Rod Dreher's Blog, page 655

Fighting Smart for Religious Liberty

If you haven’t seen the main TAC page, you’ve missed my essay from the magazine about Kim Davis and the religious liberty battle. Here are the four main lessons I learned by talking to lawyers, strategists, and insiders fighting for religious liberty; this is what they would like their fellow religious conservatives to know:

1. Broadly speaking, the public does not support them.

2. Perception matters.

3. Religious-liberty activists have to pick their battles carefully.

4. The business community is key.

5. Time is not on their side.

Read the whole thing. I explain all these points in detail.

Since I filed this piece, I had some conversations in Washington with conservatives who follow this issue intimately. They strongly indicated to me that religious conservatives can expect nothing from Republicans in Congress. The Left has no reason to bargain now, and the Right has to satisfy the business community, as well as live in fear of being called bigots. Which they do, somehow. We have to keep fighting, but we have to be a lot smarter than we have been about the nature of the battle, and what victory would look like.

I’m not going to open comments on this thread because I want you to comment on the main one. Still, I wanted readers who only look at this blog to know this piece is out there.

The Synod Ends, Deo Gratias

And so, the three-week Synod on the Family in Rome has ended. By most accounts, it was a defeat for Pope Francis and his liberalizing plans, though it must be remembered that in the Roman Catholic Church, a synod is only an advisory body; the final decision rests with the pontiff. Francis could overrule his bishops, but to do so would plunge the Catholic Church into crisis.

Ross Douthat says:

Look, what actually happened is that conservatives won what was probably the closest thing to victory that they could have hoped for, given that 1) the pope was against them, and 2) the pope stacked the governing and writing committees and the voting ranks, and did I mention that 3)the pope was against them. (People who still argue that Pope Francis was studiously neutral, that he just wanted dialogue, or that his views are unknowable, need to sit down and read the tongue-lashing he gave to conservatives in his closing address — and contrast it with the much more evenhanded way he closed last fall’s synod, when conservative resistance to the synod’s intended direction was much more disorganized.) Which is to say they produced a document that used unfashionable words like “indissoluble” to talk about marriage, that mostly avoided the subject of homosexuality, and that offered a few dense, occasionally-ambiguous, slightly-impenetrable paragraphs on welcoming and accompanying divorced and remarried Catholics without offering either a path to communion absent an annulment or proposing to devolve that question to national bishops conferences, as the German bishops and the rest of the progressive caucus at the synod clearly wished.

Ross goes on to point out, though, how the victory for conservatives was not as clear as they would have liked, and he details how determined Church liberals can use the wedge the Synod offered them to open a big gap. (By the way, Ross will be giving the Erasmus Lecture at First Things on Monday evening, on the subject of “The Crisis of Conservative Catholicism.” Join me, if you like, in watching the live webcast here at 6pm Eastern/5pm Central.)

John L. Allen’s take was somewhat different:

Saturday night, the Vatican released the summit’s final report. In broad strokes, it seemed to reflect a narrow liberal win on the issue of allowing divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive Communion, and a conservative victory at resisting calls for a more approving treatment of gay and lesbian relationships.

While all sections of the final document received a two-thirds majority, the sections on divorce and homosexuality also drew significant clusters of “no” votes, providing a clear x-ray of a divided body.

Allen says there are two different ways to respond to the three weeks of mayhem:

Madness as Method: This view holds that the two synods were launched without a clear objective, were poorly organized, and the overall result has been to leave Catholicism disoriented and consumed by internal battles. As one senior cardinal put it, “I used to think there was a method beneath the madness … now I worry that the madness is the method.”

No Pain, No Gain: Choosing a glass-half-full perspective, this view posits that growth is always painful, but that Catholicism will emerge stronger for having honestly surfaced its divisions rather than keeping them bottled up or, worse still, pretending they don’t exist. On the other side of acrimony and confusion, this view holds, lies a season of renewal.

From an Orthodox perspective, I was struck by the address that Metropolitan Hilarion, the “foreign minister” of the Moscow Patriarchate, delivered to the Synod. Here’s a link to the speech. Excerpt:

The Church is called to be a luminary and beacon in the darkness of this age, and Christians to be the ‘salt of the earth’ and ‘light to the world’. We all ought to recall the Saviour’s warning: ‘If the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men’ (Matt. 5: 13-14). The salt which has lost its savour are those Protestant communities which call themselves Christian, but which preach moral ideals incompatible with Christianity. If in this type of community a rite of blessing of same-sex unions is introduced, or a lesbian so called ‘bishop’ calls for the replacement of crosses from the churches with the Muslim crescent, can we speak of this community as a ‘church’? We are witnessing the betrayal of Christianity by those who are prepared to accommodate themselves to a secular, godless and churchless world.

