Tag: double-standards

Meandering through “Mere Christianity,” denominations, missions, and extra Ecclesiam nulla salus

I spent some time this week mulling over a blog that talked about some YouTube video dialogs across the lines of Christian traditions. The result seems kind of half-baked, but it’s what I’ve got this Sunday.

The point of “mere Christianity” for Lewis was not to minimize ecclesial distinctives, but rather to help people make useful distinctions as they think about their relationship to faith. Yet, and Scrivener himself develops this point in his own way in the video, to even conceive of such a project as being legitimate is itself to be committed in some limited way to Protestantism. It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in “mere Christianity” from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople. To imagine that there is a set of cardinal doctrines that transcends ecclesial divisions and unites all people as “Christian” is inherently to speak and think as a Protestant.

So in that sense the best way to read what Scrivener calls the era of “mere christianity” is probably to regard it as a period of deficient Protestantism in which people presupposed Protestant conceptions of the church without understanding that they were doing that. They mistook their implicitly Protestant commitments for a kind of broadly Christian and ecclesially indifferent set of commitments. That is never what Lewis was trying to do in his own work, but it is how his work was received by highly democratic and anti-institutional American readers.

Jake Meador, Is the Era of Mere Christianity Over?.

Youngish Calvinist Jake Meador is too young to feel in his bones the weight of implicit “common-core Protestantism” in America. I felt it to a degree in the 50s as a fundamentalist/evangelical oddball in a public school that didn’t share our taboos but somehow was Christianish. Observant Catholics felt it to the extent that they really supported their parochial schools. I lived across the street from an empty field on which we watched a Catholic high school arise in the late 50s.

Meador rightly observes that “It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in “mere Christianity” from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople.” To Protestants, that may be baffling, but Christ promised to build his church and, as I have noted before, there are Christians for whom belief in Christ and His Church is one act of faith, not two. I’m now one of them.

On the question of whether denominationalism is coming back, though, Meador is wise to distinguish the return of doctrinal particularity from the return of the denominations, each one instantiating those particularities, and to ask “how’s that going to work when most of the Christian action is taking place in non-denominational assemblies that have fancied that they were avoiding particularities?” (Spoiler alert: they weren’t avoiding partiuclarity. Try getting an infant baptized in one of these non-particular churches. They’re crypto-baptists.) Sociologist of Religion Ryan Burge has documented lavishly the decline of denominations relative to independent churches (religiopreneurs).

The video Meador is discussing features snippets of conversation between Protestant Gavin Ortlund and Orthodox Jonathan Pageau. Ortlund is kind of hurt that Pageau seemingly cannot univocally call him a brother in Christ. Pageau responds in part at the oddity of that hurt, inasmuch as Protestants have long sent missionaries to traditionally Orthodox lands, where they try to persuade Orthodox Christians that they’re not really Christians until they embrace some Protestant tradition or another.

Protestant prickliness about Orthodox Christians hesitating to greet them with unguarded bonhomie reminds me of Mormon complaints about Evangelicals (and others) not accepting them; why then, have the Mormons been sending pairs of young “Elders” throughout the land all my life to evangelize for their church? They’re asking for acceptance they don’t reciprocate.

I’m obviously on Team Pageau when it comes to repudiating “salvation by faith alone” and other aspects of Protestantism. I think it’s worth noting, too, that the Orthodox position that there’s no salvation outside the ark of the Church shouldn’t be taken anachronistically or out of context.

“Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. All the categorical strength and point of this aphorism lies in its tautology. Outside the Church there is no salvation, because salvation is the Church” (G. Florovsky, “Sobornost: the Catholicity of the Church”, in The Church of God, p. 53). Does it therefore follow that anyone who is not visibly within the Church is necessarily damned? Of course not; still less does it follow that everyone who is visibly within the Church is necessarily saved. As Augustine wisely remarked: “How many sheep there are without, how many wolves within!” (Homilies on John, 45, 12) While there is no division between a “visible” and an “invisible Church”, yet there may be members of the Church who are not visibly such, but whose membership is known to God alone. If anyone is saved, he must in some sense be a member of the Church; in what sense, we cannot always say.

