Rod Dreher's Blog, page 94

The Trump War Comes Home

Hello all, I just arrived home after driving all day from Texas. Tried to post this before I left, but the website was wonky. This is from a reader whose identity is known to me:

As you know, I am a Christian, and I wholeheartedly share your concerns (and the concerns of essayists you have linked to) about how this is an adulteration that is ultimately going to drive people away from the true Gospel. Because that endangers peoples’ eternal lives, that is, by far, the worst thing about this cult. That has to be said first.

That said, there’s a very real temporal danger to all this that I think about frequently: the likelihood that all of this apocalyptic rhetoric will push some angry, lonely young man out there into murderous violence. This concerns me because I’m a federal employee, and I fear that federal buildings will be targets of such people. I’m old enough to remember the truck bomb attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, which killed scores of people, including children at the building’s daycare center. And a few years after I joined my agency, some bitter, despairing man flew a private plane into a federal building in Texas over a tax dispute. He didn’t kill the person he was mad at, of course, but he did manage to kill a completely unrelated federal worker who had a family and who was very close to retirement.

I’ve spent nearly my entire career working at a large federal building in a major metropolitan area. We have lots of security: guards, metal detectors, big concrete bollards all around the perimeter of the building so that attackers can’t drive up on the sidewalk to run people over or to get close enough to kill anyone with a truck bomb (I hope), and now chain link fences around the perimeter thanks to all the protests during the summer. We have regular “active shooter” drills. Still, I have little faith that any of that would stop a fanatic if he was truly bent on taking lives.

As an aside, you know, if there’s one bright spot to all the enforced isolation we’ve had to endure this year, it’s that it has put a hard brake on our national trend of public mass murders. Not because any of the underlying problems have gotten any better, of course (if anything, they’ve probably gotten worse), but just because there are no longer big predictable public gatherings of people to target. Once the lockdowns lift and people start congregating in public again, I’m afraid that’s all going to come roaring back.

I’ve been teleworking full-time since the COVID-19 crisis hit back in March. When the crisis eventually lifts, I’m going to do everything in my power to continue teleworking full-time, or as much as my agency’s management will let me. All of this insane, ugly rhetoric will boil over into violence sooner or later – it’s just a question of where and when – and when it does, odds are it’s going to be an angry lone man with powerful modern killing tools in his hands and lies in his head. Just the sort of lies you’ve been documenting. I’ve got my wife’s husband and my children’s father to think about, and all of this macho apocalypticism is increasing the odds that some nut is going to show up at his office door to murder the servants of the evil federal government.

This is exactly why I’ve been screaming my head off at my friend Eric Metaxas’s extreme rhetoric (e.g., about how he’s prepared to die to defend Trump’s presidency, and how Christians should be prepared to fight “to the last drop of blood” for the cause). Perhaps he was speaking metaphorically, not in a sanguinary way. It’s still irresponsible. Another reader sent me stuff from a radical pro-Trump website (I’m not going to link to it) in which its commenters are openly talking about coming to DC on January 6 with guns, snipers, and the lot. They might just be talking big. But do we know that one or two of them might be serious?

 

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The Orthodox Left Wails

This week, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary made this announcement:

 

Here is more information, including a form to register for the livestream.  I won’t be traveling for this — it will be entirely online — but places for the livestream are limited.

This is an incredible honor for me, as an Orthodox Christian and reader of Father Schmemann. This lecture is usually delivered by an eminent churchman or an academic. I am a layman and a mere journalist. I am grateful to St. Vladimir’s rector Father Chad Hatfield and to others at the seminary for their confidence that I have something important to say to the Orthodox theological community. My lecture, of course, will be based on my bestselling book Live Not By Lies, which continues to sell like gangbusters.

It is no surprise that the Orthodox theological left in this country is wailing and gnashing its teeth over the announcement. I have made it my business for almost a decade to keep my snout out of Orthodox church politics, so I don’t follow the discussion on social media or elsewhere, but I am told by readers that the Orthodox left believes that inviting a louse like me to give this lecture is trampling on the Holy of Holies. When a friend e-mailed me this thread by a Greek Orthodox professor at Fordham, I literally laughed out loud:

Golly. Let me answer these comments specifically, but then tell you readers who are outside the very small world of American Orthodoxy what’s going on.

Dreher has no credentials. Can’t even put ‘Doctor’ in front of his name. Well, they’ve got me there. On the other hand, I’ve written two New York Times bestselling books of cultural analysis from a Christian perspective, for the popular reader. The Benedict Option has been translated into twelve languages. Live Not By Lies is in the process of being translated into six, I think, and we expect more. Clearly, a lot of people think I have something worth listening to.
I wouldn’t even know what an “anti-Schememann ideology” is. In no way do I deny the “inherent goodness of the world.” Where does these nuts get this? Not from reading my books. Moreover, they’ve got their nose out of joint not because I won’t talk to people who disagree with me. They’re mad because I won’t talk to them, and I encourage other actually orthodox Orthodox to avoid these phony dialogues. Many of these people apparently want to turn Orthodoxy into Greco-Slavic Episcopalianism (especially on the issue of LGBT). People who came to Orthodox from the Mainline Protestant churches, or from the Catholic Church (as I did), understand quite well the process of “dialogue” here. It’s a shopworn but effective strategy of the theological and moral left, by which they seek to get a foothold within church institutions and parishes, claiming that they’re only interested in talking about issues. Once the institution (parish, whatever) has legitimated their heterodoxy as a valid point of view, the battle is lost. These people will not stop until they have transformed the institution in their image, at which point the “dialogue” ends, and it becomes a matter of justice to silence the conservatives. I advise actually orthodox Orthodox not to walk into that trap.
The sacramentality of the world is the antithesis of Dreher’s point of view. This is crazy. The only people who can say that are those who have not read my books. It is quite common to find people — usually of the theological left, but sometimes on the right as well — who have not read my books at all, but are sure they know what I’m saying, and that it is WRONG and DANGEROUS.
Live Not By Lies is a political statement. Wrong. It’s about theology, economics, politics, technology, and culture. This is an attempt by this ideological tribe to dismiss what I have to say as a species of conservative politics. Again, these are not people who have read Live Not By Lies, and therefore, I don’t take them seriously.

What’s going on here, more broadly? Well, I have no idea why, specifically, the seminary invited me to give this talk, but I can make an informed guess.

The seminary is training priests and teachers to serve the Orthodox Church in the 21st century. It naturally wants them not only to understand the contemporary world (which is post-Christian, but also to equip them to disciple people faithfully, within Orthodox doctrine and tradition.

Live Not By Lies is a book whose genesis was in the warnings of emigre Christians who grew up in the Soviet Union, or in one of the nations of Central Europe that it held captive. They sense something similar to what they left behind rising here in the West — a totalitarian mindset that is conquering the institutions our society, and the modern mind. It’s not going to be Stalinism 2.0, but they are certain that it will be in some real sense totalitarian.

The first half of my book identifies the nature of the threat, and talks in part about identity politics, woke capitalism, technology, and “the Myth of Progress” as all being threatening to Christian fidelity, to the truth, and to religious liberty. The second half of the book is composed of testimonies from Orthodox Christians, as well as Catholics and Protestants, from that world, who lived through the totalitarian nightmare. They offer advice for what Christians today should do to prepare ourselves to identify the dangers, and to build resistance. At no point does anybody recommend voting for the Republican Party. Rather, this is about organizing prayer groups, and networks of dissidents, about educating our families for resistance, about living counterculturally, and most of all, preparing ourselves to suffer for Christ.

Why would Orthodox Christians like these theological lefties oppose this? Because the book implicitly identifies them as the problem. 

The big project of many of these people is normalizing LGBT and gender ideology within the Orthodox Church. George Demacopoulos, for example, is one of the directors of the Orthodox Studies Center at Fordham, the Jesuit university. Here’s one of the big initiatives the center is highlighting now:

Read more about it here. This is one of those phony “dialogue” things. You may be quite certain that Fordham does not host an Orthodox Studies Center interested in finding out how to defend and to live out traditional Orthodox teachings on sex and sexuality in the modern world. I don’t know where the Orthodox Studies Center stands on the matter of identity politics, but I doubt very much that the people who are shouting loudest for me to be disinvited to St. Vladimir’s are people who are prepared to tolerate a point of view that opposes identity politics, especially from a Christian perspective. (Live Not By Lies talks about how identity politics advocates think and act in ways that parallel Bolshevik patterns.)

The point is, there is no escape from these battles in the world, certainly not in the Orthodox Church. Last week an Orthodox laywoman wrote to say that her priest is telling their parish, especially the young, that Orthodoxy should update itself to modernity, and embrace same-sex marriage and the rest. This is a priest, in a large parish (I looked it up). This is not common, to the best of my knowledge, but it’s not as rare as it should be. My estimation is that many priests and leaders within the Orthodox Church would rather this whole issue go away. It’s not going away — and the clergy cannot always be counted on to teach and disciple others in faithful Orthodoxy.

My guess is that St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary wishes to inform its students of the greatest challenges to Orthodoxy in this modern world, and set them to thinking of what they can and should do to prepare themselves and their flocks to be faithful in what is sure to be a very trying time. My guess too is that St. Vladimir’s, as the heir to a church that suffered horribly under the totalitarian Communist yoke, appreciates the warnings that Slavic Christians and others who know about this suffering firsthand are sounding to the rest of us. And the seminary, in keeping with the spirit of Father Schmemann, who had a gift for communicating to broad audiences, in language they could understand, might well appreciate that an Orthodox journalist (me) amplifies the voices of Orthodox men like Alexander Ogorodnikov, a Russian Orthodox believer who was tortured in prison for confessing Christ.

The kind of Orthodox Christians who are screaming their heads off about my upcoming talk are the kind of Orthodox Christians who would prefer to keep the next generation of priests, as well as Orthodox laymen, in the dark about what they are doing. The world is moving in their direction, and they are laboring to move the Orthodox Church in the same direction, encouraging their fellow Orthodox to live by the modern world’s lies.

I say: No!

If others wish to “dialogue” with them, fine by me. But I hope you will observe what they all reveal by their reaction to this announcement. If I were a PhD or a priest, they would find some other reason to howl their protests. It’s not the man they hate; it’s the message. It is good to get this learned. If people like this ever got control of St. Vladimir’s, you can be confident that Orthodox teaching that conflicts with contemporary mores, especially in terms of sexual orientation and gender identity, would be driven out, or at least underground.

By the way, if you have read or are reading Live Not By Lies in a church or student group, here is a free, downloadable study guide that I wrote.

 

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Church Of Trumpianity

Thanks for your patience yesterday with me being on the road all day to Texas. I wrote a Substack newsletter post about a book I listened to on the drive over. There is also a Buc-ee’s photo. I’ll be writing that newsletter for free for a couple of more weeks, but expect to go to a paid model by year’s end. Why don’t you check it out now to see if it’s for you?

I was away from the keys almost all day, but did receive some texts over the long drive, from conservative Christian friends. There’s a lot of genuine shock over how fiercely their own friends are attacking them for not being aboard the Trump Train these days. No doubt about it, cancel culture is no longer just a left-wing thing. I’m hearing from conservatives who are reluctant to mention around their conservative friends that Trump should suck it up and move on, for the good of the country and of the Republican Party. This should be an ordinary opinion about which conservatives are capable of discussing. Maybe the “suck it up, move right along” conservatives (I am one) are wrong about this, but there’s an argument to be had over it. So many of the Trump Lost Causers are enraged at what they consider to be treason to the man, and are acting like Social Justice Warriors do when somebody suggests that hey, maybe white supremacy doesn’t explain everything.

A reader sent this powerful piece from Presbyterian Reformed Anglican theologian Michael Horton, slamming the theology behind the Jericho March. It’s useful for me, as I don’t have a strong grasp on the ideas and factionalism among Evangelicals and Pentecostals. In the Cult of Christian Trumpism, Horton writes:

Idolatry has taken precedence over theology.

At the same time, there is a theological heart to Christian Trumpism. Please note that I am not talking about voting for President Trump or one’s appraisal of the election’s outcome. Equally sincere Christians may be divided over these matters, which is why the Lord gave us Christian freedom to vote our conscience. Further, I’ve said quite a lot over the past several decades in criticism of those on the left (as well as the right) for trying to make Jesus a mascot in the culture wars. My public calling is not to bind Christian consciences to my own political positions.

Rather, as a minister of the Word, I am joining others in sounding the alarm that a line has been crossed into rank spiritual adultery.

More:

What we’re witnessing on the national stage right now is disgraceful. In fact, the only word for it is blasphemy––the sacrilege not of secularists marching on Washington to take away religious freedom but of evangelicals marching on Washington to perpetuate a cult. We might have ignored this as a spectacle, a performance by a handful of voices in opposition to the Constitutional system of our republic. But I feel conscience-bound as a minister of the Word to warn against what can only be considered a heresy—indeed, a cult within a certain segment of evangelicalism. It has arisen over many decades and will no doubt be around for many more to come.

While worrying about secularists outside, many of us have failed to reckon with the secularization right under our noses, as the rich cuisine of biblical faith is traded for a mess of pop-culture stew. This idolatry inhibits the church’s work of evangelism in myriad ways.

Internally, it turns the saving gospel into worldly power; externally, the hypocrisy of some evangelicals has been exposed to a cynical and watching world. “You who boast in the law dishonor God by breaking the law. For, as it is written, ‘The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you’” (Rom. 2:23–24).

I don’t know the demographic size of this movement, but it seems to represent the confluence of three trends that have seethed independently until converging, especially in the neo-Pentecostal movement that traditionally has not been identified with evangelicalism per se. These three trends are (1) Christian Americanism, (2) end-times conspiracy, and (3) the prosperity gospel.

Read it all. It’s important.

On the Catholic side, John Jalsevac worries about the syncretism of Trump’s personality cult with Christianity. (And by the way, Catholic readers, if you missed the super-weird event of Italian archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano addressing the Jericho March crowd by video, urging them to support “our president,” Donald Trump, watch his message here.)

Jalsevac begins by saying that a guy he knew in college wrote him to chide him for failing to be publicly faithful to the Gospel. Why? Jalsevac had tweeted out warnings to check the facts against Trump claims of election fraud. More:

It is now routine to hear conservative religious leaders justify their absolute certainty that Trump won – or will win – the election with some version of the assertion that “God’s hand is on him.”

As Eric Metaxas put it in a recent cringe-worthy telephone conversation with Trump, referring specifically to his legal bid to overturn the election result, “I’d be happy to die in this fight. This is a fight for everything. God is with us. Jesus is with us in this fight for liberty.”

Setting aside the stench of prosperity theology present in the suggestion that God’s favor necessarily translates into political victory, what disturbs me most about these kinds of assertions is the speaker’s conviction that somehow he has direct access to knowledge of God’s will, and that God’s will just happens to coincide with his political loyalties.