The authorities of some European countries and America, in spite of numerous protests, including those by Catholics, continue to advocate policies aimed at the destruction of the very concept of the family. They not only on the legislative level equate of the status of the same-sex unions to that of marriage but also criminally persecute those who out of their Christian convictions refuse to register such unions. Immediately after the departure of Pope Francis from the USA, President Barack Obama openly declared that gay rights are more important than religious freedom. This clearly testifies to the intention of the secular authorities to continue their assault on those healthy forces in society which defend traditional family values. Catholics here are found at the forefront of the struggle, and it is against the Catholic Church that a campaign of discrediting and lies is waged. Therefore courage in vindicating Christian beliefs and fidelity to Church tradition are particularly necessary in our times.

Today, when the world ever more resembles that foolish man ‘which built his house on the sand’ (Matt. 7: 26) it is the Church’s duty to remind the society of its firm foundation of the family as a union between a man and woman created with the purpose of giving birth to and bringing up children. Only this type of family, as ordained by the Lord when he created the world, can forestall or at least halt temporarily modern-day society’s further descent into the abyss of moral relativism.

What’s most important is what Hilarion did not say. The Catholic priest Fr. Hunwicke spotted this, and said:

At the beginning of this ghastly mess, Orthodox Marriage praxis was cited as something Catholics should have a new look at. Indeed, OrthodoxOikonomia was set before us as being an expression of the Mercy of God. Metropolitan Hilarion might, therefore, have slipped into his address, somewhere, a sly hint of Orthodox triumphalism … “How gratifying that you Latins are coming round to our Orthodox way of thinking”.

Not a whisker of it.

This does not surprise me at all, and for a reason I gave on this blog earlier in the Synod process. The Moscow Patriarchate is well aware of how weak the Christian faith is in Europe. It knows too, obviously, that the forces within the Roman church that seek to liberalize are the ones who would have Rome adopt an approach to marriage, divorce, and communion that’s more like Orthodoxy’s. My guess is that Moscow recognizes that given the current crisis of Christianity in the West, and the different way Catholicism approaches matters of doctrinal truth, for Rome to adopt a policy closer to Orthodoxy’s at this particular time and under these circumstances would, paradoxically, weaken Catholicism’s witness to the larger truth of family and marriage. This is why I actually think Orthodoxy has a more reasonable and compassionate way of handling it, but I hoped that the conservatives would win at the Synod, because the idea of Rome taking an Orthodox tack in the present situation struck me intuitively as a bad move from the interests of Orthodoxy. 

Damon Linker makes a very good, very MacIntyrean point about the profound disorder within Roman Catholicism today, when he says, “Catholics these days can’t even agree about how to disagree.”  He sketches the two opposing views within the Church today, which became very clear during the Synod:

The reformers view the church as a community of believers founded by Jesus Christ on a message of universal inclusion, hope, love, and mercy. … This helps explain why the reformers favor loosening the strictures against divorced Catholics receiving communion: because it’s a gesture of inclusion, healing, acceptance. Just as Jesus consorted with the outcasts of his time, so his church should offer welcoming arms to any and all who want to receive the message of mercy and love and become active members of the People of God.

The conservatives, on the other hand, says Linker:

The church, for them, is primarily a rigorously consistent intellectual system that teaches a vision of the right way to live. Christ rejected divorce. Over the centuries, the church has developed a rich set of intellectually satisfying principles and procedures in response to this divine decree. … The church simply has to uphold the traditional rules and procedures — not primarily because they’re traditional but because they’re systematic.

Linker adds:

The two camps talk right past each other. What is the church? How did Christ want his followers to live and worship in his name? How much change, and what kind of change, is acceptable? The question of annulment, divorce, and communion has raised these deeper and potentially far more divisive questions.

He’s right about that, but I don’t fully agree with the way he characterizes the conservatives’ take on matters. No doubt there are plenty of legalists and rigorists in the conservative camp, but what Linker (who’s a friend, fyi) seems to miss is that doctrine and “rules” are not ends in themselves, but signposts that direct us to God. Doctrine is not about right order alone, but primarily about Truth. It is far from loving and merciful to tell someone that a lie is actually the truth, only so that they can feel good about themselves, and affirmed. This, at best, is what the conservatives stand for — not mindless rule-following.

But Damon is right about one thing: the two broad factions within the Church can barely talk to each other because they differ on primary questions. I think it was in Commonweal a few years ago that I read an older liberal Catholic lamenting that back in the pre-conciliar days, at least the liberals and conservatives shared basic premises from which to make their arguments. Now, that’s no longer true. The crude version of this dynamic is what every conservative Catholic has to deal with: you can cite the Catechism and authoritative Church documents to progressive Catholics all the livelong day, and they just do not care. They’re determined to believe what they want to believe, and call it Catholic. They think that the word “Catholic” does not describe an objective reality that entails affirming certain propositions, but rather expresses their inner conviction about themselves.

