Tag: Texas

Potpourri (Happy July)

Bravery and patriotism

"Her superiors — men many years older — are hiding behind executive privilege, anonymity and intimidation," Cheney said. "Her bravery and patriotism were awesome to behold. Little girls all across this great nation are seeing what it really means to love this country, what it really means to be a patriot."

Liz Cheney, speaking of Cassidy Hutchcinson’s, Tuesday’s blockbuster January 6 Committe witness.

Good news from North Korea

The cryptocurrency crash has likely depleted North Korean coffers full of stolen cryptocurrency. To raise revenue while skirting sanctions, the country has invested in bands of hackers to steal hundreds of millions in crypto heists in recent years, Josh Smith reports for Reuters. The U.S. Treasury put the value of one theft at nearly $615 million pre-crash. It’s hard to estimate how much of that haul the crash has wiped out. “If the same attack happened today, the Ether currency stolen would be worth a bit more than $230 million, but North Korea swapped nearly all of that for Bitcoin, which has had separate price movements,” Smith writes. $230 million is still nothing to sneeze at, but North Korea has some major expenses to cover. “One estimate from the Geneva-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons says North Korea spends about $640 million per year on its nuclear arsenal. The country’s gross domestic product was estimated in 2020 to be around $27.4 billion, according to South Korea’s central bank.”

The Morning Dispatch

Very bad news from the Texas GOP

The Texas GOP added some interesting planks to its platform this year—among them, a resolution declaring the 2020 presidential election fraudulent. Augustus Bayard breaks down what else you need to know about what Republican delegates got up to in Texas.

The Morning Dispatch. That may be the worst of the news, or it may not. The platform also calls for repeal of the 16th Amendment (authorizing federal income taxes) and a referendum on secession.

Bless their hearts!

Mission Creeps

Institutions sometimes don’t really want to win.

The "Human Rights Campaign" won big when Obergefell was decided, but instead of throwing a celebratory party and then closing up shop, it went looking for new issues, seemingly having settled on pushing transgender ideology even though T hasn’t got much to do with LGB. It’s only natural for people who’ve dined out on a now-resolved progressive issue to want another one in its place. (This is not unrelated to the Iron law of institutions)

Some pro-life organizations may now be in a similar position. If any of them had the mission of reversing Roe v. Wade, their mission is accomplished. Those whose mission was passage of a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution still have some legitimate mission. Those whose mission is to end abortion in America need never cease operation (because that will never happen).

But the specter of "mission creep" looms. How far can an organization go in supporting collateral projects to make society more hospitable to women, infants, and embryos in order to reduce the felt need for abortion? Are pro-life organizations now going to pivot to backing child tax credits, WIC, SCHIP, "artificial" contraception, and other collateral causes to show their compassion for women?

Of course they are, at least some of them. Should they? Where’s the line? Are supporters who drop away because of "conservative" opposition to such government programs to be excoriated as not really pro life?

By rights, pro-life people from the political side should consider pivoting the dollars and volunteer hours to the culture-building side. If they do, though, I suspect most of their Republican pals will put them on call-blocking.

The only party I know that’s both anti-abortion and friendly to building a more family-friendly culture is the American Solidarity Party.

Just sayin’.

A kind of genius, a kind of charlatan

Taubes soon achieved a kind of mocking multi-version notoriety as a kind of charlatan. On one occasion, some Harvard professors began a discussion about the theory of the soul of Bertram of Hildesheim, whose notions, they posited, were an intermediate form between the Thomistic and Scotist schools. After listening intently, Taubes went on to expound brilliantly and in detail about Bertram, astonishing all present with his profound and comprehensive knowledge — until he was informed that no such person existed. It is, of course, easy to ridicule such pretension, but Muller, while aware of Taubes’s many dubious qualities, is always at pains to point out as well his acumen and insight. The Bertram incident, Muller notes, “also reflects his talent for placing a book or thinker in a field of intellectual coordinates, and deducing what the key tenets ought to have been. To pull off the stunt he actually had to know a great deal about Thomism (i.e. the followers of Thomas Aquinas) and Scotism (i.e. the followers of Duns Scotus).”

