Job’s Comforters

I’ve never recoiled from Job’s Comforters. At least they were “there for him” after a fashion, right?

Maybe I’m on the Autism Spectrum, or haven’t shaken off the last of my “former delusion,” repudiated when I entered Orthodoxy.

But the promised blessings and cursings in Deuteronomy were not sui generis in the Old Testament henotheistic millieu. That gods reward their followers and punish deviants was hardly an outrageous or (if I may wax anachronistic) Pharisaical worldview before Christ.

Some of the Psalms presented a more equivocal view, and we’ve learned from the highest of authorities, through pericopes like the man born blind, that into each life some rain must fall.

But the lessons that grief is not the time for theodicy, and that “I’m so sorry” is generally the best thing we can say when we’re tempted to something more “pious,” are not learned and remembered easily.

I’ve even heard dubieties coming from the mouths of the putatively grieving, trying to comfort their comforters. I’m thinking especially of a Calvinist father whose young adult son wrapped his car around a tree while home on leave. “We prayed that God would keep him from apostasy, and this apparently was the answer.”

That seemed very pious at the time. Now it seems reptilian. Another of his children did apostatize, and wrote a kiss-and-tell book about growing up in that household. I couldn’t bear to read it, but it sounded all too plausible from the reviews.

I guess Job wouldn’t have been much of a story if three guys showed up and just kept saying “we’re so sorry, Job.”

And we can always be grateful for Bildad the Shuhite as the punchline for “Who’s the shorted man in the Bible?”

* * * * *

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

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

How To Avoid Being Called A Russian Agent Online

Caitlin Johnstone, a down-under very-lefty, waives copyright. Her offering today made it irresistible to copy her, wholesale:

Continue reading “How To Avoid Being Called A Russian Agent Online” →

We’ll need another scapegoat now

So Jeffrey Epstein is dead by “suicide,” and the sighs of relief in high places are audible all the way over here in flyover country.

That’s all I’m going to say about my suspicions. There will be no shortage of conspiracy theories, and considering Epstein’s list of celebrity bros, I’ll be all-too-tempted to go down one or more or those rabbit-holes.

Judging from the uproar, most of us would like to see Epstein spending a very long time upstate, as we New Yorkers say about the state prisons. At the same time Teen Vogue -target audience girls, 11 to 17—publishes an article on the pleasures of anal sex: “It is often described as a feeling of fullness, which can be delightful…It’s NOT a big deal.” Do we condemn Conde Nast, or applaud them for “empowering … young adults to do what they want with their bodies” or pretty much ignore the whole thing as, with a few exceptions, seems to have happened. Similar questions apply to Desmond Napoles, a pre-teen “drag kid” who has performed in gay bars and has been the subject of an admiring profile on “Good Morning America” as well as a celebratory blog post by a convicted pedophile. When is a child fully capable of autonomy? Age of consent is inevitably arbitrary—you may have in mind a mature, thoughtful 16 year-old and her long-term 17 year old boyfriend while someone else is thinking of a manic-depressive, boundary-pushing girl with a daddy hang-up of that age. How, in this post sexual-revolution era, do we etch out laws and policy, not to mention norms, that apply to both?

Most people are not ambivalent about Jeffrey Epstein’s case. The same cannot be said about the many questions it puts before us.

Kaye Hymowitz, Jeffrey Epstein and All the Others: An Explainer.

One of the things that makes me want to puke is the coastal progressives who hear racist dog-whistles from Red America but who avert their eyes from Teen Vogue and deny that pre-teen drag queens like Desmond Napoles, valorized of gay bars and network TV, are in any way sexualized. Pas d’ennemis à gauche.

So Jeffrey Epstein is dead. We’ll need another scapegoat now.

* * * * *

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

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Mother Nature winds up

I have a sinking feeling that Mother Nature is gearing up to show us, yet again, that it’s not nice to try to fool her or to abuse her. The toll could be billions.

I’m not just talking about climate change. I’m talking about the moving human pieces, and the pushing-back human pieces, too.

Like this: the global south gets hot first; its residents mass-migrate north; authoritarian personalities in the north are mightily alarmed. Mayhem ensues.

Did I just accidentally paraphrase Camp of the Saints? It’s not a rhetorical question. I think mass-migration is a key element of that profoundly racist (I’m relying on Rod Dreher for that characterization) book.

Instead of just wondering, I looked it up: Dreher says the feckless official response to mass-migration was a key plot element in Camp of the Saints, too, and I’m not sure that climate change was the migration’s impetus. But those are indifferent details, aren’t they?

