Elevation of the Cross

The modern West is anti-Christian

The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is.

René Guénon Guénon , The Crisis of the Modern World

The American Hermeneutic

The problem with race and the Bible was far more profound than the interpretation of any one text. It was a problem brought about by the intuitive character of the reigning American hermeneutic. This hermeneutic merged three positions: (1) The Bible was a plain book whose meanings could be reliably ascertained through the exercise of an ordinary person’s intelligence; (2) a main reason for trusting the Bible as true was an intuitive sense, sealed by the Holy Spirit; (3) the same intelligence that through ordinary means and intuitions could trust the Bible as true also gained much additional truth about the world through intuitive processes that were also deliverances of universal common sense. The first position was a traditional Protestant teaching intensified by the American environment; the second was historically Protestant and Reformed; the third was simply a function of the American hermeneutic.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

I just love this story …

It is well known among Cypriots, not to mention a matter of national pride, that St. Lazarus lived on the island of Cyprus after the Lord’s Resurrection. Saint John’s Gospel tells us that the Jewish leaders had resolved to kill both Jesus and Lazarus. They considered it necessary to kill Lazarus because belief in Jesus as the Messiah increased after he raised Lazarus to life when he had been dead for four days (John 12:9–11). Lazarus was literally living proof of this extraordinary miracle. The New Testament itself does not tell us that Lazarus went to Cyprus later, but this was known in the tradition of the Church of Cyprus. The gospel message came to Cyprus very early, and the Church was established there even before St. Paul became a missionary (Acts 11:19–21).

My husband, Fr. Costas, was born and lived on the island of Cyprus when it was still a British colony. He related to me that the Cypriots would boast about St. Lazarus to the British there. But the British would often scoff at this claim, saying there was no proof that Lazarus had ever come to Cyprus.

A very old church dedicated to St. Lazarus, dating back to the 800s, is located in Larnaca, Cyprus. In 1972 a fire caused serious damage to the church building. The subsequent renovation required digging beneath the church to support the structure during reconstruction. In the process of digging, workers uncovered the relics of St. Lazarus located directly below the altar in a marble sarcophagus engraved with the words “Lazarus, the four-day dead and friend of Christ.”

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou , Thinking Orthodox. You’ll probably see this again the next time Readwise pops it up for me.

… but I love this even more

The Christianity that those of us, at least in the United States … grew up around came from one of two categories largely. And people who want to defend those types of Christianity will call this a caricature. I don’t care anymore. But what I’m about to say, even if you think it’s a caricature of what they’re trying to teach, this is what a lot of the people within these traditions have actually received. Right? So it’s very easy to defend some tradition based on what’s in the books, and what we would mean to say, right? But I’m talking about what the people who I encounter, the people who talk to me about spiritual things. come to me and give confessions, what they’ve received from the Christianity they’ve grew up around, how that has shaped them, how they think because of it. And if people, representatives of those groups want to say that’s not what they meant to teach, cool, but maybe some introspection on why that’s not what people are receiving.

Anyway, what people have received comes in two categories. One is sort of the smilin’ Bob Shuler School of, “God loves you just the way you are and you don’t have to do anything. Just don’t worry about it. Just smile and be happy and listen to the hymns of your choice that you enjoy.” … That worked really well with boomers. That seemed to answer something they needed to hear. Maybe they’re a generation who grew up with very dissatisfied perfectionist parents, and so just hearing you’re fine just the way you are was what they needed, right? But that doesn’t work on subsequent generations, because subsequent generations are more realistic or nihilistic depending on your point of view, and know there’s something deeply wrong with themselves and with the world around them. So just telling them over again, “No, no, you’re fine, everything’s fine, it doesn’t work.” That’s why those kind of churches are all empty now.

The other school of thought is pretty much the exact opposite. It’s God doesn’t really love you. Right. In fact He’s pretty angry with you and He’s getting ready to send you to hell. Right? And the only way to avoid that is, depending on your tradition, right, is, for you to love him nonetheless, really sincerely — and there’s a rabbit hole to go down. How sincere am I ever really? — and do that plus live your life at a certain way and follow certain rules. Which will differ based on tradition, and which you will inevitably fail at.

That second one is most of the people who I interact with on spiritual matters, and it’s almost like they’ve been taught and they’ve internalized that. Their life in this world is this sort of really horrible reality show, almost like Squid Games, and like God is about weeding out contestants and narrowing it down to this faithful few and everybody else goes to hell, goes to eternal punishment except for this faithful few who, again, depending on your tradition, he may just pick. Or, you know, they’re the ones who really did it right. They’re the ones who really loved him sincerely, or they’re the ones who really lived their life the right way.

And any way you slice those things, most people again are realistic enough that when they look at their life, they don’t see a lot of evidence in their life and their actions that they’re one of the people God picked, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really sincere about following God, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really toeing the line and living the life they know they should be living, meaning most people are walking around — like religious people — walking around thinking they’re probably going to end up in hell. That God is probably mad at the most of the time, and that He’s looking for them to make some missteps so, boom!, they can get nailed.

Also most atheists are walking around doing the same thing they’re protesting constantly that there is no God because they can’t deal with that guilt and stuff that they’ve internalized. They can’t live like that. No one can live like that their route to trying to live like that and deal with the cognitive dissonance is just to deny that any of it’s true, over and over and over again publicly, loudly to everyone who will listen. Right.

Whereas the religious people are just in this kind of quiet desperation of how do I figure this out. Right.

So let me reiterate again, right, and Penal Substitution plays a big part in this. That’s why I’m bringing it up in this context:

God loves you. Jesus said so. St. John’s Gospel, the Father Himself loves you. He is not angry at you. He does not want to destroy you for your sins. There is no power of justice that commands him to do so. No one commands him to do anything. He loves you. He wants you to find salvation, but salvation is a thing you have to actually do. He wants you to do it. The Bible says so. God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But you have to do it. He empowers you to do it. He forgives you when you mess up trying to do it. He heals you when you damage yourself trying to do it and failing. He is entirely on your side. The God who created the universe is entirely on your side and the saints are on your side and the church is on your side. Everyone is on your side. Christ is advocating for you. Everything is set up for us.

When Saint Paul says to us, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. You don’t stop them like Kierkegaard did. Read the next verse because it is God who is working in you to will and to do according to his pleasure. We continue on and we work out our salvation because we know that God is on our side and empowering us to do it and loving us and loving other people through us. We need to pray about that. We need to pray it. We need to repeat it. We need to kind of imitate what the atheists are doing. We need to say it out loud. We need to say it to each other. We need to say it to everyone who will listen right? That God loves you and wants you to find salvation, wants you to be healed, wants you to be set free from sin. He wants all these things for you. It doesn’t mean you have nothing to do. That doesn’t mean you’re fine just the way you are. You know you’re not fine just the way you are, right? But it means that He is there to help you to grow to be transformed into the person who you need to be and want to be. The person he created you to be for eternity. That’s the actual message of Christianity. Don’t accept any substitutes for that, ever at all for any reason.

That’s what I have to say.