Bp. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church.

Catholics find it impossible to theologize without deductive reasoning—a characteristic shared by virtually all Western Christians

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox. I almost made this a separate item in my typical multipart collation, but it feels rather like an epilogue.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Friday, 6/7/24

Legalia

Musical rackets

Copyright law is just a big steaming mess. Whenever you think it can’t get crazier, it always does.

YouTube is the ultimate battlefield for copyright claims gone wild. Even when I do a short YouTube video about music, I can never play examples from actual recordings. (That’s why I’ve never given an online course on music history. Corporate lawyers would shut me down in a New York minute.)

Consider the case of the YouTuber whose video got demonetized because his “Samsung washing machine randomly chimed to signal a laundry cycle had finished while he was streaming.”

How is that even possible? But it gets even stranger.

Ashley Belanger reports in Ars Technica:

Apparently, YouTube had automatically scanned Albino’s video and detected the washing machine chime as a song called “Done”…[but it] actually comes from the song “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”) from Austrian composer Franz Schubert.

The song was composed in 1817 and is in the public domain. Samsung has used it to signal the end of a wash cycle for years.

I’m not sure what Schubert would make of all this. But I can assure you that none of his heirs will get a penny from this. That’s not the purpose of song copyrights anymore.

Ted Gioia, in a thoroughly disheartening chronicle of where AI appears to be taking us.

See also James O’Malley, Music Just Changed Forever

One crime with 34 cooties

I have added a P.S. to my recent post “34 Counts!”:

I don’t think I’ll dwell on the 34 counts any more, and regret having done so. The 34 counts were 34 bookkeeping entries. In most courts — and in best practice — this would have been charged as one crime, or so I’m told.

Politics

Sheep

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

I heard David French tell a story about masculinity today that was very David Frenchy in that it was based on a movie, American Assassin:

This is the story of Chris Kyle. And it was — I remember seeing it here in Tennessee. And you couldn’t find a parking spot in our theater. That movie was an absolute sensation.

And one of the most memorable parts of that movie is when Chris Kyle is involved in a playground fight, and his father goes through this sheepdog, sheep, wolf analogy. And that is there’s three kinds of people in this world. There’s the sheep, there are the wolves who prey on the sheep, and the sheepdogs who protect the sheep from the wolf.

And he says, I’m not raising any sheep in this household. So what are you? And at that point, Chris Kyle identifies himself as a sheep dog, as somebody who protects the weak against the wolf. OK? And so it’s a very anti-bullying sort of vision of male courage.

And then here comes Donald Trump, who fits to a T the definition of a wolf, of a bully. The story the right told about itself was that they would be inoculated against the wolf, against the bully, because they have this ethos of the sheepdog.

But then when the wolf arose and the bully arose, they went with the bully, the very person that a generation of young right-wing men were warned about. And so that’s what makes this, in many ways, so much more deeply disturbing even than it otherwise been (sic), because it called into question kind of the cultural enterprise that was happening before Trump.

On that same podcast, Jamelle Bouie, riffing on Trump’s first post-conviction public appearance being UFC (Universal Fight Club), quipped that “Professional wrestling is camp for straight men..”

Not a referendum on Trump?!

I believe I recently passed on an opinion that both Trump and Biden want this election to be a referendum on Trump. Now I pass along the opinion that it’s a referendum on Biden:

[Y]ou can just look at the polls in the US: 51 percent of Americans now support mass deportations of the kind Trump is proposing; including 42 percent of Democrats, and 45 percent of Hispanics. That was unthinkable four years ago — and it’s entirely on Biden. The revolt against this basic failure of governance is now strong even in big cities, run by Democrats, and among non-whites, who are moving toward Trump.