As far as I can see, the practical effect of this often starkly apocalyptic language has not been to inaugurate some new era of authentic Christian spirituality in the public square, producing in abundance repentance and the fruits of the Holy Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, etc.).

On the contrary, too often the effect has been to inaugurate a cult of personality characterized by anxiety, fear and anger, in the process devastating the foundations of discernment, leaving credulous Christians defenseless against the claims of every spiritual and political charlatan who is on the “right side” – starting with Trump himself.

After all, if God’s messengers have prophesied that Trump will win the 2020 election, then to doubt that Trump did win the 2020 election means that you doubt God. And any “facts” you run across that undermine your faith in Trump’s victory must be mistrusted as diabolical deceptions.

Or, if Trump is made in the mold of King David, and if King David could save Israel despite being a terrible sinner, any concerns you have about Trump’s character must be dismissed with a wave of the hand as scrupulous handwringing, unhelpful distractions at a time when what we need are single-minded warriors.

Or, if demons are literally behind voter fraud, then to doubt or even to raise questions about the legitimacy of many of Team Trump’s fraud allegations is to fall for the deception of demons.

And so on.

Within this eschatological view of politics, truth claims are no longer approached as facts to be adjudicated by applying old-fashioned rules of logic and evidence, but rather as tests of loyalty – spiritual loyalty. This produces, in the end, a kind of intellectual and spiritual blackmail: i.e. if you doubt or even question this specific truth claim, it must because you are not, in the end, a very good Christian.

Jalsevac goes on:

Within the dualistic Manichean cosmos, there are no shades of grey. Grey is the color of cowards who have not yet chosen a side.

This is a grave mistake. Good and evil are at work in this world. However, any kind of A-to-A application of the supernatural eschatological language that applies unqualifiedly to the realm of principalities and powers to the messy and mixed contingencies of time-bound politics is fraught with danger and potential for delusion.

I have already alluded to two of the troubling consequences of this error: Firstly, that it makes it impossible to investigate and evaluate facts, because the truth test is instead replaced with the loyalty test – i.e. the question to ask is not, “is this fact true,” but rather, “does it support our side?” If the answer to the second question is “yes”, then the fact must be true.

And secondly, by eradicating any meaningful distinction between our spiritual and political concerns, it leaves us exposed to spiritual hucksters who will happily hijack our profoundest spiritual impulses to advance their political aims.

Read it all. It’s so good! Jalsevac speaks directly of one of my great fears in this moment: that having made an idol of Trump, and pouring all their energy into defending the temple of this idol, Christian conservatives (and other conservatives) are destroying the capacity of political conservatism to build effective resistance to whatever the Biden administration is planning, and making it impossible for credible next-generation leadership to arise in the GOP, to build on the good things that Trump did. If Trump hangs around attempting to build a 2024 campaign, or at least to destroy any rising Republican who doesn’t bow low towards him, the Republican Party will be destroyed. People inside the Trump bubble, possessed by a spirit of Trumpism, cannot see how crazy this all looks to people — even conservatives, even non-Never Trump conservatives! — outside the bounds of the Trump faithful.

If Donald Trump is symbolically on the ballot in 2022, or symbolically (and literally) on the ballot in 2024, we are going to see a GOP wipeout of epic proportions. I talked to a close Christian friend after Election Day, and found out that she voted for Biden. I know her to be pro-life, and very conservative. This might have been the first Democrat she ever voted for in a national election. I asked her why. “I want him gone,” she said — meaning Trump. Me, I didn’t vote like that. I did not vote for Biden, and was sorry that Biden won. But given the way Trump has behaved since the election, and the effect this has had not only on prospects for conservatives, but also on churches and friendships dear to me, yeah, I want him gone too.

UPDATE: This is an interesting thread:

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The Tragic Sensibility

Aaron Renn devotes much of his consistently excellent Masculinist newsletter to a discussion of Live Not By Lies. You can subscribe to The Masculinist here; it’s a sophisticated discussion of manhood, culture, and Christianity. In the new one, Issue 47, Renn writes, in part:

Dreher is frequently accused, with some fairness, of being excessively gloomy. As with all of us, I don’t think we can understand why he is the way he is without putting it in the context of his life experience. I haven’t done a detailed biographical investigation of him, but the things I’ve heard Dreher say about his own life are characterized by various degrees of trauma and loss. He was bullied in school and was not able to overcome his assailants, nor did the authorities come to his aid. He moved back to his hometown from the big city but his family was not necessarily glad to see him. He gave his all to expose Catholic abuse scandals but was unable to bring about justice. That experience nearly shattered his Christian faith, and did cause him to leave the Catholic Church and go into Eastern Orthodoxy.

If these were our experiences, we’d probably be gloomy too.

More:

People who can see terrible truths are quite often like this, wounded and alienated from institutions. My own newsletter is a product of this very thing. A three-year period of frankly bizarre occurrences did me enormous harm and caused me to question everything I thought I knew.

That’s fair, and more than fair: it’s really insightful. Renn made me reflect on the sources of my own pessimism. Might have taken two years of therapy to get to where Renn got with those grafs.

I would only add to Renn’s catalog of my own path my disgust with the Republican Party and movement conservatism during the second George W. Bush administration, when I came to terms with the Iraq War, and how we got there. As I’ve said here many times, I had to reckon with my own intellectual complicity with that project. I lost faith in the party and the movement, and came to doubt my own judgment.

You want to know why I freak out over the Christian conservatives telling themselves and the world that God spoke to them and said that Trump is going to be president after January 20, and calling them to rally to Trump’s side? I’ve never been the sort of person who says “God told me” this or that, but on the Iraq War, I was the kind of man who was morally certain that I was right, and that all those who disagreed with me were either cowards or fools. [UPDATE: This, I should clarify, is why I lost faith in my own judgment back then. It wasn’t taking the wrong side in the war, like you feel when you’ve backed the wrong political candidate, or picked the wrong horse. It was the deep certainty I had that the cause was so just that it was not possible for anyone to disagree in good faith.]

Mostly, though, Iraq deeply damaged my faith in governing elites, and in the GOP, which I thought was the realistic party, the hard-headed, unsentimental party. So, by the way, did the 2008 financial crash. Both Republicans and Democrats, across both the Clinton and G.W. Bush administrations, gave the financial industry what it wanted, and created the conditions for the crash. I don’t trust these people. Still don’t.

About the Catholic Church, I will just say that I saw that leadership elites will make the weak, the vulnerable, and the trusting suffer to protect their own interests. It’s true of any leadership elite, but I had not expected that in the Church. I learned otherwise. It was a confirmation of what I learned as a bullied kid in high school: most of the time, people in authority, and with the responsibility to protect those who can’t defend themselves, will not stand up to bullies.

The situation in my Louisiana family I’ve written about extensively. Let’s just say here that I learned after a costly move, involving my wife and kids, that things were not what I had been raised to believe, and that the idea I had of family was something of a sham. I had not seen any of that coming, and could not have predicted it. It broke me physically and otherwise, in ways from which I’m still not fully recovered.

In fewer than 20 years, I lost my faith in my church, my country (as an agent of righteousness in the world), my political party, and my family — and in some ways, myself. You’d be gloomy too.

What I’m struggling to come to terms with is the knowledge that life is worth living, and life is ultimately good, despite these all too human failures. I find it very hard to trust. I hadn’t quite thought about all this in cumulative context until reading Renn’s newsletter. Funny how things that are totally obvious to a stranger can elude one.

Renn goes on:

While Dreher is right to be gloomy in my view, he comes across as someone invested in a future of defeat. He explicitly says he has hope, yet a mood of defeatism pervades his work, something I’m far from the first person to notice. He’s more likely to write about someone who suffered and survived, or someone who’s living a healthy, quiet existence somewhere, than of stories of victorious conflict or justice triumphant. I think accounts for much of the pushback he receives. This sadly provides an excuse for people to dismiss him as “alarmist” or whatever and ignore the substance of his work, which is frequently quite penetrating.

This is where perhaps different life experiences might have produced a different outcome. Imagine if, for example, he had been able to get people to go on the record about Cardinal McCarrick, leading to his removal and justice triumphing. How might he feel differently about the world today with some big wins like that under his belt?

These too are fair comments. Every couple of weeks, somebody will write me a letter telling me that something I wrote brought them to religious faith, or led them to convert to Orthodoxy, or meant a lot to them in some big, life-changing way. Man, those things make such a difference. It makes me feel that it’s worthwhile. I should also confess that I have a hard time accepting success; I only think about the things I failed to do. I just checked on the sales numbers for Live Not By Lies, and they’re pretty good. Selling 66 percent more than The Benedict Option at this same period, despite not being able to go out and give talks to support it, and not having much mainstream media attention to it. Still, I find it hard not to think about what I might have done better with the book or my promotion of it. That’s just my personality. I can’t tell how much of it is modesty, how much of it is the vice of ingratitude, and how much of it is plain old neurosis.

Overall, though, I have learned from experience not to expect much from the people and institutions you are supposed to trust. You invest a lot of yourself and your hopes in them, and they break your damn heart. This is called wisdom, and it comes from understanding the meaning of tragedy (such as: my dad and my sister, who both believed that Family Was Everything, but who shared such a strong idea of what family should be that they laid the groundwork for the dissolution of the family after their passing.) When I go on and on about the Christians of the Communist world who endured without losing their faith or having their spirits broken, and trying to draw lessons from it, I’m not just searching because it interests me professionally, you understand.

Miracles might happen. God can do anything He wants. None of the people I talked to in the former Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc expected to live to see the end of Communism. They did what they did because it was the right thing to do, and because they know that somehow, God, and His goodness, would triumph. I believe that. I really do. But in some times more than other times, faith is the evidence of things unseen.

To be precise for a moment, the reason I am so gloomy about our prospects as traditional, conservative Christians in the short term is because I have done my homework, and I know where all the trends are taking us. We have the liberty to change our direction, but the only way we will do so is if we wake up, and — to use an old-fashioned word — repent. If we keep living this way, our fate is probably sealed by the choices we made, and failed to make, today.

When I think about the big failures I’ve been part of — everything but the childhood bullying thing — they all come down to a combination of factors: people believing too much in their own goodness, and denying the possibility of failure, including failure of judgment; refusal to turn back when warned, in part because it was too scary to let go of a comforting narrative, or at least a familiar one;. and finally, trusting that everything was bound to turn out for the best if we just stayed the course.

One work of art that I take as explaining life to me is Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.” It’s about idealism, disappointment, disorder, and redemption. This passage especially:

‘O look, look in the mirror,

   O look in your distress:

Life remains a blessing

   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window

   As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

   With your crooked heart.’

I’m living out these lines right now. I’m writing these lines in everything I do.

If I didn’t have hope, though, I wouldn’t write at all. The story I told of my late sister’s life and what I learned from it, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (only $1.99 on Kindle) is a book about hope, but also tragedy. I had not realized until my sister, a small-town school teacher, died, and I started hearing stories from people about what a difference she made in their lives, how much great good could come from a quiet life, a hidden life. That story also proved tragic for me, in the end — I mean, beyond her untimely death — but that doesn’t negate all the good she did, and that she lived. Few stories involving the human heart are simple. When I published that book seven years ago, I received a number of letters and comments from people about how it inspired them to move back home to raise their kids around their families. I will never know this side of heaven how much good was accomplished through that book. I trust that some was, though. That brings me hope.

I imagine that Benedict of Nursia was thought of as a crank and an alarmist when he left the city of Rome as a young man, and went to live in a cave in a steep valley in the countryside north of Rome. Who does that? And when he came out and started monastic communities, people must have thought he was leading men (and women) to throw their lives away. Still, he persisted. He never lived to see the fruits of his labors. It’s fair to say that the movement Benedict started played a key role in saving western European civilization, and leading an unknowably large people to the faith.

You have to take the long view, I believe. There was no reason for anybody to be optimistic in Rome around the year 500. Everything was falling apart. Benedict was no optimist. He was a man of faith, and that meant a man of hope.

This is why I’m so gloomy when I talk about the situation with our culture and our politics, but so cheerful and lively when people meet me. I like people, and I like to talk to them, and hear their stories. I take their company as an opportunity for an epiphany that might show me the world more clearly, and might help me see truth, beauty, and/or goodness. It has happened so many times before. As Russell Kirk said, “The world remains sunlit, despite its vices.”

Americans seem to have trouble separating optimism from hope, I think. Maybe it’s because we lack a tragic sense of life — that is, we deny that suffering is the human condition, and that all wisdom begins with suffering. That we cannot separate joy from suffering. That we must know that everything we build will one day turn to dust.

Or maybe I have just become some sort of Slav. Anyway, Tolkien’s lines resonate deeply within my heart:

Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’— though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

Say, I’m going to be driving all day tomorrow to central Texas for a private event. I won’t be able to approve comments until late in the evening. Please be patient, I’ll get to it.

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Trump Threatens To Make Political Prisoners

Lin Wood is one of Trump’s lawyers. Look what he tweeted out, and that both Donald Trump and Ret. Gen. Mike Flynn retweeted:

The President of the United States retweeted a call to jail the Republican Governor of Georgia and the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia, because they will not help Trump’s effort to overturn the election.

Gen. Flynn, the star speaker at the Jericho March on Saturday, endorses arresting these duly elected political leaders. If you read my account of the march, you’ll know that Flynn told the crowd to stop listening to their minds, because that’s where fear lives, but instead to listen to their hearts, to their “gut instinct.” He, like most of the other speakers, said that God is on their side. Other speakers there said God told them to take up this cause.

Here are actual quotes from someone else who spoke at the march:

“I carry out the commands that Providence has laid upon me.”

“But if the voice speaks, then I know the time has come to act.” 

“We must distrust the intelligence and the conscience and must place our faith in our instincts.”

“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter.”

Lots of people at the march sounded those same themes. But all those were spoken by a single political leader. I lied — he wasn’t at the Jericho March. Those are quotes from Adolf Hitler. 

Don’t you dare “Godwin’s Law” me. We have today the President of the United States, as well as a retired military man who has risen to a position of leadership of the Christian resistance, publicly endorsing a call to jail two elected state officials — Republicans, even — because they will not do the political bidding of the president. Flynn calls for jailing elected officials in the name of “we the people.” That is objectively fascist.

This ought to be instantly disqualifying to every single sane patriot in this country. Of course Trump won’t get away with it if he tries to do it. But the fact that he’s willing to endorse it, and so is Gen. Flynn, a former high-ranking intelligence officer, is electrifying.

All you Christians who are with Trump and Flynn, do you see what you are doing? What about you Republican members of Congress, you Senators? What’s it going to take? Do you fear Donald Trump and his mob more than you love the Constitution?

