Some animals are more equal than others

Legal Scholar Gerard V. Bradley thinks there’s more the just a desire defend the sexual revolution behind the sudden and dramatic American turn against religious freedom.

That “more” is identity politics:

For the first time in American history, it has become respectable to publicly oppose religious liberty and its supreme value in our polity. This unprecedented turn is ominous. It will not only diminish our constitutional law. It will remap our common life, for religious liberty has always been a linchpin of our political culture.

…

You might think that all of this is just another example of the sexual revolution threatening religious liberty, as it has for decades. Think again …

The sexual revolution may be a necessary part of the gale-force headwind buffeting religious liberty. But sexual freedom itself is not nearly sufficient to threaten it. Only identity politics could do that.

Here are three of many possible illustrations of what I mean when I say that identity politics poses an especially great threat to religious liberty. They stem from three related errors.

The first is that what believers invariably understand themselves to be doing (steering clear of immoral involvement in the bad conduct of another person) is forcibly reconceptualized as an attack the personal status or “identity” of a person self-identifying or presenting as a member of a supposedly vulnerable group …

…

Compounding this first error is the prevalent notion that where public authority recognizes the religious liberty of someone like Jack Phillips, the state puts its own “imprimatur” on Phillips’s unjust discrimination, and even on his normative premise that marriage between two men or two women is morally impossible …

…

A third error builds on the first two. Often styled as “dignitary” harm, the idea seems to be that when you are refused a service due to the provider’s moral qualms about assisting you in certain activities, your personhood or identity is “demeaned,” and your “dignity” is attacked.

… It is ever more apparent that, in this context, we are really talking about perceived insult, about a same-sex couple’s feeling that they have been humiliated or demeaned, even though no word has been spoken, no gesture made, that means anything more than “It is against my conscience to participate in this activity.”

… Before sexual identity could emerge as the colossus it is, religion had to be reduced from a set of beliefs and truth-claims about the way the cosmos really is to nothing more than one’s singular expression of ineffable spiritual experiences or of the collective identity of one’s religious tribe. Religion had to first be authoritatively re-described, against the self-understanding of many believers, as experience, or even as raw subjectivity, somehow walled off from the realms of genuine knowledge about reality ….

A key here, which I fear Prof. Bradley did not summarize very well, is that even on identity politics terms, there is at least as great a dignitary harm in telling the religious “accused” that his deepest convictions are contemptible (as a Colorado civil rights commissioner told Jack Phillips in the wedding cake case) as there is in the accused’s sober “It is against my conscience to participate in this activity.”

“That’s not religious freedom, that’s discriminaaaaaaaation!” is the hackneyed and idiotic new convention for remapping our common life, and it’s reinforced every time the New York Times and other idiots put religious freedom in scare quotes (e.g. Indiana’s controversial “religious freedom” law …).

Some identities are just more equal than others.

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Richard Lugar, R.I.P.

Mr. Lugar was elected to represent Indiana in 1976, after managing a family farm and food-machinery business and serving as the mayor of Indianapolis. He rose to become the leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before he was defeated in a 2012 GOP primary by a tea-party-backed insurgent who branded him as insufficiently conservative.

Wall Street Journal

There wasn’t much I could do about it, but that loss was the proof that Indiana had slipped its moorings.

My “Richard Lugar Memory” was a remarkable Lincoln Day Dinner speech in my home county in what must have been the mid-1980s. I was still (and for another 20 years or so) notionally a Republican.

Lugar had just returned from a junket in the Phillipines, was a bit jet-lagged, but spoke brilliantly, mesmerizingly, without notes, for what seemed like forever but not long enough.

Among other things, he warned the assembled Republicans not to believe the propaganda that the opponents of Ferdinand Marcos were a bunch of Communists. Rather, Marcos was supported only by plutocrats with medium and small business and all others in opposition.

The propaganda was pretty consistent with the Republican party line, but Lugar was prophetic, Marcos was ousted in the aftermath of a notoriously corrupt snap election, and the Phillipines were better for it.

I never voted for anyone but Lugar when he was on the ballot thereafter. He wasn’t just one of Indiana’s best, but one of the best, period, full stop.

We didn’t deserve him, the GOP ousted him for a fool (after I had repudiated the party but generally voted in its primaries, as Indiana doesn’t have voter registration by party), and the Republican party paid for that folly by losing the Senate seat to Joe Donnelly, duly replaced 6 years later by another Republican fool (the one of three primary candidates who most convincingly promised slavish fealty to the Überfool in the White House).

