Rod Dreher's Blog, page 651

Me in Colorado Springs This Weekend

Hey, Colorado Springs, I can happily report that yesterday, my doctor cleared me to travel this weekend (a back injury forced me to cancel my North Carolina trip at the last minute), so I will be in your town Friday and Saturday for a couple of talks sponsored by the Anselm Society.

On Friday night, I’ll be talking about How Dante Can Save Your Life, at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, 7-9 pm. Details here.  Excerpt:

Following the death of his little sister and the publication of hisNew York Times bestselling memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Dreher found himself living in the small community of Starhill, Louisiana where he grew up. But instead of the fellowship he hoped to find, he discovered that fault lines within his family had deepened. Dreher spiraled into depression and a stress-related autoimmune disease. Doctors told Dreher that if he didn’t find inner peace, he would destroy his health. Soon after, he came across The Divine Comedy in a bookstore.

In the months that followed, Dante helped Dreher understand the mistakes and mistaken beliefs that had torn him down and showed him that he had the power to change his life. Dreher knows firsthand the solace and strength that can be found in Dante’s great work, and distills its wisdom for those who are lost in the dark wood of depression, struggling with failure (or success), wrestling with a crisis of faith, alienated from their families or communities, or otherwise enduring the sense of exile that is the human condition.

If you’ve read the book, I hope you’ll come anyway, because the final chapter, so to speak, had not yet been written. And it was holy and beautiful, filled with hope and resolution. Plus, I’ll be jacked up on back pain medication, and you never know, I might start speaking in tongues, or something.

On Saturday afternoon from 2 to 4 a bunch of us are getting together downtown to talk about the Benedict Option. Details here. You will be doing me a big favor if you come and share your own opinions and experiences. I’m working on a book about the Ben Op, as you know, and I genuinely benefit from learning from these discussions — and, in turn, so will readers of the book.

Do you know about the Anselm Society? You should.

Ben Carson Is A Creationist. So?

Jeff Jacoby told a liberal colleague the other day that he would not vote for Ben Carson for president, but thinks he would make an excellent Surgeon General. After all, Dr. Carson, a Seventh Day Adventist by faith, is a pediatric neurosurgeon who for over two decades ran his department at Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the best in the world. Time magazine once called Dr. Carson one of the best doctors in the country.

That wasn’t good enough for Jacoby’s liberal colleague, who wanted to know how on earth Jacoby could support a Surgeon General who is a creationist. If he rejects the science on something as fundamental as that, how can he be trusted? Jacoby answered, in part:

The best-known and most beloved surgeon general of all — C. Everett Koop — is remembered for his early leadership in fighting AIDS and for warning bluntly that smoking was harmful. Liberals admired him for putting public health before politics or ideology. Yet Koop, too, was skeptical of Darwinism. “It has been my conviction for many years that evolution is impossible,” he wrote in a 1986 letter. Like Carson, Koop also believed that Genesis should be taken at face value, not as “something like parables.” Yet those views clearly were no barrier to Koop’s nonpareil service as surgeon general.

Similarly, Carson’s decades of remarkable medical achievement should quell any suggestion that his biblical views about the development of life “in the beginning” have impeded his scholarship and skill at saving and improving lives in the present. All faiths (including dogmatic atheism) incorporate teachings that cannot be supported by mainstream science. Water into wine? Manna from heaven? Golden plates from an angel in New York? A universe that spontaneously created itself?

Read the whole thing. 

Jacoby’s last point is especially interesting. I’ve noticed over the years that very little winds up secular liberals like creationists, especially when people they would otherwise respect (like, say, a pediatric neurosurgeon) confess to taking a scientifically implausible, religiously informed view of how the universe began. I suppose it has to do with the role the Scopes monkey trial plays in our national historical narrative, but in my experience, creationist belief is kryptonite for secular liberals.

Thing is, as Jacoby points out, most of us who profess any religious faith at all — and even dogmatic atheists — believe in things that cannot be proven by science. If that were to be an insurmountable barrier to serving as Surgeon General, the current holder of that office, Dr. Vivek Murthy, would have to resign; he is a believing Hindu, and man, do they ever believe weird things. No believing Catholic or Orthodox could serve, because their strange and unscientific beliefs include the conviction that bread and wine become in some mysterious way the body and blood of God after a priest says certain words over them. All believing Christians, for that matter, believe that the infinite, eternal God entered into time and became a man, and not just a man, but a Galilean Jew whose mother was, get this, a virgin. And after they killed him, he rose from the dead and flew off to heaven.

It’s very strange, you have to admit.

Jews who profess Judaism not only believe that God exists, but they also believe (as do Christians) that He revealed himself exclusively to a tribe of desert nomads, out of all the people on earth, and chose that tribe for a special mission in history. Crazy! Believing Muslims confess that God sent an angel to a prophet praying in a cave in Arabia, and dictated a holy book to him. That really happened, according to Muslims. It might seem silly to you, but that’s what they believe.

Should no believing Jew, Muslim, or Christian ever be allowed to serve as Surgeon General because they believe things that cannot be proven scientifically? For that matter, you cannot prove scientifically that there is a purpose to human life. I have an atheist friend who is a staunch humanist, who believes that the purpose to life is to love others and to do good. She can’t explain to you why she believes that, only that she does. A Ditchkins type could demolish her in 90 seconds. But this is her faith. Though she wouldn’t call it faith, this is her faith.

“Can you regard someone’s religious creed as preposterous, yet entrust the person who is faithful to that creed with public office?” asks Jacoby. “Of course; Americans do it all the time.”

Yes, we do, because that’s how it is among us humans.Secular liberals who freak out in the presence of creationist beliefs are pretty much virtue-signaling. We use science to help us to understand the material world, and how it works, but most of us believe in something beyond the purely material, which is to say, beyond the reach of science’s ability to know. We experience life as a poem, not a syllogism.

 

Wilberforce vs. Benedict

My friends Michael Gerson and Pete Wehner have a cover piece out in the new issue of Christianity Today, in which they argue for a new model of Christian political engagement that they call “the Wilberforce Option,” after the great English Evangelical abolitionist. Excerpt:

What is needed is not a full-scale retreat, but prudence. We must adjust our angle of vision in significant ways, and to discern how best to leverage this moment rather than lament it. Rather than raging or making grudging concessions to modernity, we might take this moment to display the essential character of Christianity, one that wins people over.

We start with the practical. This model will require not the white flag of surrender, but a dose of realism. Christians will need to adjust to living in a same-sex-marriage world. This does not mean they have to endorse it. But they need to learn to live in a world where gay marriage is constitutional. Making gay marriage the hill for Christians to die on is a strategic and substantive mistake. However important the legal definition of the family, returning to the traditional conception would require reversing decades of social change, of which same sex marriage is the latest (and not last) outworking. This is a massive cultural project, not a realistic immediate goal.

They’re right about this. I wish they weren’t, but they are. They go on to say that conservative Christians will need to learn how to work with gays and those who support gay marriage. This is also true, and the pair is right to say, “this is not a form of compromise; it is the normal practice of democracy.”

More:

But if common ground is possible in some areas, political disagreements will be necessary in others, especially on issues of religious liberty. Some versions of secularism believe individuals need protection against oppressive religious institutions–such as a religious order that doesn’t provide contraceptives, or a Christian college that upholds traditional sexual standards. Yet most Americans don’t hold this view, and it cannot become our government’s view.

 

Religious liberty is vital. It’s vital not only as a core human right, but also as a way for Christians to live by their beliefs, without having to bend to the will of the state. Christians have every right to create sub-cultures in which they live out their faith – and parents can raise their children in ways that reflect their values rather than the values of dominant culture.

And a genuine pluralism is good for other faiths and the broader society.