Gabriel Sanchez, an Eastern Rite Catholic, has a pretty dark view of the Synod’s conclusion:

The glib optimism flowing from ostensibly conservative Catholics concerning the recently concluded Extraordinary Synod on the Family is a thing of wonder. Only in a Church where abuse, dissent, and outright heresy are so commonplace could a document like the final Relatio be held up as a banner of orthodoxy. Some conservatives are now laying into traditional Catholics, noting that their worries about schism and collapse were not just overblown, but thoroughly ridiculous. As a friend of mine observed, however, just because a stroke is a more dramatic way to die doesn’t mean a nice quiet bout of cancer won’t do the same job.

More:

The truth is that most Catholics scandalized by the Synod and the Pope won’t leave. The sunk costs are too high. Instead, they will close their eyes to their surroundings while singing “Everything is Awesome” just loud enough to drown out all the voices—clerical and lay—calling for a sexual revolution in the Church. Some Catholics, like the Society of St. Pius X and the faithful who remain attached to tradition, will continue to resist the institutional Church, including the Pope if necessary. God bless them. There will be no heavenly reward for obedience to those who betray the clear teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Holy Church.

Whole thing here.

What will Francis do now? He is not predictable. The conclusion of the Synod may not have been the end of something, but only the beginning of the end of something. The one thing that the history of most churches in the West of the past half century shows: church liberals never take “no” for an answer.

OK, time to pour the bourbon and get ready for Ross Douthat’s webcast talk. See you there.

 

 

Louisiana Governor Showdown

Louisiana held its general election this past weekend, and as expected, the November runoff pairs Democratic state legislator John Bel Edwards against US Sen. David Vitter, a Republican.  (In Louisiana, the two top vote-getters in the open primary advance to the runoff.) According to official returns, Edwards, the only Democrat in the field, garnered 40 percent of the vote, with Vitter far behind at 23 percent. The other two GOP candidates together drew 34 percent of the vote. If one of them had dropped out prior to Saturday’s vote, there is no question but that Vitter would have lost badly, and that the next governor, succeeding Bobby Jindal, would be a Republican. This is a deeply red state.

Vitter’s bare win, though, puts the governor’s mansion in play for the Democrats. From the Wall Street Journal:

Months ago, Mr. Vitter was atop the polls, flush with millions in campaign cash and running like an incumbent. But amid continued talk of his 2007 prostitution scandal and a drumbeat of criticism about his attack-heavy campaign tactics, Mr. Vitter’s negatives spiked among voters. One PAC has been running an “Anybody But Vitter” campaign.

Mr. Vitter, however, maintained a strong conservative base that carried him into the runoff.

The fact is, Vitter is unpopular in the state, a lot less popular than a two-term incumbent US Senator should be. He has very high negative ratings; people don’t trust his character. Politico paints the picture:

Vitter — who finished second with only 23 percent, four percentage points ahead of Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle, the third-place finisher — is deeply wounded, in part driven by attacks from rivals within his own party. Just this week, Angelle and Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne reignited talk of his 2007 prostitution scandal, and a Republican sheriff arrested a private investigator working for Vitter’s campaign and accused him of spying.

Polls have shown Vitter’s image rating tanking among the state’s voters, compared to the popular Edwards. But while Vitter had focused his primary campaign on his GOP rivals, the Republican Governors Association revved up its attacks on Edwards, spending $1 million in the final weeks on TV ads that call Edwards an “Obama liberal” and features audio of Edwards saying “I supported the president” four different times.

By contrast, John Bel Edwards, the Democrat, is about the best candidate his party, which is very weak in Louisiana, can hope for. He’s pro-life and pro-gun, and clean. More from Politico:

Edwards’ ads rarely mention his party affiliation and instead emphasize his most conservative policy positions. One ad features Edwards and his wife discussing their decision to keep her pregnancy after a diagnosis of spinal bfida in the womb. Their daughter, Samantha, is now in graduate school and engaged, the ad says.

“John Bel never flinched,” Edwards’ wife Donna says in the spot. “He just said, ‘No, we’re gonna love this baby no matter what.'”

Another ad highlights Edwards’ military background, with a trio of his West Point colleagues discussing why Edwards was chosen to be on a committee enforcing the school’s legendary honor code.

“John Bel Edwards doesn’t just talk about his values, he lives them every day,” one of his classmates says, providing a not-so-subtle contrast to Vitter.

What’s more, Edwards was often the most articulate legislative voice fighting Gov. Bobby Jindal these past eight years, especially on cuts to higher education. Jindal is now highly unpopular in the state. On the other hand, Vitter and Jindal are known to despise each other, but theirs is not a dispute on policy or ideology, but over Jindal’s refusal to stand with Vitter when the prostitution scandal engulfed him in 2007.

The real fight is going to be over the 34 percent of the vote that went to GOP candidates Scott Angelle and Jay Dardenne, who were savaged in general election ads by Vitter, and who hit him hard right back. Neither one endorsed Vitter in their election night concession speeches. I would be surprised if Angelle endorsed Vitter at all, and very, very surprised if Dardenne did. Angelle was thought to be Jindal’s pick for his successor; Dardenne is known to have had a long-running feud with Jindal.