Fr. Stephen DeYoung (transcript by Tipsy)

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

From grim to grimmer

Bummer

I could have filled this post with many clippings colorfully describing how bad things are. I’ve done it before and I’ll probably do it again. That’s just the kind of guy I am: melancholic.

But it just seems too much this week. I’m having trouble identifying anything going right in the USA.

I came of age in the 60s, and although I’ve been expecting our collapse for a long time, the manner and speed of the seeming collapse are a surprise.

I’ll summarize what’s a bit unsettling, even for me, thus:

We are moving rapidly from American hegemony to a multipolar world.
The very best President imaginable couldn’t stop, but could at best slow, our relative decline.
The very best President imaginable wouldn’t even run because of the politics of personal destruction.
But a toxic narcissist, jilted by voters in 2020, would run again in 2024 on a platform of vengeance. “Vengeance” turned out to mean turning America into a “shithole country.” (That will teach us!)
The Mainstream media are whistling past the cemetery as all this goes down.
UPDATE: Charlie Kirk, who it seems was more consequential than I had realized, gunned down Wednesday. I wrote everything in this post, other than this bullet point, before the murder of young Kirk. I knew little about him. My first impression was unfavorable because he was associated with Jerry Falwell, Jr. at the time that Falwell’s Potemkin Piety was collapsing. Thereafter? Well, I’m about 50 years older than his target demographic. (My wife didn’t even know who he was.) I’ve read a lot about him this morning, but the most interesting observation I read was too frank for this raw moment, so I’ll let you ferret out your own information if you care to.

With that off my chest, I’ll try to edify y’all for a while.

Repelled by conservatism, but not a liberal

Conservatism, as you know, is a complete mess in America right now. But reading conservative authors like Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson does give you an adequate appreciation for the power of nonmaterial forces — culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and community cohesion.

…

I’ve been driven away from the right over the past decade, but I can’t join the left because I just don’t think that tradition of thought grasps reality in all its fullness. I wish both right and left could embrace the more complex truth that the neocon Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed in his famous maxim: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.”

David Brooks, Why I Am Not a Liberal. This pretty clearly was one of the ten best things I’ll see in the New York Times this month, so that’s one of my gift links.

Breakneck: what you get in an engineered society

Publishers have figured out how to get limelight for their new titles, and one new title that’s deservedly getting a lot is Dan Wang’s Breakneck, about the astonishing ascendancy of China.

For a solid interview with Dan Wang (interviewer Ross Douthat), click this shared link: This Is Why America Is Losing to China.

Wang attributes this in substantial part to the relative influence of engineers in China versus that of lawyers in the USA. Engineers build; lawyers obstruct.

I find that somewhat plausible. But I write this precis not as an uncritical defense of my former profession, but to call attention to where engineered China went off the rails: trying to engineer China’s demographics led to over 300,000,000 abortions, over 100,000,000 sterilizations, and a population that’s skewed toward males.

That is, in my experience of engineers, classic engineering myopia. China could have benefitted from a bit more rule of law, less engineering “logic.”

What’s “fair” got to do with it?

There are people who get outraged when a court — especially the Supreme Court — impose or affirm what seems like an “unfair” result.

The scare-quote is not because fairness is a fantasy. It’s there because courts’ “unfair” decisions are mostly decisions to follow the law despite any countervailing sense of fairness.

And I approve of that approach. Consider: what is truly “fair” about denying a win to a guy who followed all the legal rules and then got sued by a guy who ignored the rules but somehow feels cheated (and has a good lawyer to sell his sob story)?

Liberalism without illusions

William A. Galston, a blast from the Clintonian past, has a wonderful article in Democracy Journal. I summarize, but I fully intend to read it several more times.

My summary:

Liberal democracy (a/k/a classical liberalism) has some inherent weaknesses:

Because liberal democracy restrains majorities and gives even small minorities a say, it slows the achievement of goals that majorities support. In other words, it requires more patience than many possess.
Liberal democracy requires tolerance for minority views and ways of life to which many citizens are deeply opposed.
Liberal democracy requires a distinction between civic identity and personal or group identity.
Liberal democracy requires compromise.

Liberals (left-liberals, or “liberals” in the modern pejorative sense) complicate these weaknesses with characteristic illusions:

Myopic materialism: the belief, especially pervasive among elites, that economic issues are the real issues and that cultural issues are diversionary, deliberately heightened by unscrupulous leaders to gain support for their anti-liberal agendas.
Parochialism. Yes, transnationalism is the parochialism of elites, because most people in advanced democracies as well as “developing” nations value particular attachments—to local communities and to the nation, to friends and family and compatriots.
Naivete about the course of human events and the possibilities of human nature.

Credit for my discovery of this article goes to Rod Dreher.

Broken Windows

Okay, everyone is writing about it, and Trump’s vehement denials and $10 Billion lawsuit against Dow Jones makes it newsworthy that there’s now potent corroboration of Dow Jones’ (via the Wall Street Journal) claim about Trump’s hand-rendered birthday card for ephebophile Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday. But I can’t say anything smarter than this:

From what I can tell, in fact, there’s no actual theory underlying the impromptu new conspiracy theory that the letter was forged. No one can explain how or why a birthday message purporting to be from Trump to one of his close associates would have been doctored for a privately published book compiled in 2003. Did time-travelers from the present day fake the letter and plant it knowing that it would come out someday and damage him—after he’d already been elected president twice?

If so, their plot failed. This isn’t going to damage him. It’s just another broken window in a neighborhood that’s full of them.

…

Andrew Egger explains at The Bulwark:

In a way, Donald Trump and his allies have spent their entire political lives preparing for this moment. The whole miserable decade of “alternative facts,” of witch hunts, of flooding the zone with sh-t—it all amounted to a long, powerful education for his base. It’s a training in a certain kind of zen meditation, in which stories damaging to Trump pass from the eyes and ears directly out of the body without ever intersecting the brain. By now, the base has gotten in their 10,000 hours. They’ve become masters of the craft. They can perform all sorts of remarkable feats—the media-cope equivalent of lying on beds of nails while cinderblocks are smashed on their chests. These cinderblocks, they whisper serenely, are just a liberal plot. If I pay attention, the Democrats win.

…

The Epstein scandal is the “final boss” of Trump scandals, the supreme test of reality-defying propaganda skills that MAGA has acquired over the course of 10 years. The crime involved, pedophilia, is one of their obsessions; the villain, Jeffrey Epstein, is a lead character in their hysteria about an elite child-abuse cabal; yet the evidence continues to mount that their own messiah, Donald Trump, knew what was happening as it happened and—at best—did nothing to stop it. It’s like the Access Hollywood scandal but with the spin difficulty dialed up by a factor of 10.

…

Think of American government as a big neighborhood. The neighborhood has started to go to hell. Its residents are adjusting their expectations for it accordingly.

Bad things happen when neighborhoods start to go to hell. As public evidence of minor disorder and neglect rises, crime gets worse. That’s the “broken windows” theory of criminology—the idea that letting lesser offenses like window-breaking go unpunished signals to good guys and bad guys alike that laws won’t be enforced. Criminals respond by escalating to more serious offenses and law-abiding locals become fatalistic or apathetic.