We’ve got feckless governments galore, and our choices seem to be between authoritarian and feckless. And if we got the happy medium of resolute government blocking excessive immigration, the agent of death would be heat and famine — the poor dying for our sins again, but not so directly as by armed anti-immigrants. (I’m not hyperlinking to Camp of the Saints, by the way, because I only looked at it once on Amazon and now Amazon bombards me with unwanted offers of various right-wing books.)

We could use a deus ex machina about now, couldn’t we? Or ex anywhere.

I’d say I’m waiting to finish Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism for my final judgment, but I never reach certainty on such complex things.

Final Judgment isn’t mine, anyway. It’s, uh, “Mother Nature’s.”

* * * * *

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

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Housekeeping

I have been migrating selected records from an obsoleting database manager (Bento, a flat-file dBM for Mac from FileMaker) to DEVONthink. I’ve been unable to figure out a way to mass-migrate 4000+ records.

It’s surprising how little from 20-30 years ago feels worth copying-and-pasting for preservation. But I’ve preserved quite a few things from the period when I was learning a lot online about Orthodoxy (not recommended, by the way).

And then there was this:

Kenneth Offner works with Intervarsity Christian fellowship at Harvard. He has his work cut out for him. But recently he’s been wondering whether evangelicalism is up to the task.

In his newsletter he says he finds himself enjoying First Things ever so much more than Christianity Today, and is intensely interested in books from Ignatius Press while having zero interest in the Top Ten Evangelical Books of the Month.

Is Offner on his way to Rome or Eastern Orthodoxy? Not necessarily, but he thinks American evangelicalism is in deep detritus. “We are drifting so far from our Reformational roots that were Luther or Calvin to appear today they might see more things they recognized in Catholicism than in evangelicalism. (Which is not to imply that they would become Catholics!)”

Offner includes his own taxonomy of what is meant by evangelicalism today. It is a question often asked. Most students of the subject come up with at least three criteria that define evangelicalism: belief in absolute authority of Scripture, a born again experience, an eagerness to evangelize others. But Offner says there are twelve different evangelicalisms, although not all of them have a brand name. Here they are, followed by the themes that characterize them.

(1) Reformed Evangelicalism — thinking Christianly, transforming culture, changing institutions, opposed to dualism.

(2) Anabaptist Evangelicalism — community, countercultural, pacifist, servanthood vs. authority.

(3) Neo-Orthodox Evangelicalism — knowing God vs. knowing about God, narrative theology vs. propositional theology.

(4) Charismatic Evangelicalism — expecting Signs and Wonders, personal experience, God speaks afresh today.

(5) Theonomist Evangelicalism — God’s unchanging law, salvation as God’s lordship, postmillennial, America as Christian country.

(6) Fundamentalist Evangelicalism — antiliberal, biblicist, seriousness of (external) sin, everything is black and white.

(7) Dispensationalist Evangelicalism — nondenominational, pro-Israel, grace vs. works.

(8) Pro-American Pietist Evangelicalism — America as Christian country, civil religion, personal piety, power of politics.

(9) Anti-American and Anti-Pietist Evangelicalism — sinfulness of capitalism, anti-rules, anti-Right, anti-Fundamentalist, freedom is what counts.

(10) Therapeutic Evangelicalism — inner healing, sin as sickness, evil as dysfunction, self-knowledge.

(11) Social Action Evangelicalism — priority of the poor, physical-spiritual unity, works vs. faith.

(12) Liturgical/Sacramental Evangelicalism — tradition, sacraments, ordered worship, respect for the mystical.

Offner goes on to say that only the last is Trinitarian, the others focusing almost exclusively on the Father or the Son (with the Reformed including both Father and Son).

…

From Richard John Neuhaus’s “While We’re At It” Coda to his monthly rambling First Things review of the cosmos, this time from the November, 1993 issue (reformatted for readability, emphasis added).

That was about 3 years before I discovered Orthodoxy, which is Trinitarianism’s ne plus ultra. I had no recollection of this item, though I recorded it contemporaneously with the magazine’s arrival.

To say that only Liturgical/Sacramental Evangelicalism is Trinitarian surely is a statement about the reality of Evangelical praxis, not about the content of its nominal doctrine. But it is a true statement about praxis, or so close to categorically true that any orthodox Evangelical should feel a sad recognition upon reading it.

I wonder if it was working at me during those 3 years?