If Edwards can keep his turnout up — this is going to be tough — he only needs 10 percent of the anti-Vitter Republican vote to win. Though the safe money is always on a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Louisiana, I think Edwards has a good chance of making it. I personally know Dardenne voters who are already saying that they’re crossing party lines to vote for Edwards. Most of it, from what I’m told, is disgust with what they think of as David Vitter’s sleaze. Some of it, though, is being fed up with what Bobby Jindal and the Republican legislature has done to LSU and the state’s higher education system over the past eight years. This past spring, LSU had to announce a plan to declare bankruptcy — a plan that a friend of mine who works at a senior level in state government says was no bluff:

Being in a state of financial exigency means a university’s funding situation is so difficult that the viability of the entire institution is threatened. The status makes it easier for public colleges to shut down programs and lay off tenured faculty, but it also tarnishes the school’s reputation, making it harder to recruit faculty and students.

“You’ll never get any more faculty,” said [LSU Chancellor and President F. King] Alexander, if LSU pursues financial exigency.

This is a disgrace, one that is very much on the minds of middle-class people with kids in college or headed to college soon. The election will be decided on whether Vitter’s deep campaign war chest can throw enough “He’s the white Obama!” ads at Edwards to make them stick, or whether disgust with the status quo — and it is very much a Republican status quo — in Baton Rouge can tempt enough Republicans to take a chance on a conservative Democrat.

 

 

‘He Has Lifted Up the Lowly’

As you know if you’ve been reading this blog over the weekend, I am reading at the moment (taking a break from Dostoevsky, before the last act of The Brothers Karamazov) a newly translated Russian novel called Laurus. It is set in medieval Russia, and the title character is, for a time, a religious type called a “holy fool,” particularly beloved in Russia. It refers to people who behave in extreme ways that seem foolish to the rest of us, but do so out of an unusual sense of holiness. St. Francis of Assisi was the most famous holy fool in the West.

The people I’m writing about in this post are not holy fools. They are just simple believers. Let me make that clear. Still, being enchanted by the holy fool of Laurus made reading this powerful post last night about the forms of Christianity embraced by many poor people strike with particular force. Owen White, an Orthodox Christian, writes, in part:

I know a lot of intellectual Christians, in conservative Catholic and Orthodox and Magisterial Protestant camps, who make fun of and/or disparage revivalist Christianity.

I’ve written about this before, but 20 some years ago I read Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, a decent enough book, but in one section where he is dealing with the environment he goes into a rant regarding the manner in which Evangelical eschatology lends itself to a lack on concern for the welfare of the planet.  In the course of this argument he particularly went after the hymn I’ll Fly Away.  I took his point, but I was also angry, and when I first read it I was not quite sure why.  Upon reflection I thought of my grandfather, who worked hard appalachian hills in his childhood, saw hell in WWII, and then spent an adult life in the steel shops.  He wasn’t inclined to claim Christ until his elderly years, but who had every reason, at damn near every point in his life, to want to fly away.  I thought of the poor folk I had known throughout my life, and, of course, I thought of the black church I had known since not much longer than I could remember, with its spirituality always sung in Jacob’s wrestling plaintiveness.  Most of human experience has been such that any sane man, woman, or child would want to fly away.  Mark Noll has lived a very comfortable life, and by all accounts I could find, he has always been quite comfortable.

Yes, white American revivalist Christianity would end up with Left Behind novels and WWJD bracelets bought at Christian stores in malls by white kids going home in SUVs that cost 30k.  I can’t grasp that level of banality.  I don’t know that from the revivals of my youth.

I do know that there remain a lot suffering folk in this land.  White Christianity has become a largely middle class and up affair, but Christianity of color still brings in the working and poor classes.  I remain uncertain as to how a Christian milieu that is intrinsically linked to a patrimony of comfort is even possible, outside of the work of demons.

I would ask this – if you are inclined to disparage revivalist Christianity on the whole, and you have never seen a group of elders in a Missionary Baptist church in north Mississippi sing Leaning on the Everlasting Arms in the above manner, well friend, I’m sorry, but consider that perhaps you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.  The Spirit goes where He wills, and He wills the company of those who pray in desperate tones.

You’ve got to read the whole thing and see the video performance to which he refers (“in the above manner”). At this outpouring of the spirit, any pope, patriarch, theologian or Christian philosopher who didn’t bow in the presence of the holy has rocks in his head.

I’ve told the story here on several occasions, about the time on our honeymoon that my wife and I made a pilgrimage to Fatima, in Portugal, to thank Our Lady for her intercession on our behalf. We took a bus north from Lisbon to the hill town, and plodded into town from the station on the outskirts. It was a dreary January day. We had to walk down the main street in the drizzle to get to the basilica and the vast plaza in front of it. It was a miserable stroll through a town whose economy apparently depended in large part on tacky religious kitsch. It was everywhere. Glow in the dark Virgin Marys in shop windows, one after the other. There really seemed no limit to the junkiness. By the time we reached the end of the street and a row of trees shielding the plaza, we were feeling repulsed by the place.