And:

But if Christians are known primarily for defending their institutions and ideals, they will look like one aggrieved minority among many. The legal culture is changing in alarming ways – perhaps moving away from accommodating religious practice and institutions. But the face of Christianity can’t be the face of fear and resistance. Evangelicals will fail if they are mainly seen as scrambling to defend their prerogatives. This is a danger, a trap. It would mean fighting defensive battles on terrain staked out by others.

The focus of Christian social engagement is not pluralism; it is personalism. We should be known for, and distinguished by, protecting human beings, their rights and their dignity, even and especially those beyond the Christian fold.

Read the whole thing, if you can; it’s behind a paywall. Their main point is to argue for continued, vigorous Christian social engagement, despite a huge defeat on same-sex marriage.

Because Gerson & Wehner criticize the Benedict Option, CT asked me to respond to their essay. That response is here. In the 750 words the magazine gave me, I identified to major flaws in their piece. Excerpt:

First, it is naïve to believe that if only Christians stop making a big deal about homosexuality, LGBT groups and their allies will partner with us in other areas. Many people on the other side see orthodox Christians as the equivalent of straight-up white supremacists.

It’s outrageously unfair, but that’s the world we live in. As long as we hold to traditional biblical teaching on sexuality, all the winsomeness in the world won’t make them like us.

Second, I sense in Gerson and Wehner’s essay a veiled willingness to compromise on Christian sexual orthodoxy. They blame “some Christian leaders” for “associating Christianity primarily with sexual morality.” That’s true, to an extent, but the secular world, especially the media, has played a far more consequential role in this distortion.

Our news-entertainment media have for the past two decades obsessively promoted the LGBT cause. It has been the sole standard on which many outside the church judge us. Why should those who stand on the issue where all Christians stood for nearly two millennia surrender to the radical innovators?

To elaborate, what I sense from their essay — and I could be wrong about this — is that Gerson & Wehner are eager to put the issue of gay marriage behind the church, so we can get on to other things. An Evangelical woman I know put it like this in a conversation to which I was party: “When can we get past this so we can get back to preaching the Gospel?” The thing is, you can’t separate out “the Gospel” from the received body of Christian teaching, and what it means to be holy. Like it or not, chastity (the right use of sexuality) is an inseparable part of that package. True, God, in His mercy, may well grant some who failed in this area a crown in heaven, and send to eternal darkness those who were perfectly chaste but who did not love. That doesn’t give us the right to diminish the importance of upholding the Biblical standard on sexual behavior, any more than it gives us the right to diminish the importance of holding ourselves to account for greed, anger, or any other deadly sin.

The world doesn’t hate Christianity because of what it teaches on greed, though it does find our teaching largely irrelevant. It does hate Christianity because of what it teaches about lust, and despite what Gerson & Wehner want, it will become our government’s view — and there’s a good chance that it will also become the American people’s view before much longer. G&W don’t want Christians to be known “primarily for defending [our] institutions and ideals,” but it’s not clear to me that we are going to have a choice in the matter.

Like I said, I could be wrong, but my basic disagreement with my friends is because I think they are too hopeful about how accommodating mainstream culture will be of dissenting Christians. It is hard for many Christians to understand that many, many on the other side see us as no different from racists. It makes no logical sense to them, and it makes no intuitive sense to them. But that’s how it is. Ask yourself how accommodating our society is of open racists, and that’s the position orthodox Christians are in now in some places (ask Brendan Eich about this), and will be in more places before much longer.

This is a post-Christian culture. It doesn’t mean the world has come to an end, but it does mean that we need to be more realistic about where we are.

Stuff White Liberal Catholic Theologians Like

Reader Andrew W., commenting on the Thin-Skinned Theologians post, says, “Being a liberal theologian is like having a Ph.D. in Stuff White People Like.”

Regarding that claim, another reader points out the four papers that Katie Grimes, a Villanova theologian, has uploaded to Academia.edu. Let’s peruse them, shall we?

Here is Butler Interprets Aquinas: How to Speak Thomistically About Sex. The abstract:

This essay examines whether the Catholic magisterium’s use of Aquinas to condemn homosexual acts is actually Thomistic. Rather than being aligned with the magisterium, Aquinas advances a moral epistemology better illustrated by the work of philosopher Judith Butler. Deploying Butler as a means of immanent critique, I show how magisterial attempts to argue ainst lesbian and gay sex fail on their own terms. Reading Aquinas alongside Butler shows us why we need not choose between fidelity to Thomistic natural law and affirmation of lesbians and gays.

Okay. More from the paper:

I believe Aquinas has been misrepresented. Rather than being aligned with the magisterium in its recapitulation of Ratzinger, Aquinas advances a moral epistemology better illuminated by the work of philosopher Judith Butler, a scholar who at first glance seems at best irrelevant, or at worst antithetical, to the aims of Catholic theology.

That’s because Butler is not known for writing theology, but for her work arguing that gender is a performance. More:

But Butler’s capacity to allow contemporary religious scholars to use Aquinas more effectively in the pursuit of sexual truth is far from accidental. Butler’s recognition of the performative instability of sexual identity positions her to appreciate the democratically discursive and inevitably unstable character of the collective pursuit of moral truth. Depicting sexuality as a process whose revelation unfolds in history much as Aquinas believes moral truth does, Butler allows contemporary religious scholars to read Aquinas in the hermeneutic he himself established. Deploying Butler as a means of what Jeffrey Stout calls immanent critique, I show how Ratzinger’s attempt to argue Thomistically against gay and lesbian sex fails on its own terms (2009, 163). Read in light of Butler’s work, Aquinas can come out of the closet.

Et voilà, theologian Grimes has queered Aquinas, twisting the great Dominican theologian of the High Middle Ages to fit into contemporary cultural politics. Did I mention that Prof. Grimes faults Ross Douthat for “his view of Catholicism as unapologetically subject to a politically partisan narrative that has very little to do with what Catholicism really is”?

We move on to “Do the Lord Care?: Tupac Shakur as Theologian of the Crucified People.” Tupac Shakur, for those who do not know, was a very successful rapper killed in a 1996 drive-by shooting. The abstract:

The slain rapper Tupac Shakur contributes indispensably to two contemporary theologies centered around the crucified people, the theological aesthetics of liberation presented by Roberto Goizueta and the theology of the lynching tree articulated by James Cone. Placing the pioneering work of Goizueta and Cone in conversation with existing scholarship on the theological importance of Shakur’s music, I argue that Tupac crafts a theological aesthetics of liberation aimed at illuminating the injustice and Christological implications of the hypersegregated ghetto and the black mass prison.

You will recall that Prof. Grimes complained that Ross Douthat “no professional qualifications for writing on the subject” of theology. But she certifies that a rapper was a theologian — this, even though unlike Douthat, he didn’t go to church:

Others may disqualify Tupac from speaking as a theologian on account of his detachment from institutional forms of Christian faith. Against this, I maintain that Tupac’s location outside of the institutionalized church may have strengthened his prophetic abilities. As Ralph Watkins reminds us, ‘‘the fact that the prophet does not come from the institutionalized church does not obviate the need for the prophet.’’

Here’s a link to her paper “Breaking the Body of Christ: The Sacraments of Initiation in a Habitat of White Supremacy.” The abstract:

Since the racially segregated space of the United States operates as a habitat of white supremacy, the vice of white supremacy pervades the church’s corporate body and thereby permeates all of its practices, including those of baptism and the Eucharist. Rather than turning to the church’s sacraments as an antidote to the vices of a presumed external culture, this paper chronicles the way in which these very practices have been corrupted by it. The church cannot reform itself from within. In order to enable these sacraments to build the body of Christ, the church must work to dismantle regnant patterns of white supremacist racial segregation in the world.

The Villanova sage continues in the body of the paper:

Inverting the moral gaze by shining a spotlight on the white body, this article attempts to ask whites, both individually and corporately, “how does it feel to be problem?”

