Rod Dreher's Blog, page 93

The Final Christian Generation?

One of this blog’s most intelligent and thoughtful readers (based on the e-mails he sends me every week) passed on this in response to my “Jeremiah Was A Bourgeois” post. I want to share it with you:

I’m like you, I’m a Jeremiah.

People criticize you for not having hope, but I think the real problem is that they have put their hope in Men. Or in the institutions of man, instead of God. Such hope is perverse and a false hope and it should be shattered. You aren’t trying to take away people’s hope in God! You’re trying to get them to place their hope in God, not America or the Republican Party or the Roman Catholic Church or Southern Baptist Convention or Calvin College or Baylor University or whatever institution it is that is being eviscerated right now by liquid modernity.

Understand, I’m not against these Christian institutions, I just don’t think we can ever rest on our laurels and think we’re done. “Well, I established a Christian college with a sound doctrinal statement, our work is finished!” “Ah, we’ve solved the Papist problem with our new Reformed Church. Should be good until the end of time.”

There can be no ‘end of history’ for Christian institutions. Christianity is analogous to the observer effect: once you take Christianity’s critique of the world and the Christian hope for the world’s salvation and then distill it from the air and fashion it into a concrete social institution or practice, it ceases to be Christian in some sense. You lose something instantly. Once the Gospel becomes partially embodied as some social institution on earth, that institution becomes just another institution subject to God’s final judgment–may they be found faithful in His sight and may God judge mercifully!

To establish a Christian institution, whether a denomination like the SBC, a Christian college, or a magazine or whatever is to bring something into the world that will one day come to an end–and I mean through decay in some sense. I don’t think God’s universal and invisible church will ever be absent, but the particular institutions playing the role–yes. We’ll move from one to another. The world is corrupting. The same forces of the fall are constantly at work. Maybe it is like radioactive decay. But still, I’d expect a greater half-life than what we saw with some of the Christian colleges failing so soon after their founding. So Christian institutions are in constant need of reform, though reasonable reform. Knowing we can never balance the equation, we shouldn’t try for reformations that attempt it–likely just shortens the half-life.

Maybe its like building castles in the sand, you have to constantly keep them going–they won’t last out of their own inertia. Or keeping a fire going. We have to be vigilant.

The problem with your critics is that they don’t understand this. They have faith in human institutions. They think “not my denomination/college/whatever”. Maybe it is a combination of things. They lack a knowledge of history to see things are constantly in flux. Just like a sand castle, the faith has to be rebuilt every generation. The battle against chaos is never over, but must constantly be re-won. SJWism might in some sense be new, but it can’t really be new. Sorry, gonna drop some Jungian archetypal thinking on you, but SJWism has to be archetypal. Liquid modernity too. I think it is unlikely that this is just a historical accident. I suspect some corrosive power deep in the human soul that has always been there, always coiled up and waiting has just now gotten its chance. This is much bigger than liberalism, SJWism, or modernity–some dark human passion is at the root. We can’t just wait for SJWism to pass as though its a strange historical accident. Rather we have to be vigilant and responsible and engage in Christian praxis that can manage this underlying human passion, restrain it. If I had to put money on it and name the passion, I’d say that whatever it was that drove the Babel-builders in Gen 11 is the source. And then they despair when the world is not a tower to heaven and seek destruction.

Your critics may lack imagination. Who in the 1950s could have imagined the behemoth GM would file for bankruptcy in 2009? No one. But when it did happen, it wasn’t catastrophic–no one beat their breasts. The world didn’t stop in awe. No comets hailed the great bankruptcy. It was just another news story from the great recession. Because by the time it happened, the world was such a different place that GM was virtually the sick man of Michigan.

Similarly, I can imagine that the institution we know as the Roman Catholic Church might collapse in the next thirty years. But when it does, the world won’t gawk, it will have already moved on. RCC will likely go out with a whimper. When it does happen, it won’t be cataclysmic. But your readers can only think about this in terms of how they envisioned the RCC when they were young. Now if that institution were to suddenly collapse, that would be shocking and cataclysmic. But look with your eyes, not your memory, and that RCC is already gone. The sick one in front of us may not recover. See the RCC for what it is right now and for where it is headed–where it is trending, not your Platonic ideal concept of it you fashioned in your youth when you imagined the world was static and unchanging.

Everything I say about RCC I could say about the SBC–which I think is definitely coming to nothing. Nonexistence by 2100, irrelevance within just 5 years. I could say about Wheaton, Calvin, Baylor, etc etc.

Prediction: China will continue to outmaneuver us in the South China sea by aggressively building islands, bases, buzzing our planes, threatening our carriers, threatening our allies, driving wedges. We won’t stand up to them. All the sudden Japan and Australia are really interested in rearming. No one does that when they trust the U.S. to keep them safe. Our allies have already lost faith in us. This ain’t just Trump, this is U.S. in general since Obama. What would have been unthinkable 20 years ago–the U.S. losing dominance over the Pacific is now very very thinkable for Japan and Australia. Of course, the people who go around saying “peace and prosperity” will never admit this is happening. No, China is not beating us in the Pacific. No they are not outmaneuvering us. No their army is not becoming better than ours. They will say this forever–until the one day where its just obvious that China dominates the Pacific. They will instantaneously shift from “China is no threat to the U.S. in Pacific–stop your fearmongering” to “The Pacific is a lost cause–why we shouldn’t contest an area China already controls”. You can’t trust people who can only see what’s in front of their faces and never anything beyond it. Its like your law of merited impossibility: China will never be powerful enough to challenge the U.S. in the Pacific, but when they do there’s no point in trying to stop them, they are too strong.

Yeah, this brings to mind Samuel D. James’s mixed review of Live Not By Lies, appearing in Christianity Today. He says I don’t have enough hope in America’s religious heritage, and in the First Amendment, which will protect us traditional Christians from soft totalitarianism. He’s a smart guy, and I think he really must believe this. That is faith misplaced, for sure. That piece, and the comments from the reader above, sent me back to thinking about historian Edward J. Watts’s The Final Pagan Generation, which I last wrote about here.
It’s a study of pagan elites in fourth century Rome, when Roman society was radically shifting away from its pagan roots to the new Christian religion. The pagans Watts writes about didn’t see it, no doubt because they had so much psychologically invested in the continuation of Roman society, and because all anybody in Rome had known since time out of mind was paganism. I wrote two years ago:

[A]s Watts tells it, in fourth century Rome, the educational system was overwhelmingly pagan, and socialized the students into an overwhelmingly pagan hierarchy. They learned to identify with this, and simply assumed things would always be this way.  This was an educational system designed to educate kids into thinking things would be the way things were for their fathers.

I thought here about what so many Christians have said to me about Christian secondary and university education: that it’s built on the assumptions that things are always going to be the same way for Christians, despite the rapidly changing culture, and that Christian education is about socializing young Christians for leadership in that familiar social order.

Watts says it’s very important to remember that the first 50 years of the lives of the final pagan generation were quite stable in terms of government. Thus they were socialized into believing that things would always be that way. Elites did very well under the stable Constantinian system. Wealth concentrated in their hands. Personal connections became vital to entering and maintaining oneself in the elite classes. Cronyism was common.

By mid-century, when the elites of the FPG (final pagan generation) were well-established in their careers, the state’s attempt to privilege Christianity and marginalize traditional religion picked up. Constantine died in 337, and civil conflict followed. Roman leaders faced pressure from more radical Christians to step up the de-paganization, and tried to walk a balance between their demands and not upsetting the still large pagan population. In 356, Constantius stepped up the anti-pagan laws.

Interestingly, the pagan elites didn’t take all this too seriously, according to Watts. A lot of temples remained open despite Constantius’s orders that they be closed. The emperor’s policies “might have been disagreeable, but they hardly seemed to be a pressing or universal threat.”

Towards the end of his reign, Constantius’s anti-pagan laws grew even stronger, but paganism was still such a vivid and powerful presence in daily life that the pagan elites felt confident that the danger would pass when the emperor did. Watts judges that in retrospect, the elites ought to have stood up to the emperor in some way, to protect their religion. Instead, they chose to take the easier route, protecting their careers and their money-making opportunities by not antagonizing a powerful emperor. That seemed a reasonable bet.

Constantius was succeeded by Julian the Apostate, a Roman emperor so called because though he had been raised a Christian, reverted to his ancestral faith, and tried to re-impose paganism on the empire. He failed. The culture, though still dominantly pagan, was moving quickly. More:

What’s interesting about this is that even though daily religious realities for most Romans were not very different than they had ever been, this hid from most people the massive changes that were actually taking place. This seems contemporary to me. Liberals may well see Trump as a Julian the Apostate figure, trying to roll back the progressive Sexual Revolution. And there are certainly conservatives who regard Trump that way, and love that about him. But the cultural changes that have overtaken America, and that are continuing to do so, are fundamental, and aren’t going to be undone by government policy.

Furthermore, I believe that Christians see daily life going on locally much as it always did, with the exception, maybe, that their churches don’t attract as many people. Nothing radical is happening in most places. Maybe they think that a sympathetic president in Washington is going to turn things around for the faith. The situation strikes me as rather like that of the pagan believers in Rome in the 360s.

By the 390s, the strength of paganism had waned so much that Christian bishops began exercising political power to convince Roman officials to actively suppress paganism. Watts writes that when it came to appealing to Roman authorities to protect pagan institutions and practices from the Christians, “the final pagan generation sometimes seemed as influential as the president of Polaroid in the age of the smartphone.”

