in this space before the reprimand a Catholic friend and I rightly received from a Catholic priest back in 2000, who tired of listening to us complain about all the catechetical failures of the RCC. He told us that we were right, but that did not relieve us of our responsibility to take matters into our own hands with ourselves and our families, when we had them. The resources are out there, he said; you can’t sit back and wait for the institutional church to do this for you.

Anyway, in this pastor’s situation, I think what he will see in that church is a winnowing away. People in the congregation — young people and their parents — who don’t embrace that “higher commitment to Christ” will not make it. They will drift and drift until sooner or later, they are lost to the church, and completely assimilated into the world. A church that changes itself to accommodate people like that will lose its core members who really are committed to Christ. Forget “seeker-friendly”; a church needs to be “finder-friendly” above all, and serve first those who really do embrace the faith in its fullness. A church that sees its mission as being a life coach to the bourgeoisie will not make it.

This part of the pastor’s letter got to me:

In an attempt to disciple men, I also meet with a group of young married men (25-35). How often do we meet? The only commitment they could make is once per month! And often, at least one or two men don’t come because of work responsibilities…yes, that’s right…work responsibilities…on a Sunday morning.

I have written in the past about how the Benedict Option doesn’t call on people to relocate out to the desert to a compound, or anything like it, but this letter reveals the limits of that approach. In a situation like the one this Evangelical pastor describes, I believe it will be necessary — not optional, necessary — for families to relocate and/or find another profession, for the sake of their own souls.

A friend who lives in a highly secular part of the country tells me he’s thinking of giving up his good job there to move with his family down to south Louisiana. He believes it may be necessary to give his kids a better shot at holding on to their Catholic faith, because despite all our problem here in Louisiana, the culture is still a lot friendlier to Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, than where he lives now. I would add that to live in a culture that expects family men and women to work so hard and so long that they have no time, or insufficient time, for religious life is a culture that will exterminate faith within its participants and their children. If that degree of commitment to one’s job is what is necessary to “succeed” on middle-class America’s terms, then Christians caught in that kind of culture are going to have to decide between God and Mammon. You cannot serve both.

Finally, here’s a good tweet reflecting on the Christianity Today cover piece by Michael Gerson and Pete Wehner, advocating what they call the “Wilberforce Option” (in contradistinction to the Benedict Option):

The success of any ‘Wilberforce Option’ is dependent on Benedict Option practices.

— Peter L. Edman (@pledman) November 3, 2015

I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way, but Peter Edman is right. Wilberforce and the Claphamites were able to sustain their level of engagement with the world for the cause of abolishing slavery and other social reform because they lived by thick practices. The Wikipedia entry on the “Clapham Sect” speaks to that in its opening paragraph:

The Clapham Sect or Clapham Saints were a group of Church of England social reformers based in Clapham, London at the beginning of the 19th century (active c. 1790–1830). They are described by the historian Stephen Michael Tomkins as “a network of friends and families in England, with William Wilberforce as its centre of gravity, who were powerfully bound together by their shared moral and spiritual values, by their religious mission and social activism, by their love for each other, and by marriage”.

That right there is a terrific example of the Benedict Option, and I appreciate Peter Edman bringing it to my attention. Another aspect of the Claphamites that I like from a BenOp point of view is that they did what they did from within an established church and tradition, thus avoiding the strains and the pitfalls that come with starting a new church.

In , Gerson said:

But this set of legal challenges [to religious liberty, by Obergefell] does not translate into social apocalypse. By many (though not nearly all) indicators, American culture is getting better. Divorce rates and abortion rates have declined in recent decades. Rates of violent crime and homicide are down dramatically from historical highs. Many religious conservatives mistake alarming legal trends for across-the-board cultural decay.

It is a mistake to assume that positive social trends — less divorce, less abortion — signal cultural health from a Christian point of view. Gerson is absolutely right that Christians like me, who tend to cultural pessimism, need to deal realistically with the fact that the country might not, in fact, be going to hell, but actually to heck, if that. I accept that caution from Gerson, but would make one of my own: the quality of life in the Scandinavian countries is, by most material measures, superlative — and these are pretty much godless societies. If we think of Christianity as primarily a social reform movement, as the early Social Gospellers did, we deny the core of the religion, and lay the groundwork for its dissolution. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her book Natural Symbols (thank you to Father Peter Funk for recommending it to me), writes about “three phases in the move away from ritualism.” She’s talking here about reform within the Catholic Church of the 1960s, in which Catholic reformers sought to do away with what they took to be dead rituals, such as Friday abstinence from meat. She writes:

First, there is the contempt of external ritual forms; second, there is the private internalizing of religious experience; third, there is the move to humanist philanthropy. When the third stage is under way, the symbolic life of the spirit is finished. … The reformers who set low value on the external and symbolic aspects of Friday abstinence and who exhort the faithful to prefer eleemosynary [that is, charitable] deeds are not making an intellectually free assessment of forms of worship. They are moving with the secular tide along with other sections of the middle classes who seek to be justified in their lives only by saving others from hunger and injustice.