Joe Biden’s main campaign theme seems to be that he alone can defend liberal democracy from Donald Trump. What Biden has never understood is that restricting immigration is absolutely critical to defending liberal democracy. Everything else is just words, condescending words. If Trump triumphs in November, Biden will be responsible for simply ignoring basic political reality, alienating the very people he needs.

…

One person was responsible for Trump’s first term: Hillary Clinton. And one will be responsible for his second: Joe Biden.

I guess it’s worth reiterating at this point that I’m not anti-immigration. It remains the lifeblood of America, and immigration is vital for our future fiscal balance. I’m a proud immigrant myself — and America will always be able to integrate newcomers in ways European countries simply cannot. But, like a huge majority of Americans, I’m in favor of legal, orderly, controlled immigration — and not the chaos we now see everywhere in the West. This is not racism or xenophobia; it’s a recognition that borders and the rule of law matter; and that without secure borders, we risk losing the core reality of a nation-state; and without a better-paced influx, we risk delegitimizing immigration altogether, and balkanizing our societies.

Andrew Sullivan

Loser Trump

Trump’s base does not win elections outside of party primaries. It did not win the midterms for the Republican Party in 2018, it did not win re-election for the Trump in 2020, and it did not win a red wave for Republicans in 2022. The signature Republican victory of the last four years, the election of Glenn Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe in the 2021 Virginia race for governor, rested on an effort to marginalize the Trump base so that party leaders could engineer a nominee with the ability to distance himself from the former president and his movement.

Jamelle Bouie.

And true to form, the RNC’s Lara Trump has issued a fatwa against Larry Hogan, Republican candidate from U.S. Senate from Maryland, for saying the public should respect the process and the verdict in the Trump felony trial. Kiss that seat goodbye, GOP.

Chicken Littles of the Left

Some people reportedly (I haven’t met one outside of click-bait stories) are worked up that some Trump supporters want to ban IVF, contraception, and recreational sex. Though I know some arguments against each of those sacred cows, this strikes me as a reverse mirror-image of QAnon.

I would welcome more careful thought about IVF, but I’m an outlier. Anyone who thinks that a lame duck Donald Trump is going to pander to a very small group of ideologues who are seriously out of step with 90%+ of their countrymen needs to take a deep breath. Anyone who thinks that Donald Trump (who probably has frequent sperm donor perks at the fertility clinics of Manhattan) is personally opposed to IVF, contraception and recreational sex (“I never did anything that needed forgiveness” or something like that, he said) needs inpatient psych care.

Culture

Defining deviancy down … and up

When and why did American life become so coarse, amoral and ungovernable? In his classic 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down”, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a semantic explanation. He concluded that, as the amount of deviant behaviour increased beyond the levels the community can “afford to recognise”, we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt conduct we used to stigmatise, while also quietly raising the “normal” level in categories where behaviour is now abnormal by any earlier standard. The reasons behind this, he said, were altruism, opportunism and denial — but the result was the same: an acceptance of mental pathology, broken families and crime as a fact of life.

In that same summer, Charles Krauthammer responded to Senator Moynihan with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He acknowledged Senator Moynihan’s point but said it was only one side of the story. Deviancy was defined down for one category of society: the lower classes and black communities. For the middle classes, who are overwhelmingly white and Christian, the opposite was true. Deviancy was in fact defined up, stigmatising and criminalising behaviour that was previously regarded as normal. In other words, there was a double standard at work.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Presented without express comment

A new poll from Ipsos has found that support for same-sex marriage among Americans has fallen to just 51% approval.