And yet, writes Watts, the final pagan generation, up to the end, still believed that it was going to last forever for them. Theirs was a failure of imagination. When I hear conservative Christians today talk about the “Constantine Option” — by which they mean making sure that Christians have allies in political power — I recognize that they have a point, but I urge them to consider also the fate of Julian the Apostate. He was every bit the Roman emperor that his ancestor Constantine the Great had been. But it didn’t matter. He was able to suppress Christianity to some degree, but the new religion was too well established to turn back by imperial decree. Political action alone will not stymie an idea whose time has come.

Among the things I said Christians of this “final Christian generation” should do:

Stop thinking that it’s always going to be this way, and that anything short of radical action is sufficient. The mindset of older Christians may actually be a hindrance, because they don’t understand how radically different the world today is.
Do not mistake the presence of Christian churches and symbols in public life for the true condition of Christianity in the hearts and minds of people. Remember, the pagan temples and statues of the gods remained long after paganism was a dead letter.

I also talked about how (drawing on Watts) some of the most creative Christian fourth-century elites withdrew from the world and became monastics. They became a counterculture, in distinction to bishops and secular priests, who were formed by and served the imperial system. “These were the first elites of the fourth century who immunized themselves against the rewards that imperial officials could offer and the punishments that they could inflict,” said Watts. This is not a criticism of bishops and priests, but rather shows that the strengths the monks developed by living outside the system — taking a Benedict Option, so to speak — later proved socially and culturally decisive in the times to come.

Read the whole thing. It’s from 2018, but it is even more relevant today — especially given how many Christians put their faith in Donald Trump to restore the America they knew and loved. The future is not pre-ordained by any means, but if we Christians are going to pass the faith on over the coming generations within this post-Christian culture, we absolutely must learn from history. Our complacency, and our trust in the durability of traditions and institutions, is going to seal our fate. And so will our devotion to optimism, versus  hope based in a realistic assessment of where we stand in this culture today.

Note also the excellent comment I appended to that 2018 piece, by a reader who posts as “Beowulf.” He’s the same reader who sent me the e-mail with which I began this post.

UPDATE: Beowulf adds:

Prediction: folks will not understand the China bit and think I’m tying Christianity to American hegemony. I really mean that as an illustration of how people are blind to see what’s happening and are in denial. I do hope we stand up to China, but I do so qua American not necessarily qua Christian–though they might be entangled when it comes to China.

But watch America in the Pacific. I think it is a good test of people’s abilities to accurately describe what is happening before their eyes. Also, I don’t want to see Catholics lose their church–I am so glad they are out there. I want to see RCC reformed. I just don’t see it happening and we should be prepared for a collapse.

The post The Final Christian Generation? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Social Justice Warriors, For Real

Hello all, I was away at the dentist for much of the day. After a decade of non-dentist-going (because I hate going to the dentist), I finally had to give up my cowardice-related boycott — this after suffering some unpleasantry resulting from biting down on a popcorn kernel. Turns out that I chipped a filling, which will need to be replaced, but they promised to sedate me heavily, because I’m Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man when it comes to all things dental. Wonder of wonders, they told me that my teeth were in really good shape after a decade. Of course, I said; if you’re afraid of the dentist, you don’t miss brushing and flossing.

Anyway, all of that is to explain why I’ve been away from the keys today. We also had a pipe burst in the house last evening, which flooded the back end of the house. The good news is that we probably won’t have to take out the drywall, but the man came today and said the baseboards are shot. We have to keep the monster humidifiers running through the weekend, then he’ll come back to test for moisture in the walls on Monday to see if we’re okay. Merry Christmas! As if that weren’t enough, all the alarms in the house went off this morning at 4:30, for no discernible reason. We got them all off except the fire alarm in our bedroom. The alarm company lady told us there was nothing she could do. Nothing worked, except my 16-year-old son bashing it into silent submission.

It’s been quite a day, I tell you.

So, I am happy to hand over this post to a reader, who sends in a disturbing letter:

A few weeks ago, you mentioned a Twitter contrasting the styles of a Chinese military propaganda video and a U.S. Army recruiting advertisement.

Well, Tucker Carlson addressed the elephant in the room. His entire monologue is worth watching, but below are the key points:

What are the consequences of this kind of thinking? Over time, identity politics will destroy our country. No nation can remain unified for long if people are encouraged to think of themselves as members of competing ethnic groups first and citizens second. Countries need a reason to hang together; unity doesn’t happen by accident. The fixation on race that has seized our leadership class guarantees permanent disunity. It’s terrifying if you think about it, but it could be much worse.

The hatred for Tucker Carlson is mystifying. Is it because he’s really a spiteful demagogue? Or is it, I think, because he’s willing to point out distressing, yet blatantly obvious truths about our world? The fact is, America’s already at the stage described by Carlson, it’s just that most people are in denial. I love what he said about needing reason to hang together, because it’s so true. This country can remain a nation only so long as the number of people who think it’s worth fighting for and, if necessary, dying or killing for, outnumber those who either don’t care one way or the other or seek to dismantle and “transform” it.

[Carlson:] The U.S. military, for the record, has a very long history of treating everyone with respect and dignity because it was a meritocracy and a meritocracy is designed to treat people with respect and dignity on the basis of how they behave, not on the basis of how they look.

I’ll push back on this slightly, because the military is far from a perfect institution. It didn’t always treat everyone with respect and dignity and it still fails to do so today. However, it’s probably done as good a job as any institution out there could’ve done. This is beyond the scope of what we’re talking about here, but the U.S. military is somewhat unusual in its development compared to the professional militaries of say, Europe. But, I can attest from personal experience, that the military is by-and-large a meritocracy and that veterans themselves are largely proud of their service and say that it’s given them a leg up on life.

Part of the reason why the U.S. military is imperfect, however, is that it’s increasingly become a battlefield for the culture wars. Conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. military is often at the forefront of social change in this country and, in many ways, it’s true – Blacks and other racial minorities achieved equality in the services long before they achieved true equality in society. Unfortunately, this has translated into more radically-inclined forces into using the military almost exclusively as a vehicle for social change. I say exclusively, because they’re not in the least bit willing to entertain any other points of view or consider that the military may not be the best place for such practices. Unfortunately, many of these radicals serve in uniform or in a civilian capacity in national security. Perhaps they target the military because, unlike the rest of us, the military can’t really say, “no.”

In an essay for the Army War College in 1992, an Air Force lawyer named Charles Dunlap (you can read his blog here) wrote a controversial paper in which he described America 20 years from then as under the control of a military junta, but the military, ironically, “can’t fight,” in his words. This wasn’t a prediction on his part, but merely a crafty way of arguing against diverting the armed forces from its primary area of competency, which is warfighting, towards civilian functions better suited for non-martial institutions.

If only Charles Dunlap knew then that Wokeness, not civilian duties, would be what ailed the military over two decades down the road. While I don’t want to go as far as to say the military has lost all capability to fulfill its primary task (I have no way of knowing that), I can’t imagine that it’d be an effective fighting force if the same level of demoralization which ails American society afflicted the armed services also. Not only would the military be unable to fight, it’d be incapable of even enforcing a military dictatorship! Like the militaries of the ex-Communist countries, it’d collapse like a house of cards.

The conspiracy theorist in me says this is exactly what’s intended – weaken the institutions that defend and legitimize the country and make it easier to take down the country. But the more likely answer is that the Woke are merely doing what they feel to be justice. Once they take down the military or take over it, there isn’t much left for them to go after, except maybe religious institutions.

I encourage you to watch Tucker Carlson’s monologue, or at least to read the modified transcript.Here’s more from it:

This summer, the U.S. Army’s so-called Operation Inclusion instructed soldiers that the phrase “Make America Great Again” was a form of socially acceptable “covert White supremacy.” According to the Army, a presidential campaign slogan was White supremacy. No one did anything about that.

Now, according to the Army’s Equity and Inclusion Agency (yes, they have one), the phrase, “all lives matter”, American exceptionalism, and the celebration of Columbus Day are racist. Over the summer, the now-retired head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, encouraged his employees to read the lunatic tract “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, a book that is both inherently bigoted and very stupid. Over the summer, Kaleth Wright, then the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, proclaimed on Twitter that his greatest fear was that one of his airmen might be killed by a racist cop. Not killed by the Chinese military, but by American racism.

You don’t see it in the adapted transcript, but in the broadcast, Carlson airs a clip from a US Air Force psychologist complaining about the threat from microaggressions. Think about that: an Air Force officer, whose mission it is to lay his life on the line fighting for this country, complained publicly about the pain of microaggressions. I don’t get that.

In the adapted transcript, Carlson links to a Department of Defense report stating that the Trump-appointed Acting Secretary has accepted the recommendations by a Diversity & Inclusion board set up by his Trump-appointed predecessor, Mark Esper. Among them (this is from the DOD release):

The board calls for a thorough review of DOD aptitude tests to ensure they do not adversely impact diversity. The DOD will develop plans for a rigorous and thorough assessment of all aptitude tests currently administered. The goal of this assessment will be to analyze, identify and remove — as applicable — “barriers that adversely impact diversity while retaining rigorous screening processes necessary to access a high-quality force,” the board recommendation states.