Steven E. Aschheim, Brilliant Scholar or Predatory Charlatan?: On Jerry Z. Muller’s “Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes”

The Noble Cause

Are

the most vociferous supporters of Donald Trump [falling into] a determined repetition of assertions – especially that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, but also concerning COVID–19 and many other matters – that wouldn’t stand up even to casual scrutiny, and therefore don’t receive that scrutiny[?]

That sounds to Alan Jacobs uncomfortably like the Lost Cause/Noble Antebellum South lies with which the South has dispositionally flirted for 150 years now.

Why Jesse Singal remains a man of the left

Question: Where’s your red line with the left? You frequently criticize people who jump ship to the right out of disgust with the left, but for you personally, what would it take? —Keese

For every crazy story about something happening on the left, I promise you there is an equivalent one from the right. It happens to be that there are more liberals in media and academia, so there’s an endless supply of stories coming out of these places about various forms of overreach and radicalism, but that doesn’t mean the average journalist or academic is crazy. I mean, see above — most folks just want to do their jobs and not get fired by a psychotic 25-year-old.

More broadly, I think this is the wrong way to approach politics. I don’t see “the left” as a social club I’m a member of because I like the people in it and approve of their conduct. I see it as a loose set of beliefs about the way the world should work that I view as much better and more reasonable than what the right has on offer. I really think luck determines almost everything, and that society should be built in a way where rather than endlessly reward those who already have gotten lucky, we do what we can to lift up the unlucky to a decent standard of living. I think a lot of bootstraps discourse is nonsense, or close to it, when you look into the specifics.

I’m not laying out a particularly detailed or sophisticated philosophy here, and I’m of course going light on policy specifics, but the conservative movement is not a welcoming place for those who hold those beliefs. So I don’t think any number of insane blowups on the left would cause me to “switch” — it would have to be some sort of deeper ideological transformation that I don’t think is in the cards. I’m too old.

Jesse Singal

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

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.

Gleanings, 11/9/21

Todays posting has zero politics (I resolutely deny that the judiciary is political). That’s not to say no draft item was political, but that I felt sullied by their presence and deleted them.

Forgetting what it means to be fully human

Of course, there are hands somewhere in the chain of events that produce the stuff of our lives. In a globalized economy, the hands may be a world away. Many items, such as clothing and electronics are rarely made in America anymore. My home county in South Carolina once boasted the highest concentration of textile mills in the world. Today, there are none.

We are a people who eat without farming and are clothed without weaving. Our lives are abstracted from the activities that sustain them. We are alienated from human existence, though we rarely notice.

I have an instinct that this alienation creates a “thinness” to our existence. We lose connection and communion and wander amid ideas and not realities. Economists describe all of this as a “service economy,” meaning that what we do is abstracted from growing and making.

…

I am not a Luddite who believes that a world with mechanical devices is inherently bad. I do believe, however, that it is possible to forget much of what it is to be human. There are always hands somewhere in the chain of events that give us what we need and use. However, when it is never our own hands, something is lost.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, ‌The Distraction Delusion

Biggest Supreme Court debut

In law school, I got the best score in a class of 100 or so on Introductory Constitutional Law. Maybe that’s because I was very interested in what government could not lawfully do, whereas my progressive classmates didn’t much care about annoying words like "cannot lawfully" when it came to pursuing their goals. I literally cannot remember any other student voicing moral objection, for instance, to academics lying, in their Amicus brief opposing capital punishment, about what the social science data showed.

So although I’ve soured (again) on general news and on politics, I follow several smart legal blogs and podcasts. I’m not even opposed to gossipy items like this:

In the years that I’ve been following SCOTUS, who has had the biggest high-court debut? I’d probably say then-SG Elena Kagan, whose first oral argument before the Court was in a little case called Citizens United in 2009.

