Rod Dreher's Blog, page 95

Why Did These Millennials Leave Church?

Here is a lengthy comment by a reader named Tony, from the “Donald Trump Is Not The Messiah” thread. It was so long and interesting I wanted to give it its own page. Tony begins by quoting something from reader Jonah R. (in italics):

“The biggest Trump supporters I know, including my own extended family, are nominal patriarchs of families where middle-ages kids are shacked unmarried with their latest boyfriend or girlfriend. Their grandchildren, glued to social media on their smartphones, know nothing about Christianity and have rarely if ever set foot in a church. MAGA Grandpas rarely attend church themselves. Despite having a solid work ethic and many other admirable qualities, they’ve failed to preserve and pass along their faith and their culture within their own families, and they want to blame “the left” for what their kids and grandkids have become.”

This struck a nerve with me, particularly the part about ‘the left’ being blamed for what ‘their kids and grandkids have become.’ I’m of the age to be considered one of ‘the kids’ in question here, even though my own family, while Southern and somewhat conservative, are not diehard Trump people. (The ones who are endorse Trump for reasons that are less cultural than political. I don’t agree, and they know that, but we’re all able to still drink beer and love each other during the holidays, and for that I’m grateful.)

I’m an elder Millennial. I come from a conservative Catholic community in south Louisiana. I went to Catholic schools from kindergarten all the way to 12th grade. I got involved in campus ministry at my high school, and even stuck with it well into college. I knew the history of the Church, I knew all about the pre and post-Vatican II controversies, I knew all about the faults and shortcomings of modern American culture, and I even thought about being a priest for a little while. Maybe even more strangely for someone at those ages, I loved to pray. I spent a lot of time alone, trying to know God. I spent a lot of time with others, trying to know God. I made a lot of friends throughout that time, friends who are still in my life, and who I hope are in my life forever.

I ended up leaving Christianity. (I’ve been trying to piece something of a faith back together for the past couple of years, but that’s another story.) I know of at least one other person in my group who did, too, and I know of more who dropped out of being ‘involved’ in their faith at all, whether or not ‘faith’ remained something vital in their lives. And in the past few years I’ve met not a few people in my age group who also grew up in very religious communities (families went to church often, kids were involved in Bible studies/retreats, etc.) who now, in their 30’s, want absolutely nothing to do with religion in any form, much less Christianity.

We’ve shared our stories with each other. There are themes. And I think they speak to what this commenter said about the faith not being ‘passed on’ to people in my generation and in subsequent generations, because what was ‘passed on’ to us was not, from my current vantage point, ‘faith’ at all. Often it was things that were much, much worse.

Some of this might be a little graphic, so I’ll warn you ahead of time right now.

First, the Bible studies. Everyone I know who grew up in religious communities at the same time I did, be they Catholic or Protestant/Evangelical, east coast or west coast, south Louisiana or South Carolina, has a Bible study story. Often several. And it’s always the same story.

Bible studies, frankly, weren’t Bible studies. They were Masturbators Anonymous meetings. Even if you attended a meeting with the intent of learning about the Word, or understanding your religion in a deeper way, or even just hearing how other people related to Christ in their own lives, nine times out of ten you weren’t going to get that. It would start there, and then the leader, often a parent or someone your parents’ age, would inevitably guide the meeting to a discussion about masturbating.

The merits of traditional Christian sexual morality are beside the point here. Imagine, instead, that you are a teenager, likely even below the age of 18, and your youth minister is pushing you to tell a group of your peers, in a ‘Bible study,’ how many times a week you’re masturbating, and what you plan to do to let Jesus help you overcome this struggle. Worse still, imagine that you are that same teenager in a ‘Bible study,’ and your youth minister (who, again, is much older than you) is confessing to you about how often they masturbate and/or watch porn, and about how it’s threatening their marriage, and all the while they’re wailing and gnashing their teeth in front of you begging God to help them overcome this struggle. (Again, this is not an adult sharing this with another group of adults. This is an adult sharing this with children. Furthermore, nothing–not the sacraments, not the relationship with Christ, not the growth in discipleship or how to pray–will ever, ever get as much air time as this particular topic will, at the behest of the adult leader. Who, as a kid, you are trusting implicitly.)

Yeah. It’s weird. And in my experience and in the experience of people I came up with, that kind of thing was normative. What was the hot topic at Bible studies? Masturbating. Men’s meetings? Masturbating. Women’s meetings? Masturbating. Retreats? Masturbating. And it was never the kids who wanted to talk about it. It was the adults.

This kind of thing sets up a weird dynamic for a young person. And it does something to you, even if you don’t know it’s happening, even if you’re bought in 100%. Or even if you’re not bought in 100%, and all this masturbation talk weirds you out a little, but you can push that aside because you’re really here to try to bring Jesus to other people inasmuch as you understand what that sort of thing actually means when you’re a young person. (That was me near the end.)

Second, emotional manipulation of young people was rampant in these sorts of settings and communities. Say, for example, you’re a chronically depressed 16 year-old. You’ve thought about suicide several times, and one time you even came close to attempting it. But you don’t know who to turn to with this information, you don’t think anyone will understand, and you don’t even know what to do, but dammit, you need to tell someone. Who’s the one person in your life who, at least in your mind, represents unconditional love and acceptance? Who really ‘gets’ you, but could also probably help you? More significantly, who’s the person in your life and in this community who has actually gone out of their way to present themselves as this unconditionally loving, competent, empathetic person?

Your youth minister, of course.

So you tell your youth minister. And he listens. And he tells you that he can help you, but not only that, Jesus can help you, and not only that, you can help others by ‘being brave’ and sharing this with others in the open. At a retreat. And you can tell your peers about how Jesus saved you from this dark time in your life. Wouldn’t that be great? Imagine what you sharing this with your peers would do in terms of bringing them to Jesus. (Again: this is not an adult and an adult. This is an adult and a child, a child who is looking to this adult for real help with a really distressing, dangerous situation in their lives.)

Yeah. It’s weird. And dark. (It’s also the sort of thing that cults do to obtain new membership and solidify current membership. You can look that up if you don’t believe me.) I happen to know someone who witnessed that exact thing. I have a similar story, though mine is not nearly as egregious as that example, and I have heard other stories that were every bit as bad as that one. Again, this sort of thing does something to you when you’re that age, whether you’re aware of it or not.

The third thing that comes up often is fear. The people in my life, myself included, who came up in these sorts of environments or were involved in these sorts of environments will often say that the main dynamic in them was fear. The stories here are varied: your parents wouldn’t let you watch Disney movies when you were growing up because they were secretly Satanic. (Ditto any kind of music that wasn’t explicitly ‘Christian,’ of course.) You had to be homeschooled (poorly, in this example–I’m not at all against homeschooling per se) because public schools were ‘a den of demons’ (I know someone whose father actually still believe this. Nevermind that Christians are capable of existing in public schools, too.) Sexual contact of any kind before marriage is sinful in a way that other sins are not sinful, so you better guard your ‘purity’ in a way that you don’t guard anything else. (‘Purity culture’ in particular was very influential when I was growing up, and I know people for whom this obsessive focus on sexual sin resulted in an anxiety around having sex even with their spouses once they were married. I shouldn’t have to explain why I don’t believe that scaring the living daylights out of people when it comes to sex to such a degree that they are dysfunctional when they are trying to have healthy sexual relationships with their spouses has anything to do with the mission of Jesus in this world, though obviously others disagreed.)

I could go on. The way the religious life was framed as non-stop ‘struggle’ or ‘battle.’ (Wild at Heart was big at the time.) The way you were encouraged–sometimes explicitly–to not associate with people who were not ‘in it’ like you were. The way people who ultimately did leave the faith–whatever faith–were pitied, or ostracized, or shamed. What any of that, or any of the rest of it, had to do with with the kind of life offered by Jesus is something about which I currently have strong opinions, but only because Jesus is someone I still care very much about, even if I’m not entirely certain what that might mean.

But most people in my age group with whom I’ve had these conversations over the years just don’t care. At all. I said before that all of that weird stuff does something to you, even if you don’t realize it. What it does is create something like a trauma response in adulthood: exposure to anything that reminds you of those particular settings and situations triggers emotions that are unpleasant, even aversive. Simply put, exposure to anything religious grosses you out. You may not know why. And then you start talking to other people, and you realize that you’re all grossed out because of similar experiences you all had at the hands of the adults who were entrusted with passing on the faith to you. Had you been given Jesus and the freedom of a way of living in the knowledge that God loves you unconditionally, and of the responsibility you subsequently have to love others unconditionally, and how sin and grace and all of that orbit around that center of gravity, you’d probably feel differently. But chances are you weren’t given that. What you were given instead were sermons about how Satan is hiding in children’s movies, and how your mental health issues could be leveraged to bring more people into the Jesus Club, and the fact that adults seem really, really, really fixated on talking about jerking off.

I’m not dumb enough to believe that everything I’ve said here is the only reason why Christianity is declining in America, much less the West. I’m not dumb enough to believe that this is even the only reason why people my age (and younger) want nothing to do with religion, or even that my experience here is necessarily representative of the broad experience of church camp kids who are now Millennials. These are, admittedly, just anecdotes, and anecdotes are not data. But they are anecdotes experienced by me and others over nearly a decade and in numerous places and regions nationwide. And at some point, that points to something.

So, yeah. It’s easy for Trump-supporting Christians (and maybe even Christians who don’t support Trump) to point at their Millennial and middle-aged kids who are shacking up with their significant others (or whatever other horrible sins they’re indulging in) and bemoan the lack of religion or morals in public life. It’s easy to blame ‘the libs’ or ‘the left’ for it, or whatever boogeyman happens to be convenient. What’s not convenient is facing the fact that a lot of people in my generation think about Christianity and are not just apathetic, but angry and outright grossed out, and a lot of it stems from the sick behavior of the people we were trusting to give us something that was more real than the rest of the world.

The post Why Did These Millennials Leave Church? appeared first on The American Conservative.

You’re Immoral? You’re Fired!

A reader writes:

I work for a non-profit community arts organization who is working towards instituting a morality clause for its paid staff.  Now granted, morality clauses aren’t new, and I know they are often standard clauses for churches, religious organizations and institutions who at times have abused them in nefarious ways.  It looks like they are beginning to appear in contracts for secular organizations, beyond just record labels/film entertainment/professional sports due to social media/cancel culture and the importance of image/branding for employers. (i.e. bad publicity affects their bottom line.)

I found this video really helpful:
https://fb.watch/2fUK_nkxfU/

At 1:53 she mentions how morality clauses may now be applied beyond breaking the law, to apply more broadly to individuals asserting certain viewpoints/ways of thinking and goes on to talk about how important it is to protect yourself by making sure the language is really specific and being really careful to only align yourself with organizations that have the same values.

This does not bode well for anyone, regardless of your politics or beliefs. Institutions or companies seeking to force their agendas on employees could use these against religious, irreligious, conservative, liberal-anyone, as long as a person fails to embrace their values or way of thinking. (And the past has shown this to be true.) If (more likely when) these start to move past the arts into other areas, polarization will worsen and people will be forced to entrench themselves further into their own tribes.  I don’t know if people are thinking about these things, I know I wasn’t until now.

Is anyone else dealing with this?