Note the Human Resources gobbledygook. “To ensure they do not adversely impact diversity” means “to protect the military from test results that reveal troop capabilities that violate diversity dogma.” But the military is still going to maintain the standards “necessary to access a high-quality force.” I’m guessing that the verb “access” there means “build.” How is it possible to throw out aptitude tests that do not give you a predetermined ideological result, but still expect them to measure real abilities? You can’t. But the US military can’t very well admit that it can’t have both quotas and the best possible fighting force, so it is simply declaring that it will.

It’s not that only white people (or people of any race) are best at combat. Of course that’s not true. My point is that you can’t have an accurate understanding of who is best at various combat-related tasks if you have to weight the test to achieve social-engineering goals. If the NBA, NFL, or Major League Baseball adopted the same standard, they would field politically correct teams that were mediocre on the field. They don’t do that, because those teams understand that the goal is to win games, period, and they will do whatever it takes to field a team that wins games, no matter what the color of the players. But the US military, whose mission is rather more important than that of the New York Yankees or the Kansas City Chiefs, won’t hold itself to the same realistic standards as professional sports teams.

Don’t think for a second that the Chinese and the Russians will be fooled by this. But we will be. That’s the ideology of the ruling class now. If a manager doesn’t buy into the diversity and equity ideology, he or she will be retired or fired. Don’t think that you can get away with pointing out that the mission will suffer if one prioritizes anything other than competence and quality of the product. The ruling class does not want to hear it.

Don’t forget the story I’ve told here that I heard from a Russian man in Moscow last year. He talked about the time he first knew that the Soviet system was doomed. He was a recent graduate of film school, and assigned to be a production assistant at the broadcast of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. He was with the Russian TV crew preparing the VIP box for the opening ceremony. Suddenly some KGB agents burst into the box to check everything out before Secretary Brezhnev and the others showed up. They saw some metal piping, and ordered it removed, saying, “We didn’t agree to that!”

The crew explained that the pipes were needed to hold up the lights for the broadcast, so Brezhnev and the leadership would be visible to television audiences. The KGB insisted that they hadn’t approved the pipes, and that they were the final authority. Down came the pipes.

And here, from the opening ceremony broadcast, was the result: Brezhnev and the Politburo, appearing before the world in the dark. 

The Russian told me that he knew that the Soviet system was doomed when he could see that those who ran it set up structural barriers to prevent them from getting information that they did not want to have — even when something as important to the Soviet Union as the presentation of its leadership to a worldwide audience.

James Damore was fired by Google when he told the company what it didn’t want to hear about diversity in tech. Similarly, you can be very sure that no executive — not in the US military, not in universities, not in corporations, nowhere — will be promoted unless they agree to live by the lies of diversity and equity ideology. The US military may have lost Afghanistan, but its leadership is damn sure going to win the war on common sense.

Do you disagree? Help me see what I’m missing, then. I don’t want to be right about this. The national security of my country depends on a strong military, not a politicized and demoralized one.

One more thing: earlier this year, The New York Times reported on the military’s recruiting crisis. Who is joining the military? Too many white people? You would think so, given the military’s new focus on Diversity & Inclusion. Actually, say the Times (emphasis mine):

The main predictors are not based on class or race. Army data show service spread mostly evenly through middle-class and “downscale” groups. Youth unemployment turns out not to be the prime factor. And the racial makeup of the force is more or less in line with that of young Americans as a whole, though African-Americans are slightly more likely to serve. Instead, the best predictor is a person’s familiarity with the military.

So the military already looks like young America — and in fact is slightly more black than young America as a whole. What is the point of turning our fighting force into Social Justice Warriors, then?

The post Social Justice Warriors, For Real appeared first on The American Conservative.

Jeremiah Was A Bourgeois

Close readers of my work know that I’m an admirer of theologian Hans Boersma, and also his friend. When I was told that he had reviewed Live Not By Lies for Touchstone, I was nervous about reading it. I really don’t want to disappoint Hans! Fortunately Hans’s review was really good, which both relieves me and fills me with gratitude. He calls me a “contemporary Jeremiah” — middle-class hobbit that I am! — and says it may be hard to see things as so bad for Christians when practicing Christians like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, US Attorney General Bill Barr, and new Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett hold senior leadership roles in public life. More:

Notwithstanding such counterevidence, when I read Dreher’s latest missive, I cannot shake the conviction that he is a true prophet and that the all-too-common pooh-poohing of his warnings and the ridiculing of the advice contained in his latest “manual” are grounded in a serious miscalculation. In fact, the cold shoulder that Dreher regularly experiences, including from top-notch Evangelical and Catholic scholars, may be among the most telling signals that he is correct in observing that Western culture (including many Christians) no longer has the inner resilience or fortitude to resist the barbarians who—as Alasdair MacIntyre has rightly insisted—have made their way inside the gates and are ready to impose their totalitarian regime upon us all.

When it was announced last week by St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary that I was going to be giving a prestigious lecture there next month, via Zoom (register for it here), there was a general wailing and gnashing of teeth among some Orthodox theologians, steamed that a mere journalist (and a scuzzy right-wing one at that!) was invited to give this lecture. David Bentley Hart’s valve slammed shut with the clamor of a sewer cover plate, and with a mighty eructation, he issued forth a seven-syllable word that nobody understands, but everybody is sure must be unpleasant. Alas for them. The lecture I’m to give will be about what we have to learn from the witness of Christians of the Soviet captivity, about how to identify and resist the soft totalitarianism that creeps ever forward here. The lecture is named after the late, great Father Alexander Schmemann, who was a founder of the seminary.

In his diary, Father S. wrote (10/6/75): “My dream is to write for the people, not for theologians. And when I find that it works—what joy!” And he also wrote (5/24/77):

“Orthodoxy refuses to recognize the fact of the collapse and the breakup of the Orthodox world; it has decided to live in its illusion; it has turned the Church into that illusion (yesterday we heard again and again about the ‘Patriarch of the great city of Antioch and of all the East’); it made the Church into a nonexistent world. I feel more and more strongly that I must devote the rest of my life to trying to dispel this illusion.”

This is what I try to do with my last two books, Live Not By Lies and its 2017 predecessor, The Benedict Option. So many of us Christians — clerical, academic, and lay — are living in an illusion about the state of the churches and the faith. The house is on fire! Where is their urgency? Things are not going to come right again if we can only keep quite still and wait. Nor are we going to carry Christianity into the future by compromising with the world on non-negotiables.

Anyway, back to Hans Boersma’s review:

A book review cannot do justice to the main strength of Dreher’s account, namely his interaction with those who resisted—people such as Fr. Tomislav Kolaković, Václav and Kamila Benda, Alexander Ogorodnikov, and others. Their horrific first-hand tales make it impossible to ignore what they have to say about the fatigue of the West in the face of its current challenges.

I appreciate this point. Yesterday I sat for an interview by a podcaster in California. Before we started, he told me about a Russian friend who pastors a Russian-language church on the West Coast. He said the Russian has been telling him that he can feel rising in this country the same spirit of the system he left behind in the Soviet Union. My interviewer also said that some of his California friends who grew up under communism — I believe he said Chinese communism — have recently left California for Texas, because life in the Golden State was beginning to remind them too much of the old world. Finally, he said that his daughter attends a prestigious school in the Northeast, and that the students there are being encouraged to snitch on fellow students who express wrongthink. You read that right: students are taught that if one of their peers says something that in any way violates progressive orthodoxy, they are to report the offender to school authorities.

Why would people not want to know that this danger is upon us, so we can build defenses to protect ourselves? All I can figure is that it’s the same old human fault: we prefer not to know about things that upset our peace of mind — even if these things can ultimately destroy us.

Boersma — born in the Netherlands, and a naturalized citizen of Canada — sees hope:

The silver lining is worth underlining. Part of the advice, particularly for Americans, should be to continue Christian political, legal, and social engagement at every level. The past few decades have seen declining religious commitments in America, with church attendance levels markedly down among younger generations. This is an ominous sign, which underscores Dreher’s analysis. Still, as a Dutch Canadian, I cannot help but observe that significant differences still persist between Western Europe and Canada on the one hand, and the United States on the other. It is far more difficult for committed Christians to rise to the political top in Western Europe and Canada than it is in America. One simply cannot imagine the Attorney General of Canada launching a speech such as that of William Barr, adamantly insisting on religious freedom. The appointment of someone like Amy -Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands is simply out of the question.

It is particularly Western European and Canadian Christians, therefore, who should take Dreher’s book to heart. For the most part, they have been effectively shut out from political, economic, and legal places of influence. (Unfortunately, by implication, Europeans and Canadians are far less likely than Americans to turn Dreher’s book into a bestseller.) By contrast, the pre-totalitarian character of American culture still allows for public opportunities to counter the nihilism of the woke capitalist tide. In the American context, therefore, as a matter of prudential judgment, we would do well to emphasize the “pre” in the term “pre-totalitarian culture.”

Is it, humanly speaking, likely that American cultural and political life will withstand the pressures of “woke and watchful capitalism”? No. Christians who care about the future of the gospel in America should give heed to Dreher’s manual. Live Not by Lies is a timely, perhaps even prophetic book.

Read it all. As Boersma points out in his conclusion, Dreher acknowledges in the book that few people in Russia really understood the horror they were inviting on themselves by trashing the old system. His observation took me back to this quote from a speech by the cultural impresario Diaghilev, at a fancy 1905 dinner he gave at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow:

We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, without fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.

Twelve years later, the old order was swept away by revolution. Diaghilev, who was in Europe at the time, never returned home, and died in exile.