Trump has broken a lot of windows in our government. How can we expect Americans to maintain the same expectations for civic order that they used to have as the proverbial neighborhood falls into disrepair?

Nick Catoggio.

Somehow, this seemed like the time to resurrect an item I only recently deleted from my footer:

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social mediu

Sunday, 9/7/25

Goldilocks Protestantism

Second, mere evangelical churches will not easily adopt magisterial identities. It is, for one thing, a matter of conviction: They believe in populist biblicism … The lack of tradition is a feature, not a bug.

Brad East, Goldilocks Protestantism.

Brad East, a Protestant of, I think, evangelicalish leanings, wasn’t even on my radar two years or so ago. Now I look forward to reading just about anything with his byline, listening to any podcast in which he’s dialoging.

For all my reactivity to Evangelical tomfoolery, East, the lads (and a few ladies) at Mere Orthodoxy, and the panels on the Mere Fidelity podcast are mesmerizing to watch flirting with traditions “mere evangelicals” would contemn. I wish them better success than their Mercerburg spiritual kin, Philip Schaff and John Williamson Nevin.

Infallibility

At its base, papal infallibility stems from a need for epistemological certainty (absolute mental surety) and is another symptom of the legalism of Roman Catholic theology—the institution of the papacy is bolstered by a Western psychological desire for absolute assurance.

Fr Andrew Stephen Damick , Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

No “off” switch

Unlike a computer, the mind does not have an “off” switch. When we are not actually using it, it carries on under its own power, behaving as if it were in charge and issuing a constant stream of comments and challenges, almost all of which are of a negative character. As we have seen, the Fathers call this activity logismoi, and although these thoughts are not evil of themselves (most of them start as simple speculations of the “what if” variety), the spiritual experts maintain that all sin has its roots in this stream of thought. The stream of thoughts is negative because the mind dwells in a land of unrelenting desire and boundless fear, and it attempts to influence us to experience these two areas as our rightful home. Almost anyone who has ever lain awake at four in the morning listening to the workings of the mind knows what this feels like.

Fr. Meletios Webber, Bread & Water, Wine & Oil

Paradox

…the Marxists, the I.W.W.’s who looked upon religion as the opiate of the people, who thought they had only this one life to live and then oblivion—they were the ones who were eager to sacrifice themselves here and now, thus doing without now and for all eternity the good things of the world which they were fighting to obtain for their brothers. It was then, and still is, a paradox that confounds me. God love them! And God pity the lukewarm of whom St. John said harshly (though he was the disciple of love) that God would spew them out of His mouth.

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness

Bad Religion

[B]ad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place.
Mysteries abide at the heart of every religious faith, but the Christian tradition is uniquely comfortable preaching dogmas that can seem like riddles, offering answers that swiftly lead to further questions, and confronting believers with the possibility that the truth about God passes all our understanding.
The goal of the great heresies … has often been to extract from the tensions of the gospel narratives a more consistent, streamlined, and noncontradictory Jesus.
“Religious man was born to be saved,” [Phillip Rieff] wrote, but “psychological man is born to be pleased.” This new man would be interested in neither political utopianisms nor moral idealisms. All existing orders would be equally acceptable to him, “so long as the powers that be preserve social order and manage an economy of abundance.”

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion. Ross also said something about the Nicene Creed, but I thought it was too skewed to publish without a critique that I didn’t have time to write.

Going to the gym

Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.

James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Saturday, 9/6/25

A question to keep you up tonight

The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), particularly Article 92, mandates obedience to lawful orders but distinguishes that unlawful orders—those that require criminal acts or violate the Constitution, U.S. federal law, or international law—must not be followed. Military personnel are legally required to refuse unlawful orders, with the understanding that obeying illegal orders does not absolve one from responsibility under both U.S. military law and international law. This principle was firmly established by precedents such as the Nuremberg Trials, which rejected “just following orders” as a defense for war crimes. (Via Perplexity AI, but confirmed)

If you believe or suspect, as I do, that Donald Trump plans a series of provocations toward the end of declaring martial law and remaining in office, UCMJ Article 92 might come as at least a small comfort. “If they order troops to fire on peaceful civilian demonstrators, the troops should refuse, right?”

Well, “should” is doing a lot of work there. An incident last week gives great pause:

I ran across this dystopian sentence in the New York Times: “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

…

The vice president was asked yesterday to specify the legal authority that entitled Trump to blow up a bunch of people in the Caribbean. The authority, he replied, is that there are “literal terrorists who are bringing deadly drugs into our country and the president of the United States ran on a promise of stopping this poison from coming into our country.”

He and I happened to attend the same law school, so from one alumnus to another: That’s not the correct answer, J.D. The president’s campaign pledges don’t magically acquire the force of law because a plurality of the electorate decided he’d be marginally preferable to his opponent.

…

[So w]here is that authorization? Since 2001, presidents from both parties have strained the logic of the post-9/11 AUMFs against al-Qaeda and Iraq by citing them to justify attacks on adjacent jihadist threats like ISIS. No one seriously believes they can be stretched so far as to encompass drug trafficking in the Caribbean, though. Absent any new approval from Congress, letting Trump mark people for death based on an assessment of “terrorism” by his own State Department amounts to granting him the power to kill anyone whom he deems a threat.

That’s how we ended up with Pentagon lawyers poring over law books on Wednesday, desperately trying to find some statute that might retroactively justify blowing up 11 Venezuelans.

The answer to the question posed to J.D. Vance is that there is no obvious legal authority for what the president did. There’s only what we might call post-legal authority, the idea that—as Trump himself once put it—“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Which, I think, cuts to the heart of the difference between conservatives and postliberals.

…

To ask which legal authority gives Trump the power to kill Venezuelans on mere suspicion of drug trafficking is to engage in non sequitur. The president said he would save the country by preventing drugs from entering the U.S. and he’s going to do that. What does law have to do with anything?

…

On that note, here’s a question to keep you up tonight: If the Times is correct that the Pentagon couldn’t identify a legal justification for Trump’s order to kill a bunch of people, why did it obey his order?

To ask that question is to invite demagoguery about not taking crime seriously or knowing “what time it is,” blah blah, but I know exactly what time it is and it’s exactly the right question for the hour. Our new government fundamentally believes that law is an obstacle to American greatness—that law, normally just a nuisance, has itself become a major problem bedeviling the country—and it intends to solve this problem too. One way is to normalize shooting first and asking questions later. That’s the significance of what just happened to that Venezuelan ship.