Watch the whole video — it’s short, only about six minutes. It’s a statement by a lawyer warning clients that they had better watch closely before going to work for a company to see if they are required to sign an employment contract that has a morality clause. Says the lawyer, “Unfortunately, there’s very little room to negotiate that.” This is why she says that before signing a contract, you should understand exactly what the company’s morality clause covers, and what you are free to say or do. The lawyer doesn’t take a particular ideological point of view, but simply warns that you could find yourself fired if you violate the morality clause, even if you aren’t aware of it.

How far can this go? You tell me. My guess is that in the past, most companies would not have cared overmuch what you did in your private life, as long as you were a hardworking and honest employee. Now, though, if you cross any number of lines, you can be fired for bringing moral disapproval onto the company — if the company has a morals clause in your employment contract.

In the recent past, it would have been unheard of for someone to hold a company responsible for words spoken or deeds done by an employee away from the office, not in an official capacity. But now? If an employee of Cogswell Cogs puts a Trump sign in his front yard, and a racial minority neighbor sees it, then goes on Twitter to complain that a Cogswell Cogs middle manager made him feel “unsafe” in his own neighborhood, the company’s PR department is not going to want to deal with the hassle. If they have a morals clause in their employment agreement that allows them to fire an employee for putting that sign up, they will.

But would such a morals clause be enforceable? Here’s something I would like for your lawyers in the readership to tell me: how far can the morals clause go before it violates the Constitution? What if an employee was photographed going to a church on Sunday where the pastor preached a message that gay activists regard as bigoted? Would his church attendance trigger a morals clause? What about the case of an employee engaged in political activism, even something as minor as putting a sign for a candidate in their yard?

When I worked for The Dallas Morning News, one of the employee rules was that we were not allowed to put political signs in our yard. This was reasonable; it was to protect the newspaper from allegations of political bias. It would not have been reasonable in the case of people like me — a columnist who wrote sometimes about politics — but the general rule was sensible for a newspaper, whose business reputation could have been damaged by its reporters promoting particular candidates or causes. This was the pre-social media era, though, and cancel culture wasn’t yet a thing.

I wonder how things stand now. Companies always do their best to shield themselves from adverse publicity. As the lawyer in that clip points out, most companies will fight to keep themselves at an advantage. Don’t want to go work for a company that reserves, in writing, the right to fire you if you publicly say or do anything that violates the company’s dedication to “diversity, inclusion, and equity,” or whatever they call progressive social values? Then don’t work there. It’s a free country, right?

What happens when all the potential employers sign on to a progressive social agenda, though? What happens when the only way you can get and keep a job is to agree to keep your political, religious, and moral views to yourself, if they conflict with the company’s stated policy? Would you be willing to live by the lies?

This is another example of the soft totalitarianism I talk about in Live Not By Lies . A totalitarian society is one in which every aspect of life is politicized. If the use of morals clauses keeps going this way, then we will have made our society more totalitarian without ever having changed a law. If private companies can police the off-the-job behavior of their employees, to the point of firing them for being “immoral” simply for expressing contrary opinions, or associating with groups of which the company disapproves, then the effect will be totalitarian, even if the state never gets involved. If you have to be silent, even out of the office, about your non-progressive beliefs, for the sake of gainful employment, then how free are you?

Again, I’m not sure where the law stands now in terms of protecting employees covered by morals clauses. I see no reason why principled liberals and conservatives shouldn’t get behind legislation to protect the privacy and right to free expression of all employees, especially as cancel culture grows more powerful. One can understand a religious or activist group legitimately wishing to retain the right to fire someone who agitates in private life explicitly against their organization’s purpose. But that is a narrow exception.

For example, it is reasonable (if regrettable) for the Human Rights Campaign, the big LGBT lobby, to dismiss a lesbian employee who donated money to a campaign for a ballot initiative that would keep MtF transgenders out of women’s locker rooms and bathrooms. Though many lesbians would agree with the ballot initiative, the organization is on record supporting transgender access. If I were running HRC, I would be tolerant of the diversity of lesbian opinion, but I could understand the organization’s leadership wishing to dismiss this employee as having publicly taken a stance contrary to its goals.

But what if Cogswell Cogs did that, on the grounds that its corporate values include building a safer and more inclusive society? Do you really want to live in a world where a corporation has that kind of control over the private activities of its employees?

The core problem here is at base the collapse of the line between public and private. The disintegration of that wall works to the advantage of busybodies who are willing to stop at nothing to force ideological conformity on everyone.

Let me repeat the reader’s question: Is anyone else dealing with this? Tell us.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Rod, thanks for your post today about morality clauses. However, I’m surprised to see few, if any references throughout your blog to one of the solutions: the “Christian entrepreneurship” you mentioned in a few pages of BenOp.

One of the only ways orthodox Christians will have any relief from the woke mob in business is to set up businesses themselves, whether startups or traditional small companies or work as independent contractors. I myself work as an independent contractor, and while I recognize that it’s not the right fit for everyone, I have never in five years had to worry at work about being forced to say or do anything that makes me uncomfortable. There’s no reason that should change over the rest of my career.

Again, I recognize that some people either aren’t comfortable with the risks of entrepreneurship or are already deeply invested in a larger organization, and that’s fine and dandy. But big businesses are going to keep going woke, like it or not, so employees should know that ahead of time and prepare some alternatives. After all, isn’t advance preparation the whole point of BenOp, and now, Live Not By Lies?

Anyway, Christian entrepreneurship seems like a point you could hammer home more strongly as part of blog posts like this evening’s.

Excellent point! Thank you.

Another reader, this one a lawyer:

In my opinion, a morality clause could never violate the Constitution. While the Constitution prevents governments from restricting free speech, it does not afford that protection to individuals vis-a-vis private employers. On the contrary, the Constitution does provide protections for private parties to contract. If you contract away your free speech rights through a morality clause, then there is really no protection for you. If I had to defend a case like that, I’d argue that it should be void as against public policy, which is a legal theory used to try to void certain contractual provisions. This doctrine of law might work, but I wouldn’t be too optimistic in putting up this defense. There might be another avenue to attack termination for certain speech if you can show the termination was discriminatory based upon being in a protected class. In the context we are talking about, you’d Likely need to show you were terminated for your religious beliefs. However, I’m also not very optimistic about this line of attack in the situation where someone have voluntarily entered into a contract with an expansive morality clause.

A couple of other thoughts. This will potentially only apply to a very small portion of the public, those who have employment contracts. Most people are at-will employees, with no contract. In my state, they can be fired for any reason or for no reason, so long as they are not a protected class.  So, someone subject to a narrowly drafted and well defined morality clause may have more protection than your run of the mill at-will employee. So, the lawyer you referenced is giving good general advice to anyone with an employment contract. My advice would be to do your best to negotiate a morality clause which is limited to specific classes of criminal acts.

The post You’re Immoral? You’re Fired! appeared first on The American Conservative.

Religious Liberty In Post-Religious America

I have been hard on my own side — conservative Christians — who have behaved lately as if Trump were some sort of political messiah. The frankly seditious rhetoric of some of these people (the quote is in this blog post of mine from yesterday) is going to give the Left the excuse they need to crack down on people like us. Here is a tweet from a (Canadian) Catholic academic who teaches at the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana:

Well, I think that Covid is real and that Trump lost, but you know what? People who disagree are simply wrong, not evil, and they don’t need to be imprisoned. Those who think otherwise are no better than the extremists who want Trump to declare martial law and become an American Caesar, to keep the Bad People from taking over.

Writing in The Atlantic recently, the journalist Ronald Brownstein considers the meaning of religious liberty in a country that is growing more progressive and more secular. Excerpts:

The Supreme Court’s decision last week overturning New York State’s limits on religious gatherings during the COVID-19 outbreak previewed what will likely become one of the coming decade’s defining collisions between law and demography.

The ruling continued the conservative majority’s sustained drive to provide religious organizations more leeway to claim exemptions from civil laws on the grounds of protecting “religious liberty.” These cases have become a top priority for conservative religious groups, usually led by white Christians and sometimes joined by other religiously traditional denominations. In this case, Orthodox Jewish synagogues allied with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn to oppose New York’s restrictions on religious services.

But this legal offensive to elevate “religious liberty” over other civic goals is coming even as the share of Americans who ascribe to no religious faith is steadily rising, and as white Christians have fallen to a minority share of the population.

That contrast increases the likelihood of a GOP-appointed Court majority sympathetic to the most conservative religious denominations colliding with the priorities of a society growing both more secular and more religiously diverse, especially among younger generations.

More:

“What we are seeing today is this effort to turn religious freedom into religious privilege,” Rachel Laser, the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me. Religious institutions and individuals are being given “the right to wield religious freedom as a sword to harm others, and frankly to dial back social progress in light of our changing demographics and progress toward greater equality.”

Indeed, the succession of recent religious-liberty rulings by the conservative Court majority may represent another manifestation of the fear of cultural and religious displacement that helped Donald Trump amass huge margins among white Christian voters in both of his campaigns. “We are dealing with a majority-conservative Court that suffers from the same Christian-fragility disease as we are seeing in Trump’s base—as though Christianity is what’s under attack when others are asking for equal treatment,” Laser said.

Read it all. Brownstein advances the current Democratic Party line that “religious liberty” is code for “we hate the LGBTs.” He makes the reasonable point that as America grows less religious, it will be harder to defend religious liberty, because fewer people will grasp why it matters. But he posits conservatives on the Supreme Court who are defenders of religious liberty as in some sense anti-democratic advocates of privilege. The obvious answer here is that religious liberty, like free speech, is never more important to defend than when the practice of it offends the majority. This is Classical Liberalism 101, but it’s an increasingly disfavored opinion on the Left.

Religious freedom, like freedom of speech, is an important Constitutional right to defend even if it gets in the way of “social progress” and “greater equality.” It is chilling to think that liberals who would understand clearly what it would mean if conservatives criticized free speech and/or religious freedom as standing in the way of “patriotism” or “the free market” lose their ability to defend constitutional rights when they interfere with progressive goals. Besides which, you wouldn’t know it from Brownstein’s piece, but “religious conservative” is not a synonym for “white right-wing Christian.” There are non-white conservative Christians, as well as conservative Muslims and Orthodox Jews whose views do not line up with intersectional doctrine.

Brownstein’s piece, and the liberals quoted in it, are exactly why conservative Christians like me vote Republican in national elections, in hopes of getting judges in place who understand why in America, it’s important to protect the rights of dissenting religious minorities. Brownstein writes as if it is illegitimate for religious conservatives to assert the constitutional rights guaranteed to all Americans. It really will be harder to do in irreligious America, which is why I’m glad there is a conservative majority that will sit on the Court for a long time to come. It will be up to them to contain the anti-Christian hatred that we are certain to see in the years and decades to come, cultivated and advocated by academic, media, and political elites.

I also think, though, that it is important for us religious conservatives to speak up when we believe our own side is acting unreasonably — this, for the same reason it’s important for people on the Left to speak out against illiberal progressives. We do it because it might have a positive political effect, but we also do it because it is the right thing to do, even if it makes no difference. My fear is that the Left will consider all of us to be Deplorable.

I know some of you readers will say, “If you believe that the Left is probably going to behave that way sooner or later towards us, why would you oppose standing with Trump now, and preventing the Left from gaining power while we can?”