This, by the way, is why I do not join those on the Right who denounce the entire American system as rotten. Decadence there certainly is in some quarters, but people who are eager to bring it all down are not people who have paid attention to history. Liberalism (I’m speaking of classical liberalism, of which there are left and right variants) has reached a decadent phase, but we should be very wary of its passing, for we know nothing of what will replace it. Between militant wokeness on one side, and Gen. Flynn’s Christo-authoritarianism on the other, threadbare liberalism still looks pretty good.

About the Schmemann lecture, I want to say one more thing. There has been rather purplish rhetoric coming from voices on the Orthodox Left — that is, from those who want to liberalize Church teaching on LGBT issues. They correctly understand that my argument in Live Not By Lies identifies LGBT rights as the tip of the sword that the state and its institutional and corporate allies will use to oppress Christians faithful to Scripture and Tradition. And they rightly foresee that my lecture will make mention of that. I don’t believe there are good faith discussions to be had with Orthodox who believe that the clear teaching of the Church is negotiable. I do, though, think that it is well worth talking about what it means to live out this teaching in the contemporary world, and the challenges Orthodox Christians, both gay and straight, face in a world that at best fails to comprehend our ethic, and at worst despises it. But that is not the conversation on the table.

A reader sent along this commentary from 2019 by the Orthodox biblical scholar Edith Humphrey, criticizing a text authored by Metropolitan (Archbishop) Kallistos Ware, a venerable figure in Orthodoxy who, in the piece (a foreword to a book), seemed to be opening the door to revising Orthodox teaching on homosexuality, and sexuality in general. Humphrey dissents, lamenting that “this foreword is ambiguous at a time which cries out for clarity.” She goes on:

The Metropolitan makes the disclaimer that he is not suggesting we abandon Orthodox teaching on this matter wholesale, but rather that we “enquire more rigorously into the reasons that lie behind it.” I would have welcomed a foreword that actually did this, raising questions regarding anthropology, discipline, and sexual expression. Instead, His Eminence’s questions have led the reader to question the ability of Orthodox Christians to discipline their bodies, the wisdom of the confessor who is seeking the salvation of those who have same-sex desire and whom he loves, and the dignity of a Church that cares about sexual expression among its members. Indeed, he does not only commend an inquiry into the reasons for the Church’s teachings, but also “experimentation,” “creative courage,” and “loving compassion” that “acknowledge…the variety of paths that God calls us human beings to follow.”

I have seen this kind of rhetoric before and it leads in only one direction. What begins as a call to pastoral clemency frequently ends in an unexamined shift in ethical and social practice. In contrast, I would agree with my dear friend Bradley Nassif, who quotes Chesterton’s sage comment that one should never tear down a fence unless one knows why it was put there in the first place. His own article in this same issue of The Wheel, now available to all online, goes far in asking and answering the right kinds of questions, including why the Church, following the Scriptures, has set these boundaries.  May the questions we ask come from a place of knowledge and faithfulness, and may those who lead us couple pastoral compassion with truthful discipline. For true co-suffering love requires both!

Well, I may be wrong about some issues, but the thing you will get from me in my upcoming lecture is clarity. I will be talking not just about the Orthodox Church world, but about the life and faith of all Christians living in the West. I hope you will buy a ticket for the Jan. 30 online event, and tune in. Punches shall not be pulled.

(By the way, for you readers who are looking for the Study Guide I wrote for Live Not By Lies, here it is — free and downloadable.)

UPDATE: Here’s a post from Orthodoxy In Dialogue, one of those let’s-queer-the-church organizations, in which they are trying to lead a mass campaign to get me disinvited from speaking at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. Though I am not orange, I am a Bad Man. Notice the unintentional comedy in this screengrab from the bottom of the posting:

 

We have to do everything we can to keep Bad Man from speaking — because we promoted the free exchange of ideas by offering a wide range of perspectives blah blah blah.

It’s terrific to see these people unmask themselves. They are doing exactly what Prof. Humphrey says they do: pretend they seek “dialogue,” but direct the dialogue only one way. I am grateful to Father Chad Hatfield for his invitation, and for holding firm. I certainly don’t expect everyone who hears my talk to agree with me, and I invite criticism. But these Dialogists are only interested in talking at everybody else, and silencing dissenters. Notice too how they aren’t even interested in whether or not one is Orthodox.

Well, I agree. If you are not an Orthodox Christian, but you support a true diversity of thought and speech within important institutions, I hope you will buy a ticket to my upcoming talk next month (online). I know that my Catholic and Protestant readers will enjoy what I have to say, and I bet some of my Jewish and Muslim readers will too. Here’s the link to reserve your spot.

The post Jeremiah Was A Bourgeois appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Cautionary Tale

A reader sends a cautionary tale. It’s so interesting that I’m sharing it with you:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the soft totalitarianism you’ve been warning about for quite a while now.  You’ve been able to explain things – and draw others’ observations into the dialogue, too – to give a very full and very accurate description of what’s happening here.


My parents lived through World War II.  All of my uncles served in various capacities, and one – a hero who defended Wake Island during the Japanese bombardment there – was taken prisoner at Zentsuji POW camp for the duration of the war.  The family never knew he was alive until the war ended, and then we found out a lot about his starvation and frequent torture at the hands of the guards (he weighed 80 pounds when he was liberated).

But tellingly, I knew nothing of these events through my parents or grandparents directly.  I found out about the Nazis by reading “The Winged Watchman” by Hilda van Stockum when I was a young and avid reader.  And when I was about 10, I stumbled upon an article in Life Magazine from a concentration camp survivor that was certainly not meant for young eyes.  It was so horrible that it was incomprehensible to me.  When I was 13, living on a Marine base, I found Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and was deeply struck by it.  I read more of his books in the ensuing years.  And so I was launched out on an off-and-on quest to understand how these sorts of things could happen.

At the same time I lost my Catholic faith.  It was the late 60s and the Mass suddenly changed and became a guitar hootenanny and holding of hands (shudder).  The “new Mass” had completely obliterated the transcendence and reverence of the Holy Sacrifice.  I was left without a mooring.


Irony of ironies, I wandered until I found my way to a Hindu meditation group at age 18.  I was a misfit but a seeker after truth and God, and I needed to be part of something that was “bigger than myself.”  I stayed in that monastery for 28 years.  I loved the monastic life part of it, but as the years went by and I finally matured, there were increasing signs of unhealthy attitudes by the hierarchy, loss of morale among the “worker bees” (sometimes we worked round the clock on senseless and unthought-out projects), and just plain nutty pronouncements to keep us in line, such as:   if someone left the organization after taking final vows, their families would be negatively affected for 7 generations in the past and 7 generations into the future.  (Karma and reincarnation were, of course, core beliefs.). I remember thinking when I first heard this gem, “What the heck?!  Who made that up?”).  This was how we were controlled to not leave, or we would bring shame (and some kind of retribution) on ourselves and, obviously, our ghostly dead relatives.  We were infantilized. There were unspoken rules and regulations, secrecy about generally everything, and when bad things happened, the truth was rarely spoken, and we all knew it.  We received explanations that the Chinese government would be proud of.


There I was — living in soft totalitarianism.


I remember feeling irked, when visiting my mother and sister once a year, that they’d ask my opinion on certain social issues, and I’d always say something like, “Well, Master (what we called the dead but “ever-living” guru) said that……”.  Finally, they’d look at me and ask, “But what do YOU think?”  They felt I was brainwashed and they would be right, really.


The longer I was there, I was asked to be a spiritual counselor to younger ones and to interview potential new nuns.  The more I listened to their stories, the more I realized that this religion was attracting a surprisingly large number of people who were emotionally dysfunctional.  They would either want to join because they were escaping a failed life “in the world”; or they had some significant issues that spilled over into their everyday relationships with other people, making things really difficult.  And this group was no place for them to work out their deep-seated issues.  Most were deeply sincere, but many were not going to succeed and cause endless disruptions because no one there was qualified as a therapist to help them.


Because of the constant over-work (I had an ultra perfectionist work supervisor) and emotional tension, I developed an aggressive cancer.  I had to apply for chemo agents as an indigent because the organization didn’t have health insurance for its own members at that time.  But I was given time off to recuperate.  Boy, did I do a lot of thinking!  That was the beginning of the end for me there.  I began speaking up and no longer used “Ketman.”  That did not go over well with my superiors.  Still, it took another 2 years to leave, but when I did, I was given the courage – don’t ask me how, but it was Divine Grace – to be totally open and vocal to everyone about why I was leaving – contrary to the modus operandi of leaving at midnight without anyone knowing.  The last week I was there was a living hell and I was accused by the hierarchy of leaving because I was in “delusion.”


After leaving, I experienced some bitter years of regret – I lost my youth there and had to start over from scratch at age 45 (we did not get a salary and I had no money of my own and had to ask the group for some) – to realize how I’d duped myself for so long.  I had no experience with banking or living in the world, having entered the organization out of high school.  (And yes, I had taken my final vows, but so far I’ve not heard from any of my long-lost relatives about any fiery retribution raining down on their incorporeal heads.)


I had come to that group emotionally immature and had my own issues until those kept coming up often enough during my life there that I knew I had to face them.  I can’t say all was bad because I made many good friends and I learned a huge amount about human nature.  I developed compassion and stretched myself out of my comfort zone.  I also read a ton of Catholic saint books from their library; also accounts of Rev Wurmbrand’s terrible tortures in Romania and Corrie ten Boom’s imprisonment at Ravensbruck, which gave me a very full picture of totalitarian regimes, perhaps subconsciously helping to see my own situation more clearly.


