Category: Faith & Ideology

Sunday of the Last Judgment

No, that’s not a prediction. That’s the formal name of this last pre-Lenten Sunday in Orthodox Christianity. It’s also known as “meatfare,” because tomorrow we begin abstaining from meat until Pascha, April 20 this year.

State of the Union, February 23

A lot of people are trying to find precedents for what’s going on with the USA over the last 34 days. May I suggest that this is a fall of Babylon?

The US as Babylon was first suggested to me by a schismatic (when I was unwittingly schismatic) almost 60 years ago. I’ve never quite shaken it, and I think that there was a seed of truth there that’s compatible with Orthodoxy. One important divergence in my application is that I absolutely wouldn’t say “When the Bible says ‘Babylon,’ it means the USA.” Rather, I think Babylon is a typology, and that the USA fits it to a “T” today. In a few hundred years (“if the Lord tarries,” as they say), it could be China.

On the other hand, we don’t read Revelation liturgically, and I’ve never heard an Orthodox Priest or academic suggest this directly. I can’t rule out that the thought is just a bit of mental baggage from my past. It hasn’t caught on in white American Evangelicalism because — well, read the passage. It’s not holding up a flattering mirror.

In all this, friends, remember that God’s judgments are true and righteous, that He is gracious and loves mankind, and that the end of a world isn’t the end of the world.

Atheism in the Church

Last week, I quoted the ever-provocative Stanley Hauerwas

Atheism slips into the church where God really does not matter, as we go about building bigger and better congregations (church administration), confirming people’s self-esteem (worship), enabling people to adjust to their anxieties brought on by their materialism (pastoral care), and making Christ a worthy subject for poetic reflection (preaching). At every turn the church must ask itself, Does it really make any difference, in our life together, in what we do, that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself?

Might this be profitably expanded to include political mobilization? …

The Atheist Liturgical Calendar

… Or our “liturgical calendars”?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so … what any calendar does, because any calendar you use is going to be cyclical, is going to be a series of weeks that make up a series of months that make up a series of years, and that cycle is going to repeat. There’s going to be a May 23 every year. It loops back around.

Even if you want to talk about— Let’s talk about the most secular calendar I can think of, which is the American consumer calendar, meaning it’s structured around holidays that are built to sell things. So we just had Memorial Day: sell barbecue supplies and flags. We’re going to have—now, Juneteenth has been added to the list; I think that’s also going to be a lot of barbecuing for most people. Fourth of July, sell fireworks, sell flags. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is in there: buy gifts for Dad, get the tie cake from Carvel. Valentine’s Day. St. Patrick’s Day: sell a lot of beer and green stuff, etc. So this is the most— about as secular as you can get of a calendar; even though some of those dates are still named after saints, it’s pretty secular.

That calendar, if you follow it, will shape the rhythm of your life. And that’s what it’s designed for! … Retail establishments want that to shape the rhythm of your life. That “seasonal” section at your local Walmart, where they have the stuff for whatever the next one of these holidays that aren’t really holy days per se in most cases— They’re counting on that cycle. They want that to shape your life. “Oh, now I go and buy and consume this. Now I go and buy and consume that.” They’ll shape your life; it’ll form you.

This, to me, is one of the worst backlashes of particularly the Puritan movements that come out of the Protestant Reformation. Bear with me here, Protestant friends. Really think about this. They had such an antipathy for [things] like saints’ days… Some of those Puritan movements— Well, most of those Puritan movements wouldn’t celebrate Christmas, the birth of Christ. Some of them won’t even celebrate Easter, Pascha. But definitely we don’t want a lot of, you know, feast days. I think it’s in the Westminster Standards that says you must guard against the proliferation of saints’ days.

Fr. Andrew: Nice! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Protect everyone from this, right? So all of this stuff from the Christian liturgical calendar gets removed. And most American Christianity, American Evangelicalism really comes out of those Puritan movements, just historically. But then what do you end up centering even your church life around? You’ve got Mother’s Day sermons, Father’s Day sermons.

Fr. Andrew: You’re going to have a liturgical calendar one way or another.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! Fourth of July sermons when you sing patriotic songs in a church!

Fr. Andrew: I know.

Fr. Stephen: All of these things. It’s the same thing! You’ve just chosen the most secular possible version!

Fr. Andrew: What I want to know is—and I’m pretty sure the answer to this question is yes; I just haven’t encountered it yet because I haven’t googled it up yet— Are there Amazon Prime Day sermons?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I’m sure. I know there are Black Friday sermons.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, of course!

Fr. Stephen: [Sigh] Right? Just pause and think about it for a minute. What’s better: to base and structure your liturgical life on the life of Christ and the stories about Christ recounted in the Bible, or to base the cycles of your church life on random national holidays that often don’t even have any particular religious significance? I mean, the answer to that seems so obvious to me. I think the Puritans would be horrified by Fourth of July sermons and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day sermons! So think about that. But this is why, again, the calendar is so important.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and (mostly) Fr. Stephen De Young

Science and religion

Just as colonial officials and missionaries, traveling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonize the past in similar manner. The ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Romans: all were assumed to have had a ‘religion’. Some peoples—most notably the Greeks—were also assumed to have had ‘science’. It was this that had enabled their civilization to serve as the wellspring of progress. Philosophers had been the prototypes of scientists. The library of Alexandria had been ‘the birthplace of modern science’. Only Christians, with their fanatical hatred of reason and their determination to eradicate pagan learning, had prevented the ancient world from being set on a path towards steam engines and cotton mills.

Tom Holland, Dominion (spelling Americanized)

History Rhymes

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Naked suffering

My grandparents did not have a car, but they hired one to go in to the hospital, when the end finally came. I went with them in the car, but was not allowed to enter the hospital. Perhaps it was just as well. What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it? In that sense, Mother was right. Death, under those circumstances, was nothing but ugliness, and if it could not possibly have any ultimate meaning, why burden a child’s mind with the sight of it?

Thomas Merton, The Seven-Story Mountain

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Sunday of the Prodigal Son

What if …?

What happens when a biblicist church (non-creedal, non-liturgical, congregationalist) becomes biblically illiterate? Brad East (Biblicist Churches that Don’t Read the Bible) thinks it’s happening, and that:

there is nothing left; at least, not if you remain, on the surface or even beneath the skin, biblicist-primitivist-congregationalist in polity, doctrine, and practice. The rug has been pulled out beneath your feet, the branch you were sitting on has been sawed off, the pillars have all been thrown down: there is nothing left.

Besides, that is, the Zeitgeist. But discerning the spirits is no longer possible when the word of the Lord in Holy Scripture is no longer known, cherished, prized, read. Where else is there to turn? Either to tradition or to the culture. I see no third option.

As he has defined the problem, the only third option probably is, as he “Updated,” “the singular authority of a charismatic, entrepreneurial, popular pastor.”

But as a former member of biblicist, non-creedal, notionally non-liturgical, congregational churches, I’d suggest thinking outside that box: creed, liturgy, hierarchy. That means admitting you’ve been wrong, but I ate that humble pie 27-plus years ago, and it was awfully good.