Grimes is appears to be white, for what it’s worth (here’s a link to her blog page, with a photo). Her paper details truly wicked historical collaboration between the institutional Catholic Church and white supremacy, but she concludes that the central sacraments of the Christian life — Baptism and the Eucharist — were defiled by that. It is hard to figure how she squares that with Catholic sacramental theology, but what do I know, I’m just a magazine writer.

Grimes says that

In reality, God cannot be truly worshiped where there is no justice and no common weal. Cavanaugh may speak the truth when he encourages Christians to work “to transform earthly affairs while resisting being conformed to the evils of the world.” But at least in the case of white supremacy, the church cannot reform itself from within.

Indeed, the vice of white supremacy entered the church’s corporate body not just when the churchwas acting in un-Catholic ways; the church acquired this vice even by being itself. Nor can the church overcome this corporate vice by clinging together more tightly. The church acquired the vicious habits of white supremacy not by losing itself in the world but even when it remained cohesively distinct from it as it did in the era of the urban Catholic parish.

Even in the opening decades of the twentieth century, when the Catholic church was its most sacramentally active and parochially unified, it enacted the corporate vice of white supremacy with great vigor. Precisely because the church both must and cannot help remaining open to the world outside of it, the world’s injustice almost always becomes the church’s. This occurs not just when the church fails to accurately perform or understand its body-making sacraments, but precisely because the church is a body. Rather than facing a choice between the pursuit of justice in the world and the preservation of ecclesial integrity, we must instead pursue justice in the world for the sake of ecclesiastical integrity.

You might be thinking, “Isn’t this the heresy of Pelagianism? I mean, she’s saying that we cannot have true worship until the world is made perfect by our efforts.” Katie Grimes says she is no heretic. She just wants the Church to ride the government’s backside until it forces white people to move:

We should not expect white Christians either to choose new racial habits or to change the racial character of the white supremacist places they inhabit. Rather than leaving Christians to their habits as Hauerwas proposes, white Christians need to be made to submit to spatial re-habituation.

Rather than distinguishing themselves from the world in order to serve and save it, white Christians need to be compelled to inhabit a world not of their making.

In particular, white Christians will be re-habituated only when they no longer possess the power to perpetuate white supremacist racial segregation in their neighborhoods and parishes. Rather than espousing a type of Pelagianism, I expose the narrow limits of white agency. White people cannot save themselves. The vice of white supremacy must be unmade by the transformative grace of Black Power, which places black life and freedom first.

Theologians need to learn to care less about how to persuade whites to do the right thing and more on what they need to be made to do. Rather than intensifying projects of moral suasion, the church ought to begin devising strategies of white corporate coercion. At stake is not just the justice of the church but its very identity as the body of Christ.

I know what some of you are thinking: “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Villanova’s theology department employs a Social Justice Warrior crackpot.” Well, let me tell you on behalf of Fr. Jim Martin, SJ, your hatey-hate is wrong, and it’s not even theology.

Do you know where we would be without liberal Catholic theologians like Katie Grimes, telling us that Aquinas was a closet case, Tupac Shakur (sample lyric: “A smokin ass nigga robbed me blind/I got a tech nine now his smokin ass is mine”) was a true theologian, and that the Church ought to commit itself to advocating for the government to forcibly move white people out of their homes and neighborhoods? Why, we would be at the mercy of nincompoop Catholic laymen like Ross Douthat, who only thinks he knows what Catholic theology is!

That group letter to the Times sure is paying rich hathos dividends …

UPDATE: Reader WhiskeyBucks nearly made me fall off my chair with this:

“Reading Aquinas alongside Butler-” You can stop right there. When Martha Nussbaum calls Judith Butler “The Professor of Parody”you know you’re dealing with the worst kind of anus-gazing, tortured gibberish that the post-modern academy has on offer. You could take a box of Crispix and “read alongside Butler” and churn out 25,000 words about how wheat-based cereal lacks the agency to presuppose its own subordination which exemplifies a temporally based vulnerability when submerged in milk, and therefore sogginess is a product of the patriarchy, and Jesus Christ was a drag queen.

Benedict Option: Danger to Democracy?

When conservative critics of the Benedict Option say that the Left and its apparatus in the State will not leave us alone to pursue it, this is what they’re talking about. The author is Nathan Pippenger, a poli sci PhD student at Berkeley. Excerpt:

What, then, would be the result of a quietist, separatist movement that could erect only ineffectual barriers against the forces of the majority culture? Probably not the comforting preservation of traditional ways of life, but an exacerbation of the alienation which motivated the separatism in the first place. And here is where all of us—or, at least, those of us not completely resigned to permanent fracture and division among Americans—have reason for concern. The success or failure of democracy depends, in large part, on the recognition of citizens that they all share a part in it. If one group of citizens feels completely, comprehensively walled off from the broader public, the reassurance that laws come from “We the People” will be cold comfort. And this problem will persist unless the group can truly make its life in isolation from the majority; unless it can educate, worship, and govern in its own corner of the world. Anything short of this is unlikely to satisfy the separatists, since the world they want to preserve will continue to face intrusions from a wider society they can’t really escape. We want to be able to justify the legitimacy of democratic government by affirming that it really does emanate, however imperfectly, from the will of the people. When a subset of the people intentionally wall themselves off, the legitimacy of the rest of us ruling over them is called into question, and their reasons for obeying us are weakened. A “Benedict option”-style retreat, then, might look like the obscure politics of an isolated minority. But in reality, it concerns all of us.

Let me repeat that: “When a subset of the people intentionally wall themselves off, the legitimacy of the rest of us ruling over them is called into question, and their reasons for obeying us are weakened.”

In other words, if we withdraw in dissent, no matter how peaceably, we cannot be left alone because we might come to question the legitimacy of the political order, and lose sight of why we ought to obey the majority.

I find this extraordinary. With the Benedict Option, I have not called on conservative Christians to become neo-Amish (though if some feel led to that, be my guest). I have called on us to confront the fact that ours is a post-Christian culture, one fast moving toward an anti-Christian culture, and that should force us to rethink our place in the public square. And it should compel us to focus much more intently on building and strengthening local forms of community, so that we can hold on to our faith and pass it on to our kids, come what may from the wider, hostile culture.

It is primarily about religion, not politics. It does, though, have political implications, because it is premised on an ebbing of faith in liberal democracy. Note that I did not say loss of faith, but ebbing; I’m in no way advocating the end of liberal democracy (what would replace it?), but I am frankly expressing my inability to believe that it can produce a good (= virtuous) society anymore. It is, as political theorist Patrick Deneen writes, unsustainable.

And so first-wave liberals are today represented by “conservatives” who stress the need for the scientific and economic mastery of nature but stop short of extending this project fully to human nature. They support nearly any utilitarian use of the world for economic ends but oppose most forms of biotechnological “enhancement.” Second-wave liberals increasingly approve nearly any technical means of liberating man from the biological imperatives of our own bodies. Today’s political debates occur largely and almost exclusively between liberals, first-wave and second-wave, neither of whom confront the fundamentally alternative understanding of human nature and the human relationship to nature that the preliberal tradition defended.

Liberalism is thus not merely a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights, as it is too often portrayed. Rather, it seeks the transformation of the entirety of human life and the world. Its two revolutions—its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature—created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity in the service of the fulfillment of the self. Liberalism rejects the ancient and preliberal conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to govern their base and hedonistic desires. This kind of liberty is a condition of self-governance of both city and soul, drawing closely together the individual cultivation and practice of virtue and the shared activities of self-legislation. Societies that understand liberty this way pursue the comprehensive formation and education of individuals and citizens in the art and virtue of self-rule.