Here’s what I would say:

As a conservative, I fear the devil we don’t know. The creation of liberal democracy took many generations, and lots of bloodshed. It may not last, but given the alternatives, we should not be quick to abandon it;
The Left may not behave this way, in the end; we might pull back from the brink; in 1930s Spain, the Left was literally burning down churches and convents, and killing priests and religious; right-wing autocracy was arguably the only thing standing between Christians and death; we are not remotely close to that here;
There’s the William Roper challenge, from “A Man For All Seasons”; when Sir Thomas More’s son in law, Roper, says he would cut down all the laws in England to get at the devil, More responds: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!” The idea that Christian conservatives would need to overthrow the Constitution to protect ourselves from the devil of whatever the Left has in mind for us would open ourselves up to persecution, with no place left to hide.
Besides, a Trump dictatorship? Really? This is what some of us want to overthrow the Constitutional order for?

In the end, if the constitutional order became so unjust that it was impossible to work for true justice within it, we would be justified in taking revolutionary means of redress. But again, we are nowhere close to that. The Republicans did well in the House and Senate races. It is quite possible that with a better candidate, Republicans could retake the White House in 2024, and continue putting in place judges that care about things like religious liberty. The point is, we are far from defeated. The idea that some people would destroy the system, flawed though it may be, to protect Trump’s hold on power is incredibly self-destructive — especially given that Christians, especially conservative Christians, are a minority now, and will be an increasingly unpopular one.

Unless conservative American Christians are prepared to stand behind an American version of Bashar al-Assad — and hey, the day may come when that may be necessary; if Assad goes, Islamic radicals are going to cut the throats of Syrian Christians — we had better be prepared to work within the system to fight the Left’s anti-religious bigotries.

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The Stark Reality Of Post-Christian America

One big reason that I am frustrated with Trump’s attempts to hold on to office by any means necessary is that it impedes, and maybe even discredits, the urgent and necessary cause of building a credible, competent, and effective opposition to the cultural revolution that the Left is leading throughout the institutions of our society. I believe there are plenty of commonsense people who are more towards the left in their economic thinking, but who are sick and tired of the ideological insanity that has conquered leftist elites. Edie Wyatt is one such person in Australia; there are bound to be more than a few people like her in America. But if opposing the crazies on the Left means signing up for a tour of duty in Trump Army, they won’t do it.

A reader sent this blog entry by Steve Hayward, writing at Powerline. 

And in response to my item yesterday about the cuts starting to happen to tenured faculty in the liberal arts at several universities, another reader passes along two current job ads in political science from Butler University that make the rot explicit:

The Butler University Department of Political Science invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor with expertise in contemporary political theory. The candidate should have a strong commitment to excellent, inclusive undergraduate teaching and an active scholarly agenda. We are particularly interested in candidates whose scholarship and teaching engages critical, transnational, or global political theory beyond the conventional Western canon such as indigenous, decolonial, modernity/coloniality, Black, or Latin American political thought, and who can offer one or more courses suitable for Core Curriculum Social Justice and Diversity designation.

The Department of Political Science at Butler University invites applications for a full-time non-tenure-track lecturer for a two-year appointment with possibility of renewal. Applicants should have a strong commitment to excellent, inclusive undergraduate teaching. We are particularly interested in candidates whose teaching and scholarship engages intersectional, abolitionist, or critical historical institutional perspectives on race/ethnicity/indigeneity, gender/sexuality, and politics in the United States and potentially beyond it. The successful candidate will teach lower-level and upper-level undergraduate political science courses (including an introductory American politics survey), will contribute to the Core Curriculum, and will help build an inclusive learning environment for our increasingly diverse student population. This faculty member could choose to affiliate with the International Studies; Peace and Conflict Studies; Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and/or Science, Technology, and Environmental Studies interdisciplinary programs.

Like the news media, large parts of academia have chosen sides and don’t even pretend to be neutral any more. And the side they’ve chosen is not one that wishes the country well.

Memo to parents of high school students interested possibly in studying political science in college: Scratch Butler University off your list of prospective colleges.

Truth. Why would you pay money to have your child indoctrinated by militant wokeness? If you were a student, why would you go into debt to learn how to hate your culture and your people (or other people with whom you share this country)? These ideological maniacs are trying to destroy what we have been given. Universities used to be repositories of culture; now, like the laborers of Saruman’s smithy, they produce the anti-culture.

Another reader sends in this item about the new Rhodes Scholars, and how the prestigious program has gone full woke. Excerpt:

The 2021 Rhodes class, announced in late November, is such an orgy of left-wing identity politics it would be impossible to parody.

“This year’s American Rhodes Scholars—independently elected by 16 committees around the country meeting simultaneously—reflect the remarkable diversity that characterizes and strengthens the United States. Twenty-one of the 32 are students of color; ten are Black, equal to the greatest number ever elected in one year in the United States. Fifteen are first-generation Americans or immigrants; and one is a Dreamer with active DACA status. Seventeen of the winners are women, 14 are men, and one is nonbinary. These young Americans will go to Oxford next October to study in fields broadly across the social, biological and physical sciences, the humanities, and public policy. They are leaders already, and we are confident that their contributions to public welfare globally will expand exponentially over the course of their careers.” [Rhodes Trust]

Of course, the scholarship winners don’t reflect the diversity of America in the slightest. What they reflect is the political obsessions of those running the Rhodes Scholarship.

Maybe so, and if true, this is a forecast of the coming elites in US society. Always, always, always pay attention to the elites, because they are going to be controlling the institutions of our country in the future. And you know, if our universities surrender a commitment to real scholarship to embrace leftist ideology, then they should not be supported. Let them die; their deaths will be ruled a suicide. The corruption of the elites is a reason why there will continue to be a populist movement in America.

I totally get voting for Trump as a middle finger to these people. But let’s be serious: that’s not the same thing as effectively fighting them. Ask yourself: are the woke and their ideology more in control of American institutions in 2020 than they were in 2016? If so, why? Might the answer tell us something about the importance of having conservative political leaders who understand how to use power effectively, instead of performatively? And might the answer tell us something about the relative value of politics?

In the end, though, conservatives have to understand that we are playing a weak hand, because the culture has moved away from us. Ross Douthat has a good piece in National Review about this, in which he mentions why the Ahmari-French debate offers false (or at least only partial) solutions to the crisis, because both are political, when the core of the crisis is cultural — which is to say, religious. Douthat:

You can see the great intra-Christian debate on the right during the Trump era, the famous Sohrab Ahmari–David French battle, as an attempt to figure out how to deal with this reality — with Ahmari counseling a renewed attempt to use government’s power over culture to seize the ground that the prior iterations of Catholic-Evangelical-Jew failed to claim and hold, and French offering the alternative hope of pluralism and peaceful coexistence in a country without any clear religious center, any culturally established faith.

The problem with French’s prescription is that pluralism depends on decentralized institutions, and the centralizing forces in American institutional life right now — in media, education, politics — are extremely difficult to resist. Meanwhile American social life is atomizing in many ways, and local life especially — and that pull and push means that structurally the country almost seems to want a new religious center, a magnet to pull our lonely individual selves back together, to forge community and a sense of the common good in the only smithies still in operation.

But the difficulty with Ahmari’s prescription is that most of the people who work in those national smithies simply prefer woke ideas to traditional religious ones, or at least still tilt away from anything resembling cultural conservatism when pressed to choose a side. I find traditional Christianity more coherent and plausible and belief-inspiring than secular liberalism or woke-progressive zeal. But I have also seen enough in my career as a professional arguer to doubt that the more-effective use of judicial or admini­strative power will in­duce a critical mass of culture-workers and culture-shapers to see the world my way.

Douthat says things won’t turn around until the elites begin to return to Christianity in large numbers. Maybe, says Douthat, we aren’t awaiting a new, and doubtless very different, Saint Benedict, or a new Constantine, but instead a Saint Paul.

Look around you at our universities: they are falling into intellectual ruin. The post-Christian culture is freefalling into decadence. If we await a new St. Paul, then he will have to be formed by disciplined communities of study and practice. The Benedict Option is in part for building and maintaining the enclosed gardens in which the St. Pauls of tomorrow can be nurtured. (If you don’t like the monastery analogy, then think of what we have to build as akin to the church forests of Ethiopia.) And, Live Not By Lies is about something more immediate: grasping that a new form of totalitarianism is coming fast upon us, and that we have to take certain actions right now if we want to get through it without capitulating on our integrity.

I guess the thing that winds me up, and why I always bang on about items about, for example, the rot in academic culture, is because so little attention is paid to it on the Right. At the present time, one of the most important movements for defending cultural memory are classical Christian schools. These are schools where they teach the Romans, the Greeks, the medievals, and the treasures of our civilization. My kids either attend or have attended one. This movement is growing, and it’s usually doing what it does on a shoestring budget, because rich conservatives — and not-so-rich conservatives — don’t give money to it. Donald Trump’s PAC has raised over $200 million since Election Day. It is breathtaking to contemplate what classical Christian schools could do with that money!

From The Benedict Option:

 “Education has to be at the core of Christian survival—as it always was,” says Michael Hanby, a professor of religion and philosophy of science at Washington’s Pontifical John Paul II Institute. “The point of monasticism was not simply to retreat from a corrupt world to survive, though in various iterations that might have been a dimension of it,” he continues. “But at the heart of it was a quest for God. It was that quest that mandated the preservation of classical learning and the pagan tradition by the monks, because they loved what was true and what was beautiful wherever they found it.”

As crucial as cultural survival is, Hanby warns that Christians cannot content themselves with merely keeping their heads above water within liquid modernity. We have to search passionately for the truth, reflect rigorously on reality, and in so doing, come to terms with what it means to live as authentic Christians in the disenchanted world created by modernity. Education is the most important means for accomplishing this.

“Retaining the imagination necessary to see or to search for God is going to be an indispensable element in the preservation of true freedom and Christian freedom when our freedom under law becomes more and more limited,” Hanby says.

It is important to vote for wise and capable political leaders. But that’s not the answer to this crisis. If I were on the cultural Left, I would be thrilled to watch all the passion and resources from the cultural Right go into propping up Donald Trump. In the end, it makes the Left’s triumph more likely. Wanting to fight intelligently, and for the long run, is not the same as defeatism, no matter what the cranks and hotheads tell you. What does it serve a man to win the White House and the Congress, but to lose the souls of his children to the faith? That is the question every conservative Christian ought to be asking right now.

Let me offer you something interesting that I found on Twitter:

Compare this Chinese military recruitment video with the American one below. This probably says something about regimes and ruling classes. The identifiable themes in the Chinese video are duty, honor, patriotism, sacrifice, family, fatherland, identity 1/ https://t.co/q98DQ1FTpn

— Pedro L. Gonzalez (@emeriticus) December 7, 2020

Here’s the American one. I can’t pin anything down here except that it’s like a Call of Duty trailer set to annoying music 2/ https://t.co/bHhNUUmlTA

— Pedro L. Gonzalez (@emeriticus) December 7, 2020

These videos do in fact tell us something and here is a drill sergeant warning you about it–for which he got in trouble 3/ https://t.co/LGsXNaWBe0

— Pedro L. Gonzalez (@emeriticus) December 7, 2020

The anti-culture is not only among the strongholds of the Woke, you know.

The post The Stark Reality Of Post-Christian America appeared first on The American Conservative.

Donald Trump Is Not The Messiah

There’s a certain kind of liberal who thinks that the culture war was something conservatives made up to get votes. This is not only wrong, but absurd. As James Davison Hunter, the sociologist who coined the term, has explained, what we call “culture war” describes a real phenomenon of people within a polity whose deepest beliefs about cultural matters (as distinct, I suppose, from, say, economics) put them in an irreconcilable position with those within the polity who do not share those beliefs.