But Texas’s solicitor general, Judd E. Stone II, is not far behind. On Monday, he presented his first arguments to the Supreme Court in two matters you might have heard of: Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson and United States v. Texas, aka the challenges to S.B. 8, Texas’s controversial new abortion law.

I’ll discuss those cases more below. For now, I’ll just observe that Stone seemed to get the most buzz of the four advocates, who included two former Lawyers of the Week—U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and former Texas SG Jonathan Mitchell, the mastermind behind S.B. 8’s clever design—and Marc Hearron, senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights.

How did Stone do? Not surprisingly, assessments on Twitter reflected observers’ views on the merits of the controversial cases, with a self-described liberal calling Stone an “idiot” and a self-described conservative calling him “incredible.”

Speaking for myself, I thought that Stone acquitted himself very well, especially for a first-time advocate handling two extremely difficult, high-stakes cases. He fielded a flurry of challenging questions, not just from the three liberals—especially Justice Kagan, who along with Justice Alito might be the Court’s best questioner—but even from the conservatives.

And whether or not you liked the substance of Stone’s responses, there’s no disputing that he kept his cool throughout the proceedings (when many of us might have wet ourselves or fainted). I agree with Steven Mazie of the Economist, who tweeted that “given the totally bonkers law he’s been assigned to defend, Judd Stone is pretty unflappable.”

David Lat’s Original Jurisdiction blog

Seriously: Defending a deliberate, brazen and byzantine hack of the legal system one’s very first time at SCOTUS would be about as (ahem!) interesting as a day could ever be.

Struggling for the right rationale

My favorite legal blog is Volokh Conspiracy, a very active multi-author collaboration. Much fat being chewed there on Texas S.B. 8:

The principle at stake is that state governments cannot gut judicial protection for a constitutional right.

…

if Texas prevails in this case, it and other states could use similar tools to undermine a wide range of other constitutional rights, including gun rights, property rights, free speech rights, and others.

…

If a state enacts a statute that blocks meaningful federal judicial review of laws that might violate constitutional rights, courts should not permit such a subterfuge to succeed. If doing so requires overruling or limiting previous precedents on issues like sovereign immunity and limitations on the plaintiffs’ ability to sue to enjoin judges (as opposed to other types of state officials), then that is what should be done. These latter principles are far less important than ensuring judicial protection for constitutional rights, and therefore should give way in cases where there is an unavoidable conflict between the two.

…

The Supreme Court need only rule that sovereign immunity must give way in a case where the only alternative is to shield from challenge a state law that could create a serious "chilling effect" on a constitutional right. Such "chilling effects" already justify preenforcement lawsuits in a number of other contexts, such as freedom of speech. The case for such prioritization is especially strong when we are dealing with rights protected against states by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Ilya Somin, joining the chorus that "you can’t let Texas get away with this."

Stephen E. Sachs, whose ideas Somin is critiquing, files a rejoinder, of course, and for those who like getting into the legal weeds, it helps show just how rich a discussion topic Texas’s [expletive deleted] law is.

NFL

The coin just dropped Sunday on how different NFL helmets look now that they’re trying, through both officiating changes and technology, to reduce brain injuries. They’ve all got some kind of inset plates on the "forehead" of the helmet likeliest to be involved in dangerous hits. Oddly, I noticed the tighter officiating before I noticed the helmet changes (that’s odd because I have only recently begun watching football again, and I don’t read about it).

Now that I’ve given my amateur impression, I offer you a link to NFL talk about the subject. There are other links if you search "nfl helmet technology improvement."

UATX

One of the very best things about freedom and entrepreneurship is that when things get bad, innovators can create better alternatives.

[M]any universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized. At our most prestigious schools, the primary incentive is to function as finishing school for the national and global elite. Amidst the brick and ivy, these students entertain ever-more-inaccessible theories while often just blocks away their neighbors figure out how to scratch out a living.

