Rod Dreher's Blog, page 96

Woke Preacher: Live Not By Lies Is ‘Dangerous’

In today’s news of Big Tech wokeness, Facebook has announced a new policy instituting a hierarchy of hate to guide its policing of racist speech. From the Washington Post:

Facebook is embarking on a major overhaul of its algorithms that detect hate speech, according to internal documents, reversing years of so-called “race-blind” practices.

Those practices resulted in the company being more vigilant about removing slurs lobbed against White users while flagging and deleting innocuous posts by people of color on the platform.

The overhaul, which is known as the WoW Project and is in its early stages, involves re-engineering Facebook’s automated moderation systems to get better at detecting and automatically deleting hateful language that is considered “the worst of the worst,” according to internal documents describing the project obtained by The Washington Post. The “worst of the worst” includes slurs directed at Blacks, Muslims, people of more than one race, the LGBTQ community and Jews, according to the documents.

As one way to assess severity, Facebook assigned different types of attacks numerical scores weighted based on their perceived harm. For example, the company’s systems would now place a higher priority on automatically removing statements such as “Gay people are disgusting” than “Men are pigs.”

Facebook has long banned hate speech — defined as violent or dehumanizing speech — based on race, gender, sexuality and other protected characteristics. It owns Instagram and has the same hate speech policies there. But before the overhaul, the company’s algorithms and policies did not make a distinction between groups that were more likely to be targets of hate speech versus those that have not been historically marginalized. Comments like “White people are stupid” were treated the same as anti-Semitic or racist slurs.

In the first phase of the project, which was announced internally to a small group in October, engineers said they had changed the company’s systems to deprioritize policing contemptuous comments about “Whites,” “men” and “Americans.” Facebook still considers such attacks to be hate speech, and users can still report it to the company. However, the company’s technology now treats them as “low-sensitivity” — or less likely to be harmful — so that they are no longer automatically deleted by the company’s algorithms. That means roughly 10,000 fewer posts are now being deleted each day, according to the documents.

All race hatred is equal, but some forms of race hatred is more equal than others.

The important thing to see here is that race neutrality — one standard for all — is considered bad because it results in outcomes that the woke see as intolerable. You’d think that the Washington Post would at least question that illiberal premise in its report, but no, the Washington Post is a newspaper that publishes a puff-piece interview with Ijeoma Oluo, a black writer who says white males are the source of evil in the modern world. No questioning this toxic thesis at all. Hard-hitting questions, like:

This is not a student newspaper. This is the main daily newspaper in the capital of the most powerful nation on earth. It’s from an interview with an author whose thesis is that white men make America bad. And the Post writer just assumes that this is a normal thing to say. I guess it is among American elites and their institutions.

Take a look at the first chapter of the book, via Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. As you read it, replace “white men” with “Jews” in the rhetoric. Or with “black men”. You will immediately recognize this as racialist propaganda designed to convince the reader to hate its targets. It would be one thing to hold up to critical examination the role that white males play in our society, and have played historically. That is a legitimate target of discussion and debate. But that’s not what this book is about, to judge from what’s available. This is a book about demonization. Again, if a book were published in this country in which Jews (or any minority) were written about in these terms, and in this tone, it would immediately be recognized as hateful. Instead, Oluo gets a softball interview in the Post in which she is never once challenged about her thesis, but is instead given the opportunity to discuss how writing about the evils of the white man really wears her out. Isn’t that just like the crafty white man, to make people wear themselves out telling him how bad he is?

The point is not that Oluo holds these contemptible views about people on the basis of their race and sex. The point is that this kind of obnoxious radicalism is absorbed without question by the class that controls the means of cultural production in this country. This matters. This is the kind of thing that the people who escaped Soviet communism are trying to warn us about, and that I talk about in Live Not By Lies. They are conditioning people to scapegoat and persecute. What Facebook is now doing — abandoning its race-neutral policy on hate speech, and declaring that hate speech against whites, males, and other Deplorables, is not as bad — is just one more mile marker on the road to whatever horrible system they are building. In my book, I quote the cultural critic René Girard’s line from the turn of this century:

“The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.”

Speaking of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill, I suppose I am obliged to inform you that someone on the woke Evangelical Left has taken notice of Live Not By Lies, and has written a review of it. I knew that Greg Thompson’s review was coming, and that it was going to be harsh, but I had not expected that I would reach the end of it and be laughing out loud. No kidding. He doesn’t call me a “racist,” but he does call me blasphemer of the Holy Trinity. It’s that kind of review.

I’ve read it three times, trying to figure out how to respond, but in all honesty, I can’t. The review is so spectacularly dishonest in its characterization of what I have actually written that to begin to address the criticism would require me to write something as long as he did. I mean, this is a review that faults me for being illiberal, and for being too quick to dismiss the problems with liberalism. Well, which is it? Again, it’s that kind of review.

The part that gives the game away is when Thompson faults me for writing a book about anti-communist dissidents in the Soviet bloc instead of writing a book about his favorite topic, the struggles of black Christians. Even though I make it clear in the introduction that the idea for Live Not By Lies came from meeting emigres from the Soviet bloc to America who told me that they sense something arising here that they thought they had left behind, Thompson is sure that I have a nefarious reason for this. After all, he said, I could have talked to Americans in the black church, who have lived through and are living through present-day totalitarianism (he really does say that totalitarianism in America is “a past and present reality”). I didn’t do this, he alleges, because black people would have laughed at my thesis. Um, no; I didn’t do this because I was interested at first in why people who lived under Soviet totalitarianism think that something similar is starting to emerge here. As is perfectly obvious in the introduction.

Greg Thompson is mad that I didn’t write the book Greg Thompson would have written, and more to the point, he’s mad because my book identifies people who believe the things Thompson believes as the problem. That’s fine — the fox naturally does not like it when someone endeavors to warn the hens that a fox is on the prowl. It’s interesting to note that in his long jeremiad, Thompson doesn’t really deny that the things I say are happening are actually happening. He just denies that they are bad. On this, we disagree so profoundly that I don’t see grounds for constructive dialogue. Honestly, when a reviewer construes my remark in Live Not By Lies that “there is nowhere to hide” — by which I mean that faithful Christians should not think they can escape this stuff — as “blaspheming the Trinity,” I realize that we live on the same planet, but in different worlds. Oh well.

Thompson is a white liberal social-gospeller (to use an old-fashioned term) who has co-written a book (to be published next year) about why white Christians should give reparations to black people. When it comes out, he can count on a lot of favorable attention from the mainstream media (which has ignored Live Not By Lies, but I expected that), which will ask him no hard questions about his thesis, which I’m guessing would require, if enacted, expropriating money from some Americans, on the basis of race, for redistribution to other Americans, on the basis of race. It will no doubt come as a surprise to these pale-skinned emigres from Eastern Europe and Russia that they will owe money to the descendants of black slaves to pay for the sins of the well-off white people of generations and centuries past. All that matters is skin color. From Live Not By Lies:

[A]n American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship.

The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool, and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

No, I am not saying the Greg Thompsons of America are going to inflict Red Terror on us. What I am saying is that the same orientation to justice as a matter of collective guilt is what animates the Social Justice side — and that it will inevitably lead to great injustice. This is precisely what the people who lived under the Soviet version of this understand, and why they are so anxious right now. In a Facebook post not too long ago, Thompson dismissed people who see Marxist tendencies within the social justice movement as snowflakes who have their feelings hurt. Read the post, and you’ll see that he’s managed to insulate himself against any criticism of the Social Justice Left as being in bad faith. He’s got the Washington Post on his side, and the most powerful media company in the world, Facebook, and the cultural wind at his back. Kulaks of the world, be warned.

Look, it is quite possible that I’ve written a bad book. But I think in this case, the book could be nothing other than bad to a woke preacher like Greg Thompson, not because it fails to understand his causes, but because it understands them well. I am reminded of leftist intellectual Susan Sontag’s memorable, extremely controversial remarks at a 1982 conference about the Solidarity trade union movement. Addressing her leftist and liberal audience, Sontag said:

“Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?”

Fifteen years from now, compare Live Not By Lies, the work of a journalist, to the contemptuous review of the learned University of Virginia PhD, and let’s see who had a clearer vision of the deepest meaning of wokeness. I have every confidence in my book’s vindication.

Thompson writes:

I find Live Not by Lies to be so utterly egregious. And not simply egregious but, in spite of its quavering affect and hunted ethos, dangerous.

Good. To woke ideologues like Pastor Thompson, it is supposed to be.

The post Woke Preacher: Live Not By Lies Is ‘Dangerous’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Race-Ideology Thuggery Destroying Haverford

Congratulations to all you Left Coast companies relocating to Texas, a much saner place to live and to do business. But don’t think you’re going to get away from the crazy. Look at what’s going on at the University of North Texas, in Denton, thanks to the school’s Division of Institutional Equity And Diversity:

Hey, it’s voluntary — but are you sure you don’t want to go, white professor? Live by lies — or live on unemployment.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Kay writes about racial panic at Haverford, in suburban Philadelphia. Excerpts:

It’s a long story, but also an important one, as the mania that swept Haverford College in late October and early November 2020 lays bare, with unusual clarity, the fervid atmosphere of grievance and self-entitlement that has made the administration of elite colleges and universities so difficult.

I cannot possibly do the story justice by quoting excerpts. Haverford is an ultraliberal campus. Seriously, there are about as many self-identified conservatives on campus as there are transsexuals (according to a student survey). Over 90 percent of the students identify as some form of leftist. Yet to read the absolutely screaming-meemie racial hysteria into which the activist students threw the entire campus, and how the left-wing mob intimidated everyone into backing down, is to confront a totally decadent culture that will probably destroy the university — unless the university’s leadership can destroy it first. Unfortunately, as Kay writes, that’s not likely to happen. The university surrendered to all the revolutionaries’ demands — but even that wasn’t enough. Kay:

When campus meltdowns of this type occur, you often see conservative culture warriors demand that administrators take a hard line, demonstrate backbone, “grow a spine,” and so forth. But what is their incentive for doing so? It was once the case that a university president was able to balance different constituencies against one another as a means to achieve some kind of policy equilibrium—liberal students versus more conservative professors, administrators against alumni, this department versus that. But that doesn’t happen anymore: Thanks to the homogenizing effects of social media, all of these constituencies tend to be drinking the same bathwater from the same troughs, and so get caught up in the same social panics at the same time.

One of my interviewees was a recent Haverford graduate who’d actually been thrown out of an online alumni group in early November for pushing back against strike cheerleading. He showed me a November 3rd letter, signed by no fewer than 202 alumni, instructing the administration to meet the strikers’ demands. Until such time as that happened, the alumni warned, they’d be “withholding donations to the Haverford College Annual Fund” and “speaking to other alumni of the college and urging them to take the same actions.”

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Not so long ago, one might have been able to count on the naturally oppositional reflexes of young adults as a counterbalance to this kind of crowdsourced social panic. But the social justice movement has narrowed the acceptable target set for acts of defiance, encouraging students to reflexively push upstream against both real institutional hierarchies and constructed intersectional hierarchies of race and sex. As I learned in my interviews, moreover, today’s college students have become desensitized to forms of surveillance that their civil-rights forebears would have found intolerable. During the strike, every Haverford student was being monitored by two separate surveillance regimes generating publicly reported data: (1) a COVID-19 testing regime administered by the school, and (2) a crowdsourced peer-to-peer ideological testing regime administered by students themselves. In this kind of environment, the cautionary tales contained in books such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, which once figured prominently in discussions about intellectual conformity, have lost their power.