In a past era, whites who believed that racial integration was intolerable were locked in a culture war with those who believed segregation was intolerable. If you understand segregation strictly in terms of political rights, you’ll miss the core of it. The South built an entire culture around white supremacy. The racial conflict didn’t become a culture war until one side tried to subjugate the other. The fight against segregation was right and necessary, but it was also a culture war.

From the pro-life point of view, so is the struggle for the right to life of the unborn. You, pro-choicer, may oppose that struggle, but you should at least recognize that the people who wage it are every bit as committed as you are to their moral position. The only way to end the culture war is for one side to defeat the other, politically or otherwise. But then, something else will come up. It’s baked in the cake with a fragmenting society like contemporary America’s. Liberals who fault conservatives for waging culture war are blind to the way they are usually the aggressors in these contests. They blame conservatives who are trying to defend what they have for not having the decency to surrender.

Ross Douthat has a column today about how Joe Biden has chosen a fierce progressive culture warrior, Xavier Becerra, as his secretary of Health and Human Services. Excerpts:

In the best-case scenario for Biden, the Trumpian voter-fraud narrative could set in motion a Tea Party redux on the right, with fringe characters and Trump loyalists successfully primarying established G.O.P. figures — but without the high-unemployment economy and the Obamacare fight that enabled the Tea Party Republicans to take the House in 2010. Instead, a radicalized Republican Party campaigning on a supposedly stolen election while the Democrats campaign on prosperity and normalcy could set up the rare midterm scenario in which an incumbent president’s party actually picks up seats.

If you want to know how the Biden administration could blow this opportunity, though, look no further than his just-announced choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra.

No cabinet agency is likely to be as prominent as H.H.S. during the first year of the Biden presidency, given the upcoming vaccine rollout and the slow unwinding of public-health restrictions. And for a campaign that placed so much emphasis on the idea that disinterested expertise and capital-S Science should guide the coronavirus response, Becerra is a peculiar choice: a partisan politician from a deep-blue state whose health care experience is mostly in legal battles with the Trump White House over Obamacare, rather than in health policy or medicine itself.

Douthat says Obama made culture war from the Left a priority. More:

It was inevitable that a Biden administration would pick up some of these threads. But Becerra is the pick you make if you intend to pursue a lot of them, since that’s where his qualifications lie — as a partisan warrior on issues like guns and immigration and as an abortion-rights maximalist who has used his attorney general’s office to sue the Little Sisters of the Poor after a Supreme Court decision in their favor and to pursue felony convictions against the pro-life filmmakers who made undercover videos of Planned Parenthood executives talking about the sale of fetal body parts. (That prosecutorial push was denounced for “disturbing overreach” by the Los Angeles Times editorial page, which is not exactly noted for its pro-life sympathies.)

As John McCormack of National Review puts it, to understand how social conservatives feel about Becerra, imagine if a Republican president elected on a promise to heal partisan wounds and deal with a pandemic nominated Rick Santorum as his first secretary of Health and Human Services.

Read it all.

Always remember and do not forget: when the media gushes on about Biden as a Catholic president, note that he nominated as his HHS secretary a politician who went after the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Now, it is imperative that the Right get its act together to fight this — first, by holding the Senate for the GOP, then by developing a coherent counter-strategy, and pursuing it with discipline. It appears, though, that the Right is going to spend itself on fighting a quixotic battle for Donald Trump, from whom the election was allegedly stolen. Trump himself is reported to be considering skipping the Biden inauguration and flying to Florida to announce his 2024 candidacy at the same time Biden is sworn in.

If that is true, and he really goes through with it, it will be the most disgraceful and unpatriotic act we have ever seen from a US president. Having Donald Trump traveling the country for the next four years campaigning will tear the country apart. And because it will be difficult for any conservative to take on Trump within the Right, it may destroy the Republican Party’s chances of coming up with a strong, viable candidate for 2024, a year in which conservatives will likely face Kamala Harris.

The stolen election narrative is becoming a new religious phenomenon. Do I believe that there might have been election fraud? Sure. It’s a big country. But do I believe that Team Trump can prove it, or that it flipped the election? We aren’t seeing proof of that. I was talking to two friends last week, both conservative lawyers (one of them I know for sure voted for Trump). Both said there is a chasm between what Trump’s team is telling the public about the case, and what is actually in their legal filings. The court filings are pathetic, the lawyers said. Clown-car stuff. But see, this is the kind of thing that ordinary people — that is, people without legal training — can’t easily understand. One of the lawyers said that voter fraud might well have happened, but if you can’t show evidence in court, you’ve got nothing. That is the problem here, for Team Trump.

Unlike Eric Metaxas, I don’t believe that it is clear that God is on Trump’s side, I don’t believe that Trump will be inaugurated, and I certainly don’t believe that Trump is worth dying for. Nor do I believe that it’s worth killing America to save Donald Trump’s political career. I did not vote for Joe Biden, and I devoutly hope that the Republican Party holds the Senate and prevents him from doing his worst. I hope that I am a patriot who cares about what’s best for the country. I do feel alienated from America, often, and I expect at some point in my lifetime to have my loyalty to this country challenged by something anti-Christian that the state does. If that happens, I hope and pray that I have the courage to defy the state.

But this Trump thing ain’t it. 

There’s going to be a series of big Christian pro-Trump events in DC and elsewhere next week, the “Jericho March.”Take a look at their self-description:

The title comes from the Hebrew Bible (aka the Old Testament), the Book of Joshua, Chapter 6. In it, the Israelites circled the besieged city of Jericho six times, and on the seventh, blew their trumpets, and the city wall fell, allowing them to take the city. (Wikipedia tells the story.) It is hugely important that Trump supporters associate their crusade to overturn the election with the taking of a city, and with God’s favor on their cause. Make no mistake: this is a total combining of Trumpism, nationalism, and Christianity. The list of dignitaries who are participating includes one Catholic bishop — Strickland of Tyler, Texas — and a prominent and respected Orthodox priest, Father Hans Jacobse.

I don’t get it. I don’t get putting the cause of Christianity behind Donald Trump like this. Trump appears to have lost the election, but even if there were solid reasons to believe that he had it stolen from him, is it really wise to bring Jesus Christ into this partisan political dispute? Donald Trump did not die for my sins, nor did he trample down death by death. I have not been paying attention to the Jericho March world, but poking my head into the blog of George Michalopulus, an Orthodox Christian layman I used to know when I was living in Dallas, and someone who is identified by the Jericho March organization as a “religious leader” who will be part of the DC rally next week — well, it’s eye-opening, to say the least. Michalopulos approvingly quotes this statement from another blog, writing “It really says it all, doesn’t it?”:

And so knowing the stakes, we return to Trump, standing at the crossroads. He will soon be faced with a monumental choice. He can submit to Biden’s fraudulent victory and willingly vacate the Presidency, or he can refuse to do so and maintain control by any means necessary. The former will result not only in Trump’s personal ruination (likely including imprisonment), but the ruination of his family, and the destruction of the United States discussed above. The latter would almost assuredly kick off an outright civil war, and even if Trump’s faction should prevail, would embark the U.S. down an uncertain and uncharted path of American Caesarism. And yet, however grim these two possibilities are, Trump must indeed choose one of them over the coming weeks. His hand has been forced. The die must be cast.

I hope and pray that Trump can rise to this moment, and that not only is God not done using him as a cudgel of divine punishment against the wicked powers of the world, but has in fact preserved and prepared him for precisely this opportunity, when all the cards are on the table and every player has gone all-in. Now is the time Trump must act decisively. He must be prepared to use the full power of the Presidency and his authority as Commander in Chief to crush his enemies, who are the servants of the evil one and who work to bring America fully under their Satanic one-world system. After he has fully exposed the attempt to steal the election, he must use his authority under the Insurrection Act to arrest and/or kill everyone who participated in this plot. He must arrest the leadership of the Democrat Party, everyone of significance in the mainstream media, the major players in big tech, and the numerous other globalist string pullers and heavyweights behind the scenes who are mostly unknown to us (i.e. Soros and his ilk). These people have outed themselves as enemies of America and must be treated as such.

Trump won the election in a landslide. He has the loyalty of the American people. He has the loyalty of the police and the military. It is within his power to take this fight and to win it. If he submits to the forces of the NWO, we are doomed as free people and must spend the rest of our lives seeking only spiritual solace (if this is God’s plan, so be it, we will endure until the end). But perhaps there is yet hope, and the final hour of America has not yet come. Perhaps Trump will cross the Rubicon and take the fight to the forces of darkness, beating back the globalists and giving the United States another chance to turn things around.

American Caesarism. This leader of the Jericho March is calling for a coup d’etat against the United States, and invoking a divine mandate to do so. My God.

I’m speechless. Look, I believe that soft totalitarianism is coming, and though I believe Covid is a real crisis, I also believe that powerful people are going to take advantage of it to push for bad things. But the idea that Donald Trump is our only hope — really? Really? The idea that he has the mandate of heaven, and that Christians should be prepared to see the Constitutional order destroyed for the sake of Donald Trump — it’s just beyond crazy. I would never, ever submit to the dictatorial rule of Donald Trump, and it is utterly appalling that Christians would say that doing so is what God would have us do.

Politically, I have very little in common with the Evangelical commenter Michael Gerson, but he’s right in his column today:

“I’d be happy to die in this fight,” radio talk-show host Eric Metaxas assured Trump during a recent interview. “This is a fight for everything. God is with us. Jesus is with us in this fight for liberty.”

Elsewhere Metaxas predicted, “Trump will be inaugurated. For the high crimes of trying to throw a U.S. presidential election, many will go to jail. The swamp will be drained. And Lincoln’s prophetic words of ‘a new birth of freedom’ will be fulfilled. Pray.”

Just to be clear, Metaxas has publicly committed his life to Donald Trump, claimed that at least two members of the Trinity favor a coup against the constitutional order, endorsed the widespread jailing of Trump’s political enemies for imaginary crimes, claimed Abraham Lincoln’s blessing for the advance of authoritarianism and urged Christians to pray to God for the effective death of American democracy. This is seditious and sacrilegious in equal measure.

What has come over these Christians? Understand me clearly: I believe that the Biden administration will be bad for people and causes that I very much care about. I believe that conservatives — Christians and otherwise — should do what a political opposition is supposed to do: oppose, as effectively as possible. But that’s not what these people are talking about. They’re talking about blowing up the entire system unless Donald Trump can have his way. Yappy Catholic crazy person John Zmirak likens me and other Christians who don’t sign on to the Trump post-election crusade to Nazi collaborators. And Eric Metaxas, who has been a friend of mine for over 20 years, promoted that column to the skies. This is where the heads of a lot of Christians are these days: Donald or death.

I have prepared myself mentally for a time in post-Christian America when Christians would be seen as a menace to society, and unpatriotic, simply because we are faithful to our God. If this has to come, then let us meet it like Christians: with deep prayer fueling meaningful resistance, culturally, religiously, politically and otherwise. In fact, my current book encourages Christians to start forming networks now for mutual support when open resistance to soft totalitarianism becomes necessary.

But come on, to have an incumbent political candidate — especially one as flawed as Donald Trump — lose an election in the midst of a global pandemic that he has not handled well is not the same thing as the imposition of tyranny. Let’s be serious here. If we are to resist the regime, then we have to have exhausted all peaceful, orderly means possible. We have not done that, or even close to it. What this seditious batsh*ttery is doing is giving would-be authoritarians on the Left the excuse they need to suppress us. And it’s making conservative churches look ridiculous in the eyes of others, driving people away from the church — to say nothing of repelling natural conservatives who don’t regard the continuation of the Trump presidency at the cost of the Constitutional order as the will of Almighty God.

