Rod Dreher's Blog, page 664

We Are Not Going to the Hills, OK?

Catholic writer T. Renee Kozinski sees some things she likes in the Benedict Option:

This time round, though, it is less like Benedict and more like the Maccabees: lay people, not monks, who aspire to build walls around what is true, good, and beautiful in order to preserve these transcendentals along with themselves and their children. You see this in the micro-educational institutions that create a community of learning and faith, without hope of any largesse or approval-stamp from the culture at large; you see this in small church communities centered around a liturgy that “brings beauty flowing into the realm of the senses.”

In fact, many of these marginalized communities have existed already for more than thirty or forty years. What seems new now is that instead of talk about “the new evangelization” or a movement out to “re-claim the culture,” the discussion in some of these communities seems to be also about “withdrawization,” or an intensified focus on the elements of the monastic life—prayer, contemplation, beautiful liturgy, hierarchical authority, an ordered way of life that has retreated away from a disordered world.

This, to me, is an attractive option. I am a watcher, an observer, I’ve begun to feel as if I am watching the world, our culture, turn into a hallucinogenic baby of the perverse marriage of 1984 and Brave New World, but instead of straightforward flip-flops (“war is peace”) as a means to political control, it is clownish, celebratory warpings of natural law and nature as a means to soul-control. Creating fortresses sounds attractive, because I am frightened—the mask of sanitary individualism and creative moral license is coming off, and the maggot-ridden face of each is becoming clearer and clearer.

We live not in a culture oppressed by one party’s lies; we live in a culture in love with the ability to lie to itself. “Abortion is about me and my body” is just one. “Happiness is what makes me feel satiated” is another. “Tolerance is supporting whatever you want, Caitlyn.” Joseph Pieper could say, “I told you so” because indeed we are seeing abuse of language as abuse of power, but now at a level and ubiquity that is unprecedented, much more fundamental than anything I’ve experienced in reading history or culture-watching prior.

… but she’s opting out of the Benedict Option, because she believes it amounts to a refusal to be “salt and light” in the world:

Should the salt refuse to be shaken out on it? Should the light retreat? This is one possibility, and God may want this, and I may be wrong. But Jesus never congratulated the disciples for hiding out in Jerusalem; He came to them, pitied them, and gave them power to sacrifice themselves, to rise above fear. Most of them died at the hands of a culture, out in that culture that “kept truth imprisoned in its own wickedness.”

I remember a bishop who in 1999 said to a group of middle school students, “Your generation will be martyrs.” Those students are now in their twenties. Another bishop, Francis Eugene George, said, “I will die in my bed. My successor will die in jail. His successor will die a martyr’s death.” In those years I kept those words, but could not see the form this would take. Now I can see the form, the context laid, in just fifteen years.

I want my children to learn courage and how to hang on to the faith in the face of darkness. I want them to be soldiers because I think they will need this. A monastic-retreat or a fortress-community in its best form can give an important, essential element, an embodiment of the faith itself, but that is not enough. That alone can create people who see the world like a jumping fish sees the far-distant shore. We also need to teach our children what they will face, how to live with courage, how to die, and most importantly, how to love those lost in the culture. They need to know that to live in this world means a kind of death, and they need to believe that truth, goodness, and beauty are transcendentals found outside themselves, but also be motivated to walk alongside “those people,” to be challenged by them to love better with more personal understanding. I don’t want my children to become hot-house creatures who cannot survive in the desert of this world, who have nothing to offer, who have taken the life-boats off the Titanic and are rowing away, insensitive to those crying out in the frozen water.

Well, Ms. Kozinski, have I got good news for you: I’m not asking you or anybody else to run off to the woods and build a compound to keep the world out. I think that is neither possible nor desirable for lay Christians. What the Benedict Option asks you to think seriously about is the extent to which all of us need to withdraw strategically, in a limited fashion, into our own communities — churches, schools, and so forth — not to keep ourselves untainted by the world, but so we can deepen our knowledge, practice, and commitment to the faith, and our bonds with each other, precisely so we can be the salt and light that Christ commanded us to be.

I ask you to read this 2004 First Things essay by Robert Louis Wilken, a leading historian of the early church and a Catholic convert. Especially these parts:

In my lifetime we have witnessed the collapse of Christian civilization. At first the process of disintegration was slow, a gradual and persistent attrition, but today it has moved into overdrive, and what is more troubling, it has become deliberate and intentional, not only promoted by the cultured despisers of Christianity but often aided and abetted by Christians themselves.

More:

Material culture and with it art, calendar and with it ritual, grammar and with it language, particularly the language of the Bible—these are only three of many examples (monasticism would be another) that could be brought forth to exemplify the thick texture of Christian culture, the fullness of life in the community that is Christ’s form in the world.

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture. The unhappy fact is that the society in which we live is no longer neutral about Christianity. The United States would be a much less hospitable environment for the practice of the faith if all the marks of Christian culture were stripped from our public life and Christian behavior were tolerated only in restricted situations.

If Christian culture is to be renewed, habits are more vital than revivals, rituals more edifying than spiritual highs, the creed more penetrating than theological insight, and the celebration of saints’ days more uplifting than the observance of Mother’s Day. There is great wisdom in the maligned phrase ex opere operato, the effect is in the doing.

Or, to put it in the words of my priest in this past Sunday’s sermon, with regard to evangelizing the world, “You can’t give away what you don’t possess.” The Benedict Option is about finding ways to thicken our Christianity and Christian culture, so it doesn’t get blown away by the increasingly hostile post-Christian culture in which we live.

Think of it like this: if it’s raining so much that the whole world appears to be on the verge of flooding, and you worry about saving yourself and your neighbors, do you stand there while the water rises, because you want to share the experience with the others, or do you build a boat so you can climb aboard it and pull into it the others who, seeing that the alternative is death, clamber aboard?