I eventually made my way back full circle to Catholicism and the Latin Mass (no thanks to the current disastrous Pope who seems bent on being woke himself).


Still, when we hear about how people are hooked into wokeness, it makes perfect sense.  Just as my parents did not tell me about the Holocaust and what happened during the War – until much later when I would ask them about it – the parents of this generation probably never talked to them about this either (if they were ever taught it in the first place), so a huge and vitally important part of world history was lost very, very quickly; and I suspect a great number of my generation had no faith and therefore could not pass down any spiritual anchor or tradition to which a young person could feel part of.  So wokeness and ideologies become substitute religions, and the fervor of these religions is astonishing and scary.


We have really failed our duties to the next generation.


I didn’t mean this to be so long, but I did have a cautionary tale to tell, for what it’s worth.

The post A Cautionary Tale appeared first on The American Conservative.

Eyes Wide Shut

Samuel D. James has reviewed Live Not By Lies at Christianity Today.  He kind of liked the book. Here’s the core of his disagreement:

Dreher is a seasoned journalist with much experience covering religious liberty battles. Given this, Live Not by Lies makes a surprisingly weak case for an impending woke totalitarianism. Much of the book feels impressionistic, as if switching from historical Soviet testimony to contemporary cultural analysis and then back to Soviet history is itself sufficient evidence. Dreher acknowledges that the religious, social, and political situation of late-19th-century Europe is quite different than that of the current United States, but he sees the difference as mostly irrelevant. He has a low opinion of American Christianity—“the spirit of the therapeutic has conquered the churches. … Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith”—but he says almost nothing about America’s formidable (though not impervious) legal protections for religious liberty. Ultimately, he offers no plausible roadmap showing how a country whose legal institutions are deeply shaped by the First Amendment and a historically religious citizenry could flip-flop into a woke terror.

Ultimately, he offers no plausible roadmap showing how a country whose legal institutions are deeply shaped by the First Amendment and a historically religious citizenry could flip-flop into a woke terror.

Funny, but I just got off a Zoom interview with an Evangelical podcaster, who mentioned to me his friend, a Russian emigre pastor on the US West Coast, who has been warning him lately that he is seeing arise in America a version of what he grew up with in the Soviet Union. The podcaster, who lives in California, mentioned friends in his own state who grew up under communism, who have recently left the state for Texas because things in the Golden State were beginning to seem unnervingly like old times.

Anyway, this is the first time I’ve heard that Live Not By Lies doesn’t make a plausible case for soft totalitarianism. Maybe so, but I don’t believe it. The first half of the book explains how I think all this is going to go down, and the mechanisms for the change. Did James miss all the stuff about woke capitalism? About the social credit system? It’s all there. Maybe I didn’t convince James, and the fault lies with me as a journalist and rhetorician.

But I can’t help wondering if James is one of those Christians who does not want to be convinced — one of the people Solzhenitsyn talked about when he spoke of those who were eager to believe — wrongly — that what happened in Russia could not happen in this country.

James says I don’t show how a “historically religious” people could submit to soft totalitarianism. Well, one way you do it is by losing your religion — both in terms of quantity (that is, a reduction in numbers of believers) and in quality (the content of their belief). Both things are happening right now. The younger generation is falling away in large numbers from the churches, and they also have by and large abandoned Biblical orthodoxy on sex, especially on LGBT, and are moving swiftly to embrace Critical Race Theory. This matters because soft totalitarianism will manifest itself largely by forcing dissenters to capitulate to progressive orthodoxies on LGBT and race. The idea that America’s religious past guarantees its religious future is risible. James used to work at the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Surely he can read the surveys.

And surely he knows that the First Amendment is something that requires interpretation. The United States does indeed have a strong history of religious liberty jurisprudence — thank God — but it is not guaranteed to remain that way forever. There are irreconcilable conflicts between religious liberty and civil rights — especially gay civil rights. How should they be resolved? Courts have to make that call. Similarly, in the famous Bob Jones decision, SCOTUS ruled that the IRS could withdraw the tax exemption of a religious institution (Bob Jones University) that racially discriminated. What would happen if the Biden Administration decided to withdraw tax exemption from religious institutions that discriminate against LGBTs in any way?

Furthermore, with “religious liberty” having become a synonym for anti-gay hatred among so many on the Left, there is no guarantee at all that the liberties of dissenting Christians will be protected forever. A few years back, and conservative Christian law professor at an elite law school told me that none of his colleagues had any instinctive feel for religious liberty. They were not religious, and knew no one who was. These are the professors who are educating the next generation of judges. Moreover, I was at a Federalist Society convention a couple of years back, and heard Christian lawyers and law professors lamenting the dearth of religiously active young members of the Society. The overwhelming majority of them are libertarians, said the older men. This is going to matter a lot.

In only six years, we have gone from gay marriage being declared the law of the land, to the Supreme Court finding that US civil rights law protects transgendered people from being fired. It should not be at all difficult to imagine that anybody who rejects LGBT orthodoxy will pay a professional and personal price. In Live Not By Lies, I quote a doctor who grew up in Soviet Russia, saying that in the US hospital where he works, no physician is allowed to refuse any request by a patient for cross-sex hormones or other gender-changing intervention, even if it goes against the physician’s best medical judgment (note: not his religious conscience, but medical judgment). There are many examples like this.

Is it really so hard for Samuel James, as a conservative Evangelical, to see how all this can come down? I sincerely don’t get his point.

About my claim that “the spirit of the therapeutic has conquered the churches,” I would refer James to the ample documentation by sociologist Christian Smith, and others, about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as the de facto American religion. I wrote a lot about that in my book The Benedict Option. Niceness über Alles is the law of church life in much of America today. I certainly don’t believe in putting in a good word for meanness; what I’m talking about is a lack of resilience that comes from being all too eager to be thought well of by respectable people. I’ve told the story here many times about the Christian college professor who told me that the students on his campus, having been formed by church youth groups (which treat faith as entirely relational, e.g., “Jesus is my best friend”), don’t know how to live faithfully in a world that sees orthodox Christianity as mean and bigoted. A church that doesn’t know what it means to suffer for the Gospel is not going to be able to withstand persecution.

James is betting on the church being left alone, because what happened in Russia can’t happen here. Not to use nice Americans, with our history of churchgoing, and our First Amendment. That is not a bet I would take. Would you?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote:

“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”

It can happen here. It is happening here right now. Do you know someone who grew up under communism? Ask them what they think.

The post Eyes Wide Shut appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Antiracism’ At LSU

The racist “antiracist” madness has now come home to my alma mater, Louisiana State University. Before we go further, I should point out that this is the flagship public university in a very red state governed by a Republican legislature and a conservative Democratic governor.

The LSU Faculty Senate has a proposal before it — one that a source within the university tells me is fully expected to pass. It reads, in part:

 

Here’s the core of the proposal:

AAAS2000 (African & African American Studies) would be a course in which students are indoctrinated in “antiracist” ideology, Critical Race Theory, and the like. From the description here, it is not mere history; it is highly ideologized history (“intersecting oppression”). And if this passes the LSU Faculty Senate, taking this course in left-wing racialism would be a requirement of graduating from LSU. Just imagine how difficult it would be for any student to challenge the professor in this class. To do so would cause one to out oneself as a racist, in the eyes of these ideologues. Dissenters will be intimidated into silence.

One of those dissenters works for the university, and reached out to me to say:

This proposal comes from faculty members affiliated with AAAS [African & African American Studies], but what is interesting is that the Black Student Athletes Association has provided the impetus for this proposal. This is just great: student athletes at LSU dictating academic requirements and curriculum for the entire university, with the complicity of LSU faculty who would like to impose a singular racial world view on all students enrolled in the university.

Here are the required courses all LSU undergraduates must take for their degrees. A single course counts for “three hours”; ergo, six hours of English composition means two classes, each stretching over a semester:

Add to that three hours of Grievance Studies, if the Faculty Senate proposal passes. So what’s going to go from the list above to make room for the mandatory Grievance Studies class? LSU requires no classes in Greek philosophy and thought, none in literature, none in history, none in philosophy, or in any of the foundations of a traditional Western education. You may take these courses to fulfill general requirements above, but you are not required to do so. But if this proposal passes the Faculty Senate, the university will have declared that it is more important for LSU graduates to have had instruction in “intersectional oppression” than Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, or any of the other greats.

What does that tell you about the future of the university?

I am also told that LSU has imposed discriminatory guidelines for faculty hiring. Academic and professional merit and accomplishment? That’s on the back burner. Race is what matters. Don’t believe me? Here is a link to the Faculty Hiring guidebook that LSU’s office of Academic Affairs sent to its professors. 

Here are some excerpts. If, every time you see the word “Diversity Advocate” below, you replace it with “Commissar,” you will better understand what’s going on here:

More:

This is an astonishing abdication of academic integrity and responsibility, in favor of an ideology of racial preference. There should be lawsuits. How is it legal that race can be used to such an extent in determining hiring policies and curriculum requirements at a public university?