And look, if we really are going to conclude, after prayer and deliberation, that our sacred duty, as Christians, is to support the overthrow of the Constitutional order and the establishment of autocracy — a radical move that would only be justified under the most extreme conditions — then for heaven’s sake, let’s not rubbish everything our forefathers bled and died for to preserve the political viability of … Donald Trump!

To be fair, I shouldn’t assume that all Jericho March people believe what Michalopulos does. Still, the conflation of Trumpist nationalism with Christianity is very bad for the church. I say that as a conservative Christian who believes in a broad nationalism (as opposed to Davos-style internationalism). I think the “Stop The Steal” movement is mistaken, but I would not be so alarmed by it were these leaders not tying it to fidelity to God. The progressive Left in this country is bonkers; that we know. Must we on the Right show ourselves to be every bit as shipwrecked on the reef of ideology? Every minute we spend on trying to salvage Trump’s pride is a minute we are not spending on building a meaningful, substantive resistance. And it is de facto helping people like Xavier Becerra by neutralizing conservatives and Christians who would be open to fighting against whatever the Biden administration attempts, but who don’t want to be associated with sedition and religious extremism.

Donald Trump is not King Messiah. The Republican Party is not Biblical Israel, and neither is the United States of America. Our salvation does not depend on maintaining political power. Stop acting like it. We live in a country that’s falling to pieces, in a society that is corrupted by the collapse of the family, the failure of churches, the poisoning of academia by ideology, and on and on — and returning Donald Trump to office will do almost nothing to reverse that toxic tide. We conservative Christians can’t even keep our adult children in the church, but boy, we sure are going to go to the mat to keep Donald Trump in office. It makes no sense.

UPDATE: A reader who is a pastor writes:

Agree with 95+% of what you shared today, but…ha ha:

Having greater zeal for politics than discipleship, to include any particular candidate, is a mark of what has brought upon us the state of the “church,” such as it is, in America today.

Nevertheless, I have empathy for those criticized, enough so that some no doubt would tend to characterize me similarly, although many of “them” find my positions on such matters confusing to angering from their point of view.

Nevertheless, a key point you might ponder is that many do not believe soft totalitarianism is anything but transitory in nature and therefore ultimately only a segue to harsh totalitarianism. While it would not be the classic “fair reading” of your work, the reality is that for those looking through these lenses, there are things that you write that actually motivate them in ways that you criticize. Whereas some read an historical account of a tragic period of time and deeply ponder and identify with those who suffered, others immediately think that if various individuals had been more assertive, perhaps even more radically willing to engage before the dark winter fell, that somehow tragedy could have been avoided.

In short, there are individuals who believe this very moment is their last chance to keep not soft totalitarianism, as you have defined, but rather some of the worst, most harsh elements of systems historically found in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and various fascistic regimes from coming upon them and their country. They perceive the American Left as having worked for over 100 years to destroy the Constitution and now, having so thoroughly infected and degraded the American political system, their last chance to save the constitutional Republic is by such means as you have brought up, rightly with grave concern.

While those with messianic zeal toward Trump are indefensible from my point of view, troubling, even a part of the problem upon which they are fixated, like the flip side to a coin, I am very open to the potentiality that the fears driving them may actually, in a relatively short time, be proved true.

I don’t know. Maybe so. I’ll tell you what I see in somefolks I know who have given themselves over to Trump at this level (as distinct from those voting for him as the lesser evil). I see people who rightly discern disorder in the wider world, but who do little or nothing to address the disorder in their own lives. A pastor once told me that most of the people in his conservative church were all wound up about what the liberals were doing to disrupt America — and they were right! — but they had no interest in thinking about how their own total immersion in consumer culture, and the ways of suburban America, were undermining their own Christian discipleship, and malforming their children. The threats were always Out There, never internal. The answer was always Vote Republican, consume the correct media/social media, and to sort one’s own opinions to absolve oneself from doing anything meaningful.

I was present for this conversation between a MAGA parent and a skeptical adult child:

Parent: “What’s wrong with the church these days is they don’t teach the Ten Commandments anymore.”

Child: “Can you name the Ten Commandments?”

Silence.

I got into an argument not long ago with one of my own Trumpy relatives, who was griping about how the country is going to hell, and people have lost their morals, and so forth. Yeah, I pretty much agree, I said, but listen, I asked, when was the last time you went to church, not counting Christmas? I knew that my relative was one of these people who gets up on a soapbox to complain about everybody else, especially the Damn Democrats, but never, ever turns that critical eye inward, or towards conservatives. My interlocutor complained that the church wasn’t worth going to, because blah blah blah.

Y’all know I am death on the Woke, and their aiders and abettors. But I have the feeling that a lot of the sentiment among the MAGA militants is indignant but shallow. Let me use myself as an example. Here’s a story I’ve told here about myself. When I was younger, and deeply involved in Catholic culture, I had this idea that if only we would get the right Pope, and the right bishops, that the problems in the Church would turn around. Well, we had a good Pope (this was the JP2 days), but he was unwilling to act right, according to me. I remember a dinner we had at my place in Brooklyn, with me and some fellow conservative Catholic friends. As usual, we were bitching about what bishops and others in the institutional church were failing to do.

A priest who was present said that we were right, but he challenged us not to sit passively by and wait on the hierarchy to get its act together. He pointed out all the possibilities we had to get together with other faithful Catholics, and to feed ourselves from the wisdom of the Church — and to prepare to catechize our children. The priest was 100 percent right. I can’t say what the others present did or didn’t do after that night, but I know that I fell right back into bitching about the failures of others.

We all do it. And hey, we complainers were not wrong about the faults of churchmen! But that was all we were willing to do: find fault with others, but not do any hard work on our own to address the effects of the problem where we could. I don’t say this to let lousy bishops or failed politicians off the hook. But I do say it as a criticism of people — myself included — who act like holding strong opinions and voting this way or that is all that can be expected of us.

I am not telling people to be politically passive. But it’s frustrating to see people giving themselves over to political passions and would-be solutions that don’t actually have a lot to do with what most threatens the church and the moral condition of our country. As far as I recall, the last Democrat I voted for in a Congressional or presidential race was Michael Dukakis in 1988 (not counting writing in Wendell Berry in 2008). We have had sixteen years of GOP presidential governance since then (twenty-four if you count the Reagan administration before it). We have had GOP control of Congress for some of those years. Has the culture been saved? I would reckon that conditions are probably better than they would have been had the Democrats been in charge all that time, but come on: Republicans in power have not prevented the decline in religion, the fragmenting of society, and the dissolution of the traditional family. And it’s not fair to have expected them to do all that; politics cannot make up for failures in religious life, education, family formation, and the rest.

If you have the time, go read the transcript to the 1998 PBS Frontline documentary, “The Lost Children of Rockdale County.” It’s about a syphilis outbreak that raged through a high school in a prosperous Atlanta suburb. What the disease investigation revealed was a teenage culture in which promiscuous sex was common, and the kids were being raised not by attentive parents, but by pop culture and themselves. This was in a ruby-red Republican suburb in the South. A suburb filled with churches. But what was wrong there, no politician could have fixed.

UPDATE.2: A reader e-mails:

UPDATE.3: The Arizona Republican Party wants to know if you will die for Donald Trump:

 

The post Donald Trump Is Not The Messiah appeared first on The American Conservative.

Thoughts About Celebrity

A few disconnected thoughts about the curse of celebrity in American life. This post was going somewhere when I started it, but, well, you know.

David French wrote a really good column the other day titled, “The Crisis Of Christian Celebrity.” He used the busting of hipster megachurch pastor Carl Lentz as an adulterer to launch a wider reflection on what celebrity does to pastors. He writes, in part:

The longer I live, the more I understand a verse from the book of Jeremiah: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick, who can understand it?” I also ponder the truth of C.S. Lewis’s definition of courage (you’ve heard me quote it before): “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” (Emphasis added.)

I’ve known pastors who were absolutely convinced that they were faithful men—right until the moment when they made a “connection” with the attractive woman in the front pew. I’ve known Christian leaders who believed they were honest—right until the moment when honesty might harm their ministry. And I’ve known celebrities who believed they were humble—but who also somehow convinced themselves that God needs their ministry to accomplish His work on earth.

Moreover, the celebrity’s apparent talent and relevant success teach him to do the things he must not do: to trust himself, to believe that he is a person of virtue, to believe that he is important. This is particularly dangerous when talent and success almost always create both opportunity and motive for serious sin.

Celebrity carries with it a false blessing and a dangerous curse, and both work in their own ways to destroy men. The false blessing is that celebrity itself has its own charisma. You see this when people are in the presence of a famous man or woman. They act differently from the way they act around virtually anyone else. They laugh too loudly at jokes. They fix their eyes on the famous person. They listen, rapt, to every word. The air seems charged with a faint hint of electricity.

This reality is both exhilarating—it feeds the ego—and exhausting. There is no “normal” life even for those folks who are only “subculture famous.” They’re constantly, always reminded of their importance, and this importance not only makes illicit relationships feel possible (“look how he or she’s attracted to me”), the pressure of that importance creates its own sense of entitlement (“My happiness and pleasure are paramount.”)

And then, when the fall happens, the sense of importance virtually mandates the cover-up. (“Look at all the vital work we do. We cannot fail.”)

Read it all. It’s good. French is talking about Evangelicals, but there have been celebrity Catholic pastors who have fallen hard. At the moment, Father George Rutler is embroiled in a scandal, but he denies everything. The Manhattan district attorney’s office is investigating. I hope they are able to exonerate him, not because I am a particular fan of Rutler’s, but because I hate to see any man of God, whatever his church, fall like this. The PI involved with Rutler’s accuser is a dirty piece of work, so maybe Rutler is innocent. We’ll see.

I think religious celebrity is a bad deal all around. I remember standing in a crowd in the courtyard of the Latin Patriarchate, maybe twenty feet from a car in which Pope John Paul II sat in the passenger seat. The car wasn’t moving. I think he had just arrived in it from Bethlehem, and was waiting for security guards to come get him out of the car safely. The tension in the crowd was unbearable. Everyone there loved the Pope — me too, absolutely! (I was Catholic then, but I would have loved him anyway.) There was this strange electricity in the air, just like David French says. There we all were, only feet away from the most famous man in the world, and not just the most famous man, but for us Catholics, the Vicar of Christ. I shouted out his name, like everybody else, then immediately felt stupid. You’re a journalist, for God’s sake, maintain your composure. Then I shouted it again.

That’s the only time I can think of that I was really overcome in the presence of a celebrity. In my former job as a movie critic, I was able to interview a number of movie stars, but I can’t remember any of it. When you do that work for a living, you can see in the people (in the media, I mean) who just want to hump the legs of celebrities. It’s so cringey and embarrassing that it serves as a constant reminder not to be like them. They’re the ones whose blurbs always turned up on the posters of bad movies, giving it four stars.

On the other hand, is anybody fully immune? Some celebrities can be really nasty, but mostly they’re just there to do a job, and so are you. If they’re really good at their jobs, they make you, the reporter, feel special, like you’ve been let into their inner ring. It’s nonsense, of course, but even cynical reporters like to feel blessed by starshine. Once, when she was campaigning for an Oscar, Gwyneth Paltrow called me at home in New York, and ermagerd, I knew she was going to be calling, but I was still tongue-tied.