Among the Ahmed Truthers

A geek reverse-engineers Ahmed’s clock, and concludes that he didn’t even build the thing, but rather took the guts out of a ’70s or ’80s era digital clock, put them in a pencil box, and tried to pass it off as his own. Excerpt:

I found the highest resolution photograph of the clock I could. Instantly, I was disappointed. Somewhere in all of this – there has indeed been a hoax. Ahmed Mohamed didn’t invent his own alarm clock. He didn’t even build a clock. Now, before I go on and get accused of attacking a 14 year old kid who’s already been through enough, let me explain my purpose. I don’t want to just dissect the clock. I want to dissect our reaction as a society to the situation. Part of that is the knee-jerk responses we’re all so quick to make without facts. So, before you scroll down and leave me angry comments, please continue to the end (or not – prove my point, and miss the point, entirely!)

For starters, one glance at the printed circuit board in the photo, and I knew we were looking at mid-to-late 1970s vintage electronics. Surely you’ve seen a modern circuit board, with metallic traces leading all over to the various components like an electronic spider’s web. You’ll notice right away the highly accurate spacing, straightness of the lines, consistency of the patterns. That’s because we design things on computers nowadays, and computers assist in routing these lines. Take a look at the board in Ahmed’s clock. It almost looks hand-drawn, right? That’s because it probably was. Computer aided design was in its infancy in the 70s. This is how simple, low cost items (like an alarm clock) were designed. Today, even a budding beginner is going to get some computer aided assistance – in fact they’ll probably start there, learning by simulating designs before building them. You can even simulate or lay out a board with free apps on your phone or tablet. A modern hobbyist usually wouldn’t be bothered with the outdated design techniques. There’s also silk screening on the board. An “M” logo, “C-94” (probably, a part number – C might even stand for “clock”), and what looks like an American flag. More about that in a minute. Point for now being, a hobbyist wouldn’t silk screen logos and part numbers on their home made creation. It’s pretty safe to say already we’re looking at ’70s tech, mass produced in a factory.

So I turned to eBay, searching for vintage alarm clocks. It only took a minute to locate Ahmed’s clock. See this eBay listing, up at the time of this writing. Amhed’s clock was invented, and built, by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidary. Catalog number 63 765.

Read the whole thing.

Here’s a video purporting to show how you can make a clock exactly like Ahmed’s in about 20 seconds:

Here’s a second video, this one by scientist Thomas Talbot, who cries foul on Ahmed:

Says the Daily Beast, in its story about “nerd rage” against a clock they think is fake:

Thomas Talbot, an electronics author and prominent medical virtual reality scientist, said the clock’s printed circuit boards and ribbon cables, along with the 9-volt battery backup, are signs of a commercial product.

In his video, Talbot displays a photo of Mohamed’s clock and on screen, flashes an arrow over a tangle of cords jutting from the case. “This was put in here to look like a device, with these cables and these… to look like a device that would be suspicious, and I think intentionally so,” he says of the design.

“This is simply taking a clock out of its case, and I think probably for provocative reasons, intentionally,” he said in his video. He did not elaborate further.

“When I saw this, I thought, ‘We’re getting duped here,’” Talbot told The Daily Beast, adding, “Anybody who knows electronics really well needs less than five seconds to know that was a clock taken out of the box.”

The researcher, who has run contests for young inventors Mohamed’s age, said he doesn’t intend to pick on Mohamed but rather the media’s failure to capture more of the story. Over the weekend, social media activists embarked on a campaign to downvote his YouTube video, which had more than 380,000 views Sunday night.

“Whether it fits your narrative or whatever you want to believe… this particular child down in Texas did not make anything,” Talbot said in the video, adding, “People should not recognize this as an invention and recognize this child as an inventor for this particular creation.”

More from the Beast:

For some electronics experts, Mohamed’s windfall is unfair to students that actually invent things. Bryan Bergeron, an author of electronics books and editor in chief of the magazine Nuts & Volts, said that Mohamed’s project “would be ‘cute’ for someone age 7. But even then, not ‘inventive.’”

“The problem with giving this 14-year-old—whom I have nothing against; I really know very little of him—kudos for being inventive, is that there are tens of thousands of 11-year-olds out there actually designing circuits, building them from scratch and ‘innovating,’” Bergeron told The Daily Beast.

One of those teenagers is my electronics geek son, who was initially furious over what happened to Ahmed, but now thinks Ahmed is a plagiarizing little punk. My son said to me last night, wearing his MIT t-shirt, “I’m actually inventing things, but this kid is getting all the intention for something he didn’t even invent. This is really disappointing.”

You know what’s interesting about the Talbot part of that story? That here’s a scientist offering an analysis that debunks what might be a tall tale, but the Social Justice Warriors want to shut him up because his analysis might disprove the initial narrative.

I jumped to conclusions about Ahmed’s clock the first time, so I’m not going to do it now. But what these geeks show us makes the entire episode look very fishy. The early Ahmed Truthers on this blog who suspected the kid was put up to this stunt by his attention-seeking gadfly of a father might have been on to something. Whatever the truth is, it seems at least likely that Ahmed did not “invent” anything. That may not justify the overreaction of school officials and the Irving police, but it’s worth seriously considering, if Ahmed did, in fact, plagiarize this device, whether or not he was trying to provoke exactly this kind of overreaction. Somebody needs to get to the bottom of this — or has the story become too useful for the White House and others who rushed to Ahmed’s defense to discredit?

Obama Disses Chaput

This is remarkable:

Margie Winters and her wife, Andrea Vettori, have been hoping for months to speak with Pope Francis during his visit to America.

On Wednesday, the couple will take a big step forward toward that goal in a high-profile venue.

Winters, who was fired from Waldron Mercy Academy in Merion Station [a suburban Philadelphia Catholic school] in late June after two parents of students complained about her same-sex marriage, has been invited with Vettori to the White House for Wednesday’s arrival ceremony for the Bishop of Rome and leader of their faith.