Nick Cattogio (bold added)

Mind-boggling

I suspect you haven’t heard more about this because the ramifications boggle the mind:

3. China may have hacked data from every single American in one of the largest-ever cyberattacks, experts fear. Hackers backed by Beijing targeted more than 80 countries, stealing information on telecoms, transport and military infrastructure in a year-long campaign, investigators concluded in a report released last week. Since 2021, the group, known as Salt Typhoon, has accessed data that could enable the Chinese intelligence services to monitor global communication networks and track targets including politicians, spies and activists. Even the telephone conversations of Donald Trump and JD Vance were compromised, according to the FBI. Hackers sponsored by the Chinese government “are targeting networks globally, including, but not limited to, telecommunications, government, transportation, lodging, and military infrastructure networks”, the joint statement, from agencies including the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and FBI, said. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)

John Ellis News Items

Noted

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

Thursday potpourri, 9/4/25

Bon mots

In another article in The Journal, [Kyle] Smith panned “The Roses,” about a miserably married couple: “People are going to want to walk out of this movie even when it is shown on airplanes.” (Ray Psonak, Tokyo)
In his newsletter, Jim Acosta reacted to the labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, fawning over the president during that three-hour cabinet lovefest: “Get a room. Just not the cabinet room, please.” (Linda Hoffman, Georgetown, S.C.)
In The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi offered an explanation for what she sees as unusually conspicuous cosmetic surgery among the MAGA elite: “These are not human faces, they are luxury meat-masks meant to signal wealth and in-group belonging.” (Chris McDonald, Gainesville, Va.)
In Esquire, Dave Holmes contemplated the choice confronting young American scientists facing the Trump administration’s assault on research: “You could live in fear of being sent to the gulag for your frog embryos not having their citizenship papers in order, or you could go live in a place like Australia, where you’re valued and well compensated, where your lifesaving work is free of political manipulation and where Chris Hemsworth is a 6. Who wouldn’t take that deal?” (Dave Pramuk, Napa, Calif.)

Frank Bruni

Tyrannies

Among the most useful contrasts involves distinguishing the ancient form of tyranny from the modern variant.

The philosophers of classical Greece (Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle) treated tyranny as a regime devoted to enabling the tyrant to fulfill his lust for the greatest possible pleasures. …

Modern tyranny is very different. Unlike the ancient form, modern tyranny is usually ideological, motivated by ideas, and it involves administration on a vast, national scale, which means it requires a popular movement to gain power and a party to hold it. …

The thing that’s interesting about Trump is that he has far more in common with ancient tyrants than he does with modern ones. …

[Trump is] a man who personalizes everything. It’s always about Trump—his ego, his power, his image, his accomplishments, his strength, his wealth. This is why Cabinet meetings quickly become cringe-inducing displays of obsequiousness on the part of senior members of his own administration, who trip over themselves to bestow ridiculously over-the-top praise on Dear Leader. It’s also why Trump is using the formal and informal powers of his office to punish his domestic political enemies, regardless of whether doing so violates longstanding norms restricting presidential behavior.

…

The pleasures he wants now are mainly the nation’s undivided attention and ever-greater quantities of money. He gets the first by weighing in on every controversy in the country, from crime and immigration to Sydney Sweeney’s ad campaign for American Eagle, a proposed change to the Cracker Barrel logo, and who will be admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He gets the second by shamelessly extorting money from other governments and wealthy companies, universities, law firms, and individuals from around the world.

Damon Linker

On that very last sentence, the extorted money is not really going into Trump’s pocket. It goes to the government, and typically is for specific purposes such as campus reforms or trade schools.

But it’s still extortionate.

Thinking outside the nativist box

On Saturday while grilling on his back porch, a friend of mine noted with disapproval how those of British nationality are now a minority in London (approximately 41 percent of Londoners were born outside of the UK according to the UK Office for National Statistics). He believes that native-born British aren’t permitted to object and that their capital is demographically no longer theirs.

This friend shares many of my core Christian convictions and was educated at a service academy and an Ivy League graduate school. He is intellectually curious and attends a large suburban megachurch. He also regularly engages with the podcast offerings of the New Right that have displaced legacy media. While he isn’t an Anglican, I’ve encountered similar talking points in the online fringes of my own church tradition, including discussion of “Heritage Americans.”

I don’t share my friend’s distress (possibly because I’m from Colorado which has a low percentage of native-born residents, and live outside Washington, D.C. where seemingly nearly everyone is from elsewhere). It’s preferable, in my viewpoint, to live in a place where many want to move to rather than a place many are relocating from. The capital of any large empire inevitably attracts diaspora populations from its far-flung territories ….

Jeffrey Walton

Dirty Harry

When Oxford University decided to give an honorary degree to former President Harry Truman, Elizabeth Anscombe objected:

Some things you simply cannot do, no matter the consequences. And for Anscombe, “choosing to kill the innocent as a means to an end is always murder.”

…

Consequences in ethical analysis are never as important as actions and intentions, and they can never justify doing something that is inherently wrong; to argue otherwise inevitably leads to an ethic in which moral absolutes wither away. (Humans will always be able to convince themselves that their circumstances are that dire.) If the intent behind Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to use civilians as means to that end, then no appeals to potential consequences could justify that decision. To do so, for Anscombe, was to rationalize murder.

Luis Parrales, Elizabeth Anscombe and the Bomb

Lie taxonomy

The problem is that all too many Christians are in the grips of two sets of lies. We’ll call them the enabling lies and the activating lies. And unless you deal with the enabling lies, the activating lies will constantly pollute the body politic and continue to spawn violent unrest.

What’s the difference between the two kinds of lies? The enabling lie is the lie that makes you fertile ground for the activating lie that actually motivates a person to charge a thin blue line at the Capitol or take a rifle to a pizza parlor.

Here’s an enabling lie: America will end if Trump loses. That was the essence of the Flight 93 essay in 2016. That was the core of Eric Metaxas’s argument in our debates this spring and fall.

Here’s another enabling lie: The fate of the church is at stake if Joe Biden wins.

And here’s yet another: The left hates you (this sentence sometimes concludes with the phrase “and wants you dead.”)

David French, Only the Church Can Truly Defeat a Christian Insurrection

Performative piety (on the campaign trail)

On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a press release recommending that schools adopt a policy that calls for recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. The press release said in part:

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society. Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”…

… [Senate Bill 11] directs the Office of the Attorney General to defend any school district or charter school that adopts such a policy. In addition, the Attorney General is empowered to recommend best practices for implementation.

For Texas students considering how to best utilize this time, Attorney General Paxton encourages children to begin with the Lord’s Prayer, as taught by Jesus Christ.

The press release then sets out the text of the Lord’s Prayer as it appears in the King James Version of Matthew 6:9-13.

(Religion Clause blog)

Paxton is deeply corrupt and fighting for his political life through a divorce and a primary candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

The Ten Commandments don’t need friends like him, but he may need to bandy them about to burnish his image with low-information voters fond of performative piety.

Corrupt Todd Rokita take note.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

New World Order

[H]ere’s the real takeaway: Tianjin is not just hosting another international gathering; it is hosting the embryonic headquarters of a new world order. When half of humanity convenes to discuss not how to obey the old hegemon, but how to craft sovereign industrial futures, the game has already shifted. The West, stuck in yesterday’s script of divide and rule, cannot grasp that the 21st century is already unfolding elsewhere – in Russian engines powering Chinese jets, in oil tankers sailing east, in Modi and Putin shaking hands against the backdrop of an Asia that is no longer waiting for permission. The SCO in Tianjin is Eurasia writing history, while the West scribbles in the margins of its own decline.