* * * * *

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

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

True, not faux, pluralism

I blogged a few days ago on Our Great Death Struggle. A key part, at least in my intent (if I didn’t covey its centrality, blame the writer), was this:

Brooks’ counter [to anti-pluralism] — a hymn to pluralism — sounds just a little too much like whistling past the graveyard, but I’ll give him credit for this introduction to his hymn:

The struggle between pluralism and antipluralism is one of the great death struggles of our time, and it is being fought on every front.

(The Ideology of Hate and How to Fight It)

…

If I admit some ambivalence, so long as the antipluralism is rigorously nonviolent, both physically and rhetorically, will you think I’m a monster? Read Brooks’ hymn to pluralism (not quoted) and see if you find it completely satisfying.

Frankly, I was feeling pretty down by the time I got done.

Then it occurred to me that pluralism versus anti-pluralism isn’t a binary decision. These are tendencies, and to some extent, political positions — and thus susceptible of normal political give-and-take.

I had in mind things like an immigration policy that is enforced and that protects our relatively unskilled workers from wage-depressing unskilled new immigrants. In other words, between closed-and-locked-down border and wide-open border.

Well, Damon Linker, like me, was impressed with Brooks’ framing of “struggle between pluralism and antipluralism,” and had some additional ideas for give-and-take:

It is not always entirely unreasonable to be unhappy with the consequences of pluralism. It may well be that, for some, human flourishing is incompatible with the “diversity, fluidity, and interdependent nature of modern life.”

… A productive response to the anti-pluralists might … involve backing off on the progressive insistence that every corner of the United States must affirm the moral outlook of its most liberal cities under penalty of social and economic censure.

This second item is especially important because it would demonstrate that progressives are willing to put their proudly proclaimed pluralism where their mouths are. Ask a progressive why she cheers on a lawsuit seeking to bankrupt an evangelical Protestant baker for refusing to provide a cake for a same-sex wedding, and she’ll likely talk about the scourge of bigotry and discrimination and explain that pluralism demands that they be stamped out everywhere they exist.

But, as paradoxical as it may seem, that conviction is itself another form of anti-pluralism, albeit one that believes itself to be acting in the name of pluralism …

Progressives have no problem … pronouncing the dignity of … differences, when it concerns people who are non-white, especially when they are non-Christian, and even when their metaphysical convictions entail a rejection of pluralism. But when it comes to the distinctive outlook of, say, conservative white Christians, that acceptance and even affirmation of difference vanishes in an instant. Now the power of the state must be marshaled to force these anti-pluralists to embrace the comprehensive moral outlook of progressivism, with those who resist shamed and penalized into submission.

If pluralism really is our ineradicable reality and a social and moral good worth defending (it is both), then it needs to be applied equally to all — to those who substantively affirm pluralism as well as to those who do not (as long as they refrain from incitement to, and acts of, political violence).

Among its other benefits, extending pluralism equally to all just might have the effect of giving parts of the country more resistant to pluralism the time to catch up to changes in the broader culture (though there’s no guarantee that they will). Pluralists may wish the anti-pluralists would get with the program sooner, but pushing too hard and too fast has a way of generating a backlash — precisely the kind of backlash that is roiling the nation (and much of the world) at this very moment.

I wish I’d said that. Occasional gems like this are why I still follow Damon Linker.

* * * * *

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

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Instrumentalizing God

For decades, I endured periodic sermons and political rants disguised as prayers. Because of who and where I was, and the few loose political affiliations I had, those sermons and rants almost all ranged from right to further right.

And because I thought God shouldn’t be instrumentalized and that prayer shouldn’t be pretext, I hated them, much as I hated “worship” that was really pep-talk-cum-pop-concert.

I’m pleased to report that who and where I am has changed, that my political affiliations are even fewer, and that it’s much better now. That’s a separate story.

I say all that to note this: A “letter to God” in the New York Times Opinion section. That letter struck me in places as being a left version of those pretextual prayers. But it’s not. Whatever its faults are, they seem outweighed by its merits, especially this week.

(Be it noted that George Yancy is not George Yancey.)

* * * * *

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

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Our great death struggle

Don’t go anywhere near the New York Times OpEd page on the internet today if you think there absolutely, categorically, no relation between Donald Trump and domestic terrorism. Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Michelle Goldberg, David Leonhart, and Charles Blow all weigh in, and I thought only Blow blew it in the quotability category.