The point is that even from a secular, anthropological point of view, to consider fidelity to Christianity as a matter of good works, downplaying the difficult-to-accept moral and theological aspects, is to open the door to secularizing the religion. I don’t think that this is what Gerson intends, but to cite positive social statistics as a counterargument to decline-and-fall-ism may be read as implying that Christianity is thriving because indicators of social health are improving. We would certainly hope, as Christians, to see believers building more stable, prosperous lives, but it is certainly possible to build a stable, prosperous life without having religious faith. That cannot be the primary measure of spiritual health.

Of course I agree with Gerson (and Wehner) that “religious conservatives must learn to operate in a same-sex marriage world,” and that that means at times “work[ing] cooperatively alongside people in gay marriages. This is not moral compromise; it is the normal practice of democracy.” But I disagree here:

Pulling back from the practical, religious conservatives will need to recover some perspective. For most of the past 2,000 years, Christians have lived in societies that did not reflect their sexual ethics. And sexual ethics is not the sum total of Christian ethics, which, at its best, affirms the priority of the person and the defense of human rights, well-being and dignity.

No, sexual ethics is certainly not the sum total of Christian ethics, but they cannot be set aside, either, for the sake of peace with the post-Christian world. It is precisely on this point — sexual ethics — that the greatest attacks on the Christian faith are coming in this culture. It is precisely that which draws lawsuits and government action against us and our institutions, and that will continue to do so. Nobody is going to sue Christians for proclaiming the countercultural Christian teaching about wealth, and trying to live it out. No Christian individual or church is going to be called a hater for insisting that the Bible means what it says about Mammon.

Not long ago, I heard a very sincere Evangelical say, “When can we get away from this stuff and go back to preaching the Gospel?” This is a trap. The Gospel can no more be sanitized of its hard sexual teaching for the protection of moderns who don’t wish to hear it than it can be sanitized of its hard teaching about wealth. True, Christians today can make an idol of sexual purity, but the answer to that is not to minimize its importance. Authentic Christian living is irreduceably ascetic, meaning that it requires all Christians to struggle against the passions of the flesh. This does not mean all Christians must give up all material goods and pleasures (though monastics are called to that), but it does mean that they must be rightly ordered — something that can only be accomplished by ascetic practices, as the Orthodox Church still teaches, and the Catholic Church understood until the Second Vatican Council.

Anyway, I think C.S. Lewis gets it right here. Sexual ethics are not the point of Christianity, but in an erotomanical culture such as ours, we had better be careful about downplaying them:

Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

To return to Peter Edman’s point: we will only be able to sustain the strength to live out the Wilberforce Option in public if we are living the Benedict Option in private. I would take this a bit further: the Benedict Option entails the Wilberforce Option as public witness. If we neglect the Benedict Option, though, in time, we will find no basis for the Wilberforce Option either.

By the way, if you haven’t seen the documentary Into Great Silence, about the Grande Chartreuse, one of the most ascetic Catholic monasteries in the world, it’s well worth your time. These men live in another world:

Campus Cultural Revolution –> More Culture War

Every time I think that there could not be anything more outrageous than whatever these crackpot campus Social Justice Warriors come up with, they manage to exceed my own imaginative capacities. Brace yourself for this one.

At Yale University, there’s a campus-wide tempest underway over an October 30 letter the wife of a master of Silliman College there wrote to residents of the college regarding the Intercultural Affairs Committee’s directions not to dress offensively at Halloween. Erika Christakis, whose husband Nicholas is master of the college (she is associate master), wrote, in part:

Even if we could agree on how to avoid offense – and I’ll note that no one around campus seems overly concerned about the offense taken by religiously conservative folks to skin­revealing costumes – I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience;increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition. And the censure and prohibition come from above, not from yourselves! Are we all okay with this transfer of power? Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity – in your capacity ­ to exercise self­censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you? We tend to view this shift from individual to institutional agency as a tradeoff between libertarian vs. liberal values (“liberal” in the American, not European sense of the word).

Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society. But – again, speaking as a child development specialist – I think there might be something missing in our discourse about the exercise of free speech (including how we dress ourselves) on campus, and it is this: What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment?

In other words: Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.

You would think that college students, especially college students at one of the nation’s leading universities, would appreciate that kind of respect for them. And if they disagreed with her, they would at least consider the matter debatable.

Oh no, no, no. Over 700 students and faculty at Yale (and a few at other colleges) signed an open letter denouncing Erika Christakis. It reads, in part:

The contents of your email were jarring and disheartening. Your email equates old traditions of using harmful stereotypes and tropes to further degrade marginalized people, to preschoolers playing make believe. This both trivializes the harm done by these tropes and infantilizes the student body to which the request was made. You fail to distinguish the difference between cosplaying fictional characters and misrepresenting actual groups of people. In your email, you ask students to “look away” if costumes are offensive, as if the degradation of our cultures and people, and the violence that grows out of it is something that we can ignore. We were told to meet the offensive parties head on, without suggesting any modes or means to facilitate these discussions to promote understanding. Giving “room” for students to be “obnoxious” or “offensive”, as you suggest, is only inviting ridicule and violence onto ourselves and our communities, and ultimately comes at the expense of room in which marginalized students can feel safe.

More:

To be a student of color on Yale’s campus is to exist in a space that was not created for you. From the Eurocentric courses, to the lack of diversity in the faculty, to the names of slave owners and traders that adorn most of the buildings on campus — all are reminders that Yale’s history is one of exclusion. An exclusion that was based on the same stereotypes and incorrect beliefs that students now seek to wear as costumes. Stereotypes that many students still face to this day when navigating the university. The purpose of blackface, yellowface, and practices like these were meant to alienate, denigrate, and to portray people of color as something inferior and unwelcome in society. To see that replicated on college campuses only reinforces the idea that this is a space in which we do not belong.

 

Nicholas Christakis attempted to meet with a group of students for hours to talk about all this. Take a look at how these coddled brats treated him:

There are more videos. Greg Lukianoff was there watching it, and writes:

One of the stronger accusations the students make is that Christakis’ refusal to apologize for his wife’s email makes him unfit to be master of Silliman.

“As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman,” one student says. “You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?”

When Christakis disagreed, the student proceeded to yell at him.

“Who the f*ck hired you?” she asked, arguing that Christakis should “step down” because being master is “not about creating an intellectual space,” but rather “creating a home.”

This student is not alone. Many other students are going so far as to demand that Christakis and his wife resign from their roles as master and associate master. According to theWashington Post, students were drafting a formal letter Thursday evening, calling for the removal of Christakis and her husband from their roles in Silliman.

Read about the whole thing, courtesy of Lukianoff, of the indispensable FIRE.

Make no mistake about it, this mob is the enemy of free thought, the enemy of culture, the enemy of all of us who care about the intellect and learning. They are trying to hound this man and his wife off campus simply because she voiced skepticism over the university’s administration’s attempts to manage the way adult college students costume for Halloween. Incredibly, this mob of students, in the name of “safety,” demands that Mommy and Daddy Yale’s administration protect them from having to confront any image or sight that might cause them the least distress.

If the Yale administration gives a single inch to these people, they will have disgraced themselves. Mark my words, though: these young left-wing, anti-liberal tyrants will move into elite positions in the American establishment, because Yale is a gateway to that kind of privilege. And when they do, they will exercise that power against anybody who doesn’t bow down to their radicalism.

Sooner or later, the backlash will come, and it is not going to be pleasant for the Social Justice Warriors. Ordinary people are going to get sick and tired of this Maoist bullying, and push back hard. May that day be hastened.

 

Keep It Classy, Crimson Tide

Photographed outside a fraternity house off-campus student housing in Tuscaloosa:

Leonard Fournette was in Katrina.

You won't like Leonard Fournette when he's angry. pic.twitter.com/HPpgsk1C6l

— Bill Mooneyhan, (@billmooneyhan) November 6, 2015

The LSU-Alabama game is Saturday night. It was going to be a big game anyway, but after this — which, it appears, nearly everyone in Louisiana has seen by now — it’s going to be very, very personal.