My cyberfriend Terry Cowan, commenting on Shangai Cooperation Organization (the SCO) meeting in Tianjin, China — without us. Here’s how a few of our mainstream media covered it (not that Terry thinks they’ve got much true to say):

Wall Street Journal (gift link)
New York Times

Then, a day later, Trump exerted his charm:

Twenty-six heads of state joined Xi Jinping to watch a military parade in Beijing. They included many autocrats, including from Russia and North Korea, but no leaders of big Western democracies. Beforehand Mr Xi said mankind faced a choice between peace and war, and called China “unstoppable”. Donald Trump told China’s leader to “give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States”.

The Economist World in Brief, Wednesday 9/3. Fuller Economist coverage here.

John Ellis channels the Financial Times:

Xi Jinping has capped a week of frenetic diplomacy by presiding over one of China’s biggest military parades, projecting his nation’s growing power in a show of solidarity with fellow strongmen Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. A procession of China’s newest tanks, drones and missiles rolled past Tiananmen Square on Wednesday to mark the 80th anniversary of the second world war victory over Japan. The People’s Liberation Army showed off its latest weapons, including hypersonic missiles, with Xi hailing troops as a “heroic force” that should develop into a “world-class military” — implying a full equal to the US’s armed forces. The Chinese president said the PLA would “resolutely safeguard national sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity” — code for Beijing’s goal of gaining control over Taiwan. “The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is unstoppable,” Xi added. (Source: ft.com)

I’m not going to blame Donald Trump for all this. I have little doubt that his various tarrifs, trash-talking, vacillation and so forth accelerated it, but the American empire didn’t much rally under Joe Biden, either. We’re at an inflection point, and I expect us to be much closer to “bit player” than to “hegemon” when it’s over.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

Labor Day 2025

HHS

America at last has its own Trofim Lysenko, a crank whose screwy ideas about science gained influence over policy not because of their methodological rigor but because their contrarianism reflected the prejudices of a feral populist revolutionary movement. … You tell me: Is a country that’s transitioning from relying on vaccines to prevent disease—including brain cancer, perhaps—to relying on Ivermectin and beef tallow more or less of a sh-thole than it used to be?

The only good news is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is unlikely to rack up a body count as large as his Soviet predecessor. But he’s sure gonna try.

…

[A] first-world public health agency, the most well-known of its kind on Earth, is about to become a third-world soapbox for voodoo and superstition.

…

The best-case scenario for public health until 2029 is that no one except the populists pays the slightest bit of attention to the federal government’s medical recommendations. Mass resignations would encourage that.

But if that’s not enough, I think resigning is also compelled by basic dignity. Refusing to participate in a corrupt enterprise is a mark of good character and an act of moral hygiene. What Trump and Kennedy are doing is indecent, and decent people being involved in it both obscures that fact and subjects those people to temptations to behave indecently themselves.

Nick Catoggio, Our Own Lysenko

TGIF

Here’s a pet theory of mine: The Democrats’ struggle to cobble together a winning message is at least partly a result of Democratic strategists and spokespeople sucking at their jobs. They expect favorable coverage from the legacy press and have an irksome habit of talking to reporters as though they’re essentially lower-rung party employees.

For example, a guy named TJ Ducklo—a truly fantastic name for a party hack—was briefly a deputy White House press secretary under Biden until he reportedly accused a female reporter of “jealousy” and threatened to “destroy” her. He presumably expected he’d get away with it, because he thought the press worked for him …

Or take Ian Sams, a top Democratic spokesman who was tasked with reassuring reporters that Biden, despite his visible decline, was sharp as a tack. He was in the news recently after he admitted that he met Biden face-to-face only twice. But I’ll always think of him as the guy who, while working for Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign, became furious when a BuzzFeed journalist tweeted something mildly critical of one of Harris’s debate performances.

As reported by The Washington Free Beacon, he went whining to BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief at the time, Ben Smith, that the critical tweet was “whiteness manifest,” whatever that means, and a “really bad look” for the publication. Smith’s reply was spot on: “Do you seriously not have real problems? This text makes me think you are totally, totally unready for an actual presidential campaign.”

Will Rahn, filling in for Nellie Bowles at TGIF. Rahn contrasts Republican press relations, where the GOPsters don’t expect fawning coverage, but I don’t want to borrow too much.

Rahn then pivots to this:

A shooting in Minneapolis: The biggest news of the week is a mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minnesota called Annunciation, and there are no jokes to be made about it. It horrifies me. It’s demonic. And, for the life of me, I cannot understand the Democratic impulse to diminish the power of praying for the victims, children who were shot while praying. It’s like a preprogrammed, knee-jerk reaction that, especially in this instance, is just bizarre and offensive.

Those who seek solace in prayer pray in these situations. We pray for the dead and wounded. We pray for the families. We pray for ourselves. Some might even pray for the soul of the shooter.

I get that you want to make this about gun control. My suggestion is that you shut up about the prayer stuff and just make it about gun control.

Amen! He’s not as funny as Nellie, but I wouldn’t mind too much if Nellie took more time away, leaving him in charge.

He can’t unsee it; I’m trying to bring it into focus

The reason I feel such a tinge of discomfort by the Center Gai scene is not because I care what travelers do, but because I can’t unsee: the forces driving mass hyper-consumptive tourism are the same ones fomenting fascism, science skepticism, kleptocracy, billionaire veneration, labubus, and entertaining ourselves with little colored bubbles until the very second before we die.

Craig Mod via John Brady.

That’s a big claim that I need to chew on a bit. I thought you might want to as well.

Lone-wolf violence in America

In recent years, certain supporters of transgender rights have developed a public language of militancy and conflict, in which familiar habits of left-wing activism — attempts to shut down controversial speech, claims that contrary opinions are fascist or genocidal — are supplemented by an armed-and-dangerous iconography that’s usually associated with the American right.

In the wake of the murders of Catholic school children in Minnesota, the second attack in three years carried out by a transgender shooter against children at a Christian school, it would be relatively easy to write a column holding such militancy responsible for the carnage. All I would have to do is adapt the scripts so often used to blame conservatives for violence, from the J.F.K. assassination (which the scribes of Camelot quickly attributed to the angry rhetoric of Dallas right-wingers) down through the Tea Party and the Trump eras.

If I were making that argument, I would insist that words have consequences: If you tell people that they’re facing “trans genocide,” and that religious conservatives especially are agents of their fascist subjugation, why wouldn’t you expect some troubled souls to opt for vigilante action?

Likewise, if I were laying blame this way, I would insist that violent images inspire violent action: If you sport a shirt with the slogan “Protect Trans Kids” underneath a hunting knife (as the lieutenant governor of Minnesota did in 2023), or if you put a transgender writer toting an AR-15 on your magazine cover (as an alternative weekly in the Pacific Northwest did just two months ago) with a headline asking “Are You Triggered?” you bear some responsibility when the trigger actually gets pulled. Especially when the Minneapolis killer’s own manifesto reportedly trafficked in the same imagery, featuring a “Defend Equality” sticker overlaid with an image of a machine gun.