I’m telling you, in the post Trump era, this Michael Flynn must not be allowed to get anywhere near power. I intend to do whatever I can to resist soft totalitarianism coming from the Left. But I also do not intend to tolerate authoritarianism coming from the Right.

UPDATE: Just banned this person for leaving the following comment:

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News Flash! Radicalism On The Right!

I’m sorry that I didn’t write more today. I’ve got a hard deadline on a long essay due on Tuesday, and as is usual for me, when I don’t have unlimited length, I have to decide what to cut — and it’s difficult! It is much harder to write 2,500 words than 6,000, because I lack discipline. So it’s always a rush to the last minute to make the thing say what it needs to say. One frenzied morning in 2013, I wrote a 6,000-word blog post about Dante in a single sitting at a Starbucks, over the course of a morning. My wife saw it before I got home, and worried that I had had some kind of mental break. No indeed — when I get into the groove, I go. That blog post was the seed of a book published two years later (a book that because of some publishing snafus, I had to write from start to final version in, get this, three months).

Anyway, something caught my mind this morning, and really annoyed me. It’s a report from NPR on how ex-national security officials are warning of “mass radicalization” on the Right. Hannah Allam is the reporter. Excerpt:

ALLAM: That’s Elizabeth Neumann. She was a Homeland Security official who served until last spring. She talks about the conservative media world as a portal to another reality, one where the election was stolen, the pandemic isn’t a big deal and Democrats aren’t just political opponents but dangerous enemies. Neumann says she has relatives who’ve gone down that rabbit hole.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

NEUMANN: For me personally, I am wrestling with how do I help people that have – unbeknownst to them, they’ve become radicalized in their thought. They hold views that they didn’t hold 10 years ago. I have argued that unless we help them break the deception, we cannot operate with 30% of the country holding the extreme views that they do.

ALLAM: Eventually, the talk turns to solutions – public awareness campaigns, enlisting faith leaders. But for any of this to work, they say, it has to start at the top.

They’re not wrong. I just spent a lot of time writing three lengthy criticisms in this space of right-wing Christian radicalization in the post-election period. These were painful to write in part because I could not avoid criticizing an old friend, Eric Metaxas, a good man who is saying and doing some bad things these days — and who, to my way of seeing it, represents the corruption of the Christian conscience by Trumpism. Let anyone who doubts that I am seriously concerned about this issue of the Right, from the Right, read “Eric Metaxas’s American Apocalypse,” then “What I Saw At The Jericho March,” and finally “A Defense of Jericho March Criticism”.

That said, what appalls about NPR’s coverage of issues like this — and the mainstream media’s coverage in general — is how they completely ignore the simultaneous radicalization of the Left. Or to be more precise, I would say that they ignore how the radicalization of the Right was in some way preceded by the radicalization of the Left. It either does not interest them, or, as is more likely, none of them can see it because it is the water in which they swim.

Consider gay marriage, which is now thoroughly mainstream, and supported by a wide majority of Americans. This is radical social change — to the best of our knowledge, it has never existed in recorded history in any society, ever, even in classical Greece and Rome, which tolerated homosexuality– and it happened virtually overnight. The poll data numbers-cruncher Nate Silver, who is himself gay, wrote in response to the 2015 Obergefell decision legalizing gay marriage:

In the United States, gay marriage has gone from unthinkable to the law of the land in just a couple of decades. Homosexuality has gone from “the love that dare not speak its name” — something that could get you locked up, beat up, ostracized or killed, as is still the case in much of the world — into something that’s out-and-proud, so to speak.

It is so difficult to convey to Millennials and Generation Z people how unthinkable same-sex marriage was prior to 1994, or thereabouts. When Ellen DeGeneres came out on her sitcom in 1997, it made the cover of Time magazine. It was a big, big deal. Younger Americans act like it’s perfectly obvious to anyone that gay marriage is right and just, but this is a very recent development, historically speaking.

After Obergefell, in 2015, Bloomberg did a historical, data-driven look at how fast social change happens in America when a psychosocial dam breaks. It wasn’t just gay marriage, as the graphs show, but other important issues (e.g., women’s suffrage). When this feature was written five years ago, only a handful of states had legalized some form of recreational marijuana. Now many more have, and earlier this month, the House of Representatives voted to legalize weed from coast to coast. This bill is going to die in the Republican Senate, but it’s now just a matter of time. If you had told most Americans a decade ago that in 2020, the House of Representatives would vote to legalize pot, and it would barely make the news, they would have thought you were, well, high.

It is understandable why people who favor gay rights would be thrilled by the Supreme Court’s ruling, and by the societal acceptance and affirmation of gays and lesbians. But you would have to be bonkers to downplay the effect a landmark social event like that would have on social and religious conservatives, of which there are very many in this country, though they are rare in newsrooms. For better or for worse, same-sex marriage smashes the Christian sexual ethic and marital model. And it unavoidably has ramifications for religious liberty, as there is an irreconcilable conflict between religious liberty and gay rights.

Now comes transgenderism, which is far more radical than gay rights, but from which we are told the slightest hesitation to affirm whatever trans activists ask for is evidence of deep-seated bigotry that must be punished. The Today Show and Good Morning America have puffed in recent years a child drag queen, and we are told that to have any qualms about drag queens reading queer story books to little children inside public libraries basically makes you a Nazi. Et cetera, ad nauseam.

Think about race. I was born in 1967, and raised within a popular culture that formed us to embrace and celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a colorblind America. It is impossible to overstate how everything in schools and pop culture taught this liberal, quintessentially American moral vision. But now, we are told by the Left that it is hateful bigotry — racist, even. To assert as true on many American college campuses today, or in institutional settings, what has been unquestioned gospel — liberal gospel — since the mid-1960s is to set oneself up to be denounced, fired, and hounded by a mob.

About that mob: most of us, since the 1960s, have had the sacrosanct important of free speech hammered into us. Many of us went through Banned Books Week in school, where the spectre of Puritanical right-wing nanny-goats out to take our Judy Blume volumes away from us was trotted out to remind us how important free speech is. All of a sudden, wham, it’s the Left that’s saying people ought to be fired and turned into pariahs for saying or writing the Wrong Thing. Now everybody in middle-class professional settings has to be extremely careful what they say, because the wrong word could mean the destruction of your livelihood.

This is not coming from right-wing nuts, hysterical fundamentalist preachers, or other stock figures in the liberal pantheon of bogeys. This is coming from the kind of people who work in the NPR newsroom, and who do not regard any of this as evidence of radicalization.

But it is. It damned sure is. The only thing standing between the Democratic Party and the end of women’s sports is — I can’t believe I’m writing this — a Republican Senate. Why? Because the Democrats have promised to pass, and Joe Biden has promised to sign, the Equality Act, whose many gifts to society would be to open the door to all women’s athletics to biological males who identify as female.

But go on, tell us about right-wing radicalization.

Politico‘s Tim Alberta has a great feature in which he picked 20 different people he was in touch with during his campaign reporting, who, taken together, give us a picture of America today. These are people of all races, straight and gay, one trans person, Democrats, Republicans, and independents. It’s a depressing picture, as Alberta says straight-up, because it reveals a country anxious, fearful, and deeply divided. These are all fascinating snapshots — the one about the black woman from Detroit who is feistily pro-Trump is an eye-opener — but none are as memorable as this one:

I’ve encountered some colorful characters in 2020, in person and over the internet, but none quite like CHARLIE WILSON. Here’s a snippet of the introductory email he sent me early this year: “I had two careers: professional journalist 1979-1990, finance 1990-2002. Have traveled to all 50 states. … Grew up in Milwaukee and have lived in Iowa (3 years); Kansas City (2 years); L.A. (only 8 months); Washington, D.C. (5 years); Boston (11 years); Seattle (16 years); Klickitat County (2½ years). Have traveled to 26 countries. Same-sex married since the Supremes legalized it. Life member NRA, 15 guns and ‘enough’ ammo. Democrat for 40 years, now independent. Write-in vote last time. Changed my mind on gun control and global warming within the past 5 years. Drive an electric car and a 1-ton diesel pickup truck.”

It’s impossible to synopsize the entirety of our exchange, which touched on everything from “rampant” voter fraud to implicit media bias to the parallels between the pre-Civil War “Jacksonian period” and today. (He didn’t explain his vote for Kanye West, though given his disdain for both parties and his asymmetric beliefs, he didn’t need to.) The most provocative passages he sent me—after offering evidence that he’d donated considerable money to Democratic Party before leaving it after the 2012 election—detailed the failures of the modern left.

“What’s especially striking to me is the reversal of the long historical pattern of the Rs representing the well-off and the Ds representing the struggling working people. That has reversed here just as it has nationally: The wealthier someone is around here, the more likely they are to be D,” Wilson wrote. “There is a great deal of laughable moral smugness, unearned intellectual conceit, and offensive economic snobbery that goes with it. The Democratic Party that I knew and supported for 40 years was on the side of the working people, but that just isn’t true now, either legislatively or culturally.”

“There is more diversity of opinion and outlook along the five-mile road between us and the nearest town than there was in all of Seattle, Boston, or Washington, D.C., where I lived and worked for a combined total of 32 years,” he added. “The idea that people in rural areas think alike, and even worse, that they don’t think at all, is widely held on the coasts and especially in the media, and couldn’t possibly be more ignorant and obnoxious.”

Wilson concluded, “I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: If Democrats want to ‘unify’ the country—and I frankly don’t believe that they do—they’d get off their god damned high horses for once, and ditch their overweening, self-declared superiority, and join the human race.”

From Charlie Wilson’s lips to the NPR newsroom, and every newsroom in this country!

Ha ha! That’ll never happen. If I got a phone call or e-mail from a mainstream journalist wanting to talk to me about the radicalization of the Religious Right, I wouldn’t do it. This is not because I have nothing to say about it — I manifestly do, and have spent the last few days writing acres about it. It’s because I don’t want to participate in their sham depiction of religious people and conservative people as dangerous radicals — which some are — when they never write or broadcast anything about how the Left pushes and pushes and pushes, and is never satisfied until they make it damn near impossible for the rest of us to hold jobs, get an education, pursue a livelihood, affirm and seek to live out our religious beliefs in peace, be proud of our ancestors and this country, and on and on.

The media is freaking out about right-wing radicalization, but ignoring the simultaneous rise in left-wing radicalization. But they’ve done something like this before. In 2002, the political scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio published, in The Public Interest, a version of a political science paper they had done about how the Secular Left rose in influence within the Democratic Party at the same time that the Religious Right rose in influence within the GOP. Part of the story they tell is that the national news media completely missed this story. From the paper:

The most striking finding to emerge from these comparisons is the paucity of news stories and commentaries that identify secularists or the secularist outlook with the Democratic party, particularly when contrasted to the large number of stories and editorials in both papers about the Republican party’s relationship with evangelical and fundamentalist Christians (43 stories and 682 stories, respectively). During this period of increased party polarization along a secularist-traditionalist divide, readers were 16 times more likely to encounter a story about evangelical-fundamentalist clout in the GOP than to find one about secularist clout in the Democratic party. There were more stories published by the [New York] Times about the influence of evangelicals in the Republican party in 1992 alone (93 stories) than were published by both the Times and the Post throughout the entire decade about the importance of secularists to the Democratic party (43 stories).

We found a similar imbalance when we selected stories that associated a fundamentalist or secularist outlook with both a stance toward abortion and a party identification (283 stories versus 16 stories). The skewed coverage, most pronounced during election years, also extended to other issues and controversies–delegates at national party conventions, prayer at football games, partial-birth abortion, school vouchers, gay adoption, judicial or cabinet nominees, and special-purpose activist

groups such as the Christian Coalition or People for the American Way. If a general worldview was mentioned in the story, the [Washington] Post and the Times overwhelmingly emphasized Christian

fundamentalism and missed the secularist side to the story.

The impression conveyed by both newspapers is that traditional religious beliefs motivate people to oppose abortion, back conservative Republican candidates, support conservative social movements, and adopt intolerant attitudes, but that a modernist or secularist outlook apparently has little or no connection to the reasons why someone supports abortion rights, opposes vouchers, joins culturally progressivist organizations, expresses antipathy toward evangelical Christians, and votes for liberal Democratic candidates.

Broadcast news coverage during the 1990s was no better. …

How do Bolce & De Maio, the political scientists, explain this radical imbalance of coverage? Citing other social science work establishing that print and TV journalists are overwhelmingly on the secular left, they theorize that the journalists missed the rise of the Secular Left in the Democratic Party because what they Secular Left wanted looked normal to them. The Religious Right people — those were the weirdos, the threats to the common good, the bad people.

Nothing ever changes with these people, the media.

 

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A Defense Of Jericho March Criticism

I have had lots of positive feedback, but also negative, to my “What I Saw At The Jericho March” post, which summarized and criticized the Christian Trumpist-nationalist event in Washington over the weekend. In this post, I want to respond generally to a few of the main lines of criticism.

“This is not about Donald Trump. This is about America and the Constitution.”

Please. As one reader wrote to me on this point (I paraphrase here): “Could you imagine the same kind of march, and the same intense rhetoric, about Jeb Bush or any other Republican presidential candidate?”

Besides, the Constitution provides a structure through which we adjudicate disputes like this. The Trump stolen election claims were submitted through the system, and all failed. It is theoretically possible that every one of the courts, including the US Supreme Court, got it wrong. Courts are human institutions, and therefore fallible. If they have failed here, then we have to live with it. The institutions of liberal democracy do not guarantee inerrancy. But what is the alternative? The actual alternative, right here, right now?

We could do away with liberal democracy. I don’t believe that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government. It is conceivable, certainly from a Christian point of view, that liberal democracy could bring about more evil than good, in which case one has a moral duty to oppose it. I don’t believe that we are there, at least not yet. But if that is your belief — that is, if you think that the entire structure of American liberal democracy has been fatally corrupted — then don’t waste my time talking about your fidelity to the Constitution.

“Why won’t you understand that this election was obviously rigged? There was fraud everywhere!”

Was there really? You might remember my saying in this space that a conservative lawyer friend who has worked election fraud cases before told me a couple of weeks ago that the gap between what Trump’s legal team is saying in public, and what it’s actually saying in court filings, is huge. Andy McCarthy, writing at National Review Online, looks at a passage from Team Trump’s filing in a Wisconsin case. The federal judge — a Trump-appointed one — dismissed it. McCarthy writes:

After all that’s been said over the last six weeks, this fleeting passage near the start of the court’s workmanlike, 23-page decision and order should take our breath away (my highlighting):

With the Electoral College meeting just days away, the Court declined to address the issues in piecemeal fashion and instead provided plaintiff with an expedited hearing on the merits of his claims. On the morning of the hearing, the parties reached agreement on a stipulated set of facts and then presented arguments to the Court.