David Brooks is analytical. Do not dismiss all these shooters as “failsons”, pimple-faced denizens of their moms’ basements. They can have a pretty darned sophisticated worldview, akin to Jihadi terrorists, who also are trying to spark conflagration:

Many of today’s mass murderers write manifestoes. They are not killing only because they’ve been psychologically damaged by trauma. They’re not killing only because they are pathetically lonely and deeply pessimistic about their own lives. They are inspired to kill by a shared ideology, an ideology that they hope to spread through a wave of terror.

The clearest expression of that ideology was written by the man charged with a killing spree in Christchurch, New Zealand. His manifesto has been cited by other terrorists; the suspect in this weekend’s El Paso mass shooting cited it in his own manifesto.

It’s not entirely what you’d expect. At one point its author writes about his travels around the world: “Everywhere I travelled, barring a few small exceptions, I was treated wonderfully, often as a guest and even as a friend. The varied cultures of the world greeted me with warmth and compassion, and I very much enjoyed nearly every moment I spent with them.”

The ideology he goes on to champion is highly racial, but it’s not classic xenophobia or white supremacy. It’s first feature is essentialism …

The second feature is separatism …

The third feature is racial Darwinism. Races are locked in a Darwinian struggle in which they try to out-reproduce their rivals. Currently, the black and brown races are stronger than the white race and are on the verge of obliterating it through invasion.

Immigrants, the Christchurch suspect wrote, come “from a culture with higher fertility rates, higher social trust and strong robust traditions that seek to occupy my peoples lands and ethnically replace my own people.”

If we allow them into our country, brown immigrants will overwhelm whites just as Europeans overwhelmed the Native Americans centuries ago. As the El Paso suspect put it, “The natives didn’t take the invasion of Europeans seriously, and now what’s left is just a shadow of what was.” Immigration is white replacement. Immigration is white genocide.

This is not an ideology that rises out of white self-confidence but rather white insecurity.

(Emphasis added)

Note the implied link: “Everywhere I travelled, barring a few small exceptions, I was treated wonderfully, often as a guest and even as a friend. The varied cultures of the world greeted me with warmth and compassion, and I very much enjoyed nearly every moment I spent with them.” And they could do so (damn them!) because they have cultural self-confidence — high fertility, high social trust and robust traditions — that we lack.

They’re not entirely wrong about our relative lack of confidence. Try to get a copy of the Manifesto and you’ll find that mere possession of it is criminal in, for instance, New Zealand.

Brooks’ counter — a hymn to pluralism — sounds just a little too much like whistling past the graveyard, but I’ll give him credit for this introduction to his hymn:

The struggle between pluralism and antipluralism is one of the great death struggles of our time, and it is being fought on every front.

(The Ideology of Hate and How to Fight It)

Michelle Goldberg is directly damning, and not just of Trump and Republicans:

A decade ago, Daryl Johnson, then a senior terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote a report about the growing danger of right-wing extremism in America. Citing economic dislocation, the election of the first African-American president and fury about immigration, he concluded that “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”

When the report leaked, conservative political figures sputtered with outrage, indignant that their ideology was being linked to terrorism. The report warned, correctly, that right-wing radicals would try to recruit disgruntled military veterans, which conservatives saw as a slur on the troops. Homeland Security, cowed, withdrew the document. In May 2009, Johnson’s unit, the domestic terrorism team, was disbanded, and he left government the following year.

…

This past weekend, … a young man slaughtered shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso. A manifesto he reportedly wrote echoed Trump’s language about an immigrant “invasion” and Democratic support for “open borders.” It even included the words “send them back.” He told investigators he wanted to kill as many Mexicans as he could.

Surrendering to political necessity, Trump gave a brief speech on Monday decrying white supremacist terror: “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.” He read these words robotically from a teleprompter …

It’s true that the Obama White House, giving in to Republican intimidation, didn’t do enough to combat violent white supremacy. But Trump rolled back even his predecessor’s modest efforts, while bringing the language of white nationalism into mainstream politics. His administration canceled Obama-era grants to groups working to counter racist extremism. Dave Gomez, a former F.B.I. supervisor who oversaw terrorism cases, told The Washington Post that the agency hasn’t been as aggressive as it might be against the racist right because of political concerns. “There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base,” he said. “It’s a no-win situation for the F.B.I. agent or supervisor.”

(Trump Is a White Nationalist Who Inspires Terrorism) I had forgotten the Homeland Security débâcle.

David Leonhart turns the tables on a mostly-conservative trope:

[L]iberal America also has violent and deranged people, like the man who shot at Republican members of Congress playing softball in 2017. Some Democratic politicians have also occasionally lapsed into ugly, violent rhetoric and suggested they want to punch their political opponents.