As for the administration, its leaders know that the best problems to have are the ones you solve with money—especially if that money belongs to the wealthy parents of privileged children. Haverford tuition, which currently stands at about $54,000, presumably will go up to pay for all those promised goodies Raymond agreed to. But having cleverly marketed her concessions as “equity advances,” the college now can claim that it’s simply upselling customers to a better product. And while the treatment of Raymond, Bylander, and Strong-Leek during that Zoom call was mortifying, the strike is now over, and they still have their high-paying jobs. All they traded for them was their dignity. And in a market economy, that’s their decision to make.

Read it all. You really need to — the details are genuinely shocking, even at this late date.

You have got to be out of your mind to want to send your kid to Haverford, or to go there. It is a complete radical nuthouse. Would you want your kid to be subject to this kind of pressure and abuse? Jonathan Kay writes:

The process of sifting through these events at Haverford has convinced me that the ideological crisis on American campuses can’t be solved by administrators—not because they are beholden to critical race theory, intersectionality, gender ideology, postmodernism, or any of the other bugbears of conservative culture critics, but because they simply have no practical inducements for doing so. Ultimately, this is a crisis that is going to have to be addressed, if at all, by students themselves.

An interesting observation. What do you readers who are faculty, administrators, or staff at colleges and universities think? I’m eager to hear.

Really, please do read Jonathan Kay’s amazing report from Haverford. These thuggish students and their collaborators within Haverford are really destroying that institution. It’s not hyperbole. And tell me this: who is going to draw and defend a line in the sand at the University of North Texas — and at every other college and university in this country?

Kay’s conclusion — that the only people who can stop this madness are students — seems to indicate that wokeness has become the standard ideology of middle class and professional America. Doesn’t it?

UPDATE: Related, this recent video from The Cut asks, “What are white people superior at?” All the respondents are black. The general answer is, to sum it up, “Not a damn thing.” The question itself is racist and provocative. The Cut, based in Seattle, has 10.2 million subscribers to its YouTube channel.

Do these smartypants progressives really think they’re going to get away with this? This is how you are going to get the future Donald Trump.

The post Race-Ideology Thuggery Destroying Haverford appeared first on The American Conservative.

Father Rutler’s Scandal

You might have heard about the case of Father George Rutler, the conservative celebrity Catholic priest who has stepped away from his pulpit at his Manhattan parish pending the conclusion of a police investigation. Catholic News Agency reports:

Ashley Gonzalez, a 22-year-old security guard with MG Security Services, went public Nov. 26 with an allegation that Rutler forcibly groped her, after she had allegedly seen the priest, late at night, watching homosexual pornography on an office computer in the church rectory.

Rutler is the author of over 30 books and is a well-known public speaker and television commentator on EWTN.  He has also been a frequent contributor to the National Catholic Register. The archdiocese told News12 there have been no other allegations raised against Rutler in the past.

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The alleged incident happened around 1:20am Nov. 4, Gomez said. He said Gonzalez contacted him at 2:45am asking for help, and that he helped her to file a police report that morning.

The alleged incident took place during Gonzalez’s second night on the job, Gomez said.

According to Gonzalez, Rutler had offered that she could sit in his office when she was not actively doing her rounds. Gonzalez had finished her first set of rounds at around 1:15am and was sitting in the office texting her mother when Rutler entered the office and greeted Gonzalez.

He then sat down at the computer and checked the ongoing General Election results, Gonzalez alleges, before beginning to watch a homosexual pornographic video. Gonzalez said she filmed Rutler with her cellphone as he did so.

The CNA reporter has seen the video, and said the bald man (they didn’t identify him as Rutler, because one doesn’t see his face) is clearly watching gay porn. I spoke to a different journalist who has also seen the video, and he told me there is no doubt at all that it’s gay porn.

Whether or not Father Rutler groped the guard, the evidence appears clear that she caught him watching gay porn, and recorded it. Maybe there is a good explanation for this, but I can’t imagine what that would be. Even if Rutler is cleared of the groping allegation, if the porn thing is confirmed, his career as a priest is over, and ought to be.

People outside the Catholic world may not be aware that George Rutler is one of the most famous conservative priests in the country. He has been a staple on EWTN, the Catholic channel, for many years. He is a powerful homilist, and presents himself as a flinty archconservative who suffers no fools gladly. I met him once, and was not surprised at all to learn that one of his prized possessions is the pen with which Pius IX signed the Vatican I document certifying papal infallibility. I was surprised, given his posh mid-Atlantic accent, to learn that Father Rutler is a native not of Old Lyme, Connecticut, or of Boston’s Back Bay, but of New Jersey.

The traditionalist Catholic writer Steve Skojec says that the Rutler allegations are “a kick in the teeth”. Excerpt:

[I]t has become an exceedingly rare thing to find a priest or a bishop who will risk sticking his neck out and saying the hard things that need saying. Who will risk declaring that the emperor has no clothes. And this is why, when we do find them, we celebrate them as champions.

One of these men, one of the most consistent of these priests over my own lifetime, has been Fr. George Rutler. He is considered an absolute treasure by virtually every orthodox Catholic who has had the pleasure of reading his writings or hearing him speak.

A lot of conservative Catholics feel that way about Father Rutler. This is why some are indulging in conspiracy theories that the video of him (apparently) watching gay porn must be a deep fake. Folks find it very hard to take one more hero falling into disgrace. But unless there’s a surprise vindication yet to come, it looks like that is exactly what has happened to George Rutler.

Sadly, it is not a surprise these days to discover that a priest has a porn problem. So many men in this society do, and given the awful cascade of revelations about Catholic priests, especially sexually incontinent gay men within the priesthood, we can’t be all that shocked anymore. But it really is a shock to learn this about a priest who has become so admired and even beloved for his orthodoxy. From a conservative point of view, Father Rutler was one of the unambiguously good guys standing tall in a low, dishonest time. If it turns out that he was a secret gay porn addict, it’s hard to overstate how demoralizing that will be to many, many Catholics.

It is always a tragedy when any priest falls from grace like this. But when one who has been so public for so long, preaching Catholic orthodoxy, falls into this kind of serious sin, it is a real scandal — a stumbling block for others. “Even Father Rutler…”. To those whom much is given, much is expected. If you cannot trust that a man like George Rutler does not amuse himself by watching men screw each other, who can you trust?

Rutler’s fall — again, if it is confirmed, but my source said the video is unambiguous — gives ammunition to those within the Catholic Church who wish to liberalize its teachings on homosexuality. They will say that it forces gay priests to be hypocrites. (And not just gay priests: I don’t know if the married conservative Hungarian lawmaker who supported anti-LGBT legislation, but was just arrested in Brussels when cops busted a gay orgy, was a Catholic, but he was certainly a kind of hypocrite.)

Now, it is true as a matter of logic that a man’s failure to live up to a moral principle he endorses does not invalidate the moral principle; it only proves that the man is a sinner. Anyone who sins — and that’s all of us — would be hypocrites in that case. For example, I believe adultery is a grave sin, but if I were caught in adultery, that would not negate the claim that adultery is sinful. It would only make me a grave sinner who needs to repent.

But if I, who has built a reputation as a moralistic Christian writer, were to commit adultery, the effect of it would be more serious than if an ordinary Joe Blow did. I would be excoriated in the public square, and would deserve to be. It would be very hard for me to come back from that, professionally. Fair or not, my moral failure would discredit my writing. And it would not be fair, because my personal moral failure would not testify to the unsoundness of my principles, but of my character. Still, nobody would ever take me seriously again. That’s just how it works.

As I have gotten older, though, I have become no less committed to my principles, but I have become more tolerant of people’s frailty. When I was younger, and recently married, there was a man in my hometown who cheated on his wife. The man had the reputation of being upright. When I heard the news from my sister about Mr. So-and-so, I was harshly judgmental. I was thinking of that man (who has since died) just the other day, after a conversation I had with a pastor about the struggles of his congregation. I thought about how Mrs. So-and-so had a reputation for being difficult to live with, a bitter and reproachful woman. How do I know what went on in that marriage? Even the best marriages have their ups and downs, as any married couple can tell you. What were the particular circumstances that caused Mr. So-and-so to violate his marriage vows? I don’t know, obviously, and whatever those circumstances, it was objectively wrong. But I am far less willing to pass harsh judgment on Mr. So-and-so than I was 18 years ago, when my sister told me the news.

The So-and-sos stayed married until he died, so I guess she forgave him. The point is, life is long and life is hard. I know the weaknesses of my own character, and living with them has caused me to become more merciful to others. Twenty years ago, if I had heard the George Rutler news, I would have been full of anger at him, and wanted to see him made an example of (if the gay porn allegations were true, that is). Now, I am mad at him, and if true, he should be forcibly retired as pastor, because his credibility as a spiritual father would be shot. But I find myself pitying him more than I ever would. Why? Because, as I said, life is long and life is hard. The things people do out of loneliness, anger, sadness, grief, humiliation, and so forth, and their inability to carry the pain that that suffering brings — it’s so, so much, the things people carry.

What a gift the Christian mechanism for repentance, forgiveness, and restoration is. I get mad at wrongdoers who expect their wrongs to be forgiven without any evidence of real repentance. But for those who are truly sorry for what they did, I am grateful that we have the command by Christ to show mercy. We are losing it, though, as woke standards take hold. A Catholic friend said he wonders if Father Rutler, age 75, might be suffering from early onset dementia. What if that were true, and Father Rutler had fought a lifelong battle against destructive sexual passions, but the loss of his mental acuity was releasing those inner demons? (I don’t think it’s true with Rutler, who seems quite sharp in his recent video appearances, but it’s an interesting theory). I told him that I had been thinking not long ago about what humiliating things I might do or say if I were suffering from dementia.

My friend said, “You can be sure that there will be no forgiveness.” No, not anymore, not in this culture.

As I was writing this post, a workman came over to do some home repairs for us. I had been really irritated with him for not returning my calls. He came highly recommended, so the only reason we stuck with him despite his not returning my calls was because a friend of ours who had used him said he was really good at his job, and reliable.

He seems like a kind and gentle soul. We were just having a “2020, what a terrible year” conversation. He mentioned to me that Covid has been the least of his worries this year. Back in April, he caught his wife having an affair. She had done this two years ago, but he forgave her and took her back. They have kids. He’s Catholic. Then, she cheated again, and this time he put her out. He said that this has rocked his world, and thrown everything off balance. Well, of course. The poor man probably struggles to put one foot in front of the other. He said his priest has been a big help to him through this crisis, but it has been very hard.

Being slow to return phone calls to a potential new client is hardly a sin, but I still felt kind of bad for being irritated by it. The things this man is carrying — my God. “I thought we would be together until one of us died,” he said, softly.

Anyway, if Rutler really did watch gay porn, and certainly if he assaulted this security guard, at the very least he has some hard penance to do — especially because his moral failures will have discouraged the many people who looked up to him as a spiritual father and leader. This kind of thing has a lot to do with why I could no longer carry on as a Catholic. Learning from 2001 to 2005, reporting on the scandal, that so many Catholic priests and bishops were really moral frauds took a devastating toll on my faith. I kept telling myself the truth: that the sins of the priests do not negate the truths the Church proclaims. It’s one thing to keep that in your mind as an intellectual proposition, but another thing to be able to hold onto it in your heart.

When a priest my family and I were growing close to — a phony who put on orthodox airs — proved to be a liar, something broke within me and my wife. He had, in fact, been formally accused of molesting a minor male (though this was never proven, in the end), and removed from ministry in another part of the country. We had male children. “We can never trust them again,” she said, through tears. And she was right. We really trusted this guy, and thought that we couldn’t be fooled. And it turned out that he was not who he said he was. The local priest put him to work in the parish, off the books, without telling the bishop or the congregation.