But I’m not making that case, because it would betray a consistent theme of this column, going all the way back to the attempted assassination of Representative Gabby Giffords in 2011: namely, that all attempts to blame extreme political rhetoric for mass shootings should be treated extremely skeptically, because the phenomenon of lone-wolf violence in America rarely attaches easily to either left-wing or right-wing ideology.

…

“Diabolos” in Greek means accuser, and in that sense the dark spirit that inspires these crimes suffers a defeat when we react with unity and solidarity rather than immediate recriminations.

Whereas it gains a victory every time we respond by immediately blaming our political rivals, and trying to prove over the bodies of the dead that, yes, our ideological opponents are even more evil than we thought.

Ross Douthat, Politics Rarely Explains Mass Shootings (gift link)

Grand Jury Nullification

A federal magistrate found that there was probable cause to support the charge. Yet, on three occasions, a grand jury in the District of Columbia declined to indict. Instead, the U.S. Attorney filed an information for a misdemeanor violation of Section 111. A writer at MSNBC suggests that the grand jury’s refusal to indict may be due to a weak cases being brought by the U.S. Attorney.

Since the failed indictment for Reid, there have been two more grand juries that failed to return a true bill.

It is possible that these juries are carefully attuned to the gradation between felonies and misdemeanors. May I suggest another possibility? Federal grand juries in the District of Columbia, made up (almost) entirely of critics of President Trump, are engaging in nullification of the Trump Administration’s law federal enforcement efforts. I imagine this sort of active resistance will increase as more federal officers are fanned throughout the District of Columbia. …

Historically, at least, the concept of jury nullification was viewed as a popular check against tyrannical governments. I imagine an average D.C. resident who can take time off from work to serve extended periods of federal grand jury duty may see himself in that fashion.

Josh Blackman. This is all the more remarkable because the received wisdom is that prosecutors can get grand juries to indict anyone for anything.

Occam’s Razor

Whenever the White House announces a new criminal investigation into one of Donald Trump’s enemies—an event that occurs with Stalinesque frequency—the administration and its allies have a go-to line: “No one is above the law.” FBI Director Kash Patel, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, and others have gleefully deployed the tagline. It’s a smirking, knowing stand-in for the claim that Joe Biden did the same thing to Trump while insisting that Trump was not above the law, and so turnabout is merely fair play.

[Account of why that dog don’t hunt omitted.]

The Occam’s-razor account of how it is that Trump became the first ex-president to face criminal investigation is that Trump is the first professional crook to be elected president. This would also neatly explain why he invented the idea of locking up the president’s enemies. Crooks are generally cynics who think that everybody in power is a criminal, and the only difference is that some people are hypocrites about it. (“My father’s no different than any other powerful man,” Michael Corleone says in The Godfather.)

Barack Obama did not threaten to lock up John McCain or Mitt Romney. The idea that the law is a weapon the president uses to protect his friends and harass his enemies was brought into American politics by one man. He now happens to be the one man who is very definitively above the law.

Jonathan Chait, MAGA Has a New Favorite Slogan

Summing up

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

Sunday, 8/31/25

I enjoyed my Evangelical boarding school experience. I looked forward to the end of Summer Vacation and moving back into the dorm.

For that and a few other reasons, this has long been my favorite time of the year.

It began 62 years ago tomorrow, when my dad and I packed up the car and headed north. The day ended up being quite an adventure, involving fuel pump failures on both family vehicles. I’m not sure the story is worth retelling – except for the possibility that my dad was wondering “Is God trying to tell us this was a mistake?”

I don’t think it was, despite all the Evangelical problems I now can’t un-see. “Evangelical” is where my family was, and we couldn’t imagine wanting to be otherwise.

PSA

No, not prostate-specific antigen, nor public service announcement.

We’re talkin’ Penal Substitutionary Atonement. It is not the sine qua non that so many think it is.

Grace

I can think of few phrases in modern Christian speech that have been more abused through misuse and overuse than “we are saved by grace.” As a young Protestant, this was explained to me thus: “We are saved by God’s unmerited favor.” This has the unfortunate implication that, whatever salvation may be, it’s something that’s happening in the mind of God – His unmerited favor. It strikes me as somewhat empty.

Its emptiness belongs to that nefarious doctrine (as I would describe it) of the Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA), in which God’s justice demands our condemnation, while God’s mercy demands the blood of Jesus. All of which, it would seem, leaves us as bystanders in a cosmic court where the eternal disposition of our wretched souls is worked out.

In Orthodox understanding (which is the understanding of the early Church), grace is ever so much more. Indeed, grace is the Divine Energies, the very life of God. I have given this article the title, “Saved by the Stuff of Grace,” to draw attention to the ontological character of grace. Grace is not an aspect of a Divine psychology. Grace is the very life of God. We are saved by becoming partakers in the life of God: He becomes what we are that we might become what He is – i.e., that we might dwell in Him and He in us.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Saved by the Stuff of Grace

Vladimir Lossky

The inadequacy of this theology was brilliantly deconstructed by Vladimir Lossky, whose analysis reveals why this opinion results in other problems that manifest themselves in Western Christian theology: Christian horizons are limited by the drama played between God, who is infinitely offended by sin, and man, who is unable to satisfy the impossible demands of vindictive justice. The drama finds its resolution in the death of Christ, the Son of God who has become man in order to substitute Himself for us and pay our debt to divine justice. What becomes of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit here? His part is reduced to that of an auxiliary, an assistant in redemption, causing us to receive Christ’s expiated merit. . . . The price of our redemption having been paid in the death of Christ, the resurrection and the ascension are only a glorious happy end of his work, a kind of apotheosis without direct relationship to our human destiny. This redemptionist theology, placing all the emphasis on the passion, seems to take no interest in the triumph of Christ over death. The very work of the Christ-Redeemer, to which this theology is confined, seems to be truncated, impoverished, reduced to a change of the divine attitude toward fallen men, unrelated to the nature of humanity.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Taming the Church

There was a subtle repressiveness behind this seemingly innocuous pluralism. Niebuhr failed to describe the various historical or contemporary options for the church. He merely justified what was already there—a church that had ceased to ask the right questions as it went about congratulating itself for transforming the world, not noticing, that in fact the world had tamed the church.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

Work

No one should imagine that the work he does is an end in itself; it has the role of beautifying his nature, with the virtues of patience, of self-control, of love for his neighbor, of faith in God, and in turn of opening his eyes to the wise principles placed by God in all things.

Dumitru Staniloae, Orthodox Spirituality

A hundred fine names for the Sulks

Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends. Ye call it the Sulks. But in adult life it has a hundred fine names—Achilles’ wrath and Coriolanus’ grandeur, Revenge and Injured Merit and Self-Respect and Tragic Greatness and Proper Pride.’