Said the Philadelphia Catholic reader, a pro-life Catholic Democrat who sent this item: “Why doesn’t he just come out and say, ‘[deleted] you, Archbishop Chaput’?”

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput praised the school for dismissing Winters, but said he did not orchestrate her firing.

(In talking to legal experts about the next battles in the religious liberty war, they have told me that churches running religious schools and institutions are going to have to start drawing strong lines and enforcing them now, or they are going to lose future court battles.)

The Washington Post editorial board the other day noticed that Obama is inviting high-profile Catholic dissenters and fellow travelers to the papal reception, but not applying the same standard to other heads of state coming to the White House:

No doubt there’s often a fine balance between hospitality and principle when foreign visitors come to town. The administration doesn’t want to give offense, but it also doesn’t want to give in to what it may see as prejudices that it doesn’t share.

What struck us as we read about this small controversy is the contrast between the administration’s apparent decision to risk a bit of rudeness in the case of the pope and its overwhelming deference to foreign dictators when similar issues arise. When Secretary of State John F. Kerry traveled to Havana to reopen the U.S. Embassy recently, he painstakingly excluded from the guest list any democrat, dissident or member of civil society who might offend the Castro brothers.

And when Chinese President Xi Jinping comes to the White House next week, shortly after the pope leaves town, it’s a safe bet that he won’t have to risk being photographed with anyone of whom he disapproves.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Vatican is worried that the White House is inviting high-profile LGBT guests to this occasion to pit the Pope against the Church’s own teachings in the public eye:

According to a senior Vatican official, the Holy See worries that any photos of the pope with these guests at the White House welcoming ceremony next Wednesday could be interpreted as an endorsement of their activities.

The tension exemplifies concerns among conservative Catholics, including many bishops, that the White House will use the pope’s visit to play down its differences with church leaders on such contentious issues as same-sex marriage and the contraception mandate in the health care law.

Who, exactly, is waging culture war on whom here?

Ben Carson No Match for Emperor Julian

Ross Douthat tries to get to the bottom of the Ben Carson presidential campaign. He concludes that Evangelicals and other conservative Christians ought to get real and quit fantasizing. They are wasting time and focus on Carson when they ought to be paying attention to a candidate who can deliver the one thing they (we) need more than anything else in 2016:

In this election cycle, though, the evangelical hero quest is particularly self-defeating. With same-sex marriage established nationwide and social liberalism ascendant, religious conservatives have a clear policy “ask” they should be pressing every major Republican contender to embrace. They need guarantees that the next G.O.P. administration will move proactively — through something like Senator Mike Lee’s evolving First Amendment Defense Act — to protect religious schools and charities from losing grants or accreditation or even tax-exempt status because they maintain a traditional position on sexual ethics.

I’m sure that a President Ben Carson would deliver these protections. I’m equally sure that the longer the fantasy of a Carson presidency persists, the less likely it becomes that religious conservatives will get them.

Absolutely correct. This dovetails perfectly with what I’ve been saying for some time about the conservative Christian fantasy that Kim Davis’s resistance is going to advance our cause in the religious liberty fight. In fact, it’s likely to be a setback.

I want to share something with you from the history of early Christianity that is relevant to the situation contemporary Christians find ourselves in, and increasingly will find ourselves facing. This is an excerpt from church historian Robert Louis Wilken’s book The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity. In this section, Wilken discusses how the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, who ruled from 361 to 363, set out to return the recently Christianized (in name, at least) empire to paganism. Wilken writes:

Julian wished not only to restore the traditional forms of worship, most notably animal sacrifice; his aim was to subvert the influence of Christianity and eventually purge the society of the new religion. To do this he devised two ingenious projects. The first had to do with the schools, and the other was a bold and improbably building project in Jerusalem.

Six months after he became emperor, Julian issued an edict that “schoolmasters and teachers” should excel in “morality” and “eloquence,” and city councils across the empire were to evaluate the qualifications of teachers in light of these criteria. On first reading, the decree sounds innocuous, but the body of traditional writings (such as the poems of Homer) studied in school were chosen not only on literary or aesthetic grounds: literature carried the moral and spiritual values of the society. Since those values were suffused with religion, even the teaching of grammar and rhetoric, the foundation of the educational system, instilled belief in the traditional gods, Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Heracles, and the others.

The publication of this edict alarmed Christian leaders and angered Christian parents whose children, they believed, would be deprived of a proper education. Training in rhetoric was the gateway to a successful career in law or the civil service. Their fears were well grounded. The emperor said that Christian teachers had to make a choice: either they must give up their Christian beliefs or resign their positions in the schools; teachers should not “teach what they disapprove. If they are genuine interpreters of the ancient classics, let them first imitate the ancients’ piety toward the gods. If they think the classics wrong in this respect, then let them go and teach Matthew and Luke in the Church.”

Julian’s school law was an astute and calculated attack on the leadership of the churches. He knew that Christians had not yet developed their own educational system and were wholly dependent on the pagan schools for the education of their children. Without the benefit of a solid grounding in grammar and rhetoric, the Church would soon lose one of its most potent resources, men who could speak Greek or Latin correctly and write refined and elegant prose.

Fortunately for the early Christians, Julian died in battle two years into his reign, and the emperor’s throne passed back into Christian hands. Wilken goes on to say that for all his anti-Christian zeal, Julian the Apostate was “a man of the past.”

Unfortunately for us latter-day Christians in America, the Julian spirit is the wave of the future. This is why the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) is so important. As National Review editorialized the other day:

FADA is so important because it would provide a safe harbor from the real threats to conscience that the progressive juggernaut on gay marriage poses. Among FADA’s modest aims: protect the tax-exempt status of entities that adhere to the belief that marriage is the union of a man and a woman; protect individuals who hold the same belief about marriage that President Obama professed when he was elected from being deprived of eligibility for federal grants, licenses, and employment; and prevent colleges and schools from losing their accreditation because of their position on marriage.