But it’s folly to pretend that the problem is symmetrical. Mainstream conservative politicians use the rhetoric of physical violence much more often, starting with the current president of the United States. And right-wing extremists have a culture of violence unlike anything on the left. Its consequences are fatal, again and again.

Over the years, Republicans have sometimes called on Muslim leaders to ask themselves why their religion has produced a disproportionate share of the world’s terrorist attacks — and to do something about the situation. I’d urge those Republicans to take their own advice. Right-wing terrorism is killing far more Americans these days than Islamist terrorism.

(Conservatism Has a Violence Problem)

I thought Leonhart was a fitting ending, but as a reviewed this blog, I concluded that punchy and evocative (how else but by evocation does one write about nothingism — nihilism?) Ross Douthat needed to get the ~~final~~ penultimate word (reserving a final whimper for myself) because Douthat makes it clear why today’s Republican party cannot respond to Leonhart’s call:

There really is a dark psychic force generated by Trump’s political approach, which from its birther beginnings has consistently encouraged and fed on a fevered and paranoid form of right-wing politics, and dissolved quarantines around toxic and dehumanizing ideas. And the possibility that Trump’s zest for demonization can feed a demonic element in the wider culture is something the many religious people who voted for the president should be especially willing to consider.

But the connection between the president and the young men with guns extends beyond Trump’s race-baiting to encompass a more essential feature of his public self — which is not the rhetoric or ideology that he deploys, but the obvious moral vacuum, the profound spiritual black hole, that lies beneath his persona and career.

…

[T]his is what really links Trump to all these empty male killers, white nationalists and pornogrind singers alike. Like them he is a creature of our late-modern anti-culture, our internet-accelerated dissolution of normal human bonds. Like them he plainly believes in nothing but his ego, his vanity, his sense of spite and grievance, and the self he sees reflected in the mirror of television, mass media, online.

… It’s not as if you could carve away his race-baiting and discover a healthier populism instead, or analyze him the way you might analyze his more complex antecedents, a Richard Nixon or a Ross Perot. To analyze Trump is to discover only bottomless appetite and need, and to carve at him is like carving at an online troll: The only thing to discover is the void.

… [T]he dilemma that conservatives have to confront is that you can chase this cultural problem all the way down to its source in lonely egomania and alienated narcissism, and you’ll still find Donald Trump’s face staring back to you.

(The Nihilist in Chief)

The immediate Republican response to Leonhart should be denying Trump even the nomination for 2020 (maybe even joining the impeachment Democrats), but that’s not going to happen. The GOP has no Frodo willing to take on Saruman.

The struggle between pluralism and antipluralism is one of the great death struggles of our time, and it is being fought on every front.

(Brooks, supra)

If I admit some ambivalence, so long as the antipluralism is rigorously nonviolent, both physically and rhetorically, will you think I’m a monster? Read Brooks’ hymn to pluralism (not quoted) and see if you find it completely satisfying.*

But why should the burden be on pluralism to justify itself? Any sudden swing to antipluralism would be, by virtue of the adjective “sudden,” an un-conservative and radical departure from the pluralism we’ve been aspiring to (and succeeding at to a degree). The conservative default is against fixing what isn’t broke, and fixing very carefully what may be.

I could probably go on tweaking this all day and all night, but I’m going to publish and then try to leave it alone.

* UPDATE: Damon Linker was as underwhelmed by Brooks’ hymn to pluralism as I was, but offers a via media between pluralism-as-overweaning-ideology and anti-pluralism-as-insurrection.

* * * * *

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

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

White nationalist terrorism

I read news reports of mass shootings, and commentary about them, selectively. Few tell me anything vital I didn’t already know. The new twist is the 8chan angle, so I read a little about that.

I’m not saying “there’s nothing we can do about them.” Once seen, it’s hard to unsee that white nationalist terrorism has surpassed jihadi terrorism as a threat on our shores, and we should treat it as we treat jihad in law enforcement strategy.

But:

[L]aw enforcement isn’t enough. Targeted gun control isn’t enough. Culture matters …

Members of a radicalized underground often work diligently to introduce their themes and ideas into public discourse. They want to kill, yes, but they also want to change the culture. When national leaders use their rhetoric or adopt their themes, it is thrilling. It is energizing. It is inspiring to the movement. It tells them that they just might win.

Think of the thrills, energy, and inspiration they’ve experienced from the highest office in the land — and from parts of the most popular cable network in the land — since Trump came down the escalator in 2015.