A “stipulated set of facts,” in this context, is an agreement between the lawyers for the adversary parties about what testimony witnesses would give, and/or what facts would be established, if the parties went through the process of calling witnesses and offering tangible evidence at a hearing or trial.

Trump had tweeted that his team had found “many illegal votes” in Wisconsin, and would show it in court. The Trump people have been complaining the judges won’t let his people present their facts and evidence in court because of legal technicalities about “standing.” That did not happen in Wisconsin. McCarthy:

Judge Ludwig denied the state’s claims that the campaign lacked standing. Instead, he gave the campaign the hearing they asked for — the opportunity to call witnesses and submit damning exhibits. Yet, when it got down to brass tacks, the morning of the hearing, it turned out there was no actual disagreement between the Trump team and Wisconsin officials about the pertinent facts of the case. The president’s counsel basically said: Never mind, we don’t need to present all our proof . . . we’ll just stipulate to all the relevant facts and argue legal principles.

In the end, after all the heated rhetoric, what did they tell the court the case was really about? Just three differences over the manner in which the election was administered — to all of which, as Ludwig pointed out, the campaign could have objected before the election if these matters had actually been of great moment.

There was no there there. Despite telling the country for weeks that this was the most rigged election in history, the campaign didn’t think it was worth calling a single witness. Despite having the opportunity of a hearing before a Trump appointee who was willing to give the campaign ample opportunity to prove its case, the campaign said, “Never mind.”

This happened in Michigan and Pennsylvania too, McCarthy said. More:

It has become an article of faith among ardent Trump followers that the election was stolen. The president continues to insist that this is the case, and these flames were further fanned by 19 Republican-controlled state governments, along with 126 Republican members of Congress, who joined the meritless Texas lawsuit, tossed out by the Supreme Court on Friday. The rationalization behind that stunt was that the president has been denied his day in court. But every time a court offers him an opportunity to establish by proof what he is promoting by Twitter, Team Trump folds. Why is that?

He’s a swindler, is why. And he’s found tens of millions of people willing to be swindled.

“How can you believe that ‘soft totalitarianism’ is coming from the Left, and then criticize people who see the threat and are prepared to do something about it?”

For a couple of reasons. First, the kind of totalitarianism that I believe we are creating in this country is not one that politics alone can solve. The only speech I heard all day at the Jericho March (which, by the way, I watched on TV; I wasn’t in DC) that resonated with me was the one at the very end, by video, from the pastor Jonathan Cahn. He spoke for 15 minutes about the various cultural threats coming at us. Curiously, he didn’t talk about Trump, or the election. He was right about the threats. Politics is a partial solution, but most of this stuff has little or nothing to do with the presidency. I firmly believe that many conservative Christians have allowed themselves to get worked up over this election as a distraction from our collective failure as the church to disciple ourselves. So very many of us are as much a part of this declining culture as those we criticize.

This “something” that the Jericho March people are prepared to do satisfies them emotionally, but will do next to nothing to stop the movement towards soft totalitarianism, which is something coming on us not from the state primarily, but through corporations, universities, the media, and Big Tech. It plays to the radical subjectivism of our culture, and the fear of discomfort and loss of status.

Secondly, “doing something about it” does not justify doing anything. Social and moral conservatives are in the minority in this country, and are going to be further marginalized as the Boomers pass away. The younger generations are not nearly as religious or conservative. We have to play the long game. That means raising up a generation of leaders — political, intellectual, religious, cultural, and corporate — who are wise and discerning. I don’t agree with the “winsomeness is next to godliness” approach, insofar as it theorizes that unbelievers and liberals will like us if we are just nice enough. That doesn’t work. At the same time, it’s opposite — that being combative and insulting will guarantee victory by rolling over the opposition — is doomed.

We have to learn how to play a losing hand in a winning way. The pro-life movement has learned over the years how to do this pretty well. Abortions are down, and even with the Roe regime basically untouched by the Supreme Court, at the state level, many restrictions have been put in place that have saved unborn lives. The steady, abiding witness of pro-lifers over these past decades is paying off.

The kind of crazy talk at the Jericho March rally is going to get us all targeted by the state, and by wokesters in institutions, but will not advance our cause one bit. Besides, as a conservative and a Christian whose writing in recent years has been dominated by anger and anxiety over the loss of religious and civil liberties in the face of wokeness, I can say without a doubt that I would not want to live in a country governed by the radical nationalism and emotivist Christianity of the Jericho Marchers.

In his remarks, Gen. Mike Flynn told the crowd to listen to their hearts, not their minds. This, at a conservative rally! As longtime readers of mine know, one of the main problems with the woke is their belief that feelings are facts, as long as the person feeling it is one of the children of light. Well, what do you make of this argument from the conservative website American Thinker? The author claims that the election is illegitimate. Why?

An election is legitimate when its results are credible manifestations of the popular will. … If we cannot have confidence in an election result, it is illegitimate.

This standard would give veto power over election results to people who don’t want to believe the results, no matter the facts. Why is it wrong for, say, a black transgendered person to claim that a conservative is guilty of bigotry only because the black transgender person feels that the conservative is, but not wrong for an election to be invalidated only because conservatives feel that it was a sham? If conservatives are going to surrender to this emotivist culture of feels, what is the point of conservatism?

“You are an elitist who looks down on the people who marched.” 

This is the right-wing populist version of the leftist tic, “You’re a racist/sexist/homophobe/transphobe,” in response to criticism of their actions or positions. It is not the position of someone who feels confident in their beliefs.

Look, I was never part of the Never Trump crowd because I fully agreed (and still do) with Tucker Carlson’s great January 2016 essay in Politico, titled “Donald Trump is Shocking, Vulgar, And Right“. The Republican Party had failed its people. Carlson wrote this at the beginning of the GOP primary season, in a time when a lot of conservatives believed Trump was a joke. But Carlson explained in his piece why establishment conservative failures led to Trumpist populism. Carlson was correct. The GOP needed populist shock treatment. It was bound not to be polite, and indeed, it was not.

Whether it was effective, or worth the losses, is very much debatable. But I’m not going to do that here.

To believe, though, that any criticism of Trump and his supporters is illegitimate because of snobbery is to surrender the integrity of one’s judgment — and is no different from what the Left does regarding claims of bigotry. It’s the argumentum ad hominem fallacy — and is, in fact, a form of reverse snobbery.

What we need — what any political party or movement has to have — is serious discussion and debate. What the Jericho Marchers propose is quite radical. If they are right, then that has profound implications for the future of the nation, and for what morally upright and patriotic Americans should think and do in the days ahead. This is absolutely not the time for people who disagree with them, or who have misgivings about their project, to fall silent because it hurts the Jericho Marchers’ feelings.

When it was the Left howling because their feelings, or the feelings of sacred victims within the progressive cosmos, were hurt by conservative criticism, we told them, famously, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” But now we are supposed to walk on eggshells around Christians who are calling for apocalyptic measures to fight demonic evil that has supposedly rotted through our democratic institutions, because we don’t want to bruise their fragile egos? Snowflakery is even less attractive on the Right, because we are supposed to be better than that.

Some have criticized me for coming off as mocking some of the people at the march, especially my focusing on the unintentional comedy of the lurid, Gotterdämmerung rhetoric from speaker after speaker, interspersed with commercials for My Pillow. Does it really help to pretend that this disjunction isn’t ridiculous? Are these Christians only interested in talking to themselves? They can’t afford to be; there aren’t enough of them in the country to make the fantasies they talked about on the stage come true. They have to win converts to the cause. On that point, they have no idea how lucky they are that more people didn’t tune into the webcast for the whole march, and see for themselves the absurdity of it. I don’t doubt at all the sincerity of the participants, but again, if you’re trying to convince the nation that we need to rise up in rebellion — even forming militias, as one Jericho March speaker said — against the established order, you had better take yourselves as seriously as you expect the rest of us to do.

It does you no practical good to patronize you by feigning respect for rhetoric that is not respectable on its own merits. In his 1996 book The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch wrote, of the Civil Rights movement:

Those who feared or resented black people found themselves disarmed by the moral heroism, self-discipline, and patriotism of the civil right movement. Participants in the movement, by their willingness to go to jail when they broke the law, proved the depth of their loyalty to the country whose racial etiquette they refused to accept. The movement validated black people’s claim to be better Americans than those who defended segregation as the American way. By demanding that the nation live up to its promise, they appealed to a common standard of justice and to a basic sense of decency that transcended racial lines.

Exactly right. Was there anything about that Jericho March that conveyed moral heroism, self-discipline, or patriotism (which is not the same thing as nationalism)? This was a march in which some speakers called on the President of the United States to exercise executive authority to invalidate an election that he could not invalidate by the constitutionally provided process. That’s patriotic? I don’t think so, and I’m not alone.

And, many of us on the Right have opposed, actively or passively, the Black Lives Matter movement, and related liberation movements, because we have judged them not to be appealing to a common standard of justice that transcends racial lines, but rather by exploiting victimhood, and the rhetoric of victimization, to establish a double standard for racial groups. If it’s snobbish to expect my own tribe — Christian conservatives — to live by the same standard that I expect from people who are not, then fine, call me a snob. I would point out to you this passage from Lasch’s chapter criticizing Al Sharpton and other race hustlers:

They use victimization as an excuse for every kind of failure and thereby perpetuate one of the deepest sources of failure: the victim’s difficulty in gaining self-respect.

Exactly. Christian marchers and their sympathizers who blame “snobbery” for the failure of other conservatives, religious and otherwise, to respect what appeared to us as a grotesque pageant that affronted our political ideals and religious convictions only perpetuates the kind of things that make others disdain them, and not take them seriously on the matter of politics, or anything else.

Besides, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, two of the conditions that signal a pre-totalitarian society is when people value loyalty more than expertise, and ideology more than the truth. In my book Live Not By Lies, I talk about how this manifests itself on the Left today, particularly within institutions. Both these things were present at the Jericho March, in the speeches we heard. In a democracy, dissenters should not be shushed up, nor should people be taught that they can safely ignore substantive criticism because it hurts their feelings. That does not make those who advocate for a cause stronger. It only blinds them to reality.

“You’re discouraging conservatives when we ought to be encouraging each other.”

The old “shut up and stay loyal” thing again. No, I reject that. I reject that firmly. It was the same kind of thing that I heard from fellow conservative Catholics back in 2002, when I was still a Catholic, and first started writing critically of the Church’s sex abuse problem. If I kept that up, they said, I would be giving aid and comfort to the Church’s enemies.

Who hurt the Church more, in the end: the people who tried to hush things up, or those who tried to get the hierarchy, as well as the laity, to face this crisis honestly and deal with it?

I don’t want to encourage Christian conservatives, and populists, by telling them soothing lies, or withholding the truth when it needs to be told. You shouldn’t want that either. We have to live in the real world. Donald Trump lost this election. Even if by some miracle he really won, his legal team has not been able to prove that in court. Joe Biden is going to be the next president. The fact that Republicans did so well this November despite Trump’s loss is a sign that the main problem was Donald Trump. I can understand why Donald Trump doesn’t want to accept this. It is self-sabotaging for ordinary conservatives to live by this lie.

As I said earlier, as a political matter, the immediate challenge to conservatives is to hold the Senate. Trump’s carrying on about punishing the Georgia GOP for its supposed disloyalty to him might end up costing the Republicans the Senate. He has backtracked and said that GOP voters ought to come out, and not hold back their vote in protest. I hope they will pay attention. But if the Democrats take one or both seats because of a failure of Republican turnout, then Donald Trump will be responsible for a unified Congress working to enact Joe Biden’s agenda. This will be disastrous for the things conservatives, especially social and religious conservatives, care about.

Our longer term goal is to build on Trump’s accomplishments, and field a coherent populist conservatism, and a roster of candidates who can argue for it, and legislate effectively. The more hung up the conservative base stays on Trump’s drama queenery, the harder that is going to be to do. If Trump doesn’t step aside, but keeps stirring the pot, he’s going to make it impossible for anyone to emerge. The future of the GOP, and of whatever calls itself movement conservatism, should not depend on the political whims of a 74-year-old man who governed poorly, and could not get himself re-elected, but who can only act as a spoiler to a new generation of Republican leadership.

Donald Trump broke the old Republican Party. I’m not at all sad about that. But he is now in the position to keep a reformed GOP from emerging to be a viable vehicle for conservatism. If conservatives have to be quiet about what Trump and his loyal followers are doing to conservative prospects going forward, because we have a duty to encourage the Trumpers, count me out.

For years now, I have been trying to get liberals to see how frightening the illiberalism of the progressives looks to people who believe the things I believe, and who look like me. The Jericho March and its rhetoric fulfilled every stereotype they have of people like us. Many liberals are predisposed to think that all of us Christians and conservatives are so radical. There can be no doubt that the craziness of the radical left — the “defund the police” people, antifa, race radicals, and others — cost the Democrats plenty in this past election. Do we really think that a display like what we saw at the Jericho March on Saturday is going to help conservatives build a meaningful and effective resistance to Biden and the Democratic Party?

The greatest political failure of Donald Trump was that he never managed to increase his support beyond his base. True, he drew more minority votes this year than in 2020, but that was offset by losing educated whites. A party that wants to win in a nation as divided as ours has to be appealing to people in the middle, or at least to enough of them. You don’t appeal to those people by frightening them. Heck, I am a white male conservative Christian, and I was scared by a lot of what I saw at the Jericho March. How do you think more moderate people see it?

A lot of conservatives dislike David French, because of his Never Trumpism, and won’t listen to a thing he says. If you are one of those people, I think you’re wrong, and it’s not because I unfailingly agree with David French (I don’t!). But you would be especially wrong to miss his column today about “Christian Trumpism” and the Jericho March. Excerpts:

I’m going to be as blunt as possible: Language like Metaxas’s, like the Texas GOP’s, and like some of the statements you’ll read below embody a form of fanaticism that can lead to deadly violence. There isn’t a theological defense for it. Indeed, its fury and slander directly contradict biblical commands. When core biblical values are contingent, but support for Donald Trump is not, then idolatry is the result.

We’re way, way past concerns for the church’s “public witness.” We’re way past concerns over whether the “reputation” of the church will survive this wave of insanity. There is no other way to say this. A significant movement of American Christians—encouraged by the president himself—is now directly threatening the rule of law, the Constitution, and the peace and unity of the American republic.

French embedded this clip from the Jericho March. Listen to it:

74 million people voted for more of this utter lunacy pic.twitter.com/5DZBYmKS1c

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 12, 2020

I’m supposed to avoid discouraging a man like this because it’s bad for conservatism?! Oh, hell no. It is precisely because I am first a Christian, then a conservative, that I want this deviltry defeated. The GOP pre-Trump status quo is gone forever — and good riddance. But if this is the face of conservatism going forward, conservatism is going to have its head handed to it, over and over and over — and will deserve to lose. Worse, it’s going to make people fear and loathe the churches … but not for the right reasons (our subversive sanctity).