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

The Creed

I have said elsewhere that I deliberately will never adopt any theological “ism” that isn’t clearly derived from the Creed. Far from being a cynically contrived statement or a politically motivated one, the Creed was formulated to be as dogmatically expansive as possible, without opening the doors to needless speculation on the one hand or to doctrinal reduction for the sake of accommodation on the other.

Addison Hodges Hart, “God concepts,” the “impersonal transcendent,” and “superstitious” babushkas

Bad Religion

Ross Douthat wrote a book a few years back titled “bad religion.” a book like that wouldn’t be much use unless there was some definition of his terminology:

bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place.

…

[A] religious mistake has been to fret over the threat posed by explicitly anti-Christian forces, while ignoring or minimizing the influence that the apostles of pseudo-Christianity exercise over the American soul.

Question: how can you tell whether your church is pushing one of the varieties of destructive pseudo-Christianity? The answer is not “do they use the Bible as their source of authority?” The arch-heretics have always used the Bible, sometimes quite cunningly.

If you’re not Orthodox, I want this question to be a burr under your saddle, as it became under my saddle 34 or so years after I first headed off to Boarding School.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Dateline, Weimar America, 8/28/25

CrackerBarrelGate

This story strikes me as stupid, stupid, stupid. Here, through the voices of others, is why.

The chain was founded in 1969 — not 1776. It adopted the country branding because down-home cooking and folksy kitsch were trendy back then, not because they were trying to restore America to the Good Ole Days. Now, the market has moved on, and Cracker Barrel has been trying to adapt …

We have confused brands with moral values, and we demand to see our politics reflected everywhere, even in restaurant signage. We have also confused social media with social lives. And alone with our screens, too many of us have become addicted to rage, mashing the refresh button for the dopamine that rushes through us every time we discover that someone, somewhere, is wrong on the internet.

The addiction is so consuming that when no ready source of rage is available, we start cooking up our own out of whatever we can find in the cupboard. But if the cupboard is really this bare, I suggest people put down the phone and head to Cracker Barrel, rock themselves to serenity in the chairs on the porch, then head inside for a delicious helping of hashbrown casserole.

Megan McArdle

This, too:

The Cracker Barrel farce … is the first case of “cancel culture” I’m aware of in which the accusers couldn’t articulate why the accused was being canceled.

Which was to their advantage, I think. An offender charged with a particular thoughtcrime can answer the charge but an offender charged with nothing in particular has little choice but to surrender. Which is what the company did on Tuesday.

…

Christopher Rufo, probably the New Right’s most influential culture warrior, admitted that he’s never set foot in the restaurant but declared war on it nonetheless in the name of making an example of any business “considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’”

“The Barrel must be broken,” he announced with no apparent irony. If a progressive culture warrior had said something as clownishly imperious, self-important, and Stalinist as that 10 years ago, right-wingers would still be making scornful jokes about it today.

Nick Catoggio.

In a Man-Bites-Dog story, Christopher Rufo recently wrote a little piece that was not knee-jerk shit-stirring! But this episode tells me he hasn’t really mended his ways.

I expect no better from Rufo, frankly, but Hillsdale College has no excuse — and no more respect from me, though I thought very highly of it ten years ago when it was, like I was and am, conservative, not Trumpist. (Two Hillsdale alums, who became expats for a while, were cool on their alma mater well before I was. I guess they read the signs: Hillsdale becoming a caricature of anti-woke education.)

Television rights, National rites

They will never do it, because it’s too tacky to bear, and they don’t need the money, but here’s an interesting thought exercise for media dorks: What would the price be if Swift and Kelce were to sell the live rights to their wedding for television?

We know the NFL collects more than $110 million for a single playoff game—that’s what Peacock paid, and that was two whole years ago. Your standard live sports deal now hits 10 figures, easy. March Madness gets a billion annually to show college kids bricking 3-pointers. Paramount is set to pay more than $1 billion a year for humans pounding each other inside a steel cage.

A Swift-Kelce nuptial is bigger than all of that, mainly because of Swift, whose fame is vast and fierce, and if you don’t believe that, try criticizing one of her singles on Reddit sometime. There would be outrageous interest for both a live telecast and repeat viewing—you could do remixes, Taylor’s versions, on and on.

…

I think $500 million. That would be the absolute floor.

Jason Gay, Wall Street Journal

My better half wants a televised wedding opposite the State of the Union address, but that would reduce revenues quite a bit.

That is, I suppose it would reduce revenues. Who knows? I didn’t even know that Travis Kelce wasn’t a quarterback.

Nobel Laureate

FBI agents searched the Maryland home and Washington, D.C., office of former national security adviser John Bolton on Friday morning, reportedly as part of an investigation into his potential mishandling of classified documents. Bolton was not charged or detained during the operation. President Donald Trump—who revoked Bolton’s security clearance and Secret Service protection days into his second term—told reporters he had no prior knowledge of the searches but described Bolton, who has been a sharp critic of Trump in recent years, as “a real sort of a low life” and “not a smart guy.”

The Morning Dispatch

Congratulations, Mr. Bolton! Being described by Donald Trump as “a real sort of a low life” and “not a smart guy” is like winning a Nobel Prize for Integrity and Rectitude.

UPDATE: Even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn, or even a truffle: John Bolton Inquiry Eyes Emails Obtained by Foreign Government – The New York Times. So maybe Bolton actually, technically kinda broke a law. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” (Lavrentiy Beria, Soviet secret police chief).

The most miserable habitation in the world

The fundamental structural problem of our government during the Trump administrations is this: our constitution assumed the George Washington was President. It assumed that our high officials would be men of high character, virtuous men. It assumed that of the American people as well.

So John Adams was dead right in this quote, the last sentences of which are fairly well-known:

While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams, October 11, 1798

This President of the United States is not a virtuous man, but a vicious one. Empowered by shrewd and evil advisors (no more “adults in the room”) and motivated by avarice, ambition, and revenge, he is the whale breaking through the net, pushing the “unitary executive theory” (which wouldn’t be a problem were George Washington President) to the breaking point, turning the Department of Justice into the Department of Revenge and now trying to take over the Federal Reserve System – the better to blow a bubble from the bursting of which we may never recover.

I’m not going to resume lamenting what else bothers me about this administration (David French has some of the receipts), but I thought the fundamental problem, though it is not my original insight, might be helpful to pass along.

Do we have any reason to hope that men and women of high virtue will fill the Oval Office and Congress come 2029?

To be a conservative in 2025 …

To be a conservative in 2025 is to be politically homeless—but perhaps not entirely politically friendless.

…

At home, the party of Donald Trump—the party of J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Tucker Carlson, not to mention supposed normies such as Mike Pence, et al.—currently is engaged in answering a question I hadn’t thought anyone was asking: “What would national socialism look like if antisemitism were less of a political priority?”

Kevin D. Williamson

Apropos of the first paragraph, the bulk of Williamson’s column is about how liberals-in-the-American-polarity-sense are starting to discover some timeless truths that just might allow conservatives to become allies if not intimates.

On that lone hopeful note, adieu!