I’m glad for him that Richard Lugar did not live to see the denoument of this American tragedy.

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Betrayal, denial, cowardice

(This is Great and Holy Friday in the Orthodox Church.)

Betrayal, denial and cowardice were the hallmark of the Church on Good Friday. But from Christ we hear no blame – if only because He never thought us to be other than we are.

Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs which he did; but Jesus did not trust himself to them, because he knew all men and needed no one to bear witness of man; for he himself knew what was in man (John 2:23–25).

And if we are honest with ourselves and know what is in man, then we can only give thanks for the wondrous irony that, knowing all that, Christ gave Himself for us anyway. It is the very character of love.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Irony and Belief

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Psalms

It occurred to me, as I thought about Psalm 50/51, that there may be a good reason why Psalm 138/139 has overtaken it as my favorite.

Psalm 50/51 is the repentant Psalm of a passionate young man who committed adultery, attempted to cover it up and then, failing, had his pregnant mistress’s husband killed. All seemed hunky-dory until God’s foremost prophet of the era pointedly called him on it and pronounced the very tangible coming consequences

Ergo, Psalm 50/51.

Psalm 138/139, in contrast, seems the more subdued repentance of an older man, whose youthful passions are largely gone, who rarely acts in conscious defiance of God’s will, but who appreciates the stunningly capacious scope of hamartia, and is aware of how unaware he is — self-absorbed, thoughtless, petulant at times and in some measure.

When do the sedentary pleasures of retirement become “sloth” (as if it’s easy to work up high dudgeon over sloth), enjoyment of the table “gluttony” (ditto)? When does the now-mostly reflexive appreciation for the female form cease being the “bird flying over the head” and start “nesting in your hair” with your invitation?

Were I a monastic, I might eventually be able to put my finger on things like this, but I’m at a bit of a loss when it comes time for sacramental confession because my “missing the mark” just isn’t all that self-scandalizing. So my priest hears over and over again about my sometimes-foul mouth and vague things and stuff and trying to figure out what cardinal sins are most specifically at play.

Maybe I don’t need to “figure it out”:

Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my ways. See if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 138/139:23-24)

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Surprised by food for thought

… I was continuing to make my way through Shoshana Zuboff’s great new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It’s not an easy book to read, in part because the things Zuboff, a former Harvard Business School professor, talks about can be somewhat arcane, but also because it’s damned depressing. This is a book about how a business model pioneered by Google has come in less than 20 years to dominate everything, with consequences we can scarcely comprehend. I’m not going to get into the book’s weeds here; there are lots of weeds, and I am not sure that Zuboff is going to be able to offer a plausible way out of this mess.

The gist of it is that nearly everything we do and say is monitored by multiple corporations, who are taking that data — usually without our knowledge or permission — and using it to figure out how to sell us things and, more crucially, to guide us toward behaving in particular ways without knowing that we are being manipulated. There is no real way to opt out of the system. It is overwhelming — and Zuboff shows how the tech companies have spent ungodly sums to manipulate politicians and regulators in order to maintain maximum access to the personal data of everyone. (The Obama administration was in Google’s pocket, for example.) Zuboff likens it to the Spanish conquistadores arriving in the New World.

I bring this up in light of Brooks’s column because if you want to talk about the foundations of society being attacked, believe me, we should all worry about Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Silicon Valley on the whole a lot more than we worry about our buffoonish president. What the surveillance capitalists have done, and are doing, matters far more to the future of our democracy and its legitimacy than does Trump.

…

I find Donald Trump — lying, unstable, barely competent Donald Trump — to be less of a threat than I find the kind of progressive elites who hate him. He has the presidency, which is a powerful thing to have. But they control Silicon Valley. They command the US economy. They control major American institutions, including higher education and the media. And they trust in their own goodness.

Rod Dreher (Emphasis in original)

I continued reading Dreher’s blog entry, despite my initially thinking “not one of his better ones,” because I thought I might have missed something in the David Brooks column he quotes (of which I also thought “not one of his better ones”).

I’m glad I continued because, although I cannot praise his prose or pace, there’s nevertheless some nourishing if un-tasty “food for thought” in it, including a different vantage point from which to ask — yes, even 32 scant hours after release of the Mueller Report — whether Trump might actually be the lesser evil in 2020, both as a matter of self-preservation (as one whose Social Credit Score, as viewed by those who trust in their own goodness, is pretty low) and for the interests of America more generally.

As Freddie put it:

I have had a standing rule not to read anything with the word “Trump” in the headline since mid-2017. I have not kept to it 100% of the time, but I have been pretty compliant. But here’s something I know.