And then, crossing into the plaza, we saw a huge throng of pilgrims making their way toward the basilica in the distance. Some of them were on their knees, walking that last quarter-mile or so on wet asphalt. In front of us we saw a young woman on her knees, her hands clasped in prayer, “walking” forward. Her husband stood next to her holding a baby, and with them was an older woman, either her mother or his. Plainly they were making a pilgrimage of thanksgiving for that baby. From the way they were dressed, they were poor people, or at least working class. The plaza was filled with people like that.

My wife and I felt convicted by that sight. We realized that these same people who humbled themselves in ways we would never do, out of devotion, are probably the people who would leave Fatima with glow-in-the-dark Virgins in their trunks. It was a moment of repentance for us.

This does not make religious kitsch beautiful any more than it puts a religious tract on the same level as the Summa. But it does reveal the beauty of holiness — and its lack — in the hearts of the faithful. Then again, any reader of Flannery O’Connor, the self-described “hillbilly Thomist,” ought to know this.

UPDATE: On the other hand, a reader writes:

I grew up in a revivalist culture, and mister Orthodox doesn’t get a single damn thing about it. He doesn’t get that because he isn’t there day after day, it’s just exotic spice for him.

He doesn’t get that yeah, the cadence and emotion is awesome the first time you hear it, but when you attend the church again and again, it isn’t. Because pur-raise Jesus, nothing ever changes. it’s all a performance to raise an emotional high, sunday after sunday. The black pastor raises his voice, the women tremble in their ostentatious hats, and NOTHING EVER CHANGES. Sistah Latifah still sleepin with her ex con baby daddy, and brother Tyrone on the down low. Pastor Mal still sleepin with his girl and skimmin money off the collection plate for his new SUV. It’s just theater.

Even with white revivalist culture, it’s the same. You see the same people come up in revivals, chasing the emotional experience in more dramatic forms each time. It’s always been this way, even from the outset. The revival culture in Pentecostalism led to the “laughing revival” or Toronto blessing, and even more, like people barking. The act of emotional catharsis it brings in crowds has its own addictive power, like a drug, and that drug can build a tolerance to dangerous levels.

I do disparage it, and I sat as a child in a tent under the hot summer air. I spend four hour nights watching revival services. God save us from religious tourists.

Well, that’s a serious point. I have wondered why the black church is so ineffective at changing behavior of many worshipers. Is it because it is more about relief than repentance? I honestly don’t know. Please, readers, enlighten me.

Into the Dark Wood

Louis Dupre, in Passage To Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture:

Only when the early humanist notion of human creativity came to form a combustive mixture with the negative conclusions of nominalist theology did it cause the cultural explosion that we refer to as modernity. Its impact shattered the organic unity of the Western view of the real. The earliest Ionian concept of physis had combined a physical (in the modern sense!) with an anthropic and a divine component. The classical Greek notion of kosmos (used by Plato and Aristotle), as well as the Roman natura, had preserved the idea of the real as an harmonious, all-inclusive whole. Its organic unity had been threatened by the Hebrew-Christian conception of a Creator who remained outside the cosmos. Yet, through his wisdom, support, and grace, he continued to be present in this world. At the end of the Middle Ages, however, nominalist theology effectively removed God from creation. Ineffable in being and inscrutable in his designs, God withdrew from the original synthesis altogether. The divine became relegated to a supernatural sphere separate from nature, with which it retained no more than [a] causal, external link. This removal of transcendence fundamentally affected the conveyance of meaning. Whereas previously meaning had been established in the very act of creation by a wise God, it now fell upon the human mind to interpret a cosmos, the structure of which had ceased to be given as intelligible. Instead of being an integral part of the cosmos, the person became its source of meaning. Mental life separated from cosmic being: as meaning-giving “subject,” the mind became the spiritual substratum of all reality. Only what it objectively constituted would count as real. Thus reality split into two separate spheres: that of the mind, which contained all intellectual determinations, and that of all other being, which received them.

Meaning that in modernity, there is no essential meaning. The world is not an icon, but a screen onto which we project our minds.

UPDATE: Reader Dave comments:

But in the context of what I understand of your religious and cultural archaeology I think the way I’ll go is that the challenge is not to preserve or recover a mode of thought – that genie is out of the bottle – it’s to recover the original impetus of that way of thinking, which I say is the direct experience of the living God.

Not only way of thinking, but way of living. That brought to mind something the Orthodox priest Father Stephen Freeman wrote about nominalism, realism, and Orthodoxy. He concludes:

It is popularly said of Orthodoxy that it is not a set of beliefs, but a way of life. In many respects, this is simply a manner of saying that Orthodoxy is not a nominalist view of the world, but a revelation about the world itself.

Those who stand outside inquiring should ask themselves: did Christ come to assert a set of ideas, or did He come to reveal a way of living? If the latter – then it is not just inside the head.