Pano Kanelos, ‌We Can’t Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We’re Starting a New One..

Kanelos’s new university is getting a lot of buzz on the Right, though not all the dissidents affiliating with it are by any means conservative.

Columbia Core Curriculum

Neither coldly academic nor hotly confessional, “Rescuing Socrates” is a warm, appealing narrative of how it feels to be “thrust into a conversation” with fellow students about life’s most “serious and unsettling questions.” Because it is a narrative, the book does not impose what Mr. Montás calls “an artificial compression” on the subtle and cumulative workings of this type of education. Instead he gradually reveals how the process worked. “Many of the conversations . . . went over my head,” the author writes, “but like a recurring tide that leaves behind a thin layer of sediment each time it comes, eventually forming recognizable structures, the intensive reading and twice-weekly discussions were coalescing into an altogether new sense of who I was.”

Martha Bayles, ‌‘Rescuing Socrates’ Review: Great Books, Greatly Missed

Our position is ineffable, hence undebatable

You know personally I’ve been achingly specific about my critiques of social justice politics, but fine – no woke, it’s a “dogwhistle” for racism. (The term “dogwhistle” is a way for people to simply impute attitudes you don’t hold onto you, to make it easier to dismiss criticism, for the record.) But the same people say there’s no such thing as political correctness, and they also say identity politics is a bigoted term. So I’m kind of at a loss. Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here … right now it sure looks like you don’t want to be named because you don’t want to be criticized.

Freddie deBoer, ‌Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand

On a related note:

Funny thing about culture wars: No one ever seems to think the left launches them. Take the “1619 Project,” an effort by the New York Times to recast America’s true founding from 1776 to 1619, when a privateer ship brought 20 kidnapped African slaves to Virginia. The project has also been adapted for American classrooms.

“Yet when parents object to it, as they did in Virginia, the Times accuses the GOP of stoking a culture war,” columnist Michael Goodwin noted in Sunday’s New York Post. Never mind that the “1619 Project” is itself a culture war salvo.

…

Implicit in accusations of Republican culture wars is that some uncouth person, probably motivated by hate, is raising an issue that American liberals have deemed beyond discussion in polite society, whether it’s abortion, public-school curriculums, guns, crime or something else. So instead of honest political debate, we get what we saw in Virginia—Mr. McAuliffe’s claim about Mr. Youngkin’s “racist dog whistles,” the Lincoln Project’s sending phony white supremacists to smear Mr. Youngkin, or an MSNBC commentator explaining that the election of Winsome Sears, an African-American woman, as lieutenant governor is somehow a victory for white supremacy.

William McGurn, Wall Street Journal

Read what labels?

While health pundits tell us to “read the labels,” I tell my cardiology patients to eat food that requires no label. An apple looks like an apple and Oreos don’t grow on trees.

John Miller, M.D., letter to the Wall Street Journal

For what it’s worth — and I think it may be worth a lot

Rolls-Royce will begin to develop small modular nuclear reactors after securing £455m ($617m) from Britain’s government and a small group of private investors. Such reactors are considered a cheaper and quicker way to harness nuclear energy. Kwasi Kwarteng, the business and energy secretary, said they presented, “a once in a lifetime opportunity to deploy more low carbon energy than ever before”.

The Economist Daily Briefing for November 9.

Brazening it out

Meinecke interprets the ideological conflict between Germany and her opponents in these terms. He thinks that Germany was accused of immorality only because she frankly declared that Might was Right, while the Anglo-Saxon powers, who acted no less unscrupulously, continued to pay lip-service to morality.

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge

Newsworthiness

The Justice Department announced Monday it has indicted a 22-year-old Ukrainian national and a 28-year-old Russian national for their involvement in a series of ransomware attacks on businesses and government entities—including this summer’s Kaseya attack—and is seeking to extradite the 22-year-old from Poland where he was arrested. The Justice Department also said it seized more than $6 million in ransom payments, and the Treasury Department on Monday sanctioned Russian cryptocurrency exchange Chatex for allegedly facilitating those payments.

The Morning Dispatch for November 9. I didn’t see this item in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. But then I didn’t see this there, either.

"Newsworthiness" is an interesting concept, and varying interpretations of it is where a lot of "media bias" lies — not how they cover stuff, but what stuff they cover in the first place.

A folder for the unclassifiable

I’m going to need a new Obsidian folder captioned something like "Just Because It’s So Good." I’m not sure what all will go in beyond Garrison Keillor’s semi-weekly reveries.

21st-Century Primatology

[O]ne feels as though they have a professional obligation [to be on social media]. When Jane Goodall became a primatologist, studying chimpanzees, she didn’t stay in posh Hampstead, the place of her birth. No, she went to Tanzania where the chimps lived and bred and flung monkey-dung at each other when agitated. Similarly, if you’re in the a-hole observation business, you have to go where they live and breed and fling dung at each other. Meaning, you have to at least occasionally read Twitter.

Matt Labash

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

Mildly offensive to all

1

There has been a fair amount of terse commentary in my field of vision on the question of “Is R.R. Reno correct in this assessment?” By “this assessment, I assume the reference is to the conclusion, from which I’ll quote a great deal:

I’m willing to bet that hostility toward Kavanaugh increases proportionally with socio-economic status. It is an elite rage of law professors and management consultants. It’s the rage of the powerful, which is always more dangerous than the rage of the downtrodden. It finds articulate, well-placed leaders who can draw upon fully theorized narratives of oppression. They position themselves to speak for all who resent exclusion or exploitation, actual or perceived. They draw upon an intersectionality of rage.

For this reason, the decision by the Democrats to turn the Kavanaugh hearings into a theater of rage was a dangerous ploy. Perhaps I am even over-stating the element of calculation in the decision. Because this rage affects the powerful, Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris, and the others may themselves be animated by it—rage’s instruments, rather than its masters. If so, the situation for the Democrats is more perilous still.

Donald Trump raises the emotional stakes of political debate. This has been the key to his political success. But his success has come at a cost. Trump’s politics of rage unsettles establishment Republicans. Staid suburban voters who are moderate conservatives see Trump as a destabilizing figure in our body politic, putting a hard ceiling on his support.

In this context, Democrats have much to gain by presenting themselves as the responsible adults, the ego to Trump’s id. Dianne Feinstein and most other Democratic leaders are ultra-establishment figures with no interest in upheaval. Soon they will pivot back to playing the “responsible party” against Trump and Republican “extremism.” But the rage on display during the Kavanaugh hearings will not be easy to contain. It is fueling Leftist populism, which is on the rise. It highlights the Left’s own destabilizing politics of rage and destruction.

Ever since Trump’s ascent, the strongest arguments against him have focused on his temperamental unfitness for the presidency and his polarizing effect on our society. These are arguments for establishment competence and sobriety. In the aftermath of the rage-driven strategy to derail Kavanaugh’s appointment (quite different from the quiet, procedural tactics of Mitch McConnell, which derailed Merrick Garland’s appointment), these arguments are harder to make.

The Democrats may imagine that they, like Trump, will benefit from the politics of rage. But the Democrats’ power flows from their monopoly on the “responsible center.” The last season of leftwing rage came as the 1960s crashed to a close, and it did great harm to the Democratic Party. This time is different, in that both sides are drawing upon reservoirs of rage. But in my estimation, the Democrats will suffer more than the Republicans, because the Democrats have long been the establishment party. The politics of rage are far more likely to undermine than to renew the Ivy League–Goldman Sachs–Silicon Valley liberalism that has stood astride our politics since 1945, for rage always upsets the calculations by which establishments maintain their grip.

The analysis seems too varied to support a wager, so I’ll not play my chips. But I dread living in a country where the two major parties have become, basically, alt-right and antifa.

2

I can hear the “what about Merrick Garland” already:

Democrats file cloture on every nominee, which kicks off 30 hours of debate even if no Senator is opposed. They figure if they can’t defeat nominees they can delay and consume valuable time. Democrats have forced 117 cloture votes—versus 12 in Barack Obama’s first two years and four in George W. Bush’s.

Wall Street Journal. This is not “responsible center,” is it? Were I in Congress, I’d want to make sure there were as many adults around Trump as possible, unless my motive was letting him screw things up so badly that my odds of winning the next Presidential election reached the stratosphere.

3

Longtime readers will remember that three years ago, a reader told me his elderly mother, who spent years in a communist prison as a dissident, told him that the spirit overtaking our culture today reminds her of the years when communism came to her country.

Thinking that must be an exaggeration, I relayed that observation to a friend in the UK who defected with his wife in the 1960s from a communist country. He said that it was absolutely true. I asked him to explain that conclusion, because it made no sense to me. He said that it has to do with the willingness of people to try to destroy their opponents. With righteous mobs, aided and abetted by the media. Ideological hysteria. This was how the communist behaved. And these aging former dissidents, who don’t know each other, see the same thing happening in the liberal West.

(Rod Dreher, The Media & The Mob)

4

Oh, dear! At least one person is not fawning over Nikki Haley during her lame duck period:

But because she only advocates establishment-sanctioned mass murders (and perhaps partly because she wears the magical “Woman of Color” tiara), Haley can be painted as a sane, sensible adult-in-the-room by empire lackeys who are paid to normalize the brutality of the ruling class. While you still see Steve Bannon routinely decried as a monster despite his being absent from the Trump administration for over a year, far more dangerous and far more powerful ghouls are treated with respect and reverence because they know what to say in polite company and never smoked cigars with Milo Yiannopoulos. All it takes to be regarded as a decent person by establishment punditry is the willingness to avoid offending people; do that and you can murder as many children with explosives and butterfly bullets as your withered heart desires.

Haley will be departing with a disgusting 75 percent approval rating with Republicans and 55 percent approval with Democrats, because God is dead and everything is stupid. It is unknown who will replace her once she vacates her position (I’ve got my money on Reaper drone in a desk chair), but it’s a safe bet that it will be someone who espouses the same neoconservative imperialist foreign policy that this administration has been elevating since the beginning. Whoever it is should be watched closely, as should the bipartisan beltway propagandists whose job it is to humanize them.

Caitlin Johnstone, Empire Loyalists Grieve Resignation Of Moderate Psychopath Nikki Haley.

5

A non-trivial number of Evangelical women in Texas are supporting Beto O’Rourke over Ted Cruz. Two vignettes feature competing baby-centered narratives:

“I care as much about babies at the border as I do about babies in the womb,” said Tess Clarke, one of Ms. Mooney’s friends, confessing that she was “mortified” at how she used to vote, because she had only considered abortion policy. “We’ve been asleep. Now, we’ve woke up.”

Ms. Clarke, who sells candles poured by refugee women in Dallas, began to weep as she recalled visiting a migrant woman detained and separated from her daughter at the border.

…

Plenty of white evangelical women still support Mr. Cruz. Pam Brewer, who leads women’s ministries at Mr. Jeffress’s First Baptist Dallas, does because she wants to end legalized abortion and increase border security, to stop allowing “criminals to come kill our babies,” she said.

6

Justice Kavanaugh’s worst decision of the last month (it’s not even a close call, IMHO) was taking a victory lap with partisans Monday night. Everyone knew Trump would sully it.

Depth to which Republicans have not yet sunk: Trying to pack the court before they lost political power.

7

Reminder to the Democrats: There are good people who could actually vote for Democrats, but who don’t do so currently, because of your friends of feticide platform.