 

Liberalism instead understands liberty as the condition in which one can act freely within the sphere that is unconstrained by positive law. Liberalism effectively remakes the world in the image of its vision of the state of nature, shaping a world in which the theory of natural human individualism becomes ever more a reality, secured through the architecture of law, politics, economics, and society. Under liberalism, human beings increasingly live in a condition of autonomy such as that first imagined by theorists of the state of nature, except that the anarchy that threatens to develop from that purportedly natural condition is controlled and suppressed through the imposition of laws and the corresponding growth of the state. With man liberated from constitutive communities (leaving only loose connections) and nature harnessed and controlled, the constructed sphere of autonomous liberty expands seemingly without limit.

Ironically, the more complete the securing of a sphere of autonomy, the more encompassing and comprehensive the state must become. Liberty, so defined, requires in the first instance liberation from all forms of associations and relationships—from the family, church, and schools to the village and neighborhood and the community broadly defined—that exerted strong control over behavior largely through informal and habituated expectations and norms.

My political hopes have become far more modest. I simply want the State to leave me and my institutions the hell alone. More Deneen:

Liberalism’s founders tended to take for granted the persistence of social norms, even as they sought to liberate individuals from those constitutive associations and the accompanying education in self-limitation that sustained these norms. In its earliest moments, the health and continuity of good families, schools, and communities was assumed, though their bases were philosophically undermined. The philosophical undermining led to the undermining of these goods in reality, as the norm-shaping authoritative institutions become tenuous with liberalism’s advance. In its advanced stage, the passive depletion has become active destruction: Remnants of associations historically charged with the cultivation of norms are increasingly seen as obstacles to autonomous liberty, and the apparatus of the state is directed toward the task of liberating individuals from any such bonds.

The well-known words of John Adams come to mind:

[W[e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Having lost our faith as a meaningful guide to public life, and with the legal regime and business customs pushing orthodox Christians increasingly to the margins of American life, why is it a surprise that these Christians may, as MacIntyre put it, “[turn] aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and [cease] to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium”? It doesn’t imply that we won’t vote — we have to vote, if only to protect our own liberties — but it does imply that the political and cultural marginalization that the secular Left has been seeking for religious conservatives for so long has been achieved. I don’t know where Nathan Pippenger’s politics are, but if he is a secular liberal, why does it not please him that my people are starting to feel so alienated from politics that we are putting our passions elsewhere?

Why is he shocked that orthodox Christians would come to see the government as hostile to us, our beliefs, our practices, and our historic liberties? Why does he require that religious conservatives affirm belief that the post-Christian liberal order is just and good? Because if not, we won’t be as eager to do what the government tells us to do? Sure sounds like it.

I’m reminded of the time in my teenage years when my dad and I argued bitterly about something, can’t remember what, and I started to walk to my room. “You sit back down there and don’t you move!” he barked. “We are going to sit together as a family and watch TV!” It was important to him to maintain the façade of one big happy family, and my withdrawing to my bedroom threatened his ideal.

Thin-Skinned Theologians

The tempest-in-a-theological-faculty-teapot over the pissy letter an (ever-growing) list of Catholic theologians are sending to The New York Times to complain about the traitor-to-his-class Ross Douthat is most revealing for what it says about the rank intolerance of the Catholic academic left, and the fragility of theologians, who fall to pieces in the face of the tiniest microaggression. Note well that this conniption fit over whether or not Douthat called Massimo Faggioli a “heretic” is about an exchange that happened not on the pages of the Times, but in a subtweet. Here is a link to the entire thread whence this emerged. It started like this:

When I hear the word ‘heretics’ referred to the bishops and theologians at #Synod, I reach for my Denzinger #enough #basta #genug #çasuffit

— Massimo Faggioli (@MassimoFaggioli) October 23, 2015

“Denzinger” is a standard, comprehensive reference work of Catholic dogma. Faggioli and Douthat went back and forth a few rounds, and Faggioli insinuated that Douthat was advocating a “fundamentalist” reading of Denzinger. Then:

@MassimoFaggioli It’s not fundamentalism to note that Kasper’s proposal takes a view of marriage that the church has consistently rejected. — Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) October 23, 2015

@MassimoFaggioli And if you take a view the church has consistently rejected, you don’t get to whine when the “h” word comes up.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) October 23, 2015

Later:

Own your heresy. — Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) October 23, 2015

That’s it. That’s what the entire blow-up is about. Well, that, as well as Douthat’s October 18 column, titled, “The Plot to Change Catholicism,” in which he outlined what was clearly Pope Francis’s orchestrations to get a certain outcome at the Synod. Douthat opposed that move, so he called it a “plot”; a more neutral word would have been “plan,” but then again, if you are a Catholic with the theological convictions of Ross Douthat, it certainly is a plot. Moreover, from the column:

And a change of doctrine is what conservative Catholics, quite reasonably, believe that the communion proposal favored by Francis essentially implies.

There’s probably a fascinating secular political science tome to be written on how the combination of absolute and absolutely-limited power shapes the papal office. In such a book, Francis’s recent maneuvers would deserve a chapter, because he’s clearly looking for a mechanism that would let him exercise his powers without undercutting his authority.

The key to this search has been the synods, which have no official doctrinal role but which can project an image of ecclesiastical consensus. So a strong synodal statement endorsing communion for the remarried as a merely “pastoral” change, not a doctrinal alteration, would make Francis’s task far easier.

Unfortunately such a statement has proven difficult to extract — because the ranks of Catholic bishops include so many Benedict XVI and John Paul II-appointed conservatives, and also because the “pastoral” argument is basically just rubbish. The church’s teaching that marriage is indissoluble has already been pushed close to the breaking point by this pope’s new expedited annulment process; going all the way to communion without annulment would just break it.

So to overcome resistance from bishops who grasp this obvious point, first last year’s synod and now this one have been, to borrow from the Vatican journalist Edward Pentin’s recent investigative book, “rigged” by the papal-appointed organizers in favor of the pope’s preferred outcome.

“Heresy” is holding an opinion contrary to settled doctrine. Douthat, like many conservative Catholics, including most of the bishops at the Synod, believes that the Kasper proposal favored by Francis and by liberal theologians like Massimo Faggioli amounted to heresy. They could be wrong about that, but there is nothing at all wrong with saying so if they believe it to be true — and in fact, if they believe it to be true, they have a strong obligation to say so in the context of a Synod. If we were talking about law, not theology, we would be debating whether or not a proposal was unconstitutional. What Douthat apparently was doing in that Twitter subthread with Faggioli is to pin him down on his doublespeak, and to compel him to admit that a position that embraces something the Church has consistently rejected is what theologians call … heresy, a word that has substantive meaning in Christian history. That’s what the great Ecumenical Councils were called to define!

In 2012, Douthat wrote an entire book saying that America is a nation of Christian heretics. His point is that we, as a whole, have drifted far from anything that resembles orthodox Christianity, as defined by the historical councils. This is as true of the Right as of the Left, he said — and it matters. One of the book’s chief arguments is that the failure of Christian institutions, both Catholic and Protestant, to hold the line on orthodoxy has led to the degeneration of Christianity into a pale imitation of itself as Christians understood it for centuries. This is no small thing. As Douthat wrote in Bad Religion:

A sign of this weakness is the extent to which the very terms orthodoxy and heresy have become controversial in today’s religious conversation — either dismissed as anachronisms, or shunned for their historical associations with bigotry and persecution. In the modern age, there’s an assumption that theological debates are really just struggles for power, that the lines between heresy and orthodoxy are inherently arbitrary, and that religious belief is too fluid and complicated to fit any sort of binary interpretation.

These assumptions aren’t entirely wrong. Any theory of Christianity, my own included, has to allow that the line between orthodox and heretical beliefs often will be apparent more in theory than in practice, and clearer in hindsight than in the heat of controversy and debate. The definition of heresy proposed by Alister McGrath is a useful one: A Christian heresy is “best seen as a form of Christian belief that, more by accident than design, ultimately ends up subverting, destabilizing, or even destroying the core of Christian faith.”