Remember me telling you that Louisiana is a very red state? Where is the legislature? Would the majority of taxpayers of the state of Louisiana — of which I am one — stand for this if they knew it was happening? I am a 1989 LSU graduate, and have my oldest child at LSU now as an undergraduate. I would like to consider sending one or both of my other children to LSU when the time comes. Will I be paying to have my children radicalized by a mandatory class on Critical Race Theory at a public university (or have my children compelled to learn ketman, the art of lying to power-holders to avoid getting in trouble)? Can I have confidence in the quality of instruction if the university is so fanatical about hiring on the basis of race? Note that LSU requires future hires to prove their “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” before hiring. I think about the best professors I had at LSU in the 1980s, and while I would bet that they were quite liberal politically, what if they weren’t? What if they were just really good at their jobs, and standouts in their fields, but could not or would not, on principle, demonstrate loyalty to the politicized criteria of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”? Who cares what they think privately? Can they teach well? Are they fair to all students? Do they produce quality research?

I have seen in my own profession (journalism) what happens when administrative elites prioritize hiring on the basis of race. It causes a decrease in the quality of the collective work, and resentment among people who are taking up the slack, and/or who were denied the opportunity to be fairly considered for those jobs, because they were the wrong race, or the wrong sex. But you can’t say anything about it, because to notice this publicly sets you out as a bigot. When a professional’s identity or loyalty to an ideology — left or right — matters as much or more than their competence in their field, then the work they do cannot help but decline.

Back to LSU. Because of the Covid crisis, LSU faces a $54.6 million budget shortfall this year. There will be no pay raises for faculty. But according to the LSU Roadmap To Diversity, a university statement of policy, the university remains committed increasing the diversity bureaucracy:

LSU’s Chief Diversity Officer makes $185,477 per year, according to the 2019 LSU Operating Budget.

In 2016, the then-president of LSU testified that the decade of budget cutting had cost the university around 500 faculty members. In 2018, the same president (who has since moved on) testified that LSU is “on the bottom” in terms of state spending per student. This is not the fault of the university, but of the state government. What do I know, I’m just a Louisiana taxpayer and father of an LSU student, but it would seem that after over ten years of cutting the university to the bone, that recruiting and holding on to the very best professors ought to be the most important goal of the state’s No. 1 public university. In my view, it is generally immoral to hire people based on their race or sex. But it is also absurd and infuriating for a university that is desperate to uphold its standards while the state is starving it to death to declare that it is going to surrender to this social-engineering fantasy that has captured other universities.

If well-endowed private universities want to do this to themselves, that’s their business. But LSU has to answer to the people of the state of Louisiana. How can the university justify racialist hiring, and imposing what sounds like a catechism in racial ideology on its undergraduates, especially given the many years of budget duress?  If the university were to impose a Commissar for guaranteeing 100 Percent Americanism to watch over the faculty hiring process, faculty would revolt — and they should!

Why should Louisiana taxpayers subsidize the inculcation into undergraduates an ideology that trains them to think that giving someone a leg up in hiring because of the color of their skin, or their sex, or their sexual orientation, or gender identity, is morally right? Why are we paying for the state’s flagship university to undermine the principle of fairness and non-discrimination, and to train young people to interpret the world in terms of power and oppression? If a state university can get away with this in a deep red state with a Republican-controlled legislature, then there’s no stopping the Social Justice Warrior ideologues anywhere.

Last word: this is the kind of thing that bugs me about us conservatives. We stay focused on performative nonsense (“Truuuuuump! He fights!”) that satisfies some emotionally, but changes nothing. Meanwhile, the Left marches through the institutions, and sets itself up to capture the minds of the next generation.

UPDATE: Reader Sunniva Sr:

This is disturbing, though I doubt anywhere will be immune. Not the Deep South, not Wyoming Catholic, nowhere.

I work at a comparable institution. My life is saturated with this stuff. Frequent emails from diversity administrators, exhortations for ‘white’ men to read articles that shame us, deans who parrot Kendi and D’Angelo, the only ficus of our department is diversity and inclusion. There are no longer conversations that involve anything else.

Now the students are steeped in this garbage as well. This year, I’ve had papers that claim white people are all raised to use the N-word, white people are inherently hyper-violent, white men are evil, we need to “cleanse” the justice system (of whom, I wonder..) etc. etc. As soon as I can leave, I will leave.

The chickens are coming home to roost, as they say, but those alive today aren’t much responsible for preparing the coop.

Reader Jared:

I read the article before this one (Charlie Kirk’s Hooters Conservatism), then this one right after. One thing that strikes me is the fundamental unseriousness of *so much* on the “new right” and the absolute seriousness, no matter how insane, of the left. The left is absolutely in it to win it: spending money on lawyers, lobbying at every level of culture, and marching through institutions – even if it takes a long time, while the right is hiring Bang Girls to shoot money canons for a half-hour commercial or having rallies that make them feel good while doing nothing – *nothing* – to further serious opposition that will make a lasting impact. The sheer commercialism that takes over these events boggles the mind. It’s the Frankenstein’s monster of Republican business lust and Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

There are really good, thoughtful, and powerful speakers on the Right. How many of them are getting suffocated by this garbage? At a time when we need – *AND HAVE* – people who can argue effectively from logical AND emotional points against the insanity overtaking us, the people at the top have opted for Commercial Inc. to spread their feelgood message that “doing something” is attending a fun rally or watching one online and maybe buying a MyPillow if you really want to support the cause.

UPDATE.2: A university academic writes:

In your post “‘Antiracism’ at LSU” you ask the question “[h]ow is it legal that race can be used to such an extent in determining hiring policies and curriculum requirements at a public university?”

Unless affirmative action (or similar policies whatever their designation) are made explicitly illegal, university faculties and administrations are free to privilege openly any characteristics they please in hiring.

Yes, virtually every university will append a standard non-discrimination clause at the end of job advertisements (“This university does not discriminate on the basis of…”) but in practice candidates from a designated victim group will rise to the top because this all happens confidentially without physical record of the relevant conversations.  More importantly, however, is the fact that affirmative action vel sim. hiring practices can and do continue even when they are explicitly illegal.

My state has a constitutional amendment that explicitly bans affirmative action in hiring by public universities.  This is less than useless because it cannot control what goes on behind closed doors, i.e., the aforementioned confidential work of filtering applications, selecting a longlist, holding interviews,  selecting a shortlist of candidates, and making the final decision.  I was part of the search committee for my department’s most recent hire and there was significant pushback against one shortlisted candidate because he is a “white male with an elite education.”  This issue was raised in the faculty meeting in which we chose our hire and it helped scupper his candidacy.  There is no record of this discussion save its participants’ memories.

Further, the official ban on affirmative action simply forces faculties and administrations to be creative and patient.  At a wealthy university like mine, for example, we simply create college-funded temporary positions for scholars whose work will contribute to “diversity equity and inclusion” initiatives in the school, who will bring their “critical perspectives” to bear on whatever field they study, and who come from “nontraditional educational backgrounds.”  We all know what this language means, yet like all job advertisements its language is fully vetted and approved by university lawyers as unactionable.

And again, behind closed doors we are fully aware that if we receive applications for one of these temporary positions and forward to the college a candidate(s) who does not have “non-traditional background” (i.e. is white or male etc.) our pick will be discarded immediately.

Further, since such college-funded temporary DEI positions can be transformed into tenure-track positions upon their expiration if the hosting faculty so chooses, one can effectively practice affirmative action in faculty hiring even in the context of its official illegality.

Trying to take legal action against a practice like this is essentially impossible for anyone outside the university.  It would take a faculty member himself, who spent many years secretly compiling evidence, statistics, testimony, etc. all to even begin to build a case that the constitutional amendment was being systematically violated in practice and in secret.  A tenured professor with nothing left to prove or to lose and with a monomaniacal obsession could perhaps do this.  But an untenured assistant like me?  Fuhgeddaboudit.

So, even if grassroots action in your state were to pressure the legislature into instituting some sort of official ban on the practices outlined in your post (while they are quite blatant, they have surely been vetted by LSU’s legal team), this would all simply “go underground” and continue without any real interruption, albeit perhaps through more circuitous, roundabout pathways.  I know that this is a pessimistic appraisal but it is one rooted in my own experience.

The post ‘Antiracism’ At LSU appeared first on The American Conservative.

Charlie Kirk’s Hooters Conservatism

I don’t follow the life and work of Charlie Kirk, the 27-year-old MAGA-fied leader of the Turning Point USA right-wing student group. But that just shows how out of it I am. Though he never earned a college degree, he was given an honorary doctorate by (where else?) Liberty University, in the spring of 2019:

Liberty Online Provost Shawn Akers then conferred a Doctor of Humanities degree upon Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, “in recognition of his work and dedication to courageously promote American freedom and defend our common liberties on behalf of young students in colleges and high schools across the country and for his example and inspiration to young people everywhere of what can be achieved when faith, conviction, and hard work are put into practice.”

Kirk founded Turning Point as a high school senior in 2012 and serves as its director to champion free speech, limited government, and the market economy. In 2016, he was the youngest person to give a speech at the Republican National Convention.

“I have never had the opportunity to visit a university that embodies the teachings of Jesus Christ better than Liberty University,” Kirk said. “If you decide to profess your faith and say you are a Christian, this world is going to make it difficult. For those of you who are believers in Jesus Christ, wear that badge proudly.”

Last year, Dr. Charlie Kirk joined with Jerry Falwell Jr. and Liberty University to launch the Falkirk Center, a think tank. From the Liberty student newspaper’s report:

On Nov. 30, 2019, Liberty University announced its partnership with political activist Charlie Kirk with the creation of the Falkirk Center, a modern think tank set to renew and defend God-given freedoms and Christian principles throughout American politics and culture.

Although the center is not a traditional think tank according to Executive Director Ryan Helfenbein, the Falkirk Center strives to be a cultural influencing tool that exists for college students to actively engage in and have their voice heard.