…

Following a years-long rise in support for gay marriage, a groundswell of anti-woke sentiment emerged around 2021, much of it directed at LGBT activism as parents gained a new window into their children’s curriculum when schooling went remote during the Covid-19 pandemic …

Gay rights have since been lumped in with trans rights in the popular imagination, which may have chipped away some public support for gay marriage at the margins. …

Bev Jackson, co-founder of the LGB Alliance, said the decline in support for same-sex marriage had causes on both the Left and the Right. “Blame for the fall in US support for gay marriage lies partly with the homophobic religious Right. But equally to blame are treacherous organisations like GLAAD and the ACLU which promote insane, deeply unpopular concepts such as gender self-ID and child ‘transition’,” she said. “Gender identity ideologues have been riding on LGB’s coattails for too long, and they’re helping to destroy support for the rights we fought for decades to win.”

Laurel Duggan

Junk info

Junk info is often false info, but it isn’t junk because it’s false. It’s junk because it has no practical use; it doesn’t make your life better, and it doesn’t improve your understanding. Even lies can be nourishing; the works of Dostoevsky are fiction, yet can teach you more about humans than any psychology textbook. Meanwhile, most verified facts do nothing to improve your life or understanding, and are, to paraphrase Nietzsche, as useful as knowledge of the chemical composition of water to someone who is drowning.

Gurwinder

Privileging victims, real and imagined

The intuitive moral structure of our modern social imaginary prioritizes victimhood, sees selfhood in psychological terms, regards traditional sexual codes as oppressive and life denying, and places a premium on the individual’s right to define his or her own existence.

Carl R. Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Safetyism today

They want revolutionary ends, but they want to hide behind establishment credibility.

Jonah Goldberg, describing the successor ideology, which has famously “march[ed] through the institutions.”

Tipsy the squish

I finally had to replace the color toner cartridges on my laser printer. I opened the red-and-white Canon box I’d ordered months ago. I found unfamiliar packaging of the cartridges and unfamiliar cartridge configuration. I figured out how to install them and then looked for the instructions on recycling them (back to Canon). It was nowhere to be found.

Having seen the word “compatible” a few times, I looked more closely at the box. Where the word Canon should have been, the word “Cartridge” appeared.

I remembered when I purchased them my shock at the low price, but I double- and triple-checked. I thought I was getting an inexplicable price on Canon goods. They still conned me with the Canon-looking box.

Now I’ve got three laser cartridges I can’t recycle, and it bothers me more than such a thing is supposed to bother a conservative.

Which reminds me again of how close “conservative” today is to “barbarian.” My gut-identification today remains “conservative,” but my considered identification is center-right.

Progress

Progress should be about improving the quality of life and human flourishing. We make a grave error when we assume this is the same as new tech and economic cost-squeezing.

Ted Gioia, I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress

GD Misinformation

Mainstream coverage of this issue is a buffet of sanctimonious overclaiming. It says authoritatively that kids in the US can’t go on blockers or hormones prior to lengthy, in-depth assessment (false). That no one under 18 is getting surgery (false). That the worldwide rise in referrals to youth GD clinics is almost entirely the result of reduced stigmatization (no one knows). That GD, or the perception that one has GD, can’t spread through adolescent social networks (almost certainly false on the basis of anecdotal evidence and any familiarity with developmental psychology). That it’s a ‘myth’ that significant number of kids who believe themselves to be trans will later feel differently (false, according to all the existing data). That only a tiny percentage of people detransition (we have no data at all on this in the context of youth gender care in the States).

What the Media Gets Wrong on Gender Reassignment. This is from 2021 when the elites were uniformly purveying lies about Covid, gender dysphoria and who knows what all else. Things have gotten markedly better in recent months on adolescent gender dysphoria.

Capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball

For many of our applicants—and this, of course, is what the program is about, what the humanities are about—learning has, or ought to have, an existential weight. Beneath their talk of education, of unplugging from technology, of having time for creativity and solitude, I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of ‘relevance,’ the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity. The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.

William Deresiewicz, Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul H/T Frank Bruni (who led me to actually read a piece I’d only skimmed). Ted Gioia, My Lifetime Reading Plan, practiced it before Deresiewicz preached it.

Losers

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality-without exploiting them for fun and profit.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

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.