Between those two, my ability to trust priests, which had been sorely tested for years, vanished. Just like that. Same with my wife. It was as if a thief broke into the house and stole it right out of our hands. We didn’t realize it at the time, but when we lost the ability to trust the clergy not to be perverts and liars, we lost the ability to stay Catholic — this, even though again, we knew that the sins of the priests do not negate the moral and theological truths proclaimed by the Church.

But religious faith is not a matter of logic setting everything to right. Something can be true, but a man, for whatever reason or reasons, cannot receive that truth. The workman in my house was just telling me that he doesn’t know if he will ever be able to marry again, simply because his wife’s double betrayal shattered his ability to trust. Does this mean that marriage is bad, or that all women are untrustworthy? No, not at all. But it means that this one man was so broken by experience that he cannot be receptive to the kind of faith needed to remarry. At least not yet.

This, I think, is the greater sin of priests like Father Rutler, who get caught in serious sin (assuming that he’s guilty, which he denies): that they make it harder for people like me, who are weaker in faith, to trust religious authority. And they make it harder for good priests who deserve the trust of their people to be spiritual fathers to them, because scandals like this bring all clergy under suspicion. If even Father Rutler…

Steve Skojec writes:

When I look at the Church these days — at the ascendancy of evil, at the relentless attacks upon what is good, at the endless (though sometimes justifiable) infighting, at the inability to trust anyone — I feel like a beaten dog, wanting to flinch away into the safety of a hidden place to lick my wounds.

There is no disposition one can adopt in a matter like this that feels like solid ground. Our ability to trust in our priests has been utterly shattered, and that is a tragedy.

Of course, we are also all-too-aware of our own propensity to sin. Most of us, if we’re being honest about it, should be horrified by what we are capable of: “There but for the grace of God go I…”

But how? How do men who start out with good intentions go so wrong? How is it that all of us are capable of shocking betrayals of our consciences and beliefs?

We walk through a vale of tears.

UPDATE: A friend who works in the video field, and who has seen the original clip purporting to be of Rutler watching gay porn, says this story stinks to high heaven. He said it could be valid, but it seems entirely out of character with Rutler, and that one does not have to have deep fake technology to falsify the video images supposedly being shown on Rutler’s screen. Friend says it is also extremely weird that the second phone call the woman made in the middle of the night after this alleged incident happened is to a private investigator. And not just any PI, but Manuel Gomez, who was profiled last year in The New York Times. Excerpts:

As a private investigator, Gomez looks for cases that seem to reveal police wrongdoing. He has cultivated relationships with local television reporters and often appears on their shows to denounce cops and prosecutors. He thrives on the attention. At 51, he’s built like a safe, strong and square, and he dresses like the detectives he grew up watching on TV, in shiny shoes, double-breasted pinstripe suits and shirts with his initials stitched into the cuffs. At times he talks like a hard-boiled action hero. “I see myself as a punisher for the wicked and a bringer of justice to the innocent,” he told me. “I protect the weak.”

More:

But as I followed Gomez over the course of a year and a half and multiple investigations, watching him attack the credibility of cops and prosecutors in New York, it became clear that Gomez had credibility issues of his own. His single-mindedness, though clearly an asset to his clients, could also be a liability. He could be rash to the point of recklessness. He had a history of aggression and violence. And he sometimes overlooked facts that didn’t conform to his preconceived ideas of justice and injustice. Some cases his clients have brought against the city and the police have been dismissed with prejudice by the courts. Goldberg told me that even if his clients were out of options, he’d advise against hiring Gomez. “I am loath to believe anything the man says,” he told me.

That’s a big red flag. I’m very glad that the DA’s office in New York is investigating the Rutler situation. Their computer forensics team should be able to determine whether or not Rutler really did watch gay porn as the woman claims. I expect that they are also examining the video she took, to determine if there are signs that it was tampered with.

And, a parish priest sends this:

Some thoughts for you and your readers:

Men don’t generally become priests because they desire to be celibate.  They become priests because they believe they are called by God.  Celibacy, obedience and all the rest are what comes with it.  They have to figure all of that out.  Imagine you trying to reconcile a celibate life starting around 20 years old?  Yes, everyone is supposed to be chaste if they aren’t married, but I don’t know many men who are 100% successful at that age.  I know many heterosexual men who remained in seminary despite having very real possibilities of leaving for a woman and a relationship.  They didn’t stay because they weren’t torn or didn’t desire marriage and children, they stayed because they believe the call to priesthood was stronger.
Perhaps 90% of the confessions from laymen include pornography.  It’s everywhere and almost everyone is looking at it even if they are not addicted.  Why should a priest be held to a higher standard?  Morally everyone is to be held to the same standard.  Why do people expect a priest to not be tempted by the same things that every man is tempted by?  Why do people expect priests to be morally superior?  Why is that something that they need from priests?  I don’t claim to be any better than anyone else.  I know I’m not.  Why do other people need that from me?  If you need someone else to be morally pure so that your faith remains strong, that’s a problem for you.

It’s different to say that you would hope a priest is pursuing a life of holiness since they have committed to living that way.  Even that having holy priests is a good thing in general for the Church.  No doubt it is.  Yet, despite hearing from saints over the centuries about how hard sanctity is we are still surprised when others don’t achieve it.

Every time this happens, we hear the usual lamenting from people that their faith is shaken.  Many lay people have this need and desire to put priests on a pedestal.  There are usually one or two national priests on such pedestals at a time.  They inevitably fall because life is hard and filled with all kinds of difficulties.  Priests are sinners.  Stop putting priests on a pedestal.  It’s often the fame that attracts the temptations.  Stop needing there to be a priest who is morally superior.  If you are scandalized by a priest failing morally, it’s your problem because you aren’t treating him like a human being.  There is a temptation to want priests to be angels and not men.  People often want someone else to embody what they cannot achieve.  Often this is where they put priests.  Honestly, people just need to grow up.
If we made public any one of your readers’ moral failings, who could stand the scrutiny?  I guarantee if we took a snapshot (or video) of an isolated incident of someone’s life they would be destroyed as well.  I don’t know a man who could survive.  We are in a precipitous decline in our culture and every person is being affected by it.  Priests will be as well.  They come from the culture and the widespread use of pornography.  To be sure abuse is in a different category, but to expect that priests won’t be affected is incredibly naïve.  The weird priests are usually the ones who claim to never have looked at porn and are afraid of their own manhood.  I’m actually serious here.  The priests who are maladjusted are not the ones who have never committed a sexual sin, it’s the ones who either deny having done so or the ones who deny it’s an issue.
Should his ministerial career be over because he watched gay porn?  I don’t think because of that alone.  (That he apparently watched it in front of someone he knew was there is far more troubling.)  Where is the line in the sand as to what sins invalidate a ministerial career?  Porn, alcoholism, theft, pride, sloth, a romantic dalliance with a woman?  We are told pride is the worst sin by far and that sins of the flesh are lesser sins.  If we start removing men from ministry because they sinned mortally then we are in real trouble.  Recall the Donatist controversy?  We have been down this road before and over a far worse sin.  Personally, I would rather have a church full of priests who have sinned, have repented and truly become humble than be left with a bunch of sanctimonious, prideful judgmental priests.  Trust me, you want to go to confession to the “sinner priest,” not the other kind.  They don’t know mercy because they don’t think they need it.  So, they also don’t offer it.
Don’t trust anyone until they earn it.  I don’t trust a priest because he’s a priest.  He has to earn it and he can lose it.  Just like anyone else.  Be skeptical of any priest who is harsh or super “orthodox.”  It’s usually a sign of internal struggle.

It’s not the worst thing that priests fail morally.  It can actually help the Church.  Not directly, but indirectly.  Life is hard, purity is hard, postmodernism life is hard.  Everyone is affected.  We are all fighting a huge battle, every single one of us.

That was really good and thoughtful. Thank you, Father. You’ve given me a lot to ponder.

The post Father Rutler’s Scandal appeared first on The American Conservative.

At Home In Helm’s Deep

I was on the phone with a conservative Christian friend this morning, talking about the state of things in our country. We are both pretty downcast about what these last few weeks have revealed about contemporary conservatism, and the Christian church in America.

To summarize our conversation, what grieves us is this:

The belief among many of our fellow conservative Christians that the only meaningful measure of Christian presence in the world is power; and
The inability to come to terms with the fact of Donald Trump’s election loss, such that it compels people to believe things that are demonstrably untrue

Let me say a few things about both points, which are related.

A fairly common critique of my 2017 book The Benedict Option is that it is quietist in the face of cultural attack. Most of the people who say this, like most of the people who accuse the book of advocating heading for the hills, give no sign of actually having read the book. But let’s say that they did read the book, and do believe genuinely that my program amounts to surrender. How do I respond?

First, I do not counsel abandoning politics. Right now, there are pro-Trump conservatives telling Georgia voters to stay at home on January 5, withholding their votes in the two Senate runoffs to punish the GOP for supposedly not fighting hard enough to defend President Trump in this allegedly stolen election. This would be a monumentally self-sabotaging move. The Democratic Party holds the House, and it will also have the White House soon. If it can claim the Senate, there will be nothing to stop the Democrats from enacting their agendas. A Republican-controlled Senate is the only restraint. You may think ill of the GOP, but if you are any kind of conservative, I see no alternative but to vote Republican in Georgia — and at the same time, work to reform the party from within.

Second, the problem with so many Christian conservatives is that they are far too involved in politics, wrongly seeing gaining political power as the summum bonum of our lives. What good does it do to have politicians who vote as you like if you have failed to pass on the faith to your children? Look at these data from the Pew Center, on the rapid decline of religious belief and observance in America. The decline has been underway since the early 1990s, through both Republican and Democratic administrations. Overall it is better to have a government that is favorable, or at least not hostile, to religious belief and practice than one that is not. But it profits a church nothing to gain all the political power in the world, but lose the next generation to Christ.

Philip Rieff made clear in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) that a social order begins to die when its older members cannot transmit its values to their young. This is America today. How can we possibly hope to evangelize the nation if we cannot even hold on to our own children? You may wish to believe that the main fight facing the churches is political, because that is the one you are most prepared for. But I am telling you that it’s not. It’s spiritual and cultural. The tide has turned against Christianity in Western civilization, and we Christians must face the hard fact that it will require heroic sanctity just to hold the ground we have. Politics are part of that struggle, but they aren’t the main part of it, and anyone who believes that is deluding themselves. This is Maginot Line Christianity: a Christianity that is prepared to fight the last war instead of the one actually upon us.

The Duke of Wellington is reputed to have said that the Battle of Waterloo was won upon the playing fields of Eton. The meaning is that the moral and intellectual formation of the British Army officer corps that took place in Britain’s elite schools provided the skills that proved decisive in the victory over Napoleon. Whether that is true or not, the battles, both miniature and epic, that lie ahead for the church will be won or lost based on the kinds of formative institutions — families, churches, Christian schools — that we establish now.

In Nashville recently, I met an Evangelical pastor from Portland, Oregon, who told me that three years ago, when The Benedict Option was published, he recalls many in the Evangelical world dismissing it as alarmist. What you wrote in that book, he said, is now our reality. In just the past three years, he said, he has seen the atmosphere in his city shift from one of tolerating the church as weird but essentially harmless to regarding it and its members as evil. “What we’re living through today is going to be reality for the rest of America tomorrow,” he warned.

Recently I was in touch with a young Evangelical pastor in Austin, Texas, and brought up what the Portland pastor told me. The Austin pastor said yes, they have seen the same thing in that liberal city, in the same period of time. “It’s incredible how fast this is all happening,” he told me.