My criticism of the Jericho March might cost me some Live Not By Lies book sales. No author wants to lose book sales, but I didn’t write a book called Live Not By Leftist Lies. If they want to understand better the forms of and threats from soft totalitarianism, my book explains it. If they want advice from Christians who lived under hard totalitarianism, and have words of wisdom for us, it’s there in the book. But they will not find MAGA at all costs in its pages. My brothers and sisters in Christ who are going down this wrong and dangerous path do not need my false flattery, and they do not deserve my support.

The post A Defense Of Jericho March Criticism appeared first on The American Conservative.

What I Saw At The Jericho March

For my sins, I guess, I watched all six hours of the Jericho March proceedings from Washington today, on the march webcast. I say for my sins, but in truth, I decided to watch it because I am interested in what the activist Christian Right is saying, and how they are thinking, in the wake of Donald Trump losing the election.

Except he didn’t lose the election, according to them. It was taken from him. This is an article of faith, not to be doubted. If you doubt, you are a traitor, a coward, in league with the Devil. I’m not exaggerating at all. I saw an interview that the influential Evangelical broadcaster Eric Metaxas gave to the populist activist Charlie Kirk this week, in which he boldly claimed that patriots must fight “to the last drop of blood” to preserve Trump’s presidency, and that those who disagree are the same as Germans who stood by and did nothing to stop Hitler (Metaxas is best known as a biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer). In the same interview — I wrote about it here, in “Eric Metaxas’s American Apocalypse” — Metaxas said it doesn’t matter what can or can’t be proven in court, he knows, and we know, that the election was stolen. When Kirk, who is very sympathetic to Metaxas, asked him what he thought of where the cases stood, Metaxas blithely claimed that he is “thrilled” to know nothing about them.

This knocked me flat. I have known Metaxas since 1998. He is one of the sweetest men you could hope to meet, gentle and kind, a pleasure to be around. Not a hater in the least. Though I have not supported his Trumpist politics, I would not have figured him for someone who would go as far as he did on the Kirk interview. What kind of person calls for spilling blood in defense of a political cause for which he does not care if any factual justification exists? What kind of person compares doubters to Nazi collaborators? A religious zealot, that’s the kind. The only way one can justify that hysterical stance is if one conflates religion with politics, and politics with religion.

This is why I decided to watch the Jericho March today. It was a Trump rally by Christians (and sympathetic Jews) designed to mimic the Biblical story of the Israelite army ritually marching around the walled city of Jericho, blowing the shofar, and watching as God demolished the city’s defenses, so the Israelites could conquer. The idea of the Jericho March is that the true believers would circle the corrupt institutions of the US Government, the ones promulgating the hoax that Trump lost the election.

I watched because I wanted to see how far the Christian Right — for the record, I am an Orthodox Christian, and a conservative — would go to conflate Trump politics and religion. Pretty far, as it turns out. Right over the cliff.  You had to see it to believe it.

The rally was held at a stage erected somewhere on the National Mall, it seemed. Eric Metaxas was the emcee. Festivities began with a large American-born Israeli man whose website is Shofar So Great, who says he received a blessing from his Orthodox rabbi to break Shabbat so he could fly to Washington and blow the shofar at the Jericho March, because it’s that important to support Donald Trump. Though he was puffing a bit as he talked — as I said, he is not small — he came through in the clutch, blowing two shofars at once, impressively. Then he blew a special red, white, and blue shofar made especially for You Know Who. He referred to it as the “Trump Shofar.”

He was followed onto the stage by a woman in a Women For Trump t-shirt, who praised “Yeshua ha Mashiach” — Jesus the Messiah — and sang the Star Spangled Banner. The crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!” Metaxas took the stage adding his praise for “Yeshua ha Mashiach.”

“‘Hallelujah’ is American for ‘praise the Lord!'” said Eric. It was going to be that kind of day.

Eric told the crowd that a particular man had a vision of the Jericho March a few days ago, and that we would be meeting that man onstage soon. “When God gives you a vision, you don’t need to know anything else,” said Eric, who then asked people to use the price code ERIC when they buy a MyPillow.com product. The company’s founder, Mike Lindell, would soon be speaking too.

That line — “When God gives you a vision, you don’t need to know anything else” — turns out to be the main key to understanding all of this. Over two decades ago, when I was getting to know Eric, we had a friendly argument over something theological, as we walked around Manhattan. When I challenged something Eric said, he replied that God had told him it was the thing to do. “How do you know that?” I asked. Because he did. The argument went nowhere. I remember it so clearly because that was the first time I had ever had a conversation with someone who asserted that something was true not because God said it — all Christians must believe that, or throw out Scripture — but because God had said it to them personally. 

I had been a practicing Christian for only five or six years at that point, and I was a Catholic. I had been intrigued by Catholics claiming to have had visions, but knew very well that the Catholic Church warns its people not to accept anything like that without testing them against authoritative teachings of the Church, at least. I had never spoken to a Christian who believed without questioning it that God spoke to them. When I got home, I mentioned that to my wife, who had been Southern Baptist for most of her life.

“You didn’t grow up in the Evangelical subculture,” she said. “That is totally normal.”

It’s one thing to claim that God told you to change churches, or something like that. It’s another thing to claim, especially if you have a national microphone, that God told you that the election was stolen, and that people need to prepare themselves to fight to the last drop of blood — an actual quote — to keep the libs from taking the presidency away from Trump. Watching the Jericho March, I saw that what I encountered for the first time in conversation with my friend over two decades ago is actually pretty common. Most of the Jericho March speakers, in one way or another, asserted their certainty about the election’s theft. The fact that courts keep throwing these Trump lawsuits out only proves how deep the corruption goes.

See how that works? They are willing to tear down the country for a belief that they cannot prove, but that they will not believe is disprovable.

Next came the MyPillow king, Mike Lindell. He spoke about all the prophetic visions and dreams he had about Donald Trump. Never “I believe I had a vision” — there’s never the slightest doubt with these people. I say that as a Christian who believes God really does speak to people directly at times, that he really does send visions sometimes. But we have to be extremely careful about these claimed private revelations. Back in the 1990s, a Catholic priest I knew told me that his parish was deeply divided over claims of a member that she was having private visions. I remember him telling me how frustrated it was that so many people in his congregation had little interest in ordinary Catholic discipleship. They were suckers for spiritual fireworks, and often looked down on fellow Catholics who were skeptical, thinking them to be lacking in faith.

Anyway, Lindell told the crowd that one day, God arranged for him to meet Donald Trump at Trump Tower. Isn’t God amazing? said Lindell. Here was another theme that was constant throughout the day: that God was directing every little thing. Trump is God’s instrument. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of them that God’s purposes are not man’s purposes. The Old Testament tells us that God allowed his people, Israel, to fall into captivity as punishment for their sins. How do we know that God isn’t allowing something like that to happen now? How can we be certain that Trump is God’s favored?

We can’t. But don’t try telling these folks that.

I began to think that all of this is the right-wing Christian version of Critical Race Theory, and various doctrines held by the woke Left. For example, if you look at the evidence, and you find the claim of endemic white supremacy to be lacking, well, that just goes to show how deep the corruption within you goes. If a woman claims to be a man, then you must believe her, and to fail to do so only shows your bigotry. And so forth. I don’t need to go into detail on that here. I have spent the past few years documenting this destructive insanity, and make it one of the foci of my new book. This ideology has conquered so many institutions in this society, and few on the Left dare to stand against it. All the passion on the Left belongs to the irrational zealots of critical theory, and their minions.

I wish I could add a new chapter about how we conservatives are allowing ourselves to be conquered by the same kind of unreality. We can’t look away from it, or fall back on whataboutism.

Metaxas came onstage after Lindell spoke, and told the crowd that the president’s helicopter, Marine One, would soon be hovering above the crowd. It was a Felliniesque moment: Trump descending from on high to bless the mighty throng. “Praise God!” says Metaxas. “Thank you Jesus! God bless America! … That’s not the Messiah, that’s just the President.” Remember the opening sequence of La Dolce Vita?:

 

A man who is one of the founders of the Jericho March — I didn’t get his name — took the stage to explain how it came about. God poked him in the side one night as he slept, waking him up. “God said it’s not over,” the man told the crowd.

Then God showed him a literal vision of the Jericho Marches. Then God introduced him to a woman — standing there at his side — who had had the very same vision!

Isn’t God amazing?! By this epistemic standard, the faithful can baptize anything that occurs to them. For all I know, God really did give these people exactly these visions. The point is, everyone is expected to agree that surely, the Lord has spoken to them. O ye of little faith, how dare you doubt?

Then onto the stage came one Fr. Greg Bramlage, a Colorado priest who says he is an exorcist. He shamanically prayed down heaven to deliver America from demons. These were real deliverance prayers. He is saying, in effect, that to oppose Trump and his re-election is to be an agent of Satan. This was the first time I got really angry. As regular readers know, I believe in the power of exorcism. I believe the demonic is real. But there was this Trumpy priest deploying holy prayers of deliverance from the demonic on behalf of a politician, and did it in a way that logically locates doubters within the shadow of Mordor. It felt sacrilegious.

I wondered what Protestants in this crowd thought about the Catholic priest addressing prayers to Mary, the saints, and the angels. Following him was an opera singer belting out “Ave Maria.” Trumpy ecumenism is a fascinating religious development. This isn’t simply a revival of the old Chuck Colson/Richard John Neuhaus “Catholics & Evangelicals Together.” This is something much more intense. Later in the day, a Catholic priest blessed a framed image of Our Lady of Guadalupe that they plan to give to Melania Trump. Again, what did the Evangelicals think of that? I believe that it is good for Christians to work together on political and social causes of mutual concern. But if I believed what Evangelicals believe, I would have a lot of trouble affirming, by my presence, those kind of Catholic prayers. But maybe common love for Trump overcomes these theological divisions.

Retired Gen. Michael Flynn came onstage, saying that his MyPillow gave him the best sleep of his life. Then he recited the Our Father. Jesus, America, hucksterism: that was another theme of this rally. At times during the webcast, the screen would split, with the speaker on the left, and a My Pillow commercial on the right.

This Flynn speech was important, though. He said, “The Courts don’t decide the election, we the people decide.” But later: “The rule of law is at stake.”

Well, which is it? The rule of law in our Constitutional republic means that the courts operate in the name of We the People. Flynn declares mob rule over our constitutional institutions in the same speech in which he decried the loss of the rule of law. He obviously didn’t get the irony, nor, I’d wager, did a soul in that crowd.

He also told the people to ignore their minds and listen to their hearts, because in your heart is where you determine truth. It’s. All. About. Feeling. Don’t think, feel. This is 100 percent what Metaxas was saying this week on Charlie Kirk’s show: logic & evidence don’t matter if your heart tells you that Trump won. You watch: this movement is going to end up demanding that Gen. Flynn become the military dictator of America.

Get this: at the height of Flynn speech, Trump appeared overhead in Marine One. Like an apparition! After Trump choppered off to the Army-Navy game, Flynn resumed his address. Every time they attack Trump, he said, they’re attacking you! Total identification of the collective with the individual man, Trump. I despise facile comparisons, but this is a core fascist trope. At the 1934 Nuremberg Party rally, Nazi functionary Rudolf Hess told the faithful, “The Party is Hitler! But Hitler is Germany, as Germany is Hitler!”

 

No, I don’t think Donald Trump = Adolf Hitler. My point is simply that political rhetoric that turns a political movement into a personality cult, and unites the masses in this psychological way with the leader, are never headed to a good place. You see what Flynn also did here: trained people in the crowd to reject any criticism of Trump as a personal attack on them.

Don’t doubt that God is speaking to you about his favored leader, Donald Trump. Reject all criticism of the leader Trump as the same as attack upon yourself. Let no distance come between you and the divinely appointed leader. By his tweets we are healed.

Then the second-most surprising speaker of the day appeared on a giant screen, in a video address: Catholic Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the former Vatican ambassador to the US, and the world’s fiercest critic of Pope Francis. Vigano came to global prominence in 2018 when he accused Francis and leading members of the Curia of covering up Cardinal Ted McCarrick’s romps through the beds of seminarians. Vigano, who is believed to be living somewhere in Italy in seclusion, has become a leader of the anti-Francis conservatives within the Catholic Church, though some have distanced themselves from him as Vigano’s rhetoric has become more extreme.

This was a hugely significant development, one no doubt brokered by Steve Bannon. It is hard to overstate how much credibility Vigano has with a large number of conservative Catholics. “We are the silent army of the Children of Light,” Archbishop Vigano told the crowd. Fighting for Trump is a holy crusade. He denounced the Deep State. It is fascinating that Vigano, an Italian citizen, kept talking about “our homeland,” as if America was his. Is he internationalizing MAGA, doing a right-wing Christian version of what the BLM left did over the summer with American racial conflict, which brought people out to the streets of European capitals?

Next onstage was a woman wearing a blue scarf in honor (she says) of the second day of Hanukkah. She pounded a gavel and said, repeatedly, “No King But Jesus! No King But Jesus!” What on earth must Jews think of all this? Christian Zionist syncretism was all over this event.

After she departed, Metaxas advised the crowd to use their “prayer language” if they have one. Then came a Messianic Jewish “rabbi” exhorting the crowd “in Yeshua’s name.” This man, Curt Landry, says he recently had a Cecil B. DeMillian vision of Moses leading a flock of sheep.

“Like a banana, the sheep’s face peeled back, and inside was the Lion of the Tribe of Judah,” he said, using a messianic title for Christ.

As was Landry roaring about apocalyptic visions, the broadcast went to split screen to show a My Pillow ad. A reader of my tweetstorm about all this messaged me to say, “Credit where it’s due: flogging a MyPillow discount between prayers for God to smite your enemies is the most American thing ever.”

Then a woman who heads a pro-Trump organization in Virginia came onstage to instruct the crowd: “We have to align our spirituality to our politics.” Just as Trump won a landslide election victory, she said, we will have a “landslide against evil.”

We have heard this over and over this year from the woke Left: those who oppose them are not just wrong, but evil. And now we have it from the Right. This country cannot withstand this. Here, from a 1980s-era British documentary series about the Spanish Civil War, is a conservative Spaniard recalling how bitter the factions were in his country just before the war’s outbreak:

And then, you’ll never believe what happened at this Christian prayer rally.

Alex Jones, the Infowars king and ragemonkey conspiracy theorist, took the stage.

“Humanity is awakening! Jesus Christ is King!” he screamed. And: “This is the beginning of the Great Revival before the Antichrist comes! … Revelation is fulfilled!”

Jones — see his entire address here — denounced Mark Zuckerberg and a litany of elites as “miserable slaves of Satan.”