In simpler terms, FADA would protect religious individuals and institutions from losing their tax status, licenses, and/or accreditation because they dissent from LGBT anti-discrimination statutes. It defends our place in the public square from those contemporary Julians who would drive us out as a way of delegitimizing our faith and ultimately purging it from society.

The Neo-Julians understand what the first Julian did: that educational institutions are the gateway to full participation in the professional life of society. In his day, there were no Christian schools. In our day, they exist, obviously, but if they begin to lose their accreditation because they hold at the policy level to traditional Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality, most of those schools will in short order cease to exist, because their diplomas will be worthless. Those few schools which survive will be attended by Christians who will have given up realistic hope of participating in American life except at the margins. This may be a sacrifice we are called to make, but we should fight hard to keep that day at bay. If we lose the institutions within which our local communities we can hope to cultivate an authentically Christian life in a hostile paganizing culture, we will be in very serious trouble.

This is not a Chicken Little fantasy. Gordon College in Massachusetts is going through this right now, with the regional college accrediting authority threatening to withhold accreditation unless Gordon changed its institutional policies about LGBT. The college and the agency reached a truce, but it looks temporary, and Gordon made significant concessions.

If Christians want to block the efforts of Julian’s disciples in our own time, we had better get serious about finding a Republican candidate who is electable, and who will fight for and sign the FADA. The idea that we are going to overturn Obergefell is risible. The real fight now is to protect Christian institutions from coercion under antidiscrimination law, and to protect the right of traditional Christians to participate in licensed professions without in effect having to apostatize.

Trump Takes Scott Walker’s Scalp

Whoa!:

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has concluded he no longer has a path to the Republican presidential nomination and plans to drop out of the 2016 campaign, according to three Republicans familiar with his decision, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Mr. Walker called a news conference in Madison at 6 p.m. Eastern time.

“The short answer is money,” said a supporter of Mr. Walker’s who was briefed on the decision. “He’s made a decision not to limp into Iowa.”

More:

He continued to lead the Republican pack in Iowa all spring, and roared over the open road on a Harley-Davidson to a seven-candidate political fund-raiser in the state in June.

But Mr. Trump’s surge as a political outsider galvanized grass-roots Republicans who are angry at all conventional politicians, and he drew support more from Mr. Walker than from anyone else.

Earlier this year, I thought it would be a Bush-Walker race to the finish. And now look. Larison says Walker never was ready for prime time.

Debauching Kermit

A reader sends in the Guardian‘s review of ABC’s new Muppets show. The newspaper hates it. Says ABC has debauched the Muppets by making them all reality-TV-ish. Excerpt:

What were previously sly winks to a grownup audience are now grotesque full-body grimaces, delivered with depressing sledgehammer brutality. In one scene, Animal laments his consequence-free promiscuity. In another, Zoot from The Electric Mayhem is outed as an alcoholic. And then, most heartbreakingly of all, there’s Kermit.

This version of Kermit is absolutely unrecognisable from anything that’s ever come before. This Kermit badmouths fellow celebrities, openly discusses his sex life and, at one point, describes his life as “a living hell”. That’s not who Kermit is. Kermit is the perennial wide-eyed optimist, the figure who grounds the chaos around him in sincerity. Kermit is the dreamer who believes in the power of people. He’s the one who sings The Rainbow Connection. He is most definitely not the stress-eating, coffee-drinking executive that The Muppets paints him as. It physically hurts to see what ABC have done to him.

That’s ABC Disney for you, folks. When I was growing up, Disney was the first name in quality family entertainment. Now, whenever I see the Disney name tagged to any programming, I assume until proven otherwise that it’s going to be depressing and sleazy, and definitely not something for the kids. When we had cable TV, one channel we absolutely wouldn’t let our kids watch was the ABC Family Channel, which was more like the Addams Family Channel.

They’ve Miley Cyrus’d everything.

The Politics of the Benedict Option

Yesterday in church, Father Matthew in his sermon made a comment that struck me as highly relevant to a rationale for the Benedict Option. He was talking about the risks of evangelizing when we have not been properly discipled. Yes, we are called to share our faith with the world, he said, “But you can’t share what you don’t have.”

What he meant was that you can talk about the Christian faith all you want to, but if you don’t fully understand it, and haven’t been to some meaningful degree shaped by it, you should consider whether or not you’re really sharing the faith at all. He is an Orthodox priest talking to an Orthodox congregation, and what he specifically meant, I think, is that Orthodox Christianity can’t be reduced to a formula you can print on a pamphlet. It is not only a set of beliefs, but a set of practices. Becoming more deeply Orthodox is less a matter of accepting the right beliefs and deepening your understanding of them (which is important) and more about living the faith and allowing its regular practice to change your heart.

When he said that line, though, I thought about something an Evangelical professor I met last week in Tennessee told me about the challenge I’ll face recruiting his fellow Evangelicals for the Benedict Option. Many Evangelicals, he told me, think of evangelism as solely a matter of transferring a message — that is, spreading information. If the information is received and affirmed, they have made a convert (“led someone to Christ”). The problem with that, he said, is that Evangelicals are often weak on follow-up — on “discipleship” (that is, growing in a disciplined way in embedding the Gospel in our hearts and lives). If you can help Evangelicals see that the Benedict Option is really a matter of taking on more rigorous discipleship, they will be a lot more open to listening to you.

That’s really helpful to me. When Father Matthew says that we can’t pass on what we don’t have, he’s saying that we have to pay much closer attention to deepening our own faith if we want to share it with others. The two aren’t opposed to each other, but work in dynamic relationship with each other. Remember, in the Gospels, Jesus often retreated to the desert to pray after meeting with crowds. In order to be active in the world as Christians, we must also be contemplative.

The Benedict Option is required at this time and in this place because we Americans are in very serious danger of forgetting what it means to be Christian. We have exchanged Christianity for Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, and don’t know it. Just as being Christian is more than just mentally and verbally affirming a certain set of propositions, evangelizing for the Christian faith is more than just communicating a message. Life-changing information is passed on in more ways than mere words.