The Book Plate of Doom

Found inside my purchase on Thursday from a used book store on Chartres Street in the French Quarter:

 

Aside from the solecism (“wrung”), this is a pretty impressive sentiment, one with which I wholly concur. I hope Joe Bille parted from this book, Why Angels Fall: A Journey Through Orthodox Europe from Byzantium to Kosovo, of his own volition. I am enjoying it very much.

Our Beloved Patron

Conor Friedersdorf and Your Working Boy, paying homage to Ignatius J. Reilly outside the former D.H. Holmes, on Canal Street. We thought of Mark Levin, and communiss, and bottle-green jackets.

Photo by the Mighty, Mighty Reihan Salam, with whom we broke bread at Domenica.

Why Trump Matters

This is a problem that’s a serious tragedy on more important levels than politics, but it may explain why people like me cannot understand why Donald Trump is so popular: middle-aged white men without college educations are dying in record numbers, and they’re killing themselves. From the NYT:

Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.

That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.

The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.

“It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” wrote two Dartmouth economists, Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner, in a commentary to the Deaton-Case analysis to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Wow,” said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”

Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said.

They don’t really know why this is happening. This, below, is an important part of this story too. From the WaPo:

Deaton and Anne Case, both Princeton economists, received international media attention for the paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). But before they submitted it there, they tried to get it published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Deaton said.

“We got it back almost instantaneously. It was almost like the e-mail had bounced. We got it back within hours,” said Deaton, who was interviewed in Dublin, where he was attending a conference on the Ebola crisis and global public health sponsored by Princeton University.

Deaton and Case then tried the New England Journal of Medicine, putting their work in the form of a two-page “Perspective” that summarized the alarming trend they’d discovered in government mortality statistics. Again they were rejected.

Why do you suppose that is? Is it that elites don’t want to hear about the suffering unto death of middle-aged white men with high school educations or worse?

A lot of people in this dismal demographic are backing Donald Trump, says this Real Clear Politics analysis of his supporters:

In terms of demographics, Trump’s supporters are a bit older, less educated and earn less than the average Republican. Slightly over half are women. About half are between 45 and 64 years of age, with another 34 percent over 65 years old and less than 2 percent younger than 30. One half of his voters have a high school education or less, compared to 19 percent with a college or post-graduate degree. Slightly over a third of his supporters earn less than $50,000 per year, while 11 percent earn over $100,000 per year. Definitely not country club Republicans, but not terribly unusual either.

… [H]is support comes from across the full range of Republican identifiers but is slightly higher among those who are less well educated, earn less than $50,000 annually and are slightly older.

The death story doesn’t explain Trump, to be clear, but it gives a pretty good idea where a lot of Trump’s support comes from.

Why is this happening to this demographic cohort exclusively? Steve Sailer offers a couple of partial answers: one is the Seventies Finally Caught Up With Them; the other is this:

Perhaps painkiller overdoses, mental health declines, reported pain, disability, dropping out of the labor force, lower wages, and The Big Unmentionable (immigration) all tie together. As Hispanics flooded in, lowering wages, blue collar whites felt less motivated to stay in the labor force as they aged and their bodies got creakier. Getting on disability requires, I imagine, an ability to get doctors and other authority figures to believe your account of musculoskeletal and/or mental health disabilities. The most effective way to get other people to believe you are disabled by physical and mental pain is to believe it yourself. And if you tell the doctor your back is killing you so much you can’t work and you persuade him, he’ll likely write you a prescription for some pills.

Note this passage from the Deaton/Case paper; emphases mine:

The three numbered rows of Table 1 show that the turnaround in mortality for white non-Hispanics was driven primarily by increasing death rates for those with a high school degree or less. All-cause mortality for this group increased by 134 per 100,000 between 1999 and 2013. Those with college education less than a BA saw little change in all-cause mortality over this period; those with a BA or more education saw death rates fall by 57 per 100,000. Although all three educational groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings, and an overall increase in external cause mortality, increases were largest for those with the least education.

And note this too, while asking yourself what Republicans have done for these people lately:

Although the epidemic of pain, suicide, and drug overdoses preceded the financial crisis, ties to economic insecurity are possible. After the productivity slowdown in the early 1970s, and with widening income inequality, many of the baby-boom generation are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents. Growth in real median earnings has been slow for this group, especially those with only a high school education. However, the productivity slowdown is common to many rich countries, some of which have seen even slower growth in median earnings than the United States, yet none have had the same mortality experience (lanekenworthy.net/shared-prosperity and ref. 30). The United States has moved primarily to defined-contribution pension plans with associated stock market risk, whereas, in Europe, defined-benefit pensions are still the norm. Future financial insecurity may weigh more heavily on US workers, if they perceive stock market risk harder to manage than earnings risk, or if they have contributed inadequately to defined-contribution plans (31).