“World government is here! The system is publicly stealing this election from the biggest landslide and the biggest political re-alignment since 1776!” he ranted.

“GOD IS ON OUR SIDE!” he bellowed. Then: “We will never bow down to the Satanic pedophile New World Order!”

The Christians in the crowd cheered him. Alex Jones, you may recall, is being sued for defamation by families of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, which Jones for years denied on his radio show. Alex Jones is a profoundly evil man. But today, he was a hero to these Christians.

“Joe Biden is a globalist, and Joe Biden will be removed, one way or another!” One way or another. My God. Do these Christians have any idea what they’re tying themselves to? Do they care?

 

Ali Alexander of Stop The Steal took the stage and threatened to have his followers “shut this country down” if they don’t get what they want. He said he is a single-issue voter, and is dedicated to fighting forces that are trying to make his vote not count. This is why he demands that the House not certify the election results in January. The Democrats have a majority in the House, so this won’t happen. But Alexander warned GOP members of Congress who fail to rally to the cause that they will be primaried. He said his minions will be attempting to take over state and local Republican parties next year. Alexander said, “We will burn the Republican Party down, and we will make something new.”

Then came a black Evangelical pastor — I didn’t get his name — onto the stage holding a shofar in his hand. People on the Left who like to say that the MAGA people are racist are projecting. There were blacks and Latinos involved in today’s march. And though it was dominated by Evangelicals, it was by no means just an Evangelical event. Catholics were prominent, and there was even a couple of Orthodox speakers. Anyway, the black pastor proclaimed, “Jesus … will rule in America!”

Think of it! A black Protestant clergyman holding a shofar at a rally to support Donald Trump. That was NOT on my 2020 scorecard. He screamed about fighting witches and Marxism. “The Jericho walls must come down!” he repeated. Then he blew a shofar as a MyPillow ad aired on the right half of the screen.

Let me repeat this: a black Evangelical pastor denounced witches and Marxists and blew a shofar to defend Donald Trump’s presidency. If you had gone back in history a decade and told the world that this would happen one day on the National Mall, they would have put you in an asylum. Now you would be forgiven for thinking that our country has become an asylum.

Next came a white pastor, who announced “the final mission to ending this high treason.” He likened the crowd to soldiers preparing for war to restore Eden. “We are here to save Earth and its inhabitants,” he said.

Listen to me. Listen. If the twentieth century tells us anything, it’s that whenever you hear anyone standing before a crowd, winding them up about the cause of creating utopia on earth, you had better run.

Before he left the stage, the pastor gave a phone number for people to text in donations. Of course.

Then came a pastor with an outfit called the Black Robe Regiment. He compared pastor  Trump supporters to the Israelites about to cross the Red Sea. Pharaoh’s army is coming, he said, but just you wait. “God is about to do something in this country that is going to take the threats we’re dealing with and put it [sic] down.”

Real pastors, he said, lead their flock into battle. He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. The pastor denounced separation of church and state (“What is this separation of church and state?” he sneered). This was truly  extraordinary: the conflation of shedding blood, seizing the government, and serving God. This was a great gift to the Left, this speech. The entire day was. A very conservative Christian friend e-mailed me during all this to say, “My God, this is the kind of stuff that drove me away from Christianity for 25 years!”

Another speaker, a man wearing a black cowboy hat, called on Trump to “invoke the Insurrection Act” to “drop the hammer” on “traitors.” He said that Trump should know that the “militia” is with him.

“Let’s get it on now, while [Trump] is still the commander in chief,” said the speaker.

This man demanded that the US president invoke extraordinary powers to punish his political enemies, and that Christians form militias to support him. After he left the stage, Metaxas’s only comment was, “This guy is keeping it real.” Again, these people are the mirror image of the insane intersectional Left. I would no more willingly submit to their rule than I would to woke soft totalitarianism. What a rotten time.

There was more. “This is the beginning of a Christian populist uprising,” says Lance Wallnau, popular pro-Trump Christian writer. He denounced pastors who aren’t on board as cowards. No kidding, this stuff is going to shatter local churches. A Baptist pastor friend texted me earlier this week to say that a dozen people had already left his church, their minds set afire by this kind of propaganda. They went off to fight for America.

My little parish church has people in it who voted for Donald Trump, and people who voted for Joe Biden. These creeps like Lance Wallnau, and the whole lot of them on the stage today, are coming after the unity of churches like mine with this crazy talk. There’s no danger of this in my parish church, but if my pastor ever made people feel unwelcome if they weren’t on the Trump train, I would leave. Don’t you Christians see what they’re doing? A lot of us have been complaining about how Critical Race Theory is tearing up some of our churches (not mine, but those of some of my readers and friends); now woke MAGA is trying the same thing from the Right.

The Catholic bishop of Tyler, Texas, Strickland, addressed the crowd by video, by offering a prayer. Nothing in this prayer was inflammatory or partisan, but the fact that he chose to join this particular march in this way makes it clear which side he’s on. A sitting Catholic bishop, sharing the event with Alex Jones. How will he explain himself to his people? I’m sure he didn’t know Alex Jones was going to be there — Jones wasn’t announced in advance — but Jones was there ranting about pedophiles and the Deep State. What a mess.

By mid-afternoon, the crowds had thinned considerably. Eric Metaxas told the crowd that the show would wind down with a flourish. “We’re going to end by blowing some shofars and blowing your minds,” he promised. But first, he and the Jericho March organizers sang “God Bless America”:

 

The final speech was a 15-minute video address by Jonathan Cahn, a messianic Jewish pastor from New Jersey (the Times once profiled him). He’s best known for a bestselling book claiming that the Bible prophesied the Trump presidency. Cahn is a powerful speaker — the best one of the day, except for the black pastor — and, well, he wasn’t wrong about the things he said about threats to religious liberty, and what the progressive left in charge of institutions was intending to do. You could have taken the same exact litany, framed the acts in positive terms, and it would have sounded like a progressive Democratic campaign speech. I have been writing about these same things on this site for a long time. Cahn is not wrong to say that the churches should be concerned about these things, and resist them.

But like this? By putting all your faith in Donald Trump? By believing and proclaiming things that are false, or at least contestable? By demonizing all those who doubt or disagree?

This is how you fight for righteousness?

No. No, no, no. No!

“You are the light of the world,” Cahn told the crowd. That message was constant throughout the day. Thes pastors and lay leaders conferred divine innocence on the crowd. “Children of Light,” Archbishop Vigano called them. Whatever they believe, and whatever they do, must be right, because they are agents of God. They are brave. They are pure. They are light-bearers. They are saints, charged by God to fight the pedophile Deep Staters, the Marxists, the Democrats, those who doubt Trump and who stab him in the back. They will create heaven on earth. I heard it myself from the stage at the Jericho March.

The livestream ended by the hosts bringing a MAGA character called Brick Suit (because he wears a suit in a brick pattern) on to wish viewers farewell, while a My Pillow ad played:

 

Yes, it is bonkers. All of it. But you would be wrong to make fun of it and blow it off. This phenomenon is going to matter. Divinizing MAGA and Stop The Steal is going to tear churches to bits, and drive people away from the Christian faith (or keep them from coming in the first place). Based on what I saw today, the Christians in this movement do not doubt that Trump is God’s chosen, that they, by following him, are walking in light, and whatever they do to serve Trump is also serving God. They have tightly wound apocalyptic religion to conservative politics and American nationalism.

“We have to align our spirituality to our politics,” said the speaker today. Notice that she didn’t say “align our politics to our spirituality.” Politics determines spirituality. 

In my recent book Live Not By Lies, I talk about how Marxism, and Marxism-Leninism, was an apocalyptic secular millenarian cult that had a lot in common with Christian cults of the past. The revolutionary Marxist left saw the world in black-and-white terms, as a clash between Good and Evil that would eventually lead to a bloody showdown. The forces of Good (workers) would crush the forces of evil (the bourgeoisie), and create heaven on earth. We know how that turned out.

The millenarian temptation is always with us. The woke Left has surrendered to it. Instead of good and evil falling along class lines, it falls between races and genders. I spend most of the first half of the book discussing in detail how the Left has marched through the institutions, and are imposing what I call “soft totalitarianism” on the rest of us — something they justify with the same kind of anti-rational, passionate, apocalyptic moralizing. I’m more worried about them, because they have far more power. It’s clear how totalitarian the woke Left is.

But if I had to write the book again, I would have to say more about how unstable and given over to irrational radicalism the Right has become. It’s not totalitarian, because they are not trying to politicize every aspect of life, but it is destabilizing all the same. After today, I don’t doubt that a significant portion of the Right would accept an authoritarian regime, though not a totalitarian one.

America is in a very dangerous place. In this October TAC essay adapted from Live Not By Lies, I talk about Hannah Arendt’s criteria for discerning a pre-totalitarian society. In the essay, and in the book, I talk about how these criteria explain the woke Left, and why educated elites throughout politics, media, academia, and corporations, have absorbed their dogmas. But read the piece in light of what I’ve written above, especially about how alienated people are willing to believe ideology over truth, and how they are willing to smash any institutions for the sake of seeing their idea of justice triumph.

This is where the woke Left is. But this is also where a lot of the Trumpist Right — in particular, the Trumpist Christian Right — is. Remember, General Flynn, the central figure of today’s rally, recently endorsed a call for Donald Trump to declare martial law and arrest his political enemies. He was nevertheless at the center of today’s Christian event, along with the insanely malicious blowhard Alex Jones. What does this say about Christianity today? What does it say about what Christians like this think of truth? Of common decency?

A Catholic priest who read my tweetstorm about all this today e-mailed:

Reading your tweets about these Jericho marches, I couldn’t help but think about the famous Regensburg Lecture, given by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 (the one with the “controversial” quote about Muhammad).

Benedict’s crux of the lecture was that the proper understanding of God was to emphasize God’s Intellect over his Will. God, as we know, is the Logos, reason itself. A God who is Logos would NEVER ask us to do anything unreasonable, because to do so would go against His very Nature. The lecture went on to essentially say that too many people (from modernist philosophers to Islamic Fundamentalists) perceive God as more of a “will” than an “intellect”; that kind of understanding leads people to think “God told me to fly a plane into an office building; it kinda sounds loony, but God told me to do it, so I’m gonna do it. No matter how unreasonable the demand, if God asks me to do something, I should do it, because he’s God.”

Benedict then went on to say that the world needs to rediscover the God who is Logos, who is reason itself.

I unfortunately think that too many American Christian fundamentalists now emphasize God’s Will over His Intellect, and these Jericho Marches are just the beginning of a bad current of philosophy beginning to enter American Christian life. Obviously the threats from the Left are real and pressing, but we can’t descend into illogical madness as our means to fight against it. Truth is the best weapon we have, and the God of Truth, Goodness and Beauty will always guide us towards those things.

Great points. Sadly, the “American Christian fundamentalists” he mentions also include Catholic Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano and other Catholic clergy who joined today’s rally. Between the woke Left and the MAGA Right, church is getting to be a war zone. God help us.

I figure Trump doesn’t care. He’s sitting back watching it all burn. It’s entertainment. Similarly, a day or two after doing the interview with Charlie Kirk in which he called on believers to fight to the last drop of blood for Trump, Eric Metaxas released this parody music video, with lyrics by the Queens Catholic crackpot John Zmirak. It’s just a game for these characters. Just a game. With price codes for pillows.

UPDATE: Eric Metaxas has sent out this in his newsletter:

by the way, there has been a lot of misunderstanding around some things I’ve said on Twitter and on this podcast with Charlie Kirk. To be clear, I have said that if we believe it’s possible an election was fraudulent, we have come to a fork in the road. Either we as Americans INSIST that everything be properly investigated and votes counted IMMEDIATELY or we CANNOT move forward as a country and can NEVER inaugurate anyone under such a cloud. And to those who say there’s no evidence I say nonsense. I have seen enough to warrant a SERIOUS investigation.

And here is the point, right now and in this battle, America is at stake, and nothing less. This is not about Donald Trump, but about America and the sanctity of our free elections and our voices as American citizens. And yes, I am willing to die in this fight and to fight till my last drop of blood. But I am CERTAINLY not calling us to arms. I am saying I will fight and I exhort others to fight because if we let this happen now we will immediately cease to be America. There is no going back from a fraudulent election, from nefarious figures stealing the voice of the American people. People may misunderstand how I have said this, but you may rest assured I’d rather be misunderstood in my call to action and prayer than sit by and do nothing when the greatest country in the world is destroyed by those who have no respect for its institutions or for we the people who are its only government.

Bull. Watch the Charlie Kirk interview yourself. He does not say “if we believe it’s possible an election was fraudulent.” He says unequivocally that the election was stolen. He tells Kirk that he doesn’t care what can or can’t be proven in court. When Kirk asks him what he thinks of the cases, he says that he’s “thrilled” not to know anything about the details.

“And to those who say there’s no evidence I say nonsense. I have seen enough to warrant a SERIOUS investigation.”

Oh? Fifty judges or panels of judges, many of them appointed by Republican presidents (even Trump!), disagree. Why are they wrong? Maybe some people say there is “no evidence.” I don’t, because I don’t know. I have said that I believe it is possible that there might have been fraud in some places. But I have to trust judges to examine the evidence, and determine if the allegations are serious enough to alter the election results. The answer has been no. At least fifty times no. Are they all in on the conspiracy too? Judges have to make decisions on facts and logic, not on what God tells them in their hearts. I would rather live in a society governed by the rule of law — even at the risk of judicial error — than by the pious whims of religious broadcasters and retired generals.

“And yes, I am willing to die in this fight and to fight till my last drop of blood. But I am CERTAINLY not calling us to arms. I am saying I will fight and I exhort others to fight because if we let this happen now we will immediately cease to be America.”

How does that work, exactly? He’s willing to give his life, and to fight till the last drop of blood, and to “exhort others to fight” — but he’s “CERTAINLY not calling us to arms”? You don’t bleed from harsh words. You bleed from armed conflict. The cognitive dissonance here is really quite something.

A friend points out that perhaps Metaxas was speaking metaphorically about “to the last drop of my blood.” If so, then that is reckless rhetoric to use in an environment in which people are calling for martial law, arresting political opponents of Trump, and establishing pro-Trump militias. And he should not have repeated the line. It’s all a game. Big scary talk.

UPDATE.2: Bwaaaaaah!

The post What I Saw At The Jericho March appeared first on The American Conservative.

Eric Metaxas’s American Apocalypse

Before I get started here, let me say clearly that Eric Metaxas has been a friend for over 20 years. He is a dear man, very kind and sincere, and loves God with all his heart. Nothing I say here should be interpreted as a personal attack upon him. I am criticizing his words and his opinions, which, as a Christian and as a conservative, alarm me greatly. The fact that Eric is not a cynic, that I have every confidence that he 100 percent believes what he says, only intensifies the tragedy. I would prefer not to write about Eric’s views, out of respect for our friendship. But I cannot stand to see what is happening to what is broadly my tribe, without saying something. He is influential, and he speaks not only to a lot of people, but for them as well.