A reader passes on this BenOppish comment from the conservative writer Gary North, who ponders what the people who donated $17 million to conservative Christian Rick Perry’s failed second bid for the presidency could have done with that money instead of sending it to a long-shot Republican presidential candidate:

What causes could they have funded?

What books could this have published?

What free online K-12 Christian curriculum could this have funded to compete with the Khan Academy?

What Christian research organization could this have launched?

Of course, he could not have raised this kind of money for any of these alternatives. Conservative Christians think that national salvation will come through politics. They will donate to an obviously lost cause until the lost cause hits the brick wall. They will write those checks in hope of a short-term political victory in Washington. Congress does not change. The courts do not change. The federal bureaucracy does not change. “But if we can just elect a President…”

Reagan failed to change Washington. Why would anyone believe that Rick Perry could do this… especially Rick Perry?

The futility of national politics should be obvious. But it isn’t.

North urges his readers to read a 1999 letter by the late Religious Right founding father Paul Weyrich, in which he declared that the culture war had been lost, and more or less called for a Benedict Option in a time when social conservatives like me were still holding out hope for politics. North includes the text of the letter in his link. Here’s an excerpt:

I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn’t mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn’t going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.

Therefore, what seems to me a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture. I would point out to you that the word “holy” means “set apart”, and that it is not against our tradition to be, in fact, “set apart”. You can look in the Old Testament, you can look at Christian history. You will see that there were times when those who had our beliefs were definitely in the minority and it was a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated.

What I mean by separation is, for example, what the homeschoolers have done. Faced with public school systems that no longer educate but instead “condition” students with the attitudes demanded by Political Correctness, they have seceded. They have separated themselves from public schools and have created new institutions, new schools, in their homes.

The same thing is happening in other areas. Some people are getting rid of their televisions. Others are setting up private courts, where they can hope to find justice instead of ideology and greed.

I think that we have to look at a whole series of possibilities for bypassing the institutions that are controlled by the enemy. If we expend our energies on fighting on the “turf” they already control, we will probably not accomplish what we hope, and we may spend ourselves to the point of exhaustion. The promising thing about a strategy of separation is that it has more to do with who we are, and what we become, than it does with what the other side is doing and what we are going to do about it.

More Weyrich:

Finally, we need to drop out of this culture, and find places, even if it is where we physically are right now, where we can live godly, righteous and sober lives.

Again, I don’t have all the answers or even all the questions. But I know that what we have been doing for thirty years hasn’t worked, that while we have been fighting and winning in politics, our culture has decayed into something approaching barbarism. We need to take another tack, find a different strategy.

It was hard for mainstream conservatives to see that back then. Certainly I did not. In 2015, though, you have to work hard not to take the prospect seriously.

Say, readers, if you live in the Washington area and want to come out to talk about the Benedict Option, you will have a couple of opportunities next month. On October 9, I will be giving a noon talk on Capitol Hill to the Faith and Law group for Congressional staffers. The next day, the great Ken Myers and I will be onstage at Georgetown on Saturday October 10, in lectures and conversation sponsored by the Tocqueville Forum at the university. Here’s a link to the site. Info:

Saturday, October 10, 2015

10:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Gaston Hall, Georgetown University 3700 O St. NW

It’s free and open to the public. Stay updated on Twitter by following @benedictoption. If you have never heard Ken Myers speak, you are in for a treat. The world is made up of two kinds of people: those who have never heard Ken Myers and who therefore do not subscribe to his Mars Hill Audio Journal, and those who have heard Ken Myers, and therefore become passionate about him and his work. There is not one thing I can say or ever will be able to say about the Benedict Option that Ken has not been saying in some form for years, with vastly more erudition and eloquence. From his Mars Hill Audio Journal site, this description about the basis for his work:

What is culture?

The word “culture” can be used in many different senses, and thinking clearly about cultural matters requires some initial clarity about how the word is being used. Most anthropologists and sociologists define a culture as a way of life informed by and perpetuating a set of assumptions or beliefs concerning life’s meaning.

What is distinctive about modern culture?

All cultures convey a set of assumptions about the kind of creatures human beings are and the kind of world in which they live. One of the defining characteristics of modern Western culture is that its artifacts, practices, and institutions convey the belief that there is no intrinsic meaning in the universe.

What is the Church’s interest in culture?

Defining the relationship between the Church and the thing we call “culture” requires an understanding of the nature of the Church and its mission. It also requires discernment about what cultures could and should do, as well as what the actual cultural forms that we live with are doing.

Also, this past weekend I agreed to drop down to Charlottesville, VA, to give a talk about the BenOp on Monday October 12 at the Center for Christian Study at UVA. We haven’t locked in a time yet, but stay tuned.

These are exciting times for small-o orthodox Christians. Tough ones, but exciting all the same. Read this, and read this; both will give you a deeper idea of the challenges the Benedict Option will attempt to meet. I hope you will come be a part of the discussion at Georgetown, and wherever I am talking about it, and others are talking about it. We needs to brainstorm this.

Why Rush Should Meet the Bunk

Wendell Pierce talked to the Hollywood Reporter about his new memoir, The Wind in the Reeds. Here’s a link to that interview. Excerpt:

On the surprising similarities to conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom he’ll play in Confirmation, which will air on HBO in 2016:

I actually was intrigued by the man even more because I saw so much in his upbringing as in my mother’s upbringing and my uncle’s and my grandfather, and so I tapped into that, to the understanding of that. His grandfather, the hero of his life, said, ” ‘Can’t’ is already dead. I helped bury him. Don’t ever tell me you can’t do something.” Mine would say, ” ‘Can’t’ died three days before the creation of the world. Don’t ever tell me you can’t do something.” That sort of similarity of the wisdom of those black folks who had gone through so much racial violence and protecting their children as they tried to prepare them for going

Wendell Pierce (s_bukley / Shutterstock.com)

out into a racist world and a world that, as my parents always told me, “Those who don’t have your best interests at heart.” I try to tap into the humanity of who the justice is. And coming from Pin Point, Ga., he reminded me of College Point, La. — the moral construct of church, the importance of education and so on — where my mother and where my family came from. So I tapped into that. I find it very interesting. I found similarities in that. I reached out to [Thomas, to meet him]. I doubt he will meet me, but, hey, please put it in this article that I still, to this day, would love to meet him.