…

Alt-right support for Trump wasn’t random. It wasn’t arbitrary. It was directly related to his rhetoric, and it was cultivated by his allies, and it was cultivated in part because it was a new way to fight, to punch back against the hated Left.

… [W]hen a nation experiences the wave of mass killings, threats, harassment, and radicalization we see now, it’s time for American leaders to respond with unequivocal, relentless messages not just of condemnation for racists but also with their own words of reconciliation and national unity …

… It’s worth saying 10,000 times: Fighting for your political values does not ever require you to abandon decency and respect. In fact, given the magnitude of the issues at stake, decency is even more urgent. It helps keep emotions under control.

… [O]ur nation’s leaders need to focus on reconciliation and unity, and if they are not up to that most basic and fundamental aspect of their job, then they must be replaced.

David French, Declare War on White-Nationalist Terrorism (emphasis added).

You know full well that Donald J. Trump is not up to that aspect of the job. He cannot convincingly utter conciliatory words.

But — and this is not a throw-away line — it remains to be decided whether his Democrat opponent next year will also be divisive. There are several prominent in the twenty-plus hopefuls who are licking their chops in anticipation of meting out pay-backs, though they may try to conceal it. I won’t name names, because I haven’t kept a scorecard to prove my case, but I form pretty accurate impressions.

It may come down to a matter of degree. Less divisive is better. Less blatantly divisive is better, too (I’ll bet Democrats are wistful about the days of “dog whistles”). The Democrat field offers a few candidates who can convincingly play the role of Reconciler-in-Chief.

But when it comes to degrees of divisiveness, platforms and policy agendas start to weigh more, too, as does the placement of the pale. I’m more than okay with white nationalists being beyond. I’m more than okay with Connor Betts being beyond. I’m not okay with orthodox Christians being beyond.

* * * * *

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

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Imagine there’s no sovereignty

To us moderns, the secular is fundamental. Even when religion is considered a universal sociological category, we almost always first translate it into something secular, such as its function: it synthesizes diverse perspectives and experiences, it knits people together, it makes the world coherent, it assuages the fear of death, it provides legitimacy for power, it constructs social roles, and so on. In this way, we are perhaps willing to accept that every society has a religion, but only if we first reduce religion to yet another aspect of the fundamental secular, to yet another ideology or worldview.

…

I contend that the Middle Ages were neither religious nor secular because the religious and the secular are two features of a single construction: the modern, Western social architecture of “Church” and “State,” “private” and “public,” “individual” and “market,” and so on. The societies of the Middle Ages had a different architecture based on different assumptions and different concepts, ultimately on a different vision of the cosmos.

…

One of the central arguments of this book is that we should abandon the use of “religion” and “secular” “Church” and “State” understood in their modern senses in our attempts to understand the Middle Ages, in this case the thirteenth century. This is not because the terms have no meaning—in our world they have a great deal of meaning. Rather, it is because one cannot get too far along in building a thick description of the thirteenth century before concluding that everything was religious or, if one is inclined to come at it from the other direction, before concluding that everything was secular.

…

Peter Berger has written, “By secularization we mean the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols.” The problem, however, is that institutions and symbols are recognizable as religious only from the vantage point of the secular. This means secularization might be just as legitimately understood as being the process by which sectors of society and culture were construed as religious institutions and symbols. In other words, secularization is the process through which the “religious” as we conceive of it was created. Along these lines, Brent Nongbri has accurately remarked that we call religious “anything that sufficiently resembles modern Protestant Christianity,” and when Charles Taylor states that the British were more religious in 1900 than ever before, we might consider him to be, in a sense, defining the term “religious.”

…

[T]hirteenth-century France was built as a “most Christian kingdom,” a term that the papacy frequently used in reference to it. I do not mean that the kingdom of France was a State with a Christian ideology. I mean that it was Christian, fundamentally. There was no State lurking beneath the kingdom’s religious trappings. There was no State at all, but a Christian kingdom. In this kingdom, neither the “secular” nor the “religious” existed. Neither did “sovereignty.” I do not mean that the religious was everywhere and that the secular had not yet emerged from under it. I mean they did not exist at all … The people of thirteenth-century France, however, were not trying to figure out how to build a “Sovereign State” and they were not trying to disentangle the “secular” from the “religious.” They had never heard of these things. Their world made sense, and it was a world that did not contain these concepts. This is the world that I am after.

Continue reading “Imagine there’s no sovereignty” →