There is a very good reason that the Church has always been vigilant against heresy. There is nothing wrong with Douthat identifying a theological position advanced in public by a theologian as “heresy,” any more than there is nothing wrong with a newspaper columnist opining that a legal position advanced in public by a law professor as “unconstitutional.” It is a serious charge because heresy is very serious business in Church matters, especially at the Synodal level. The only real question is whether or not the accusation is true. These theologians raising a ruckus about the use of the word “heresy” are trying to discredit Douthat for using a perfectly good word and concept that has actual meaning in the world of the Church.

How do you get to be an academic theologian, yet go to pieces when a newspaper columnist says on a Twitter subthread that a position you hold is heresy — a position, by the way, that seems to be the position of a majority of the Synod fathers? Are Catholic theological faculties really that thin-skinned? Villanova theologian Katie Grimes, who lists her favorite theologian as “Tupac Shakur,” explains why she signed the anti-Douthat letter on her way to the fainting couch. Excerpts:

More than many other figures who misrepresent or oversimplify Catholic theology in the mainstream media, Mr. Douthat has tended to portray himself as one who recites Catholic teaching rather than one who interprets it, especially over the course of the past few weeks. This alone I take issue with.

Translation: he routinely writes things that I disagree with. Otherwise, what could that possibly mean? What is the difference between “reciting” Catholic teaching and interpreting it? More:

When [the Times] wished to employ an editorialist about the economy, it selected a Nobel Prize winning professor.  When the New York Times publishes articles about global warming, they trust the judgments of “credentialed” scientists.  One wonders why the New York Times does not extend to the discipline of theology the same respect?  In other words, while one does not need a PhD to perceive and to live God’s truth, one does need some sort of systematic training to pontificate (pun intended) about questions of church history and liturgical, moral, and systematic theology.  These can be found outside of the theological academy, but they must be found somewhere.

Oh, please. This is her sorry/notsorry over the credentialism thing. I’m sure Katie Grimes has somewhere on her hard drive letters to the editor complaining about all the columns that liberal lay Catholics Maureen Dowd and Frank Bruni have written over the years on theological matters, in which they have torn into the Church with far, far less care and nuance than Douthat takes every time he writes about Church matters. The Times does employ economist Paul Krugman to write about economics, though he ranges beyond that often, and it employs Tom Friedman to write about foreign policy. Its other columnists are all generalists. This is how newspapers work. Again, this is not about magna cum laude Harvard graduate Ross Douthat’s credentials; it’s about his holding opinions contrary to what liberal Catholic theologians wish to believe.

Prof. Grimes ends her piece delightfully:

Let’s also not forget that Mr. Douthat’s position owes in no small part to the credentials of race and gender that he has accumulated but not earned. We take white men much more seriously than we take others, even when they say very silly things.

Let’s also not forget that argumentum ad hominem is a logical fallacy. She’s throwing whatever she can at Douthat and trying to make it stick. These liberals are making fools of themselves.

A non-Catholic friend who is watching all this e-mails to say:

This brings us to CS Lewis and the concept of The Inner Ring, which he saw in its most advanced form among Oxford dons:

http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php

And a sample from CSL:

There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline. And if you come back to the same Divisional Headquarters, or Brigade Headquarters, or the same regiment or even the same company, after six weeks’ absence, you may find this secondary hierarchy quite altered.

There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may be called “You and Tony and me.” When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself “we.” When it has to be expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself “all the sensible people at this place.” From outside, if you have despaired of getting into it, you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or “The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness.

There is snobbery, but that is not the essence of this. CSL didn’t think Inner Rings were automatically bad, but they were unavoidable.

Ross D is threatening because he is part of a cultural inner ring (NYT) that ordinarily speaks the gospel to the Spirit of Vatican II inner ring, the church of progression of doctrine. Now he is speaking heresy by using the word, or the concept, of heresy.

Precisely. The pages of the Times is supposed to be their territory. And there is Ross Douthat, Times columnist, spouting … heresy. That’s one thing they cannot abide. So when Frank Bruni — liberal, gay, Catholic, untrained in theology — publishes columns that advance opinions about Church doctrine that are squarely opposed to orthodox Catholic teaching (see here, here, and here, for example), these theologians do not go into a swivet about the Times lowering its standards, as they did over Douthat. Because they no doubt agree with Bruni, or at least find his commentary to be within the range of what is acceptable. But let Douthat offer the opinion in his column that Pope Francis and his allies in Rome are trying to change something that cannot be changed without doing grave damage to the Church, and let him identify that theological position in a sub-Tweet as “heresy,” and suddenly it’s the bloody Diet of Worms.

So, we are to conclude that for liberal Catholic theologians and their fellow travelers in the clergy and Catholic press, “heresy” is a trigger word. St. Irenaeus would have reduced this lot to gibbering spasms with a side glance. This whole episode illustrates the truth of Douthat’s claim in Bad Religion:

That’s because America’s problem isn’t too much religion, or too little of it. It’s bad religion: the slow motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place. Since the 1960s, the institutions that sustained orthodox Christian belief — Catholic and Protestant alike — have entered a state of near-terminal decline. The churches with the strongest connection to the Christian past have lost members, money, and authority; the elite that was once at least sympathetic to Christian ideas has become hostile or indifferent; and the culture as a whole has turned its back on many of the faith’s precepts and demands.

To the extent which the institutions represented by the signatories to the Anti-Douthat Letter cannot withstand a journalist identifying a teaching as heretical, and the vigorous public discussion of theology that such a declaration ought to spark, they are part of the near-terminal decline. It is a sign to anyone thinking of taking up theological studies on those particular faculties of the kind of intolerant (of Catholic orthodoxy) atmosphere of inquiry they are likely to find there. They write not from a position of strength, but of weakness. I take it as a sign that Douthat hit his mark, and hit it hard. When Catholic theologians cannot be trusted to be guardians of Catholic orthodoxy, somebody’s got to take a stand to protect the Church. Might as well be a dirty scribe.

UPDATE: The hypocrisy, it burns:

“[T]he problem with his article and other recent statements is his view of Catholicism as unapologetically subject to a politically partisan narrative that has very little to do with what Catholicism really is.” — John O’Malley, SJ, et alia, 10.26/15.

“We have a Vatican II president. Barack Obama, I am sure, does not think of himself in those terms, but when I heard his speech at Grant Park in Chicago the night he was elected, and more recently his commencement address at Notre Dame, that is what immediately struck me. On those occasions he embodied and professed in his public persona the spirit of the council. … I often hear laments that the spirit of Vatican II is dead in the church. Is it not ironic that not a bishop but the President of the United States should today be the most effective spokesperson for that spirit?” — John O’Malley, SJ, 5/25/09

UPDATE.2: Fr. James Martin, SJ, is grieved by the hatey-hatey-hate-hate, and more:

In response to this contretemps, in which my words have been twisted, and commentators have held me up for contempt, I have received hundreds of hateful tweets.  And this is where commentators who use these tactics simply egg people on, fanning more and more hate.  And if they know it, then they should stop.  If they don’t know it, they do now.  It’s a participation in sin.

So for example, Mr. Rod Dreher posted a photo of a blurb that I did for Mr. Douthat’s last book, as if that were proof of something deceitful.  Yes, I liked Mr. Douthat’s last book.  So much so that I offered a generous blurb.  And, no, I don’t like what he’s writing today.  People change their minds.  Is that really so difficult to comprehend?   But rather than giving someone the benefit of the doubt, my sincere praise for Mr. Douthat’s book was held up as evidence of my deceit.   And if you don’t think that leads to more hatred, read the comments below.