To start, and for readers who haven’t been following me: I am an Orthodox Christian and a political conservative (registered as an Independent). I did not vote for Joe Biden, and have never associated myself with Never Trump. I have praised Trump when he has done things of which I have approved, and I have criticized him when I thought he deserved it. I don’t “hate” Donald Trump, nor do I hate people who voted for him. I dread the Biden presidency, but I believe the man won the race. I think it’s possible that there was election fraud in some places in this big country of ours, but based on Trump’s performance in court since election day, I don’t believe that it is provable, if it existed at all.

Eric is going to be the emcee at the Jericho March in DC this weekend. It’s a big Christian to-do intending to rally the faithful behind Donald Trump’s claim that the election was stolen. Headlining it will be retired Gen. Michael Flynn, who recently endorsed a call for the President of the United States to impose martial law and arrest his opponents. Somebody like that should be anathema to conservatives. But these are not normal times. These are times that reward ideological extremism all around.

Because I’m trying to understand what these Christians are thinking, I watched this week’s interview that the influential conservative activist Charlie Kirk did with Eric. You can see the whole thing here:

I took notes. All these quotes can be verified in the clip. I wish I had written down the time stamps for all of them. Nearly all the stuff I quote below is said in the first 21 minutes, FYI.

In characterizing the election result, it is hard to be more lurid than Eric in this interview. He believes that Donald Trump won the election “by a landslide” (in fact, Biden won 7 million more votes than Trump, and even if Trump had won the Electoral College vote, it would have been close, not anything like a landslide).

“It’s like stealing the heart and soul of America. It’s like holding a rusty knife to the throat of Lady Liberty,” Eric says, of the election.”

“You might as well spit on the grave of George Washington,” he says.

“This is evil,” he says. And: “It’s like somebody has been raped or murdered. … This is like that times a thousand.”

This. Is. Hysterical. But there’s more.

“This is trying to kill the American people. This is everything.” And he says to believe otherwise is listening to “the voice of the Devil.”

Think about that. An Evangelical broadcaster is saying that Donald Trump’s election loss is a thousand times worse than rape and murder, equivalent to the murder of a nation. And if you don’t believe it? You are demonized.

And then this:

“Everybody who is not hopped up about this … you are the Germans that looked the other way when Hitler was preparing to do what he was preparing to do. Unfortunately, I don’t see how you can see it any other way.”

I was ticked off the other day when he boosted Zmirak’s obnoxious accusation that I (he cites my previous book by name) and other conservatives who don’t endorse Stop The Steal are “servile” equivalent of Nazi collaborators. I tweeted about it, at Eric, asking him if he agreed. He responded thus:

Well, now Eric has said in his own words that anyone — even fellow Christian conservatives like, well, me — are “good Germans” if we don’t share his opinion and his vehemence. How the hell are we supposed to think when we have been likened to the kind of people who went along with a mass murderer who prepared the Holocaust and World War II?

Do you believe that, reader? Do you believe that people who may even have voted for Trump, but who do not think that the election was stolen from him, are no better than Nazi collaborators?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, Trump is one for 50 in federal courts. Judges have found no evidence for the claims put forward of election fraud. Maybe there has been fraud, but in our system, you have to be able to prove it. Who knows, maybe it really happened somewhere, but no one can demonstrate it at this time. It is metaphysically possible. But we can’t operate on what might have happened somewhere, and what might one day be brought to light. (In their conversation, Kirk and Metaxas say that maybe if we pray hard enough, God will uncover fraud somewhere.) Courts, and our system, have to operate on the best evidence available. It’s just not there. Trump-appointed judges have been among those who have found this. Are they all in on the conspiracy too?

Well, here’s news: Eric Metaxas doesn’t care what the courts have said. In a clip that starts right here, he says,

“So who cares what I can prove in the courts? This is right. This happened, and I am going to do anything I can to uncover this horror, this evil.”

Evidence, or the lack of it, does not matter. He is declaring as a matter of faith that Donald Trump won the election. How can you argue with that? You can’t. It is a statement of faith.

So, when he talks about doing “anything” he can to fight this thing that is a thousand times worse than rape and murder, what does he mean? Quote:

“We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.”

There is no way around it, and it grieves me to say it: Eric Metaxas is calling for violent bloodshed to defend Donald Trump’s presidency, and he doesn’t care that Trump’s lawyers have not been able to prove in court that Trump had the election stolen from him. He told Charlie Kirk that he is willing to kill or be killed for a political cause for which there is not enough evidence to advance a court case, even among friendly judges.

This is fanaticism. But according to Eric, to disagree with him is to be under the sway of the Devil. Actual quotes:

“This is sacred. … Every American should say I really don’t care what it takes, we will not let this happen in America.”

“The fact that Republicans would shrug, it’s just despicable, it’s very clarifying, and I just believe God is in this, what can I say?”

“I still feel that those of us who know this is massive fraud, we have no choice but to fight.”

He knows because … he just knows, is all. God is in it, after all. It’s holy war. He says too:

“Everything’s at stake. America’s at stake.”

“If we don’t get our people in … we go over the cliff, and we don’t come back.”

If you really believed that, then of course you would be willing to kill and be killed for the cause. My God.

Eric says that America is God’s instrument, one that he has used to spread “liberty” around the globe. The Christians of Iraq could not be reached for comment, most of them dead or displaced as the result of America’s unjustified invasion of that country, but what are facts to a Christian nationalist who just knows things. He says “I believe it is God’s will that we would continue to do that, at an increased level, for a long time… .”  Manifest destiny, I guess.

At this point in the interview, Kirk asks Metaxas — who has, recall, just called for fighting to the death to defend Trump’s sacred case — where he thinks Trump’s legal strategy stands. Know what Eric says?

“I am thrilled to be too ignorant of the details to answer that question in any substantive way.” 

I’m not kidding. Click on that link to see and hear it for yourself. He says that the courts are irrelevant, that America is in the crucible, that we have a fight to the death on our hands, and that anybody who disagrees is no better than Germans who stood by and let Hitler come to power … but he cannot give even one detail of the actual court cases, and is “thrilled” to be ignorant of the cause for which he is urging people to shed blood and die! 

And more: after all this rhetoric exerting people to regard this conflict as a holy war for the existence of America, and to be prepared to fight to the “last drop of blood” to prevail, he responds to Kirk’s remarks about a future of conflict like this (click here to hear it yourself):

“I know that the lunatics who believe in violence and stuff, they’re going to do that. But I don’t know that it has to happen. … Prayer can also calm down the violence.”

The violence he has just spent the entire freaking interview encouraging from the Right! Do words not mean anything?!

There’s even more. Eric tells Kirk that, “People I know and trust well have heard from God that Trump will have a second term.” Says this doesn’t prove it, but “if these people heard from God, then it has to happen.” Says these people “have a track record.”

So he cannot give a single substantive reason why Trump should prevail, or how he might do that. People he trusts say that God told them so. Eric: “I know that sounds insane to people, but I’m at a point where I don’t care.”

Towards the end, Eric says that “part of the reason God has allowed this” — the election crisis — “is to wake up the church.” For politics? Not to inspire us Christians to repent of anything other than failing to be more politically engaged on behalf of Donald Trump? He goes on:

“The holy remnant of the church is, has never prayed like this and fasted. People like me and others we’re fasting. When’s the last time we fasted and said God, you have to do this, there’s too much evil, we cannot just shrug it off, you need to speak, Lord, you need to do something. People have been fasting and praying so much that I know something is going to happen. Whatever happens, something will happen.”

Because we can earn God’s favor by our deeds? Really?

Maybe God is doing something — just not what Trumpy Evangelicals want Him to do. He is surely exposing intellectual and theological rot: the kind that inspires Christian leaders to declare apocalypse, exhort believers to shed blood and prepare for martyrdom, and to denounce anyone who disagrees as devil-driven collaborators with history’s greatest evil — all for a cause that the leader cannot even begin to explain.

I was talking to my wife about this, and she got pretty upset (and has given me permission to share this story). She was a senior in high school — First Baptist Academy in Dallas — when Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush. She said that the adults in their circles had been encouraging students throughout the campaign to believe that if Bill Clinton was elected, it would be indescribably awful, but not to worry, because God would surely not let that happen. And yet, it happened. She said it’s hard to express the titanic sense of shock that she and other students had that day. This was not supposed to happen! God had failed!

My wife said that when Christian leaders talk like Eric is talking, they set people up to question their entire faith. If Joe Biden is sworn in, does that mean God has failed, or abandoned us? Or, if Christian authorities were wrong about Trump getting a second term, what else are they wrong about? Are they wrong about who Jesus is?

Words mean things!

I say all this as the author of a recent book, Live Not By Lies, that argues a soft form of totalitarianism is descending on American life. It is a bold, some would say alarmist, claim. But it is a claim that I spend four chapters explaining and defending. I could be wrong about it. Maybe my facts are wrong, or my logic is faulty. It is testable; I lay it all out. I would be very, very happy to be proven wrong. I can tell you exactly why I believe that I’m correct, and I make a case for it. I don’t just assert it because God told me so. If I did, you would be justified in rolling your eyes and moving on.

It’s fair to ask: if I really do believe that a form of totalitarianism is emerging in American life, why am I not willing to fight to the death to defend the country from it?

The answer has to do with the answer a pro-lifer would give when asked why, if he really believes that abortion is a form of homicide, he is not blowing up abortion clinics and stopping at nothing to kill abortion doctors?

Before one takes violent action, one has to be reasonably confident of success. Otherwise it could mean shedding blood in vain. It might — might — be justifiable if that violence could stop unambiguously evil acts. But what if the violence not only stood very little chance of succeeding, but also risked causing things to be worse? Regarding soft totalitarianism, as I explain in the book, we are not looking at something that is Stalinism 2.0; rather, this is going to be more like Huxley’s Brave New World combined with Communist China. Is it worth mass killing to prevent a system that requires people to affirm their loyalty to an ideological creed (broadly speaking, wokeness) in order to get into college, to hold many jobs, and to participate fully in the economy? At this point, I would say no — but that does not mean that we will not be facing a form of totalitarianism, a word that refers to any system in which politics conquers every aspect of life.

Second, violence is only justified when all legal, peaceful forms of resistance have been exhausted. That is not remotely the case in the US, with regard either to abortion or soft totalitarianism. The patient activism and witness of the pro-life movement has not overturned Roe yet, but we are much closer than at any point since 1973. And if it is overturned, that only means the issue goes back to each state. It only moves the line of battle. Victory will never be total, because in a democracy, you have to move hearts and minds. The fact that the abortion rate is declining speaks to the success pro-lifers have had in doing just that, despite the fact that abortion remains legal.

Similarly, political conservatives have barely begun to fight against soft totalitarianism. They might not ever do it. Half the Senate is Republican, but do you see Republicans fighting against the radical racialism that is conquering institutions, or the extreme gender ideology that is doing the same? No, they hardly ever do. Do you see them in any number give speeches about the importance of defending religious liberty? Nope. Trump did some good things on these fronts as president, but did he make any of it a priority? No, he did not.

Why not? One major reason is that wealthy elites, as well as middle-class suburban professionals, have embraced wokeness. In his Kirk interview, Metaxas talks as if this is all something imposed on the masses by a tiny number of liberal elites — something that was the standard Evangelical view of the 1980s and 1990s. Well, guess what? Managerial elites and the professional classes have already accepted wokeness. This is their ideology now. It is absurd in 2020 to think that the problem can be solved by electing more Republicans. If that were true, why didn’t having Trump in the White House and the Republicans in charge of Congress for the first two years of the president’s term turn the tide? Aside from the fact that these issues really don’t matter to Republicans — not even to Donald Trump — the cause of this crisis is not primarily political, but cultural.

Far too many conservatives live in a bubble, and fail to see that Big Business is as much if not more of an enemy than Big Government. Conservatives grouse about how wokeness has overtaken university culture, but is this something that can be solved by politics alone? To their credit, Trump’s administration has done good things on that front (e.g., dialing back the Title IX overreach from the Obama years). But even if Trump were much more popular than he ever was, and even if he were a brilliant political tactician (which he isn’t), he would not have been able to make a decisive difference.

It has to do with the nature of the totalitarianism. Multiple people with whom I spoke in the former Soviet bloc, interviewing them for Live Not By Lies, told me that Communism was easier to deal with in one key aspect: it was easy to see the lines between good and evil then. Now, it’s easy for them to sense that something very bad is happening, something that has similarities to what they lived with in their youth, but it’s far less cut and dried than Marxism-Leninism. I talk about all this in the book — how unlike Communism, this is a therapeutic form of totalitarianism, one that is intimately bound up with consumerism.

The soft-totalitarian cultural revolution is not coming to America with the Red Army. You can’t fight it like the Hungarians fought the Soviets in 1956, or the Czechs fought them in 1968. But coming it is, and fight it we must.

Christian nationalists who hold a naive, Reagan-era understanding of the world are part of the problem. In his interview, Metaxas talked about how a Trump-led America is good for the whole world, because it makes us all “freer”. If you talk to the people of the former Soviet bloc, they don’t see America like that (though they used to). Now they regard America — especially our Woke Capitalism — as the source of some of their problems. Gender ideology — it comes from America. In Poland, I talked to Christians who were having to decide between their consciences and their jobs, because the Polish branch of American multinationals for which they worked were forcing them all to celebrate LGBT Pride in the workplace. This is what America means now to a lot of those people who used to regard us as a friend. Nationalist Evangelicals like Metaxas are living in a world that is forty years out of date. The unquestioned radical individualism of contemporary American life is not a simple virtue, but has become our undoing — and many people overseas recognize this.

I regard myself as a nationalist too (as opposed to globalist), but I do not consider America to be an unambiguous force for good in the world. One of the things I liked about Donald Trump was his stated belief that America should stop it with these unnecessary foreign wars. When I hear Evangelicals like Metaxas trotting out that shopworn rhetoric about America being a force for spreading “freedom” around the globe, and how we have to ramp that up again, I hear the voice of George W. Bush in his Second Inaugural Address, and I wonder if they even paid the slightest attention to what Trump has been saying.

Back to the point: if we were going to take radical action against this coming soft totalitarianism, what would we have to do? Blow up people’s Alexas, and seize people’s smartphones and throw them in the lake. That’s because the new totalitarianism is intimately woven into the technology that we have all accepted. How far do you think a presidential candidate would get in this country by promising to ban Alexas and the technology that powers them (also, Siri)? I would vote for him, but I think I would be a tiny minority. The point is that we have become the kind of people who welcome this stuff, not because we aspire to live under totalitarian domination, but because it makes life easier and more fun. The Christians of Russia and the Soviet bloc who stood up to hard totalitarianism all told me, for Live Not By Lies, that the only way Christians in the West are going to be able to mount a resistance to what’s coming is if we are prepared to suffer.