UPDATE.2: Today, Sunday, it is raining outside, and I am bound to my chair in the living room, suffering from a bad back, but it is an opportunity to read this newly translated Russian novel, Laurus, set in medieval Russia (the New Yorker writes about it favorably here). I have never read a novel like this story of its title character, a mystic peasant and pilgrim. It’s the kind of novel I set down after a few chapters, pick up my prayer rope, and pray. Why is that? Because, I think, the book immerses you in a world of the spirit, in a very Russian way. I can’t know what it would be like to encounter this book if I had not been praying and living as a Russian Orthodox Christian for the past nine years, but I can say that it is like walking into a room that I’ve never entered, but that seems weirdly familiar. Even though the world of the protagonist is very, very different from my own, I keep reading along and thinking, yes, that’s it, that’s the way it is.

I found this snippet from an interview with Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who is a very serious reader of Dostoevsky. It illuminates things:

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. [Emphasis mine — RD]

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.

This made me understand what Father Stephen Freeman was getting at. I see now that living out Orthodoxy amounts to be retrained to live as if nominalism were not true. That’s how it feels from the inside.

Q: What’s Wrong With This Tweet?

Red State founder Erick Erickson, who is nobody’s idea of a bleeding heart, posted this on Twitter:

I hate to see the elder President Bush grow old. What a patriot that guy is. https://t.co/rguq8yBaZb

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) October 24, 2015

And this is the response he got from some wingnut:

@EWErickson In what world is a establishment RHINO labeled a patriot. If he got his way we would of never had Reagan. Lost WH in one term.

— Jimmy Rae (@JimmyRae4senate) October 24, 2015

 

Mind you, Jimmy Rae is a nobody, with only a handful of followers. Still, his tweet symbolizes everything that’s wrong with movement conservatism today. There is no sense of the virtue of pietas, no sense of continuity with the past, no sense of prudence or balance or any of the other qualities that one traditionally associates with conservatism. Just mindless, malicious passion.

You see it on the Left too, of course. The spirit of liberality among movement liberalism is hard to find. It’s grim righteousness and mindless, puritanical intolerance.

I have come to hate politics. And to think that there was a time when I wanted politics to be my life, when I saw it as something exciting and hopeful and worth doing.

‘The Spiritual Hope of the Nation’

The Very Rev. Gary Hall, a former professional joke writer, is still making us laugh in his new role as dean of Washington’s National Cathedral, an Episcopal institution. From Sally Quinn’s favorable profile in the Washington Post:

“If the Cathedral wants to survive as institutional,” he goes on to explain, “it has to be transitional. It has to be the spiritual hope of the nation. It has to be about faith in public life and interfaith collaboration.”

Okay, but here’s the funny part:

“… I describe myself as a non-theistic Christian.”

And he goes on to expand on the concept.

“Jesus doesn’t use the word God very much,” he says. “He talks about his Father.”

Hall explains: “Where I am now, how do I understand Jesus as a son of God that’s not magical? I’m trying to figure out Jesus as a son of God and a fully human being, if he has both fully human and a fully divine set of chromosomes. . . . He’s not some kind of superman coming down. God is present in all human beings. Jesus was an extraordinary human being. Jesus didn’t try to convert. He just had people at his table.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the dean of the National Cathedral, the spiritual hope of the nation.

Makes me nostalgic for Evil Vicar:

Being the Best Wichita in Wichita

There’s a mean but useful expression to describe something that’s the best of its not very good kind: “the best ballerina in Galveston.” The idea is that the pool of Galveston ballerinas is so small that it’s not hard to rise to the top of that tiny pot of cream.

It came to mind reading Russell Arben Fox’s smart reflection on the travails facing Wichita, where he lives, a challenge that most mid-sized American cities face. Russell says that the billboard ad for a never-quite-launched city weekly newspaper there captures the attitude cities like his need to adopt: “Face It. You’re in Wichita.” He explains:

That billboard advertisement was wiser than it knew, because it captures an essential truth for cities like Wichita, cities far larger than the hundreds of “micropolitan” urban clusters across the county with a populations of 50,000 or less, but also cities that are not part of an extended metropolitan agglomeration. I mean cities that form their own relatively isolated geographic centers, perhaps topping out at a half-million residents or so. The truth that such cities must face, basically, is that a great many of their residents are regularly tempted to believe that their home isn’t what it is, but rather is, or should remain, or is almost ready to become, one of the other two options mentioned above. The truth, of course, is that Wichita and cities like it are not oversized rural towns, supposedly similar in culture and practice to so many of their surrounding and supporting communities. Neither are they, though, on the cusp of a great metropolitan explosion, primed to start networking and contributing to–in terms of jobs, the arts, and more–those flows of information and investment which characterize the great global cities of the world. Wichita, like so many other cities of middling size, is not likely to become a major node in the globalized flow of information, culture, and wealth anytime in the foreseeable future, and it is cannot pretend that its political culture is that of a quaint homogeneous farming village at heart. It is, put simply, a big city–but not all that big; a space of concentrated resources, both human and commercial–but not an ever-expanding supply of such. That’s what it is stuck with.