Oh, come on. It wasn’t held up as evidence of your “deceit,” only your hypocrisy. You associated yourself with a letter that denounced Douthat for “accusing other members of the Catholic Church of heresy” — but you warmly endorsed a Douthat book that’s all about identifying contemporary heresy among Catholics and other Christians (subtitle: “How We Became a Nation of Heretics”). You don’t object to Douthat calling others, even other Catholics, heretics — unless they are your friends and allies, it appears.

More from Fr. Martin:

But they and others–who are far more culpable–have engaged in enough of that kind of uncharitable behavior to have fostered an atmosphere of hate and mistrust in our church. Instead of Thomas Merton’s famous “Mercy within mercy within mercy” we get “Hate piled on hate piled on hate.”

Invective.  Disdain.  Contempt.  Attacks.  Insinuations.  And hate.  An endless river of hate that is the result of these kinds of articles and essays and speeches and tweets.

Hoo boy. 

I am grateful for this post by Fr. Martin, because it shows me so clearly what respectful disagreement unsullied by mean-spirited invective and ad hominem comments looks like. Verily, a model for us all.

Hatey-hatey-hate-hate! Corky St. Clair, SJ, weighs in on Fr. Martin’s side.

 

The View From Catholic Schools

In a way, I’m glad for the letter asking the Magisterium New York Times to put Ross Douthat in the Index of Prohibited Writers. That missive, signed or otherwise publicly supported by members of the liberal Catholic establishment, shows their hand. And it shows the nature of the battle that the Catholic Church is engaged with itself. I talked by phone today to a prominent Catholic academic who had reached out to me over e-mail, then later told me a story about his interaction with this bunch, including one signer of the Douthat letter.

“You have no idea what a bunch of fascists these people really are,” he said, of progressive Catholic academicians, then told a story of a situation he witnessed not long ago. I can’t give the details here, to respect his privacy and the privacy of others involved, but he said the experience revealed to him the degree to which many of these progressive Catholics in academia will sabotage fidelity to the Church and the character their own institutions for the sake of their ideological vision. Outsiders — parents, donors, and others — often don’t understand what’s going on, because the progressives cloak their actions behind anesthetizing rhetoric. The event taught my interlocutor that these people do not play: their rhetoric (e.g., the Douthat letter) cloaks the face that they mean business.

Along those lines, a reader of this blog, on another thread, wrote:

I was in a Catholic college seminary many years ago, but I think many of these points are still valid:

I lost my faith in Theology classes. Scripture was presented as prescientific myth and fable. Deconstructive Theory applied to theology was very much in vogue. My children, who went to a Catholic high school, got a lot of the same deconstructive analysis of scripture. They view the faith as purely as myth and fable and practice nothing now. The teachers who were most destructive to their faith were priests and sisters who spent time talking about the historical Jesus, Q, and whether miracles really happened. One teacher tried to teach lectio divina but handed out complex philosophical works and expected college level analysis of the work. Good preparation for college but not lectio divina.

The traditional morality of the Church in the seminary was not taught outside of the lens that it is oppressive psychologically to all people, but especially oppressive to women and gay men and women. The book I read in my morality class was Human Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought.

Prayer was very didactic and logical. Things like devotions (holy hours, the rosary, benediction) were discouraged. They were things only ignorant country people did. As recently as five years ago during a sermon my mother’s pastor mocked people who say the rosary and light candles in front of statues.

Treating my faith academically only killed it. It only began to thrive again after I left the seminary and got back to my backward county ways: saying the rosary, going to confession, and reading some of the old devotional material that was laughed out of the seminary.

My experience with many priests is that they are ashamed of orthodoxy and traditional piety. They undercut it but fail to replace it with anything except pop psychology and social action. I guess I’m saying that many priests seem to be Moral Therapeutic Deists–and that they do not want to see orthodox Christianity survive.

I was not able to hear his entire Erasmus Lecture on Monday night because of a poor Internet connection, but I did hear Ross Douthat say that one of the faults of conservative Catholics (like him) is that they underestimated the resilience of Catholic dissenters within the institutions of establishment Catholicism. Well, now they know.

Here is a very powerful piece by a Catholic theologian who taught at the Jesuit-run Loyola High School in Chicago. His name is Elliot Milco. Excerpts:

Like many Jesuit institutions nowadays, Loyola is a bit ashamed of its Catholic roots.  When the term “Catholic” pops up in official correspondence, it is usually prefaced by “Jesuit” or “Ignatian”, as if Ignatian Catholic were a distinct religious identity to which the school subscribed.  This subtle distinction is amply internalized by the student body.  Students periodically refer to themselves as “Jesuit”; I have even heard it used in contrast to “Catholic” as an expression of deprecation for the Church.

The Ignatian ideals of the school are informed by the mission of social justice, which the Society of Jesus embraced following the Second Vatican Council.  Superior General Pedro Arrupe is frequently invoked, as are his catchphrases “educating for justice” and “men and women for others”.

… The spiritual identity of the place is captured by the word Experience.  The school’s “Chapel of the Sacred Heart” (a dedication few people are aware of, as it is totally devoid of iconography related to the Sacred Heart) inspires slightly less solemnity than an airport chapel.  The tabernacle is hidden in a back corner, where awareness of it will not trouble the relaxed conviviality of the space.  For the most part, students only enter this place for “Gesu Chapel Services”, in which episodes from the life of Ignatius of Loyola are used to lead them to reflect on their own experiences and struggles.  Mass is offered daily, but few students attend.  The atmosphere fits the ideal of the liturgical movement: the president of the assembly leads a dialogical reflection on the experiences of the community and the call of the Gospel.

If you ask a Loyola student what the Gospel is about, they are likely to answer “service”.  If you ask them what prayer is about, they are likely to tell you “reflecting on your experiences”.  Service and self-awareness make up the heart of Ignatian Catholicism.  In the theology classroom, these two themes predominate.  Other, more doctrinal strains occasionally enter and fade, but from the first semester “Sacramental Journeys”, to the senior elective “Justice Seminar”, theology courses are centered on coming to terms with one’s own narrative, being authentic, and seeing how Christian stories of justice, solidarity, community and leadership offer valuable tools in these tasks.

More:

From 2003 to 2007 I was a student at Loyola Academy.  I experienced the school as an evangelical protestant, and it left me with a very cynical understanding of what Catholicism is about.  Catholicism, I would have said in 2007, is an old religion that has recently tried to modernize, and done a bad job of it.Catholics do not have any special respect for Scripture.  In order not to have to say that the Bible is a bunch of fables, they warp their understanding of “truth” into something relativistic and experiential. Throughout my years there, I saw atheist classmates repeatedly praised by religion teachers as being more “advanced” than the rest of us, which led me to question whether my teachers really believed in anything.  Catholicism, I thought, was vague, overly political, and sentimental.  It was a spiritualization of socialist politics that had collapsed into all-inclusive formlessness.

Milco ended up converting to Catholicism, obtaining a theology degree, and returning to Loyola to teach theology. More:

To this day, I’m not sure how I got the job.  They had a last minute opening, and I was familiar enough with Ignatian jargon to make a good impression in the interviews.  My first day at work with the department, I was subjected to a conversation about the future of Catholicism.  The consensus among my co-workers was that the hierarchical, institutional Church needed to go, and would eventually fall apart.  They thought institutional collapse would liberate the Church and enable it to become something new, something better suited to meet the needs of the age.