See this man below? His name is Yuri Sipko, and for years he was the leader of Russia’s Baptists. This photo was taken in 2019 on the streets of Moscow:

I had just spent two hours interviewing him in a coffee shop. Here, from my book, is part of what he told me:

“Many of us didn’t even have Bibles. Just to be able to find yourself in a situation where there was a group, and one person was reading the Bible to others, this was the greatest motivation,” Sipko says. “This was our little niche of freedom. Whether you were at work in the factory on the street or anywhere else, everything was godless.”

Today, it is easy to obtain a Bible in Russia, easy to meet for worship services, and easy to find religious teaching on the internet. Yet something among contemporary Christians has been lost, the old pastor says— something that was held dear by those small groups.

Sipko goes on:

Christianity has become a secondary foundation in people’s lives, not the main foundation. Now it’s all about career, material success, and one’s standing in society. In these small groups, when people were meeting back then, the center was Christ, and his word that was being read, and being interpreted as applicable to your own life. What am I supposed to do as a Christian? What am I doing as a Christian? I, together with my brothers, was checking my own Christianity.

Small groups not only provided accountability, he says, but also gave believers a tangible connection to the larger Body of Christ. “This was so wonderful. This was true Christianity”

It was startling to hear Sipko say that in Russia today, there are Evangelicals who have returned to the patterns of life their ancestors lived under communism—even though there is far more freedom (of religion, and everything else) since the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991. “They have a very clear understanding that their faith in Christ means they are going to have to reject this secular world,” he says. “Even under free conditions today, we are having to live in the underground.”

Here is a man who lived through Stalinism, and suffered greatly — and he’s saying that in a Russia that is much more free, and much wealthier, the young Evangelicals who want to be faithful are having to turn their backs on career, material success, and status. He went on:

“Without being willing to suffer, even die for Christ, it’s just hypocrisy. It’s just a search for comfort,” says Yuri Sipko, the Russian Baptist pastor. “When I meet with brothers in faith, especially young people, I ask them: name three values as Christians that you are ready to die for. This is where you see the border between those who are serious about their faith and those who aren’t.”

Sipko is a Russian, but if he were an American, it is impossible that he would list “the second term of Donald J. Trump” as one of those values. I suppose Metaxas would denounce him as no better than a “good German.”

I suppose that line offends Eric, in a “how dare you” way, but what else is one supposed to conclude by his extremely rash rhetoric slandering everyone who does not share a belief that he is too ignorant — proudly ignorant! — to be able to defend with facts or logic when asked? How many American Christians who have endorsed the “Stop The Steal” campaign, and who find their blood heated by this kind of talk, would be willing to do what the young Russian Baptists are doing, and live like their ancestors did, for the sake of preserving the faith? These are prepared to shoot their neighbors for the sake of Donald Trump, but in real life, they wouldn’t even shoot their television.

All this really upsets me, as you can tell. If, God forbid, we were to have a civil war in America, then it should only be a last resort, after every other bloodless option has been tried, and should be something undertaken only for the gravest reasons. This is not a game. There are real and demonstrable reasons to be concerned, even afraid, about where post-Christian American society is headed — believe me, I’m the last one you have to convince of that! — but the idea that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump is not one of them. It is shameful that a Christian with a wide broadcast audience would stoke the apocalyptic fears of people, and urge them to “fight to the death, to the last drop of blood” — then act like violence is only something that can come from “lunatics” of the Left.

We have seen this year how violent the Left is prepared to be, but mark my words: if radical Christians shoot people or commit some other violent act in defense of Trump, Eric Metaxas and those who talk like him will have blood on their hands.

Finally, in my book, I talk about how Hannah Arendt said that one of the signs of a pre-totalitarian society is one in which people stop believing in the truth, and instead easily accept any claim, however unsubstantiated and preposterous, that satisfies them emotionally. I gave examples of how the woke Left does exactly that. I finished the final manuscript in March. But if I were writing it today, I would mention the way so many of my fellow conservatives have shown themselves lately to be no better than the Left.

In the past on this blog, I have called out Prof. Tommy Curry, a leftist race radical who used to teach at Texas A&M, but whose hysterical broadcast and print rhetoric came very, very close to justifying violence against whites to achieve social justice. When I criticized him in this post and in others, some leftists, including a journalist at the Chronicle of Higher Education, faulted me for having the gall to hold Curry responsible for his words. Well, the same standard has to apply to conservatives. Many on the activist Left are destroying this country, its institutions, and the possibility of communal peace, with their crackpot ideology, deranged lies and slanders. But God help us, so are some on the Right, including the Christian Right.

I’ll leave you with this, from an e-mail that just came in as I was finishing this post. The author identifies himself as an Evangelical “at the tail end of Gen X.” He wrote me about an earlier post about why young people are leaving the faith. He writes:

I know individual parents who are grieving over their kids abandoning the faith, but there is not the widespread, church-wide lamenting and sorrow you would expect. In fact, people are much more distraught about Trump losing, than the fact that kids leave the faith at a rate of 80% (or whatever the number is) as soon as they graduate high school.  Sure there are some articles about it and the stats get thrown around some, but on a day to day basis, there is little actual discussion about what I see the is the complete collapse of faith in people (who grew up in the faith) that are now 40 and younger.

The number is not that high, but it’s still a four-alarm crisis. If you have been to Europe, which is a religious desert, you have seen the future of America. Where is the concern about that from the churches? We are literally talking about the future not of Donald Trump’s political career or of the United States of America, but of the eternal lives of our children and descendants. Who among Christian conservatives is saying that we should be prepared to struggle to the death to keep our children and grandchildren faithful to Jesus Christ? Politicians come and go, but in the life of the church, it really is true that if we don’t get our young people in the doors, we go over a cliff, and we aren’t coming back.

From a Christian point of view, this really is an existential crisis. It’s more important than election fraud. It’s more important than social justice. It’s more important than anything else. This Christian indifference is trying to kill the church. It’s everything. But far too few Christians act like it. It’s more fun to work ourselves into frenzies about the princes of the earth, and in so doing, accelerate the collapse of the church itself.

History will judge us for this. And so will Almighty God.

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Race, Wokeness, And Ketman

Several items having to do with our hysteria over race, and the ideologically-driven dishonesty that has captured our culture, have crossed my path this week.

First, in France right now, there’s a massive controversy over something a Romanian soccer referee said in a match between Paris St-Germain and Istanbul’s team (thanks to reader Brian V. for tipping me off). Deutsche Welle tells what happened:

The Champions League fixture between Paris Saint Germain and Istanbul Basaksehir was abandoned Tuesday after players left the pitch over alleged racist slurs by a match official.

“Our assistant coach, Pierre Webo has been sent off with a ‘racist’ word by the 4th official ref. of the match. Match has stopped for a while,” the Turkish club said on its official Twitter feed.

Basaksehir players left the match some 20 minutes into the game, after a long and heated discussion with match officials. The PSG team followed.

The score was 0-0 after 14 minutes when the game was stopped. Basaksehir assistant coach Pierre Webo accused the fourth official, Sebastian Coltescu of Romania, of using a racial term to describe him. It sparked a commotion in the technical area that led to Webo being sent off by the referee.

Coltescu was audible in the empty Parc des Princes stadium as the match was being played behind closed doors because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking in Romanian, the official was heard saying: “The black one over there. Go and check who he is. The black one over there, it’s not possible to act like that.”

Television microphones also picked up a furious Webo repeatedly asking the official why the racist term was used to describe him.

Basaksehir substitute Demba Ba came off the bench and demanded an explanation from Coltescu.

“When you mention a white guy, you never say ‘this white guy’, you just say ‘this guy,’ so why when you mention a black guy do you say, ‘this black guy?'” Demba Ba asked the fourth official.

PSG players Neymar and Kylian Mbappe also demanded an explanation and Basaksehir coach Okan Buruk told Coltescu: “You are racist.”

You can imagine how well it went after that. Here is a detailed breakdown of the incident by a Twitter commenter. The Romanian ref explained that he used the word “negru,” which is the Romanian word for “black.” But that wasn’t enough either, because the simple fact of identifying a coach by his race — this, as an indication of which person the ref was talking about — is racist, according to these people.

So: according to the Woke, if you don’t see color, you are a racist. But if you see color, you are also a racist. You cannot win. If they want to destroy you with accusations of racism, they will. What you have actually done, and what you actually thought, doesn’t matter. All that matters is what those with the power to destroy you on the basis of accusation alone say you have done.

Do you understand now why the people who grew up under Soviet communism are so alarmed now? Do you understand why I wrote Live Not By Lies? It’s totalitarian garbage like this. What they are doing, the Woke, is compelling people vulnerable to having their careers destroyed by bogus accusations of racism to avoid any contact with people of color, out of naked fear for their livelihoods. All it takes is an accusation. Just an accusation.

At the University of Pittsburgh, a reader writes, all students are required to take a course on “Anti-Black Racism: History, Ideology, and Resistance.” Here is the syllabus, including online lectures. 

An explainer, from the website:

This is obviously nothing but woke ideological indoctrination. One thing that jumped out at me came in the final lecture, on “how to be antiracist.” The instructor, from the university’s diversity office, talks in part about the scourge of “microaggressions” (like, I guess, being Romanian and using your language’s word for “black” to talk about a black man), and then gets on to discussing crime. Just short of the 13 minute mark, the instructor repeats a familiar ideological claim from Critical Race Theory:

 

Crime is prevalent in some communities, she admits:

 

 

Really? So, in Minneapolis of late, there has been a “staggering” surge in carjackings.” This is because Minneapolis is overpoliced? Really? From the Star-Tribune story:

The spree comes amid a nearly unprecedented spike in violent crime, particularly shootings, since the May 25 killing of George Floyd in police custody and the civil unrest that followed.

In November, the toll of people shot this year surpassed 500 in Minneapolis, the most in 15 years. Seventy-nine homicides is the highest count since the mid-1990s, an era when the city earned the grim moniker “Murderapolis.”

The nice lady from Pitt’s diversity office, her salary paid by the taxpayers of Pennsylvania, would have you know that this is happening because there are too many police in Minneapolis picking on black people. Who you gonna believe, the Pitt diversity officer, or your lying eyes? Some things are so insane that only intellectuals can believe them.

What a mess we are in. Our universities, and all institutions consumed by wokeness, are systematically training people to live by lies, to deny the evidence of their eyes, to dismiss facts as bigotry. And taxpayers are funding the destruction of their own societies! Pitt, by the way, because of Covid, has instituted a university-wide salary freeze, a 78 percent cut in capital spending, and other emergency budget measures. You can be sure, though, that the diversity office will be the last thing left standing. It is vital to our leadership elites that the next generation be educated in lies.

Meanwhile, I refer to you to a recent clip from Prof. Glenn Loury of Brown University, a total badass who refuses to live by lies:

John McWhorter and I at The Glenn Show getting down to cases re. reporting on urban violence: pic.twitter.com/1z1CQrn9hZ

— Glenn Loury (@GlennLoury) December 10, 2020

Look, I completely understand people like my liberal friend Damon Linker being up in arms about conservatives who are eager to believe things that are untrue.  But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the left-liberal establishment — directors within institutions — are undertaking a mass project in educating students to see the world through ideological lenses, including instructing them to believe lies, e.g., that the overrepresentation of black men in violent crime statistics is because black communities are policed too much. These are lies that, among other things, will cost people their lives. It’s happening in Minneapolis. These kinds of lies will also cost people their livelihoods. You think that unfortunate Romanian referee will ever work in that field again?

A side effect of these woke lies is that students who are savvy enough to see through the bullshit will acquire an important skill: ketman. From Live Not By Lies:

It is difficult for people raised in the free world to grasp the breadth and the depth of lying required simply to exist under communism. All the lies, and lies about lies, that formed the communist order were built on the basis of this foundational lie: the communist state is the sole source of truth. Orwell expressed this truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Under the dictatorship of Big Brother, the Party understands that by changing language—Newspeak is the Party’s word for the jargon it imposes on society—it controls the categories in which people think. “Freedom” is slavery, “truth” is falsehood, and so forth. Doublethink—“holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”—is how people learn to submit their minds to the Party’s ideology. If the Party says 2 + 2 = 5, then 2 + 2 = 5. The goal is to convince the person that all truth exists within the mind, and the rightly ordered mind believes whatever the Party says is true.

Orwell writes:

It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

In our time, we do not have an all-powerful state forcing this on us. Under soft totalitarianism, the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in doublethink every day. Men have periods. The woman standing in front of you is to be called “he.” Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result.

To update an Orwell line to our own situation: “The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Many Christians will see through these lies today but will choose not to speak up. Their silence will not save them and will instead corrode them, according to Miłosz.

In his writing about communism’s insidiousness, Miłosz referenced a 1932 novel, Insatiability. In it, Polish writer Stanisław Witkiewicz wrote of a near-future dystopia in which the people were culturally exhausted and had fallen into decadence. A Mongol army from the East threatened to overrun them.

As part of the plan to take over the nation, people began turning up in the streets selling “the pill of Murti-Bing,” named after a Mongolian philosopher who found a way to embody his “don’t worry, be happy” philosophy in a tablet. Those who took the Pill of Murti-Bing quit worrying about life, even though things were falling apart around them. When the Eastern army arrived, it surrendered happily, its soldiers relieved to have found deliverance from their internal tension and struggles.

Only the peace didn’t last. “But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities,” writes Miłosz, “they became schizophrenics.”

What do you do when the Pill of Murti-Bing stops working and you find yourself living under a dictatorship of official lies in which anyone who contradicts the party line goes to jail?

You become an actor, says Miłosz. You learn the practice of ketman. This is the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting. Ketman was the strategy everyone who wasn’t a true believer in communism had to adopt to stay out of trouble. It is a form of mental self-defense.

What is the difference between ketman and plain old hypocrisy? As Miłosz explains, having to be “on” all the time inevitably changes a person. An actor who inhabits his role around the clock eventually becomes the character he plays. Ketman is worse than hypocrisy, because living by it all the time corrupts your character and ultimately everything in society.

Students ought to know that this required course is not about truth, but about educating for conformity to the ruling ideology within American institutions. Honestly, if I were a student at Pitt, I would not risk my degree to stand up to this. I would go along to get along, give the Controllers what they want, and keep my powder dry for a more meaningful act of resistance. But what about the next time it happens? How do I know that I won’t rationalize away my act of ketman? How do I know that I won’t eventually become the role I play, living out lies permanently, for the sake of protecting my job and my status? Maybe I will even come to believe the lies.

 

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