I would point out to you that this has happened with Donald Trump in the White House, and Republicans in control of the Senate. In the first half of Trump’s presidency, Republicans also controlled the House of Representatives. If you think political power is sufficient to stop the Endarkening of Wokeness, you are dreaming.

There are a lot of conservative Christians in America who dream. They cannot bring themselves to accept that Donald Trump lost this election. I was on the phone the other day with a friend who insisted that Trump had this election stolen from him. What’s the evidence? My friend had none. I pointed out that I sort of know through Orthodox church circles Judge Stephanos Bibas, the Philadelphia federal judge who authored the opinion dismissing the Trump legal team’s challenge to the vote there. I told my friend that Judge Bibas is a brilliant man, profoundly conservative and morally upright. If he says there is no evidence to back Team Trump’s claims, then you can take that to the bank.

My friend insisted that no, Biden stole the election.

“But why?” I said, exasperated.

“It’s just a feeling.”

At which point I gave up. In Live Not By Lies, I quote Hannah Arendt on the reasons why people accept totalitarianism. One of the reasons is that people affirm as true whatever suits their emotional needs:

We are being conditioned to accept as true whatever feels right to us. As Arendt wrote about the pre-totalitarian masses:

They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent with itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

In my book, I talk about how this mentality has conquered the woke Left, and how old-fashioned liberals who know better are collapsing in the face of these ardent mob assaults. But let’s be honest: we have this on the Right too. If we give ourselves over to believing that our instincts alone reveal truth to us, we will believe any passionate liar whose rhetoric strikes a resonant chord. We can see this so clearly on the Left, but many of us are blind to the same fault within ourselves.

This morning a publicist for Live Not By Lies sent me a copy of a forthcoming review in The Classical Difference, a magazine of the classical school movement. I don’t think the review (by Ty Fischer and Joe Gerber) is online yet, but I can offer you these excerpts. The reviewers say that LNBL should be read in conjunction with The Benedict Option:

Before diving into the books, a few caveats. First, the better things are culturally where you are, the more you need to read these books because you have more time to prepare for the fight. These books will serve as confirmation for people who see the smoke from Mordor when picking up the paper. For those immersed in nominal American Christian culture somewhere, these books are a healthy slap in the face.

Second, read Dreher’s books in reverse order. Live Not By Lies, his most recent book, digs into the problem that we are facing in the soft totalitarianism championed by the cultural elites. The Benedict Option, published a few years ago, dwells on the solution: intentional, thick, communities that are wedded to the historic Christian faith, mindful of Christian history, and addicted to truth. Both books are riveting.

Both of Dreher’s works point readers toward the unvarnished truth. Both state that we have currently lost the culture war. While there are still pockets of Christian culture in communities, the levers of power in American politics, entertainment, art, and industry are, for the most part, no longer moved by Christians. In fact, these switches are being thrown to crush Christians who happen to mention that the Emperor is nude.

Dreher’s warnings are grounded on his study of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose 1974 essay also inspired the book’s title and its epigraph: “There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”

The idea that the better off (culturally) you are, the more you need to read these books, is a good insight, one that had not occurred to me. It means you still have some resources to work with. Again, pastors and others who are living in the most aggressively post-Christian local cultures are telling me that it can and will get so much worse. If your local culture is relatively sane by comparison, by no means assume that what has happened to Portland and Austin can’t happen where you live. It can, and it probably will. Use the advantage of time to build resistance. Classical Christian schools are citadels of cultural memory, and absolutely vital to the future of the faith in the new Dark Age.

The reviewers write:

Live Not By Lies reminds us of Aragorn and Theoden riding out of Helm’s Deep. My sense is that failing to stand for truth with a readiness to face suffering will cause us, a generation from now, to long for the day when we could come back to this day and look falsehood in the eye, and stand for Christ, truth, our children, and our neighbor.

If you are reading Live Not By Lies with a church or school group, here is a link to the free downloadable study guide I prepared. I really do believe that we are in a critical period in which Christians cannot waste the liberties we have to make ready for the long trials ahead. By all means, let us fight for religious liberty and other rights! But let us not be sidetracked by delusions, whether it’s about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, or by an eagerness to believe that political power is the key to defending the faith. If St. Benedict of Nursia, emerging from the ruins of the Roman Empire in the West, had built his mission on the political slogan Make Rome Great Again, and the mission that such a slogan entailed, we would never have heard of him again, and the future of the faith in the West would have been very, very different.

The battle we are fighting now is for the survival of the Christian faith in the West. Every man, and every woman, who professes the faith is needed, with clear eyes and brave hearts. We must put aside illusions, and strive to see the world as it is, not as we wish it were.

(By the way, readers, if you haven’t checked out my Substack newsletter, Daily Dreher, I invite you to do so. You can sign up to have it delivered every day in your e-mail. I usually post around midnight or later. It’s free for now; I work hard on it after my TAC workday is over, so I will eventually start charging a little something for it. Over there, I write more personally, and try to keep my focus on reasons to hope. It’s a good exercise for me, and I’m getting lots of positive feedback from readers.)

UPDATE: A reader who is part of the Anglican Church of North America sends this video address that his bishop gave to their recent diocesan meeting. In it, Bishop John Guernsey talks about the urgent need for the faithful to prepare for the trials ahead, and recommends Live Not By Lies as a guide. Thank you, Bishop Guernsey!

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

Interesting video from an ACNA diocesan bishop today. Funny. A couple of years ago the then and current Archbishop of the ACNA came to our parish, talked to the congregation a bit after the evening service and took a few questions. Once things broke up and people started heading home I calmly asked him privately, gesturing toward the still largely filled parish hall, what plans were being made to instruct and prepare those people for when they start losing their jobs and can’t find any, losing their houses, losing their professions, losing their bank accounts, losing their young children, losing their reputations, perhaps their lives, and when they won’t be able to meet in our beautiful fourteenth-century-style building safely and quietly any longer.

He understood me. He answered, “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

I was stunned by his answer and did not have the presence of mind to reply, “I wonder how many nervous and perceptive German Jews and Christians quietly muttered the same hopeful denials among themselves as they saw the powers of darkness coalesce in the 1920s and early 1930s?” The inevitable came. And it’s coming again–for us here in America. It’s our turn now. And it won’t feel very soft when it strikes. Many of us won’t make it. I wonder if I will. Perhaps the ACNA is awakening to the emergency at hand. However, I am not hearing about such things from the pulpit. Folks won’t like it. Lord Jesus, have mercy upon us and grant us thy strength and peace.

Is anybody hearing these things from the pulpit? Readers?

UPDATE.3: I just heard from Archbishop Foley Beach of the ACNA. He is the unnamed Archbishop mentioned in the reader’s comment above. He writes to say that he would not have said the thing the reader attributes to him. He writes, “I have been preaching since before I became the Archbishop on the theme: Wake Up America! pointing out just what [the reader] asked about in the question. ”

“Many of us in the Anglican Church in North America left buildings, salaries, pensions, insurance plans, and reputations for the Gospel in leaving the Episcopal Church when it gave into revisionism and liberalism,” he adds. “We would do so again.”

I see now that I should not have posted that comment from the reader without first reaching out to him. I apologize to Archbishop Foley Beach for posting the comment without at least first giving him a chance to confirm or deny it.

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Sex, Eton, And Soft Totalitarianism

This ideologically cracked person is a New York Times columnist:

 

You can believe such peculiar things and be a featured columnist at the world’s most prestigious newspaper. In fact, I would doubt that any of the other columnists could get away with writing something in the paper that flatly denied Blow’s claim. If they did, they would probably face an internal lynch mob demanding their firing for making trans and nonbinary employees feel unsafe. In fact, I bet Douthat or Brooks would think really hard before tweeting anything contrary to Charles Blow’s claim. Who needs the hassle of an SJW mob — especially when one cannot have any confidence that institutional authorities will stand up to the mob?

Here’s an interesting case out of Eton, the most prestigious school in the United Kingdom. The school’s headmaster, Simon Henderson, fired teacher Will Knowland over a lecture that he never delivered, titled “The Patriarchy Paradox.” Knowland uses science, history, and cultural analysis to explain the significance of sexual difference, and why traditional masculinity is necessary to social thriving: because it is built into our nature. You can get the highlights of his talk in this news story, but here is the 33-minute lecture on YouTube:

What Knowland says in this lecture was common sense until basically five minutes ago. It is certainly debatable. Knowland says he wanted to give the boys of Eton a point of view that challenges radical feminist orthodoxy. Eton’s super-woke headmaster ordered Knowland to take the video down from his YouTube channel. Knowland refused. Eton sacked him.

Now over 1,000 Eton students and others have signed an open letter to the Headmaster petitioning for Knowland’s reinstatement. Here’s a link to the letter. Excerpt:

The common opinion of the boys is that Mr Knowland presented the ideas in his video with as much academic nuance and sensitivity as could ever be reasonably expected. He makes at least 41 academic citations. His video is arguably a model for how to convey a contentious argument impeccably. We struggle to identify where Mr Knowland’s video steps out of the realms of academic debate and into genuinely discriminatory private opinion. The boys have concluded from watching the video that the problem cannot lie in the way he sets out the ideas, but in the ideas themselves. This dangerous conclusion must not be confirmed by a judgement against Mr Knowland.

Second, the boys perceive a hypocrisy on the part of the school about its role in the protection of minorities. Mr Knowland is being dismissed for having a different view to the view of the majority. His view is not very uncommon or exceptional. It is simply different. Mr Knowland’s dismissal presents as a gross abuse of the duty of the school to protect the freedoms of the individual, especially where those freedoms run up against the norms held by the majority. We feel morally bound not to be bystanders in what appears to be an instance of institutional bullying.

Why has the school not extended the protection to Mr Knowland that we hope it would to any boy who voiced a similar idea, be it on religious or secular grounds?

Are the boys also bound by the same restrictions to expression? Should boys who express the same idea as Mr Knowland expect to be similarly dealt with? Is there a difference if this idea is voiced privately, or, as with Mr Knowland, in an academic context?

Third, in a meeting on the 24th of November, the Head Master explained the test that he applies to determine what kinds of ideas are illegal. For him, anything that can be deemed ‘hostile’ by any single member of one of the school’s designated minority groups will be censored. We think this test is too severe. Young men and their views are formed in the meeting and conflict of ideas. A conflict of ideas necessarily entails controversy and spirited discussion. The Head Master’s ‘hostility’ test excludes nearly all of what makes up a liberal education.

How can the school reasonably expect teachers to engage in the promotion of free thought inside and outside of the schoolroom when the consequence of overstepping some poorly-defined line of acceptability is to lose their livelihood and home? Is this not an abuse of power?

Fourth, in a previous meeting with Pop, the Head Master stated his view that female teachers would be in some way ‘compromised’ by having to discuss the video in class. This appeared to be the Head Master’s principal objection to the video. Does this not patronise female staff? The undersigned believe that women are no less equipped than a man to contend for or against the video’s arguments.

Read it all. 

Eton College isn’t just any school. The all-male boarding school is Britain’s most elite. Since the end of World War II, five Prime Ministers, including the current one, have been educated at Eton. When you cannot even challenge radical feminist orthodoxy and gender ideology at the most elite school in Great Britain, you must know that intellectual corruption has reached the pinnacle of British society. If Henderson prevails over Knowland, then the conditions under which the certain ideas can be tested through rational argument will no longer exist at Eton, apparently.