The Jefferson Bible

What was that again you were saying about our Christian Founding Fathers?

Practical Atheism in the Church

Atheism slips into the church where God really does not matter, as we go about building bigger and better congregations (church administration), confirming people’s self-esteem (worship), enabling people to adjust to their anxieties brought on by their materialism (pastoral care), and making Christ a worthy subject for poetic reflection (preaching). At every turn the church must ask itself, Does it really make any difference, in our life together, in what we do, that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself?

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

The Grand Myth

That grand myth which I asked you to admire a few minutes ago is not for me a hostile novelty breaking in on my traditional beliefs. On the contrary, that cosmology is what I started from. Deepening distrust and final abandonment of it long preceded my conversion to Christianity. Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Saturday, 2/15/25

Conservatives versus Nihilists

Trump really seems not to give a crap about the working class. Trump is not a populist. He campaigns as a populist, but once he has power, he is the betrayer of populism.

What’s going on here is not a working-class revolt against the elites. All I see is one section of the educated elite going after another section of the educated elite. This is like a civil war in a fancy prep school in which the sleazy kids are going after the pretentious kids.

…

Conservatives believe in constant and incremental change. Nihilists believe in sudden and chaotic disruption. Conservatism came into being opposing the arrogant radicalism of the French Revolution. The Trump people are basically the French revolutionaries in red hats — there are the same crude distinctions between good and evil, the same contempt for existing arrangements, the same descent into fanaticism, the same tendency to let the revolution devour its own.

David Brooks (emphasis added; unlocked).

The evils of revolutions almost invariably outweigh the goods. We’re getting what we voted for good and hard.

What’s radical about Trump?

[Trump]’s simply not as radical a departure from his predecessors’ worst policy instincts as we’d like to believe. But he is a radical departure in cultivating fear as a tool of leverage, right out in the open. And not just fear of political repercussions either.

In his earliest days as a Republican candidate for president, he half-joked with fans that he’d pay their legal bills if they punched protesters at his rallies. As he moved toward the GOP nomination in 2016, he warned there’d be riots if conservatives tried to block him at the convention. … It flatters his ego to know that his fans might be willing to kill for him and it pleases him to have an extra lever most politicians lack to pressure others into giving him what he wants. His amoral willingness and charismatic ability to intimidate is the molten core of his strongman persona.

January 6 is the supreme illustration … More than one Republican member of Congress has claimed that fear of rabid Trump supporters harming their families led some of their GOP colleagues to oppose his impeachment and removal after the insurrection. 

Encouraging unrest if he doesn’t get his way isn’t the only tool he uses to intimidate opponents, though.

…

He yanked federal protection details from John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Mark Milley, and Anthony Fauci, placing them in danger for no better reason than that they criticized him in the past.

If you cross the president, you should expect your career, your finances, or even your life to be imperiled if it’s within his power to facilitate that. And rather than obscure that horrifying fact, Trump seems eager to advertise it: Freeing the thugs who broke into the Capitol on January 6 hoping to hang Mike Pence was his way of showing opponents that there’s no sin he won’t countenance if it’s committed in service to him.

Nick Catoggio (emphasis added)

Trump will never forgive Ukraine

Trump is no friend of Ukraine. Earlier this week he dipped into his stream of consciousness to pronounce that Ukraine “might be Russian someday” as J.D. Vance, the poor man’s Tucker Carlson, prepared to meet with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. He is surrounded by people who derive some weird kind of jollies from smearing and vilifying the Ukrainians—the vice president and other so-called nationalists who are all too happy to see a nationality exterminated if that pleases Vladimir Putin—as well as by people such as Kash Patel, the Kremlin stooge (on the cheap, no less) whom Trump has nominated to run the FBI. Trump will simply never forgive Ukraine for its government’s failure to help him manufacture a phony scandal (entirely superfluous, given the real ones) involving corrupt business practices and the Biden family.

Kevin D. Williamson

Softening, a little, on Trump

[Howard] Kurtz: It’s been reported, and feel free to push back on this, that when Trump won in 2016, you were at The Wall Street Journal and you were sobbing at your desk. . . . Has your view of him evolved since then?

[Bari] Weiss: It’s a good question. I mean, look, I’m the first to admit that I was a sufferer of what conservatives at the time would have called TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. . . . I’m someone that believes, call me old-fashioned, that everything is sort of downstream of character. And the kinds of things that he had said, and the way that he talked, and the way I felt he would coarsen our public discourse, those are all real. . . .

There were two things, I think, that I didn’t know in that moment when I was crying at my desk. One would be the sort of overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction to him, and the kind of illiberalism that was born out of the reaction to him that calls itself democratic, that calls itself progressive, but is actually extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian in its impulses. . . .

The other thing that I didn’t see was that Trump was going to do a lot of policies that I agreed with. I thought the Abraham Accords were historic and excellent. I thought his policy vis-à-vis Iran was excellent. The economy was better.

Howard Kurtz interviewing Bari Weiss of the Free Press on Fox News Channel’s “Media Buzz,” Feb. 9, via Wall Street Journal.

That’s a fair summary of longer comments, which you can view in less than 5 minutes via the “interviewing” link. The character issue remains.

J.D. Vance

A Trump presidency would have been completely unbelievable to me when I wrote my book about the G.O.P. and younger voters, so I approach political prediction with humility. Republicans do not have a robust modern record of vice presidents becoming their party’s presidential nominee — just ask Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney and Mike Pence. And those working under Mr. Trump do not always emerge from the experience unscathed. Four years is an eternity in politics, and if America ultimately concludes that the Trump-Vance administration was a failure, the Republican Party could look to turn the page.

But so far a good many voters like the direction this administration is going in, and Mr. Vance is finding his own moments, as at the A.I. conference, to show how he’s different from our recent generation of presidents. Mr. Trump may think it’s too soon to anoint successors, but he finds himself with a vice president who is better aligned with the spirit of what he is trying to achieve than virtually any other Republican.

Kristen Soltis Anderson. a Republican pollster

Clarity achieved

Imagine what they might have done. Trump could have announced that Musk and his minions were going in to audit the federal government. Within a few months, they’d bring a report, outlining every insane piece of waste or DEI excess or fraud they could find. Trump would then urge Congress to vote on these reforms. Win, win, win. It’s a great idea to shake up the joint with an outsider! But nah. They are busy ensuring that any cuts they make are brutal, dumb, and destined to expire.

…

Last year, a ton of readers who agreed with me on immigration, DEI, the transing of children, and the need for a more restrained foreign policy asked, in frustration, why I still couldn’t endorse Trump.

I hope that’s clearer now.

Andrew Sullivan.

I fear that for tribalist Trump-supporters, anything that owns the libs is just fine; they will not see more clearly now.

I shoulda listened

A binary system dictates binary choices. The Democrats were out for me. Donald Trump was the alternative.

Hunter Baker, When Pragmatic Politics Goes Bad: An Apology to the Never-Trumpers

Unlike Andrew Sullivan, Baker did vote for Trump and regrets it.

Ordo Amoris

I’m not personally going to enter into the little debate that has been going on about J.D. Vance’s characterization of Ordo Amoris, the ordering of loves, in Christian ethics. Here’s where the debate seems to stand:

Last month in a Fox News interview Vice President JD Vance articulated a … vision of a Catholic doctrine, ordo amoris. He said, “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

While there were Catholics who agreed with Vance and defended his argument, Pope Francis was not among them.

On Tuesday the pope published a letter attacking Trump’s policy of mass deportations that appeared to directly address Vance’s argument. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis wrote.

“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted,” he said, is “love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

David French

Make of that what you will, but don’t make too much of it because it’s a red herring:

Even if you agree with Vance’s formulation of ordo amoris, it strains credulity to argue that the United States isn’t prioritizing its own citizens when it spends such a small fraction of its budget on foreign aid — and when that aid provides concrete strategic benefits to the United States.

It’s also just bizarre to argue that describing the consequences of a policy is somehow emotionally manipulative when avoiding those consequences was the purpose of the program that’s being frozen or cut.

So, yes, you say that children might die without a certain program when the very purpose of the program is to prevent children from dying. That’s not manipulation. It’s confronting individuals with facts. It’s making them understand exactly what they are choosing to do.

There are few things more symbolic of the decline of the Republican Party than this radical turn against humanitarian aid ….

David French again (bold added).

I got a real punch-in-the-face reminder just days ago of how out of touch I am on today’s Evangelicalism. So all I’ll say on French’s perception that “Trump is influencing the evangelical church more than the church is influencing him” is that:

  1. It’s plausible: American evangelicalism has always been “plastic” (H/T Mark Noll, America’s God).
  2. I appreciate French’s tacit acknowledgement that there’s more to the Church than its distorted-but-prominent evangelical presentation.

The waning of family

“Like the waning of Christianity, the waning of the traditional family means that all of us in the modern West lead lives our ancestors could not have imagined. We are less fettered than they in innumerable ways; we are perhaps the freest people in the history of all humanity. At the same time, we are also more deprived of the consolations of tight bonds of family and faith known to most of the men and women coming before us—and this fact, it will be argued, has had wider repercussions than have yet been understood.”

Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God (Disclaimer: This book has long been in my queue because of quotes like this, but I have not read it.)

Colluding on the narrative

When, on a single day in 2018, more than 300 newspapers ran synchronized editorials against the president’s claim that the news media were the enemy of the American people, they sent a message about journalism’s independence.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

I like Jonathan Rauch, but it seems to me that the message was that the media collude to set the narrative.

Most of the time, it’s not so patent.

A new form of ideological aggression

Dugin is extremely critical of modern Western society, and has written that “the entirety of Russian history is a dialectical argument with the West and against Western culture, the struggle for upholding our own (often only intuitively grasped) Russian truth.” But he also says: I am not anti-Western. I am anti-liberal. In fact, I love the West.… … I simply cannot accept the West in its current condition, at the end of modernity.… … He complains that “spiritually, globalization is the creation of a grand parody, the kingdom of the Antichrist.… American values pretend to be ‘universal’ ones. In reality, they are a new form of ideological aggression against the multiplicity of cultures and traditions still existing in the rest of the world.”

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism

This is one respect in which Trump may well be better than the Democrats.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 Publican and Pharisee

An American Orthodox Church?

There is no American Orthodox Church. It’s going to take centuries for there to be an American Orthodox Church. It took centuries for there to be a Russian Orthodox Church. There was a metropolitan of Kiev … who was appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople, who was a Greek for a long time, the metropolitan of Kiev. Because Russian Orthodoxy didn’t exist yet. It took centuries for it to come into existence.

Gentile Christianity took a long time to come into existence. The core of every church St. Paul founded was Jewish Christians, and he argued vehemently that that did not mean the Gentiles did not need to become Jews to become part of the community. So the fact that we have— Well, there have been attempts, but the fact that the Orthodox Church has not tried to boot-strap an American Orthodoxy is a very good thing, because the thing that would be produced by that would be a nightmare. It would be American in all the worst ways. There are forms of Christianity in the United States that are very, very American in all the worst ways: consumerism, obsession with entertainment culture and celebrity, this men’s conference this week that was like: “Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, monster trucks! UFC fights…” Like, it’s pathetic. It’s a distortion of Christianity in favor of Americanism.

…

[T]he Orthodox Church [in the USA] is still very close to its immigrant roots. That’s a good thing. That’s one of the things that’s protected Orthodox Christianity in this country from the way that American culture colonizes everything and corrupts it, frankly, with consumerism and these other traits, these other negative traits. It’s not just consumerism either. It’s pornification; it’s all kinds of things in American culture … But those immigrant ties have protected the Orthodox Church from that, and those immigrant ties are not going to last forever. My concern is less with how do we make the Orthodox Church more American; my concern is how do we stop it from becoming too American too fast and becoming some weird chimera.

Our goal has to be preserving what’s been handed down to us, preserving it intact, preserving it free from corruption, and then presenting it to people because it will bring about their salvation. But it’s going to challenge them. It’s going to be difficult.

Fr. Stephen De Young

Muscular Christianity?

One reason I became Orthodox is that the heart of this faith is not to be found in the legacy of Imperial Byzantium but in the spirit of the Desert Fathers, the hesychasts and the saints of the prisons. I don’t think many of my critics really understand Orthodoxy; but the life and teachings of, say, St John Chrysostom, St Isaac the Syrian, St Moses the Black or modern saints such as St Porphyrios or St Nektarios are more than enough to refute some of the cruder arguments for a ‘muscular Christianity’ that the Internet is currently coughing up.

Paul Kingsnorth

White Man’s Burden

My morning prayers used to include “thwart our meddling in traditional cultures, teaching them acquisativeness and perversion as the new White Man’s Burden.” If you have no idea why I would pray such a thing, go back and read this week’s news stories about some of the liberal groin pieties that USAID has been funding of late. Or this distilled version:

I doubt that it was necessary (not to mention legal) to feed USAID to the wood chipper to stop that crap, and I strongly suspect that some very meritorious work that enhances our image in the world will be collateral damage of Elon and his band of snot-nosed barbarians.

But my prayer for thwarting has been answered — a reminder to “be careful what you pray for.”

What’s better than joy?

‘Milton was right,’ said my Teacher. ‘The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Presentation in the Temple

Today, the Orthodox Christian world celebrates Christ’s presentation in the Temple on the 40th day after His birth. And after 76 years on earth, I notice for the first time that “the righteous Simeon” who received Him and prayed the Nunc dimittis was not a priest in the Temple, but a righteous man who was there frequently and was led there by the spirit that day.

UPDATE: One of the hymns in Matins calls him a Priest, though that fact doesn’t appear in Luke 2. So I stand corrected.

Nondenominationalism and crypto-baptists

I stand corrected: not every non-denominational church is functionally Baptist.

Oh, I could quibble and say the LARPing Anglicanism without a bishop is sort of Baptist-adjacent. But when it includes an organized vestry and infant baptism, I wave the white flag.

Dechurching

[T]here are more people who dechurch into a kind of right-wing political religion than into a left-wing political religion.

Jake Meador, The Rise of the Right-Wing Exvangelical, citing The Great Dechurching

Race and the Bible

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

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

“Religion”

Just as colonial officials and missionaries, travelling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonise the past in similar manner. The ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Romans: all were assumed to have had a ‘religion’. Some peoples—most notably the Greeks—were also assumed to have had ‘science’. It was this that had enabled their civilisation to serve as the wellspring of progress. Philosophers had been the prototypes of scientists. The library of Alexandria had been ‘the birthplace of modern science’.26 Only Christians, with their fanatical hatred of reason and their determination to eradicate pagan learning, had prevented the ancient world from being set on a path towards steam engines and cotton mills.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Belonging nowhere

Yesterday my family and I went to a wedding in Dublin. We got up in the dark, lit the candles, heated water on a gas stove I’d set up in the garden and washed in a plastic tub in the bath. Then we put our best duds on and drove out of the darkness. [They were in a storm-caused power outage of several days’ duration.] There was light in the city, of course. The wedding was beautiful. I’d never been to an Orthodox wedding before. Our friend, the groom, was lit up from within.

After the ceremony I got talking to another guest, a Romanian woman now living in Ireland. ‘When I go home now’, she said, ‘I feel like a stranger. It doesn’t feel like home, really. But I am not Irish either. I don’t belong anywhere.’ It could have been the familiar lament of the immigrant, but it was not that. ‘Except here,’ she went on, gesturing about her. ‘In the Church, there are people from all sorts of countries, but we all come together and everything makes sense. Nothing seems to make sense outside it any more.’

I nodded my head and agreed. I feel the same these days. My secular friends, my atheist relatives: I love them, but some of them think I’ve gone mad, or already was. This journey of prayer takes you away from the world, lifts your feet slightly above the ground, away from the electric spectacle, with its currents that drag you down. They can’t see that. How could they? It can’t be accessed through argument. It’s nobody’s fault, but the river that runs between us is real.

Later, my wife and I got talking to a priest we know around the dinner table. Here we were, an English Christian convert to the Eastern Church, a British-Indian Sikh, a Romanian Orthodox priest, all of us talking about religion in the capital of Ireland, and all of us agreeing on one thing: that we could understand and connect much better, on some deep level, with each other, and with other religious people, whatever their faith, than we could with people from our own culture who had no religion at all.

The English, said the priest, seem to be a very irreligious people. I told him he was right. It makes me sad, but there it is. I could talk more easily now, I think, to an African Christian, an Indonesian Muslim or an Indian Hindu than I could to a secular British atheist immersed in what passes for culture in my homeland. I’m not judging. I’m just laying it out.

You can aim towards God, I think now, or you can aim somewhere else. You can open up all of your inner rooms and say, come on in, Father, clear out all the crap I have stored in here, and fill these rooms with light. You can say that in a lot of different languages, in a lot of different dialects, with a lot of different approaches. Or you can keep the doors closed.

Paul Kingsnorth

We shall not cease from exploration

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in,” Richard Dawkins has argued. “Some of us just go one god further.” The idea behind this aphorism is that every serious religious worldview is a closed system and that to really practice and believe in one is to necessarily reject all the rest as incredible and false.

…

Dawkins is simply wrong about the requirement for believers to disbelieve in every other faith. The bookstore of all religions isn’t necessarily a library of total falsehoods with one lonely truth hidden somewhere on the shelves, and embracing one revelation doesn’t require believing that every other religion is made up.

…

Consider the story of religious pilgrimage offered recently by the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth. Raised to experience his isle’s Christianity as a hopeless antiquarianism, he found that spiritual interests grew naturally out of his environmentalism, which led into a commitment to Zen Buddhism, which lasted years but felt insufficient, lacking (he felt) a mode of true worship.

He found that worship in actual paganism, and he went so far as to become a priest of Wicca, a practitioner of what he took to be white magic. At which point, and only at that point, he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, ideas and arguments and some stark mystical experiences as well.

But it would have been unimaginable to him at the start of the journey that the Christian faith imparted to him weakly in his childhood — that “ancient, tired religion” as he put it — could have possibly been his destination in the end. Only the act of questing delivered him back to the initial place, no longer old and tired but fresh and new.

“We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote T.S. Eliot in “Four Quartets.” “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” That’s a nice encapsulation for Kingsnorth’s journey. But for the general obligation imposed upon us all, as time-bound creatures in a world shot through with intimations of transcendence, a different Eliot line is apt: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Ross Douthat, excerpted from his forthcoming book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Sunday, 1/26/25

Musings from a funeral

I went to a funeral on MLK Day (when there were unrelated festivities going on in Washington DC as well). I hadn’t seen the deceased probably in more than a quarter century, but I always liked him.

Apart from being dead, Tom looked good. Apart from her hair haven’t gone white, his wife looked great. It was good to see them again, though it does eventually get tiresome when you only see your old friends at funerals, especially when one is the guest of honor.

His daughter’s Remembrance dwelt at some lengths on Tom’s piety, and deservedly so in my experience. We got acquainted at our former Reformed church. When our church split planted a sister church with guitars and drums and plexiglass and repetitive praise songs and such, I think he went with the sister church instead of staying with us stick-in-the-muds. Eventually, he moved out of state, to a warmer and trendier place, to start his own business in a field he knew from 30 or so years’ experience. He remained firmly in the Reformed tradition, though he switched in his new home to the Presbyterian side rather than the continental.

And soon enough, the Orthodox Christian faith caught my serious attention and I, too, left — in an opposite direction from Tom.

Which brings me to my topic. Why me? Why did I get lucky? Why don’t more people like me find the Orthodox Christian faith?

I don’t really have an answer, but I have largely gotten over my convert-itis, my urge to harangue people about looking into Orthodoxy. I’m just not prepared to say that the world would be a better place if every pious Protestant was forever wringing his hands and anxiously poring over books to see if maybe he hadn’t picked (or been born into, or married into, or whatever) the true/best Church. There’s something to be said for settling down and practicing your faith, especially since the alternative of searching, searching, searching just might be unhealthier than settling down in the wrong place.

Or so it seems to me. I don’t mean to be cavalier about extra Ecclesiam nulla salus or to fudge the borders of Ecclesiam, but if I can hope for the salvation of all, and can get out of my left brain about distinctions, surely I can hope for the salvation of heterodox Christians.

Settling is what I had done 30-plus years ago. As I can attest, God knows how to unsettle you when you need it. So if you are feeling unsettled in your Church, come and see what’s up in your nearest Orthodox Church. Otherwise, stay put and be the best [fill in the blank] you can be.

And may God have mercy on me if this is the advice of a squish.

Before we forget the stunt …

Of Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s National Cathedral sermon (which turned to direct admonition of Donald Trump):

I must be one of the only people other than those actually in the cathedral to have listened to the entire thing. It was dry, high-minded, and Christ-light, and it built on a theme of “unity” in which all people drop their political differences and embrace a generalized, feel-good, Esperanto-like uni-faith, with everyone directing their prayers to Whom It May Concern.

Caitlin Flanagan

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Tuesday, 1/21/25

Does 47 have what greatness takes?

[T]he heroic presidency runs the persistent danger of becoming craven or abusive, as Vietnam and Watergate taught. This is what so many critics worry about with Mr. Trump — that his transformations will be more resonant of Richard Nixon than of our most esteemed presidents.

Yet there is a complementary question that should concern supporters of Mr. Trump: Can he succeed? He has amassed enormous power in his party and is building an intensely devoted administration. Those factors will bring him wins in the short run.

But it takes extraordinary skill to wield executive power successfully throughout an administration. If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda.

The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. …

Second is the question of whether Mr. Trump knows where he wants to go. … Mr. Trump has a powerful slogan, “America first,” a robust agenda, and many discrete and often insightful political instincts. But he lacks a coherent sense of the public ends for which he exercises power. …

Third, personal gain was neither a priority of the great presidents nor a guide to their exercise of power. …

Fourth, Mr. Trump is unlike any previous president, even Jackson, in broadly delegitimating American institutions — the courts, the military and intelligence communities, the Justice Department, the press, the electoral system and both political parties. This will do him no favors when he needs their support, as he will.

…

Fifth, Mr. Trump’s obsession with hard executive power and an extreme version of the unitary executive theory will be self-defeating. If his stalwart subordinates carry out his every whim, as he hopes, bad policies will result. If the loyalists Mr. Trump is putting at the top of the Justice Department do not give him candid independent advice that he follows, he will violate the law and often lose in court, as happened in his first term.

The great presidents … understood that hard power could go only so far and that persuasion and consent were surer tools to achieving lasting presidential goals in our democracy. This idea is lost on Mr. Trump.

Finally, as Mr. Schlesinger noted, the great presidents all “took risks in pursuit of their ideals” and “provoked intense controversy.” And, except for Washington, they all “divided the nation before reuniting it on a new level of national understanding.”

Mr. Trump is a risk taker and a divider. But it is hard to see how his approach to the presidency ends in national reunion.

Jack Goldsmith (unlocked article)

Offshore politics

Velocior, superior, stupidior

What runners they were,
round and round the arena
in their expensive armour

like that other runner
from Marathon, his time
unsurpassed until the arrival
of steroids. We cover the ground
faster, but what news do we bring?

Excerpt from Postcard, in R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

The neutering welcome

Merkel, when she insisted that Islam belonged in Germany just as much as Christianity, was only appearing to be even-handed. To hail a religion for its compatibility with a secular society was decidedly not a neutral gesture. Secularism was no less bred of the sweep of Christian history than were Orbán’s barbed-wire fences. Naturally, for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be admitted.

Tom Holland, Dominion

If this makes no sense to you, read it again. And again. If it still makes no sense, you need to read some history, and Dominion wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

What is truly “self-evident”?

So yes, the equality of all humans seemed staringly obvious (at least in theory) to Franklin and Jefferson. But that was because their culture was saturated with Christian assumptions―so much so that the concepts and phrases they used were taken from Locke, who had got them from Hooker, who had got them from Scripture.”

Franklin’s brief, scribbled correction is a marvelous metaphor for the ex-Christian West. His replacement of the words “sacred and undeniable” with “self-evident” echoes what was happening across European society as a whole in 1776, at least among elites. It was an attempt to retain Christianity’s moral conclusions while scrubbing out its theological foundations: keeping the fruits while severing the roots, if you will. And it resulted in the insistence that JudeoChristian convictions on anthropology and ethics were now to be regarded as universal norms on which all reasonable people would agree.

Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World

See my remark in the prior item.

Oblivious

On this bitter-cold January morning in the American midwest, my thoughts turned to hot, hearty soup, and this quickly led to a reflection.

There is a catering service in my fair city that used to be open to the public for sit-down lunch. Its kitchen included a soup genius.

I’d go there on a wintery day, and once I learned of it, I would invariably check their freezer before leaving, buying as many as four quarts of frozen, leftover soup.

Then one day the proprietress approached me: “Did you realize that a lot of people on fixed incomes come here to buy soup?” Crestfallen, I answered “No, I didn’t. I’m sorry. Thank you for telling me. I’ll leave the soup for them.”

My obliviousness fit my recent description of non-rebellious sin.

God never said “Thou shalt not buy leftover soup.” He didn’t say “Thou shalt think twice or thrice about the indirect consequences of buying leftover soup.” And, since this was a rather upscale eatery (albeit in a downscale neighborhood), I’m not sure that the proverbial “moment’s reflection” would have revealed the indirect consequences to me; I just saw it as “I get good soup and this caterer gets more money.”

But I was, quite obliviously, snatching food from the mouths of poor pensioners. Greater awareness might have prevented that, and the proprietress’ consciousness-raising was welcome.

Proof

Woozle Effect

When a source makes an unproven claim and it’s then cited as proof by another, which is cited by another, and so on, until the chain of citations looks like evidence. This is common because, while many writers check their sources, few check their sources’ sources.

A recent example: evidence that puberty blockers are safe and effective was overestimated because institutions were circularly citing each other.

…

Hitchens’s Razor

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” ― Christopher Hitchens. If you make a claim, it’s up to you to prove it, not to me to disprove it.

Gurwinder Bhogal

Time to pull this out (again?)

I don’t recall if I’ve shared this favorite here:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems_, 2008;_ New Collected Poems, 2012.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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, 1/19/25

Here’s the thing about αμαρτία

This excerpt from the Orthodox Trisagion prayers (Thrice-Holy prayers) grabbed my attention 27+ years ago:

O Lord, cleanse us from our sins. O Master, pardon our transgressions. O Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy Name’s sake.

That left an impression that is still with me.

I learned fairly early in my catechesis that sin in Greek is αμαρτία, commonly rendered “hamartia” in English. It literally means “missing the mark.”

As an Evangelical, and then as a Calvinist (though to a lesser degree), I’d gotten the impression that “sin” was simply rebellion against God. But that wasn’t true to all that I saw in me that missed the mark. There was self-absorption feeding obliviousness to the concerns of others. I didn’t choose that to rebel against God. There was such limitation that I sometimes didn’t know what I should do and chose something that harmed others. I also didn’t choose that to rebel against God (I’d have preferred omniscience).

The three sentences from the Trisagion Prayers seemed a perceptive taxonomy where my Church and pastors saw only uniformity: rebellion. For some kinds of mark-missing we need cleansing, for others pardon, for still others, healing.

My soul said “Yes! They’ve got it!” And so the case for Orthodoxy grew weightier.

I don’t remember mentioning this before. Perhaps it will help someone with the same perception I had.

But now that I’ve got that down on paper (so to speak), connections occur to me. Maybe my Protestant mentors didn’t think about human failures that aren’t acts of rebellion toward God because the common Protestant theory of atonement (basically, God the Father already gave God the Son the punishment we deserve for our rebellion and so He won’t punish us as well) is an uncomfortable fit for non-rebellious mark-missing like self-absorption and lack of omniscience, for which we need something more than pardon.

To call that idea half-baked may be too generous, but now it’s on my mind.

How liberal theology works

I pay a lot of critical attention to American Evangelicalism because in important ways it was my religious world and we’re collectively still swimming in its latest iterations.

Also, I don’t think I ever understood the Protestant mainline. I recently got some help in that regard (recently because I’m gradually catching up with the podcast series from which this transcript comes):

Fr. Stephen: … I don’t think people fundamentally understand how liberal theology works, and this can give us a window into how liberal theology works. Liberal theology is in keeping with Hegel, the Hegel we’re rejecting on this show, just to be clear. Not promoting liberal theology, but we need to understand liberal theology and how it works.

The reason I’m just saying “liberal theology”— I’m not saying “liberal” as opposed to “conservative.” I’m saying “liberal” in the sense of post-Enlightenment, that doesn’t think the Enlightenment was a bad thing. I’m talking about post-Enlightenment theology; I’m talking about— Well, let’s get to brass tacks. …

But liberal theology essentially, like Hegel, takes whatever point in time they stand at as being the apex of history to that point. This means— And I’ve critiqued it this way on the show before, but I’m going to do it again. This means that liberal theology is always innately chauvinist, at least somewhat racist, colonial, because, again, you have to take your culture and civilization as being the apex, which means the other ones who might disagree with you are somehow primitive, backward, unenlightened, etc. So there’s always overtones of that, always overtones of that within liberal theology. But you take your point as being the apex of history to that point, and you ascribe the developments that have led to that apex as being the work of the Holy Spirit.

So if now we, European-derived Western culture, have a new understanding of gender or sexuality or biological sex or any other ethical, moral issue of who God is, whatever—whatever has developed historically, in this Western—dare I say often white—culture, whatever is developed in that culture, this is the work of the Holy Spirit that has brought us to this, and therefore it is endorsed, and we re-shape our theology based on this. So a new understanding of gender that arises within culture and society is, for them—the work of God has brought that about within society.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… This is where you hear people use language like “the right side of history.”

Fr. Stephen: So it doesn’t matter if the person questioning that is from the same culture but who says, “Hey, I don’t this historical development—” they’re doing more like what we’re advocating for, which is saying, “Well, no, we have to sift through this and say what is from God and what isn’t”; or if it’s someone from another culture, who might have another skin color, might be from another continent. It doesn’t matter who’s questioning it: whoever’s questioning it is innately backwards, is innately rejecting the work of the Holy Spirit in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is also where you hear people say things like: “It’s 2023!” Like that’s an argument! “It’s current year!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but you have to understand, this is their understanding. And this is why trying to take any kind of approach with them, of “well, but this previous understanding…” or “this thing from the past,” no matter what it is, fundamentally doesn’t work, because they have this underlying presupposition that their culture now at this point in time is the apex of all human cultures and civilization and that God has brought it there. This is why, when I— when you hear me critiquing liberal theology, it’s often from what sounds like a liberal perspective, like I’ll say to people who express these ideas— They’ll be attacking, for example, African bishops in their own church for not going along. What’s nice about me using that example is there are at least three different denominations I could be talking about.

…

When they, as white, bourgeois Americans or Europeans, attack African bishops and call them “backwards” and all of these things for not being on-board with their new liberal consensus, I will call them white supremacists, because that’s what that is.

Fr. Andrew: Colonialism.

Fr. Stephen: Right? That is colonialism. It’s: all the things they claim to hate, they’re actually doing. But that’s why I— If people hear me critique it that way, I know some people might get confused, but that’s why I critique it that way, because that’s the only critique that can function on their own presuppositions. That’s the only critique that’s valid from their— based on their own presuppositions. Any critique from tradition is going to fall flat on its face, because they’ve substituted—instead of our understanding of tradition, they have this alien understanding of history, so trying to talk tradition doesn’t work. That’s the only kind of critique—

And that’s because, ultimately, that line of thinking is an ouroboros. It’s a snake eating its own tail. It can’t— Its first principles are incoherent. That’s why you can critique their beliefs based on their beliefs, because they don’t fit together. But so, we add that at the end this is the deviant view of how the Spirit works and how Tradition works, that we need to be aware of, because I don’t think we can have productive dialogue with people who have imbibed liberal theology and who are coming at things from that perspective when we come at them from a completely alien perspective that shares none of their presuppositions. I don’t think there’s any way for that to be productive, other than, you know, maybe just saying, “You have to abandon everything you think you know. Change everything,” which may work sometimes, and maybe if you show them how self-refuting their own ideas are, maybe that’ll help that happen, but there’s a fundamental lack of communication between those who have fallen prey to that kind of liberal theology and the rest of us. That it would be good for their sakes if we could find a bridge to try to bring them back to the truth.

Fathers Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen DeYoung on the Lord of Spirits podcast for December 29, 2023.

I share this because I found it helpful in understanding United Methodists and Episcopalians over my lifetime. They’re treating the Zeitgeist as the Heiliger Geist, and they contemn Africans in their communions whose Zeitgeist isn’t keeping up with the latest fashions.

Secularizations

After he had twice visited the United States in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a perceptive essay contrasting Christian development in America with parallel developments in the parts of Europe most directly shaped by the Protestant Reformation. His assessment included an observation that was as shrewd in its comparative wisdom as it is relevant for the themes of this book: “The secularization of the church on the continent of Europe arises from the misinterpretation of the reformers’ distinction of the two realms [of church and society]; American secularization derives precisely from the imperfect distinction of the kingdoms and offices of church and state, from the enthusiastic claim of the church to universal influence in the world.” What Bonhoeffer saw has been described with other terms here: The key moves in the creation of evangelical America were also the key moves that created secular America.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God. This surely is relevant to my inquiry into Carlo Lancelotti’s Touchstone article.

Truth gets a rocky start

Schaff’s work in America got off to a rocky start. In his inaugural address at Mercersberg, The Principle of Protestantism, Schaff argued that American Protestantism needed to reject its antihistorical, sectarian tendencies and recognize its place within the historic church, which had organically developed through time.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation.

Schaff wasn’t wrong.

Religious versus Secular

Why accept the substantivist definition of religion as about belief in transcendence? Taylor thinks he needs such a definition in order to keep his subject matter properly delimited; if nationalism were a religion, then the whole religious/secular distinction would get thrown into confusion. But there might be good reasons to question this distinction. The distinction has come under increasing scrutiny from scholars who view the religious/secular distinction as both historically constructed and politically motivated.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Authenticity

The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images.’ In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty. … What is so compelling here is that the motive force behind the Reformation was the urge to regain authenticity, with which one can only be profoundly sympathetic. The path it soon took was that of the destruction of all means whereby the authentic could have been recaptured.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Thursday, 1/16/25

American Meritocracy

For most of my professional career, I’ve been a skeptic of the American meritocracy. Not a skeptic of the basic idea that competent and intelligent people should fill positions requiring competence and intelligence, but a skeptic of the idea that a system of frantic adolescent hoop-jumping and résumé-building, designed to skim the smartest kids from every region and segregate them from the rest of society for college and beyond, has actually created an elite that’s more responsible, effective, morally grounded and genuinely cosmopolitan than the more quasi-aristocratic upper class that it displaced.

Ross Douthat

NAR

I’ve spent most of my life thinking that I was well-informed on the American religious scene — especially Evangelicalism. For a long time, that self-regard may have been warranted.

No more. I recently passed the 27th anniversary of my reception into the Orthodox Christian faith. And it may be time to admit that I’ve lost track of what’s going on in the American Evangelical world.

Stephanie McCrummen of the Atlantic has recently published two articles on the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and those who share its outlook with or without conscious acknowledgement of NAR.

I’ve had my eyes on NAR for a few years, but here’s where McCrummen floored me:

What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.

What she’s describing in NAR That 40% figure got my back up as absurd until I realized that I was basing it on the typical doctrinal commitments of Evangelicalism more than 27 years ago. In fact, it’s been 45 years since I unequivocally identified as Evangelical, being for 18 subsequent years (before my Orthodox reception) only Evangelical-adjacent.

So I can’t say she’s wrong. I also can’t say she’s right, but if she’s right, it would go fairly far in explaining the great Evangelical murmuration from “character matters” (Bill Clinton) to, in effect, “he may be a rapist sonofabitch but he’s our rapist sonofabitch.” So the NAR “prophets” have spoken.

Metaphors: Choose Wisely

Metaphors matter. They can elucidate, but they can also elide and confuse. For a long time, the conservative metaphor for the Left’s tactics has been “slippery slope.” It’s a bad metaphor. It suggests that radical efforts to harm American families are all just the result of the gravitational pull of the earth, or the inevitability of logical progression. That isn’t the case. The tactics used against American families are far more clever. And they invariably involve a “Bait and Switch.” Sell the American people on a principle we can all agree on: “inclusivity,” “tolerance” and “anti-bullying.” Then, smuggle in an entirely different program under its name. That is how gender ideology ended up part of the mandatory “anti-bullying” curriculum, as opposed to the “sex education curriculum,” which is subject to parental opt out.

Abigail Shrier

Greenland, Canada and the Canal

When an authoritarian-minded leader poised to control the world’s most powerful military begins overt saber-rattling against neighbors, the most obvious and important question to ask is whether he intends to follow through. That question, unfortunately, is difficult to answer. On the one hand, Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even concepts of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war. Seizing the uncontrolled edges of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in any real-world scenario.

On the other hand, Trump constantly generated wild ideas during his first term, only for the traditional Republicans in his orbit to distract or foil him, with the result that the world never found out how serious he was about them. This time around, one of his highest priorities has been to make sure his incoming administration is free of officials whose professionalism or loyalty to the Constitution would put them at risk of violating their loyalty to Trump. We cannot simply assume that Trump’s most harebrained schemes will fizzle.

An easier question to answer is why Trump keeps uttering these threats. One reason is that he seems to sincerely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker ones. Trump has long insisted that the United States should seize smaller countries’ natural resources, and that American allies should be paying us protection money, as if they were shopkeepers and America were a mob boss.

Jonathan Chait, Donald Trump’s Performative Imperialism

We’ll know he’s a Christian by his blasphemy

So let’s run the race marked out for us. Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire. And let’s fix our eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith and our freedom and never forget that where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. That means freedom always wins.

Mike Pence, at the 2020 Republican National Convention, via William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry. Compare this the Hebrews 12:1-2 and ask yourself “just how low is the bar for being considered a devout Christian Republican?”

Cui bono?

Cui bono? Whom did this new story serve? Who benefits from a world of consequence-free sex, weak ties, the putting off of childbearing and family? Today, the pharmaceutical and medical industries benefit, by selling decades-long prescriptions for contraceptives, and then various attempts at ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] later on. Corporations and employers benefit: they gain a new labor force unsaddled by commitments to family, place, or other less-than-profitable concerns.

Christine Emba quoted by Alan Jacobs

Pathetic wankers get their day at SCOTUS

On Wednesday America’s Supreme Court examined a Texas law mandating age verification for websites where a third or more of the material is “sexual” and “harmful to minors”. A district judge blocked the law, which is similar to measures recently passed by 18 other states, but an appeals court reinstated it last year.

A trade association of adult entertainers, known as the Free Speech Coalition, is arguing that the law restricts adult Texans’ access to protected speech and violates the First Amendment. The Supreme Court struck down a similar law (the federal Child Online Protection Act) in 2004, the plaintiffs point out. Texas’s defence relies on a high-court ruling from 1968 that upheld a law banning erotic bookstores from selling their wares to children. But online commerce, the plaintiffs retort, is a world apart: adults may be reluctant to reveal their identities to porn sites because they worry about “identity thieves and extortionists”.

Economist World News in Brief for 1/15/25.

That last sentence should be a real eye-opener. Paraphrasing: “We’re such pathetic wankers that we do business with identity thieves and extortionists. We have a right to be pathetic wankers, so to hell with the kids who get exposed.”

That’s not the whole case the “Free Speech Coalition” could make against the Texas law (and about the logic of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) but it’s got to be among the most risible.

Glimmers

Woke retreat

Recently, [Mark] Zuckerberg ordered tampon machines to be taken out of men’s bathrooms in all of Meta’s offices. Commenter Richard Hanania said,

This is like pulling down the statue of Saddam. Now you know wokeness is dead.

… Nobody could have imagined that a vulgar, orange billionaire from New York and an anti-woke South African immigrant in Silicon Valley might be the champions Europe needs to find its own courage and Make Europe Great Again. But then again, despite the false faith of the left-wing ideologues and their bureaucracies, the march of history follows no predictable path.

Rod Dreher

Cabinet of the Cancelled

[F]or those of us who have run afoul of the Left’s dogma, particularly in public, it’s harder to worry over the Trump cabinet’s failure to harmonize with the views of credentialed bureaucrats.

Abigail Shrier, Trump’s ‘Cabinet of the Cancelled’

Devouring one another

Look no further than MAGA mega-toady Steve Bannon declaring war on MAGA mega-toady Elon Musk.

Bannon has had a bee in his bonnet about Musk for the better part of a month, ever since Elon went to the mat in support of H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants. “He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” he told an Italian newspaper recently, vowing to have Musk “run out of here by Inauguration Day.” Turning to Silicon Valley’s habit of hiring migrants instead of Americans, Bannon took the gloves off—and sounded a little, well, woke in the process:

“No blacks or Hispanics have any of these jobs or any access to these jobs,” Bannon said.

“Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon observed. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

Well then.

Pity poor Elon, who spent Christmas week defending Indian engineers from Groypers calling them sewage-drinking subhumans only to have Groyper-adjacent nationalist Steve Bannon turn around and accuse him of being racist. The rift over immigration policy developing between red-pilled tech bros, color-blind nativist ideologues, and gutter white supremacists will be a fun one to follow over the next four years.

But it won’t be the only one. There are numerous rifts opening on the right as Donald Trump prepares to take office. The GOP caught the proverbial car on Election Day and now each of its factions wants to drive; watching them tear each other apart will be one of the small silver linings of a second Trump presidency.

Nick Catoggio

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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, January 12, 2025

America’s Puritan-Lockean synthesis

A few months back, I decided once again to subscribe to Touchstone magazine, a subscription I had allowed to lapse for many years.

The first issue to arrive I found disappointing,, but the second included Carlo Lancelotti’s America verus Europe, which advances the idea that the:

notion of a “delayed” American secularization stands in contrast to the views of many prominent European thinkers of the last century. Curiously, they also thought that America was “special” but in the opposite sense. They deemed the United States to be far more advanced than Europe in terms of a scientistic, utilitarian, individualistic, and materialistic worldview. For example, as early as 1943, when Simone Weil returned from New York to London a few months before dying, she wrote that the great danger threatening European Christianity was “Americanization,” by which she meant detachment from the past, which was slowly killing people’s ability to perceive the supernatural. The “Western” spirit of the Enlightenment “is found in America in its pure state and to the second power, and we are in danger of being devoured by it. . . . the Americanization of Europe would lead to the Americanization of the whole world.”

This view rings true to me, as does the idea that this outcome was baked into our founding by a “Puritan-Lockean synthesis.” But I’m still chewing on it, especially the thought of that founding synthesis, which I’m unprepared to expound. The whole constellation of critique is likely to reappear here in the future. Meanwhile, it appears to me that the article already is unlocked for the curious.

Something to chew on

It is a strange yet incontrovertible fact that, when God did take flesh, He in many ways (though certainly not all) revealed himself to be closer in spirit to the Tao of Lao Tzu then to God as conceived by the Hebrews at that time, even though the Hebrews had the revelation of Moses. This might be difficult to accept by those who are accustomed to thinking of Christ as the fulfillment of the expectation specifically of the Hebrews. Ancient Christian tradition, however, holds that Christ satisfied the longing of all the nations.

Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao

American Pharisaism

I have wondered much that Christianity is not practiced by the very people who vouch for that wonderful conception of exemplary living. It appears that they are anxious to pass on their religion to all other races, but keep little of it for themselves …

…

It is my personal belief, after thirty-five years experience of it, that there is no such thing as “Christian civilization.” I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same.

Charles Alexander Eastman, whose American Indian name was Ohiyesa. Quoted by Paul Kingsnorth in his 2024 Erasmus Lecture.

More of Kingsnorth’s Lecture:

What, actually, is spiritually beneficial about this “Western civilization”—or any civilization? After all, Babylon and Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, were as civilized as the ancient world got.

To find out, we might hold up the stated values of our civilization against the famous list of seven deadly sins. The list was compiled in the sixth century by Pope Gregory I. He based it on an earlier list of eight passions, compiled by the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus, which is still current in the Eastern Church. How is Western civilization doing today at fending off these sins?

Pride is celebrated everywhere—pride in nation, status, wealth, ethnic group, identity, religion. We have a month-long festival named for it. Greed is the basis of our economy. Along with envy, it is the cornerstone of the idol of our time, the universally worshiped god known as “economic growth.” If we were neither greedy nor envious, the economy would collapse in five minutes. Wrath is the fuel beneath the culture wars and all of our political factions. As for lust—find me a billboard or a film or a song or a brand of shoes that doesn’t piggyback on this most primal human passion. It is perhaps behind only gluttony in its ubiquity. Even sloth has been monetized. How else could something as oxymoronic as a “leisure industry” even exist?

Macho-Man Orthodoxy

There seems to be a surge of interest in the secular and the heterodox press, blogosphere and podcast worlds in the distinctly masculine flavor of Orthodox Christianity’s growth in the USA.

I’m happy that my parish has seen a surge in attendance and people joining. Our growth does skew toward young men, but I have a God-daughter who came on her own, and we recently added a single mom with two kids. A godson, older than me, came with his wife at first from dissatisfaction with his United Methodist church coupled with the ethnic tag on our diocese, which matched his ancestry!

But one particular recent article, in “secular” press, about the male-skewed growth of Orthodox Christianity, rang false more often than it rang true.

False notes:

  • tougher form of Christianity (a Priest lamentably said that, so I can’t blame the author)
  • They must fast, too … (fast from many foods, but not from all food)
  • puts emphasis on denial and pushing yourself physically (superficial and misleading; a good priest likely would tell someone going to extremes to lighten up because they’re missing the point)
  • the strict church (nobody’s monitoring compliance)
  • pushes them physically and mentally
  • masculine

These snippets are not so much false factually as false to my experience of Orthodoxy.

It has been notable since I entered Orthodoxy (or earlier), long before the present growth surge, that converts skewed male, and that if a whole family came in, it likely was the dad who instigated and led the conversion. People puzzled over the reason for that, but the idea of men consciously motivated by “more masculine” wasn’t front and center.

I doubt that it should be so today, but I’m not positive about that. My experience of the Orthodoxy faith is largely confined to one parish, which I’ve served as a tonsured Reader and de facto Cantor/Psaltis from my earliest days in the Church. In other words, I don’t get out much, but I wouldn’t agree that I need to get out more. Sampling other parishes is likely to prove superficial, and as they say “the plural of anecdote is not data.”

In that vein, these are the only two paragraphs that didn’t feel a bit “cringe”:

Father Timothy Pavlatos, who leads St Katherine Greek Orthodox Church in Chandler, Arizona, agrees that the “challenge” of the Orthodox church appeals to many young men.

“Orthodoxy is challenging in the physical sense too, and it requires a lot… they live in a world where it’s instant gratification and just take what you want, what you feel you want, what you think you need, Orthodoxy is the opposite of that, it’s denying yourself.”

The article emphasizes the sentiments of recent male converts, but Orthodoxy is capacious and somewhat disorienting for someone new to it. We (thinking back to myself 27 years ago) ask dumb questions and utter dumber opinions. To the degree that men are interested in Orthodoxy as a kind of spiritual testosterone, promoting distinctly masculine growth, I foresee them dropping out when the reality dawns on them.

We all, converts from other Christianities or not, bring baggage into the Church, and the doors shouldn’t be closed to those kinds of baggage but open to my kind. The important thing is whether a convert wants to conform his (or her) life to Christ through the life of the Church, and is prepared to renounce and repent of un-Christlike opinions along the way.

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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