Remember a decade ago, how George W. Bush used his re-election mandate to try to privatize Social Security? Those were the days.

It’s important to note again that Deaton and Case say that nobody knows what is causing this. They offer possible economic causes. R.R. Reno at First Things offers some possible cultural causes:

The male-female difference is a fundamental, orienting reality in every culture. Having a sense of oneself as a man or woman gives us a place to stand in the world. The transgender revolution represents that latest, most dramatic stage in today’s efforts to efface the social authority of the male-female difference. Well-educated adepts know how to use today’s multicultural patois to navigate in our brave new world of officially mandated gender blindness. They can affirm the progressive orthodoxies in words, while conveying to their children in their deeds a plastic but nevertheless gender-differentiated approach to life. Meanwhile, kids and young adults from poorly educated households are deprived of a functional language to talk about what it means to be a man or woman. Without such a language, they can’t see themselves as successfully being men or women. And so they are deprived of a baseline adult achievement that come-of-age rituals in traditional cultures have always celebrated.

To a great extent, our progressive culture strips ordinary people of almost all settled roles, other than economic ones. This heightens the existential pain of the already harsh economic realities of our globalized economy, which can be very punitive to the poorly educated. Two generations ago, a working class man was often poor or nearly poor, but he could be respected in his neighborhood as a provider for his family, father to his children, law-abiding citizen, coach of a Little League team, and usher in church. The culture that made such a life possible has disintegrated, partly due to large-scale trends in our post-industrial society, but also because of a sustained and ongoing ideological assault on the basic norms for family and community. Death rates are likely to continue to rise for poor Americans. I see no signs that the war on the weak will abate.

I can hear it now: “That right-wing religious hater is blaming transgenders for working-class white people drinking and doping themselves to death!” If you think that, you run the risk of dismissing a more profound critique of the way both free-market capitalism and the permissive morality of post-Sixties America have conspired to wreak havoc on those least able to bear the burdens they impose.

But even that is only a partial explanation (though one that I, obviously, find plausible). Why is this not happening to Hispanics and African-Americans, neither of whom are getting rich, and both groups of which are also suffering from the problems of fatherless children and family disintegration? Here there might be a religious explanation, or at least a spiritual one: white people do not know how to suffer successfully.

Hear me out. Here is a link to a paper by sociologist Brad Wilcox and several colleagues that gives insight to this problem. From the abstract:

We find that religious attendance among moderately educated whites has declined relative to attendance among college-educated whites. Economic characteristics, current and past family characteristics, and attitudes toward premarital sex each explain part of this differential decline.

Religion is becoming increasingly deinstitutionalized among whites with moderate levels of education, which suggests further social marginalization of this group. Furthermore, trends in the labor force, American family life, and attitudes appear to have salient ramifications for organized religion. Sociologists of religion need to once again attend to social stratification in religious life.

The authors say “the evidence we present here suggests that the middle is dropping out of the American religious sector, much as it has dropped out of the American labor market.”

Going deeper into the paper, Wilcox et al. show that:

We then turn to a consideration of the economic, demographic, and cultural correlates of the religious disengagement of moderately educated whites. We do so from a broadly institutional perspective, recognizing both that religion is not only a social institution that supplies norms, beliefs, and rituals that pattern social behavior, or moral logics, but also an institution that depends on social and cultural structures from other institutions to sustain these moral logics (Friedland & Alford, 1991). In particular, we explore the possibility that working class disengagement from the institutions of work and marriage (Cherlin, 2009;Wilcox, 2010) are strongly associated with recent declines in religious attendance among white working class Americans. We view these two institutions as particularly important objects of inquiry because American religion has both legitimated and been bolstered by an “American Way of life” marked by stable employment and marriage over much of the last century (Edgell, 2006; Herberg, 1955). Thus, if moderately educated whites are now less likely to be stably employed, to earn a decent income, to be married with children, and to hold familistic views, they may also be less likely to feel comfortable or interested in regularly attending churches that continue to uphold conventional norms, either implicitly or explicitly (Edgell, 2006; Wilcox, 2004). We also view the institutions of work and marriage as important sources of social and normative integration that link Americans to religious institutions (Schwadel, McCarthy, & Nelsen, 2009). For these reasons, this paper relies on the GSS and NSFG to explore the links between declines in working class religiosity and patterns of employment, income, family structure, sexual behavior, and attitudes toward premarital sex.

The religious disengagement of working class whites is important for at least three reasons. First, religious institutions typically supply their members with social and civic skills, and often a worldview that motivates them to engage the political or civic spheres, that increase their civic and political participation (Putnam, 2000; Verba et al., 1995; Wuthnow, 1995). Second, religious institutions appear to foster higher levels of physical and psychological health among their members, both by providing social support and by furnishing people with a sense of meaning (Ellison, 1991; Ellison & Levin, 1998). Third, and most important for our perspective, some research suggests that least- and moderately-educated Americans are especially likely to benefit from the social support and civic skills associated with religious institutions. The non-college-educated often lack the degree of access to social networks and civic skills that the college-educated have; and religious activity can compensate for this deficit.

There follows a brief but fascinating discussion about the cultural attitudes of working-class whites toward work, self-esteem, marriage, and church life. It’s too long to quote it all here, but the bottom line is that the changes in the American economy over the past few decades have worked to alienate working-class whites from religious life because of the way the white working class connects its sense of self, and of justice, to the ability to be rewarded for hard work, being honest, playing by the rules, and delaying gratification. When this formula fails, they don’t know how to deal with it. Say the sociologists, “In brief, the declining economic position of white working class Americans may have made the bourgeois moral logic embodied in many churches both less attractive and attainable.”

What’s more, say the sociologists, white churches are strongly oriented towards the traditional family, and traditional Christian prohibitions on premarital sex. When working-class families fall apart because of divorce and/or having babies outside of wedlock, those whites feel less comfortable going to church.

Why don’t sociologists observe the same phenomenon in black and Hispanic working-class people? Because black and Hispanic Christians don’t have the same kind of religious sensibility:

Black churches, however, emphasize marriage less than white churches, relative to qualities such as shared struggle and perseverance (Cherlin, 2009; Ellison & Sherkat, 1995; Lincoln & Mamiya, 1990). For instance, when it comes to family life, they speak of parent and child, of broader networks of kin, and of the fictive kinship to be found among one’s brothers and sisters in church. It is possible, then, that African Americans could achieve the caring sense of self, even in an unfavorable economy and without benefit of marriage, and find support at church. This suggests that declines in church attendance among the moderately educated should be less for blacks than for whites.

Assessing trends over the past few decades in attendance among Hispanics is difficult because of changes in the composition of the Hispanic population. Given that issues related to immigration, discrimination, and incorporation into American society loom large for churches serving Hispanics (Figueroa Deck, 1989), we suspect that Hispanic churches are less focused on family structure and employment, and more focused on providing a sense of solidarity and practical support to their members, than are non-Hispanic white churches. Moreover, there is less class heterogeneity among Hispanics, who tend not to be college-educated or affluent; this probably affords working class Hispanics a sense of comfort in the churches they attend (Schwadel, McCarthy, & Nelsen, 2009). Thus, we would expect that employment difficulties and lower incomes would be less likely to influence the church attendance of Hispanics than non-Hispanic whites.

So, if Wilcox et al. are right, the black and Hispanic working classes are better able to weather economic adversity and family setbacks because they are more closely tied in to their churches. Their faith gives them resilience that whites more or less do not have, because of the way we whites believe. I believe that as holding to traditional Christianity begins to cost the white middle class something serious, we are going to see a mass apostasy. We whites had better get busy learning from the black and Hispanic church if we are going to make it.

Now, there is one more aspect to white working-class despair: dispossession. It does not take a sociologist to grasp that the tectonic social changes in American life since the 1960s have been at the very least disorienting to whites. The point to grasp here is not that we shouldn’t have had those changes; many of them were just and necessary, others, not so much. The point to grasp is that the experience of those changes may have been psychologically traumatic to certain whites who expected the world to work in a different way — a way that favored them.

Perhaps there is a comparison to be made with Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union — which was, of course, a vastly more severe phenomenon, but I think there may be some comparison to be made, re: a people who assumed that the world was a certain way, and woke up rudely to the fact that it was not. Add to that the fact that among elites in our culture — especially academic and media elites — white working-class people are the bungholes of the universe, and, well, here we are.