We know too how pervasive wokeness is at our top American institutions, such as our Ivy League universities. New England prep school culture is also woke. Outside of education, Charles Blow could write a column for America’s leading newspaper arguing for his bizarre gender theory (which, again, is common among elites), and it would raise no eyebrows, but I would wager that a Will Knowland would find it impossible to advocate for the commonsense beliefs in his “Patriarchy Paradox” lecture.

The good news is that Knowland’s views are based on observable fact, and cannot be suppressed forever. A society that replaces them with ideology will not survive. The bad news is that we can and will endure tremendous pain and destruction before learning our lesson. The people of the Soviet Union endured 75 years of torment until the lies of Marxism-Leninism — which claimed that human nature was socially constructed, and could be re-constructed — collapsed. When those in power within an institution, or within a social order, are in thrall to an ideology, the destruction they can cause is immense. The task in front of us is not only to fight against the Etons — those once-great but now-corrupted institutions that produce the ruling class — and the madness they promote and enforce, but also to develop strategies for keeping alive the cultural memory of what we once knew to be true. This, incidentally, is what Live Not By Lies is about. The war against soft totalitarianism is not really with the state, at least not yet. It is primarily against an ideologically militant ruling class and the institutions it controls.

 

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The Great Reset & Social Justice

You can be a world-champion cyclist, and even that will not protect you from being eviscerated by your sponsor if you as much as like on social media posts by mainstream conservative figures:

Apparel manufacturer Rapha has slammed world time trial champion Chloé Dygert over her social media conduct, saying the apology issued by Dygert for liking offensive and divisive posts on Twitter did not go far enough.

The statement was sent to Rapha customers via an email on Friday morning, and the apparel brand pulled no punches on Dygert, who recently inked a four-year deal with the Canyon-SRAM professional women’s team, which is sponsored by Rapha.

“We are writing to you today to clarify our position on the actions of new Canyon//SRAM Racing rider Chloé Dygert who, back in June, endorsed racist and transphobic views on social media. Rapha wholeheartedly condemns these actions as they were offensive, divisive and have no place in cycling or society. Since we became aware of this incident, we have taken time to fully investigate what happened, consulting with the rider, Canyon//SRAM Racing and other partners in order to take informed action in response,” the statement said. “Having undergone that process, we believe that Chloé has made very serious errors of judgment, which were compounded by an apology she issued that was not sufficient.”

They compelled her to apologize, but for some reason, the self-abasing apology was not sufficient. These people are tyrants. You know what her “racist” views were? Liking a tweet by black conservative Candace Owens questioning the bona fides of Colin Kaepernick, and liking one by Charlie Kirk saying hard work, not the color of your skin, determines how you are treated in America. In other words, simply questioning the BLM narrative, or one of its sacred figures, is “racist,” according to Dygert’s employer. The “transphobic” tweet simply questioned the trans narrative. You are not even allowed to publicly doubt.

By the way, there’s a new add-on to your browser, Shinigami Eyes, that will identify transphobic and transphilic social media accounts by color, so you will know whom to hate without having to read what they actually said. But no sir, the social justice Left is not taking us to a kind of totalitarianism. How dare you say that?!

Meanwhile, social science brings us a new reason to hate white conservative Christians. It’s a new academic paper that finds that “racist” opinions related to Covid are held disproportionately by “white Christian nationalists,” proving that they are really bad people. The study’s authors put the following “racially coded” statements to subjects, to test their level of agreement:

It is racist to refer to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus”.

The fact that poor, minority communities are more likely to be infected with COVID-19 is a symptom of our unjust society.

Black Americans are being infected with COVID-19 at higher rates largely because they are not behaving responsibly.

Some racial minority groups may have a biological susceptibility to COVID-19.

Our lax immigration laws are partly to blame for the COVID-19 crisis.

All immigration should be halted at least temporarily to protect American jobs during this time.

One way to prevent further pandemics in the United States would be to build the wall along our Southern border.

The fact that COVID-19 is spreading rapidly among prison inmates should be the least of our concerns.

If prison inmates are being infected with COVID-19 at higher rates, that could be a form of divine justice.

If you answer the wrong way, that proves you are racist and/or xenophobic. The study is obviously crap. For example, in a time when blue-collar workers are being hit disproportionately hard by Covid-related job loss, it makes rational sense to halt immigration to protect jobs. It might be the case that any American demographic group — racial or otherwise — is hit harder because of cultural practices of its members. This belief could be demonstrably false, in which case to hold the view after it has been shown to be false is a form of bigotry. But in a state like mine, where the overall population is disproportionately obese, black residents are 38 percent more likely to be diabetic. Diabetes in Louisiana correlates to income and educational level; Louisiana is a relatively poor state, with a disproportionately large percentage of black people who lack higher education and a higher income. We also know that people with diabetes are likely to be hit much harder by Covid.

Now, my uncle is white, but he is obese and diabetic. Knowing these risk factors, if he were to carry on a normal life, and contract Covid by exposing himself to greater risk, would it be fair to blame him for his behavior? What if he was black? Listen, I have no idea how black people in Louisiana or anywhere else are behaving, in general, regarding Covid precautions. My only claim is that it is not racist on its face to say that cultural and behavioral norms among certain demographic groups make them more or less likely to catch Covid.

But let’s not worry about that. What we really need in this country is Science to justify hating white conservative Christians. And Science is coming through! Maybe someone will invent an app that will color-code any social media content produced by a white conservative Christian, so it will be pre-hated and pre-dismissed for your convenience. We must stop at nothing to identify these threats to Health and Safety, neutralize them, and move them to a place, literally or figuratively, where they cannot threaten us with their hateful opinions. You disagree, maybe? Why are you soft on racism and transphobia?! Maybe you’re one of the bigots too!

If we can have software that identifies transphobic people, why not software that identifies racist people? Maybe making the world safer and healthier requires putting this kind of digital warning on social media accounts of problematic people — Deplorables and so forth. Linking Covid to its country of origin in one’s speech patterns is racist, according to social science. Better protect the community from racists who talk like that by flagging their social media accounts, and threatening their jobs and livelihoods. You see where this is going.

Moving on to more evidence for our soft totalitarian future, in Australia, the state will use the data generated by your card purchases to find out where you have been in case you have been diagnosed with Covid:

And why not? The data are already there. It is arguably a legitimate public health reason for the authorities to know this, to fight the spread of disease. The interviewer asks the data expert if the state has to get permission from the individual before accessing that data. He says it’s not clear, but it shouldn’t be required. Safety, you know.

It makes sense. And yet, I hear the voice of Czech dissident Kamila Bendova every time I read something like this. From Live Not By Lies:

Kamila Bendova sits in her armchair in the Prague apartment where she and her late husband, Václav, used to hold underground seminars to build up the anti-communist dissident movement. It has been thirty years since the fall of communism, but Bendova is not about to lessen her vigilance about threats to freedom. I mention to her that tens of millions of Americans have installed in their houses so-called “smart speakers” that monitor conversations for the sake of making domestic life more convenient. Kamila visibly recoils. The appalled look on her face telegraphs a clear message: How can Americans be so gullible?

To stay free to speak the truth, she tells me, you have to create for yourself a zone of privacy that is inviolate. She reminded me that the secret police had bugged her apartment, and that she and her family had to live with the constant awareness that the government was listening to every sound they made. The idea that anybody would welcome into their home a commercial device that records conversations and transmits them to a third party is horrifying to her. No consumer convenience is worth that risk.

“Information means power,” Kamila says. “We know from our life under the totalitarian regime that if you know something about someone, you can manipulate him or her. You can use it against them. The secret police have evidence of everything like that. They could use it all against you. Anything!”

I am not one of those people who believe that Covid is a hoax. I know it’s real. But I also know that Covid gives powerful people who do not have our best interests at heart a rationale for extending control. I am not sure what to make of “The Future Shape Of Things,” a document that has been going around the Internet for a week or two. It purports to be from a former adviser to the Bundestag, the German parliament. I post it here with caution, but I also observe that the author, Sebastian Friebel, footnotes his claims. This is the part of the report that leaps out at me:

Digital companies and governments worldwide

…are instrumentalising the fear of the virus to achieve social acceptance for comprehensive digital surveillance and control systems. These systems, which include contact tracing, digital identities, biometric face recognition and digital immunity certificates, are designed for totalitarian control of the entire population. In China, the full range of these inhuman technologies is already in use, which means that the most basic rights of citizens can be restricted by AI-based systems. The combination of a ‘Corona app’ and a preliminary stage of digital immunity certificates is being used to automatically deprive citizens of their freedom of movement if their ‘health status’, as detected by the machine, does not meet the specifications.9 Cameras with facial recognition additionally record and identify every person in public space. The 5G mobile phone standard enables this form of mass monitoring in real time. So in China digital technology determines who is still allowed to leave their home. Such a society can hardly be described as anything but a technocratic tyranny. I am sorry to say that similar plans are also being pursued by our own federal government. It, too, is already seeking to introduce a so-called ‘vaccination or immunity documentation system’, depriving people in our country of basic rights such as freedom of travel and freedom of assembly, or allowing them such rights only if they can prove immunity, e.g. through vaccination.10 These intentions are no different from those of the Chinese dictatorship, and it is only thanks to public protest in Germany that the government has not yet been able to pass this legislation in its original form.

Financial and digital groups set up global surveillance architecture

This year, the World Economic Forum will introduce the ‘CommonPass’, a system for international travel, likewise aimed at surveillance and control of access to public life and freedom of travel worldwide. This system requires people to have a kind of ‘digital identity’, as well as uploading their vaccination status and/or Corona test results to a database, in order to be able to travel at all.11

The project is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, Google, the major bank J.P. Morgan, the financial group BlackRock and representatives of the United Nations.12 The aim of the institutions and companies involved is to encourage all governments worldwide to use the system. This again shows (besides the above-mentioned ‘Great Reset’) the global ambition of the corporations behind the project, and again the UN is being instrumentalised for their purposes. The question arises as to why the financial groups in particular have such a strong interest in monitoring and controlling people, and why they are willing to invest such a lot of money in the development of these technologies.

Return to normality only with digital surveillance?

Taking into account the current data situation on coronavirus, the German Ethics Council still advises against the introduction of such systems, but does not entirely exclude them for the future.13 It can therefore be assumed that digital immunity certificates or something like the CommonPass will be presented to us in the course of the coming months by the media and the government, as a prerequisite for a return to normality. Several German companies already offer digital surveillance systems, which automatically check whether a person has normal body temperature and is wearing a mask. Some of these systems are already being combined with facial recognition, and manufacturers advertise them as providing ‘effective real-time monitoring of faces with or without masks’.14 Should these technologies be introduced in Germany, it would be a first step towards the Chinese social credit system. I do not want to accustom myself to the idea that such technology will soon be capable of determining our freedom of movement. My concern, however, is that some people would give up their individual freedom for a deceptive sense of security. But are such massive surveillance measures really a proportionate response to the coronavirus situation?

And notice this as well:

Corona helps banks achieve their goal of abolishing cash worldwide

In addition to the political aspects, the financial sector is abusing the crisis to continue to push ahead with the drive to global cash abolition. Unfortunately, many people are not aware of the impact of the switch to digital currencies and the enormous potential for abuse associated with this. At this point, I would urge everyone to consider the real consequences of a cashless society and in particular to reflect on the control that the operators of a global digital payment infrastructure would have over the entire population. It should also be recognised that if cash were abolished these companies would make money from every payment transaction worldwide without exception, which I for one would have no wish to see happening.

Influential forces, which even before Corona were already intensively lobbying for global cash abolition, are now exploiting the crisis to achieve their goals. Let us just mention in passing that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is also involved in the project.26 In view of the enormous economic potential in this sector, it is in any case unlikely that such players in this sector will ultimately be concerned with anything other than money and political influence, even if they conceal their aims behind high-profile ‘fund-raising campaigns’. So when we are told that because of Corona we should give up using cash, we should not ignore the strong economic interests behind it. In this context, it is worth mentioning that the UN is also using its name to promote this global campaign by the banking sector.27

It really is true. It sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense, but here is a link to the Better Than Cash Alliance, the United Nations website promoting the end to cash in the global economy, in the name of efficiency and — of course — “inclusivity.” The big foundations are involved, and also national governments, big charities, and USAID. It’s not a conspiracy if it’s out in the open. And they have good reasons for wanting to go cashless. But doing so would mean that anyone marked out as a dissenter by governments or corporations would not be able to buy or sell without government approval. Excluding someone from a cashless economy would be as easy as pushing a button. Is this really the kind of world we want?

The Great Reset is not “communism,” as some on the Right have said. As Ben Sixsmith points out in The Spectator US, it is globalist corporatism. Take a look at this blog post from the World Economic Forum that says “The Great Reset Must Place Social Justice At Its Centre.”In it, these titans of industry say that the next economic system must merge capitalism with socialism. They aren’t wrong to point to the destabilizing effects of severe economic inequality. But if you read on, you’ll see that they intend their redistributionist schemes to follow the model put forth by elites we on the Right deride as Social Justice Warriors. This is why I started this long post with the item about how a champion cyclist is facing cancellation simply for having liked politically problematic (from a SJW point of view) social media posts, and why SJWs are using technology to identify electronically problematic social media posters, and why social scientists are developing a bullshit rationale for discriminating against Deplorables, and doing so for the sake of fighting Covid.

Imagine the globe’s biggest economic players, as well as national governments, working together to digitize the world and extend control over politically and culturally problematic people — all for the stated goal of making the world safer, fairer, more just, and more inclusive in the post-Covid era. Whether the “Future Shape of Things” document is the product of paranoia or not, at least some of what its author is talking about is real, and serious, and as sinister as he says. Live Not By Lies was completed at the very beginning of Covid. In a future paperback edition, I will need to add a chapter about Covid and the Great Reset.

The clothing company threatening to cancel the athlete, the academics writing that nonsense paper demonizing white Christian nationalists, the tech people identifying (without accountability) certain people on social media as “transphobic” — none of those people will ever be invited to Davos to talk about the Great Reset. But they’re part of it. There’s a coalescing of economic, political, and cultural elite opinion around Pink Police State ideas and rhetoric. The Covid crisis is real, but they are not allowing it to go to waste.

UPDATE: A reader points out:

A Shinigami is a Japanese death demon, something like a psychopomp, and in a recent piece of anime/manga that was important and influential, a Shinigami was an agent of death who could look at someone and see the hour and mechanism of his death. Shinigami Eyes can be understood as seeing who needs to be marked for death.

The post The Great Reset & Social Justice appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Sane Man In A World Gone Mad

Last night I agreed to meet a reader of this blog who was traveling through my city with his family, headed home after the holiday weekend. We had an intense and (for me) rewarding two-hour talk. Afterward, he gave me permission to use anything he said to me in a blog post, provided I keep his identity confidential.

The man — I’ll call him Aaron — is in his thirties, and is a pastor at a small nondenominational church in a big city. Aaron said that the things I write about on this blog is the reality that he and his congregation are living. He loves The Benedict Option. He recently read Carl Trueman’s new book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (here’s a link to my interview with Trueman about it), and said he was blown away by the accuracy of Trueman’s diagnosis of our cultural crisis.

Aaron agreed with me that so many Christians simply do not want to face the severity and profundity of the crisis, because it’s too unnerving. They prefer to fight the battle that they feel prepared for, instead of the battle that we actually have in front of us. He said he cannot understand why so many parents allow their young kids to have smartphones. That’s a common theme here on my blog, but in his pastoral work, Aaron is dealing with the consequences of ubiquitous smartphone use by kids. “Pornography,” he said, and looked down, shaking his head.

He said that he and his wife don’t allow their children to have smartphone access, and are criticized for it by others in their community. It’s as if the adults have decided among themselves that protecting their children from the basilisk is too hard, so they’ve agreed, however subconsciously, to shame any parents who don’t surrender.

Recently, an older teenager started coming to their church — a male who calls himself transgender, and who has been on cross-sex hormones for a while. The kid is not gay — he’s attracted to females — but he is really confused. Comes from a relatively well-to-do family. Aaron says the boy’s parents have turned him over to trans culture, because they think they are doing the progressive thing. But the kid is hurting bad. Aaron and the men at church are trying to figure out how to minister to him, to lead him back to reality without crushing him. The anger Aaron feels at our corrupt culture is palpable — and justified. He thinks of this boy who is at war with his own body and his own nature, such that he injects himself with estrogen and dresses like a woman — and how the dominant culture in this country holds him up as a hero. The boy’s parents abandoned him to this.

I was thinking about this this morning when I read this recent sermon by the Russian Orthodox metropolitan (archbishop) Tikhon Shevkunov.In it, Met. Tikhon talks about how entire nations can become demonized. He argues that that is what happened to Russia, leading to the 1917 Revolution. Excerpt:

And what demonic madness remained! The entire Church structure was practically destroyed; millions of people repressed; an astronomical number of deaths; the culture demolished, and a great heritage destroyed or taken out of the country. In our province [Pskov] there are a multitude of ruined churches and old estates. In their demonic madness the people destroyed all the best the country possessed. It came to the point where our religious and non-religious heritage was denied and rejected. Only in 1934 were schoolchildren allowed to study history and literature.

Suicidal demonic possession often happens to large communities of people. The doctors talk about this in another way, but what they say is also interesting. I am now preparing articles on the events of 1917 and I think, Lord, how could people burn down their own house with the conviction of suicidal fanatics?! Many doctors of that time—Bekhterev, Rossolimo, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov and others were no strangers to the revolutionary mood. Even so, they all say that it was mass psychosis. But Orthodox Christians say that it was demonic possession. Unfortunately, many Orthodox Christians are far from completely understanding this. The events of 1917 speak to this.

To be honest, not all religious people saw the revolutionary events as evil, demonic, and suicidal. Moreover, theological seminaries were often hotbeds of revolutionary movements. During the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, revolutionary cells formed in a number of seminaries. That means that there was a real enfeebling of the Church, a demonic delirium. It is no coincidence that one of the secretaries of our country’s communist party was a former seminarian. Most horrible is that a person who has faith can lose it. Who loses faith? Someone who once had it. Who becomes demonically possessed? Mostly believers—the devil attacks them. The devil is not so interested in unbelievers—they’re outside God as it is. We have to remember this. And how many priests and bishops also greeted the events of February 1917 with elation! Many of them became new martyrs after they had come to their senses. To be sure, it’s easy for us to talk about this in hindsight. And of course, we are not judging anyone. But this demonic possession had stolen into the very heart of our religious nation!

Demonic possession is a reality. No matter how the diabolic powers laugh at it! They are precisely the ones who are laughing at us when we talk about the spiritual illness of demonic possession, possession by the devil. For the devil there is nothing more useful than convincing people that he doesn’t exist, that there is no such thing as demonic possession, that it simply doesn’t occur that he can completely take a person over and lead him around where he wishes, and do it in such a way that the person doesn’t even guess what’s happening. That person will elatedly think that those thoughts are his own, that it’s his own decision.

More:

We rarely talk about this subject. And thank God! It’s too scary! But from time to time we are obligated to remind our flock and our own selves about it, no matter how people relate to it (even if it’s with displeasure and misunderstanding), in order to protect ourselves and our close ones from the possibility of getting this serious illness—which is only cured by humility, love, peace, hope in God, and prayer to the Lord. May the Lord preserve you!

Read it all. 

Last night, the young Protestant pastor Aaron said that he wonders what it’s going to take to wake Christians up to what is happening in this country. “Maybe it will take the judgment of God,” he said. And then: “Or maybe we are living through God’s judgment now.”

Aaron told me that he is grateful to this blog for many things. One thing he said stuck with me: that it reminds him that he is not crazy, that the things he sees really are happening, that he is a sane man in a world gone mad.

I’ll end with a portion of a letter that a reader of my Substack newsletter sent. You can read the whole thing on the newsletter here. This is the excerpt I want to share with you:

On different and weirder note I also wanted to thank you for your post about how God speaks to us.  Your description of your experience being like something projected on a screen resonates with my own experience.  I have previously written about it in your comments section but thought I would revisit it and attach my fast childlike attempts to draw it in case there’s the slightest bit of resonance you may find something edifying in. I’m no artist, and tried to do these as quickly as possible to get the feel of the moment without judging what I was doing. And selfishly, I don’t really have many others I can even share this with who might not think I’ve gone into complete madness. I was still rather anti-Christian at this point in my life but had recently discovered Orthodoxy through your blog and found myself very unhappily agreeing with what I was finding out about Orthodox thought and practice. I started saying the Jesus Prayer as a kind of experiment and noticed it was bringing up loads of inner turmoil and psychic resistance.  Now, and I really hope this doesn’t make me sound crazy, but I have had plenty of experience with mind altering drugs and occult rituals. I know how strongly you can think your experience is unique and meaningful and it’s really just your own delusion.  There are all kinds of ways.  Anyway, I was rather hungover, looking at my two month old daughter, realizing all my conceptions about life seemed shallow and grotesque in the face of my love for this little person who seemed of so much cosmic significance.  I simply mumbled to myself for no particular reason, “I have to stop being at war with reality.”

Much like you described it, it was like another vision of reality opened up within my own sight. An image of Christ, which you will see bears no small resemblance to icons seemed to shoot through me.  It was as if there was a Christ the Teacher icon layered a million times on top of one another went through me.  One thing that strikes me so hard about it is the red triangles around Christ that I saw. I had never seen an icon at this point but it’s a feature you see in quite a lot.

Then, another vision opened, as if from a single central point, opening up into a large circle, and this black robed demonic figure walked toward me with roaring storm in the sky. If you get this other early 90’s musical reference, it was much like the roaring background noise during the opening of The Afghan Whigs’ album Gentleman.  It’s the closest comparison I can make. It hissed, pulled something from me, and then wandered back across this incredibly red desert away from me and the vision closed.  I had time to say “What the hell was that?” and then with an utterly physical retching, it felt like all the organs in my body did a 180 degree turn. I let out a pathetic sounding moan and in an instant it was like I understood the why of the Christian moral life.  I felt an overwhelming sense of love towards Mary, and a sense that she was 14 years old.  I don’t know how I know that, it was just there. And a huge sense that even knowing this, it didn’t make it any easier. I had a point on a map, but didn’t have the slightest clue how to get there. I might as well be a hobbit being told to take a ring to Mordor.  The visions had a sort of slightly two dimensional quality I would also come to recognize as being icon like. I still had never seen an icon but in all my years of spiritual events, the ones that seemed “real” as opposed to creative imagination have always had that quality. I really think there’s something “real” about what’s being conveyed in icon art but have no understanding of the why or how it came about.

Anyway, in the intervening years, I can still tell you everything wrong, or cult like about Christianity, or how Jesus at times seems to be a complete charlatan,  and would be the devil in any other context, but I can only offer the reality of my life,  the softening of my own heart, and acts of charity since that moment as testament that something happened that is utterly, terrifyingly, and completely real. And really at the end of the day that’s what we’re all called to do.  I try to keep Matthew 5:13 around as a warning to myself that taking up the cross has consequences if you do it too half-assedly.