“This is not your dad’s or granddad’s think tank,” Helfenbein said. “We’re trying to have massive cultural influence, and Gospel driven and Christ-centered cultural influence that also speaks to issues that culminate in public policy.”

As the Falkirk center looks to take on current social issues with the Bible as its compass, the center also looking to engage a younger generation of people who are passionate about standing for their Christian principles and reforming what the center believes is a leftist, progressive leaning culture.

Here’s a screengrab from the Falkirk Center website:

I assumed, naturally, that Charlie Kirk was an Evangelical leader. A week or so ago, I wrote about how he welcomed Falkirk Center fellow Eric Metaxas onto his program to discuss the election fallout. Metaxas said a lot of things I found shocking; I wrote about them here:

Eric Metaxas’s American Apocalypse

Well, apparently the eminent young Evangelical leader Dr. Kirk has been hosting a big TPUSA conference in Palm Beach this weekend (it was reportedly oversold, and between five hundred and six hundred people who paid to come were not allowed in). Here is some of the quality conservative and Christian content from the event:

Following TPUSA co-founder Bill Montgomery dying due to Covid-19 – Charlie Kirk says he will not take a coronavirus vaccine to thousands of students at his annual conference. pic.twitter.com/oRUnuKVLkF

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) December 20, 2020

I wanna just explode over how embarrassing and pathetic this is, but most of you know how I feel about TPUSA so use your imagination. Nothing says worshipping Jesus and the need to live out the Word at the same conference you drag out a money cannon with Bang girls. https://t.co/20w9ioHyas

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) December 20, 2020

Turning Point USA sponsor “Bang Energy” continued to shoot money out of a cannon throughout their 25-minute sales pitch to attendees – urging TPUSA activists to buy their product. pic.twitter.com/KOB9bQwpnN

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) December 20, 2020

It’s just awesome how much massive cultural influence this Gospel driven and Christ-centered young doctor is building for himself, innit?

The money cannon was part of a 25-minute live pitch for Bang Energy, one of the conference sponsors.

Hey, I like eccentric spectacle, and if Charlie Kirk’s right-wing frat boys and girls want to party in West Palm Beach in the middle of a deadly pandemic, well, let them do them. But you know what, Charlie Kirk? You better leave Jesus out of this dirtbaggery! This vulgar trash has nothing whatsoever to do with God.

For that matter, I have no idea what it has to do with conservatism either, but then, my Kirkean conservatism is Russell’s, not Charlie’s. But I’m sure the Falkirk Center will explain to us all how the TPUSA money cannon exemplifies what can be accomplished “when faith, conviction, and hard work are put into practice.”

I’m just going to leave this little screengrab from the TPUSA site below. I think we all remember that time Alexander Hamilton’s Bunker Hill Babes enlivened the dullness of the Constitutional Convention with their popular “Back Bay shilling shake” routine:

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Old White Lives Don’t Matter

It is harder to think of a more effective way of preparing the United States for open and violent racial conflict than by coming up with a scheme by which some Americans, by virtue of their race, are permitted to receive the vaccine against a deadly pandemic before others. But that’s what we are doing. More:

Every US state has been advised to consider ethnic minorities as a critical and vulnerable group in their vaccine distribution plans, according to Centers for Disease Control guidance.

As a result, half of the nation’s states have outlined plans that now prioritize black, Hispanic and indigenous residents over white people in some way, as the vaccine rollout begins.

According to our analysis, 25 states have committed to a focus on racial and ethnic communities as they decided which groups should be prioritized in receiving a coronavirus vaccine dose.

More:

In the US, black people — and Latinx people — are almost three times more likely to die from Covid-19 then whites, according to the CDC, due to economic disparities.

Rates of hospitalization and death from Covid-19 among Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans are also two to four times higher than for whites.

Yet a recent Kaiser survey showed that more than one third of black Americans remain hesitant to get a vaccine.

It found that black Americans are among the groups least likely to want to get vaccinated against coronavirus, even if a scientist deem vaccines safe, effective and the shots are given for free.

But why are black and Latino people almost three times more likely to die from Covid? I’m sure we will be told that it’s “structural racism.” The story talks about how racial preferences for the Covid vaccine are justified by health authorities on the grounds of “equity.” Whenever you see the word equity, you should know that it means racial discrimination to equalize outcome. 

And here, we are talking about access to a vaccine to prevent a deadly disease. People are going to be denied equal access to this disease based on the color of their skin. Look, authorities really do have to prioritize access to the vaccine, given that we don’t have enough doses for everybody. Whatever their race, the elderly and essential workers justifiably move to the head of the line. But privileging people’s access to vaccine by skin color? Really? The New York Times reports:

An independent committee of medical experts that advises the C.D.C. on immunization practices will soon vote on whom to recommend for the second phase of vaccination — “Phase 1b.” In a meeting last month, all voting members of the committee indicated support for putting essential workers ahead of people 65 and older and those with high-risk health conditions.

Historically, the committee relied on scientific evidence to inform its decisions. But now the members are weighing social justice concerns as well, noted Lisa A. Prosser, a professor of health policy and decision sciences at the University of Michigan.

“To me the issue of ethics is very significant, very important for this country,” Dr. Peter Szilagyi, a committee member and a pediatrics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said at the time, “and clearly favors the essential worker group because of the high proportion of minority, low-income and low-education workers among essential workers.”

That position runs counter to frameworks proposed by the World Health Organization, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and many countries, which say that reducing deaths should be the unequivocal priority and that older and sicker people should thus go before the workers, a view shared by many in public health and medicine.

Look at this:

Marc Lipsitch, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, argued that teachers should not be included as essential workers, if a central goal of the committee is to reduce health inequities.

“Teachers have middle-class salaries, are very often white, and they have college degrees,” he said. “Of course they should be treated better, but they are not among the most mistreated of workers.”

What the hell? The race of teachers should count against them in determining whether or not they should be prioritized for vaccine, according to a Harvard epidemiologist? My jaw is on the floor. What if, instead of the word “white,” we substituted the word “Jewish”? How would Dr. Lipsitch feel then?

These people are racists, straight up. And they are elites who run this country and its institutions. Here’s what another white Ivy League professor told the Times:

Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

Die, old white people. Just die. Your white lives are not worth as much to Ivy League professors, or the public health authorities, as the lives of others.

The reader who pointed this out to me adds:

This is exactly what I’m talking about and have been warning about for almost five years. It will always come down to death. Distributing death and life to meet racial quotas.

At what point is this too oppressive and evil to tolerate? When do we reach Locke’s threshold? …We have an elite that is obsessed with death and suicide and power. Trump is small potatoes compared to what is coming and what is here.

Meanwhile, the forces of “social justice” continue marching through scientific institutions. Here’s news from Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia. Haverford has been convulsed by “antiracist” strikes — which, of course, are all about institutionalizing left-wing racism. Excerpts:

Without any overarching guidance from the administration, faculty members took a number of different approaches to respond to the two-week interruption in classes caused by the strike and finish the semester.

One notable response came from the Biology department. Before the strike had even ended, the department had discontinued classes for the remainder of the semester in order to focus on redesigning the curriculum with equity and inclusion in mind. All classes, including thesis sections, were canceled outright. The department adjusted thesis requirements and deadlines to reflect this change.

Writing in the Jewish magazine Tablet, bioethicist Ashley K. Fernandes explores why so many German doctors became Nazis. Excerpts:

It is worthy of emphasis that although many professions (including law) were “taken in” by Nazi philosophy, doctors and nurses had a peculiarly strong attraction to it. Robert N. Proctor (1988) notes that physicians joined the Nazi party in droves (nearly 50% by 1945), much higher than any other profession. Physicians were seven times more likely to join the SS than other employed German males. Nurses were also major collaborators.The Holocaust should be studied by every health care professional as a reminder of how sacred the substance of our craft is, and what the consequences may be if we forget the dignity of persons again.

More:

In 1942, and as a direct result of a deep-seated tradition of anti-Semitism within the German medical community, the Christian churches, and Europe in general, the “Final Solution” was proposed—the murder of the entire European Jewish population. Nazi medicine, through what can only be called, in modern terms, “advocacy,” had a profoundly negative effect on culture. Physicians, dressed in white coats, gave the imprimatur that indeed, those that were to be gassed were not human persons at all:

At every turn, the annihilation procedures were supervised—and, in a perverse sense, dignified—through the presence of medical staff. … We may say the doctor standing at the ramp represented a kind of omega point, a mythical gatekeeper between the worlds of the dead and the living, a final common pathway of the Nazi vision of therapy via mass murder.

The killing of 6 million Jewish persons and 9 million “others”—could only have been accomplished through a buy-in into a twisted philosophical anthropology. Science alone could not accomplish this destruction, because science never stands alone. So, although we may not kill persons, we may kill animals, vegetables, and subhumans. What the Nazis needed was a philosophy to define out of lives inconvenient to the goals of the Race, and then science to do the killing. This is why the Holocaust can be deemed a “bioethical assault” on human personhood.

And here, on the need to stand against language that dehumanizes others, and prepares us to accept the normally unacceptable:

Whatever the reason—dissimilarity or something more sinister—language alters perception, and perception affects our ethical calculus. For example, to build support for euthanasia of the disabled, Nazi filmmakers deliberately altered lighting on the faces of the disabled, to make them more “inhuman” in their appearance. Purposeful and dramatic dehumanization has the same ultimate outcome on our perception as slow, chronic dehumanization. Simple gestures—such as standing up against such language publicly when people dehumanize or showing personalistic leadership through examples of patience and even tenderness at the bedside—will do much to begin reversing this narrative.

By “personalism,” Fernandes means seeing people as individuals first, possessing equal dignity as others. One more quote from Fernandes:

Finally, a fifth lesson to be learned is that, as a physician, you must serve the patient exclusively—not some abstracted idea of “society.” Physicians and health professionals in the Holocaust decided that the good of the racial state took precedence over the good of individual persons. “Nazi doctors hailed a move ‘from the doctor of the individual to the doctor of the nation.’” The justification for the euthanasia program, in large part, was couched in economic terms—a cost-saving measure for society in a time of scarcity.

Today, we seem to be losing more of our commitment to the individual patient—for there are other “gods” in medicine. “Quality of life,” “public health,” or even “patient satisfaction” have become ends in themselves, not a means to an end.

Read it all. 

Now here we are with Ivy League elites and public health authorities deciding that denying the vaccine to certain people — white people — because of their race, is right because of “social justice.” And we are training new generations of medical personnel in this racist philosophy.

I hear some of you now: Don’t you get why we vote for Trump? Yes, I would — if that made any kind of difference. All of this has accelerated while Donald Trump has been in the White House. You know that, right?

We are in a world of trouble in this country. The cultural Left, especially the elites, are preparing us all to be at each other’s throats on the basis of race. Why can’t they see this? Honestly, have they learned nothing from history?

UPDATE: Reader Njoseph points to this Kevin Drum piece, which says the CDC is not deprioritizing old white people because of their race. I don’t see that. The two Ivy League ethicists I quoted openly say that whiteness is a strike against early vaccination. The CDC committee member says they should vaccinate frontline workers “because of the high proportion of minority, low-income and low-education workers among” them — in other words, because in part they are people of color. These experts are saying flat-out that social justice requires deprioritizing certain demographics because of color. You can call it “giving priority to the marginalized,” but it’s the same thing. We always find euphemisms for things we know we shouldn’t be doing.

 

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Christmas For The Church Staff

A reader who works in a Midwestern church sent me something she thinks churchgoing people ought to know this year:

This week is going to be a tough one for a lot of folks. Not only are our family gatherings impacted or cancelled, but our church traditions are disrupted. And we’re angry about that, and it is easy to direct that anger at church staff.

People who work for churches have had a really rough year.

Most of us aren’t eligible for unemployment, and didn’t realize we lacked that safety net until this year.

A lot of us had our income and hours reduced, and our workload increased, over the course of the pandemic.

Some of us saw our coworkers lose their jobs, and were then informed we were taking on that person’s workload on top of our own.

It made us sick to shut down the churches. We don’t like livestream either. We never intended to worship remotely, but here we are trying to minister in chaotic circumstances.

When we are treated unfairly or discriminated against, we usually don’t have an HR department as a resource.

Church members demand our personal cell number, that we use for work constantly, and for which we are never reimbursed. We answer emails, texts and calls at all hours.

Our pastors balked at the idea that we might need a laptop, so we just use our own during the pandemic, because most churches weren’t prepared for remote work. Almost a year later, we still aren’t.

Our schedule is never predictable, because we have to be available for funerals, weddings, and other parishioner needs, and this makes it hard for us to pick up a second income. Sometimes we aren’t allowed to take on a second job, especially if it is at another church, because our pastor is territorial.

We know the church down the street is doing things differently. They have a different pastor and a different church council to answer to than we do.

Just because we’re staff, it doesn’t mean we make the decisions. In fact, we’re often forced to do things that we don’t like or agree with, because our pastor wants people to like him or the church council thought it was a good idea.

I know we used to be more available to you. The office hours are reduced, people are working from home, staff hours have been reduced, and the number of staff is reduced. We’re doing our best.

We decided to work at a church because we wanted to serve God, and even though we haven’t been able to pay our bills for the past few months we’re still here serving you because we want to serve Christ.

I know you want to question every change and protocol during the pandemic. A lot of these things come from the government or church hierarchy, and not only do we have no say regarding the changes but we’re really tired of explaining and defending them.

You’re not the only upset person we have talked to today. You probably won’t be the last.

I know what we have done in years past. Nothing about this year is remotely like years past. We long for tradition as much as you do. Not only for sentimentality, but because we have had to reinvent the wheel every day since March.

We would love to have multiple services over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. But with social distancing, contact tracing, sanitizing and the parishioners who are certain just allowing people in the building is irresponsible, we just can’t accommodate more services.

Half of us stay awake at night terrified that we’ll make a mistake trying to stay open that causes a death. The other half stays awake at night terrified that we’ll make a mistake in trying to be safe that loses a soul.

After we told you that the church wasn’t open for prayer and sent you away we went to the bathroom and cried. We know you’ve been exiled to Babylon. We hate denying you Jerusalem. It eats us up inside.

Yeah, we know the pastor doesn’t follow the rules that we make you follow. But he won’t lose his job for breaking the rules, and we will.

I know you want me to spend time on something, but my hours were cut in half, and I will get in trouble for not finishing my work. But I will probably talk to you for an hour about your online bake sale idea anyway, consider it volunteering for God, and hope I’m not reprimanded. I know you’re lonely. I am, too.

When I politely tell you no, and you go to the pastor who says yes, you should realize he says yes to everything and everyone. And so my workload keeps increasing, while his life stays the same.

I know Open Office is free, and maybe the church using Microsoft Office is a waste of money, but these petty complaints wear us down. No one ever complains about the cost of landscaping or bathroom remodeling, but they are quick to point out any perceived “luxury” for staff. For this reason, some of us buy our own pens and other office supplies.

We don’t want to tell you that the service is full and you can’t come to the church. But we have to. We try to make the livestream as nice as our skill and budget allows. We’ve never worked in live television before, but we’re trying.

It’s cold. We’d rather be with our family than being Christmas service bouncers.

We know that even now you will donate to any charitable cause the church sponsors, but still voted to cut our pay during the pandemic. We’re really tired and demoralized. We have never experienced stress like this before, with criticism from every direction.

And we love you. We love you so much. We miss you. We miss the jokes, the church festival, the fish fry, the bingo night, and your faces in the pews. We miss your kids and your grandma. We miss your jokes. We miss you stopping by. We miss praying with you. We miss you so much.

We work at a church because we love God and love people, not because it is a good career.

I know you’re frustrated. You want us to do more, be safer, open fully up. You’re tired of the pandemic and you want life to be normal again. You want to experience the joy of Christmas and carols sung in community. We do, too.

There’s a rumor going around that people are planning to crash Christmas services, defy the sign-up, the mask requirement, the capacity limits, and push past the greeters to “take back the church.” I’m asking you not to do that. The person you will be pushing past has suffered a lot this year, can’t afford to lose their job, can’t afford for the church to be forced to shut down again, and hates this as much as you do.

Please be kind to church staff this Christmas.

Fantastic. Please pass this on to your church e-mail lists.

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The Dalton Gang Shoots Itself

The Dalton School is an elite school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that has long prided itself on its “progressive” values. Progress comes at a price: tuition for its K-12 program is over $54,000 a year. Naturally Dalton has been at the forefront of declaring its progressive bona fides over race and “antiracism,” and declaring its own need for more repentance, but now the Bolsheviks within are storming the Winter Palace.

A hundred Dalton teachers are revolting over the school’s plan to reopen, and have issued a set of demands to the school. Some students are joining. What do they want? Gosh, what don’t they want? Excerpts:

Here is a link to the original text of the ransom note, which most of the Dalton faculty have signed. As Scott Johnston, who broke the news on his blog, comments:

The demands for additional staffers alone would add millions of dollars to Dalton’s annual budget. Siphoning off 50% of donations would dry up funding. Eliminating AP classes (referred to as “leveled courses”) would destroy college admissions. It’s not an exaggeration to say these demands, if implemented, would destroy Dalton altogether. According to insiders, much damage has already been done.

But if they don’t agree to the demands, what will happen? Don’t get me wrong, the protesters cannot be allowed to succeed. Yet if they don’t, knowing how insane progressives are on these issues, will they choose to destroy the school? After all, if Dalton is as racist as they say, how can they let it continue forming racist graduates to go out into the world and spread Evil?

I wonder what it’s going to take for institutions to put a hard foot down and tell its radical faculty and students: “NO!” Identity politics destroys every institution in which it is allowed to gain a foothold.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Hello, I am an 18 year-old reader of your blog. I go to a Private School in Los Angeles, and part of your “The Dalton Gang Shoots Itself” seemed extremely upsetting to me, as I feel like I understand how Private Schools generally operate with regards to donations.

The demand that seemed the most ridiculous (& destructive) was the one that said 50% of Donations would be re-routed. This is probably the worst thing the school can do for low-income families because many private schools have large endowments to fund financial aid. At my school, the average student is on some level of financial aid, and the school is kept afloat by donations and the relatively few full-tuition students. One of my best friends is an African American student who I know is only able to attend because of these donations. This is true for many of the minority students that we have.

That is why these demands are tragic, not only for the school, but for the people who the demands intend to help. Most families, white or black, are not able to afford to send their kids to Private School on full tuition, and diverting 50% of donations could prevent a large number of minority students from attending a competitive school. If the teachers truly cared for the Black Community, they would not have included this demand. The demand is only intended to fund the Teacher’s Unions (that unfortunately run the schools in LA and NY, and care little about education).

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