In his novel The Moviegoer, Walker Percy wrote about how the movies enchant places:

Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.

Celebrities do that too. It’s like they are hyperreal. When I was a little kid, like, kindergarten age, my mom stopped by the C&E Drive-In in our town to get ice cream cones for my sister and me. In the car next to us was a guy named Joe Morlon, a reporter for Channel 9, the CBS affiliate in Baton Rouge. I watched way too much TV back then, and thought TV was real life. I actually felt bad that we could not buy Dolly Madison brand snack cakes (“The neat-to-eat-treat”) in our town, despite the fact that they sponsored the Charlie Brown specials; it meant that we were Nowhere.

But ours was the kind of town where Joe Morlon would stop and order a hamburger. He blessed us with his presence. I couldn’t get over that.

A few years later, around 1980, Ralph Waite, TV’s Pa Walton, was passing through, and had a sandwich at a new cafe on Ferdinand Street. He left a signed photo. Pa freaking Walton, in our town! Those people across the river in New Roads, or across the creek in Jackson — Pa Walton never went to their town, now did he? Sucks to be you, New Roads and Clinton!

Fast-forward another decade and change. I am an adult, working as a journalist in Baton Rouge. I am at a Christmas party at a colleague’s house. In walks an older man who had been a veteran anchorman on local TV news, since I was a child. By then, I was too cool for school, and was the kind of smartypants who made fun of local TV celebrity, especially that anchorman, who carried himself like the head of the American delegation at Versailles. But … I kind of froze. I made a point not to go anywhere near him at that party, because come on, what was I going to say to him? I would be tongue-tied, and then I would hate myself for being tongue-tied, and cascade into an Albert-Brooks-in-Broadcast-News shame spiral. And that guy, that old dude, was probably just thinking, “Where can a guy get a J&B on the rocks in this place?”

A big problem with celebrity is that a lot of people think that being famous somehow confers wisdom and authority. Being on TV does weird things to people — not only the people who get on TV, but those who see them. Twenty years ago, when I was living in New York and would be on national cable news from time to time, I found out that people thought I must be rich. Only rich and famous people get on TV, they thought. Oh, if only! In my experience, most people who are part of that world understand that it’s all pasteboard and tinsel. The ones who take it for real life, and who believe they are good and wise because the people they hero-worship — other celebrities — pay attention to them, well, those are the ones who make complete fools of themselves. It comes, I think, from a deep insecurity, from a craving to be validated, to be “certified,” as Walker Percy called the feeling of seeing your town in the movies.

At some point, maybe a decade ago, I realized that I had gotten out of touch with modern celebrity. It started when I would go to the grocery store, and wouldn’t recognize the people on the covers of the magazines and the tabloids. Their names were a mystery to me. Still are. All those young stars look the same to me. Recently, I heard one of my kids say that one of their classmates had seen an “Instagram influencer” in town recently. An Instagram influencer. Golly. I’m so out of it. You know how they say the music that was popular when you were a teenager is the music that will be your favorite for the rest of your life? Well, in my mind, Harrison Ford is still a big deal, and though he is one year older than my mother, he is perpetually in his fifties. I’m basically frozen at the point where I stopped paying attention to pop culture.

Here is a link to C.S. Lewis’s great essay on “the Inner Ring.” It’s a warning about a great temptation nearly all of us face: the desire to be on the inside. Excerpt:

My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man.

I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man. But you may have an open mind on the question. I will therefore suggest two reasons for thinking as I do. It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel. On the other hand, by the mere law of averages (I am saying nothing against free will) it is almost certain that at least two or three of you before you die will have become something very like scoundrels. There must be in this room the makings of at least that number of unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists. The choice is still before you: and I hope you will not take my hard words about your possible future characters as a token of disrespect to your present characters.

And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

Read it all. The urge to be in the Inner Ring — boy, do I get that. But celebrity is not the same thing as power. People who worship celebrity assume that being famous makes on part of the Inner Ring. So if they happen to get famous themselves, however minor their fame, or live in social proximity to celebrities, however petty, they assume that they deserve to be there, and may end up worshipping their own celebrity or celebrity-adjacent status as self-validating. Carl Lentz probably thought that being Justin Bieber’s best friend made him the Reinhold Niebuhr of Pop Evangelicalism instead of a vain adulterous dirtbag with fancy friends and fancy glasses.

Nothing is sadder than the question posed indignantly, “Do you know who I am?” I first heard it when I was 17, on a flight back from Europe (my mom had won a trip in a church raffle, and sent me). I was seated near the back row, and heard a man from Louisiana arguing with a flight attendant, who kept telling him not to hang out near the galley.

“Do you know who I am?” the man huffed. I thought, wow, a real celebrity, I wonder who he is? I learned from their touchy dialogue that the supposed dignitary was a friend of the Louisiana Agriculture Commissioner’s, who had been leading a tour of Europe with his political supporters, and was seated up in first class. Here was this guy telling a Delta Airlines attendant on a flight to Atlanta from Brussels that she’d better back down, because he’s a friend of a provincial minister of agriculture. It’s a thing of beauty, if you look at it from a certain angle.

 

 

The post Thoughts About Celebrity appeared first on The American Conservative.

She Was Poor, White & Broken. Then Came God.

Here is an extraordinary — and I mean that emphatically — essay by an Australian named Edie Wyatt, writing in Quillette: “My White Privilege Didn’t Save Me. But God Did.”  Wyatt wrote this to object to something the Quillette editor, Claire Lehmann, wrote. It was good of Lehmann to publish the Wyatt essay, which starts like this:

Following the furore over Netflix’s Cuties movie in the fall, Quillette editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann tweeted that the creepy conservative obsession with paedophilia is as bizarre as the feminist obsession with rape. I took umbrage, and noted my annoyance—though I knew what she meant. Sexual violence, particularly toward children, is becoming more of a marginal topic. Rape, while a serious problem in every society, has been in historic decline in the west.

I am not naturally conservative, and I do not exhibit the required antagonism toward men to qualify me as a decent feminist. But in the area of sex, rape, and paedophilia, I am unable to separate my politics from what is fashionably called my “lived experience.” As a young girl, I was raped, as were other members of my family (not all of them female). It was only in my reaction to this tweet that I started to think of how those experiences, and the circumstances that surrounded them, shaped my politics.

My experience is not uncommon among those who share my socioeconomic background. I will spare readers most of the unpalatable details. But suffice to say I had a childhood marked by constant fear—of sleepless nights spent keeping watch.

The abuse started when I was about six. When I was about 10 (by my recollection), the abuser moved away, and no longer had access to my home. I then had a few years of peace. I might have used that interregnum to ask my parents for help, had they been more approachable.

The life she had as a child was horrific, as she details. No one protected her or her cousins. Unsurprisingly, as a teenager, Wyatt acted out in very destructive ways. Somehow, she got into university. More:

You won’t find it surprising to learn that I related easily to Marxist ideology. I liked the idea that my oppression was systemic, that I was marked for suffering before I was born, and that I was a victim of it. If this was all true, then the path to justice was corporate and institutional, rather than the terrifying path of facing my own issues as a powerless individual.

By the time I was 20, my mental health was deteriorating, and what was left of my family was falling apart. Following the suicide of her brother, Nicky showed signs of serious emotional instability. Neither of us knew she was also experiencing early signs of Huntington’s disease. I will always remember the sorrow and frustration in her face when she turned to me one day and said, “no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to get myself together.” We’d always dreamed of escaping our torturous childhoods amid the freedom and possibilities of adulthood. The reality was different.

Under the belief (delusional, as it turned out) that the problem was rooted in my drug and alcohol use, I gave up both. Unfortunately, without that self-medication, I found myself face to face with the underlying pain and paralysing fear. One night, I collapsed on the floor, crying and in such physical pain that I could barely move. I picked up a Bible and read a passage from 2 Corinthians 5—Awaiting the New Body—that left me completely undone.

Not long after, I walked into a suburban Baptist church, full of strange, unfashionably dressed, conservative Christians. I was a Marxist, a feminist, foul-mouthed, a chain-smoker, and desperate. The love I received in that place is the reason that I will defend the rights of fundamentalist Christians to my dying breath. They were the kindest people I’d ever known. They loved me, on principle, and in doing so saved my life.

People who advocate for a world without religion have no idea what it is like to find the relief that I found at that time. My purpose here is not to describe my “Amazing Grace” moment, but to explain why I have no patience for militant atheists. In the face of my evangelical Christianity, progressives (mostly men) have called me every unholy thing imaginable—including, of all things, a paedophile apologist.

I went back to university, now into my second year, as a newly minted Christian. As I was no longer a Marxist, I lived in a world of cognitive dissonance. While pumping out essays about the patriarchy, the evils of capitalism, and the sinister influence of religion, I diligently studied my new faith.

Wyatt laments that the Left — the academic Left, anyway — has abandoned economics for culture war. More:

The postmodern re-engineering of left-wing political theory has included the redefinition of “privilege” in a way that is separate from economics, a definition of “sex” that is separate from biology, and a definition of “violence” that does not involve actual violence. It’s a language and a narrative that completely abandons the working class, while erroneously taking for granted our loyalty. Until recently, I have thought my objections with the new Left were the result of its ideological incoherence. But when I deal honestly with my reactions to issues of sexual violence, I can see that my politics has always come from a more personal place.

Australian Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe, who is Aboriginal, recently walked into parliament wielding the “black power” fist gesture, and carrying a stick with a notch for every aboriginal death in government custody. Ms. Thorpe declared she would be a voice for Australian Indigenous people. In Indigenous communities, sexual assault, domestic violence, and incest are epidemic. Yet thanks to the fashion for prison and police “abolition,” it now isn’t unusual to see left-wing activists effectively shield the men who rape and abuse women and children, instead of urging the protection of these victims.

My “white privilege” didn’t save me from childhood sexual abuse. Sexual violence almost killed me. It ruined my childhood, made me homeless, and left me with enduring scars. I can debate and theorize about politics as much as the next person. But ultimately, the politics of the modern Left is dominated by its fixation on power. And children have no power.

Read it all.

There’s so much more to this amazing essay. Wyatt blasts the “defund the police” progressives, saying that bad men who want to exploit the weak are always happy to see fewer police around. She goes on to say that her No. 1 concern is to protect women and children, and that “because of my experiences, and the newly fashionable denial of reality being promoted by progressives, I find myself sitting with the politically homeless.” I found this earlier essay by Edie Wyatt about feminism and tyranny; it’s straight fire. Excerpts:

Neo-Marxists, God bless them, have finally found some traction with intersectionality. Now those who remember the horrors of communism are largely gone, they have the opportunity to re-invent themselves to a naive generation. They do this by basing victimhood in concrete traits of races, gender and sexuality (instead of the proletariat which kept getting prosperous and leaving them). Intersectionality has the same narrative as classical Marxism, just redefined groups. Instead of victim-hood being ground in work, struggle and poverty, we see it ground in implicit bias, racism and misogyny.  Instead of problems of poverty and violence, we have people with hurt feelings, being undervalued, overlooked and discriminated against. Critically, instead of capitalism, they get to overthrow patriarchy, white supremacy and heteronormality. These seems like impotent aims with little chance of social change. I have been sitting back rolling my eyes, but now they are taking over governments, and they have my attention. Because they have realised that infiltrating the state, is far easier than overthrowing it.