And the surprising conservative pundit who does want to meet him:

What’s interesting is, I hope to meet Rush Limbaugh because he was speaking about our project on the radio one day and said, “You know, it’s just the left liberal condemnation of our justice and it’s awful, but the guy playing him is that actor from The Wire [Wendell played Bunk Moreland — RD]. I kinda would like to meet him.” So just as an off-cuff relationship, I reached out to Rush Limbaugh, to his office, and said I would like to meet him. His people said, “OK.” If he invited me to come onto the show, I would go on the show because they need to have those voices.

I didn’t know Wendell had reached out to the Limbaugh people. I can think of at least two reasons why Rush ought to invite him on his show.

1. Wendell is a liberal Democrat, but despite what you might think about liberal Democrats, he’s also a very fair man. It speaks volumes that when it came to seeking a collaborator for his memoir, Wendell — a black liberal from New Orleans — hired a white conservative who lives in the country (me). Why? Because he knows that some things are more important than politics. When we met for lunch, we found that we had more in common than the things that divided us. He was a genuine pleasure to work for and with, and because he’s such a generous, big-hearted man, he opened my eyes to a lot of things about race, culture, and history that I had not been able to see before. Anyway, the fact that a black liberal trusted a white conservative to help him tell the precious story of his and his family’s journey tells you a lot about the kind of man Wendell is. He’s a man who looks past ideology, and sees the heart. And he inspires the same reaction in others. In me, anyway.

2. The Wind in the Reeds is surprisingly conservative. Don’t misunderstand: he was and is a strong Obama supporter, and by no means sympatico with the Republican Party. But as Wendell alludes in his Clarence Thomas answer above, the stories about his (Wendell’s) rural family back in the 1930s and 1940s strongly resonate with family values conservatives. Here’s a passage from the book illustrating why. Mamo and Papo were Frances and Herbert Edwards, Wendell’s maternal grandparents, who raised their large family in College Point, a tiny community along Bayou Lafourche:

Theirs was a religious household. Papo was a lifelong Methodist; Mamo, a Catholic. All the Edwards children were baptized into the Catholic faith, and Papo saw their upbringing as loyal sons and daughters of Rome as a sacred obligation. If one of the children didn’t want to go to Sunday mass, Papo wouldn’t let them play outside that afternoon. Every night, Papo would get on his knees and pray aloud, presenting all his family’s needs to the Lord while the children kneeled quietly beside him. He read the Bible to the children and explained it to them as best he could.

The way my mother and my aunts and uncles told it, everybody in College Point was as good as family, and you respected them as such. It takes a village to raise a child? That’s how it was in College Point. Any adult could scold any kid for doing wrong. They knew how your mama and daddy would want you to behave, and they also knew that your mama and daddy would appreciate the reinforcement of the community’s standards. In the Edwards family, as in most other black families in

College Point, life’s purpose was to serve God and get an education. If you did these things, and held tight to the family, you were going to make it.

Papo refused to accept from his children anything short of excellence. When one of his kids would say, “Daddy, I can’t do it,” Papo would respond, “Can’t died three days before the world was born!” He believed in you, and he expected you to rise to the challenge. Education was one of the most precious gifts a man or a woman could have, Papo believed. “If you get an education,” he told his children, “they can take away your job, they can take away your house, they can take away everything you have, but once you get something in your head, they can’t take it away from you.”

And:

Mamo worked as a cook and a maid in a white family’s house, and she spent the early part of Christmas day there preparing their dinner. Back at the farm, Papo oversaw the preparation of the Edwards family’s holiday meal, which they would celebrate as the evening meal, so Mamo could be with them. Christmas dinner was always rich with country food, including chicken, turkey, and goose from their farm, rice, green peas, and potato salad. For dessert, the family ate candy and cake Papo made himself. There wasn’t much money for Christmas gifts, but Papo and Mamo made sure their children feasted well on the Nativity.

One Christmas evening after supper, the Edwardses went to call on their College Point neighbors, to wish them a happy holiday. The kids were startled to go into one house and to see that all that family had eaten for their Christmas meal was potatoes and grits. When they returned home, Papo told the children, “This is what I mean when I tell you it’s important to save for a rainy day. If you put your money aside now, you will have enough to eat well on Christmas.”

Given the man Papo was, if the Edwardses had any food left, he probably took it to that poor family, and didn’t tell his own children for the sake of preserving their neighbors’ dignity.

One more:

His children remembered Papo as a slow talker but a deep thinker. He never made a quick decision, but acted only after prayer, deliberation, and sleeping on it. Whatever the answer was, he arrived at it through careful reason, not passion. Acting on impulse was the sure way to lose your money, in Papo’s view.

Papo worked for a time in a sugar factory, and received his weekly wages in a brown packet. He had a firm rule with himself: wait 24 hours before spending a penny of it. Uncle L.C. says that as a young working man, he thought his father’s rule was silly. You have the money, he figured, so why not enjoy it?

But when he got married and started a family of his own, he understood Papo’s good sense, and followed the rule himself. Uncle L.C., who worked at the DuPont chemical plant, has done well through saving and investing over the years. To this day, he credits Papo for teaching him by word and example the importance of being careful with your money, and not letting your passions guide your decisions.