To make a case for sticking with mid-sized cities–for investing in it and improving them–means, first and foremost, facing up to what they are. The odds of being able to quickly create in the context of Wichita’s undeniable yet also limited urban character some kind of progressive fantasy of diversity and development are small to nonexistent. With much of the social and economic innovation and opportunity in our country and world invariably gravitating to megapolises wherein the promise of anonymity is entwined with the chance of being able to elide obstacles and break through and do something productive in one new niche or another, leaving older and anxious workers behind, it isn’t surprising that Wichita’s political culture and economic landscape increasingly reflects, as Chung mentioned regarding Wichita, a “closed” environment. That environment will not suddenly change, and expressing frustration at the lack of diversity or socially oriented initiatives in such cities simply drains energy from what will have to be–as the effort to push Wichita in the direction of reasonable reform in the matter of marijuana possession shows–a long and slow effort.

At the same time, Russell continues, the idea that cities like Wichita should just give up on trying to improve anything and settle into being insular small towns on a bigger scale is even more problematic. The answer, he says, is to reject the aspirational extremes of the boosters who are forever cooking up a scheme to make a mid-sized city “world class,” as well as reject the resentful, why-try-harder attitude of temperamental conservatives who never want anything to change for the better. Here’s the third way, according to Russell Arben Fox:

Look around our city, as in so many smaller and middling cities, and you can see a great many informal and quasi-formal networks forming: small-scale businesses and volunteer operations and church groups, hosting festivals and art shows and local markets and devotionals, crossing the conceptual boundaries between urban and rural (so much easier to do in a smaller urban space than in a sprawling urban agglomeration!). Of course, few of them present themselves in terms of a “growth plan” to attract venture capital and rent floor space downtown, and neither do they generally start out rejecting all city council seed money on ideological principle. Which means, they get ignored by the fantasists on both sides of the divide.

Read the whole thing. It’s very good, and I would love to read in the comments thread here the reactions of you readers who live in such places.

I think one place to start thinking about living in such places is by thinking about what it means to live a Good Life in a place — that is, how does one measure quality of life? When I was 22, I had a very different idea about that than when I was 42 (and, as you know, that got radically altered when I was 44). You could have a higher quality of life in a place where there were a lot fewer restaurants, less diversity, and fewer things to do, as conventionally measured. I mean, you could be a lot happier in relatively boring Wichita than in, say, Dallas, though it’s hard to see that when you are young.

Let’s not forget that Wichita has at least one amazing thing that no other city in the world does — oh, and that related amazing thing too — the existence of which makes it a wonderful place to live. If you live in Wichita and you aren’t involved with them, oh boy, are you ever missing out.

A mid-sized city that had a couple of special places like Eighth Day Books and the Eighth Day Institute (with its Hall of Men) would do wonders for itself. I’m looking at you Brian Daigle and your Baton Rouge mafia!

That Crazy Cult

Predictably, there are people who look at Word of Life Church, that lunatic fringe cult in New York state (you know, the ones who allegedly beat a teenager to death), and say, “Ah ha! There’s your Benedict Option!” That kind of silly remark says more about the person who makes it than it does about the Benedict Option, in the same way that people who look at the most extreme manifestations of gay culture, or black culture, or (fill in the blank) culture, and call it exemplary of the whole.

Still, there is a Ben Op point to be made about the Word of Lifers. Take a look at this in-depth report in The New York Times, about how the church turned into a cult. Excerpts:

People of all stripes once showed up at the living room Bible study that became Word of Life, many of them disaffected members of other churches drawn by the group’s stripped-down style of worship. It was the late 1980s, and Ms. Irwin’s father, Jerry Irwin, was the founder and soft-spoken pastor.

“They wanted what the Bible says; they didn’t want all this other religious tradition,” said Janet Sylvester, who joined her two brothers in the group in the early 1990s after having a child as a single woman. “It was back to the basics.”

Boom. Big red flag. Declaring oneself liberated from all religious tradition, going “back to the basics,” is a bad sign. Churches and groups should be embedded within a long and established tradition, if only to set boundaries and to be accountable. After 2,000 years of Christianity, anybody who says that they are going “back to the basics” should not be trusted, in my view. Is it really the case that after all this time, someone is going to emerge who discovers that everybody since the early Church has been wrong, and now, at last, the true reform is upon us?

More:

When Mr. Irwin returned to Word of Life in the mid-1990s, it was as a prophet who claimed to be able to see and hear inside people’s homes, former members said. One of his visions was to move his family into the sprawling third floor of the schoolhouse. Over time he drove Mr. Wright from power.

“The freedom that you felt was slowly going away, and the fear was slowly increasing,” Ms. Sylvester said. “And the fear wasn’t necessarily a fear of him; it was a fear because he represented God in your eyes. So your fear was toward God.”