Let me first look at the liberal understanding of rights. Liberalism, broadly, sees rights and obligations between individual and the state in terms of the “social contract”.  The balancing of individual rights of citizen to those it gives over to the state, to organise the society.  An example is the the right to bear arms. In the US, this is embedded in the constitution.  And it is a real thing.  Humans are violent creatures, and it is not an unreasonable argument to suggest they have an inalienable right to hold resources to defend themselves. In Australia we yield this right to the state. we do this collectively so the state can perform the responsibilities of protection on our behalf.  This means that those who want to bear arms, have a measure of deprivation of liberty. And I support this, because I believe yielding that right to the state does more good than harm. And the state is essentially good government in Australia.  Classic liberals believe that rights come at a cost of responsibility.  When we yield the right to the state we also yield the responsibility with that measure of liberty.  In this complicated equation, the more the state does for the individual, the less liberty the individual bears. There has been a tussle over the rights/responsibility and individual/state balance in the west for hundreds of years. One could argue we are pretty close to getting the balance right. Central here, are the doctrines of free will, individual autonomy and liberty.

The left often ignore the complexities of rights and responsibilities because they like to ignore our fundamental difference in ideology.  Marx himself did not believe in individual “rights” because he did not believe in the agency of the individual. Under Marxist ideology, the individual is motivated by social agency. For Marx, this was social class, and for the intersectionalists this is race, sexuality and gender.

More:

Women in the west have have become very free, largely because they have exercised agency and insisted on the broadening of citizenship rights to include them. Women have gained rights through free and open debate and no one was censored in this debate.  Women survived the hurt feelings.  Reject the narrative. ‘White’ and ‘male’ are not poisons to eradicate in western power, this is shit Marxist ideology.  White men largely build western greatness (they had help), and removing them is not a sane objective. Teaching our children this lie is very bad, and racist and sexist. I’d rather live under the patriarchy in a western liberal democracy, than come under the oppressive matriarchy of the pussy hat Stalinist.

Marx looked to a day when the proletariat ruled the world, he didn’t think that once they ruled, they would no longer be the proletariat.  That on the march to power, power itself would became the objective.  That the proletariat would hand their individual rights and power over to the collective in order to be handed starvation, tyranny and despair. Women if you use your collective power to submit to a Marxist doctrine aimed at the conquering of the western world, rather than the advocacy of women and girls, you may just find the cost to get there will destroy not only what it is to be a woman, but the greatness of our society as well. That if you hand your collective ‘rights’ over to have them enforced by the state, individual liberty itself is the only possible cost. Central to liberalism is being responsible for the rights we have, and holding them with a measure of dignity and respect. Ignore this, and you ignore the very foundation on which your liberty is based. I, for one will not be complicit in this nonsense.

Read it all. I look forward to hearing much more from Edie Wyatt. Oh, look, here’s one more, from her blog, about the political usage of whiteness in the mouths of the Left. Here’s an excerpt that will delight our faithful commenter Siarlys Jenkins:

I am an Australian white woman and I am descended from bastards, sluts, lunatics, thieves, criminals, working women and diseased women.  I know the life they lived was on land that had been solely occupied by Australian Indigenous people for ever. But what they were doing here in this city was not colonising, it wasn’t even complicity in colonisation, it was certainly not white supremacy, it was common or garden survival, and they didn’t even really do that very well.  Alongside them were Indigenous women also living brutal lives, with less opportunities, this I don’t wish to deny, my mother certainly didn’t deny it.  I owe these white women, my ancestors, my late sister and my late cousin everything, but I owe what are now being called women of colour (WOC) nothing, certainly not an apology, nor an explanation, mainly because they don’t exist.

WOC and “brown women” are political inventions in the same way that “white women” are. My mother considered herself a White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP).  She may have stolen this identity from the free settlers who’s ancestry she had adopted, but in her work ethic, her morality and her perspective she was correct.  WASP’s can in some way be considered a people because they have a belief system, a common ethnicity, a traceable history and a more or less common understanding of themselves as a group. I can talk about the crimes and gains of WASP women, but not today.  Today I want to say that “white women” can be a physical description, but the idea that they are a people group is ridiculous.  Polish women, French women and Russian woman are all white, but when they come to Australia they do not act with one agency. “Brown women” is even more ridiculous.  This is supposed to be fair Indians, Middle Eastern women, and mixed-race women, among others. The Middle East alone has several different races with different cultures, religions and languages. Are they to act with one agency when they come to Australia? Are they defined solely in their separateness from white people?  So, what are my children, who have a Lebanese father?  Are they white? Do they lose their Lebanese heritage?  Or do they abandon their Anglo Saxon heritage?  These are stupid questions that I refuse to address.

This is all bullshit.  It is all invented to pit us up against each other, to assign historical blame, privilege and victimhood in accordance with the subtle hue of skin.  It is part of the new left trend to deflect blame from the elite and situate it in the general working populations to divide them politically. I will not play, and I refuse to pretend that it is not deeply offensive to the people who have birthed me.  They can run this line that brown scars are causing my white lady tears as much as they like, but they do it to call me a white supremacist, and that’s pretty bad.

Read it all. I am thrilled to be discovering Edie Wyatt, thanks to Quillette. We need to hear voices like hers more often. A lot more often.

One thing I would like to see is liberals and conservatives — including feminists and Christians (Wyatt is both) — teaming up to dismantle porn corporations like Pornhub. If you missed Nick Kristof’s stunning NYT piece on Pornhub and what it does to children, read it here — but steady yourself, because he writes about stone cold evil.

The post She Was Poor, White & Broken. Then Came God. appeared first on The American Conservative.

Front Bums And Seahorse Papas

There are people — progressive Christians among them — who condemn my work as “alarmist,” and so forth. One woke preacher the other day denounced my book Live Not By Lies as “an utterly unchristian exercise in dehumanization” in part because I do not lament in its pages “the abuse of transgender Americans.” Well, I’d like you to think about that in light of this exciting document produced by a large Canadian sexual education and services non-profit :

 

What’s in it? Let’s look. Here are excerpts from the section on how to use language:

“Man/woman of trans experience.” Wow. More:

It’s full of stuff like that — arcane rewriting of language and language usage, which of course is meant to change the way we see reality. It gets even weirder:

We should avoid the unnecessary and problematic gendering of body parts (for instance, calling ovaries, fallopian tubes and uteruses parts of the female reproductive system). We might

also use language such as “people with breasts,” “bodies with penises,” “pregnant people”, rather than “women with breasts,” “male-bodied” or “pregnant women.” For some, however, this may not go far enough.

Words like breast, penis, vagina, uterus, may not be how some trans people refer to their own bodies —some common ways that body parts can be renamed includes breasts being renamed as chests, vaginas being renamed as front bums, penises being renamed as clitorises, but many others are possible. While it may not always be possible to alter official medical consent forms, you can ask your clients what language they use to refer to their body and/or mirror the language that they use and make clear notes about this in the client’s file.

Words used to talk about partnership and parenting can also fall short for trans people. It may seem straightforward—if trans people take on the parenting role associated with their gender identity, then a trans man would be a father, a trans woman a mother. While this may be true for some trans people, it is not always so simple—some trans people might identify as both mother and

father. Other trans people use newly created words, or reclaimed old ones, like zaza, nini and cennend. The reproductive experience of pregnancy can be rebranded as being a seahorse papa, and lactation and chest-feeding reframed as an animalistic, functional process, rather than being quintessentially womanly experiences.

The embodied aspects of parenting can be transformed by trans people who are living in their bodies and forming families on their own terms and changing the language used to refer to these experiences is part of that transformation.

Here’s a potential problem that the guide’s authors walk you through:

In another fictional case, this one involving a genderqueer person named Barkat and Barkat’s partner Ivan, we learn that Barkat is offended by the health care provider using the terms “penis” and “vagina”. Here is part of how the non-profit suggests that the health care provider could have been more sensitive:

While consent documents cannot be changed for medico-legal reasons, it is possible to attach a small note to the forms that states, “We recognize that you may use different language to refer to your body, body parts, and the body and body parts of your partner(s). Please let us know what words you use to refer to your body.” This way, Barkat could have written down that they use ‘front bum’ for their female-assigned genitals, and Ivan uses ‘clitdick’ for their male-assigned genitals, and the counsellor could have altered their discussion of the various birth control methods to reflect this language.

“Front bum” and “clitdick” — the medical provider has to use these pornographic words for “vagina” and “penis,” because to fail to do so is bigotry.

Read it all. It’s insane. This goes far, far beyond “compassion.” Now, imagine that in order to become a licensed medical professional, you have to adapt to this way of regarding the human body, and talking about it. In The Benedict Option, I quoted a prominent Catholic physician, a man who would not let me use his name, saying that he would discourage his children from going into the medical field because he feared that they would be required to affirm policies and engage in practices that violated their consciences, as a condition of licensing. In Live Not By Lies, I quote a Soviet-born US physician at a major American hospital saying that everyone there already has to practice under trans ideology, in particular giving cross-sex hormones to anyone who asks for them, even if doing so goes against the physician’s best medical judgment in that particular case. You would be a fool to speak out against it, the doctor told me, because you would lose your job.

Did you know that this is part of the way transgender ideology is changing health care? Did you know about clitdicks and front bums and seahorse papas? Of course you didn’t; our media will not talk about them, because it would freak people out. Change language, and you change the way people see reality. This is happening in some places, and expanding as wokeness conquers the professions.

But see, people like me who say, “Wake up! This is crazy, and it’s going to change our lives!” — we are the problems. Unchristian. Meanies. The problem with the world.

Seriously, people, think about it: if we can judge a religion, an idea, a way of seeing the world, by its fruits, what are the fruits of gender ideology? Seahorse papas, frontbums, and clitdicks, is what.

UPDATE: This is related. Did you know that the Madison (WI) school district has a formal policy to keep the transgender identity of students, even little bitty ones, hidden from their parents? Does your kids’ school district have the same? They might if they followed the advice of the powerful activist group GLSEN, and its suggested trans student policy model. This is what I mean: these institutional elites are psychologically and politically manipulating people, and doing serious damage:

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Save Pineapple Hill!

Watch this short video by Angela Marsden, the owner of Pineapple Hill Grill, in Sherman Oaks (suburban Los Angeles). She built outdoor seating for her customers so they could dine safely, but the government shut her down. But then the mayor allowed a movie company to set up outdoor seating right across the parking lot. Listen to the whole thing; it’s powerful:

That poor woman. Her small business is being destroyed by unreasonable Covid restrictions. Marsden set up a Go Fund Me account to help the business — and lots of people are giving.

Local L.A. media are reporting it. Excerpt:

A restaurant owner who was forced to shut down because of coronavirus restrictions is frustrated after a film crew was able to set up outdoor dining for its workers right across from her restaurant.

Angela Marsden, who owns Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill, said her anger isn’t toward the movie industry, but because she believes restaurants are being unfairly targeted by Los Angeles County health orders.

“Tell me that this is dangerous but next to me is a slap in my face,” Marsden said. “Everything I own is being taken away from me and they set up a movie company right next to my outdoor patio.”

Under the county’s guidelines, video and music production is deemed essential. Many production crews also test employees frequently, while under the recent Los Angeles County health order, restaurants like Marsden’s were forced to shut down their outdoor dining.

Marsden says she spent close to $80,000 building and making her facility coronavirus compliant, only to be told her doors had to remain shut for in-person dining.