The Trump-Russia collusion story became a national obsession because of two matters of psychic convenience: one, the belief that someone (even a Republican FBI agent cop like Robert Mueller) is going to ride in on a horse and save us; and two, that our problems are the problem of an outside force, some malevolent international entity working evil. Only a child could believe that either of those is true.

No one is coming to save you. This is what the world is now, and this is what the world will be long long after Trump is gone. And more: this is the world we deserve. We are not broken because of Russia, or Donald Trump. We are broken because of the evil this country has done and the evil this country is. You can work to change that. But if you try to hide from it behind the Mueller report you will only fail. Because no one is coming to save you.

The 2016 election had “God’s Judgment” written all over it. 2020 may come packaged the same way. Lesser evils rather than affirmative goods may be all we’ll get to choose. Democrats: This is mostly up to you as a practical matter: can you nominate someone less evil?)\

Anyway, I point you to Dreher’s blog on the chance that you’ll find food for thought as well.

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To build anew

I haven’t been closely following the story of the Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral fire for reasons at least partly alluded to in my more casual blog:

There’s so much chaos and tourism associated with Notre Dame that my experience of it last May was pretty underwhelming …

[M]y favorite Paris Church is my surprise discovery: St. Julien le Pauvre, a Hobbit-Sized Church of great antiquity that also warms the cockles of my heart because it’s Byzantine rite. My next trip to Paris (if God grants me another after the other places I want to see) will find me there Sunday morning.

But people I do follow, either in column or blog, seem to think there’s something symbolic, even highly symbolic, about the fire, and its timing on Monday of 2019’s (Western) Holy Week. Of those, the best^* so far seems to be that of Ross Douthat, datelined Monday but discovered by me only today.

Douthat had been writing a column about Emeritus (is that correct?) Pope Benedict XVI’s recent letter (encyclical?) when he learned of the fire. (My parenthetical questions reflect some of Douthat’s theme.)

Excerpt:

The problem of Catholic narratives that can’t find synthesis, of “liberal” and “conservative” takes that feed angrily off one another, of popes and former popes as symbols grasped by partisans, is not the problem of the sex abuse crisis. It is simply the problem of Roman Catholicism in this age — an age in which the church mirrors the polarization of Western culture, rather than offering an integrated alternative.

… I am … doubtful that anything so simple as a conservative “victory” will return the church to cathedral-raising vigor and make it feel, to outsiders, like something more than a museum whose docents all seem to hate one another …

The cathedral will be rebuilt; the cross and altar and much of the interior survived. But all preservation is provisional. The real challenge for Catholics, in this age of general post-Christian cultural exhaustion, is to look at what our ancestors did and imagine what it would mean to do that again, to build anew, to leave something behind that could stand a thousand years and still have men and women singing “Salve Regina” outside its cruciform walls, as Parisians did tonight while Notre-Dame burned.

What is the synthesis that could make that possible? What lies beyond the stalemates and scandal and anger of our strange two-pope era?

Ross Douthat, From the Ashes of Notre-Dame.

That’s not just a Catholic question. It’s a question for all of Western Christendom, and I suspect for Eastern Christendom as well (the resurgence of which in nations like the Georgian Republic, which I’ll be visiting in a month, may be tenuous).

Might even the Great Schism be healed in a new synthesis? Or must we await our eventual evangelization by the global South, where Christianity, writ large, is thriving?

(^* Easily the worst was that of our President. They can retire that trophy.)

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Forsaking lunacy, again and again

I have long thought that the best critique of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option is that he’s just asking Christians to actually act like Christians, and asking the Church actually to do the work of the Church. (Long? Well, the book has barely been out for a year, hard as that is to believe, but I watched it gestate on his blog.)

I also have long thought that the best defense of the Benedict Option is that Dreher’s just asking Christians to actually act like Christians, and asking the Church actually to do the work of the Church.

Dreher’s seemingly anodyne requests are important in part because too damned many professing Christians are interested in God’s minimum requirements, when His minimum requirement is, and always has been, everything. Too many Churches (I didn’t use scare quotes. You’re welcome.) are interested only in institutional survival, and will pander to the basest fads to keep the coffers full and tushies in the pews.

Maybe just-enough-to-not-go-to-hell Christianity is nothing new. If not, that would explain the emergence in so many ages of prophetic voices. Alan Jacobs makes the same substantive prophetic point as Dreher in rather unprophetically winsome garb, coming at it from a much different direction, too. I cannot improve on Jacobs, so I’ll not try. Just go read it.

But I’m persuaded that to become an idiot rather than a lunatic (and I’ve demonstrated my lunacy today by spending too much time on the ramifications of Julian Assange’s indictment), I must read Jacobs’ beloved Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, toward which I have taken the necessary first step of getting it onto my Kindle.

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The place for broken souls

Our Orthodox Faith defines sin as an illness that is in need of healing, not as a crime that requires punishment. The Church is a hospital for the soul whose therapists (priests) first sought therapy and then became the therapists. As a healing institution the Church is the place for broken souls.

We come before Christ as tarnished images, far from that which God intended. Yet this very Creator God is patient and loving, quick to forgive. Our God invites us to holiness, to be made whole. His grace is sufficient to lift us up out of our mire and into the heights of a joy and gladness that is meant to be eternal. We need only to humble ourselves and ask for help and the Kingdom is ours.

Heaven and hell are not about location, but about relationship. All that is needed is our responsive word, followed by action. We say yes to God’s invitation while seeking out the therapy that is ours within the life of the Church.

Wholeness (holiness) is ours through this relationship with Christ, Who’s redemptive act upon the Cross, together with His having conquered death by death, delivers us from the depths of estrangement. We are lifted up to God, having been made whole, and eternal communion with God is our destiny.

With love in Christ,
Abbot Tryphon

The Morning Offering, April 11, 2019

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Toxic or Tonic?

What happened to our Arcadia? We stopped listening to it. We stopped dancing, we moved away, we started listening to the chant of the Machine instead. It is debt we chase now, not the moon. We are individuals, not parts in a wider whole. In a broken time, it is taboo to remember what was lost, and that fact alone makes Arcadia a revolutionary document. Look, it says. This is how it was. This is what was broken. At night, when you lie awake with your phone flashing under your pillow – do you miss it?

Paul Kingsnorth via Alan Jacobs (italics added).

I thought that was lovely, so I’m exposed as a monster:

…

This is where landscape writing sheds its leafy cloak and lets you glimpse its colder face – sounding like Steve Bannon, quoting Steve Bannon, black notebooks in hand, gazing from its bench at the little woodland of little England and trying to decide if “benevolent green nationalism” sounds too much like “…well, a nice kind of Hitler.”

We see you for what you are.

Warren Ellis also via Alan Jacobs, who closes with a few questions for folks like Ellis:

For these critics of Kingsnorth, is there any legitimate way to praise, and to seek to conserve, old rituals and practices? Can you love harvest festivals or Morris dancing or Druidic rites or for that matter Ember Days without being a racist, a fascist, a Nazi? Or is urban cosmopolitanism the only ethically acceptable ideal of human life?

And if you can love and practice those old ways without being a racist — How? What would distinguish morally legitimate attitudes from the ones that Kingsnorth is being pilloried for?

This inquiring mind would really like to know.

“Broken times” indeed.

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A stable dystopia

A dystopia is not a place that is threatened by genuine chaos — quite the opposite. It’s a moral horror because it actually stabilizes around evil things. The thing that was horrifying about Brave New World or 1984 was precisely that there could be no real challenge to an evil system. Indeed, most of the people living in those worlds do not see anything wrong with them, and accept them — compounding the horror further.

… I’m tempted to think that an ideology this blind to reality cannot succeed. But I’m chastened by the example of societies that are built on pretty terrible foundations that are nonetheless stable. China and North Korea both come to mind.

… [A]s an opponent of progressivism the Trump movement has utterly failed, in my opinion. Progressivism shows no signs of abating or losing steam …

I think the real, most urgent task is to understand what has changed, fundamentally, about the society we live in. Call it a post-industrial capitalist society — I can’t think of anything better. I think we’re only starting to find out what such a society really looks like. We still need to achieve a factual understanding of how this kind of society works, and to develop a really rigorous theory of whether or not it can be stable. I don’t see that anyone has achieved this yet. That’s the discussion I want to have. Then we can actually talk about how to prepare for, or exploit, its crisis tendencies.

Reader Jones (via Rod Dreher)

I’m not as sure as is Reader Jones that we’re becoming a stable progressive dystopia. (The preceding sentence is understated.)

But I think the label “post-industrial capitalist society” is fairly apt, inasmuch as capitalism-as-we’ve-known-it has dissolved civil-society-as-we’ve-known-it. And I find it arresting to think that our current polarized major party bases might resolve to some sort of stable dystopia, presumably with one side or the other zestfully suppressed.

Finally, I see little prospect that the resolution will be anything I would recognize as conservative or Christian.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here, but a bit here as well. Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

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