Category: Evangelicalism

With doctrine and church attendance.

Election draweth near

Culture

Bad Religion

More than three decades ago, Nathan Hatch published The Democratization of American Christianity, a history of the Second Great Awakening, arguably the most important religious episode in American history. At the recent Intercollegiate Studies Institute annual homecoming, I served on a panel that discussed the award-winning book. It was a pleasure to do so. Hatch gives a magisterial account of the upsurge of religious populism that shaped the new American republic in decisive ways. Anyone who wants to understand the last ten years of American politics should read The Democratization of American Christianity.

Denunciations of the “swamp” echo the Second Great Awakening’s polemics against the clerical establishment of its day, which itinerate preachers derided as complacent, more interested in high salaries and comfortable parsonages than in gospel preaching. Trump rallies follow in the tradition of raucous, call-and-response camp meetings. Commentators wonder at the fact that respectable people support Trump, not knowing that some of the most important leaders of the religious populism of the early 1800s were elites such as Barton Stone, who embraced the new, raw, and uncouth style of religious revival.

Elias Smith was a renegade preacher and journalist who, in 1808, launched America’s first religious newspaper, Herald of Gospel Liberty. He mocked and abused the Calvinist grandees, the “clerical hierarchy” that dominated Protestantism at that time. Establishment clergy like Lyman Beecher raged against preachers like Smith who were disturbing the religious landscape. It does not take much imagination to cast Tucker Carlson in the role of a latter-day Elias Smith. He thrills his populist devotees and outrages the guardians of political respectability such as George Will, a Lyman Beecher of our time.

Hatch raises larger themes. The Second Great Awakening took place during a time of rapid social change. The new republic gave rise to radicalisms of many sorts. People were on the move, as territories west of the Appalachian Mountains were settled. Old institutions and authorities lost their power. As I note above, recent decades have seen similar changes. Globalization, demographic change, the sexual revolution, social media, and other factors have precipitated a quite different but equally significant crisis of authority. We should not be surprised, therefore, that populism has returned, as it did in the late 1800s, when America was transformed by industrialization, urbanization, and swelling waves of immigrants.

Hatch documents that revivalist preachers were confident that their individualist, evangelical Christianity would fulfill the sacred mission of America. In their sermons and broadsides, populist religion mixed freely with populist politics, as was the case for William Jennings Bryan and subsequent American populists. Today’s Trumpian populism is different. To be sure, many pious people support Trump and other populist politicians. Avatars of popular religion like Paula White lurk on the peripheries. But the movement lacks an explicitly religious dimension, which is striking when we compare it to the administration of George W. Bush, an establishment figure who was not shy about his evangelical convictions.

Which makes me wonder: In spite of fascinating parallels to the outpouring of Christian enthusiasm and political radicalism in the Second Great Awakening, does today’s populism ironically contribute to an important elite ambition, the establishment of a post-Christian, entirely secular political culture in America? I hope not.

R.R. Reno

After several readings, I’m not sure what Reno is trying to say here. My impression until that penultimate paragraph was that he though our last decade’s populism just fine and dandy, as was the ferment of the 19th century; then he raises the possibility that the lack of a “religious dimension” is at least a bit worrisome.

But what an odd thing for a Catholic (or Orthodox) to believe. In case after case, the wake of the Great Awakenings was destructive of the Christian institutions that evidenced stability and left us, in the characterization of Ross Douthat, A Nation of Heretics.

Slinging slurs, pitching pity parties

I have no idea how one is supposed to respond to polling questions about the morality of changing one’s gender.

That’s mostly because I don’t think changing gender is possible. How can an impossible thing be immoral?

It’s also partly because I hold open the possibility that presenting as the opposite sex, with or without surgery and hormonal interventions, may for some individuals be the optimal way to quiet intractable gender dysphoria. (Who am I to condemn cosplaying in the cause of lessening psychic pain?)

But I’ll tell you something that is immoral. This kind of un-empathetic poor-mouthing about people disapproving (or denying the reality of) “trans lives”:

Is it morally acceptable to change your gender?

Just over half the country doesn’t think so — a proportion that has stayed fairly stable since 2021, the year after I disclosed my gender transition. It’s disheartening to reflect on the fact that every other person you meet, statistically speaking, disapproves of your existence.

Gina Chua. Nothing in the Gallup poll in question suggests that anyone disapproves the existence of people who’ve carried through on the putatively immoral decision to transition.

We are a low-down, debased people who have made ourselves indisposed toward intelligent discussion of issues. We sling slurs and pitch pity parties.

Journalistic murmurations

World Ends in Nuclear conflagration. Women and children most affected.

Something like this was an old jab at the New York Times’s stylistic preoccupations.

New era, new media, new preoccupations:

Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics

H/T Nellie Bowles, who didn’t seem to think it the least bit odd that 404 Media’s fears turned immediately to red states tracking their handmaidens to blue state abortuaries.

Politics

MVP of Election 2024?

Bret Stephens hits back-to-back homeruns.

With insanity supporters like this, sanity may stand a chance

Tucker Carlson spoke at the Turning Point USA Trump rally this week and gave the absolute best anti-Trump speech I’ve ever heard. Tucker’s speech is here and excerpted below, somehow kinky and alarming and rousing at the same time: 

“There has to be a point at which Dad comes home [crowd cheers]. Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they’re his children,” said Tucker Carlson, a grown man and a major respected figure on the right. “And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not gonna hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not gonna lie. It’s gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. And it has to be this way.’ ” 

If someone spoke like this to me on the street, I would pepper spray them. If I heard someone speak like this to someone else, I would pepper spray them and myself. Tucker Carlson’s endorsement of Trump makes me want to mainline MSNBC. Tucker’s endorsement makes me think Democracy Is On the Line, and Christopher Steele is a respected member of the intelligence community, and I heard there was a box of White House stationery at Mar-a-Lago illegally. Tucker’s endorsement just made me start knitting a pussy hat. Trump is not daddy. America is not his little girl. I believe in free speech except when a grown man is saying the words bad little girl. And Tucker Carlson needs to keep his kinks private and shameful like the rest of us.

Nellie Bowles

Nonsequiturland

Also from the echo chamber of Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller:

Democrats have continued to liken Trump to Adolf Hitler and assert he poses a grave “danger” to the planet if he is reelected, even after two recent assassination attempts against him.

(Jason Cohen)

How pray tell, Mr. Cohen, do two assassination attempts disprove Trump being a grave danger (or require suppression of the truth)? Do you tacitly call on Trump to cool it when his rhetoric generates death threats to election officials?

(Note that all the hyperlinks in my quote are to other Daily Caller stories; that’s why I thought “echo chamber” was apt.)

Would it help if it were done by image rather than words?

(If you don’t get the allusion, search for “distracted boyfriend même.)

Kamala F.B. Harris

  • In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last thanked the vice president for taking on Trump: “I believe that for all her political ambition, Kamala Harris is carrying this burden for us. She’s not Barack Obama, basking in the warmth of a cultural moment en route to becoming a cultural icon. She’s more like Frodo Baggins, walking toward Mordor while carrying a millstone around her neck, in an attempt to save all of Middle-earth from a dark fate.” (Sally McDonald, Cairns, Australia)

Frank Bruni‌

Narcissism from a slightly different angle

I find his immodesty not only a serious character flaw but a danger to his governing ability. I don’t believe he wishes to abolish the Constitution, undermine our democracy, set himself up as dictator. But such full-court immodesty has to work against one’s perspective, make impossible anything resembling a sense of history, allow for necessary accommodations with reality. A man who sees no other picture but those with himself in the center is not a man you want to run your nation.

Joseph Epstein

I quote this not to beat a dead horse, but because it is almost identical in its insight to one of the points I made long ago: Trump’a narcissism distorts his vision of the world, and that kind of distortion is intolerable in a POTUS. It’s so disqualifying that I don’t care what his “positions” are on “the issues.”

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Wednesday, 10/16/24

Not Politics

Iatrogenic Customer Dissatisfaction

I took my Lincoln into the dealer last week because wiper fluid wouldn’t spray. They fixed it and suggested wiper blades, too.

I of course got a Customer Satisfaction Survey afterword because — well, this is Weimar America 2024.

In my value system, a 3 out of 5 means this was a perfectly okay experience, no problem. I don’t expect bliss or epiphanies from a car repair.

But to Ford-Lincoln, anything less that straight 5s triggers a message to the dealer that it desperately needs to call me to fix things. So the dealer called, and I told him his corporate overlords are idiots.

And then, incredibly, another survey came to ask whether the dealer called me, and now what are my answers to the other questions (how likely are you to recommend, etc.)? I couldn’t just say the dealer called me; the other questions were mandatory so I couldn’t submit the form without answering them.

But, aha!, they had a field for free-form comments, which I filled and submitted thus:

I am never going to answer another customer satisfaction survey. You won’t be satisfied until I’ve lied and given you all fives, so I’m going to lie like a dog and give them to you. But the truth is that Ford-Lincoln has burnt some goodwill by the refusal to accept “this was a satisfactory service call.” You won’t even let me say the dealer followed up and leave it at that, because I can’t say that (which is true) without answering all the other questions and risking another round of fawning attention if the answers are less than 5.
I DON’T WANT FAWNING ATTENTION. I WANTED MY CAR FIXED. I GOT MY CAR FIXED. NOW LEAVE ME ALONE! WHAT KIND OF IDIOTS ARE TELLING YOU THAT THIS HARASSMENT IS A WAY TO BUILD CUSTOMER SATISFACTION?!

(That felt good, but I’m not sure my pulse and blood pressure are back down yet. I claim no copyright on this, and you can substitute another “f-word” for “fawning.”)

Gratitude Grievance

I beam with pride when I see companies like Shopify, GitHub, Gusto, Zendesk, Instacart, Procore, Doximity, Coinbase, and others claim billion-dollar valuations from work done with Rails. It’s beyond satisfying to see this much value created with a web framework I’ve spent the last two decades evolving and maintaining. A beautiful prize from a life’s work realized.

But it’s also possible to look at this through another lens, and see a huge missed opportunity! If hundreds of billions of dollars in valuations came to be from tools that I originated, why am I not at least a pétit billionaire?! …

This line of thinking is lethal to the open source spirit.

The moment you go down the path of gratitude grievances, you’ll see ungrateful ghosts everywhere. People who owe you something, if they succeed. A ratio that’s never quite right between what you’ve helped create and what you’ve managed to capture. If you let it, it’ll haunt you forever.

…

Thou shall not lust after thy open source’s users and their success.

David Heinemeier Hansson

The Meaning of Existence

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part,
and would have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

Les Murray, New Selected Poems

Religion (whatever that is)

Papering over an abyss of waste and horror

[T]he 2024 presidential campaign is a type of tragedy. For many Evangelicals, choosing between the two is a near-existential psycho-intellectual crisis. Because we lack an understanding of the tragic, we tend to think that everything we do must somehow be “redemptive.” …

…

Evangelical treatment of politics as nearly sacramental, rather than a part of temporal or natural life, has left them unable to conceive of political tragedy. Greg Wolfe in Image sees this as an essentially American failing, and he’s probably right. “My youthful, earnest religiosity” Wolfe writes, papered over “an abyss of waste and horror with innocuous pieties.”

…

Evangelicals seem convinced that they could never be a part of a national political tragedy, and their refusal to concede the essentially tragic nature of American politics is to their peril. Every succeeding generation of evangelicals, left right and center, seem convinced that salvation lies in their own political exertions, seemingly unaware that they too could be a part of a national political tragedy, wherein God’s judgment comes on the moral and immoral, on the pious and impious. There are cases, I am sure, to be made for voting for Trump, and that is who most of my tribe will tend towards. Maybe it is necessary. Maybe it is prudent. But don’t tell me it is anything other than tragic that either of the two leading candidates for the presidency will eventually govern the American republic.

Miles Smith at Mere Orthodoxy.

“Charismatics” didn’t used to be “Evangelicals”

There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.

It is not coincidental that many, if not most, exvangelical memoirs are written by people who have had some background with charismatic influence, and why the specific Cold War confluence of legacy Evangelicals and charismatics created the conditions for the exvangelical movement. In their Washington Post piece Erica Ramirez and Leah Payne rightly note that while the “Pentecostal-Charismatic movement overlaps with evangelical traditions in many ways, especially in their conservative ideas about political issues such as abortion, marriage and prayer in schools,” evangelicals and Pentecostals are “historically distinct — until the mid-20th century, Pentecostals and their Charismatic descendants weren’t routinely grouped with their evangelical counterparts.”

There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.

Miles Smith, Reading the Exvangelicals

It’s tempting to muse about why both “sides” consented to the conflation of pentecostal/charismatic and evangelical.

Perhaps another day. If I tried it today, I’d be neglecting other things and my take would probably be too cynical.

Politics

New Nadir

The Rutherford County, North Carolina, Sheriff’s Office said on Monday that police officers arrested a 44-year-old man on Saturday suspected of threatening violence against Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster workers. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that FEMA ordered its employees to temporarily evacuate the county after National Guard service members reported seeing a truck of armed militants who were “out hunting FEMA,” though law enforcement said the suspect acted alone. The man—carrying a handgun and rifle at the time of his arrest—was charged with “going armed to the terror of the public” and released later that day on $10,000 bail.

Via The Dispatch.

Militants hunting for FEMA workers in hurricane devastation because — why, in God’s name!? Can we sink any lower?

Kamala’s best case?

Bret Stephens, Harris Needs a Closing Argument. Here’s One. is very appealing.

With Harris I’m pretty sure there will be another Election in four years; I’m not at all sure with Trump. But with Trump at +16 in my state, I have the luxury of voting for neither of them.

Poetic justice

Less than four weeks from the election, Michigan’s Democratic governor made an in-kind contribution to Donald Trump’s campaign. Gretchen Whitmer appeared last week in a video featuring her placing a Dorito chip on the tongue of a kneeling social-media influencer. After Michigan’s bishops denounced the clip as “specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Holy Eucharist,” Ms. Whitmer apologized.

The kicker: She was wearing a Harris-Walz campaign hat in the video.

The swing-state governor says she had no idea people might find the post offensive, which speaks to how out of touch Democratic elites are ….

William McGurn

This may qualify as poetic justice. Kamala Harris deserves to be outed as anti-Catholic (see this as well as the McGurn column) quite apart from Gretchen Whitmer’s mockery of the eucharist.

But I’m kind of waiting for the rest of the Whitmer story. What’s above is suspiciously weird; I just don’t know how Whitmer could have blundered her way into that highly-scripted gaff unless it was some kind of Borat or Project Veritas entrapment. Maybe that kneeling social-media influencer was a conservative provocateur, in which case I’d fault her (him?) equally with Whitmer in staging the mockery.

Russian 1988, China 2024

So: Why didn’t Gorbachev’s reforms succeed and save an empire?

Regarding the key figure, opinion was split at least five ways: some said it had been Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk; others, Russian President Boris Yeltsin; still others, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev or KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov. Finally, one or two passed the credit (or guilt) back to Leonid Brezhnev.

Each had a cogent reason for his answer. Moscow’s Mayor Gavriil Popov and Alexander Yakovlev fingered Kravchuk because his action in leading Ukraine to complete independence had removed an essential component of any possible union. Without Ukraine, their argument went, a union would be unworkable, since the discrepancy in size between Russia and each of the other republics was so great. At least one unit of intermediate size was needed to create the sort of balance a federation, or even confederation, would require.nov Others, such as Anatoly Sobchak and Konstantin Lubenchenko, the last speaker of the USSR Supreme Soviet, did not agree with this logic.

Russia, Belarus, the countries of Central Asia, and perhaps one or two from the Transcaucasus could have formed a viable union even without Ukraine, they argued. Only one republic was irreplaceable, and that was Russia. Ergo, Yeltsin had been the key figure. If he had not conspired with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, some form of confederation could have been cobbled together to the benefit of all.

“No,” said others, including Vladislav Starkov and Sergei Stankevich, who felt that Gorbachev’s stubbornness, his failure to understand the force of nationalism, his devotion to a discredited socialism, and the authoritarian streak in his personality had prevented him from voluntarily transferring the sort of power to the republics that their leaders demanded. His failures in leadership, in short, had determined the collapse of the state he headed, and no other political figure could have saved it.

Anatoly Chernyayev, ever loyal to his boss, would have none of that. He felt that a union treaty would have been signed if the attempted coup had not occurred in August. This implied that Vladimir Kryuchkov had been the key figure. He, after all, had organized the coup, and nobody else could have done it without his cooperation.

Starkov, who named Gorbachev as the principal culprit, also pointed out that Leonid Brezhnev had shared much of the responsibility, for he was the Soviet leader who had set the stage for collapse by neglecting the country’s economic, social, and ethnic problems and by permitting local “mafias” under the guise of the Communist Party to obtain a hammerlock on power in many of the union republics.

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire

This stuff’s complicated and most of us Americans haven’t got a clue what Russia is about. Gobachev tried major reform, but there were too many moving pieces and personalities — so he got collapse in the end.

China seems to be in similar bind as Gorbachev: economic dysfunction, the cure of which might bring down the CCP.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Sunday potpourri

Western Civ

The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov expressed the non sequitur at the heart of Western civilization with a deliciously sarcastic aphorism: “Man descended from apes, therefore we must love one another.”

Andrew Wilson, Remaking The World

Irony

You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I don’t know where it will end.

Rev. John Ames via @dswanson and @KyleEssary on micro.blog.

I follow @dswanson and @KyleEssary on micro.blog. They seem like very nice guys and pretty well-educated and sensible (I wouldn’t follow them otherwise; if I want outrage, I can visit my disused X account or rejoin Facebook).

But I gotta say (the preface to many a gratuitous and unnecessary comment) that Orthodox Christianity often has a similar gripe against Protestantism, and its incorrigible devotion to novel doctrines that kept it from returning to Orthodox Christianity as it failed to reform schismatic Latin Christianity.

Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant

In my experience, really committed Protestants tend to think of themselves as “saved” because they have accepted Jesus; Roman Catholics, on the other hand, see themselves as “sinners” in need of weekly absolution. Orthodox just think themselves lucky.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul

Inquisition

In 1184, bishops who previously might have been content to let sleeping heretics lie had been instructed actively to sniff them out. Then, in 1215, at the great Lateran Council presided over by Innocent III, sanctions explicitly targeting heresy had provided the Church with an entire machinery of persecution.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Ethics

[T]he recent (as in, since the nineteenth century) evangelical Protestant practice of building ethics on proof texts is remarkably limited in our day and age. Proof texts work when the moral intuitions of the culture track with the broad shape of biblical teaching. That is no longer the case. Further, advances in technology now raise all kinds of questions about what it even means to be human—which in turn raises questions not only about fertility, but about other issues, from end-of-life care to the use of AI. The broader biblical account of human nature, not isolated proof texts, must now factor into Christian discussions of the most pressing ethical issues that we face.

Carl R. Trueman, We Need Good Protestant Ethicists

Identitarianism is anti-Christian

Fr. Andrew: The human identity, as we were made to be, is something that is always in the future. Because we, being finite, will never arrive at being God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, our identity is always in the future, my existence is what I am today … There’s this gap, there’s this lack between me and it … even when we’re in the life of the world to come, we are not going to be in a static state.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which also implies that if our progress is always this point in the future—future for us—which is the fullness of the stature of Christ, to use St. Paul’s language, then that means that this modern thing that we see now, identitarianism, where people take these labels and apply them to themselves and that becomes the end-all … of how they conceive of themselves, looking for their identity either in something in the past or something at this moment … [i]t’s really an anti-Christian philosophy, and it’s really kind of an unhopeful philosophy, because it means I’ve arrived, I am this thing, and this is what I am and who I am, period. The becoming is not on the plate, on the table. It’s a distortion, really.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and one way, one devastatingly destructive way in which we are faithful to something other than Christ is when we’re faithful to some version of ourselves. We have this idea that we’re not allowed to break character, that whoever I was yesterday I have to be someone consistent with that today, even if who I was yesterday was wretched and miserable.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “This is just who I am!” No, you can be better!

Fr. Stephen: Right, “I can’t make a break…” And this is something I say to people over and over and over again in confession, is that the devil doesn’t spend his time trying to get us to sin; we do that on our own. The devil spends his time, when we fall, telling us not to get up, telling us that this is where we belong, this is who we are, don’t bother trying to do better, to be better, to make any progress …

Fr. Andrew: I can’t remember—didn’t one of the saints say something to the effect of the demons always whisper two lies? One is: “You’re doing great!” And the other is: “There’s no hope for you!” And, I mean, those are the roots of… I don’t know, I’ve heard confessions for well over a decade and a half now; I’m pretty sure those are the roots of basically most sins.

Fall of Man Part 1: Garments of Skin | Ancient Faith Ministries

The Gospels are not a software license

The four Gospels are not a software user license — do not skip to the end and click “I agree.”

Read them. Realize the implications. Count the cost. Commit to live this life under the laws of this Kingdom, and set your feet on the road of repentance.

If more people wrestled with the difficult commands and expectations of Christ, then there might be fewer people called Christians — but they would be more ready for life in Christ.

Fr. Silouan Thompson

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

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.

Saturday, 8/24/24

Politics

Truly weird

Y’know what’s weird in a hopeful sort of way? Nostaligia across ideological lines, that’s what.

… programming on Thursday night, which seemed to aim at appealing to Nikki Haley voters from the GOP primaries. There were a lot of respectful references to Ronald Reagan. From Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. From old-time national security hand Leon Panetta, who talked about killing Osama bin Laden.

Damon Linker, Well done, Dems

[L]et’s face it, even some European conservatives find Trump so distasteful that they are eager to believe the best about Harris—especially the idea that she really might be Obama in a pants suit.

Rod Dreher, Kamala Harris and her ‘Good Vibes’ Campaign

Almost she maketh me straight

I’m reluctant to write about Kamala Harris’s smile because I’m going to get all gushy and mushy about it, and the Harris lovefest is a jammed jamboree without need of another journalist. She’s enjoying more than a routine political honeymoon; she’s in the priciest suite on the poshest cruise ship sailing through a tropical paradise where coconuts tumble juicily from their trees into her aloe-moistened hands.

But I can’t stop noticing and basking in her happy face. Actually, happy doesn’t do it justice — it’s exuberant. Sometimes even ecstatic. When she made her surprise appearance onstage in Chicago during the prime-time portion of the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, she beamed so brightly I reached for my sunglasses. When she high-fived her running mate’s wife, Gwen Walz, during a campaign rally in Rochester, Pa., the day before, she sparkled like a gemstone. Even when she talked about the economy — the economy! — in Raleigh, N.C., two days before that, she found places and pauses for her mouth to widen and her eyes to light up. Those smiles of hers communicate an elation that I immediately want to share, an optimism that I instantly want to embrace.

Frank Bruni, who may be confusing Kamala with Judy Garland.

Kamala’s hostile work environment

And now for the anti-Bruni:

The Harris-Walz messaging indeed projects a pair of lovable scamps out to defend old-fashioned American decency against two mean, corrupt weirdos, Trump and J.D. Vance. Harris’s bubbly likability is a façade. In fact, Harris has a behind-the-scenes reputation as a high-maintenance diva. As vice president, she has had an unusually high staff turnover, with burned-out aides leaving feeling chewed up and spit out.

“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” a person with direct knowledge of how Harris’ office is run told Politico, in a 2021 report. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—.”

To be sure, Donald Trump is famously a difficult boss. And yes, the presidency is not a therapy session. Still, when Kamala Harris gasses on, as she did in her convention speech, about the need for charity, and about the mandate to treat others as you want to be treated, it is all an act to create, well, a trippy California vibe that contrasts with Trump’s meanness.

Rod Dreher, Kamala Harris and her ‘Good Vibes’ Campaign

Noonan’s take

The Democratic Party has more substantial characters of recent American history to parade around on stage. The Clintons, the Obamas, Jesse Jackson, who, whatever your view of him, was there, on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, when Martin Luther King was shot. This conveyed a party with a storied past, and if you join it you’re joining something real. The Republican Party, in its great toppling, has rejected its past. You lose something when you cast your history aside, and all you’ve got for prime time is Trump sons.

…

Donald Trump is famously off his game. He knows his old insult shtick isn’t working. Some of his supporters say, “All he has to do is read from the teleprompter!” but they’re wrong. He’s no good when he reads from the prompter, he doesn’t respect what’s on it. It bores him, and he talks like a tranquilized robot. He knows what he does well—shock, entertain, mention two or three big issues. He’s having trouble making a stinging critique of Democratic policy because he’s insulted everything over the years, and when he says something’s bad now it just seems part of his act and doesn’t land.

Peggy Noonan

Normal people

The Obamas managed to strike a tone that was at once a little bit angry and a little bit hopeful. Barack spoke about how most Americans don’t want to go to war with our neighbors over politics. He’s right: In fact, most of us normal people don’t actually care how our neighbors vote, just as long as the guy next door isn’t blasting Mexican polka after 8 p.m. He also nicely articulated what’s so grating about Trump: Trump is the guy who has everything and still whines about not having enough. He’s always talking about himself: his problems, his successes, his goddamn golf score.

…

Meanwhile, Trump focuses on what really matters—cocaine: Trump took a brief moment away from listing his grievances to educate himself on America’s drug problem during an appearance on comedian Theo Von’s podcast. You’d think a rich man who lived in New York in the 1980s would know a little something about the white stuff, but listening to Trump ask Von about coke is like hearing a five-year-old ask where babies come from. “And is that a good feeling? Why would you do it?”

Honestly, the whole thing is sort of endearing, and as Helen Lewis said, it’s the first time Trump has shown an interest in someone other than himself.

Katie Herzog

Conspiracy theory of the Left

If you think, as Kamala Harris thinks, or says she thinks—(“thinks”)—that inflation in grocery prices is the result of “price gouging,” then I don’t want to hear you ever complaining about conspiracy theories. Because that is a big, dumb conspiracy theory, the sort of thing that can be taken seriously only by asses of exceptional asininity.

Kevin D. Williamson

Populists versus the credentialed experts

Populist politics defies experts in favor of deferring to the people (the voters).

The reason why such a politics still seems disorienting to so many of us is that we just lived through several decades when highly credentialized experts enjoyed uncommon levels of deference. This was the highwater mark of technocratic-managerial neoliberalism. What should the president do about an economic problem? Talk to economists and follow their advice. What about a foreign policy crisis unfolding abroad? Talk to experts ensconced in Washington’s many think tanks devoted to international affairs. The same holds for any area of policy. Whatever the problem, solving it involves finding the experts, listening to what they say, and then going along with their recommendations.

But not anymore. Or at least not consistently. The experts are still around, and they are still shown respect by journalists who focus on national politics. But they don’t have the political clout and don’t exercise the overwhelming influence they once did. This is true in both parties. And taking note of it is crucial for understanding where we are and where we’re going.

Damon Linker

How to get the press to blurt out inconvenient truth

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, and so it goes with journalistic “fact checkers.” Sen. J.D. Vance made a slip of the tongue last week, which prompted CBS News to reveal the truth unwittingly.

In an Aug. 11 “Face the Nation” interview with Margaret Brennan, Mr. Vance said that Donald Trump is “trying to find some common ground” on abortion. Meanwhile, “you have Democrats who supported abortion right up to the moment—and sometimes even beyond the moment—of birth, which is just sick stuff.”

“That’s not accurate,” Ms. Brennan admonished him.

“It is accurate,” he replied. “In fact, the Born Alive Act, multiple members of the current Democratic administration, including our vice president, supported that legislation—they have supported taxpayer-funded abortions up to the moment of birth.”

The screen, moments later, cuts to the studio, where Ms. Brennan reads from a script: “We want to clarify what Sen. Vance said about the Born Alive [Abortion] Survivors Protection Act and his claim that Vice President Harris supported the legislation. A CBS News fact-check finds that Harris voted against advancing the bill twice when she was a senator, and has previously called it extreme and a setback to reproductive rights in America. We found no evidence that anyone who currently serves in the Biden administration voted for it either.” Then the interview continues.

Sierra Dawn McClain and Nicholas Tomaino, Vance Flips the ‘Fact Check’ Script

Culture, education

Myth

Myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

Breaking political taboos

Getting inside the heads of these kinds of voters became an obsession for Mr. Schoen. As a doctoral student at Oxford, he wrote a dissertation on Enoch Powell, a Conservative legislator, who stunned Britain in 1968 with a speech predicting that if current levels of immigration continued, soon “the Black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” After sifting through polls and election returns, Mr. Schoen convincingly argued that Powell drew millions of these voters to the right in the first election after his incendiary speech, shaking the foundations of British politics and setting the template for a new kind of right-wing populism.

Mr. Schoen came to believe that people were drawn to firebrands like Powell not just because they agreed with him on the issues, but also because he was saying something political elites had tried to keep out of public debate. It proved that he was in touch with a constituency that wasn’t being heard — and it gave his movement a frisson of excitement. You didn’t need a grass-roots campaign or a lavish advertising blitz to win over the public, just the right words and voters ready to hear them.

… Ignoring a problem on the electorate’s mind doesn’t make it go away; it only sends voters searching for a candidate who will listen. Views can shift over time, but probably not over the course of a campaign. Elections aren’t a battle for hearts and minds. They’re a fight to give voters what they already want.

Timothy Shenk, 30 Years Ago, Two Young Strategists Cracked How to Beat a Guy Like Trump. Are Democrats Ready to Listen?

Learning to desire the right things

We normally pay attention to what we desire without thinking about whether our desires are good for us. But that is a dangerous trap in a culture where there are myriad powerful forces competing for our attention, trying to lure us into desiring the ideas, merchandise, or experiences they want to sell us.

Besides, late modern culture is one that has located the core of one’s identity in the desiring self—a self whose wants are thought to be beyond judgment. What you want to be, we are told, is who you are—and anybody who denies that is somehow attacking your identity, or so the world says. The old ideal that you should learn—through study, practice, and submission to authoritative tradition—to desire the right things has been cast aside. Who’s to say what the right things are, anyway? Only you, the autonomous choosing self, have the right to make those determinations. Anybody who says otherwise is a threat.

Excerpt from Rod Dreher’s forthcoming book Living in Wonder (emphasis added). The highlight describes a an “old ideal” that is a major thrust of classical education.

Bearing (false?) witness

Some more Kevin D. Williamson. This time, it’s a book review:

As a Catholic, I suppose I should try harder not to enjoy Protestant factional infighting as much as I do. But every time I read something as bog-bottom dumb as Megan Basham’s excruciatingly imbecilic new book, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, I am reminded of the poetic justice arising from American-style choose-your-own-adventure theology and exegesis: There never was a better advertisement for the benefits of maintaining a Magisterium.

…

Reviewing a book like this is like trying to argue with an avalanche—an avalanche of stupidity and error, to be sure, but an avalanche all the same. I have the same problem with this book I had reviewing Alissa Quart’s similarly idiotic Bootstrapped: The author can make enough errors in a dozen words that the critic needs 400 words to correct them. And so one ends up writing an annotated companion to a work that was not worth reading in the first place, much less annotating. (If you would like a more conventional review of the book, please do check out Warren Cole Smith’s excellent contribution.) And while readers have often suspected otherwise, I do not generally get paid by the word.

…

This is a book about, and for, Christians, which means there is something on the table more important than journalistic incompetence. There is the matter of bearing false witness. Megan Basham has some apologies to make and a public record to correct. Judgment, I am reliably informed, comes like a thief in the night.

Kevin D. Williamson, Bearing False Witness

I appreciate Williamson’s assessment of George Soros, which is one I reached independently:

There isn’t any question that Soros and his Open Society project hope to influence prominent institutions, including conservative-leaning churches and religious associations. Soros is engaged in a social change project, and that is what social change projects do. His ends are not generally ends that I share, but that doesn’t make it nefarious.

Considering Soros’ ongoing status as whipping-boy for the American Right, it’s nice to see someone else with conservative bona fides who doesn’t think Soros is nefarious.

(Noted that Bethel McGrew thinks Basham’s book is just fine. I trust Williamson more, and don’t care enough to buy and read the book. Not my circus, not my monkeys.)

Karma Update

The Italian Coast Guard on Wednesday recovered the body of British tech mogul Mike Lynch from the wreckage of the Bayesian superyacht that sunk on Monday. The 56-meter yacht owned by Lynch’s wife, Angela Bachares, had been described by its builders as “unsinkable.” Italian investigators believe the yacht sank quickly on Monday morning after being hit by a waterspout, essentially an oceangoing tornado. Fifteen people who were on the yacht have survived, with six confirmed dead and one unaccounted for. Lynch, considered “Britain’s Bill Gates,” was acquitted in June by a San Francisco jury of fraud charges related to the sale of his company, Autonomy, to Hewlett Packard in 2011. His co-defendant in the trial, Stephen Chamberlain, also died Monday after being struck by a car while jogging in Cambridgeshire on Saturday.

The Morning Dispatch

I don’t know anything about Lynch or Chamberlain, and I have no actual opinion on their guilt of things for which they were acquitted in court. But if others can cite divine intervention in the failed attempt to assassinate Trump with a gunshot, and others can say “miraculous” of the meteoric rise of the Democrats’ prospects for November, I can hint at divine justice in two related deaths of acquitted co-defendants — especially since one sank on an unsinkable yacht.

Just six weeks ago, as a bullet whizzed past Donald Trump’s ear and he popped back up onstage with one fist raised and the other clutching a bald eagle, it appeared the Democrats were doomed. No more. Against all odds, the party that until recently had the pallor of a 80-year-old on day sixteen of a Covid infection has regained its mojo, and that was abundantly clear at the DNC this week.

Katie Herzog

(FWIW, I’m still not voting for either major party for POTUS.)

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Sunday, 8/18/24

Red Letter Day

Mark your calendar, for I’m now going to pass along, in all sincerity, tips on how believing Evangelicals (i.e., excluding the “I never knew I was Evangelical until I went to a Trump rally” types) can do Christianity better — without necessarily becoming Orthodox (although, as always, the invitation to “come and see” remains in effect).

These tips ring true to me, but I left frank Evangelicalism 45 years ago; your mileage may vary:

Here’s the problem: That sociological environment that birthed evangelicalism as we know it today is basically over. The economy that shaped that world from the 50s to the 2010s is ending. That much has been clear for nearly ten years now—Brexit and the Trump election both represented quite explicit movements against the post-war open society model. …

…

Because the sociological environment that created evangelicalism is winding down, it has created enormous anxiety and uncertainty for evangelical believers who simply don’t know how to imagine a Christian movement outside of the unique environment created by the 1950s economic environment, the Baby Boom generation, and the post-Cold War pax Americana.

…

People who aren’t as steeped in evangelicalism as a sociological entity often find all this mystifying. One friend with ties to an eastern Christian tradition once remarked to me that, “you evangelicals are kind of a joke, you know? My people have been persecuted for centuries. Our children have been stolen from us. We’ve had martyrs. Our churches have been burned. But still we are faithful. We still follow God. We still meet for worship. We still pray. We still raise our children in the truth. But you evangelicals discover that critical race theory is a thing that exists and six months later you’re devouring each other.”

So what should you do in this environment if you are a Protestant Christian concerned with the life of the church? One tip: Stop caring so much about “evangelicalism” and the celebrities who define it as a sociological phenomenon.

…

To stop caring about “evangelicalism” is not the same thing as no longer caring about Christianity or Jesus or the church in general or even specific churches in our communities. It is, rather, to turn away from the mostly fake discourses that pervade Christian media and to focus instead on actual flesh-and-blood Christian communities and Christian believers.

Jake Meador, The Importance of Not Caring about Mark Driscoll

Was there ever a “positive world”?

I am on a social medium with Alan Jacobs of Wheaton, Notre Dame and now Baylor. I’m so glad. He’s got a very good detector for the kinds of plausible nonsense I’m still too likely to fall for. For his powerful critique of the idea that we lived in a culture that was “positive” toward the conscientious practice of Christianity (not mere profession) before 1994, for instance, see here, here and here.

Like the commemoration of martyrs in Orthodox Matins, I find strangely encouraging the thought that lived Christianity has never been popular.

Disjunction

I join a reunion of my Bible-college class. … At the reunion later that day, my classmates speak in phrases we learned as students: “God is giving me the victory…I can do all things through Christ…All things work together for good…I’m walking in triumph.” Yet they speak a different vocabulary when relating their lives after college. Several are suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, and others from clinical depression. One couple has recently committed their teenage daughter to a mental institution. I wince at the disconnect between these raw personal stories and the spiritual overlay applied to them.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

The incoherence of American Folk Religion

I took to studying the ones of my teachers who were also preachers, and also the preachers who came to speak in chapel and at various exercises. In most of them I saw the old division of body and soul that I had known at The Good Shepherd. The same rift ran through everything at Pigeonville College; the only difference was that I was able to see it more clearly, and to wonder at it. Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins—hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust—came from the soul. But these preachers I’m talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.

Wendell Berry , Jayber Crow

Hubris

Popular authority figures like Bill Bright, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson all assume that no previously existing educational enterprise is capable of meeting the demands of the hour. Despite the absence of formal educational credentials, each man presumes to establish a Christian university.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

I distinctly remember Jerry Falwell dreaming of “a Christian University with a first-class football program,” thus giving the back of the hand to Notre Dame and, by implication, to Roman Catholics generally.

I’m puzzled, though, about the claim that Bill Bright established a Christian University. I don’t recall any such thing and Wikipedia’s article on him doesn’t mention it.

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

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.

Saturday, 8/17/24

A hectic week in which I forgot things, including blogging (though not clipping blog fodder). Enjoy.

Culture

America the unadorned ugly

While I was driving through some of America’s most majestic natural beauty, almost everything in it built by humans was unadorned ugliness. Pre-fab bland buildings that look like they were airlifted in and plopped down in plots of land bulldozed flat, with zero shade or attempt to integrate them into the surrounding nature.

It didn’t help that I was also feeling physically gross, unable to walk, and eating trash, since that’s what’s almost exclusively available on the road in the US, because that’s what most Americans eat — prepackaged globs of fat and sugar.

America’s diet, outside of a minority of successful neighborhoods, has gotten worse since my last American Dream trip, with everything now somehow bigger, sweeter, and fattier: Mass produced, highly processed gunk, that has as much connection to what the rest of the world considers food as pornography does to intimacy.

… [M]y last three years of trips to countries as different as Vietnam, France, Uganda, and Istanbul, has highlighted and strengthened my view that while the US certainly provides our citizens with the most opportunity, and the most stuff, we don’t provide them with the most fulfilling, beautiful, and elevating life.

Chris Arnade

Changing from Häftlinge to men again

When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed. Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: “eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor,” and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead. It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

My pet peeve

When Sarah Kate Ellis was named president of GLAAD more than a decade ago, the LGBTQ advocacy organization was in dire financial straits. “I was given a scary mandate,” she told The New York Times in 2019: “Fix it or shut it down.”

She should have done the latter.

Founded in 1985 as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the nonprofit originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment. Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission. The group should have long ago taken the win and dissolved—just as the organization Freedom to Marry announced it would do shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the summer of 2015.

Accepting victory, however, can be difficult for people who devote their lives to a cause, and not only for emotional reasons. The impulse among activists, once successful, to keep raising money necessitates that they find things to spend it on ….

James Kirchick, How the Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way

I may be particularly sensitive to this sort of thing because my father once joined “Ad hoc Committee [to Accomplish Somethingorother].” They accomplished it, but soon Dad got a letter, on the Committee’s letterhead, supporting some other cause, and listing him as a committee members. I don’t recall if he didn’t support the new cause at all of if he merely had not enlisted to go on record on that cause, but some co-belligerent failed to grok “ad hoc.”

I’m confident there are conservative groups that should have declared victory and gone home (some have crossed my mind in the past but I don’t now recall them. Right to Life is not an example because it wanted to outlaw abortion, not just reverse Roe.). Human Rights Campaign is another example on the sexual-liberation Left:

Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause: transgender rights. Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach—seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress—they have taken hard-line left-wing positions. LGBTQ groups repeat the mantra “the science is settled” on the extremely complex and fraught subject of youth gender medicine and insist that anyone who questions the provision of puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children is transphobic. They continue to spread this message even as many European countries have backed away from such treatments after concluding that the evidence supporting them is weak. The reflexive promotion of major medical interventions for minors should be a red flag for gay men and lesbians, considering the research indicating that many gender-distressed and gender-nonconforming children grow up to be gay.

Whence the phrase “transing away the gay” as the newest iteration of “praying away the gay” (and checking some of the same emotional boxes). The whole Kirchick article is quote-worthy, and I commend it to you.

Politics generally

BOTS

Blunt talk:

[T]he key to a Harris win in November won’t be the support of black Americans or Indian Americans or even “brown Americans” — though she has identified at various points in her political life as all three. Rather, Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic: never-married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45.

Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.

The Democratic Party’s political engineers first sensed the centrality of BOTS to the Party’s power base during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. The Obama campaign then duly rolled out a storybook ad called “the Life of Julia”, which explained how Obama’s policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would care for Julia from graduation through motherhood and finally to the grave without her needing to form a human relationship with anyone outside the government.

David Samuels, The march of Kamala’s brides

Fundamentalist America at Defcon 2

What you’re seeing throughout American Christianity now is the fundamentalist wing is really exerting itself. And so what that means is when you encounter somebody who’s a fundamentalist and you say, “I’m not voting for Trump,” they often don’t look at that as a debatable point for which Christians in good will can disagree. They will look at this and say, “It is the natural and inevitable consequence of applying Christian principles that you will support Donald Trump.”

David French

As long-time readers know, I spent most of my first three decades as a Wheaton College/IVCF-flavored Evangelical. What I’ve mentioned less often is that schools of that flavor had some taboos that, although mostly sensible, did not merit the label “biblical.” How often Christians who purport to base everything on the Bible come up with extrabiblical Shibboleths is telling.

Political violence and threats of violence

Political violence and threats of violence have no place in the American democratic process. Yet threats and intimidation follow the MAGA movement like night follows day. One of the saddest stories of our time is the way in which even local election officials and local school board members fear for their safety. The level of threat against public officials has escalated in the MAGA era, MAGA Republicans often wield threats as a weapon against Republican dissenters, and every American should remember Jan. 6, when a mob of insurrectionists ransacked the Capitol.

David French, To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris

I appreciate French reminding me about the violence and intimidation that follows MAGA, even quite apart from January 6. He will suffer attempts at intimidation as a result of this piece.

(For the record, though, some Trump supporters allegedly fear the consequence of letting it be known that they support Trump)

French also points out some legitimate complexifiers even on abortion, which so many millions consider a categorical reason to vote Republican: (1) the 2024 GOP platform plank on abortion is effectively pro-choice; (2) abortion rates and ratios have been lower under pro-abortion democrats.

“Caring” politicians

About 4 in 10 say Harris is someone who “cares about people like you” while about 3 in 10 say that about Trump.

Via John Ellis news items. It’s gratifying that a majority is directionally correct about politicians caring about people like them. But nobody, not even 1 in 10, should be so stupid as to think that Trump cares about anybody but Trump.

Trump in particular

On message?

The silliest spectacle in politics this month has been Republicans pleading with Trump to get back on message, as if he’s somehow forgotten that inflation and immigration are his strongest lines of attack against Harris.

He didn’t forget. And he assuredly does want to win. He’s off-message because he can’t help himself. There’s something wrong with him.

The New York Times reported this weekend on a dinner he held with wealthy donors in New York on August 2. “Some guests hoped Mr. Trump would signal that he was recalibrating after a series of damaging mistakes,” the paper noted. Instead he babbled about stolen elections, repeated his “black or Indian?” critique of Harris, and assured the crowd that he’s “not nicer” following the attempt on his life last month that had supposedly left him a changed man.

One attendee told the New York Post’s Charles Gasparino that when a donor advised him to tone down some of his attacks, Trump replied, “They tried to put me in jail; they tried to ruin my reputation and then they tried to assassinate me. At some point, you have [to] be truthful to yourself.”

Being true to himself is the whole problem. His advisers are “deeply rattled by his meandering, mean and often middling public performances since the failed assassination attempt,” per Axios. One source claimed that Trump “is struggling to get past his anger,” the sort of thing one might say about a temperamental child (no wonder), not the nominee of a major party fewer than 100 days out from an election.

Trump being undisciplined and self-indulgent isn’t news, though, any more than him resorting to childish cruelty toward his enemies is. What’s newsy is how his anxiety about Harris’ surging popularity has led him into outright fantasy to try to explain it.

Nick Catoggio

Ominous words, especially from this quarter

“It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath,” LaCivita said in a recent interview with Politico at the Republican National Convention. “It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day.” An investigation by Rolling Stone last month found that nearly 70 pro-Trump election deniers serve as election officials in key battleground counties.

In Georgia, Trump supporters on the state election board have adopted rules requiring “reasonable inquiry” before election results are certified, a move that could give GOP county-election-board members the ability to reject the 2024 election’s outcome. And as The Guardian reports, the lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell “has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections.” At the national level, the Republican National Committee says that it hopes to mobilize 100,000 volunteers, including thousands of poll watchers, to focus on “Democrat attempts to circumvent the rules.” Meanwhile, one RNC senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, was criminally indicted earlier this year for her role in trying to overturn the 2020 election (she pleaded not guilty).

Then there is the mood of the MAGA base. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have become a litmus test in the GOP, and a recent Pew Research Center poll found that although 77 percent of Democratic voters believe that the election will be conducted “fairly and accurately,” less than half of Republican voters have faith in the system. Despite Harris’s recent surge, the majority of Trump supporters are confident that he will be victorious. (A recent YouGov poll found that nearly eight in 10 Trump supporters think he would win if pitted against Harris.) Trump fully intends to stoke his supporters’ disbelief and anger at the possibility that he could lose. As Wehner warned recently: “If you have friends who are Trump worshippers, a word of counsel: They’re heading to a very dark place psychologically … They felt this race was won; now it’s slipping away. Expect even greater self-delusion and more toxic rants.”

Charles Sykes, Trump Is Setting the Stage to Challenge the Election. The only steal of the 2024 Election is the one Trump and his minions are planning — and strategically placed to advance.

Not the unity they craved

Never has the GOP been more unified, and Donald Trump deserves all the credit. The issue uniting pundits, editorial boards, virtually all Republican politicians, GOP consultants, MAGA warriors, and rallygoers: the need for Trump to lay aside personal gripes and grievances and to stick to the issues and attack Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz on their records.

Jonah Goldberg

A Political Fat Elvis

The whole landscape of the campaign has been transformed. The rise of Harris instantly cast Trump in a new light. He formerly seemed more ominous and threatening, which, whatever its political drawbacks, signaled strength; now he seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis.

Trump is much better equipped psychologically to withstand ferocious criticisms than he is equipped to withstand mockery. Malignant narcissists go to great lengths to hide their fears and display a false or idealized self. Criticism targets the persona. Mockery, by contrast, can tap very deep fears of being exposed as flawed or weak. When the mask is the target, people with Trump’s psychological profile know how to fight back. Mockery, though, can cause them to unravel.

Peter Wehner, Trump Can’t Deal With Harris’s Success

Lazy, stupid, childish

Trump’s three big problems as a candidate are precisely the same qualities that mitigated the worst of what might have been a much worse Trump presidency the last time around: He is lazy, he is stupid, and he is childish. 

I can hear you objecting: “Hey, we came here for serious analysis, not name-calling!” But, in this case, the analysis and the name-calling end up in the same place: finding that the most politically relevant traits of Donald Trump are that he is lazy, stupid, and childish.

… Anyone who has heard Trump speak or read his unedited writing knows that he is not an especially intelligent man. But his native stupidity is compounded by his ignorance—which is to say, by the fact that he is too lazy to do his homework and acquire the kind of grasp of the issues that would make him a more effective candidate.

… There is a reason he wanders all over the place in his speeches—it isn’t only arrogance and self-centeredness. He’s dumber than nine chickens. That’s why he was an incompetent real-estate investor even though he was a successful reality-television grotesque. He isn’t the first dumb person to find success in the celebrity business, where stupidity seems to be an asset.

…

His penchant for using demeaning nicknames as a substitute for political argument might be thought of as an aspect of his laziness or his stupidity, but it is, at heart, part of his childishness. The same childishness is what has him insisting that he doesn’t need to run a conventional campaign, because he is a very special little boy. Never mind that after his fluke win in 2016, he has led his party from one electoral defeat to another—often in close succession, as when he pissed away Republicans’ chances in Georgia in a snit after his humiliating loss to the human eggplant in 2020.

Trump’s personality defects were, perversely enough, this country’s saving grace while he was president. He wanted to be a caudillo but ended up being very little more than a poisonous buffoon thanks to the laziness, stupidity, and childishness that kept him from realizing the worst of his ambitions as president. That very well may keep him from realizing any of his political ambitions in 2024.

I am not quite sure that I believe the maxim that “character is destiny.” Stupidity, on the other hand …

Kevin D. Williamson

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Sunday July 7

Why classical education? Why ecclesial Christianity?

(Sorry if this item feels a bit stream-of-consciousness. If you can’t get into my stream, it’s probably my fault. Skip to the next item if you get lost.)

A cyberfriend, who is both an Anglican rector and a classical school headmaster, posted this as an audio file, which I have (with a little help from VR) transcribed:

I occasionally find myself talking to folks who know that I moved into the classical Christian tradition from other educational models and they’re curious what the draw was into the classical Christian world.

Similarly, I find myself talking to many people who know that I moved into the Anglican tradition from the beginning of the century. from other Christian traditions and they have similar questions. What was it that drew you into the Anglican tradition?

Every once in a while, I also encounter people who are curious about both at the same time. Kind of what moved you into the classical Christian world while you were being moved into the Anglican world as it were, and in conversations with folks like that, I’ve begun to pinpoint some movements, some understandings of who God is, that moved me along in both of those worlds, the worlds of education and the world of Anglicanism.

Here’s one example. Seeing God as infinitely grand was one of those movement moments for me. Once I saw God as infinitely grand, I realized he could no longer be contained to a religion class or a Bible class, and all other disciplines just carry on as usual.

If God is infinitely grand, he must appear pretty thoroughly and visibly and noticeably across all disciplines, and that’s something that the classical Christian movement has focused on for some time. Seeing God in all disciplines.

Similarly, if God is infinitely grand, then he cannot be contained by words alone. We can’t worship him with just words if he’s infinitely grand. Our worship must capture more of the human person than just our words. We can’t fully grasp him, though we can sometimes helpfully describe him with words, but we can’t fully grasp him through doctrine alone. There has to be an element of mystery involved, and when we capture God in some ways through words, we do our best to be as broad as possible with those words. So a preference, for example, for something as broad and ancient as and as ecumenical as the Nicene Creed as a statement of faith, as opposed to some later post-enlightenment, more detailed statements of faith.

… Once I saw God as infinitely grand, that vision moved me both into the world of classical Christian education, where God is throughout all disciplines. It moved me more into a Catholic or Anglican tradition that is going to describe and understand and participate in worship of that infinitely grand God in ways that go beyond mere cognition and mere words.

Things like this make me feel much closer to Anglicans than I do to most Western Christian traditions — some of which I’ve been having trouble seeing even as authentically Christian, so far down Nathan Hatch’s Democratization road have they gone. (But then I go to the website of a Mount Pleasant, South Carolina Anglican parish, pastored by the newly-elected Anglican Presiding Bishop for North America, and find what looks like a cringey megachurch. If I had no Orthodox option, I personally would prefer a dignified Episcopal liturgy to any plexiglas-podium, praise-band “Anglican” operation.)

I don’t remember how far I’d gone along the road into Orthodox Christianity before I internalized that it didn’t have anything equivalent to, say, the massive and detailed Catechism of the Catholic Church, and that wasn’t just because they were too lazy to prepare one.

That was a surprise. I’d previous identified “orthodoxy” as detailed doctrinal rectitude. Now I was finding that it was like a high plateau, with dangerous cliffs all around it. The Nicene Creed was a fence to keep people from careening unwittingly over any of the cliffs; but the plateau was large, and diverse. The residents were not clones. Our priests and confessors may prescribe individual conduct on the plateau, but that can vary from person to person according to the discernment of priests and confessors.

Fr. Jon hints at why this is proper: God’s infinity makes Him apprehendable, but incomprehensible. We can’t fully define Him or cabin him, although doing so would make Him ever so more convenient and comforting. And it’s a fearful responsibility to be a spiritual guide who needs discernment, not just a rulebook with a good table of contents.

In fact, Orthodox (and orthodox) Christianity can feel kind of wild. Coincidentally, or likelier providentially, I’ve been getting a lot of exposure to that wildness lately in ways that I’m not (yet?) ready to articulate.

[John] Moriarty spoke of himself as a singing Christian. I would also suggest we may need to be grieving Christians, earthy Christians, happy Christians, and yes, on occasion, troublesome Christians. How did this Middle-Eastern mystery religion get so corralled?

Martin Shaw

Democratized heresies

Despite the variety of Christian idioms that flowered in the early republic, most seemed to spring from the common conception that Christian tradition since the time of the apostles was a tale of sordid corruption in which kingcraft and priestcraft wielded orthodoxy to enslave the minds of the people. Ties with Catholic and Protestant traditions were severed, with a heady sense that a restoration of the primitive church was at hand.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

21st Century Rabbinic Judaism isn’t New Testament Judaism

As explained at the outset of this chapter, scholars today commonly presume that a form of Rabbinic Judaism that uniformly promoted a form of unitarian monotheism predated Christianity. New Testament scholars who have accepted this incorrect presupposition and marginalized the Old Testament evidence to the contrary have produced all manner of conjectures to explain how a supposed “transition” to belief in the Holy Trinity must have come about.

Fr. Stephen DeYoung, Religion of the Apostles.

At least two things gave rise to Rabbinic Judaism in the centuries after Christ:

  1. Christ and Christians. From a controversial sect within the worship of the first century synagogue and temple, to the casting out of Christians therefrom, to the growth of Christianity and its eventual embrace by the emperor, Christ and Christianity haunted and bedeviled the Scribes and Pharisees and Rabbis.
  2. The final destruction of the Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70. No temple means no sacrifice. So what do we do now? That, along with “how do we repudiate these Christians?”, led to a refashioning along the lines we see today (though not in final form).

I am told that well-educated modern Rabbis will readily admit this, but cannot confirm it.

Not the only, or last, amnesiac

He was a pure product of the postwar period; his heroes were the post-Left French who suffered for their apostasies, like Aron and Furet and Revel. He was right to honor them.

Right, I say, in what he honored, but wrong in what he ignored. Even on his own terms, [Clive] James should have read, memorialized, and found profit in Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Maritain, Eliot, Belloc, Knox, Greene, Undset, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Weil, Mauriac, Bernanos, de Lubac, Auden, Lewis, Tolkien, Fermor, Solzhenitsyn, Ratzinger, Percy, Illich, Berry, MacIntyre, Taylor, Levertov, and so many others. Instead, it’s as if religion in any form except the severely private disappears from the world by the end of the long nineteenth century. You certainly wouldn’t know that theists of any kind put pen to page in the twentieth, much less that it was good, sometimes, and that their words and deeds regularly made a difference on the public stage.

A writer like James, for all his erudition, has amnesia of his own, both in the immediate past and in the distant past. It’s a deficit common to most of his peers: highbrow journalists and elite critics who can’t bother to glance in the direction of the pious (at least, not without cringing). The deficit may be understandable, but it’s not defensible. It renders all that they write incomplete from the outset, by definition. Not just their knowledge but their love is circumscribed artificially by choice, and this alienates them from every human culture of which we have evidence.

Brad East. I’ve quoted most of it, but it would be worth your time to read the rest. Clive James wasn’t the only, or the last, amnesiac.

IVF reconsidered

If you are uneasy about IVF, as am I, you may benefit from reading this brief against it on Christian grounds. I hope I’m not just being contrarian, pushing against a pro-IVF consensus whose “arguments” I find unpersuasive.

Miracles and science

Given the assumptions and endeavor of the modern natural sciences, the profound irony is that science precludes any possible verification of the claim that miracles worked by a transcendent God are impossible. Only a transgression of science understood as an empirical investigation of the natural world could rule out the possibility of miracles. The philosophical belief that natural laws are necessarily exceptionless is not empirically verifiable in our own or any conceivable configuration of human knowledge, because verification would require the observation of all natural events in all times and places.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

America’s Puritanism

America’s Puritan …, while possessed of many virtues, also brought about deformations of central Christian themes and ideas. The danger of Puritanism lay not just in the incipient utopianism of the “city on a hill” metaphor, but in an excessively low view of nature and creation.

Gregory S. Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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.

Pentecost …

(at least in the Eastern Church)

For the very first time, I vetted this post with AI. I didn’t change so much as a jot or a tittle.

Evangelicals

Overlooking the obvious

In the past year I have visited the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America, and Europe as the guest of churches and ministries. In each place, evangelicals exude life and energy. While staid churches change slowly, evangelicals tend to be light on their feet, adapting quickly to cultural trends.

The Jesus movement, the house-church movement, seeker-friendly churches, emergent churches—evangelicals have spawned all of these. In their wake, worship bands have replaced organs and choirs, PowerPoint slides and movie clips now enliven sermons, and espresso bars keep congregants awake. If a technique doesn’t work, find one that does.

Although I admire the innovation, I would caution that mimicking cultural trends has a downside …

Perhaps we should present an alternative to the prevailing culture rather than simply adopt it. What would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and unplugged from surrounding media, that actively resisted consumerist culture? What would worship look like if it were directed more toward God than toward our entertainment preferences?

…

While writing a book about prayer, I learned more from Catholics than from any other group. They have, after all, devoted entire orders to the practice. I learn mystery and reverence from the Eastern Orthodox. In music, in worship, in theology, they teach me of the mysterium tremendum involved when we puny human beings approach the God of the universe.

As I survey evangelicalism I see much good, but also much room for improvement. Our history includes disunity—how many different denominations do this magazine’s readers represent?—and a past that includes lapses in ethics and judgment.

Phil Yancey’s 2009 farewell column for Christianity Today (illustration added). I don’t understand why the farewell wasn’t because he was going somewhere more conducive to prayer or reverence. Does it not occur to him that one decision for Christ plus good works does not a complete Christian make, that emotion is not the same as the Holy Spirit?

Biblicist Guruism

Reflecting on a story about exvangelicals:

So how do you help address the problem that Miles is describing in his review, a culture of biblicist guruism in which the churches do not even look recognizably Protestant in any real way? How do you address the massive gaps and holes in a person’s Christian discipleship that result from sustained exposure to such churches?

…

If the Gospel was not clear or was not preached, then what you had was more a religious assembly than a church. If the sacramental life of the church was non-existent, you had a religious assembly, not a church. And if there was no aid in Christian discipline… well, you know the drill.

When I came to Grace Chapel in 2007, a small PCA church that was at the time located in central Lincoln, I didn’t know that I’d not really been part of a church before, at least as the church was traditionally understood. What I found at Grace was something I hadn’t even known to look for because I didn’t know it existed. I found something obviously and unapologetically Christian—the Gospel was clear in every sermon, and clear in a way I’d never heard it from a pulpit before, the Eucharist was celebrated regularly, and the pastor at the church actually seemed to know the people in his church and to think it was his job to care for them and aid them in their discipleship. I’d never seen anything like it before.

And the services themselves helped to reenforce the basics of Christian belief and practice: We prayed the Lord’s Prayer corporately. We confessed our sins corporately. We sang old hymns. Every week we received a benediction. The grammar and vocabulary of Christianity pervaded the liturgy; it wasn’t just a guy in a pulpit pontificating, loudly proclaiming his own loosely assorted thoughts about life and expecting you to take him seriously because he attempted to root them in scripture.

Jake Meador (italics added).

The non-church “church” Jake came from may have been an example of what he calls “biblicist guruism.”

Second Great Awakening

While Methodists, Disciples, and Mormons disagreed radically on what constituted belief in the gospel, they all shared an intense hostility to the passive quality of Calvinist religious experience, and they all made salvation imminently accessible and immediately available.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

I have alluded to this antipathy toward Calvinism previously, having first encountered it in Hatch’s book (I’m pretty sure). When I moved from frank Evangelicalism to Calvinism, it felt as if I was moving to a much different worldview, and I guess my intuitions were sound.

Protestants

… [Luther] had been wrestling with an unsettling conundrum: the failure of the Spirit to illumine all those inspired by his teachings as he himself had been illumined.

Tom Holland, Dominion

It seems fair to distinguish Protestants from Evangelicals, contrary to lifelong habit. I’m not positive that Evangelicals circa 2024 AD are no longer Protestant, but along with Jake Meador, I’m entertaining that possibility quite a lot lately. If they’ve left Protestantism, it strikes me as a continuing outworking of Luther’s conundrum.

Catholics

According to Catholic doctrine, sin offends God, disrupts the moral order, and deprives God of His glory and majesty. Punishment for the sin restores order and the glory of God.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

When I first read that, it made me a bit nauseous. The Orthodox mind is quite different from that.

Orthodoxen

Start with the Psalms

It came to me a few days ago, during morning devotions, that it would be very easy for a 21st century convert to Orthodox Christianity, from Protestantism or Evangelicalism, to overlook one very important and durable tradition of the church.

Perhaps because the Anglophone church has gained so many converts, and because those converts were accustomed to regular preaching from a wide range of scripture, we have available to us, notably on Ancient Faith “Radio,” an array of Orthodox versions of Bible studies. One of them even bears the title “The Whole Counsel of God,” and has progressed through all books of the Old and New Testaments and started over again.

In my mind, those podcasts risk obscuring from the view of converts that the basic scripture for Orthodox Christians is the Psalter — the book of Psalms. As Father Jonathan Tobias emphasized,

Chant the Psalms every morning and every evening. Two kathismata in the morning, one in the evening as appointed. This will form your mind into prayer and life.

There’s nothing wrong with going beyond that, and I should do more of general Bible study than I do, but start with the Psalms. Always start with the Psalms.

(Weird historic fact: Back in the day, Evangelicals would do some Evangelistic spadework by distributing inexpensive copies of the Gospel According to John — not the whole New Testament, but just that one Gospel account. In contrast, the Orthodox Church didn’t expose converts to the Gospel According to John, the most profoundly theological of the four Gospels, until after significant preliminary catechesis and baptism. See text at fns. 2 & 3.)

Thanks but No Thanks

Without entering into particulars, we say that as long as the Church of the Saviour shall stand upon earth, we cannot admit that there is in her bosom a Bishop Supreme other than our Lord Himself; or that there exists an infallible Patriarch, who can speak, ex cathedra, superior to Ecumenical Councils – to which Councils alone belongs infallibility, because they have always conformed to the Sacred Scriptures and apostolical tradition. Nor can we admit that the Apostles were unequal, inasmuch as they were all illuminated by the Holy Ghost up to the same measure; or that to this or that Patriarch a precedence has been given, not by any synodal or human resolution, but by right Divine, as you assert.

Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory VI, firmly refusing to attend Vatican I, which was poised to declare papal infallibility at the behest of Pope Pius IX. Via Matthew Namee. The Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria was no less firm, but pointed out (though the Pope surely knew it) what the Pope needed to do:

But not to prolong this discussion let me repeat once, and for all, that as this new attempt on the part of his Holiness the Pope has miscarried, it is necessary, if he sincerely desires the unity of the Universal Church that he should write to the patriarchs individually, and acting in concert, endeavor to come to an understanding with them respecting the course to be adopted – renouncing every dogma on which opinions may clash in the church. By so doing his efforts might perchance be crowned with some degree of success.

Involuntary sin

According to Scripture, the cause of all sin that is involuntary lies in what is voluntary.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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.

Juneteenth

I have nothing to say about Juneteenth except that emancipation was a legitimately huge landmark in our nation’s history and worthy of annual commemoration.

Public affairs

Indiana’s GOP Lieutenant Governor nominee

Indiana over last weekend nominated as its Lieutenant Governor candidate, Micah Beckwith, a pastor of some sort who:

  • Thinks that the “progressive left has taken over the Republican Party in Indiana,” and that some Republicans today are “champions of Communism.”
  • Said on a Christian(ish) podcast “We are in a season of war right now … People need to wake up, or else this mental and heart battle that we find ourselves in culturally, it will lead to bullets and bombs. It’s just a matter of time.”
  • Said God had told him, on January 7, 2021: “Micah, I sent those riots to Washington. What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.” (This is what every story on him seems to pick up.)

Those quotes are from Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times. Goldberg also says, sans quote, that he’s a “self-described Christian Nationalist.”

Beckwith was forced onto the ticket against the wishes of the Gubernatorial nominee, retiring U.S. Senator Mike Braun.

Yeah, I guess it’s national news.

I didn’t support Braun for Governor. I was unenthusiastic about him when he ran for Senate in a GOP primary whose theme was “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the Trumpiest of them all?” (but I preferred him to Todd Rokita, now our Attorney General and a truly loathsome person). I’m not certain I’ll vote for him in the General Election.

My decision will hinge to some degree on how effective he is at keeping a reassuring distance from Beckwith without, of course, repudiating him so firmly as to hand the election to Democrats. So far, his pointed message “I’m in charge” seems about right.

I’ve noted repeatedly that I repudiated any loyalty to the Republican Party on Inauguration Day 2005. But I still have a reflex to vote Republican over Democrat, and to mourn what already has become of the Republican party, and what one likely future holds.

On Christian Nationalism

Having noted Micah Beckwith’s purported Christian Nationalism, I’m reminded that I may not have staked out my own position openly.

First, I define it narrowly. There have been ridiculous accusations of Christian Nationalism based on undisclosed or untenable definitions. Real Christian Nationalists are still pretty rare, I think (but what do I, a contrarian, know?).

I’m not unaware that American pluralism is an experiment. I’m not sure whether it will succeed or fail. I’m familiar with and friendly toward the phrase “worst form of government except for all the others.” I’m not ready to abandon it.

At the risk of ad hominem, I don’t trust the “Christians” who expressly advocate for Christian Nationalism. One of my older blogs, on what we then called “culture wars,” remains relevant, but I’ll paraphrase excerpts rather than do direct quotes.

My distrust of Christian Nationalists stems fairly directly from my disagreements with their form of our putatively shared faith — disagreements that lead me to chronic use of scare-quotes around the word Christian or the use of “Christianish.”

The pious Protestants among them tend functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules, so they “honor” Him by keeping his rules. But the age of Trump has brought many to profess that they’re Evangelicals even if, in the extreme case, they’re Muslims or even atheists, because of something they like about the politics now associated with that label.

The most coherent, maybe the only, Protestant theorists of Christian Nationalism are theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If these Calvinist intellectuals had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for idolatry for the icons in my home prayer corner.

Ummmm, no thanks.

The Catholic theorists of Christian Nationalism (Integralism, they call it) are much better — not okay, but less bad. But I don’t think their side would get the levers of power anyway.

There is no remotely viable Orthodox version of Christian Nationalism, Byzantium being long-gone. And we’d lack the numbers to staff government if there were.

So I think “Christian Nationalism” in America would be, in ascending order of likelihood:

  1. Catholic Integralism
  2. Calvinistic Reconstructionism
  3. A blasphemous mish-mash of right wingnuttery in the name of God. (Like Indiana’s GOP Lietenant Governor nominee or the yard sign “Make Faith Great Again: Trump 2020.”)

I reject them all. I think all of them would be hostile to Orthodox Christianity. I prefer to continue our flawed experiment with pluralism. But I suspect I’ll live to see one of them.

We Orthodox have survived similar or worse circumstances before.

America’s enemies

American leaders have a great need to identify an enemy or group of enemies that the U.S. can define itself against in order to justify the dominant position that they want the U.S. to have. It doesn’t occur to these leaders that the pursuit of dominance itself is what creates so many enemies or that the U.S. would be far more secure by renouncing the pursuit.

…

Losing the Soviets as an enemy created a hole in U.S. foreign policy that Washington desperately tried to fill with anything our leaders could find, but the substitute villains (Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, etc.) were so weak by comparison that the threats had to be massively inflated.

Daniel Larison (who had fallen off my radar)

We seem hellbent on creating intractible enemies in at least three corners of the world. Depending on their political stripe, American politicians speak as if Russia, China, and/or Iran pose existential threats to us. Yes, we do have substantive differences with all, but I can make a case for all three that they simply wish to live their lives in their own ways in their part of the world without our interference. Look at the flash points with each: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan. All are American dependencies; all are projections of our hegemony into the very heart of their respective spheres. Regardless of your sentiments, the fate of none of those areas have any existential meaning to the U.S.; and yes, I am including Israel in that. They do, however, have existential meaning to our supposed adversaries.

Terry Cowan

J.D. Vance

I commented on June 13 about Ross Douthat’s interview with J.D. Vance.

There doubtless have been many commentators weighing in on the interview, but I’ve read only one so far: Andrew Sullivan. He made some excellent observations about places where Vance was tap-dancing around the unvarnished truth (to stay in Trump’s good graces?) or omitting crucial facts that eviscerate his argument.

Of the changes in voting rules to deal with Covid?:

The new pandemic rules, moreover, were endorsed by the Congress, which passed $400 million in the CARES Act for the election’s unique challenges, which Trump himself signed into law. If the rules were rigged, Trump helped rig them!

…

Vance’s case is completely undermined by Trump himself. Trump, after all, did not say after the election that the Covid rules were why he’d lost. He said he’d lost because votes were stolen, stuffed, and hidden, and the voting machines had been rigged. He’s saying the same things today. And the reason for all of it was not some genuine concern about easier mail-in and absentee voting (he endorsed absentee voting, after all), but Trump’s basic, characterological inability to function in a system that doesn’t guarantee him victory every single time.

That is not the system’s fault. It’s the fault of the party that nominated a malignant, delusional loon.

Putin

This week in Budapest, I met with an American academic active in the struggle for international religious freedom. We spoke about the Russia-Ukraine war, and established that we both believe Russia ought not to have invaded its neighbor. I added that as an Orthodox Christian, it grieves me how Putin has instrumentalized the Church to advance his war aims.

Then the American, a conservative Christian, posed a provocative question, that went something like this: For all his thuggishness, do you think that Vladimir Putin is on the right side of broad civilizational trends? My interlocutor brought up Putin’s harsh criticism of Western secularism and its emptiness, contrasting it to a Russia built on traditional values, including religion. Yes, Russia is in deep social and demographic trouble, and yes, Putin might be a colossal hypocrite, but, said the American, on the deep civilizational questions, isn’t Putin, you know … right?

I knew the answer, but as a man of the West, was too depressed by the question to admit it ….

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Degrowth

The case for degrowth is not about martyred self-denial or constraining human potential; it is about reorienting socioeconomies to support collaborative and creative construction of lives that are pleasurable, healthy, satisfying, and sustainable for more people and more places. End goals of degrowth – dignified work, less selfish competition, more equitable relationships, identities not ranked by individual achievement, solidary communities, humane rhythms of life, respect for natural environments – are also the means through which people exercise and embody, day by day, the lifestyles, institutions, and politics of degrowth worlds to come.

The Cauldron of Degrowth – Front Porch Republic

Euro-skepticism

The European Union began as a trading bloc, but by the early 1990s, it had evolved into a moral project fueled by elite distaste for (even revulsion against) the nationalistic sentiments these elites had become convinced were the source of all the crimes of the European past, including imperialism, racism, fascism, and genocide. What Europe needed was an inoculation against these sentiments, and the EU would be the vaccine, giving the continent a collective goal of striving to overcome particularistic attachments and the cruelty, suffering, and oppression they supposedly implant and encourage. Nationalistic sentiments would be sublimated into the transnational idea of the EU, with the EU itself eventually expanding without limit as the leading edge of a world without borders or walls impeding trade, the free movement of people, products, capital, and labor.

Damon Linker

I am enthusiastically European; no informed person could seriously wish to return to the embattled, mutually antagonistic circle of suspicious and introverted nations that was the European continent in the quite recent past. But it is one thing to think an outcome desirable, quite another to suppose it is possible. It is my contention that a truly united Europe is sufficiently unlikely for it to be unwise and self-defeating to insist upon it. I am thus, I suppose, a Euro-pessimist.

Tony Judt

Matters of Opinion

The continuing siege of Samuel Alito

I’m a journalist. We’re journalists. There are certain things we do. When we interview somebody, we make it clear that I work for the New York Times, the “NewsHour,” the Washington Post. Like, we make it clear who we are. We don’t lie. We don’t misrepresent ourselves. We don’t hide a tape recorder somewhere, and we don’t lead people on with a bunch of ideological rants. And this person did all that. It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up. And to me, this information is so doctored by her attitudes, the way she’s leading on Alito and his wife. It’s just—it’s unfair to them, frankly, to treat this as some major news story. We should be treating it as somebody, a prankster. And there’s a right-wing version of this called Project Veritas, where they lie too—as some prankster who’s creating distorted information.

David Brooks, on the Journalist who plied Justice Alito with a red-meat rant and got only a very anodyne response.

I found myself hoping that she will forever be known as the journalist who engaged in sleaze and then made it worse by publishing the nothingburger results. And then I remembered an incident in my past, when I may have been older than she is now, when I broke the rules to get the true story — not as a journalist, but as a lawyer. I, too, came up dry — and exposed for my wrongdoing.

I’m glad that did not follow me the rest of my life. I hope she has learned her lesson as I learned mine.

Worst Matter of Opinion podcast ever?

With Ross Douthat on vacation, Michelle Cottle, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen invited their hardcore colleague Jesse Wegman to join them.

Synopsis: Some justices blame the press for distrust of the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s not it. It’s really Justice Alito’s [first exaggeration about Justice Alito] and [generalization built on exaggeration] and Clarence Thomas [Oh, hell, let’s just lump him with Alito] and dismissing Alito’s version of flag-gate and laughing out loud at Justice Alito saying [garbled version of he has a duty to deliberate if he’s not required to recuse, which is true] and Mitch McConnell, who played unprecedented political hardball to defeat Merrick Garland (by delay) and confirm Justice Barrett (by contrasting haste), so that Trump’s two appointees have cooties-by-association.

I will give Carlos Lozada credit for pushing back. The bias, dishonesty, and inexcusable ignorance of the other three make me want to cancel my Times subscription.

Intuition

“I have the feeling that I understand it.” But then he adds, “In fact, it is not ‘understanding,’ and it is not ‘knowledge.’ It is a direct awareness, or intuition. It’s not the kind of thing you ‘understand.’ It’s like I said before to you: one grain of rice, and the whole earth, they are the same. You can’t learn that from a book.”

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

Mordant observation

The more people came to know gay people and understand the aims of the movement for gay marriage, the more accepting they became of it. The more people come to know trans people and understand the aims of the transgender moment, the more skeptical they become of its claims.

Wesley Yang on new polling. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Books

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.

Pete Hamill via Robert Breen on micro.blog.

I know what Hamill means.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Sunday of the Fathers

This “Fathers Day” in the USA also happens to be the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council in the Orthodox Church. That was the Council that dealt with Arianism, the heresy of Arius, who taught that Christ was a creature — very special and exalted, but a creature nonetheless.

That council responded that Christ was “very God of very God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father,” words of the Nicene Creed, so called because that Council met at Nicea.

Theological definitions

Theological definitions were declared only reluctantly by the Church, only if absolutely necessary, and only to the extent necessary to oppose specific heresies.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.

Such was the practice of the early church, before the Great Schism. It’s still that way in Orthodoxy, although the whole story now is a bit more complicated. An Orthodox cyberfriend summarized it: If it weren’t for heretics, we would have no theology.

Reminiscenses

The Red Shoes

There are many versions of The Red Shoes, but it basically tells of a young girl without much money who is entranced by a pair of red shoes she sees a princess wearing. They are so different to the heavy black shoes that everyone tramps in and out of church with. They all seem so serious, so weighed down. Through various kindnesses she gets a similar pair of red shoes.

One day outside the church she meets a man returning from a great war, far away. He has a long white beard and very bright eyes. He starts to play a fiddle. While others disapprove, he coos and simpers over the girl’s shoes, even asking her to give him a little twirl, a little dance. Feeling shamed by the churchgoers and affirmed by his gaze, she starts to dance. For a while it’s quite wonderful, even liberating. She twirls past the villagers, round the graves, laughing and in wild excitement. She hollers and pirouettes, all the time with the old man playing his fiddle and making her feel seen. For a few minutes this is quite the spectacle, but after a while, the crowd grow bored, gather their kids and go home for Sunday dinner.

Point made, the laughing girl tries to stop dancing and finds she can’t. As the panic grows in her eyes, this excites the old man even more. He starts to play faster and leads her out of the graveyard and onto the moors and through the woods. For many hours she splashes through streams and over hills, growing more and more crazed, more exhausted. Under a full moon she spasms and twists as the fiddling man keeps pace. The ecstasy has descended into nightmare, the passion into enchantment. Her feet are bleeding and somehow twined to the shoes.

Finally she dances into the arms of an angel who frees her from the ghastly parade and liberates her feet. The old man melts away into the trees. The angel washes her feet in a stream and over time she recovers. She is never going to wear those big heavy black shoes of the others, but she finds gentler, sweeter rhythms to move to. When she wants to stop, she simply sits down and takes her handmade shoes off.

…

In more brutal versions of the story, the girl meets not an angel but villagers, who, at her prompting, cut her feet off to stop the dance. She is now crippled but safe, being wheeled in and out of church for the rest of her life, chastened but wiser.

Martin Shaw, On Sex: Dancing With The Passions

Martin Shaw is a storyteller, but he upacks this story, with two of its alternate endings, nicely for the hard of hearing, including:

This grotesque scenario just exaggerates further the juxtaposition of rabid licentiousness and morbid ideas of purity. There is a distinct lack of imagination in both forms of acting out.

I’d never heard this story until last Sunday. Today’s blog is so full (too full?) of personal reminiscences that I’ve deleted an awkward one here.

The Refrigerium

Did ye never hear of the Refrigerium? A man with your advantages might have read of it in Prudentius, not to mention Jeremy Taylor.

The name is familiar, Sir, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what it means.

It means that the damned have holidays—excursions, ye understand.

Excursions to this country?

For those that will take them. Of course most of the silly creatures don’t. They prefer taking trips back to Earth. They go and play tricks on the poor daft women ye call mediums. They go and try to assert their ownership of some house that once belonged to them: and then ye get what’s called a Haunting. Or they go to spy on their children. Or literary ghosts hang about public libraries to see if anyone’s still reading their books.

This forgotten passage from C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce popped up recently.

The Great Divorce is one of the most important books in my spiritual biography. There’s not a single word of explicit theology that I remember, but the tacit theology that struck me — that one might, by indulging habitual sins (including distortions of things like the maternal instinct, or pride), make his soul unfit for heaven and even repelled by it — shook me out of a dangerous rut. Since I didn’t think that God would hold an unwilling soul hostage in heaven, just because he’d once said “the sinner’s prayer” in a fit of pious enthusiasm, I in due course left Calvinism (which suggested something like that) for Orthodox Christianity (which decidedly does not).

(That’s not the whole story. There have been 26 or 27 intervening years as I’ve lived an active corporate life in Orthodoxy, and my thinking doesn’t exactly run along those lines any more. But an effort to put the change into words has failed me.)

Proto-exvangelical

When I left evangelicalism, it certainly was not because I was disillusioned with the faith of my early childhood. I have sweet (if somewhat nutty) memories of all those days … I think my problem with remaining an evangelical centered on what the evangelical community became. It was the merging of the entertainment business with faith, the flippant lightweight kitsch ugliness of American Christianity, the sheer stupidity, the paranoia of the American right-wing enterprise, the platitudes married to pop culture, all of it . . . that made me crazy. It was just too stupid for words.

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God

I do not recommend books by Frank Schaeffer, but I read them “back in the day” for reasons not worth going into again. This quote popped up recently and seemed on point to some other things I’ve been thinking about.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how much Evangelicalism has changed since my youth. It really shouldn’t have surprised me; Evangelicalism is built on shifting sands, because the Bible they claim (or claimed in Evangelicalism1967) as their sole authority is easily twisted and manipulated.

The nondenominational Evangelical/Charismatic/Clericalist syncretism described in this piece would have been recognized, back in my Evangelical days, as cultic and outside Evangelical boundaries. Apparently it’s not so recognized any longer, but some people, God bless ‘em, become “exvangelical” by abandoning it.

IVCF & CCC

… on many campuses the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship flourished and became a locus for evangelical dissent. Founded in Britain and rooted in the tolerant English evangelical tradition, the ministry emphasized fellowship and religious studies. It published books, encouraged critical thinking, and gave students leave to raise the issues of their generation, such as racism and the Vietnam War.

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals.

I was an IVCF kind of Christian, not a Campus Crusade for Christ (now “Cru”) kind of Christian, I found when I left Evangelical hothouses and entered a secular university. (Navigators wasn’t much of a thing on my campus.) Now a great chasm lies between me and both, as both are Western and Protestant, but I can say with some confidence that IVCF prepared me in many ways for Orthodoxy, and I still feel kindly toward it.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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.