I was never sure to what extent the department saw through me.  I’m not very good at dissembling, though I held my tongue and generally avoided confrontation.  What I experienced in most of my colleagues there was a deep loathing for many of the fundamentals of the Catholic Faith: the hierarchy, tradition, Catholic morals, the idea of doctrinal orthodoxy, the sacraments, the truth of the Gospel—even, in one case, the person of Christ.  Day after day, I quietly witnessed conversations in which religious were mocked for wearing habits, the Catechism reviled, proponents of chastity lambasted, the virgin birth casually rejected, and Christ displaced from the Gospel.  I was given syllabi for courses in which I was required to teach the primacy of individual conscience over Magisterial teaching, explain that grace is “God’s ubiquitously offered gift of self”, and direct students to adopt a “realized eschatology” in which heaven is seen as nothing more than an aspect of the present life.

All of this was deeply scandalous to me, and upsetting when I thought of the spiritual corruption that awaited my students after they left my classroom.  I laboriously reframed all the “Ignatian” spiritualistic nonsense in terms of actual Catholic doctrine, and tried to make sure that all of my students had at least a basic grasp of the Gospel.

Now, says Milco, the Jesuit pope has given Chicago a liberal archbishop, Blase Cupich, who is perfectly in tune with the spirit of Loyola High. And this leads The Paraphasic to his conclusion about conservative Catholics who insist that “Everything Is Fine.”

“These people do not have to stand before hundreds of children who are already mostly committed to the corruption of the present age, and hear the words of the Supreme Pontiff quoted as evidence against the teachings of Christ,” writes The Paraphasic. And:

How easy it must be to stand by “Everything is Fine”, when the life of the Church is an abstraction, and not dozens of real faces one has to see and attempt to guide day after day.  How comforting it must be to say “Things have been this bad before!” when the corruption of the times is thought of generally and not with respect to a particular person’s spiritual development and eternal destiny, which is being visibly impacted for the worse by the scandalous vagueness of those in authority.  With such an easy frame of mind at stake, who can blame these Catholics for defending the comfortable abstraction against the doomsayers and cranks?

Read the whole thing. The stakes are very high here. Faithful Catholics like these teachers and parents are facing a determined enemy.

 

Heretic-Hunting In Context

I agree with this letter, whose lead signer is the dean of American Catholic historians. Heresy is a grave charge. pic.twitter.com/5pjEkaSRMh

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) October 27, 2015

But on the back cover of the 2012 hardback edition of Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics:

Hmmm. Talking about heresy and heretics is good, unless the spotlight turns on one’s own favored parties, in which case it is a grave matter requiring remonstration with the formerly approved heretic-discusser’s employer. Why was Ross Douthat considered by Fr. Martin qualified (“thoughtful, articulate … with an impressive command of both history and contemporary social trends”) to write about heresy in 2012, but not in 2015. What changed?

Faith & the Future of Conservatism

Damon Linker has an interesting piece up, asking “What Defines Conservatism Today?”. He writes:

To grasp what is most distinctive about conservatism, you need to dig deeper — and listen in the right places. One such place is the barber shop near my house in suburban Philadelphia. It’s a very old-fashioned business, from a world before discount haircut chains and high-end salons and day spas. Just a bunch of men cutting the hair of other men. At 46, I’m on the young end of the clientele. I usually say nothing and just listen to the conversations going on around me. They often focus on politics, and the prevailing ideology is conservatism. But what kind?

Last week, one customer made the following declaration to his barber, who nodded along in agreement: “You know, at least Trump and Carson and Cruz — they get it. Kids today think everyone on the playground deserves a medal. Parents think every kid should get an A. Their feelings are so precious. Life isn’t like that. You’ve gotta work your ass off, and then you’ll succeed. And if you don’t, you’re gonna fail, and that’s the way it should be. All this babying, it’s gotta stop. If not, the whole damn country’s gonna end up going down the tubes.”

That is the moral-ideological core of conservatism today. It presumes that life is a competition or race, that people are unequal in talent, drive, and ambition, and that those who end up on top deserve their victory and rewards — and those who come out on the bottom deserve their failure and hardships. Any attempt to overturn or even mitigate this moral order — whether through government regulation or changes in habits or assumptions in school or on the playground — amounts to an offense against justice itself.

I think Linker is on to something here, though to be honest, I would have to think through his column before I could say I agreed with it. The piece did make me ask myself what defines conservatism today — not the conservatism of the books we read, but actual conservatism as it is lived out in barbershops and other places. As longtime readers know, I have been drifting away from political conservatism for a few years now. It’s not that I think politics are unimportant, but rather that I do not see that our politics, as they are currently constituted, are capable of answering our deepest problems.

When I see what is called conservatism in America today, the question that keeps coming to mind is, “What does it seek to conserve?” It seems more and more that it defines itself mostly by saying “no” to whatever liberals want (that, and saying yes to most of what business wants, except on immigration). And hey, that is an important function! But it is not a sufficient politics, at least not one sufficient to our needs.

Russell Kirk has said that all political problems are, at bottom, religious and moral problems. What did he mean? That we can only pursue the ordering of our collective life, which is the purpose of politics, if we have a sense of the Good, that is, of an end to which our collective life must be ordered. He has written:

“The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.”

Does that sound like any kind of political conservatism you recognize? It doesn’t even sound like the political conservatism espoused by prominent Republican-Party-At-Prayer figures on the Religious Right.

In recent years, have become far more interested in religion and culture, not so much out of personal piety, but primarily because I share Kirk’s view. If we are to have any chance at restoring the polis, we are first going to have to restore the ekklesia. This is going to take a long, long time.

An interview Modern Farmer magazine recently did with Wendell Berry got me to thinking about the polis and the ekklesia. Check this out:

MF: What should a modern farmer be instead?

WB: A farmer who has understood the dependence of agriculture on nature. The responsible farmer would not own more land than he or she could know well and pay close attention to and care for properly. Farming has to do with everything. We can’t reduce it to a transaction between a technician and a machine.

A diversified farm of reasonable size—100 to 200 acres of good land here—to farm it well is to solve structural problems of the same nature as a novelist encounters. You have to have a spatial structure, the layout of the fields and so on, and a temporal structure that determines what comes first, what next, and so on. Such problems must be addressed by a good farmer on a good farm every day.

MF: How can you tell a good farm?

WB: The looks of it are satisfying. A good farm is recognized as good partly by its beauty: the presence of trees, grass, good livestock on the pastures. If you go up into Holmes County, Ohio, where the Amish are thriving on farms of 80 to 125 acres, you would be impressed by the flowers in the dooryards, the beautifully kept kitchen gardens, the lawns, the birdhouses, the beehives.

More Berry:

The old way of neighborly work-swapping here involved much talk. Neighbors worked together, a matter of utmost practicality, with a needed economic result, but the day’s work was also a social occasion. Is this a “spiritual” connection between neighbors, and between the neighborhood and its land? I suppose so, but only by being also a connection that is practical, economic, social, and pleasant. And affectionate.

That whole thing of looking somebody straight in the eye and saying something—my goodness. “I love you,” right into somebody’s face, right into their eyes, what a fine thing. Who would want to miss it?

 

Note this line: “The responsible farmer would not own more land than he or she could know well and pay close attention to and care for properly.” In the same way, the late Archbishop Dmitri of Dallas believed that a church could not do what a church is supposed to do if it grew beyond a certain size. It ought to become two congregations.

A half-formed thought: learning how to be a proper local church, in the sense that Wendell Berry meant about the farm, and Archbishop Dmitri meant about the local congregation, is a prerequisite to learning how to be political in the best sense of the term. Learning how to order our own individual lives, and our common life, around the common good, as revealed to us in Scripture and Tradition.

What I’m getting at is groping our way to a more organic understanding of society, and the polity, an understanding in which liberty is ordered by a shared sense of the Good, lived out in community. At this point, all I expect out of the Republican Party is that it fight to protect the space between the State and mediating institutions (churches, schools, and the like), so that we can rediscover and reinstate what has been lost to us in modernity.

Berry says, of farming: “We can’t reduce it to a transaction between a technician and a machine.” The same is true of the life of the polis, and of the life of the ekklesia. (If your local church is little more than a Sacrament Factory, you’ve got big problems.) A true conservatism grasps that, and seeks to reclaim the older understanding, and to re-integrate it into our postmodern lives. This quote from Russell Kirk perfectly encapsulates my own conservatism:

“I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.”

All hail the Battered Gargoyle conservatives, upon whom I suspect much more depends than it now appears, even to us.

The Wonder-Working Laurus

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

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

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

Laurus is the life of a saint, though it doesn’t start out that way. The title character is an orphan named Arseny, taken in by his grandfather after his parents die in the plague. The time is the 15th century, and the place is rural Russia. Grandfather Christofer is a doctor, which is to say, an expert herbalist. He teaches young Arseny all his healing wisdom. When he dies, Arseny takes over his grandfather’s calling. Something terrible happens, a trauma for which Arseny blames himself. Thus begins his life’s journey seeking redemption, a sojourn which will take him through Europe, to Jerusalem, and back again. Though the life of Arseny is, obviously, extremely unlike our own, Vodolazkin presents it as a pilgrimage, both literally and figuratively, and encourages the reader to see his own life as a pilgrimage toward God. This passage gets to the Orthodox heart of Laurus. In it, Arseny has reached a holy place on pilgrimage — I’m deliberately obscuring it so as not to commit spoilers — and is praying; the lack of quotation marks are in the original text:

And so, O Savior, give me at least some sign that I may know my path has not veered into madness, so I may, with that knowledge, walk the most difficult road, walk as long as need be and no longer feel weariness.

What sign do you want and what knowledge? asked an elder standing [nearby]. Do you not know that any journey harbors danger within itself? Any journey — and if you do not acknowledge this, then why move? So you say faith is not enough for you and you want knowledge, too. But knowledge does not involve spiritual effort; knowledge is obvious. Faith assumes effort. Knowledge is repose and faith is motion.

But were the venerable not aspiring for the harmony of repose? asked Arseny.

They took the route of faith, answered the elder. And their faith was so strong it turned into knowledge.

Arseny says he wants to know the general direction of his journey, especially the part that concerns him and the person he hurt early in his life.

But is not Christ a general direction? asked the elder. What other kind of direction do you seek? And how do you even understand the journey anyway? As the vast expanses you left behind? You made it to [here] with your questions, though you could have asked them [in your local monastery]. I am not saying wandering is useless: there is a point to it. Do not become like your beloved Alexander [the Great] who had a journey but had no goal. And do not be enamored of excessive horizontal motion.

Then what should I be enamored of? asked Arseny.

Vertical motion, answered the elder, pointing above.

In the center of the church’s cupola there gaped a round, black opening reserved for the sky and stars. Stars were visible but they were fading from sight. Arseny understood day was breaking.

This short interview with Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and an enthusiastic reader of Dostoevsky, helped me to understand what’s going on in Laurus. Excerpts:

LC For those of us steeped in Russian culture, the relationship between literature and religious thought always seemed very inspiring, but it’s exotic and strange from a British viewpoint. How would you describe it?

RW The key for me is the concept of “personalism”—a fascination with the unfathomable in each person. Russian personalism comprises a sharp reaction against collectivism, which, as we know, is odd given the dominance of collectivist tendencies in Russian history. But there’s a tension there. There’s a wonderful expression of personalism in Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, when Yuri Zhivago speaks of a time when “There will be no spare people any more. Everyone counts.”

LC There’s also a long-standing tension with western individualism in Russian personalism, isn’t there?

RW Personalism creates a kind of way through to community and freedom at the heart of human life. It doesn’t set individual dignity and integrity against anything. Dostoevsky dismisses western individualism as “wills asserting themselves against reality, as opposed to finding the way through from personal freedom to the freedom of God.”

LC Can we unpack that? It seems important, but the language can be offputting for contemporary readers.

RW Dostoevsky and some of his followers would say ethics is not about good and evil; it’s about truth and falsehood, reality and illusion. The right way to live doesn’t amount to a series of approved actions. It’s about living in recognition of reality.

LC I like this idea of a true reality beaming its message out from Dostoevsky’s great novels, but on the face of it it’s so airy-fairily metaphysical I wonder whether we can persuade many people today to buy it.

RW Reality is an underlying conviction of harmony. The sense that there is a unity to human experience, that somewhere every river runs into the same sea.

More:

RW Dostoevsky famously said: “If there’s no God, then everything is permitted.” It’s a view the west might consider more often. Dostoevsky’s not saying that if there’s no God then no one’s watching us and we can do what we like. He’s really asking: what’s the rationale for living this way and not otherwise? If there’s no God, then there’s no shape to our lives. Our behaviour needs to be in tune with something. If there’s no divine tune, how do you know where to go, what to do? To believe in God is not a business of rewards, but an ability to make sense of things.

LC And this ability can’t come from our experience of love and art, say?

RW How do you see to it that one thousand flowers bloom and not one thousand weeds? The problem is one of the irreduceable divergence of moral ideals.

 

This is what Vodolazkin embodies in his novel: the quest of Arseny to harmonize his life with reality, which cannot be other than giving over his personal freedom for freedom in God. One more thing from the interview:

RW: … Third, and here I would go back to Dostoevsky, the creative potential of every person is an abyss of risk and danger. In the Russian tradition, human beings are regarded as mysterious and impenetrable, so you have to govern with a rod of iron—otherwise you don’t know what they might do.

LC This is the heart of one’s equivocal admiration for the Russian soul, isn’t it? A world that has that sense of individual spiritual depth and mystery and power set against a completely unworkable political reality. What do you think the west today might take out of the Russian tradition?

RW For most of us it’s a question of what authority we are prepared to recognise, and I think authority often comes from something endured, either by ourselves or someone else. Think of Nelson Mandela. Think also of Gee Walker, the mother of the murdered Liverpool teenager Anthony, who forgave her son’s killers. Suffering confers a certain authority. We learn from it. Dostoevsky is often accused of masochism. But he’s not saying suffering is good for you. He’s saying suffering is how you are likely to learn. Don’t be frightened when it happens to you.

This is Laurus. The suffering of a wanderer in plague-haunted Russia is very different from anything we have to deal with, but suffering itself — that’s universal. The way Arseny deals with it, seeks God’s will in it, and measures his own spiritual progress by it, may strike the contemporary Western Christian with the force of revelation. That said, the astonishing final act of the novel, and its unforgettable final lines, showcase the “mysterious and impenetrable” quality of human nature, and its tragic sense.

On a number of occasions reading Laurus, I thought about how much it reminded me of Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially the vision of harmony Dante shows us in Paradiso, which, as you know, was written in the High Middle Ages, and shares with Orthodoxy a view of the world as kosmos, as ordered by God, and our task as Christians to unite ourselves to this divine harmony, which is Love. Laurus shows us what that feels like in the life of an extraordinary peasant pilgrim long ago and far away.

In the end, Laurus  is a saint’s life, though it doesn’t read as you think a hagiography would. As Williams would say, this is not a book about good and evil, but about what is real and eternal and what is false and temporal. It is hard, therefore, to place within a familiar Western Christian framework. But that is what is so liberating about it. It calls to mind Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, in that it embodies the great mystery and drama of holiness, makes it tangible to us, while at the same time revealing its transcendent character. That is no small accomplishment in our time and place.

Vodolazkin is himself a kind of wonder-worker, and Laurus is without a doubt one of the most moving and mysterious books you will read in this or any other year. The world of its characters is spiritually spellbinding, and the reader should not be surprised to find that it evokes within himself a desire to pray, and thereby take what feeble steps he can to walk alongside the humble healer Arseny on his life’s pilgrimage.

UPDATE: I just ran across this favorite quote of mine by Russell Kirk:

“I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.”

Amen and amen. If you are the kind of person who would give any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle, Laurus is a novel for you.