Tag: Evangelicalism

Bigger on the inside

My last few Sunday blogs felt pretty “meh” to me, but not this one. The post quoted in my first item particularly grabbed me as a true and wise observation that I needed to hear.

Bigger on the inside

[W]hen my friend Leah Libresco Sargeant talks about her conversion to Catholicism, she sometimes notes that focusing on the conversion story is a little bizarre. Like imagine (this is the analogy she’s used) that the Pevensie children come back from Narnia, and they start telling people about it—and everyone’s reaction is, “Oh sure, talking lion, mysterious lands, terrible betrayals and redemptions, I get it. Tell us more about the wardrobe!”

There’s been a rebound in adult conversions to Catholicism. This just seems to be true by now, as far as I can tell. … [T]here are all kinds of questions one could raise …

But the question online-people seem to want to talk about, instead, is, “Are these people converting for the right reasons?” There’s a lot of Discourse about whether people are coming to the Catholic Church because it’s right-wing (? not the most obvious option here but okay), or because they want to be manly men (hmm), or because of Catholic “influencers” etc. To put the fear or criticism most charitably, it’s a fear that people are entering the Church for a political persona, not an encounter with Jesus Christ.

And yet I guess all of this seems to me like an obsession with the wardrobe. Nobody stays in the Faith for the same reasons they converted. The Church is bigger on the inside. Having entered, you may discover how much there really is, beyond the little alcove where you happened to find a door.

…

So the real thing here is that when people enter the Church through small, weird, insufficient, or warped doors, they need wise guides to show them the path deeper in, into the heart of the Church ….

Eve Tushnet, Nobody Converts Right. Tushnet is a convert to the Roman Catholic Church, but her observations fit Orthodoxy as well (or perhaps even better; the press seems to have discovered Orthodoxy and to be hinting that it’s a dark masculinist and nationalist hotbed).

May you find yourself in a Church this morning that has depths to explore beyond “the Wardrobe,” that isn’t all “alcove.” And if you’re an old-timer there, may you be a wise guide to newcomers.

Nobody sticks right, either

At the conference, I had drinks with a devout Lutheran friend. We discovered that we shared a love for Carlos Eire’s stupendous history of Early Modern Western Christianity, Reformations. I told my friend that reading the book has caused me to realize, to my personal shock, that had I been alive back then, I might well have been tempted to join Luther, simply because of my personal temperament (that is, easily inflamed by corruption and abuse). To my surprise, my Lutheran interlocutor said reading the book made them realize that, given their deeply conservative temperament, they probably would have stayed Catholic. We got a good laugh out of that.

Rod Dreher

As hard as it must be

It would be silly for physicists to complain, “The truth about quantum mechanics is too hard!”  In the same way, it would be silly for us to complain that the truth about God is too hard.  The truth about God is just exactly as hard as it has to be in order to fit how things really are with Him.

J Budziszewski

Losing the trail

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

I didn’t remember that quote at all, but it perfectly fits the arc of the narrative in this, one of the most important books in my spiritual journey.

Theology as infomercial

Growing up in church, we were taught that Jesus was the answer to all our problems. We were taught that there was a circle-shaped hole in our heart and that we had tried to fill it with the square pegs of sex, drugs, and rock and roll; but only the circle peg of Jesus could fill our hole. I became a Christian based, in part, on this promise, but the hole never really went away. To be sure, I like Jesus, and I still follow him, but the idea that Jesus will make everything better is a lie. It’s basically biblical theology translated into the language of infomercials. The truth is, the apostles never really promise Jesus is going to make everything better here on earth.

Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Agree or disagree, there’s something worthy to chew on: Where in scripture is the promise of Jesus filling up a hole in you and making everything better? My initial, long-ago commitment to Christ was not based on that, but I heard that message a great deal in my teenage years.

(I was surprised to stumble across this quote because the book, which I read after it got a lot of buzz a few years ago, was almost completely unmemorable to me otherwise.)

Talking the talk

A Christian polemic—a Christian serrated edge—must be based on the Word of God, and not based on the sensibilities of men who spend Sunday mornings swaying side to side, moaning along to the newest Hillsong release.

Promotional blurb for provocateur Doug Wilson’s book The Serrated Edge. This isn’t a book or an author I would recommend, but having come across it, I’m reminded of how Wilson appeals to a certain sort (and such once was I).

Hannah Anderson profiles Wilson:

In a weird twist, evangelicals are more likely to follow the person who talks or writes about the importance of virtue than the person who is actually virtuous.
…
when you pull back the curtain to reveal the man behind it, you find someone with a history of speaking philosophically about the goodness of common life while also undermining it. You find a man who was raised within mainstream evangelicalism who intentionally chose marginality.

You find a man who speaks a lot about submission to authority while refusing to submit himself. You find a man who easily discusses the most extreme hypotheticals, seemingly unmoved by how they would actually affect the person sitting in front of him. 

Wilson is not dangerous because he is an ideologue. He is dangerous because he’s comfortable entertaining radical ideas to further pragmatic ends, knowing that if they go wrong, he can always retreat to the safety of the theoretical. In this way, Wilson finds a natural home among the protected class of lawmakers and bureaucrats in Washington who seem beyond the reach of voters—who increasingly engage in the work of public policy as if it were a game or reality show, who are insulated from the consequences of their choices, who remain theoretically detached while others suffer and even die under their watch.

Hannah Anderson, The Great and Powerful Doug

Discernment

Sometimes the God Within isn’t God at all, but just the ego or the libido, using spirituality as a convenient gloss for its own desires and impulses. Sometimes your books and teachers are right, and what seems your Highest Thought is really emanating from the lower reaches of your soul.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

What is an evangelical?

For quick surveys, often tied to elections, national polls tend to measure evangelicalism by self-ID. That is, if a respondent says she is an evangelical, so she is.

This is a defensible method: replicable and quick. And it generally produces serviceable results. But it also makes evangelicalism whatever survey participants suppose it to be, which is how we have 7 to 20 percent of American Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and people of no religious affiliation telling pollsters they’re evangelical Christians.

Bonnie Kristian, There Will Never Be Another Billy Graham. The title is derived from the once-useful, now-fading, definition of an evangelical as “someone who likes Billy Graham.”

The difficulty in defining “evangelical” may be a problem, but to bring today’s post full circle, a larger problem seems to be that it’s not bigger on the inside. It’s all alcove, all the time.

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

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.

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.

Is Evangelicalism Protestant?

In recent years, I’ve read a lot of American religious history, and I’ve shared snippets of those histories constantly. This year brought a particular question into focus:

A theological Rip Van Winkle falling asleep in the early 1740s and waking up half a century later would have found Americans speaking his language with such a decidedly strange inflection as to constitute a new dialect; yet those Americans would have been hard-pressed to tell him why and how their speech had grown so different from his own.

…

The striking contrast was that amid America’s post-Revolutionary tide of antiformalism, antitraditionalism, democratization, and decentralization, trust in the Bible did not weaken but became immeasurably stronger. It was still “the Bible alone,” as proclaimed during the Reformation, that American Protestants trusted. But it was also “the Bible alone” of all historic religious authorities that survived the antitraditional tide and then undergirded the remarkable evangelical expansion of the early nineteenth century. … Deference to inherited authority of bishops and presbyters was largely gone, obeisance to received creeds was largely gone, willingness to heed the example of the past was largely gone. What remained was the power of intuitive reason, the authority of written documents that the people approved for themselves, and the Bible alone.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

By the 1840s one analyst of American Protestantism concluded, after surveying fifty-three American sects, that the principle “No creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion. John W. Nevin surmised that this emphasis grew out of a popular demand for “private judgment” and was “tacitly if not openly conditioned always by the assumption that every man is authorized and bound to get at this authority in a direct way for himself, through the medium simply of his own single mind.” Many felt the exhilarating hope that democracy had opened an immediate access to biblical truth for all persons of good will. Americans found it difficult to realize, however, that a commitment to private judgment could drive people apart, even as it raised beyond measure their hopes for unity.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity.

I highly, highly recommend both Noll and Hatch if American religious history is of interest to you. Their two tomes are among my most heavily-highlighted (along with Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, which sort of sets the stage for America’s religious tragedy). But I never synthesized them explicitly.

One of the big ideas that captured my imagination this year, and that seemed at least a start on my overdue synthesis, is that Evangelicalism is not unequivocally Protestant. It took Brad East to water and fertilize Noll’s and Hatch’s seeds:

As I use it, “evangelical” names non-Catholic Christians who are “low church.” By this I mean that evangelicals are:

1) biblicist, meaning the Bible isn’t just chief among many authorities, including church tradition, but the one and only authority;

2) autonomous, meaning their organizational leadership structures are either local or, if trans-local, then voluntary and quite loose;

3) egalitarian, meaning they either do not ordain pastors or, if they do, then the qualifications for and prerogatives of the ministry are modest;

4) entrepreneurial, meaning churches are often analogous to start-up business ventures, founded and led by charismatic individuals who cast a vision for the community;

5) evangelistic, meaning proselytization is high on the agenda, using money, grassroots training, and parachurch ministries to support foreign missions and local efforts at gaining new converts;

6) affective, meaning their piety is focused on the heart, which is more likely to find expression in music, song, and spontaneous spiritual gifts than in robes, rituals, and sacraments.

Brad East, describing

a third species in the genus of Western Christianity. Neither Catholic nor Protestant, it has taken more than two centuries to come into clear view. It goes by many names, but the best is also the most hotly contested: evangelical.

But that third species has changed:

[A]s I have documented almost obsessively, biblicist churches are moving in a post-biblicist direction while younger generations have utterly lost even the rudiments of biblical literacy, along with literal literacy. (Translation: They don’t read, period.)

Beyond such literacy—beyond intensive, universal lay Bible study (should we call it IULBS?)—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.

Brad East, Biblicist churches that don’t read the Bible

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.

Sunday April 6

Perennial favorite

I believe that I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Religion I

In the pre-modern era in the West, as in much of the world today still, there was no such thing as ‘religion’. The Christian story was the basis of peoples’ understanding of reality itself: it was widely assumed that it represented the truth about existence, and that no part of life could therefore be outside of it. There was no ‘religion’, because there was no notion that this truth was somehow optional or partial, any more than we today might assume that gravity or the roundness of the Earth were facts we could choose to engage with only on Sunday mornings.

Paul Kingsnorth, The Migration of the Holy

Religion II

Another book, less exhaustive but both more enjoyable and more useful to me, is Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept by Brent Nongbri. He begins by recounting a conversation with his father in India, asking what word in their own Khasi language corresponded to the English word “religion.” The answer was a loan-word from Bengali, meaning simply “customs.” They had no word of their own for the category of action English-speakers thought of as religion.

Father Silouan Thompson, Why I’m Religious, and Not Spiritual.

Morality

The nature of true morality does not consist in our sentiments – how we feel or imagine ourselves to think about right and wrong. It does not even consist in how we act. Rather, true morality consists in who we are. Another way of describing this is to understand true morality as the acquisition of virtue, the forming and shaping of our character in the image and likeness of Christ. Mere moral rules and norms in the hands of a person whose character is flawed is similar to a child with an AK-47. The outcome is always predictable.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Is “Evangelical” a useful word?

I am still a newcomer to the world of Artificial Intelligence, but I’ve found that it’s kind of useful for giving me the broad contours of an issue.

This week, I posed the following question to three of the leading AI services:

Summarize, with hyperlinks, the discussions among American Evangelicals (and Evangelical-adjacent) on whether the label “evangelical” has any remaining utility.

I believe the following should be shareable links to the results:

What prompted my question was the seeming incoherence of using the same label to describe, for instance, prosperity gospel flake Paula White Kane and Tim Keller. Gemini was the only service that flagged the identity issue (the definition of “Evangelical”) explicitly.

Mind-bender

Our salvation doesn’t depend on our opinions. That’s hard to grasp. at least for someone formed as I was. I believe it, but don’t fully grasp it.

There have been orthodox Saints who spent their lives in heretical churches because the bishop in their area was a heretic. Today, I think “we” would tell them to leave and start an orthodox church. Their ecclesiology was stronger than ours.

I think this sort of thing ramifies more widely than I’ve yet grasped.

Grow up!

The man who denies his relationship with God, who refuses to be His son, is not a real man but a man stunted, the unfinished plan of a man.

Father Alexander Elchaninov, Diary of a Russian Priest

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

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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.

Wednesday, 10/16/24

Not Politics

Iatrogenic Customer Dissatisfaction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gratitude Grievance

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

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

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

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

…

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

David Heinemeier Hansson

The Meaning of Existence

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

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

Les Murray, New Selected Poems

Religion (whatever that is)

Papering over an abyss of waste and horror

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

…

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

…

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

Miles Smith at Mere Orthodoxy.

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

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

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

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

Miles Smith, Reading the Exvangelicals

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

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

Politics

New Nadir

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

Via The Dispatch.

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

Kamala’s best case?

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

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

Poetic justice

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

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

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

William McGurn

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

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

Russian 1988, China 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire

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

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

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Sunday after Theophany

Mythbusting I

Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Paradox

The quest for unity that drove people to discard formal theology for the Scriptures drove them further asunder.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

“Every theological vagabond and peddler may drive here his bungling trade, without passport or license, and sell his false ware at pleasure.”

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, quoting Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, who in turn is quoting a mainstream Protestant pastor’s lament about the new sects.

Conversion

“There is no point in converting people to Christ if they do not convert their vision of the world and of life, since Christ then becomes merely a symbol for all that we love and want already –without Him. This kind of Christianity is more terrifying than agnosticism or hedonism.”

Rod Dreher, Schmemann and Social Justice (quoting Fr. Alexander Schmemann)

Listening to that other voice

[T]he real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day.  Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for moments at first.  But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us.  It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through.  He never talked vague, idealistic gas.  When he said, “Be perfect,” He meant it.  He meant that we must go in for the full treatment.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, via J Budziszewski

Sin or regrettable failure

In Orthodoxy, you won’t commit mortal sin for missing liturgy. There is no concept of “mortal sin”. That’s just not how the Orthodox “model” works. You are supposed to be at liturgy, not because you fear punishment, but because being present at liturgy is an aid to theosis. It draws you closer and closer to unity with God. On the occasion I miss liturgy, I regret it, and if I don’t have a good reason (traveling, or sick), I confess it when I next go to confession. But I don’t lie there fearing for my everlasting soul.

Rod Dreher

The power of repentance

The demons are still with us, but they have lost. They and their chief, the devil, are still trying to draw us into damnation with them, but they will never again wield the power they once did. All they have left to them is deception. Against their deceptions we have humility in repentance, and the reason that weapon is so powerful is because by humbling ourselves we join ourselves to Jesus Christ, who in His humility threw down that great dragon and banished him forever at the point of the swords of the archangels, angels, and all the saints.

Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen De Young, The Lord of Spirits (book, not podcast)

Without comment

It’s dangerous to try analyzing a Christian tradition that’s not, and never has been, one’s own — though I’ve probably done so repeatedly. This time, I’ll leave Catholic commentary to a card-carrying Catholic, author of the authorized biography of John Paul II:

To make matters worse from a journalistic standpoint, the only witnesses cited in defense of today’s papal autocracy were such acolytes of the pontificate as Austen Ivereigh, David Gibson, and Massimo Faggioli—the functional equivalent of Tucker Carlson writing a piece entitled, “Donald Trump takes on unprecedented attacks from his opponents” and sourcing it with quotes from Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert. This isn’t journalism; it’s blatant advocacy. And it should be named as such.

George Weigel, The MAD Magazine Caricature of U.S. Catholicism

Father or Fathers?

Western Christian theology is founded on the phronema of Augustine. The East did not acquire the mind of one Father, but the mind of the Fathers.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

There’s a tremendous amount distilled there. You can’t read Augustine’s Confessions and easily deny that he was a saint. But he was peerless in the West and was not in serious dialog with the many Greek-speaking Fathers in the East, so he went awry in ways that have ramified mightily in the West and that accordingly lead us in the East to keep him at arm’s length.

Seems about right

The collapse of U.S. Mainline Protestantism also included a collapse in Protestant confidence, intellectual life, and public influence. Modern Evangelicalism lacked the institutions and traditions of centuries-old Mainline groups. They typically could not compete directly with vigorous Catholic intellectual life. And so rising Evangelicalism often relied on Catholic intellectual resources to make needed public arguments.

Mark Tooley

Mythbusting II

Looking for a news hook? Duke’s latest report in 2021 (.pdf here) showed evangelicals to be the nation’s least politicized Christian grouping. Only 43% of local evangelical congregations participated in even one of the 12 types of political involvements that were surveyed, compared with the more liberal “mainline” Protestants (at 52%), Catholics (81%) and Black Protestants (82%) or (not part of this study) the well-known activism at Jewish synagogues and Muslim mosques.

The Guy takes the savvy author to task on one detail, the tic of applying words like “Christian” or “church” while referring only to white evangelicals. We’re told that these past few years the radicals “seemed poised to capture the controls inside of the American Church.” True for Catholicism? For Black Protestantism? How about for mainstream evangelical denominations and parachurch groups?

Latest dissection of Trump-Era evangelicalism offers one dose of insider savvy — GetReligion.

“Tic.” I like that and should remember it.

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

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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