Nick Catoggio:

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Re-enchantment sans woo-woo

Ties that bind

Amid the hyperpluralism of divergent truth claims, metaphysical beliefs, moral values, and life priorities, ubiquitous practices of consumerism are more than anything else the cultural glue that holds Western societies together.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Subjection to the Roman Pontiff

Two years after Maifreda’s execution, Boniface VIII was prompted by the open defiance of Philip IV, the king of France, to issue the most ringing statement of papal supremacy ever made: ‘We declare, state and define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.’

Tom Holland, Dominion. You would have a hard time finding Catholics who affirm this today, though I believe that “declare, state and define” makes it clear that this is an ex cathedra pronouncement of the sort that is supposed to be infallible.

Not my circus, not my monkeys. I’ll leave it to Catholics to reconcile the declaration and the on-the-ground reality of today.

Who’s for sale?

Today’s evangelical movement is a mess. Although they might disagree on much else, even most evangelicals can agree on that. The question is: Why?

Megan Basham, a writer for The Daily Wire, offers her answer in her new book Shepherds For Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded The Truth for a Leftist Agenda, the tone of which is summarized well right in the title.

Profiling evangelical leaders and institutions she claims have been co-opted or outright bought-off by funders and foundations on the left, Basham’s book asserts that such “evangelical elite” have betrayed Christian positions on issues such as abortion, immigration, and sexuality in order to curry favor with a more mainstream cultural elite.

Basham is right that many “shepherds” are, in fact, “for sale.” But the unintended irony—and fundamental flaw—of her book is that the corrupting money is not on the evangelical left, as she claims, but on the populist right. The rise of such organizations as Turning Point USA (and its subsidiary Turning Point Faith), the Epoch Times, and The Daily Wire itself—organizations that combined bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue—bear witness to the financial benefits of pandering to populists. Turning Point USA, for example, now hosts pastors conferences that feature evangelical MAGA apologists like Eric Metaxas, Sean Feucht, and Rob McCoy. A recent event in San Diego attracted 1,200 pastors. Turning Point USA’s annual revenue now tops $80 million.

If Basham is right that the evangelical movement is sick, she has misdiagnosed the true cause of the illness: departing from the Gospel to pursue ideology and political activism. The movement has moved well beyond the responsibilities of Christian citizenship in pursuit of realpolitik.

Warren Cole Smith, Which Shepherds Are For Sale?

I think this means that it’s the pundit, not (just?) the Shepherds, who are for sale.

Yes, Moscow, ID is in the fever swamps, but don’t discount it

If you asked an American Christian 40 years ago who his or her favorite public preacher or Christian commentator was, he or she would say Billy Graham or some nationally recognizable television evangelist. Twenty years ago, responses would include megachurch preacher/author Rick Warren, who wrote best-selling books like The Purpose Driven Life. When I ask today, the answers I invariably get are names usually unrecognizable to me, even as the president of a Christian think tank that studies these issues. American Christianity, like much of American politics and journalism, has become siloed. A favorite preacher or Christian writer today will be a personality who has a million followers on YouTube or for his podcast, but is not well known outside his own constituency. Wilson has fit that category for years, occupying a special niche of contrarian, very conservative evangelicalism. But recent publicity and controversies have elevated him to a new level.

Postliberal America is the ideal field for Wilson and his followers. His Washington church will not likely grow into the thousands. Nor will his denomination grow into the millions. But he is a suitable chaplain to a growing segment on the right that disdains classical liberalism as a failure, if not flawed from the start, and wants to completely rebuild America into a new postliberal order, where Christianity is not just central, but ideally legally privileged.

Mark Tooley, writing about Doug Wilson and his “Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches,” based in Moscow, ID, but spreading like kudzu.

If you’re still dreaming martyrdom dreams about the Left coming to kill “real Christians,” get real. It seems likelier to me that hardcore postmillennialist Calvinists will seize power and persecute everything from (a) progressives to (b) those whose idea of Christian history goes back past the Reformation to the time of Christ and the Apostles. And I say that as someone who formerly was a pretty hardcore Calvinist and heard all kinds of weird things from my postmillennialist Calvinist friends.

When (if?) the postmillennialists seize power and begin the executions, they’ll call it “the Millennium.” They’re not charismatics like the New Apostolic Reformation flakes with their Seven-Mountain Mandate, but I could see the two groups temporarily making common cause. The common thread in “conservative” postmillennialism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is the striving for political power to bring in Christ’s kingdom.

What I believe about the end-times is that Christ will “come to judge the living and the dead” and “His Kingdom shall have no end.” In the Protestant world, they’d class that as “amilleniallism,” and it’s one of few carryovers from my Protestant days.

Another limitation of science

A boy may not approach his mother with the sexual rite in mind any more than a husband may try to make his wife over into a mother figure. Both attempts are confusion. Appropriateness is the test, and no merely scientific analysis of the situation will tell us why this body may not cohabit with this one. The forms are there (male body, female body), but the roles do not permit it.

Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance (Second Edition).

Re-enchantment

I listened to podcast by a group of smart Evangelical or Evangelical-adjacent guys, talking about disenchantment and re-enchantment.

One of the concerns about re-enchantment was that it would get into “woo-woo” or syncretism or something else really dangerous. But then one of them said something that triggered this reaction in me: why not re-enchant with the words of a great ecumenical saint as guardrails?

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ’s birth with His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.

I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In the obedience of angels,
In the service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In the predictions of prophets,
In the preaching of apostles,
In the faith of confessors,
In the innocence of holy virgins,
In the deeds of righteous men.

I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.

I arise today, through
God’s strength to pilot me,
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptation of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
afar and near.

I summon today
All these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul;
Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me an abundance of reward.

Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

(St. Patrick’s Breastplate) It’s got devils, false prophets, pagans, heretics, witches, smiths, and wizards. That’s pretty enchanted, no?

A bogus but popular story

There is a popular version of this story. The popular version goes like this: up until Constantine, the Christian church was a series of independent congregations following the path of the Carpenter from Nazareth, with varied beliefs about who and what he was; there was no canon law, no structure, no church hierarchy; mostly they didn’t think about theology. Then Constantine noticed the religion and decided that with some tweaking it could be made to be the spiritual substructure of a renewed centralized empire, and it was he who invented the idea of Jesus as an imperial God; he who established the list of books of the Canon, he who insisted on a defined creed and a hierarchical church government. This is the story that Dan Brown tells in The Da Vinci Code; it is a story that many spiritual-but-not-religious folk and (with some variation) some fundamentalist low church protestants share (of course the fundamentalists for some reason nevertheless accept the divinity of Christ.)

Alastair Roberts

Spiritual effects of AI

AI will seem to have godlike powers, and human nature being what it is, we will be hard-pressed to resist relating to it as such, even if we tell ourselves that it is “just” a machine.

Rod Dreher, UAP, AI, and the Naiveté of Moderns.

I have cooled on Rod for many reasons (I only get his free postings now, for instance), but this very accurately captures a key concern about the spiritual effects of AI.

There are other reasons for concern, but that’s a big one.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead