Rod Dreher's Blog, page 99

The Substack Threat

You will by now have heard that a number of marquee writers are moving over to the Substack model. Substack is a platform for writers to publish newsletters that go out to subscribers. Usually these subscribers pay some amount (the least you can charge is five dollars per month) for exclusive access to the content. It has drawn some big names. Former National Review writers Jonah Goldberg and David French, among others, are doing very well with The Dispatch, their political newsletter (which is now the No. 1 Substack in the country). Andrew Sullivan, angry that New York magazine wouldn’t let him write critically of the Black Lives Matter protests and race riots, jumped to Substack and has tripled or quadrupled his income. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi went Substack, and the other day, so did Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias.

I started a Substack about three weeks ago, to do a different kind of writing from what you see on this blog. I wanted a place for my less polemical and more reflective writing. For now, I’m sending it out for free, and have about 3,400 subscribers. But I’m putting a lot into it after I finish my day’s work here at TAC, so I’m going to start charging before long, because I need to replace my sidestream of speaking income lost to Covid. Check out Daily Dreher to see what you think. To repeat: on this TAC blog, I write a lot about the culture war, politics, and so forth, but on the Substack I step a bit back from the heatedness of these topics. If you come here for hot takes alone, you might not like Daily Dreher. But I’m finding that certain readers appreciate the more conversational, less combative tone and content of Daily Dreher. I want to emphasize, though, that unlike Sullivan, I did not start my Substack because people at my magazine were trying to censor me. TAC has been and continues to be a great place to work.

Anyway, Columbia Journalism Review has a new piece out more or less blasting the Substack model for undermining the media model and — no kidding — perpetuating racism. First, though, there’s this legitimate criticism of the Substack model:

Writing is often considered an individualistic enterprise, but journalism is a collective endeavor. And that is the paradox of Substack: it’s a way out of a newsroom—and the racism or harassment or vulture-venture capitalism one encountered there—but it’s all the way out, on one’s own. “Holy shit, I work anywhere from fifty to sixty hours a week,” Atkin, of Heated, told me. “It’s a lot.” Harvin, the Beauty IRL writer, said she missed the infrastructure—legal and editorial—of a traditional outlet. “I just know how valuable it is to have a second ear to bounce ideas off of, someone to challenge you,” she said. “I’m very not big into writing in a vacuum, and I think that is the thing I miss the most.” Kelsey McKinney, a journalist whose literary Substack, Written Out, has accounted for about a third of her income during the pandemic, doesn’t do any reporting for her newsletter because of the lack of legal and editorial backing. Investigative journalism seems particularly difficult as a solo enterprise on Substack, which doesn’t reward slowly developed, uncertain projects that come out sporadically.

But then:

If you visit Substack’s website, you’ll see leaderboards of the top twenty-five paid and free newsletters; the writers’ names are accompanied by their little circular avatars. The intention is declarative—you, too, can make it on Substack. But as you peruse the lists, something becomes clear: the most successful people on Substack are those who have already been well-served by existing media power structures. Most are white and male; several are conservative. Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, and most recently, Glenn Greenwald—who offer similar screeds about the dangers of cancel culture and the left—all land in the top ten. (Greenwald’s arrival bumped the like-minded Yascha Mounk to eleventh position; soon, Matthew Yglesias signed up for Substack, too.)

None of that is so surprising—it’s hard to earn four-fire-emoji status without having already built up a reputation within established institutions. And, as this year’s anti-racist activism has made all the more visible, those institutions are built from prejudiced systems, which form working environments that are often unsustainable for people who are nonwhite or non-elite. “I think one of the reasons why we often see that the top-twenty-five board at Substack is mostly white authors is because that’s an extension of the type of audience and recognition they get for their work on other platforms,” Harvin said.

And:

In general, will Substack replicate the patterns of marginalization found across the media industry, or will it help people locked out of the dominant media sphere to flourish? To a large extent, the answer depends on whether or not Substack’s founders believe they’re in the publishing business. When we spoke, they were adamant that Substack is a platform, not a media company—a familiar refrain of Silicon Valley media ventures. “We’re not hiring writers, and we’re not publishing editorial,” McKenzie said. “We’re enabling writers and enabling editorial.” He told me that the leaderboards, which were originally conceived to show writers what kind of “quality work” was being done on Substack, were organized by audience and revenue metrics, with “no thumb on the scale” from the company. When I asked about their views on content moderation, the founders said that, because readers opt in to newsletters—unlike Facebook, there’s no algorithm-based feed—they have relatively less responsibility to get involved.

One more:

It was a nonideological, noneditorial stance—one that he’d taken in conversation with me before. But often, adherence to neutrality only enforces existing power structures. In these moments, Substack’s founders veer into unsettling corporate-tech-dude-speak, papering over the fact that a “nonideological” vision is, of course, ideology just the same. When Sullivan joined Substack, over the summer, he put the company’s positioning to the test: infamous for publishing excerpts from The Bell Curve, a book that promotes bigoted race “science,” Sullivan would now produce the Weekly Dish, a political newsletter. (Substack’s content guidelines draw a line at hate speech.) Sullivan’s Substack quickly rose to become the fifth-most-read among paid subscriptions—he claimed that his income had risen from less than $200,000 at New York magazine to $500,000. When I asked the founders if they thought his presence might discourage other writers from joining, they gave me a pat reply. “We’re not a media company,” Best said. “If somebody joins the company and expects us to have an editorial position and be rigorously enforcing some ideological line, this is probably not the company they wanted to join in the first place.”

Read the whole thing. 

It is such a telling piece of work. Can you imagine that? This reporter, Clio Chang, a Brooklyn-based freelancer, actually believes that the presence of Andrew Sullivan on this open platform might discourage other writers — writers of color, she means — from joining it. Sully cooties, ewww! The question itself, and the fact that she was dissatisfied with the “pat” answer, is precisely what is wrong with legacy media!

Love him or hate him — I have done both over the past three decades, Andrew Sullivan is one of the most interesting and compelling journalists of his generation. And yet in the year of our Lord 2020, this extremely anti-Trump journalist was driven out of New York magazine because they would not allow him to give his opinion on race riots, because it stood to upset younger progressives in the newsroom. Of course he left. If you could, wouldn’t you?

Glenn Greenwald left the website he co-founded because, in his opinion, they were trying to protect Joe Biden, and wouldn’t publish Greenwald’s criticism of him. If you could leave a place like that and support yourself, wouldn’t you?

All this makes me realize how fortunate I have been at TAC these last nine years. Nobody has ever told me what I couldn’t write. Do you know how rare that is?

I have written three New York Times bestsellers, the previous one of which has been translated into 11 languages. I get a huge number of unique page views on this blog every month. I spent most of my career working in mainstream media, and have a long track record of accomplishment. But if TAC disappeared tomorrow, I could not get a job at an American newspaper. They would not hire me, entirely for political reasons.

And I would not want to work there. The conservative friends I have still laboring in that particular vineyard, they’re trying to get out; they say the atmosphere inside their newsrooms is intolerable. Nothing but progressive activism and militancy against wrongthink. I remember over a decade ago, walking down the hallway at The Dallas Morning News, and one of my colleagues there turning his back to me and facing the wall when I passed by. This, because I published conservative opinions in my column — opinions that he thought were a disgrace. I laughed at that, because he was haughty, and I didn’t feel sorry for him when he got pink-slipped in one round of layoffs. My boss, more liberal than I, did not agree with everything I wrote, but she was an old-fashioned journalists who believed in fairness and open debate. She always had my back, and I was so grateful for it. Well, she’s retired now, and many senior journalists like her who remain in place at legacy media have capitulated to the progressive mob.

They have forgotten what journalism is supposed to be. They deserve to lose writers like Sullivan to Substack. Notice this remark from Clio Chang, about legacy media:

those institutions are built from prejudiced systems, which form working environments that are often unsustainable for people who are nonwhite or non-elite.

That is, to put it kindly, horseshit. There is nobody more privileged in leading American newsrooms today than left-wing writers of color, or other bearers of favored identities. You not only can write your own ticket, but you can determine what gets covered and what gets written (or not written). You know who are the most marginalized people in elite American journalism? Conservatives, especially religious conservatives. These people are invisible to the Clio Changs of the world, and the Columbia Journalism Reviews of the world. Twenty years in the mainstream media business, and I’m telling you, they have never, ever recognized their blindness. In 2003, I was at a big op-ed journalism annual conference for the first time, and I found exactly two people of my generation who were conservative. We hung together and just shook our heads in amusement at the lockstep liberalism all around us — and, in particular, at the constant self-congratulation among the herd of independent liberal minds, about how it is they who are open-minded and cosmopolitan, unlike the right-wing troglodytes. The epistemic closure within mainstream journalism is airtight, and worse than when I was involved.

This really lights my fire. These people, these leftists in charge of journalistic institutions, are so sold out to their narrow vision of the world that they make it impossible for anyone who doesn’t share their ideology to work in a newsroom — and then they fault the talented writers who can make a go of it on their own for doing so, because it’s racist?!

New York magazine would still have Andrew Sullivan on its staff if they had been willing to let him express an opinion that is shared by at least half the people in America, though in NYC journalism circles, they have probably frightened anybody who agrees into total silence. Sullivan didn’t leave New York for more money — I can tell you, because he’s a friend, that he is shocked by how much more money he’s making now — but for freedom to write what he thinks. The audacity of these progressive journalistic institutions gagging writers, driving them out, then spiting them as bigots because they have the gall to sell their words to people who want to hear what they have to say — well, it makes me hate the mainstream media even more than I do.

I read The New York Times and The Washington Post for the same reason a Kremlinologist would have read Pravda and Izvestia: for insights into how the ruling class thinks. I don’t read them for accurate and insightful information about the way the world is. I know that American journalism has selected for journalists who see the world a certain way, and only that way. The moralizing of difference — for example, demonizing the mere expression of opinions that run contrary to the leftist line — has made journalistic institutions less valuable as guides to reality, and more important as guides to how left-wing elites think. It’s a closed feedback loop.

Substack is not an antidote to that, nor is it a replacement for basic journalism. And I don’t think it’s sustainable in the long run. How many subscriptions will people be willing to pay for? What’s more, it doesn’t solve the problem facing young heterodox writers who, unlike people at my career stage, can’t support themselves via Substack, and would get themselves fired or otherwise blackballed for expressing a heterodox opinion, even outside their workplace. But it’s a place of freedom for writers like Sullivan and Greenwald. For me, it’s a place to do a different kind of writing, a side project to try to recover a voice that I have lost, and, once I start charging, to make up for the speaking income I’ve lost this year because of Covid, and probably will lose next year.

The point is, I don’t see why it’s so bad that writers get paid to write, and writers who have been driven out of the mainstream journalism community for their heterodox opinions find a platform. If it causes agita among the gatekeepers of mainstream journalism, well, good. They deserve it. Like Renaissance popes who were impervious to change, they have brought this Reformation upon themselves.

 

The post The Substack Threat appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Evangelical Crisis

Over at my Substack newsletter this weekend, I wrote about a man who came to a speech I gave, and in the Q&A session said that even though he and his wife raised their three children in the Evangelical church, two of them have left it in adulthood, and the third — age 32, married, with kids — is barely hanging on. The reason? Trump. The Trump years crystallized their anger at what they consider to be the church’s hypocrisy.

After saying that obviously I don’t know his children and what motivated them, I suggested to the man that Trump might be an excuse, and that they wanted to leave the church anyway. I said that I don’t blame them at all for being alienated from a church that is essentially MAGA At Prayer, but the idea that white conservative American Evangelicalism represents the fullness of Christianity is simply bizarre — so strange that I find it hard to accept that MAGA is why they have left the faith.

I received the following excellent letter from an Evangelical reader explaining better where that man’s children might be coming from. It strikes me as a little more culture-war and-politics-focused than I like for my Substack newsletter (which I’m trying to make more personal and less polemical; it’s free for now, so sign up), but it was too good not to share. So, here it is below:

I just wanted to write you an email regarding your recent MAGA/Christianity substack about the “kids” leaving church. As a non-evangelical, this is probably (admittedly) hard for you to understand. I will try to shed some light on this as a lifelong evangelical. Southern, conservative evangelicalism has a very distinct culture and I will do my best to shed some light on this (I am not sociologist, and this is not an exhaustive list). I am using to term “Evangelical Conservative Churches” as a general descriptor – mainly aimed at the large, mega church, SBC/non-denominational churches (my experience is primarily in the large SBC world) that dominate in both numbers and influence.

In no particular order:

First, kids growing up in evangelical conservative churches, graduating from high school, and then never setting foot in church again is a very real and very common thing. If you held a gun to my head and made me guess percentages, I would say 10%-20% of these kids graduate high school and go to college and still remain active, believing, church members. The remaining 80-90% either remain “conservative” in their politics but quit church or head left and really turn on the church and their conservative, Christian parents. All that to say that the guy who said 2 of his 3 kids left the church is by no means an outlier.

 

2. Evangelical conservative (EC) churches have long had a consumer first type attitude. You will hear things like “we need to run the church like a business”, “seeker sensitive”, “felt needs”, “attractional church”, etc. This essentially boils down to “find out what the people want, and give it to them”. Once we get them in the door, then we will give them the Gospel. This is why many EC churches do things like helicopter Easter egg drops on Easter, have entertainment heavy youth group activities, pastors “dress cool” (this is so embarrassing and desperate), have the “black box style of worship music” (lights down, heavy focus on good looking “praise team”, super loud music, etc), coffee shop in the atrium, entertaining sermons with stories, movie references (or outright movie clips shown in church), etc. This often leads to an arms race of sorts where churches are competing to have the coolest, “funnest”, most cutting edge church services. This, much like Amazon crushing the local mom & pop, often ends with the bigger and wealthier churches pulling congregants (especially the highly desired “young family” demographic) from the smaller churches. Sadly, instead of remaining “traditional” and actually setting themselves apart, the smaller churches often try to emulate the latest and greatest fads but they can’t pull it off because they don’t have the money and the talent.

3. Because of the above (#2), many kids have never known anything other than churches that essentially preach (and I use this term loosely) a very weak and diluted gospel. It’s not that they are preaching heresy, it’s just that they preach just the “fun” stuff. A lot of “God loves you and has a plan for your life” sermons buffered on both sides with movie clips and funny stories. These churches often have a culture of very weak teaching combined with a “fun” atmosphere. It takes little imagination to see how this leaves kids woefully unprepared for a world that is very hostile to their beliefs. Not to mention, it leaves them with a faith that is poorly suited to sustain them in times of difficulty and persecution (more on this in a minute).

4. There is most definitely an unwritten and (usually) unspoken idea in EC churches that a good Christian votes for Republicans. You will usually not hear it said from the pulpit like this, but it is made very clear. It will usually sound like this (from the pulpit) – “make sure you vote. I’m not going to tell you how to vote, but get your Bible out and see what it says about abortion/murder and vote with the candidate that most closely lines up with this”. I’m paraphrasing, but you get the point.  I have heard many people I know literally say “you cannot be a Christian and vote for a democrat”. You can’t gain your salvation based on your vote, but you can certainly lose it if you vote for a Democrat, or so goes the thinking. This line of thinking is especially true of the older Gen X and Baby Boomers. Basically you can vote for any party or candidate as long as they are anti-abortion. Nothing else really matters. Also, there is the idea of “family values” that we are led to believe that the Republicans are for. I would defer to Matt in VA to go off on a rant about how the Republicans have not delivered on any of these for Christians (and he is totally right) but  EC christians would never not vote for the GOP because the “Democrats are worse”.

5. I don’t know how to say this next point in a way that makes sense. There is a huge fear in EC churches of Democrats/Liberals/Progressives being in control. While I get the apprehension (for the reasons you frequently write about), it is embarrassing to me that people of the Christian faith, who have been persecuted many times and in terrible ways all throughout history, are terrified about living in America with Biden as president. Worried or concerned, I understand, but listening to many evangelicals talk, you would think that their true faith is in the Republican party. At the heart of it, it is the concern that they will lose status (not realizing it was lost long ago) and they might have to experience discomfort. The craving for status and the middle class comfort that is present in so many Christian churches have created a group of Christians that are soft and weak. When a Republican wins the White House there is almost a palpable, audible sigh of relief in EC churches and when Obama (and now Biden) wins, there is a sense of hopelessness and despair that you can feel among EC Christians. They often say the right things “God is control” but their actual attitude is totally dependent on who wins/loses the White House/Congress.

So, with that backdrop, here are the issues that “kids” are dealing with as they come out of EC churches and navigate early adulthood:

They have a very poor theological background. They have been trained by their churches to be entertained and pleased but not taught. Think of the Philip Reiff quote – “men used to go to church to have their misery explained to them. Now they go to church to be made happy”. They have no true basis or depth to their faith. They don’t even really understand what they believe or why they believe it. They have just gotten 20 years of “5 ways to be a better friend” sermons. If you asked them explain the basics, to explain justification or to write down 5 of the 10 commandments, you would get a lot of blank looks. And this among kids who have been in church their whole life.
They have a hard time with the coldness of the Republican party/Baby Boomer Christians who have zero interest in social issues out side of abortion. Mention feeding the poor, adoption, foster care, etc. to EC christians over the age of 55 and you will get a lot of “they should pull themselves up by the bootstraps”, “I don’t want to enable them”, “what are you, a socialist?” comments. Mention that you adopt or foster to a 35 year old EC christian and they will say “that’s awesome”. Mention it to a Boomer EC Christian and they will literally say ” why would you do that?”. It is truly bizarre.
Sexuality issues. I could write a book on the issues here, but I think the quickest summary would be – older EC Christians have long held (and I would too) that the traditional sexual values of celibacy outside marriage, homosexuality is wrong, and adultery is a serious sin are all important and true. Most people my age remember when we were told that “if Bill Clinton’s wife couldn’t trust him, neither could the American people”. Then, along comes Trump with his multiple marriages, porn star affairs, comments about “grabbing women by the…” etc., and low and behold what happens? All the Boomer EC christians start telling us that this stuff isn’t that important. Bill Clinton was awful and Gay marriage is terrible, but now a thrice married adulterer is now God’s man! Again, young people have a hard time wrapping their mind around this (mainly because when Democrats did this behavior it was roundly criticized by their parents).
These kids have inherited their parents’ anxieties about comfort and status. They were also told by their parents that the most important thing in life was to Go To College and Get A Good Job. Well guess what? Both of those things offer comfort and status but are hostile to traditional Christianity. So guess what gets left behind?
Basically, the EC Church has been hollowed out and rotted by 30 -50 years of weak teaching and a consumer capitalism mindset. Add to that a significant time of power and comfort (i.e. zero cultural challenges or persecution for Christians until a few years ago) and now these kids are the product of that. Imagine an army that hasn’t had to fight or face a serious threat for 50 years and has gotten very lax with its discipline and training. That is the church today. And these kids are paying the price. Sadly, progressivism offers a sense meaning for these kids . Obviously, it only offers a “sense’ of meaning and not true meaning. The church has been like the “fun parent” who doesn’t make their kids do chores and let’s them eat junk food in order to be their friend. What actually happens is that the kid turns out to be ill prepared for life AND resents their parent.




Caveat – I know lots of great Christians and great kids in these churches and I am obviously painting with a broad brush here. Lots of good comes from these churches and the people in them. I don’t want to crap all over God’s people so I hope you don’t take it that way. But we have a fundamental problem in the Southern evangelical conservative churches that is getting worse not better. I do think that things will/can get better but it won’t be until the Boomers are gone and we can start from scratch because we have 30 years of poor teaching and systemic problems to undo. I’m not trying to beat up on Boomers, it’s just that they are the ones who have instituted all these bad ideas and they are just incapable of seeing the last 30 years of their ideas of what has led us to this point today.

 I also think that the idpol/progressive camps are very unfulfilling and that the church has a great opportunity to step up and give these folks something that will actually give them real hope in the future once they realize that the progressive world view will still leave them unfulfilled.

Thanks, reader. I really do learn so much from y’all.


UPDATE: A reader writes:

I appreciated your article on evangelicalism…one last, unaddressed note:

You said that “the idea that white conservative American Evangelicalism represents the fullness of Christianity is simply bizarre”.  Here’s the thing: I was taught at the non-Denominational Evangelical church I was raised in that there was only one way to God, that our best friends, who were devout, adherent, Catholics, were going to Hell.  We were taught nothing at all about the practical supernatural (so everything from Pentecostalism to Orthodoxy was either verboten, dismissed out of hand, or not on our radar). And we were taught that High church wasn’t real church, writing off another expression.

If you thought that was vapid, well, college ministry is basically exactly the same thing, with the same formulas.  People who stayed with it did so because they found meaningful friendships similar to those they had in high school.

Personally, I’ve sought and found far more rich expressions of church, but it was hard and uncomfortable, and I can see how easy it’d be to write off all that other stuff, if you even do the minimal due diligence required to figure out it exists.  Much easier to walk away and get a round of golf in on Sunday morning.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

“Remember when we were told that “if Bill Clinton’s wife couldn’t trust him, neither could the American people”. Then, along comes Trump with his multiple marriages, porn star affairs, comments about “grabbing women by the…” etc., and lo and behold what happens?”

As a Gen-Xer convert to Catholicism, who attended evangelical and fundamentalist churches prior to that, I can tell you what happened, at least from my perspective.  When Bill Clinton was elected, it was scandal after scandal during the campaigns and after.  It did not matter to the media, the feminists, the intellectuals and on, that he engaged in sexual misbehavior, some of it possibly criminal.  I think that hurt the political process in ways people may not fully appreciate today.  As a person in my 20s, I was told this behavior did not matter, as this man was elected twice and given “mandates.”

Then, as if to cleanse our palates, we voted in George W. and Obama (many of you, anyway), who were family men, who had been married for many years, didn’t cheat on their wives, etc.  They didn’t use offensive language, and were polite in public and interviews.  What did these “nice” married men do?  Deployed spouses numerous times in pointless wars.  The reasons given for the wars were always changing and highly questionable. Many of the soldiers who came back are now broken and divorced.  I was once pulled over by a very kind police officer who had just come back from a deployment.  He had PTSD, was on anti-depressants, and although his wife just had a baby, he couldn’t wait to get back over there, because he was having a hard time adjusting to normal life.

While these men were president, our country droned countless wedding parties in the name of spreading democracy, killing innocent people who were just going about the normal business of life.

W and Obama did nothing to protect traditional marriage, and for W, he had the opportunity to do so. W did the bare minimum when it came to pro-life.  Meanwhile, Obama undermined religious liberty over and again, even exhausting the resources of a small group of Catholic nuns, who actually help the poor.

As far as the economy,  Bush and Obama were on the same page as Clinton as far as favoring the elites, and not caring about the working classes.

 I say this as an extremely traddy person when it comes to marriage:   If this is the way “nice” married men govern, then the Hell with voting for them.

Finally, I’m getting a little tired of Christians lamenting the fact that so many of us make ending abortion a priority, as if the taking of a human life is something trivial.  It’s the same impulse that shrugs at droning wedding parties or starting unjust wars in other countries, because you aren’t witnessing it personally and don’t know the people involved.

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Carl Trueman Explains Liquid Modernity

A book that I’ve been waiting on for a long time has finally been published: The Rise And Triumph Of The Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, by church historian Carl R. Trueman. It was my privilege to write the foreword for the book. Excerpt:

Trueman’s book is in no way a standard conservative Christian polemic against modernity. Those are a dime a dozen. Nor is it a pietistic exhortation to prayer, study, and sober living, of which we have countless examples. Rather, it is a sophisticated survey and analysis of cultural history by a brilliant teacher who is not only an orthodox Christian but also a pastor who understands the actual needs of the flock — and who, unlike so many intellectuals, can write like a dream. I can’t emphasize strongly enough how practical this book is and how useful it will be to pastors, priests, and intellectually engaged Christians of all denominations.

I suspect Carl asked me to write the foreword because I played a small role in bringing the book to fruition. For years I have loved reading Carl’s essays in First Things, and told him that we really need a small-o orthodox Christian to explain Philip Rieff to the rest of us. This book is the result, but Carl ranges far beyond Rieff in its pages. I have been telling everybody I know that they need to get this book — and not just Christians. Again, it is written by a Christian, from a Christian perspective, but culturally conservative Jews and Muslims and others will greatly benefit from it. It explains why traditional religion and moral values systems are dissolving in the acid bath of modernity, and why it is so difficult to counteract this effect.

Carl and I recently did an e-mail interview, which I’ve been holding till the book is available. Well, now it’s out. Read this, and I hope you’ll see why I’m so excited about The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self:

RD: Ken Myers once told me that most Christian apologists try to explain Christianity to the modern world, but at Mars Hill Audio Journal, he sees his mission as explaining the modern world to Christianity. That is very much the spirit of your book. Why is this necessary?

CT: Many Christians operate with the wrong paradigms for understanding what is going on around them, particularly in the area of the sexual revolution.  That means that we may not fully grasp the significance of what we see around us and also hinders our witness.  We assume that the sexual revolution was – is – about expanding the canon of acceptable sexual behavior.  It is not.  It is actually about a fundamental shift in how we understand our humanity.  Sex is now understood as central to identity, not simply an activity.  Unless we grasp that, we will see neither the depth of the problem we face nor be able to engage meaningfully with those who are the revolution’s victims.  My hope is that my book will help Christians, and indeed others concerned about the direction our culture is taking, understand precisely what is going on and what is at stake.  That will hopefully help enable them in starting to formulate appropriate answers.

Many Christians today are embarrassed by traditional Christian sexual teaching, and see it as a ball and chain that the church needs to lose so it can appeal to contemporary people. Why is this wrong?

It is wrong because it assumes that Christian sexual teaching is simply about behavior and, as such, can be relativized as a function of the conventions of particular societies, with no universal significance.  Yet that is incorrect both theologically and anthropologically.  Theologically, it fails to see that sex is an analogue of Christ and the church.  Anthropologically, it fails to see that our sexual ethics are directly related to our understanding of what it means to be a human person.  To buy into the contemporary sexual narrative is to buy into two (not obviously consistent) notions: that sexual desire constitutes our identity; and that sexual activity is nothing more than recreation, the morality of which is not intrinsic to the act but merely determined by the giving or withholding of consent.  Neither of these is compatible with orthodox Christian notions of human personhood.  The former trivializes what it means to be human; the latter trivializes what sex represents.  No Christian can do either of these things and maintain that they still represent orthodoxy.

Why does it seem that when people give up on Christian sexual orthodoxy, they sooner or later give up on Christianity itself?

Clearly, if my point in the previous answer is correct, then this becomes a most likely outcome.  To abandon Christian sexual orthodoxy is not simply to widen the canon of acceptable sexual practices.  It is to revise key theological and anthropological elements of the Christian faith.  And once you do that, you are well on the way not simply to revising the faith but turning it at best into little more than the moral tastes of the contemporary culture.  You might well couch this in the language of traditional Christian piety but you are actually detaching such language from traditional Christian content.  Unfortunately, Christian doctrine and ethics are simply not to be decided by focus groups nor to be reflections or affirmations of popular taste.

So many of my thoughtful Christian friends can’t understand why or how this total revolution in sex, family, and sexual identity has overtaken us so swiftly. But if you look at it in terms of cultural anthropology – that is, on how we think so differently about what it means to be a person now, a self – it makes sense. Why?

The appearance of speed is actually somewhat deceptive.  Sure, the specific collapse of traditional sexual mores has happened very quickly but this is simply the latest, albeit dramatic, cultural outworking of the normative notion of the self which has been forming over a long period of time in Western culture.  The move to inner space, to feelings, as foundational to identity, was made by Rousseau and his heirs in the Romantic movement.  Those feelings were sexualized by Freud and his followers, who saw sexual desire as the most fundamental aspect of our identity and thus transformed sex from something we do into that which we are.  And the last fifty years have built on the work of men such as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse who made the obvious move once identity is grounded in sexual desire: sexual liberation becomes a key part of political liberation.  The narrative is, of course, more complicated – technology, popular culture, etc. all play their role.  But the basic point is that the sexual revolution is not an isolated phenomenon but rather symptomatic of deep and longstanding developments within Western culture.

You highlight that social conservatives point to “expressive individualism” as the source of so much disorder today, but they fail to see how they too are expressive individualists. What do you mean, and why does this matter?

Expressive individualism is the idea that we each find our humanity within ourselves and see ourselves as most authentic when we express this outwardly.  Perhaps the most extreme examples in society today would be a transgender person who only feels that they are truly who they are when they can act in public according to the gender they feel themselves to be inside.  But all of us are expressive individuals because it is the very cultural air that we breathe.  The radical libertarian operates with the same notion of individual autonomy.  The religious person chooses to be religious and then chooses which religion to follow.  We all see our clothes and our belongings as expressions of our selves.  We may each find some examples of expressive individualism more acceptable, tasteful, or “normal” than others but we are all, as democratic western consumers, involved in the phenomenon at some deep level.

One thing that comes through strongly in reading this book is how massively important history is to understanding why things are the way they are. I suppose this is always true, but it is baffling to me how uninterested in history so many of us moderns are. Why is that, and why does this hurt the church in trying to form and disciple the young?

Charles Taylor points out in  A Secular Age that modernity presents itself as the natural emergence of what human beings really are.  This helps partially explain, for example, why science has become such a powerful force within our intuitive conception of the world.  But what modernity is really doing is deploying a master narrative that blinds us to the historical construction that is modernity and, for example, the range of identities to which it grants legitimacy, all of which are really historically contingent.  Those brought up on versions of this narrative – whether that which sees history as a story of progress and improvement or a tale of oppression and woe from which the present is now liberating us – will be disinclined to see the past as a source of wisdom and their own identities as less than natural and absolute. It has been interesting that some of the initial hostility to my book claimed that it is dangerous to gay people – yet I was careful throughout to be dispassionate in my analysis.  My crime, I suspect, is that I have applied to the LGBTQ+ movement the approach it applies to others and shown thereby the historical contingency, even novelty, of its constituent identities which it has struggled so hard to naturalize.

Your book highlights three contemporary philosophers who you believe are particularly important to understanding the modern condition. Briefly, could you state who they are, and why they are important?

Philip Rieff, a Freudian sociologist, is key to my narrative because he saw the importance of the rise of therapeutic culture. The “triumph of the therapeutic,” as he calls it, is his term for describing a world which makes the personal psychological satisfaction of the individual the center of its moral imagination.  The result is that the broader culture is reconfigured in such a way that anything which might hinder this – say, the traditional categories of sexual morality – have to be dismantled.  Perhaps the most obvious examples in recent days have been provided by higher education where teachers have found themselves in trouble for making students feel “unsafe” simply because they have introduced ideas with which the students disagree.  The current debates about freedom of speech and freedom of religion are emblematic of the therapeutic nature of our culture.

Charles Taylor gave me the key insight that our contemporary cultural pathologies are functions of the nature of the self – of the way we intuitively think of ourselves in relation to the world around.   His identification of the Romantics as making the key inward move towards feeling and sentiment as defining how think of the self in the modern world is extremely important.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s insight – that modern moral discourse lacks any agreed metanarrative and is therefore really a battle between different emotional preferences – was important to me in that it helped to explain the futility of current moral debates, and why such tend to default very quickly to mutual recrimination and accusations of irrational bigotry.  The Supreme Court’s claim in United States v. Windsor, that religious objections to gay marriage were rooted in constitutional animus, and thus nothing more than homophobia, is a classic example.

Carl R. Trueman

Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin are familiar to many readers as 19th century thinkers who did so very much to diagnose and shape the modern mind. I found your discussion of the Romantics enlightening. How do they fit into the picture?

The Romantics are important because they deepen and elaborate Rousseau’s move to the inner psychological space as the source of our humanity and selfhood.  Interestingly enough, some of them also anticipate many of the cultural tendencies of our day: Shelley and Blake, for example, attack traditional marriage and the orthodox Christianity on which it was then based, and also advocate free love. And the Romantics do this through artistic media – poetry, novel, music, painting – which have a direct, emotional, aesthetic appeals.  In doing so, they begin that process whereby the convictions of the cultural elite begin to percolate down through society, and by appealing primarily to the imagination and to emotions, they have influence in a way far more pungent than any argument or weighty philosophical treatise could ever have done.

Early in the book, you say that you are not writing in a spirit of lament. Why did you feel it necessary to say so?

Lamentation is popular in Christian circles.  Indeed, that is no monopoly of the present age.  As a church historian, I find examples of the cry of “O tempora! O mores!” to be hardy perennials of church life throughout the ages – probably the result of the fact that Christians always hope for perfection but never find it on this earth.  Today in particular, as the moral imagination of the culture becomes more antithetical to that of Christianity, the temptation to lamentation is particularly acute.  But this is problematic on at least two fronts.  First, it can actually be just another symptom of the wider therapeutic culture.  Lamentation can, oddly, makes us feel better about ourselves by reassuring us of our superiority, that we see the problem and cannot therefore be a part of it.  But it is also rather lazy.  If we spend all our time lamenting, then we never start actually responding with action that might make a difference.  I learned from watching Robby George during my year at Princeton that the answer to setbacks is not to spend time crying but rather to say “OK, this is bad — so what can we do to make things better?  How should we respond?” I therefore wrote my book not as a lament but as a piece of cultural analysis which, I hope, clarifies the issues so that Christians can start to think in an informed manner about what we can expect and how we might respond.

The sociologist of religion Christian Smith has said that if the church wants to have a hope of speaking to younger generations, it is going to have to abandon moralism, and start speaking to their imaginations. I didn’t take him to mean that the church has to abandon its moral teachings, but rather has to present Christianity as something more than a moral code. Based on your work in this book, is Smith onto something?

Yes.  Moralism and, indeed, the martial rhetoric of culture war, do not resonate with the rising generation. To be frank, given how culturally marginalized the church is becoming, the latter is today nothing more than macho posturing, even a kind of therapy which simply allows some to feel they are important and making a difference when they really are not.  But we do better to focus on making our protest against the wider secular culture in more positive ways.  That’s where community comes in: churches need to build community around clear Christian teaching, serious Christian worship, and practical Christian love.  Done well, those things can grip the imagination because they offer a vision of something better than the thin communities and shallow satisfactions of consumerism. Telling people that the way they live is wrong has no plausibility unless it is set against the background of a vision of something better.

You have been a parish pastor, and you have prepared young men for the pastorate. What are the most important things for pastors to know today about ministering to people in this culture? What about for lay Christians? Things can seem so complex and overwhelming.

Obviously, the gospel has not changed, so the first task of the pastor is to teach the whole counsel of God.  But when it comes to ethical issues, particularly those relating to matters of sex and personhood, it is important for the pastor not to assume that everyone in the congregation thinks the way he does.  Clear teaching on these matters which brings out how they connect to the whole counsel of God is vital.  We cannot teach such things in an atomistic way.  As to lay Christians, they too should be encouraged to be informed on these issues.  Few have time to read a 400-plus page book on the topic (!) but there are good places to find good explanations and critiques of the culture today – TAC, First Things, The Public Discourse etc.  Read wisely, often, and well.

Where do you find hope? The standard answer, and the correct answer, is “in Christ alone,” but give us something more tangible. Do you think Christianity can survive modernity?

Yes, I do think the church can survive.  First of all, God has promised as much.  Case closed. But that is no excuse for complacency.  I think community is a big part of the answer, as you argue in The Benedict Option  and again in Live Not By Lies.  If the basic narrative of your work and my book is correct, then we are going to see increasing instability and impoverishment of community life in the future.   And people crave community.  That is where the church, with a definite creed, code, and cult, can truly make a difference to people.  We can be the community that people want, not on their terms, of course, but nonetheless in a manner that will give dignity and meaning to their humanity in a way that other alternatives cannot, however hard they may try.  This will be hard – as an egregious Englishman, I almost shudder at the thought! – but necessary.  After all, Jesus himself said that by this will all men know that you are my disciples: by the love you have for each other.  In other words, community, informed by Christian doctrine, worship, and love, is the best evangelistic tool there is.

The book, again, is The Rise And Triumph Of The Modern Self, by Carl R. Trueman.

—

Say, readers, I have been writing Daily Dreher, my Substack newsletter, for coming up on three weeks now, and have thousands of people who have signed up to receive it. It’s free for now. I hope you’ll sign up to get it daily in your inbox. It’s distinctly different from this blog, in that I don’t use it for culture war polemic, commentary on current events, or other things that are the bread and butter of this blog, but rather I try to be quieter and more contemplative there, writing about the kinds of smaller things and perspectives that get lost sometimes on this blog. Anyway, I hope you’ll check it out. As I said, it costs you nothing, though probably by year’s end I’m going to start charging a little bit for it.

The post Carl Trueman Explains Liquid Modernity appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Bigot Bumpersticker

A reader says that he designed a pro-life bumper sticker through Zazzle a few years ago, made an order, and received them in the mail. He recently tried to order more stickers, and yesterday received this notice (I have obscured his name):

 

For the record, I think Zazzle should have the right to turn this business down. I’m not like one of those “Bake the cake, bigot” liberals. This is clearly a matter of artistic expression; Zazzle is only exercising its right not to participate in messaging with which it disagrees.

Why did the reader’s “UNBORN LIVES MATTER” bumper sticker conflict with Zazzle’s content guidelines? Here, from Zazzle’s website, are those guidelines:

To ensure that Zazzle continues to be enjoyed by everyone, we have a few rules that we ask for everyone to abide by. The following content is not permitted at Zazzle:

No text or images that infringe on any intellectual property rights including, but not limited to copyrights, trademarks and rights of privacy/publicity
No text or images of obscenity, pornography or nudity that is not artistic in nature
No text or images that encourage or glorify drug use/abuse
No excessive violence
No content that is libelous or defamatory
No content that can reasonably be viewed as harassing, threatening, or otherwise harmful
No hate speech
No content that can reasonably be viewed as discriminatory based upon race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability
No content that violates or encourages anyone else to violate any law

Any products that are deemed unacceptable by the rules above, or deemed offensive or in bad taste at the sole judgment of Zazzle, will be canceled and removed from the Marketplace with or without notice.

It is impossible to see how the text violates any of those enumerated guidelines. The only option left is that Zazzle decision makers deemed it “offensive or in bad taste.”

This is how censorship is going to express itself in the new regime: gatekeepers will decide with unusual, even punitive, vigilance what can and cannot be said — and therefore, what can and cannot be heard.

This week, Target removed from its shelves Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier’s important book about how the transgender phenomenon exploits anxious teenage girls, after a single pro-trans tweet went out:

Fortunately, Target restored the book after others complained. But this just goes to show you how Woke Capitalism reacts. From PJ Media:

Shortly after the release of Irreversible Damage this past summer, Amazon refused to let the publisher, Regnery Publishing, pay to promote the book.

In the book, Wall Street Journal writer Abigail Shrier builds on a scientific study revealing the “social contagion” of transgender identity affecting a broad swath of American teenage girls and warns that various transgender “treatments” will leave girls permanently scarred.

Among other things, it warns about chest binders (meant to hide a girl’s feminine upper-body features), which may lead to “fractured or bruised ribs, punctured or collapsed lungs, shortness of breath, back pain, and deformation of the breast tissue.” This is the least invasive kind of transgender “treatment” for teenage girls. Drugs like Lupron (meant to “block” puberty) and testosterone cause more damage, and various forms of transgender surgery are even worse.

Yet Amazon sent Regnery an email warning that the book “contains elements that may not be appropriate for all audiences, which may include ad copy/book content that infers or claims to diagnose, treat, or question sexual orientation. Hence, this campaign will not be allowed to be advertised.”

Ironically, the book warns that many teenage girls who are attracted to other women — lesbians — are particularly vulnerable to transgender ideology, which convinces them that they are “really” boys, and hence no longer lesbian. While pro-transgender content may convince young women to “question sexual orientation” in this fashion, Shrier’s book urges them not to do so.

Regnery noted that “if you search ‘transgender’ in the books category on the Amazon app right now, you will see a paid ad for LGBT pride month from a prominent publisher and a paid ad for a chest binder. Amazon has told us we are not even allowed to bid on that ad space for ‘Irreversible Damage.’”

I expect we will hear exactly nothing from the same liberals that screamed bloody murder over Masterpiece Cakeshop’s wish not to make a cake for a gay wedding.

Don’t get lost in whataboutism in these cases. It’s not going to do any good. This is not about principle, but power. At the same time, understand that because this is not about principle, expect that corporations will become even more censorious against the expression of any opinion that violates woke orthodoxy. This is how the Pink Police State works: people will happily throw away important First Amendment liberties for the sake of being protected from even the possibility of having to be confronted with a thought that causes them anxiety.

The reader who tried but failed to reprint the pro-life bumper sticker he designed lives in southern California. He said he is buying copies of Live Not By Lies for all his friends and family. He adds:

I must tell you, many, many pastors and church leaders are waaaaaay behind the curve on this threat. For most, especially here in California, it’s business as usual. Not a peep from the pulpit. I grieve at how little real discipleship is going on in churches, and how adolescent most congregations are.

 

The post The Bigot Bumpersticker appeared first on The American Conservative.

Hard Words About The US Church’s Future

A Catholic parish priest writes to say that he has read the entire McCarrick Report, and offers these observations:

Along with the observation about the obvious proliferation and acceptance of homosexuality in the hierarchy, I have a few more:

For years they knew that McCarrick had shared his bed with seminarians and priests.  Since this was “adult” behavior, and they believed McCarrick who claimed it was never sexual, they never acted on it.  Once again this tells me that the hierarchy devalues priests and seminarians.  They continued to promote him because, well, “it was just priests and seminarians.”  One thing has become abundantly clear to me over the last couple of decades.  No matter what they say, they really don’t care about their priests.  Their actions certainly rarely match their sentiments and words.  We are here to exploit and command and serve as cheap labor.  This allows them to have power over us to continue to perpetuate their immorality and keep us from speaking out.
It was clear to me when they got to the section regarding Francis that the fix was in.  As you have noted from others, this was a total CYA of Francis and his favored bishops.
It was also very clear that the document was a hit job on Vigano.  I am not actually a fan of his, but the document goes out of its way to disprove his claims.  It does so in an overtly polemical way which is really unnecessary in this kind of document.
I don’t think JP2 comes off as badly as some might suggest.  McCarrick was passed over for promotion a few times.  There was one particular prelate who very much sought McCarrick’s promotion.  Then JP2 asked for testimony from numerous bishops who either lied or obscured the truth.
That being said, what is it with these guys thinking it’s merely a lapse of judgment for a bishop to sleep with seminarians and priests?   Maybe more is known now about grooming behavior?  I think there used to be a clear presumption of taking a bishop’s word as gospel truth.  “A bishop would never lie.”
McCarrick was a master manipulator.  This was a major takeaway.  He knew how to play the hierarchy off of each other and get what he wanted.  Look at the letters and how he dealt with him being asked to lead a quiet life by B16.  He basically continued to do whatever he wanted and the Church had difficulty corralling him.  Mostly because they simply didn’t have hard data and accusations yet.
I also wonder if Francis wanted to do a hit job on JP2 and B16 because by discrediting them he also discredits their teaching authority.  “Why should someone take seriously what JP2 taught regarding marriage and family if he promoted a serial abuser, etc.”  This will help Francis continue his obfuscation of the moral doctrine of the church.  He hasn’t definitively changed that doctrine, but he continues to undermine it which renders it effectively impotent.

I realize that some have criticized priests for not being more publicly vocal about the corruption.  The problems are numerous.  First, just like McCarrick they cover for each other.  Chanceries tend to be very insular with few changes of clerics in leadership, so they protect each other.  Any public criticism is immediately met with threats from the chancery.  Rarely is something so obviously wrong and provable that a priest could take the chance to say something.  Anything we report (and to whom?) will be shared with our own bishop by one of his friends.  What you end up seeing is “smoke” and behaviors that you know point to greater issues, but nothing you can definitively call out.

Second, they have complete control over your livelihood and future.  If they suspend you, then they cut your pay and benefits to a merely sustainable level.  There’s no possibility of retaining counsel.  Then if you leave the priesthood the Church says you can never work in the Church again.  All of the skills and education you have accumulated can no longer be used in the Church.  You know then, that if you leave, or are forced out, that you will have to start all over again with a new career and that you have lost any ability to effect change.  Third (and this is my position), we are now the resistance.  I have parishioners who need to hear the truth and receive the sacraments.  I know am making a huge difference in people’s lives despite the hierarchy.  I am happy as a priest and as long as the bishop largely leaves me alone, I can do good work.

This document is just another nail in the coffin of the moral authority and relevance of the episcopacy.  They haven’t been relevant to the faithful for quite some time.  I think it’s time for priests to now realize (if they already haven’t) that the bishops have abandoned us as well.  Every priest is on his own (unless he has some friends he truly trusts).

You have written extensively about the decline of our culture and the impending persecutions.  I agree with you.  I believe it’s important to realize that these persecutions will come from everyone in power; including the hierarchy who will try to make peace with our persecutors, as we already see them doing with Biden.  [Emphasis mine — RD] They are already selling out priests who speak out too strongly against moral evils.  The threat to religious liberty in the Church is not particularly from the secularists; it’s from the bishops who refuse to speak out and will sacrifice their priests who disturb the fragile and imaginary peace they seek to maintain with the powerful in the culture.

Consider this; hardly any bishop came out and instructed his faithful as to why a Catholic politician should not hold the intrinsically evil positions that Biden does and that this constitutes a grave scandal, but then they will demand their faithful not contracept and if they don’t attend Sunday Mass it constitutes a mortal sin, etc.  I can hear the faithful saying a collective “F–k Off!”  The episcopacy is dead.  How many even dared to speak up concerning Francis’ statement about homosexual civil marriages?  Some, but not many.  Don’t be fooled by the ones who seem “orthodox”.  It’s often a ruse and those guys are often just as gay as the overtly effeminate ones.  I have known many bishops and the priests who aspire to the episcopacy.  I trust none of them.  Just like the faithful have to effectively lie to save face amongst the secularists, priests have to do the same thing to their bishops and chanceries lest we be deemed a “potential liability” or worse.  The only thing left holding the Church together are faithful parish priests and laity.  (Here I am presuming the help and grace of God, of course.)

Thanks again for your work and fidelity to the Lord.

Man. That’s very heavy. But it’s necessary. It is far better for all of us to live in the world as it is rather than in the world as we wish it were.


Along those lines, this e-mail also arrived today:

Rod, I’ve been wanting to write you now, because of the last two posts–the Quickening and now Nebraska. It is not simply quickening–it is here already. I think people see the bias response teams and TIPS and all that as something that forebodes the worst–but it’s too late already–there is no coming, it’s been here a long time. Any culture that is willing to include these structures within its system has already fallen prey to a kind of scapegoating principle that is in the end tyrannical. You cannot argue with it, because there is no “it” there to argue with–it’s amorphous, always changing. It’s truly a trans-culture, which is probably the worst kind of tyranny, because at least with Stalin, he was a clear dictator–now, nobody really knows anymore.

A quick story for you: this week, two faculty members in the humanities at my small nominal “Catholic” university were laid off (8 others elsewhere). Both of these faculty members happen to have been there for 8 and 9 years respectively–clearly tested over time. They were not laid off for any student evals, any classroom misconduct, any lack of scholarship–they are both hard working, both excel at their discipline, both with promising futures. They were told it was because of financial challenges faced at the university. Here’s the thing–there were plenty of younger, recently hired faculty that could have been let go, with far less experience. But guess what: these two were Catholics–they were 24/7 Catholics. Not your typical woke Catholic, but living their faith in and out of classroom Catholics. And they were the ones let go. So, when the opportunity to let people go comes along, to change things up, you can bet it will be the Christians who will be let go, and there will be nothing we can do about it, because there will be nothing we can put our fingers on–the scapegoating will be implied, suggested, merely tacit, and when this scapegoating is done, over the course of a few months or years, there is no logic that can stand up against it. The systems they’re creating now are just a way of putting the final nails in the coffin of any resistance, but we’re already in our coffins.

If people don’t quit now and find people of faith to work with, they will suffer. If people don’t start forming communities of faith, businesses of faith, and start living small: accept less, detached from the world (by this you know what I mean–Ben Op detachment from within), seek holiness above wealth–if we do not radically change our view of what we expect for ourselves, we are going to be hurt, persecuted, etc. There will be persecution anyway–that is the Cross–but it will be much worse if we don’t change our orientation toward the Good now.

I say this, because I am one of those faculty members who was cut. I’ve got books, I’ve run international conferences, I review for the top journals in my field, I’ve played the game, and it didn’t matter–and if I hadn’t already been seeking out a network of people who courageously live their faith, I’d be lost right now. It’s not easy, I’ve lost friends trying to live my faith, but thank God I have a Church, I have true friends to pray with, etc.

Keep on calling this out–everyone needs to wake up.

I have been these past two days at the Q Ideas conference in Nashville. It’s an Evangelical ideas festival. I’ve spoken at it twice before, about The Benedict Option (both before the book came out, in 2015, and after its 2017 publication). I was well received both times, but I heard from others in the audience that there was significant pushback against the idea that we needed in any way to withdraw as Christians from society. Of course the Benedict Option doesn’t say “head for the hills,” but rather that Christians should step back a bit from this post-Christian world for the sake of thickening our communities and deepening our discipleship. That is the only way that we will be able to resist the pressure from the post-Christian world to apostatize. Even that, though, was hard for many Evangelicals (and Catholics) to grasp.

What a difference three years makes. In the green room before my talk, I spoke to John Mark Comer, lead pastor of the Bridgetown megachurch in Portland, Oregon. He told me how much my books meant to him — both the Ben Op, and Live Not By Lies . He said they are living out the realities of post-Christian America there in Portland. John Mark said that what seemed alarmist about the Ben Op in 2017 now seems obvious in 2020.

We had a rich, deep conversation. I’m not going to repeat it here, obviously, because he was not being interviewed (though he did say that he would be willing to do an interview with me). The overall theme of our talk was how apocalyptic — in the sense of “unveiling” — these times are, and how profound the hostility to Christian faith is fast becoming. “It’s head-spinning how fast it’s all happening,” John Mark told me. He said later that his church is moving now to buy apartment buildings to set up Benedict Option-like communities of prayer and discipleship, and that the church is also drafting a “rule of life” (his words) that everyone who wants to be part of the church has to agree to live by. They don’t see any other way to hold fast to the Truth in this chaotic and disintegrating age.

I had a conversation with another pastor who lives in a militantly liberal city. Same kind of thing: he said that things have become much darker and more hostile, very quickly. Me, I believe these pastors and their congregations are living in a world that will be general very soon. There won’t be anywhere to hide. I brought up how social media catechizes young people more effectively than either family or church — and social media is the same everywhere. Pastors and other Christian leaders I talked to all agree. I am used to being looked at by people like this with (at best) polite skepticism. It stunned and encouraged me to meet so many who said, “Your work really is important. Everything you’ve been saying, we’re seeing it now.”

This morning I listened to both John Mark Comer and Roberta Ahmanson on stage, in a Q&A about church history and deconstructing the Christian tradition. It was really strong and interesting. Roberta talked about how the early church drew so many women in because it was their “safe space” from the sexual exploitation of the Roman world. Later, she said that Benedictine monasteries were seen as refuges during the chaos of the so-called Dark Ages, because they were places of order and light. (This is Benedict Option 101.) The churches today have to be that too — especially for those who are being broken by the sexual madness of our time.

John Mark said that in Portland, they are seeing the fruits of a culture that rejects God, and that places great emphasis on individual autonomy. “This does not look like human flourishing to me,” he said. “It’s not just about social anarchy, but about emotional trauma.”

Both Comer and Ahmanson agreed that it is no longer enough for the church to make persuasive arguments to the world. Rather, it needs to create oases of truth, goodness, and beauty — places that people want to be a part of because they want the peace, stability, and joy that those who live in those communities have. Said Comer, “The future of the church is neo-monastic.” That includes, he said, rigorous discipleship that is visibly transformative.

Can you believe it? Megachurch Protestants really and truly practicing the Benedict Option, because they look around them in Portland and see the alternative. The middle ground is vanishing before our eyes.

John Mark said that the core problem is that Millennials and Generation Z members have huge problems with authority. The only authority they want to recognize is the authority of their own hearts, and obey the command of what they believe will relieve them of their internal anxiety. Whatever that is, it’s not Christianity, though (said John Mark) it has parasitically appropriated the language and concepts of Christianity. When Scripture contradicts what people prefer to believe, they throw out Scripture. This is why liberal Christianity is so futile: it can’t construct any kind of resilient stance against the world.

John Mark said he spoke to a man here in Nashville who said this city is a hard place to raise kids. John Mark said he had to ask the man to explain that, because coming from Portland, Nashville looks like a bastion of sanity. He said the man explained that here, Christianity is so tied into nationalism — into worshiping America as God’s chosen nation. Millennials and Gen Z’ers hate that, said the man, so they turn to progressive Christianity as its opposite. That, said John Mark, is the way to lose your faith. Nationalistic Christianity — MAGA at prayer — is a false idol, but so is its mirror opposite.

It was really an inspiring time here in Nashville. If you want to see the talks, they’ve all been recorded and archived at the Q Ideas site — but you have to pay for them, same as those who watched from home. The main thing that encouraged me about the pastors and lay leaders I met here was their shared sense that we have crossed a cultural and religious Rubicon, and that Christians cannot afford to live in denial about the seriousness of the time. As you know, I have been banging the drum about this for a while now, but men and women who are on the front lines, in ministry, are seeing the truth of it all play out in front of them.

Now is not the time for despair! But it isn’t the time for cheap optimism either. What we need to cultivate is real Christian hope. That is what will give us the strength to live in truth. It is unavoidable that we will have to learn to embrace suffering. There is no way around it, not anymore. We are not going to be spared. We will all be put to the test. What this parish priest above said — “these persecutions will come from everyone in power; including the hierarchy who will try to make peace with our persecutors” — are words to take to heart. I know more about that particular priest’s story than he’s saying here. This is a man who knows from personal experience what he’s talking about. And the fired professor’s remark — “There will be persecution anyway–that is the Cross–but it will be much worse if we don’t change our orientation toward the Good now” — are also words to live by.

If you are a reader of Live Not By Lies , once again I offer you this link to a free study guide to help you (and others reading it with you) think through how the lessons in its pages can be applied to your life. It is imperative that we all confront these hard realities now, while we have the freedom to do so, and follow Father Kolakovic’s method for discerning a way forward: See. Judge. Act.

Nobody is coming to save us. No politician, no prelate, nobody. Only God, His faithful ministers, and others in our communities who can read the signs of the times, and are prepared to act with sacrificial courage to serve Christ and His people, and to bear witness, no matter what comes — these are our only hope. But look, friends, if you want to avoid suffering, don’t lie to yourself: you will sooner or later be at grave risk of losing your faith. From Live Not By Lies :

The days to come are going to force American Christians to confront personal suffering for the faith in ways most never have done before (African American Christians are the obvious exception). Besides, it cannot be emphasized strongly enough: the old totalitarianism conquered societies through fear of pain; the new one will conquer primarily through manipulating people’s love of pleasure and fear of discomfort.

We should not conflate being socially or professionally marginalized with prison camps and the executioner’s bullet—the latter of which were all too real for anti-communist dissidents. But know this too: if we latter-day believers are not able and willing to be faithful in the relatively small trials we face now, there is no reason to think we will have what it takes to endure serious persecution in the future.

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

When he thinks of the communist past, about Christians who were sent to prison camps and never returned, of those who were ridiculed in the world, who lost their jobs, who even in some cases had their children taken from them because of their faith, Sipko knows what gave them the strength to endure. Their ability to suffer all of this for the sake of Christ is what testified to the reality of their unseen God.

“You need to confess him and worship him in such a way that people can see that this world is a lie,” says the old pastor. “This is hard, but this is what reveals man as an image of God.”

Mária Komáromi teaches in a Catholic school in Budapest. She and her late husband, János, were religious dissidents under the communist regime, and bore many burdens to keep the faith alive.

“You have to suffer for the truth because that’s what makes you authentic. That’s what makes that truth credible. If I’m not willing to suffer, my truth might as well be nothing more than an ideology,” she tells me.

Komáromi elaborates further:

Suffering is a part of every human’s life. We don’t know why we suffer. But your suffering is like a seal. If you put that seal on your actions, interestingly enough, people start to wonder about your truth—that maybe you are right about God. In one sense, it’s a mystery, because the Evil One wants to persuade us that there is a life without suffering. First you have to live through it, and then you try to pass on the value of suffering, because suffering has a value.

Wealth, success, and status are no real defenses against suffering, Komáromi says. Look at all the people who have everything this world can offer, but who still fall into self-destructive behavior, even suicide. Christians must embrace suffering because that’s what Jesus did, and because they have the promise, on faith, that to share in his suffering will bring glory in the next life.

The post Hard Words About The US Church’s Future appeared first on The American Conservative.

Woke Nebraska

A reader who attends the University of Nebraska-Lincoln writes:

Your article “The ‘Live Not By Lies’ Quickening” came out in a timely manner because of an email I received from my university today. I’m a graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), and I would guess this type of thing is par for the course for many universities in the United States now, so it probably shouldn’t surprise me, but the language of UNL’s statement troubles me. The short of it is this: UNL has a system they call “TIPS” for reporting “bias incidents.” Today, they announced that they have updated the system to take reports about the “culture” or “climate” of the campus including things that make people feel “unsafe,” even if those things do not violate University policy in any way.

It says, “Most recently, the university has added a campus climate/culture option within its TIPS incident reporting system to capture broader issues. The new climate/culture option is intended for incidents that may not violate the university’s Student Code of Conduct or Title IX compliance regulations, but run counter to the university’s core values and beliefs. Incidents that discriminate, stereotype, exclude or harass an individual based on identity may be grouped within the climate/culture incident reporting option.” Later it says, “Kelli King, assistant vice chancellor for student affairs and leader of the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards [said] ‘We want everyone to know that the university takes these matters seriously and that it is extremely important to address incidents that do not align with the values of the institution’” (Source: https://newsroom.unl.edu/announce/gradstudies/11992/69805).

That seems like a very slippery slope. Students can now report other students for “incidents that discriminate, stereotype, exclude or harass an individual” or make someone “feel unsafe/uncomfortable due to an incident,” even if those incidents do not violate UNL’s own student code of conduct or federal law. But what does that mean? It is really unclear how UNL plans to address these incidents and what type of incidents require addressing. And, how does anyone know what does or does not “align with the values of the institution” if those values cannot be ascertained from what is stated in the UNL student code of conduct or other policy documents (since you can report actions that are not covered by UNL policy)? Additionally, these “bias incident” behaviors can even be unintentional according to the TIPS website itself: “A climate-based concern can include actions that discriminate, stereotype, exclude, or harasses anyone in our community based on their identity (such as race, color, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, age, or religion). Concerns may stem from fear, misunderstanding, hatred, or stereotypes. Behaviors may be intentional or unintentional. Climate concerns may not classify as a compliance violation but do counter our core values and beliefs” (Source: https://www.unl.edu/tips-incident-reporting-system/).

Once again in that definition, UNL mentions its “core values and beliefs”, which I think can be found here: https://diversity.unl.edu/our-core-values-beliefs. There is some hope here, as in these core beliefs UNL states that it wants to “protect free speech and inspire academic freedom.” It also says that UNL “believe[s] in the freedom of speech, and encourage[s] the civil and respectful expression of ideas and opinions.” That sounds good to me, but I hope those are not just empty words on paper because it makes me wonder how their very broad “bias incident” reporting policy can be consistent with such a free-speech statement when it encourages reporting even unintentional “incidents” that do not run afoul of any UNL policy and does not say what incidents UNL deems worthy to address or how. I don’t know how anyone can read that type of broad and unclear language and just expect the university administrators tasked with responding to these “incidents” to act with deference to the ideals of free speech. That leaves way too many doors open for abuse of such a policy by those who react to expressed disagreement similarly to the people your reader wrote about in “The ‘Live Not By Lies’ Quickening” article.

Anyway, just passing along more of this troubling trend which I know is unfortunately not unique to the University of Nebraska, but as you know is popping up everywhere, even at land-grant institutions in very red states like Nebraska.

This is one of those “shocking, but not surprising” things. It gives tremendous power to students who wish to use it to punish anyone they don’t like. Students who have faithfully followed the university’s own written policies could still get into trouble if someone believes that the words or actions of another on campus make them feel bad.

How can a university allow itself to decline into something like this? There is no way a university can be what a university is supposed to be if people within that community can silence others with a simple accusation based not on any contestable evidence, but only on the basis of subjective feeling.

Earlier today, in Nashville, I was talking with a US-based Christian who spends a lot of time in Europe working on a particular human rights issue. She listened to my Q&A with Gabe Lyons today, in which I talked about Live Not By Lies, and what the experiences of Christians under Soviet domination has to tell us about our own time and challenges to basic liberties. She said that she wanted to cheer as I made my points. Americans, she said, simply don’t understand how fragile our liberties are, and how ideology is destroying them. If you have any experience with the former Soviet world, as she does, it makes all the sense in the world.

So, ask yourself: would you want to attend, or have your children attend, a university like Nebraska, where you (or your children) could find yourself in a world of trouble when someone of an approved Victim Class accused you of making them feel unsafe — not because of anything particular you said, but just because? What kind of crackpot ideology turns a university in a free country into a woke madrassa?

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The ‘Live Not By Lies’ Quickening

A reader writes:

Watching the Biden “acceptance speech” is what put me over the edge.  All of Biden’s talk of “tolerance” and acceptance of conservatives, it’s just…not my experience.

Well. This past week, at my place of employment (a local university, dominated by liberals), my coworkers were fretting over the election, and I casually mentioned my concern of voter fraud among Democrats. I didn’t call anyone names, didn’t say ANYthing disrespectful, but when the conversation shifted to “Republican voter suppression” and then (of course, as it always does) to “black lives matter” and “systemic racism” I did register a very vanilla critique of BLM’s motives.

Two of my coworkers, (both women, both hard left feminists, one black, one loudly identifies as  “queer”) started shouting at me. Really shouting.  Telling me I was making them “unsafe.” One of them even told me my CROSS that I wear around my neck made her feel “unsafe.” I have had interactions with these two before that have not been pleasant, but this was taking it up a notch.

I was pretty upset by this interaction, but in the interest of being charitable I  chalked it up to election week stress, and went back to work, hoping to forget about it. Instead, I was greeted with a call from our HR office, and told that one of them had filed a complaint against me.

My punishment? Diversity training. Just me, no one else. I’ve been told I must be more “tolerant.” It starts next week. I could cry.

So you’ll forgive me if the presidents’ words ring hollow.

Yes, it’s starting all over — the things that I write about in Live Not By Lies. We are now seeing a quickening. It’s only going to get worse from here. A lot worse. Look:

This is wild. Facebook, Mailchimp, and now Eventbrite all de-platformed a pro-Trump march, labeling it “misinformation.”

Woke corporate power, colluding against “wrong think.” Remember when it was just Alex Jones? The slope, it is so slippery. https://t.co/QyoQygzvNm

— Rachel Bovard (@rachelbovard) November 10, 2020

These kinds of headlines basically mirror the way authoritarian governments engage in censorship or repression of dissenting speech, without a transparent process or rule of law. pic.twitter.com/PVC355aHjK

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) November 11, 2020

Don’t you know that this is a sophisticated form of war? That this is how it’s going to be from now on for dissenters on the Right? You know who has seen this coming for a while: American citizens who grew up in the Soviet bloc. We need to listen to them and do what they tell us to do. This is a Kolakovic Moment for America.

To be clear, I am not one of those people who believe that this election is being stolen from Trump. I tend to disbelieve that, but I’m not 100 percent sure. What worries me is the attempt to silence dissent from the official story. Yet let’s be aware that we on the Right do ourselves no favor when we choose to believe things not because of evidence, but because it suits our ideological preferences.

A reader sent me this news that in the UK, Barclays bank decided to close the bank account of a Christian ministry because Barclays disagrees with its stance on homosexuality. Absent legislation to prevent this, we can expect the same thing to happen in the US, using the rationale of preventing “hate” — of LGBTs, of racial minorities, and the usual protected classes — and “misinformation.” If you disagree, it’s off to diversity training for you. Or you will lose access to the economy.

Please, read Live Not By Lies, and read it with your church friends and other small groups. Here is a link to the free study guide. 

My friends at the influential Issues, Etc. radio show forwarded me this letter from a listener:

Your book is having a huge impact!  I have friends reading your book who never ever read, and they’re buying copies for their friends and family.  One of my buddies said his sister is starting a small group Bible study and using your book.

The scales are falling from my Lutheran pastor’s eyes.

Good. We need to see clearly now, and act accordingly.

UPDATE: Gonna be seeing a lot more of this:

Dispatches from Year Zero pic.twitter.com/vmzzC0jVdI

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) November 11, 2020

UPDATE: A reader writes:

In response to your recent post, I had a bizarre interaction with someone I count as one of my very best friends. By all accounts, he’s a evangelical centrist working at a Protestant church in a reddish city in a purple state. He has supported Republicans, Democrats, and third party candidates over the years.

He has always been anti-Trump and was firmly in the Biden camp from early on — primarily because Biden has historically been center-left. The day after the election, we were conversing and my friend states that he cannot imagine how anyone could have voted for Trump. Thinking I was making benign point about how circumstances affect voting decisions, I tell him the story of a Trump-supporting friend who lived near rioting in a deeply blue city in a blue state. Make no mistake, this Trump-supporter’s sole reason for supporting Trump was because he was the first person in his governmental chain-of-command who seemed to care about law and order. He feared what was happening mere blocks away and his mayor, police chief, and governor neither acted nor cared.

In pointing out a throwaway, single-issue vote for Trump, my good friend absolutely lost his mind to the point of advocating for the ostracization of ALL Trump-voting friends. From the comfort of his gated community, he could not empathize with the fear one might experience by being in proximity to a frenzied mob. This is an upper-middle man who has always prided himself on having an array of friends from all walks of life who in the last few months has decided that he must push out of his life friends and family who find themselves amongst the 70 million Americans who cast a vote on behalf of the sitting president.

Joe Biden is known as a guy who is friendly with a lot of Republicans — I fear that my aforementioned example speaks louder than the sentimental bipartisanship of yesteryear. I have little doubt that Joe will be overrun by the new fundamentalism that dominates his base, from the leftiest of lefties to the centrists.

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McCarrick Report: Vatican Misdirection

The Catholic writer Michael Brendan Dougherty says the Vatican’s McCarrick Report is a total whitewash. Excerpts:

Even when it is self-exculpating, the Vatican’s report of this is self-contradictory. The money mattered — it was “weighed heavily” — but it didn’t clinch anything. The idea that McCarrick was simply making it rain all the time in the Church like a rapper showing off his boom-boom room on MTV Cribs apparently troubled nobody at all.

Hundreds of other little threads are left unexplored. How was it that experts on clerical sexual abuse knew and spoke openly about McCarrick’s reputation as creepy “Uncle Teddy” back in 2006, and McCarrick was fending off lawsuits throughout that decade, but the future cardinal living with him claimed, implausibly, to have no knowledge of anything beyond what he terms sordid rumors? The idea is ludicrous for anyone with the most passing familiarity with the culture of gossip among Catholic priests. And yet, that same cardinal is set to be in charge of the next conclave? What was it about John Paul II and figures such as McCarrick and Marcial Maciel, both prodigious fundraisers and obvious liars?

Why was McCarrick — so well-known for his reputation — living at a seminary in his retirement? Why was he one day hastily moved out into another parish rectory? What exactly did Cardinal Donald Wuerl, then archbishop of Washington, D.C., know? What about the multiple houses on the Jersey shore? Why did Vatican inquiries into seminaries during these decades not uncover the widespread culture of sexual license and abuse in many of them, which anyone who talks to churchmen knows about, and which is the subject of salacious books, and the bleedingly obvious reason for the dropout of many candidates for the priesthood?

How did it all work?

More:

But that gets to the error behind the report. What is “institutional knowledge” and “decision-making”? The report is a kind of prophylactic against a real investigation. Instead of confessing to the Church the sins of its leaders with a degree of candor and humiliation, the report tells outsiders, if you looked at these selected documents, this is the most you could possibly prove against us. Ultimately, the report itself is a kind of moral heresy.

Instead of approaching the McCarrick case in a forensic — yes, inquisitorial — way, judging the bishops of the Church as men who have duties to the Church and God to confront evil, based on what we know, we have this petty bureaucratic account.

Read it all. 

It is no coincidence that some of the key figures in the hierarchy today owe their rise to McCarrick, who, at 90, is still around. I hope he finds a truth-telling journalist and makes a final public confession before he goes.

Yesterday, a parish priest texted to say that he had read the report, and his take on it jibes with his long and unhappy experience in the Church: that the leadership class is disproportionately homosexual, and they cover up for each other’s deeds. I have not had a chance to read the entire report, but I would not be the least bit surprised. Based on the executive summary, and what MBD and others who have read it all are saying about it, it seems that this report says nothing about the intersection of gay sex and big money at senior levels of the Catholic Church. McCarrick is the living symbol of both. Over the years, I have had a number of people who are very much in a position to know talk about these things, never on the record. A very senior figure who had been part of the aborted clean-up of Vatican finances once told me that they had known that sexual corruption (always gay) was a serious problem in the Vatican, and they had known too that financial corruption was a problem. But it wasn’t until they started working on this case that they saw how deeply entwined the two are. A gay reader who lost his Catholic faith in seminary and dropped out e-mailed yesterday to say that reading the report brought him back to the things he saw on the inside that caused him to crack. He said, of the hierarchy, that “the amount of grooming and testing that happens is so orchestrated and intense” — meaning that they identify and promote fellow gay men willing to play the game, so to speak. He and I will be talking later about all this.

We might not begin to get a real idea of what happened with McCarrick until and unless federal authorities make a court case out of the US-based Papal Foundation, co-founded by McCarrick and allegedly used by him as a kind of slush fund to buy influence at the Vatican. Matthew O’Brien has written about this in the past at First Things. 

 

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Tom Holland In Alabama

Hello from Nashville. That was a long drive up from Baton Rouge yesterday. I did it in part because I’m still not quite comfortable flying in the Covid era, and in part because road trips are the only time I have to listen to podcasts and audiobooks. The last roadtrip I made, to Birmingham earlier this fall, was immensely enjoyable on the road because my companion was historian Tom Holland, whose Dominion I listened to. It wasn’t his voice, but it was his words — and oh, nobody can write narrative history like that guy.

I had planned to listen to his Rubicon, about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, but it turned out that you couldn’t get it with the Audible credits I have. You could get his Dynasty, which is about the Caesars, making it a sequel to Rubicon — but I felt weird about getting the chronology wrong. Happily, Audible allowed me to acquire Holland’s book Millennium — I think that’s the British title; here it’s The Forge of Christendom. It’s about how events in Europe around the year 1000 shaped the West. Well, I have been absolutely loving the Sigrid Undset novel Kristin Lavransdatter (the Tiina Nunnally translation), set in 14th century Norway, so I was pleased to spend more time in the Middle Ages, led by Tom.

I have to tell you that I laughed out loud as I motored through rural Alabama, listening to the book’s narrator discussing how preoccupied people of that era were with the Apocalypse, which they believed was about to be upon them, as I passed a large billboard that said: JESUS IS COMING SOON.

Plus ça change, as they say in Tuscaloosa.

Seriously, though, it’s fascinating to think that Alabama is a thousand years and an ocean away from Europe at the first millennium, but people there — and in many parts of America — are still very much thinking and talking about the Second Coming of Christ. Here’s a passage from the book’s introduction in which Holland reflects on how people around the dawn of the third millennium are also worrying about the end of the world, e.g., scientists and climate catastrophe:

Holland says that when the Antichrist didn’t appear, and Jesus did not return, Europeans had to get on with their lives. I think about the French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s prophesy about the post-Covid world: “We will not wake up after the lockdown in a new world. It will be the same, just a bit worse.”

Is it more depressing to think that we will face a world-changing cataclysm, or that we will just muddle through dully, just a bit worse?

The Dark Ages Europe Holland tells of in the first part of the book sounds like a pretty grim place, though quite interesting to me. We all know about the morally corrupt Renaissance popes, but let me tell you, some of the Dark Ages pontiffs were no slouches. John XII died at age 27 of a stroke brought on by his exertions in the bed of his married lover. You see a fair amount these days angry Catholics saying that the Catholic Church has never been as bad off as it is today. Um, no, that’s not true.

It’s interesting to reflect, via this book, how much our sense of meaning at any given moment is constructed from our fears and desires. A banal point, perhaps, but when I listened to Holland (or rather, the voice actor) talking about how so many of the wisest men of the end of the first millennium were certain, thanks to prophecies and calculations, that the End was upon them, it’s a reminder of how contingent our knowledge of the future is.

You might think that’s good news, because those who prophecy doom might be wrong. Well, hold on. In the time period that Holland writes about, Byzantium still dwelled in all her splendor and might, and didn’t much worry about the barbarian kings that ruled the lands of the former Roman empire in the West. The empires of the Saracens were places of wealth, culture, and learning — especially al-Andalus, Muslim Spain. Holland says that Caliph Al-Hakam II’s library in Cordoba might have contained as many as 400,000 books. Only a tiny fraction of that number of books existed in all of western Europe at the time. Barbarians didn’t much care for reading.

We know, though, that despite their relative backwardness, things would begin to change soon for the West. And despite their power and glory, both Byzantium and the Muslim world would decline from their height. But nobody in Constantinople or Cordoba knew it then. It was all about to slip from their grasp.

Holland wrote this book over a decade ago, yet I would say that his judgment that we are standing on the edge of a new epoch is still sound. Nobody quite knows what it is going to be yet. But things are moving. I saw yesterday that Kamala Harris said that the US, in the new administration, is going to involve itself in Syria again, on the side of “pro-democracy” forces. As a dog goes back to its vomit, so does a declining imperial power … you know how that goes. We may end up nostalgic for decadent Donald Trump after all.

Hey, if you’d like to sign up to listen to the live chat of the Q Ideas virtual town hall today and tomorrow in Nashville, click here to learn how. It has just started (though I’m not yet in the room — I slept late after that drive); my interview will be later this afternoon. But it’s all being recorded, and if you sign up, you have access to those sessions saved digitally.

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The McCarrick Report

Just before leaving for Nashville, I received a copy of the executive summary of The McCarrick Report, the result of the Vatican’s official investigation into former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was laicized a couple of years ago over sex abuse allegations. Very quickly, these are the highlights, at least the ones that stood out to me on first read:

 

In 1999, Cardinal John O’Connor of New York warned Pope John Paul II, in writing, not to elevate McCarrick to the archbishopric because he was a sex abuser. O’Connor died of cancer that year. McCarrick later convinced the Pope that these were slanders — and John Paul believed him. In 2000, McCarrick was made Archbishop of Washington, then cardinal.
Why did John Paul believe him? According to the report, the accusations were not airtight by the time they got to the Holy See. The bishops of New Jersey lied to the Pope to defend McCarrick. John Paul’s experience in Poland taught him that Communists often lied in specifically this way about clerics to discredit them. And John Paul trusted his own personal knowledge of McCarrick’s character, from having worked with him for years.
In 2005, the new pope, Benedict XVI, tried to force McCarrick to resign over all this. The record shows that he and his top advisers met in Rome, but they declined to pursue a formal canonical process to get rid of McCarrick, hoping instead that he would take the hint and withdraw. McCarrick resigned as DC archbishop in 2006, and was replaced.
From 2006 to 2008, more information about McCarrick’s abuse of seminarians and others made its way to the Vatican. Benedict XVI dithered about how to handle it. Meanwhile, McCarrick continued to work very publicly in the US. It appears that nobody in Rome wanted to act clearly and decisively against McCarrick.
The report says that Pope Francis never received solid reports of McCarrick’s actions, and trusted that they were just rumors. The report says that Archbishop Vigano, the former Vatican ambassador to the US, claims that he told Francis about McCarrick, but this (says the report) cannot be substantiated.

Those are the main claims in the report’s executive summary. The entire 400+ page report can be read here.

The Catholic News Agency report is here.

So, the McCarrick Report blames the dead Pope and the retired Pope, but exonerates the current Pope by saying that he trusted the previous two popes. How convenient. I don’t believe it for a second. I believe this is likely a whitewash of Francis, though by no means does that put the blame entirely on him.

Nevertheless, the document paints a picture of Church corruption that is damning. We see an old boys network of churchmen who weren’t afraid to lie to the Pope to advance the career of McCarrick. McCarrick certainly wasn’t afraid to lie to the Pope about himself, and he even swore an oath that he was innocent. John Paul II’s judgment when it came to bishops was deficient — this we know. We see in this report evidence that he was blinded by deep clericalism.

I find it impossible to let JP2 off the hook because he was supposedly blinded by his Communist experience.  Cardinal O’Connor was one of the most conservative prelates in the Church, and he warned the Holy Father not to advance McCarrick. I think John Paul just did not want to believe these things. Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna has said that on a different case, that of an Austrian cardinal, Grör, who had abused many boys, John Paul simply did not want to accept the truth. Schönborn has said that he had to admonish John Paul to act.

Ultimately, Theodore McCarrick’s success in the Church is chiefly the fault of John Paul II. I wish it weren’t so, but there it is.

We see that Benedict XVI was more realistic than his predecessor, but he too was timid in the face of McCarrick’s defiance. This isn’t in the report, but I recall the words of the SSPX bishop Bernard Fellay, who met with the new Pope in 2005, and recalled asking him why he didn’t take stronger action against bad men in the Church hierarchy. He said Benedict pointed to the entrance to his office and said something like, “My authority ends at that door.” In other words, the Realpolitik of the Catholic Church meant that the Pope was a de facto figurehead, that the Curia would not obey him.

True or not, we see in this report a Catholic institutional system that really did not want to confront McCarrick. Whether it was by fear (of giving scandal, of facing the horrible truth about Church corruption, etc.) or laziness, or because McCarrick was blackmailing others in the hierarchy, we don’t know. It could well have been that the senior Church leadership just didn’t think what McCarrick was accused of was that big a deal. What we see in this report is that the Vatican knew since at least 1999 that Theodore McCarrick was damaged goods, yet promoted him all along the way, and did not meaningfully try to stop him until Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York came forward in 2018 with these allegations.

Don’t forget this social science work from earlier this year tracking McCarrick’s social network within the Catholic hierarchy. He knew everybody — and everybody knew about him. If you read the McCarrick Report with knowledge of the broader culture within the Catholic Church that has come out since the scandal broke big in 2002, you will not be surprised: it’s a culture that looks out after its own, that mistakes the good of its members for the good of the wider Church, that is more interested in keeping up appearances than in moral rectitude and spiritual integrity, and that cannot be trusted to govern itself.

For me, as a longtime admirer of John Paul II — whose leadership was instrumental in my conversion to Catholicism in 1993 — facing the truth about his terrible misgovernance of the Church is hard. I can’t say that the McCarrick Report is surprising — it is not new news that JP2 was a poor steward of episcopal appointments — but it is still a blow. We know that John Paul II was blind to the evil of Maciel Marcial, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ. I do not think John Paul was malicious. I think he was willfully blind — and culpably blind.

Nevertheless, we can’t put it all on John Paul II. If Benedict XVI — who acted decisively against Maciel when he succeeded JP2 — did little or nothing about McCarrick, how much can we count on the authority of any Pope? I’m certainly not trying to exonerate John Paul here, but it appears that the whole structure was to some degree rotten. Why did none of those other high-ranking cardinals, men who knew, or should have known, about McCarrick, never step in? What was stopping them?

Maybe the full report (I only read the executive summary) will offer more answers.

We have also seen, with Francis, a deep reluctance to face the ugly truth about sexual corruption among the clergy, especially the bishops. One cannot help wondering if the institutional Catholic Church, at the level of the hierarchy, is so far gone that it is incapable of reforming itself. The veteran Vatican reporter John Allen wrote this on the eve of the report’s release:

Beyond that, we know from the experience of the last thirty years that cases with a “smoking gun” proving conclusively the Vatican knew a given cleric or prelate was an abuser and covered it up anyway are hard to find. More often we’re in the “should have known” arena, meaning they got credible reports and claims and declined to pursue them, usually due to the willful ignorance of a clerical culture.

By “clerical culture,” what’s meant is a culture in which clerics get the benefit of the doubt, and the higher up the food chain you go, the more doubt you get. Further, it’s a culture in which the opinions and instincts of bishops count for more than either lay people or rank-and-file priests – so that if one bishop says another bishop is a great guy, that’s often worth 100 laity or 10 priests warning that something is off.

That culture may be crumbling fast, but it was in place for virtually the entire span of the saga this report seeks to document.

It would be easier, naturally, if what happened could be explained by a couple of cookie-cutter villains, so we knew who to blame. The less satisfying truth may be that an entire culture, skillfully exploited by a charming and resourceful prelate, induced otherwise decent people to ignore clear warning signs of danger.

That’s really useful. Everybody’s going to want to find a villain that suits their own preferences within the Church’s politics, but this thing Allen identifies is the greatest villain of all — and the hardest to fight. They lie — to themselves, and each other — because that’s who they are.

Do you remember the final scene in the film Fargo, in which a nonplussed Sheriff Marge is taking the murderer off to jail, and speaks her simple monologue to him (if you haven’t seen the movie, don’t watch this):

That’s how I feel about this report, when I think of Popes, cardinals, and bishops, and their culpable indifference to the sins and crimes of a Prince of the Church: “And for what?”

UPDATE: One more thing. Many of you who have followed my work for a while know that I first learned about McCarrick’s evil deeds in 2002. I knew of two laymen who had been part of an American private delegation to Rome, which had gone to urgently warn the Vatican not to move McCarrick to Washington and make him a cardinal, because he was a sex abuser. The first source told me it was true, but he wouldn’t go on the record. The second source reacted with shock when I asked him about it, and stammered that if it were true, he wouldn’t admit it “for the same reason Noah’s sons covered their father in his drunkenness.” In other words, to protect the Church.

I couldn’t write about the story without those men going on the record. But word got back to McCarrick, thanks to the priest who told me about those two trusting the wrong man, and McCarrick asked his private lawyer to call my boss and admitted that the story was true, but downplayed its significance, and asked to take me off the story. My boss refused, but there was no story anyway, because no one would go on the record. I did not have enough proof to write anything.

If either of those men — or any of the others, whose names are not known to me, on that mission to Rome — had come forward then, how different would things be today? What did they have to fear? They were laymen. No bishop was going to fire them, or harm them. Yet they kept their silence.

The hierarchy is chiefly to blame for McCarrick. But it’s not the only one at fault. The lack of moral courage of the laity is part of this story too.

UPDATE: I have arrived late in Nashville tonight after a day of driving. I want simply to point out that I saw something that the liberal Catholic writer and Francis biographer Austen Ivereigh wrote saying that St. John Paul II’s name should come off high schools because of this. That is preposterous, and, if you ask me, a rather obvious attempt to shunt blame away from Pope Francis for his role in this mess. Though I’m not Catholic, I have no doubt in my mind that John Paul II is a saint. Saints are those who either died for their faith (martyrs), or who in their life exhibited heroic virtue in Christ’s service. Can anyone possibly deny that John Paul was heroically virtuous, even holy? Saints are not always without sin. St. Jerome was said to have a terrific temper, for example. St. Olav, Norway’s great king, was a warrior.

A parish priest writes:

The difference between someone being malicious as opposed to culpably blind isn’t worth much on any moral scale. To blind oneself deliberately and with awareness of the evil involved is monstrous.

Even a saint can be a useless manager, a poor judge of character, or have blindspots due to culture. These can result, as all imperfections can, in massive harm to himself and others. It is, after all, a fallen world.

I’ve been reading through the McCarrick Report which, as we both know, is likely of only modest value despite its many eye-opening (or at least suspicion-confirming) revelations. The fact is that in cases like these, it’s not what’s in the documents that tells the tale, but what passed personally without record that would give the real story.

As laid out in the report, it seems that JP II’s intervention on behalf of McCarrick for Washington took place without any actual accusations having been brought to his attention or any media scrutiny being referenced. Instead, there is a 1999 letter from O’Connor who was concerned by a remark from JP II that he interpreted as the Pope thinking to advance McCarrick from Newark–perhaps to NYC. This letter reports vague rumors, but is careful to indicate that these do not involve sexual activities, that they are only rumors, and that the behavior ceased years ago.

O’Connor’s letter was followed by a broader review of the situation under the guidance of the Congregation for Bishops and the Nuncio (Montalvo, who was new). Eventually, it led to testimony from three NJ bishops who had direct knowledge of accusers, not rumors. Regrettably, they hid what they knew.

Nuncio Montalvo’s estimation of the O’Connor letter and the testimony from the NJ bishops was shared with the Congregation. Eventually, that led to seeking the opinion of Cacciavillan, the prior nuncio to the US. HIs evaluation is a classic piece of curial reasoning.

I may have missed something, but I didn’t note an actual report of sexual activity in the memos to JP II. Three bishops withheld crucial information.

Somehow, McCarrick learned he was being shelved. But he managed to get a handwritten note to JP II at Castel Gandolfo via the latter’s Polish personal secretary. He swore he was innocent and that seems to have tipped the balance.

While JP II was from Poland and had seen Nazi and Soviet propaganda at work, that doesn’t mean he was culturally incapable of realizing that there are bad priests. That he may have felt the media sensationalized things to the detriment of the Church doesn’t mean he was blind to evil in our midst.

It could be that his experience with government and media manipulations made him skeptical, but keep in mind that it was not the government or the media that was bringing any of this to his attention. It was members of the hierarchy. 
 
And JP II wouldn’t have been the only one to be taken in by a narcissistic/socio-pathic manipulator. My own sense is that narcissism/sociopathology is the key to McCarrick’s  dysfunction, not his sexual proclivities per se. In my experience, bishops don’t recognize readily or know how to deal with such men if they manifest as compliant and dutiful–which was McC’s MO with superiors (although certainly not with subordinates).

If you haven’t read M. Scott Peck’s “The People of the Lie” you really must. It’s a short work on narcissism and examines in some detail cases involving religious communities. They confuse people, harm them, and leave havoc in their wake.

In general, I’d be hesitant to accuse anyone of doing things culpably. It doesn’t add much to the conversation and requires that I pass judgment on the state of their soul. It’s enough to be able to say they seem to be doing x intentionally or not–whether that includes culpability I can leave to God.

As for JP II, I don’t know the details about Schoenborn’s claims or what JP II knew about Marciel at what point. But I know enough about the Vatican to suspect JP didn’t have unfiltered access to information.

Of course, I’ve always maintained that JP II and B16 would have been better served if they had created their own information gathering service, set up a proper investigative service, and then significantly sanctioned or removed clerics for serious violations of belief or practice. I mean, really, what can it mean to have removed the teaching licence from Curran, Kung, Schillebeckx, etc. and yet allow them to continue to preach, hear confessions, and give spiritual guidance as priests?!! That’s a major  failure in my book, but I don’t think culpable blindness accounts for it. These men were not afraid to face darkness in themselves, others, or the institutions of the Church.

Another parish priest:

I’m reading through the report. From my knowledge and experience everything really points to the same thing: homosexuals cover for each other over and over. For decades there are just far too many in positions of power.

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