So, here are my childlike attempts to quickly scribble that moment, and one of my kids decorating the tree for something a little less weird and more wholesome. I would appreciate you not publishing that if you feel like publishing any of this, but there’s so much happiness there and a return to normalcy from this part of the letter I thought it worth sharing with you because in part your writings helped me find my own way to making it happen. And I thank you for that.

Again, read the whole letter here, and see the man’s hand-drawn renderings of the Christ that appeared to him, and the demon.

By the way, Aaron told me a story about going on a youth group mission trip to Mexico as a high school student, and stumbling into minor but all too real manifestations of the demonic, through syncretism. This stuff is real. You aren’t crazy for thinking so.

The post A Sane Man In A World Gone Mad appeared first on The American Conservative.

Submitting To Reality

Several things from social media for you to consider. First:

And this clip, taken from a new HBO documentary about transgendered children:

pic.twitter.com/2RbvMaUc8Q

— I,Hypocrite (@lporiginalg) November 22, 2020

It’s important to note that this male child Phoenix went on to reject the female identity, and now his mother regrets very much having gone down the transgender path of affirmation. (She said: “It was a mistake. Children are not transgender. And maybe there are people who actually are, but it’s probably a mental disorder.”) Still, it is astonishing to watch that short clip of this creepy progressive cult, sacralizing the boy’s rejection of masculinity. This is not simply an eye-roller about liberal religion; it is something far deeper and more sinister.

So, what unites these examples of the contemporary spirit? A rejection of the familistic ideal, which entails traditional sex roles.

Before we get started here, can we please put aside the idea that I believe that women should be confined to maternal roles, and not allowed to pursue careers? I don’t believe that. But we can’t pretend that there isn’t a severe social cost to be paid for abandoning natural sex roles.

The fundamental task of each generation is to produce the next generation, so that our people will continue. That’s not a religious belief; that’s a proposition that is, or ought to be, obvious to anyone who lifts his or her head up out of the trough long enough to see past their own appetites. If we, both individually and collectively, lose our ability to recognize that, and fail to create social structures and disciplines that make producing the next generation possible, then we will have committed suicide.

A consistent theme in the fiction of Michel Houellebecq is that we in the West have done exactly that. Bourgeois individualism and materialism are and will be the death of us, he says.

The Thomistic philosopher Edward Feser has a really good post talking about all this, in light of Carl Trueman’s blockbuster new book. (Note well: Feser criticizes Trueman’s book slightly, but makes clear that his criticism is provisional, having not yet read the book; Trueman tells me that he and Feser have been in touch since the Feser blog post ran, and that the book itself, as opposed to the interview with Trueman that I did on this blog, to which Feser responds, answers Feser’s objections.)

From Feser’s post:

Here’s what everyone used to know about human nature.  It will sound like standard natural law boilerplate, but that’s because natural law systematizes and explains what once was common sense (and still is until people are indoctrinated out of it).

Man is by nature a social animal, and sex is the fundamental way in which we are social animals.  For a human being is never just “a person.”  A human being is always either a man or a woman.  And men and women, like everything else in nature, each have a teleology – a purpose to which their nature directs them, the realization of which is necessary for their flourishing.  The purpose of a man is to be a father and husband, and the purpose of a woman is to be a mother and wife, with all that these roles entail.  Among other things, they entail having lots of children, and committing yourself for life to the family unit that results.  This unit is the cell from which larger social units are built, and the health of those larger units depends on the health of the cell, and thus on the commitment of men and women to fulfilling their roles as fathers and mothers, husbands and wives.

A man’s life’s work – his vocation or calling – reflects this social nature, and has a twofold purpose.  First and foremost, its point is to provide for his family; and secondly, it is to contribute to the needs of the larger community of which his family is a part (for example, as a butcher, a baker, a plumber, or whatever other role he is especially suited to).  In these ways, a man exists for the sake of others, and he does so no less than (as feminists complain) a wife and mother does on the traditional understanding of sex roles, even if the precise nature of his other-directed calling is different.

Sexual desire pushes us out of ourselves, then, to bond with another human being, and with that human being to create new human beings and stick together for life for their sake and for each other’s sake.  And as families ally together to form larger social units, an entire political and economic order arises, which reflects the nature and needs of these families.

Not everybody can fulfill these roles, but they are normative in a healthy society. A society in which people think of marriage and family as one equal option among many is a society whose future is in danger. Why? Because maintaining marriage and family are hard. As I have written before in this space, a couple of weeks before my first child was born, my sister, who married and began having children before I did, phoned me to say that almost all the things that gave my wife and me pleasure as young marrieds were about to disappear. This, she said, might be hard to get used to, and that’s understandable, as having children takes away your freedom. But, she said, what you can’t imagine now, on this side of parenthood, is how much joy it provides.

She was right, as it turned out. Having a child (the first of three, as it turned out) required a major sacrifice of our liberties, and the kind of things that made us happy. What drove us to embrace parenthood is the instinct that we should. I suppose part of it is that society expected this of us, but the truth is, we both had a strong instinct to want to be parents. Middle-class society, at least back in the 1990s, when we had our first, still honored that, however weakly.

My wife and I were both serious Christians when we met, and that meant that we could not establish a sexual relationship until after we married. From a sociological point of view, this meant that bearing children took place within a committed relationship, such that she did not have to worry that her husband would abandon her and the children. And our faith commitment caused us to restrain our sexual activity, period; sexual desire that I could not fulfill outside of marriage pushed me to face down and overcome a lot of my insecurities. It might sound simplistic and crude to put it this way, but submitting the erotic desire that is normal in young adults to the bounds of serious Christian discipleship, with the expectation that marriage and children was normative, helped me to grow up.

We are living through an experiment to discover what happens in an anti-familistic society — that is, a society in which marriage and family ceases to be a normal ideal, and is just one choice among many equally valid ones. Marriage is hard. Raising children is hard. If people feel no wider social pressure towards doing it, fewer will. If you have to talk people into doing so, the battle is all but lost. Feser says in late modernity, we are all Hobbesians:

Now, the deep reason why the modern liberal individualist conception of human beings rejects the traditional understanding of our natural teleology is that it rejects all natural teleology.  Its purest form is, perhaps, Hobbes’s account of the state of nature.  Hobbes held that in our natural condition, there is no fact of the matter about what we ought to desire, no ends toward which our nature directs us.  There are simply whatever desires we happen contingently to have, and none is better or worse than any other.  That is why the state of nature as he understands it is a condition of pure license that inevitably descends into a war of all against all (and thus why he takes his Leviathan state to be necessary to remedy this unhappy condition).

Of course, neither Hobbes nor the liberal tradition in general for most of the three centuries after his time pushed anything like the radical sexual liberationist agenda that has become so familiar in recent decades.  That agenda is simply too contrary to human nature for people to have taken it seriously for most of that time, or to try to implement even if it had occurred to them.  In order for it to become a realistic project – psychologically, politically, and practically speaking – the basic liberal individualist assumptions and their implications needed a long time thoroughly to permeate Western institutions, and the technological preconditions of making those implications practicable (such as the birth control pill, labor-saving devices that made it possible for women to work outside the home in large numbers, etc.) also needed to be realized.

But the implications were indeed there from the beginning.  If there is nothing in our nature that directs us to any particular ends – if there are only whatever desires we happen contingently to have, and no fact of the matter about what desires we ought to have – then there is no particular identity that nature has given any of us.  Nature has not called us to be fathers rather than womanizers, mothers rather than career women, heterosexual rather than homosexual, etc. because nature doesn’t call us to be anything in particular.  What we are is whatever we happen to want to be.  We are sovereign over ourselves, subject to no demands other than those we choose to be subject to.

The implications are radically anti-social, at least as traditional morality and the natural law theory that systematizes it understand what it is to be “social.”  For the sovereign individual who is subject to no obligations he doesn’t consent to, that sex tends to produce children is morally incidental to it.  There is no natural obligation toward the children that result from one’s sexual activity, so that they might even be aborted if one wishes.  Nor is there any natural obligation to provide for the woman with whom one has sexual relations, so that she might be divorced, or never married in the first place, if one wishes.  In general, sexual and romantic relationships need not conform to any particular model, but may be fashioned and refashioned in whatever way sovereign individuals agree to.  Sex is no longer about getting out of one’s self and seeking union with others.  It is about using others as one means among many of gratifying the self.

Read Feser’s whole post. 

Producing and nurturing the next generation is the fundamental “ought” built into nature. A society and culture that cannot do that, that does not hold doing that as the highest normative goal (“normative” in the sense that most people, though not all, are called to do this), will disintegrate. As we are doing.

Via Gavin Ashenden, look at what’s happening at Eton, the toniest of British public (private) schools:

Look at that, would you! You cannot even question this stuff without risking your job. Suzanne Moore, a left-wing Guardian columnist, left the newspaper because she was mobbed for being a “gender critical” feminist (meaning, she dissented from the complete pro-transgender argument). She did this from a feminist perspective. From the long piece she wrote about it for Unherd:

Looking back, I see that by the late Eighties and early Nineties, I had already picked up on something that perturbed me. A denial of female biology, of our ability to name and define our experience. Some of this came from certain strands of postmodern theory where objective reality gives way only to multiple subjectivities. A kind of gender tourism became possible. Everyone could be everything. A new kind of feminism came into being, one in which flesh and blood women and our desires became somehow a bit dull. Feminism without women. Grow a child inside you and push it out of your body and tell me this is a construct. (NB: no one has to have children.)

I believe quite simply bodies exist. I have been there when babies are born. And been there when people die. I know what happens when bodies no longer work…what shall we call my view? Materialism?

As trans ideology came into being, to question this was to question trans people’s “right to exist” — how is that even possible? They obviously exist! — when really we were questioning the ways in which we think about gender and oppression and how complex this all is.

It remains so. Yet somehow morality had entered the debate. To be good — ie, modern — one didn’t interrogate the new trans orthodoxy. Sex was no longer binary, but a spectrum, and people didn’t need to change their bodies to claim a new identity. All this was none of your business, and had no effect on your life.

I disagreed. By 2018, the atmosphere was poisonous. A fellow columnist at The Guardian replied to a message I sent about being civil at the Christmas do with: “You’ve prompted the most sickening transphobia, for which you have never apologised, you called islamophobia a myth and you publicly abuse leftwingers.” …

Around this time I was in Armenia covering a story on foetal sex selection. Women were aborting female fetuses as they wanted boys. The UN population fund was doing fantastic work there, knowing that as fertility rates drop, sex selection becomes ever more prevalent. This world was a long, long way from those people who think sex is just a matter of personal choice. Foetal scans at 12 weeks mean generations of girls go “missing”. In rural Armenia I visited class rooms of 27 little boys and 5 girls, while at home I was told sex is simply “assigned at birth”.

These people who are destroying the idea of male and female, and destroying the normativity of marriage and family, are destroying our civilization. They are doing this by destroying the conditions that make it possible for the next generation, and the generation after that, to exist. I’ve mentioned before in this space something a professor at an Evangelical college told me some years back: that he doubted that most of his students would be able to form a stable family, because they had never seen one. Now we are being told that the things that make for a stable family are oppressive, even bigoted.

The culture of death owns all the means of propaganda production. It takes incredible strength simply to see through the fog to reality, much less choose to take the radically countercultural path to marriage and family. But what else is there? Again, read Houllebecq. His Submission was not so much about Islam as it was about the spiritual and morally exhaustion of post-Christian France, and how no society can survive without a religion, or religious-like commitment binding it to the future.