These were dirt-poor country black folks living through the Depression in a culture of violent white supremacy. And yet, they triumphed. Their kids all did well for themselves. Wendell credits the values that Mamo and Papo instilled in their children, and through his mom, into him, for his success. I can’t resist one more great anecdote about Wendell’s mother Tee:

After graduating from Southern University with a degree in education and home economics, Tee returned to the bayou to teach. Back then, the only middle-class professions open to African Americans were teacher, preacher, and undertaker. If you were one of those, you held elite status in the black community.

Though she was working at the black school in Paincourtville, Tee, a tomboy in her youth, helped out on the farm by driving the tractor as Papo, Tee Gladys, and the others gathered hay. One of the kinfolks chastised her for lowering herself in that way.

“You finished college,” the relative chided. “You have a sheepskin. You’re not supposed to be on this tractor.”

“If I hadn’t been on this tractor, I wouldn’t have a sheepskin,” Tee shot back. In her family, there was nothing undignified about hard work.

You want to read the whole thing? Buy the book. It’s a great American story, one that pays tribute to the sacrifices of past generations, and to the truth that hard work, education, and a refusal to cripple yourself with self-pity and victimhood, even in the face of injustice, can lead to triumph. It’s the story of the black middle class in America.

3. The patriotism of Amos Pierce, Wendell’s father, a World War II combat veteran who was humiliated by his country, but who never stopped loving America — and who was, at long last, The story of what happened, and how Amos Pierce got his due at long last, is very moving, and I told it here the other day.

Come on, Rush. Call Wendell back. You really want to have him on your show.

Should We Fight Pashtun Pedophiles?

A revolting NYT story from Afghanistan:

In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

Read the whole thing. It’s horrifying — and it poses very difficult questions to us all. I mean, the outrage is easy — I certainly feel it — but the questions are hard.

I wonder how many Americans realize that one of the reasons the Taliban was welcomed by Afghan peasants is that it fought bacha bazi. The Washington Post reported in 2012:

A growing number of Afghan children are being coerced into a life of sexual abuse. The practice of wealthy or prominent Afghans exploiting underage boys as sexual partners who are often dressed up as women to dance at gatherings is on the rise in post-Taliban Afghanistan, according to Afghan human rights researchers, Western officials and men who participate in the abuse.

“Like it or not, there was better rule of law under the Taliban,” said Dee Brillenburg Wurth, a child-protection expert at the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, who has sought to persuade the government to address the problem. “They saw it as a sin, and they stopped a lot of it.”

… Afghan men have exploited boys as sexual partners for generations, people who have studied the issue say. The practice became rampant during the 1980s, when mujaheddin commanders fighting Soviet forces became notorious for recruiting young boys while passing through villages. In Kandahar during the mid-1990s, the Taliban was born in part out of public anger that local commanders had married bachas and were engaging in other morally licentious behavior.

If I were an Afghan peasant and the only way to stop Pashtun perverts from doing that to my son was to empower the Taliban, I would welcome the Taliban. Wouldn’t you?

In the NYT story, we learn that two US soldiers were punished by the military for beating up an Afghan commander they found with a boy sex slave chained to his bed. The idea here is that the US needs to work with these degenerates to fight the Taliban (who are also degenerate, but in a different way).

Think through the outrage, and understand how difficult this problem is for US strategists. I would sooner be court-martialed than sit there and listen while a man rapes a child, and do nothing about it because I have to follow orders. If men under my command had shot that SOB, I would have given them a commendation. That said, if the mission of our forces is to defeat the Taliban, then we have to work with those who fight them. If the Taliban in power is a national security threat to the United States, then it is arguably in our national interest to tolerate the evil that is not a danger to our country for the sake of defeating the evil that is.

I’m not saying that I agree with that argument. I’m saying that the correct course of action for the US here is not clear-cut.

Second, this is a pretty great illustration of the limits of criticizing “cultural imperialism” as an answer to Westerners trying to change the traditions of Third World peoples. The other day, I wrote critically of the way the US and other Western governments and institutions are trying to pressure Africans to adopt secular Western views on sexual morality, including homosexuality. This, I said, is “cultural imperialism.” And it undoubtedly is.

But one man’s “cultural imperialism” is another man’s “liberation of the oppressed.” I would have no moral problem imposing Western standards on Pashtun pederasts, at the end of a gun if necessary. Nor, for that matter, if there were, say, Ugandans who were lynching gays, and US soldiers were occupying that country and had the power to stop it, I would cheer our troops on.

(That is a different question than asking whether or not it is worth invading another country to stop Pashtun pederasty or Ugandan anti-gay lynching. Of course we should not. We cannot possibly save everyone in the world who needs saving. The reason the US military is in Afghanistan in the first place is not to civilize Pashtun barbarians, but to fight Islamic religious savages who harbored terrorists who mass murdered Americans. It is easy to believe that the Pashtuns or Ugandans are behaving like devils in those respective cases, but to also accept that the cost of trying to stop it would be too high, and unlikely to change things.)

More broadly, to religiously conservative Americans, the rich West trying to use the power of the purse to compel impoverished African nations to give up their traditional views of marriage is a case of the West attempting to impose its corrupt values on a relatively weak culture. To liberals and other pro-LGBT Americans, it’s an attempt by the enlightened West to use what leverage we have to compel morally corrupt African cultures to believe and behave more humanely towards LGBTs within those cultures. Who is the oppressor and who is the liberator depends on what you believe constitutes goodness and evil, slavery and freedom.

This is why the culture war never ends. On some fundamental moral principles, we have widely diverging views, and no way to resolve them. Culture war is an eternal thing within diverse cultures, and between them. Here is an essay by a far-left professor who denounces US cultural imperialism from a Marxist perspective. He begins:

U.S cultural imperialism has two major goals, one economic and the other political: to capture markets for its cultural commodities and to establish hegemony by shaping popular consciousness. The export of entertainment is one of the most important sources of capital accumulation and global profits displacing manufacturing exports. In the political sphere, cultural imperialism plays a major role in dissociating people from their cultural roots and traditions of solidarity, replacing them with media created needs which change with every publicity campaign. The political effect in to alienate people from traditional class and community bonds, atomizing and separating individuals from each other.