Fear and paranoia are often danger signs. To be clear, there really are scary things in the world, and fear can be a sign of sanity and health. That said, when leaders begin to talk like that, and your primary experience of church, and of God, is fearful, that’s an indication that you should hit the road.

More:

Gates went up outside the schoolhouse, and other ministers were no longer welcome. Members began letting phone calls go to voice mail, feeling the need to get Mr. Irwin’s approval before taking a call. Parishioners were often barred from taking communion because he said they were in too much sin. One member said Mr. Irwin used racial slurs during sermons, though others did not recall that.

Members’ lives slowly became less their own, the former members said, as the building around them transformed into a sort of altar to the Irwin family’s whims. The third floor, where Mr. Irwin’s family took up residence in the late 1990s, became “pretty much a mansion,” Mr. Ames recalled. One room held a trampoline, and another a small basketball court. The bathroom had a whirlpool bath. It was so big the Irwins bicycled through the hallways.

Cult of personality. Classic.

The entire NYT report is here.

As Ken Myers pointed out at our recent Ben Op event in Georgetown, we are simply going to have to develop a tolerance for risking this kind of disaster if we are going to risk something good and healthy developing. How much sense would it make to look at the various sex abuse scandals arising out of churches and conclude that all churches inevitably become nests of abuse? How much sense would it make to say that because some marriages become abusive, the institution of marriage is bound to be a dark trap? At some point, you have to move forward on trust — but that does not mean blind, unquestioning faith in and loyalty to the leadership.

Our Trump-ish, Cruz-y Future

Umm, ahh, this:

The odds that Donald Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination are going up.

Eighty-one percent of Republican insiders say the likelihood that Trump becomes their party’s nominee is more today than it was a month ago, and 79 percent of Democrats said the same. That’s according to the POLITICO Caucus, our weekly bipartisan survey of top strategists, operatives and activists in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

“I can’t even describe the lunacy of him as our nominee. But reason has not applied to date in this race, and my hopes are fleeting that it will ever surface,” lamented an Iowa Republican, who like all participants was granted anonymity in order to speak freely.

“Predictions of his demise keep not coming true,” added a New Hampshire Republican.

Asserted a South Carolina Republican, “Donald Trump being the GOP nominee is now within the realm of possibility.”

Meanwhile:

Jeb Bush, once a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is implementing an across-the-board pay cut for his struggling campaign as he attempts to regain traction just 100 days before the party’s first nominating contest.

The campaign is removing some senior staff from the payroll, parting ways with some consultants, and downsizing its Miami headquarters to save more than $1 million per month and cut payroll by 40 percent this week, according to Bush campaign officials who requested anonymity to speak about internal changes. Senior leadership positions remain unchanged.

The campaign is also cutting back 45 percent of its budget, except for dollars earmarked for TV advertising and spending for voter contacts, such as phone calls and mailers.

National Review‘s Lawrence Brinton looks at the state of GOP candidate fundraising, and draws some conclusions:

To win the GOP primary and, more important, the general election, a candidate must be able to play to both grassroots supporters and the major donors. Since the dawn of the era of Internet campaigns, beginning in the 2000 election, no candidate in either party who was not, at this point in the election cycle, in the top two in grassroots fundraising has won the nomination, nor has any candidate outside the top three in major-donor funding. Candidates who cannot win the support of major donors ultimately lack the qualities to be competitive in a general election. Influential votes and voices matter, and not just for their money. This is why candidates such as Bernie Sanders are extremely unlikely to be president, no matter how much money they raise.

Conversely, candidates whom big donors love but who do not excite the base can sometimes be lifted by the establishment to the nomination but have no hope in the general election. This why candidates such as Rudy Giuliani, despite his enormous major-donor fundraising totals, went absolutely nowhere in the GOP primaries. Ultimately, it is candidates who — e.g., Obama and George W. Bush — excite the grassroots and do well with major donors who win. Ultimately, it is candidates who excite the grassroots and do well with major donors who win.

Brinton concludes that Jeb Bush, unloved by the grassroots, cannot be the nominee. Aside from Trump, know who is best positioned, from a fundraising POV, to win the GOP nomination?

Ted Cruz. Brinton digs deep here, and explains his reasoning.

So, conservative voters may face a 2016 presidential contest between Trump and Clinton, or Cruz and Clinton. In such a showdown, incredibly, the liberal Democrat would arguably be less of an ideologue than either Republican.

Evangelical writer Thomas Kidd says there is no way he, as a Christian, could support a Trump candidacy, even if it meant a Clinton presidency. I know where he’s coming from. It will be hard for some conservative Christians to conceive of voting for Ted Cruz, who is a somewhat more respectable demagogue, but a demagogue indeed (‘memba this?). Neither Trump nor Cruz is electable. It’s looking like the only GOP candidate who might have the power to stop them is Marco Rubio, of all people. If he can’t do it, Republican Party bigs may have to hold their noses and back Cruz as the only way of stopping Trump.

It wasn’t long ago that Republicans were excited about the 2016 race, looking out over all the strong candidates in the field. That was before the Summer of Trump.