We have to submit to Reality. Money and technology and ideological terrorism can only keep Reality at bay for so long.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

[Quoting me:] “We are living through an experiment to discover what happens in an anti-familistic society — that is, a society in which marriage and family ceases to be a normal ideal, and is just one choice among many equally valid ones. Marriage is hard. Raising children is hard. If people feel no wider social pressure towards doing it, fewer will. If you have to talk people into doing so, the battle is all but lost.”

As someone who has chosen to marry and have a child, surrounded by an entire family (all others in my generation) who has decided they’d rather not… the experiment is real. Let me give you a report from the trenches.

Ever since having my son in 2017, I’ve been continually surprised at how parenting is now a choice to be questioned, manipulated and punished, instead of lauded and supported. From the way I had to spend more than 20 hours with an advocate going over fine print to avoid getting screwed by the insurance company on childbirth costs, to the way I was underhandedly fired for taking maximum maternity leave, to how the parent who waxed most poetic for YEARS about how much she wanted grandbabies decided at the last minute to back out of our childcare arrangement so that she could afford to get acupuncture (yes, really!), to how we couldn’t find a single free parenting group in our area, so had to pay cash to join one–only to realize we were the “charity” case because we were supposed to rotate meetings of the whole group between houses, and we could only afford a one-bedroom apartment, so had to beg off our turn each time. Eventually the group stopped inviting us to meetings at all.

My father directly asked me, while I was pregnant, what value I saw in bringing a child into the world at this time? My mother-in-law–who to her great credit stepped up and helped us more than any other Boomer relative–also told me drunkenly at a party that if she had to do it over again, she would never have had children. I guess my wonderful husband couldn’t make up for society’s oppression by something so banal as existing, and dearly loving his mother! Whoops!

Ironically, all these relatives who have so casually dismissed my choice are pretty much rabid about my son in the flesh. I’ve had to ask them to stop buying toys, because we have no more room for them. My mother-in-law cried when we told her we were getting priced out of Seattle, and had to leave – outright begging me “not to take him away from me!!” Despite coronavirus raging, they ALL invited themselves across state lines for Thanksgiving this year, despite me being sick with a cold, and unable to get a test at any price to confirm that it wasn’t COVID–they said they’d take their chances, just to see him!! (I cancelled Thanksgiving myself. Unilaterally.)

I want to have a second child – my mother, who failed me at the last minute last time around, urges me not to wait, and PROMISES that she’ll be a better help this time! I trust that as far as I can throw it. I’ve had to move a whole state away from the only helpful relative in order to have even the slightest hope of buying a house. During the recent COVID crisis, my father refused to watch my son for 5 hours so that I could stand in line–the only nearby option–to get a test, despite it being his day off, and despite me trying to get this test to protect HIM above all else. (And we already live in the same house – it would not have increased his exposure! I even offered to pay for him to stay in a hotel the moment I got a sore throat, but no – he stomped about the same house as us, while REFUSING to babysit!) I had to wait for my husband to get off work and drive across state lines to get one.

You know. it has to be said – these people I’m descended from want the “grandparent experience”, but run away like they were cursed from even the slightest inconvenience of the reality of it. I guess me, my brother, and my husband and his brother were just that expensive and useless? None of our siblings have considered even for a moment having children of their own, of course. Can you blame them?

To pivot away from personal experience, it’s an interesting experiment we’re doing here, but I think it’s more limited than Rod calls out in this post. This philosophy is overwhelmingly represented by white people who call themselves liberal and middle- to upper-middle class. I don’t see any of this anti-family nonsense coming from Hispanics or Black Americans (at least from my limited perspective), or from Trump voters, to be brutally honest. Just from (deeeep sigh) my people.

I think the outcome of this experiment down the road is clear enough, and getting clearer day by day. The group of people who value what I was raised to value, and who live in the lifestyle in which I was raised, are going to dwindle in number until they pretty much vanish from the Earth. And they don’t–can’t–provide my son much of a future.

But there ARE plenty of people who are choosing to have children – even against some pretty stiff odds, in some cases. And for better or worse, THEY are the future of America. If the demographics of those births discomfit anyone reading… too bad! Demographics are destiny. Bear a litter of children yourself, or forever hold your peace.

I see so clearly now (it’s hard to miss) that I was born at the tail end of a culture, and that I will be the one watching it all pass away, while struggling – alone – to try and still hold some responsibility towards the future. Not the most enjoyable destiny… but one with some meaning in it, at least. I’m not sure the paths the rest of my family have chosen will deliver even that much.

I’ll have to make some hard choices in the years to come, about where the best place to grow up will be for my son. I think a lot of the last remnants of this particular culture will.

The post Submitting To Reality appeared first on The American Conservative.

Seminarian: ‘I Want To Get Away’

This is heavy:

I’m trying to describe my experience in the seminary, dejection at the state of the Church, and my latest decision to try to leave. There is something good in these developments, but I don’t know how to express it best. Here’s what I wrote:

In the Church, truth and falsehood, good and evil have been replaced by liberal and conservative. I live in fear of being branded with the scarlet letter “C”. I have to weigh every word and action, and measure out the amount of hostility I attract to myself. All the while we hear constant rhetoric about diversity, inclusivity, and dialogue. They are the intolerant tolerant ones. All are welcome, but some are more welcome than others.


I feel like I am being gaslit by the psychologizing of religion. The implication is that sexual deviancy is caused by sexual repression. Those who advocate for obeying the commandments are blamed for people disobeying the commandments. Could there be a connection between those who are advocating for a more liberal sexual morality and those engaging in immoral sexual activity? I don’t know, I don’t feel safe asking the question, or speaking the obvious answer. Prick their consciences and they will attack.


I don’t feel good about the future of the Church. These cases of sexual abuse we are reading about happened before the age of internet pornography. I feel like chastity is discouraged in my formation program. We aren’t allowed to talk about sexual morality anymore. I don’t trust the men around me. The sexual scandals of the future are going to become much worse than the sexual scandals of the past. I used to believe the Church as restoring herself after a dark period, but I no longer have that hope.

I am currently in seminary, and I don’t want to represent the Church publicly. I’m sitting through courses on the sacraments of initiation, and I don’t want to welcome people into the Church. I wanted to be Catholic, and I was naive enough to believe the Church would support me. I wouldn’t recommend the Church to anyone. If you hope to believe and practice the Catholic faith, you will be beaten down by the Church.

After recent weeks, of news about Pope Francis endorsing civil unions for gay couples, of
seminary professors regularly contradicting the doctrines of the faith, of great dejection about the moral corruption of the Church occasioned by the McCarrick Report, and of listening to priests repeating ad nauseum talking points from the liberal Catholic media, one evening something switched in my mind, in a different way: I have to leave.

The feeling was simple, but difficult to describe. All I want is God, and I’ve travelled far enough down the road of my vocation that I am not interested in anything else. I want to be Catholic, but I have to get away from the Church. I want to believe and practice the Catholic faith, but I have to get away from these abusive Churchmen. I have to leave: the seminary, the Church, the World. I have to leave.

I remember, maybe inaccurately, reading you compare your feelings about leaving the Church to an animal chewing its leg off to escape a bear trap. My relief felt like deciding to leave an abusive relationship. I found some consolation in this interview between Joseph Sciambra and Steve Skojec. Their description (from 1h10min to 1h15min) of the low morale among the priesthood and psychological abuse through the seminary process mirrors my experience.

We have been so abused by the Church, sexually of course, but also spiritually, morally, liturgically, psychologically, etc. I’ve learned to survive by keeping my head down and my mouth shut. My heart is filled with resentment. I just wanted to be Catholic, but I am not welcome in the Church. The Church is not what she should be, and I hate what she is. My heart is filled with bitterness, and I don’t want to live like this anymore.

I’ve tried to leave the seminary several times, hoping to find a more supportive faith community, but my plans and attempts haven’t worked out. I am going to try, once again, to join a more cloistered and traditional monastery. I need some place where I can practice the faith, away from the world, and away from the Church. I don’t know what I will do if this latest attempt doesn’t work out, maybe become a homeless person, then I could maybe practice the faith in peace, maybe continue in seminary with my head down, my mouth shut, and my heart drowning in resentment. I don’t know.

You’ve often defended yourself against the criticism that the Benedict Option is advocating running for the hills. I want to run for the hills. I want to flee the world, and the Church. I want to get away.

Please pray for me, that God may provide a way.

First, let me ask you all to pray for this man. He is in torment. I know his real name, and I googled him. He’s at a large US seminary, which I will not identify to protect him.

Second, what counsel would you have for him? What words of encouragement? If you’re write something nasty to this man, I will not approve your comment. If you are a priest or religious, and would like to send a private letter for me to forward to him, please write me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com.

If you are currently a seminarian, I welcome you to write with your own experiences, good, bad, or mixed. And not just Catholic seminarians. Are you struggling with your vocation? Or do you find seminary to be uplifting? What will your church be like, based on what you’re experiencing there. What got you through hard times?

The post Seminarian: ‘I Want To Get Away’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Spanish Left: ‘Burn The Priest’

In Spain, seems like 1931 all over again:

Despite restrictions on hate speech on social media in Spain, a trending hashtag calling for Catholic priests to be burned alive was not removed for violating rules against posting calls for violence.

The invitation to #FuegoAlClero, or set fire to the clergy, was first issued by several pro-Marxist accounts, originally in defense of a bill to reform Spain’s education system that would put the state in control of religious instruction in public schools and limit support for thousands of Catholic schools, which could lead to their closure.

However, the trending topic was accompanied by calls to burn down churches because “the only church that illuminates is the one that is in flames,” signed by “the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn.”

By Tuesday evening, Twitter had done nothing about the tweets, despite thousands of users complaining the hashtag was inciting hatred and a direct violation of the company’s rules against “violence, harassment and other similar types of behavior.”

This is all happening in context of the left-wing coalition government’s proposal to reform the Spanish education system to punish the Catholic Church:

The “Celaa Law” – the bill to reform Spain’s education system named for the Spanish minister of education, Isabel Celaa – passed its first hurdle last week, and is expected to become a law despite the lack of support from education institutions.

In addition to its effect on religious education, the proposed law also calls for the closure of specialist schools that serve children with physical or mental disabilities in order to “mainstream” them at the schools that serve the general population, despite strong opposition from experts and the parents of special needs children.

The bishops are not the only ones to oppose the Celaa Law: Employers, unions and parents came together to form “Mas Plurales,” a platform that calls for real plurality in the Spanish educational system.

Hundreds of thousand rallied last Sunday against the proposed law, yet the Socialist government argues that those who defend mostly Catholic private education – that serves two million children and that has thousands of institutions – are actually defending a state-financed educational system marked by “segregating elitism and privilege.”

Read it all. 

I wrote to a friend in Madrid to ask him what was happening. He responded:

This is an extremely offensive Twitter hashtag to Spaniards, given that in the 1930s Marxists actually did literally burn Catholic clerics, monks and nuns.

The change in the law in Spain, from guaranteeing public or concerted education to now just guaranteeing public education, is purely motivated by the Socialist government’s desire to control the ideology that is inculcated in schools. Parochial schools in Spain that receive government support—the so called “concerted” schools—produced better results and at lower cost than their state school counterparts. So economically, this law is asinine and will leave perhaps millions of Spanish kids worse off.

But no matter to the Socialists. Their goal, like those of their Communist brothers in coalition, is to create a “new man”, liberated from religion.

As of this writing, Spanish Twitter is still permitting posts under the #FuegoAlClero hashtag. For example, this Marx quote, “Religion is the opium of the people.”:

La religión es el opio del pueblo.

Karl Marx #FuegoAlClero pic.twitter.com/KOQvmUgfFh

— Olmo Dalcó