There’s more (misspellings in the original) — this from a section called “the tyranny of liberalism”:

Just as western state terrorism attempts to destroy social movements, revolutionary governments and disarticulate civil society, economic terrorism as practiced by the IMF and private bank consortia, destroy local industries, erode public ownership and savages wage and salaried household. Cultural terrorism is responsible for the physical displacement of local cultural activities and artists. Cultural terrorism by preying on the psychological weaknesses and deep anxieties of vulnerable Third World peoples, particularly their sense of being “backward”, “traditional” and oppressed, projects new images of “mobility” and “free expression”, destroying old bonds to family and community, while fastening new chains of arbitrary authority linked to corporate power and commercial markets. The attacks on traditional restraints and obligations is a mechanism by which the capitalist market and state becomes the ultimate center of exclusive power. Cultural imperialism in the name of “self expression” tyrannizes Third World people fearful of being labeled “traditional”, seducing and manipulating them by the phoney images of classless “modernity”. Cultural imperialism questions all pre-existing relations that are obstacles to the one and only sacred modern deity: the market. Third World peoples are entertained, coerced, titillated to be modern’, to submit to the demands of capitalist market to discard comfortable, traditional, loose fitting clothes for ill fitting unsuitable tight blue jeans.

Cultural imperialism functions best through colonized intermediaries, cultural collaborators. The prototype imperial collaborators are the upwardly mobile Third World professionals who imitate the style of their patrons. These collaborators are servile to the West and arrogant to their people, prototypical authoritarian personalities. Backed by the banks and multinationals, they wield immense power through the state and local mass media. Imitative of the West, they are rigid in their conformity to the rules of unequal competition, opening their country and peoples to savage exploitation in the name of free trade. Among the prominent cultural collaborators are the institutional intellectuals who deny class domination and imperial class warfare behind the jargon of objective social science. They fetischize the market as the absolute arbiter of good and evil. Behind the rhetoric of ‘regional cooperation”, the conformist intellectuals attack working class and national institutions which constrain capital movements — their supporters isolated and marginalized. Today throughout the Third World, Western funded Third World intellectuals have embraced the ideology of concertacion (class collaboration). The notion of interdependence has replaced imperialism. And the unregulated world market is presented as the only alternative for development. The irony is that today as never before the “market” has been least favorable to the Third World. Never have the U.S., Europe and Japan been so aggressive in exploiting the Third World. The cultural alienation of the institutional intellectuals from the global realities is a byproduct of the ascendancy of Western cultural imperialism. For those critical intellectuals who refuse to join the celebration of the market, who are outside of the official conference circuits, the challenge is to once again return to the class and anti-imperialist struggle.

The author of that piece is a sociologist named James Petras.

James Kalb, a traditionalist Catholic, has a great book called The Tyranny of Liberalism that takes a similar tack, though from the traditionalist right. Though Petras and Kalb no doubt differ strongly on fundamental questions of right and wrong, they are united, it appears, in questioning the hegemony of neoliberalisms of the Left and Right. They might even agree on the politics of architecture, I dunno. The thing about neoliberals of both the Left and Right is that they take their own WEIRD (White Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) assumptions as universal realities.

But I digress. Going back to the Afghan thing, the main point here is that it’s not hard to identify the phenomenon we typically call “cultural imperialism,” though the term is pejorative. The real question is whether or not specific instances of “cultural imperialism” are morally justified. When the British crown began to rule India as an imperial power, Queen Victoria’s representatives in the Raj had to contend with the cultural practice of suttee (widow-burning). Their initial response was to tolerate it, because the British couldn’t risk riling Hindus and Muslims by banning a practice that was deeply rooted in religion and tradition. Eventually, though, British Evangelicals, both missionaries and believers in the British Army, led a campaign to stamp out the practice as cruel. Were they cultural imperialists? Absolutely — and real imperialists too! As the scholar of the Victorian era whose article about suttee I link to in this paragraph says, it’s simply not accurate to depict widows burned alive on pyres as nothing but victims. Some of these women wanted to do this, because it was what they believed was just.

Were they right to have fought suttee, the British? That depends on what you think about right and wrong, and the prudential application of your principles. My point about the “cultural imperialism” slur is that it is a loaded term, even when conservatives like me use it. It is politically useful, given the bad name imperialism has in contemporary democratic culture, but in truth, it doesn’t settle any arguments. The real argument has to do with the moral status of the belief or practice of the weaker culture, and with the prudence and justice of the stronger power’s intervening in the foreign culture to stop it.

All of which is to say that not all cultural imperialism is bad, but only that before we engage in it, we should be very clear about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it — and we shouldn’t be surprised when those we force to accept our values hate us for our action (nor, it must be said, when those who share our values but whom we refused to help hate us for our inaction).

A Very British Mutiny

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but is a British general threatening a military coup in the Sunday Times?! pic.twitter.com/VKu00JPvMl

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) September 20, 2015

Not a coup, exactly, but a mutiny. If you can’t read the comment in the photo, here’s the Independent‘s report on it (the Sunday Times is behind a paywall). Excerpt:

A senior serving general has reportedly warned that a Jeremy Corbyn government could face “a mutiny” from the Army if it tried to downgrade them.

The unnamed general said members of the armed forces would begin directly and publicly challenging the Labour leader if he tried to scrap Trident, pull out of Nato or announce “any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces.”

He told the Sunday Times: “The Army just wouldn’t stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that. You can’t put a maverick in charge of a country’s security.

“There would be mass resignations at all levels and you would face the very real prospect of an event which would effectively be a mutiny.”

That is a stunning statement. I mean, even if you sympathize with the unnamed general — and perhaps I would if I were a Briton facing the prospect of a Corbyn government — that is still a staggering public statement coming from a general in the army of a democracy.