“You can’t eat here, but you can walk in the same parking lot 15 feet and you can eat alfresco on a movie set because I guess COVID doesn’t go there right,” Marsden said.

Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill has been a Sherman Oaks staple for more than 40 years, and due to the strain of the pandemic, could be on the brink of shutting down for good.

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How The Lavender Mafia Works

The Catholic journalist Edward Pentin has an important interview with Father John Lavers, a Catholic priest who has some powerful insights into the McCarrick Report. First, some background:

He led a 2012 investigation into allegations of homosexual behavior and activity at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Connecticut that led to the removal of 13 seminarians, primarily from the Archdiocese of Hartford and Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey.

Father Lavers’ investigation also indicated that a homosexual “pipeline” had been created that funneled vulnerable Latin American candidates into some U.S. seminaries where they were sexually exploited, and subsequently ordained as actively homosexual priests in some American dioceses.

And on the basis of the evidence collected for the Holy Apostles investigation, Father Lavers concluded that it was Theodore McCarrick himself who was at the “epicenter” of this powerful influential network that has preyed on seminarians, and has advanced homosexually active clergy within the U.S. Church.

Father Lavers calls the McCarrick Report a “half truth, but not the complete truth.” More, from the interview itself:

Some critics in the Vatican have said this report throws up more questions than it answers, that it cries out for these questions to be answered. Would you agree with that?

It does. Yes, absolutely, a lot of questions, an awful lot of questions. There’s a surface level aspect to this, but when you scratch the surface, as we started to do in the 2012 investigation, we were being led to priests, auxiliary bishops, bishops, archbishops and even to McCarrick himself. And as the investigation was forming up, again, still concentrating on the issues at Holy Apostles, we could see that ground zero was leading us to McCarrick. All avenues of this were leading back to McCarrick … . How aspects of recruiting and grooming seminarians were all done by people that owed an allegiance or something else, obviously, to McCarrick.

So where the investigation started in one area, that is at the seminary, its epicenter of all the major problems [was] one man: essentially, McCarrick. However, it is important to realize that he [McCarrick] continues to have many supporters within the Church who owe much to him for their own personal careers and positions of influence and power, and this support is in the form of silence that many have continued to give McCarrick.

Here’s the shocking (but not shocking) heart:

Critics have said the report appears to evade the issue of pervasive homosexuality among the clergy, and the report showed the hierarchy being rather cavalier in their attitude to inappropriate homosexual behavior with seminarians and young priests when it shouldn’t be tolerated at all. What’s your view on that?

Cavalier is probably one word of describing it. I think opportunistic and predatorial is probably a better word, I would say, based on what I’ve seen through the seminary investigation. Additionally, this has also been my experience investigating bishops and priests in the Church going back to the early to mid-nineties, for various civil authorities.

At Holy Apostles, where seminarians were being recruited and coming from the Latin American countries, they were probably the most vulnerable of individuals. They’re thousands of miles away from home. They’re essentially seeing themselves in the land of milk and honey in the U.S. You’ve got unlimited budgets given to various vocations directors, wining and dining them into an illicit lifestyle, and introducing them to a lifestyle where having relationships with men, from a sexual appetite perspective, was considered to be okay.

So introducing and grooming young seminarians like this, that have no recourse to home and no immediate family, they’re totally dependent on individuals within the host country, and this makes one very susceptible to suggestions. And that all starts at a low level and works itself upwards, again in terms of grooming vulnerable people. So, it begins with having them become dependent on various priests or individuals within various dioceses. Then the money is flowing, good places to live and the good meals, the travel and vacations and so forth, and then large parties with much alcohol, and then the parties that move into more explicit type of partying, from a sexual perspective. And then that breeds a sense of participation and belonging.

The concept of now you belong to a special group of people which develops the need to protect and cover for each other. And then of course, the silence and secrecy comes into it, suggesting that, “If you liked this and you enjoy this and you want to stay here, then you have to keep silent.”

This is how the system works in such a way that everybody who is exposed to this almost has a piece of information on somebody else, and so then there’s a collaboration of silence to be maintained. So, no one tells on the other person, as long as the gravy train of sex, money and power is moving in the right direction and everyone in the sub-group can protect and advance each other within the organization.

How does the vulnerability of these priests and seminarians play into this behavior? 

It’s all built on the vulnerability of individuals. You have certain individuals among North American seminarians who may be chosen to help and corral the younger seminarians. We saw that in the 2012 investigation, there were certain older seminarians who were providing younger seminarians with opportunities to meet other priests, monsignors, vicar generals, going up to bishop level, within the various dioceses. And then all of a sudden, like what has been discovered about McCarrick’s exploits, we found in our investigation, was that young seminarians were being brought around to different places for special parties, driven by priests, and given over to other priests and other people in various presbyteries in New Jersey, Connecticut, New York and Newark areas, and the Jersey Shore, which led to the beach house belonging to McCarrick.

Additionally, one of the difficulties in identifying the key individuals is that when they come together for the parties and the young vulnerable seminarians are being indoctrinated into this world, the people that are going to abuse them sexually are not wearing clerics. They’re all in civilian attire. So the person going into this situation doesn’t know a priest from, say, the monsignor to, say, a cardinal. They just know it’s a bunch of middle-aged to older men that he’s there to party with, who are connected in various positions within the Church. So it’s only over a period of time, if they see pictures or come into contact with say a McCarrick or a bishop or a monsignor, or a vicar general over the course of regular Church-related activities, that they can put two and two together. But by this time, once they’re exposed to senior people within these groups, they are pretty well-groomed to keep silent if they don’t want to be sent back to their home country.

Why does no one ever seem to speak up in these circles? Is it because they’re all complicit in some way, because this behavior is so prevalent?

It is. There’s a complicity to this, because of either being embarrassed or fearful of rejection, or having a dependency on a particular person in the Church or threatened with physical harm personally or having family members threatened back home or they simply owe something to somebody else. Again, there are many within the clergy who owe a lot to McCarrick because of what he did or they wish to keep silent because of what they themselves were complicit in with McCarrick. So it’s the “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” scenario.

In the 2012 investigation, we were involved in situations where we provided some bishops with direct evidence of information associated with priests and seminarians. At times it was deemed prudent to not share all the information within a line of enquiry knowing already of their direct involvement in being complicit in suppressing information, but also to test to see if they would actually do something.

And they wouldn’t?

They wouldn’t. For example, the investigation would reveal further evidence, that is direct proof and clarification, which would be made known to a certain bishop or an archbishop and that person would be complicit in the deflection and suppressing of information, even to the point of destroying evidence — in some cases providing a bishop with information that the evidence exists, where to find it, who has it, and then finding out afterwards that it had disappeared without a trace. And this was common, and unfortunately remains common.

Read the entire interview. 

Some of us have been saying since at least 2002: you will never, ever get the full picture of the Catholic clerical abuse scandal until you also understand the way homosexual networks of influence work within the institutional Church. There is a reason why the late Richard Sipe, the man who knew more than any other American about the sociological phenomenon of clerical sexual abuse, told me in 2002, on the record, that gay men should not be ordained at the present time.

Sipe was a Vatican II liberal, and he said what he said not because he believed gay men could not be good priests. Rather, he said it because he said the networks of exploitation were so extensive and so powerful within the Catholic clergy in the US that a gay man who intended to live chastely would face a hellacious press from priests, seminary rectors, and others, to act on it. And once they acted on it, said Sipe, they were neutralized. Even if they were chaste for the rest of their lives, the fact of their having compromised once would make them blackmailable, and commit them to turning a blind eye to sexual misconduct among other priests. Therefore, according to Sipe, gay men shouldn’t be ordained to protect them from this system that would exploit, abuse, and instrumentalize them.

We will never see the mainstream media tell this story. Ever. Last year, the gay French journalist Frederic Martel published a celebrated book purporting to expose the rampant gay culture in the Vatican. Unfortunately, as I noted here, the book was so badly written that it became impossible to tell what was credible and what was mere gossip.

I became aware of the Pentin interview with Father Lavers when it was sent to me by a Catholic parish priest, who adds:

If the Register story is true, this pulls back the curtain in a stunning fashion. I can’t vouch for the priest being interviewed, but it seems he was considered solid enough as a former secular investigator to be part of an inquiry into homosexual stuff at a seminary in CT. This revealed DEEP layers of grooming, including drawing young men from Latin American into the seminary for this purpose. It points to specific priests and prelates, with McCarrick as a node or perhaps pinnacle of activity. The first half of the interview speaks to the McCarrick Report, but the later half gives more of what he found in his investigations. It’s about as bad as our worst case scenarios have been–not just fellow travelers or small groups of manipulators, but in some cases massive conspiracy.

I can’t imagine the investigation this priest recounts has ever been publicly discussed. I wish the secular press would interview him and get on it.

Me too. If it comes from someone like me, or any other figure in conservative journalism, it will instantly be dismissed. It needs to be done by a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Washington Post, or some publication at that level. At this point, I do not believe that it will be done. Why? Because the findings stand to knock the legs out from beneath part of the progressive Catholic narrative about homosexuality, and vindicate what right-wing Catholics have been saying for a long time.

So, ordinary Catholics will remain in the dark about what’s really going on within their clergy’s circles, and who can be trusted. Notice that Father Lavers said that bishops destroying evidence “was common, and remains common.”

A Catholic priest friend of mine was at a conference when the McCarrick news broke in 2018. He was standing next to a prominent liberal Catholic journalist, whose reaction was something like, “McCarrick! This could bring the whole thing down.” His point, in context, was that McCarrick was the personal incarnation of the nexus between gay sex and money within the Catholic hierarchy. That journalist, who has written favorably about Pope Francis and his re-orienting the Church around progressive initiatives, has scarcely written about the McCarrick case.

UPDATE: A Catholic priest e-mails:

First, I have never seen or heard of these kinds of parties.  Although, being straight, I wouldn’t have.

Second, what I have seen is “like attracts like.”  I have seen examples of how certain chanceries, seminaries, administrations get a malignant homosexual in charge and that person begins to attract and recruit more men like him.  A malignant homosexual will want other malignant homosexuals around him to, at first, maintain a lavender/effeminate/dissenting culture.  As that culture continues, I think that’s where it leads to further exploitive behaviors that become systemic.

Third, I have rarely seen a homosexual in a position of power who did not bring more of them around him.  I don’t know if this is always intentional and malignant, but it definitely happens.

You will often see this kind of thing when a bishop keeps promoting young/handsome/orthodox priests into positions that seem beyond their years.  They get promoted or are brought close with little to no experience.  I’m not saying all of them are gay, but there is definitely something about older homosexual men wanting younger effeminate men around him.  I’ve seen this dynamic in religious houses, seminaries and chanceries.  “How did that guy get that position, he just got ordained?”  He fits the type: young, handsome, idealistic, conservative, charismatic, clearly someone higher up is choosing him because of externals and is attracted to him in some way.

Main conclusion: homosexuals are a huge problem in the church.  I do know some who are ok, but not many.  Even the ones who have kept out of trouble have serious problems with Church teaching.  The reason it doesn’t change?  e.g. A bishop is gay, he promotes gay men into high ranking positions in his diocese, they get on the terna to become future bishops.  The gay subculture has become the predominant culture.  I fear we are at a place where it is so pervasive that it cannot change.  Bishops won’t connect homosexuality with the abuse crisis because so many of them are gay.  They also won’t tell the truth about McCarrick for the same reason.

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