(Lurking background concern for some of us: your little-remarked transformation into the secularist party as the Republicans transformed into the Religious Right and then, mirabile dictu, the Trump party. But you’ll not cease friendship with feticide until that secularism moderates, and the GOP’s “religion” currently is so toxic, that this concern merely lurks.)

8

Noble is right to say that society sends me on a quest for authenticity. Wisdom sends me on a quest to know myself. They are utterly different adventures. Society wants me to be my true self, philosophy demands I be as I should be.

John Mark Reynolds in part of a series of comments on Alan Noble’s Disruptive Witness.

* * * * *

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What would induce me to revert?

My cyberfriend John, a Texan who blogs occasionally (and interestingly) and apparently is half a decade or so younger than I, embraced Orthodoxy at about the same age that I did. Ten years having passed, he published on Tuesday a “revisit [to] my initial exposure to Orthodoxy – the thing that attracted me to the Faith in the first place.”

Most Texas converts seem to come from Baptist or Church of Christ backgrounds. John was one of the latter:

For many people, the Churches of Christ are just another entrée in the broad smorgasbord of American evangelical Protestantism.  Those readers who hail from Texas or Tennessee know differently, however.  Like the Mormons, they are Restorationists and retain a unique self-perception.  Churches of Christ believe in a pristine First-Century-New-Testament-Christianity that quickly apostatized after the death of the Apostle John.  They neither identify with the Reformation nor believe they are connected with that movement in any way.  The Reformers were moving in the right direction, mind you, but according to Churches of Christ did not go nearly far enough.

Their particular history began in early 19th century frontier America during the religious ferment of the Second Great Awakening.  Alexander Campbell (and others) urged a return to New Testament simplicity, arguing that a sincere student of the Bible could know what God required by reading the “blueprint” of Scripture.  One simply had to free their minds of all preconceived religious prejudices and look at the Scriptures objectively and rationally.  Campbell believed he had done that very thing, and  he and his followers concluded that they were the first to ever really and truly do that, hence the “restored” church.  Other religionists who looked at Scripture and arrived at different conclusions were dismissed as insincere, still holding to the “traditions of men.”  These early Restorers were eager to debate this point with others, though their self-serving and circular reasoning was a bit like arguing with Calvinists about predestination.

These “New Testament Christians” proudly claim to be neither Protestant nor Catholic, but simply “the church.” In fact, they are perhaps the most Protestant of any group, taking sola scriptura to all new levels ….

It’s surprising how tenacious this idea of “restoration” is in American Protestant religion (or at least in the Evangelicalism in which I was steeped from 1963 to roughly 1970 – high school and halfway through college – which largely exonerates my parents of anything more serious than naïvete about the religious ambience of the boarding school we collectively chose). What’s unique about the Churches of Christ is their denial that they’re Protestant and their extraordinary indifference to any history:

Two areas, however, continued  to frustrate me.  These days I can truly call myself a historian—I have the degree, I teach the classes, etc.  But historical research has always been my passion.  I studied our particular religious history in great detail.  Where I now have a wall of Orthodox books, I once had a wall of Church of Christ volumes.  I still have the complete works of Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone and Walter Scott (the evangelist, not the Scottish novelist.)  I knew our history inside and out.  I wrote my master’s thesis on the “Stoneite” wing of the Church of Christ in Texas, 1824-1865.   But outside of an occasional professor at our Texas, Tennessee or Alabama colleges, there was absolutely no interest in our history—or really anyone else’s for that matter.  I gave talks on the subject from time to time, and my congregation was polite, but uninterested.  The attitude bordered on active disinterest.  The reason is not hard to fathom.  The Bible is the “blueprint” and the Church of Christ is the “restored” church built on that plan.  This rendered history and the normal historical forces to be irrelevant, as at any time an individual could open their Bible and “restore” the church, regardless of their historical perspective (provided of course, they concluded as Campbell and his successors.)  I always knew this to be inane.  Writing these words makes this belief sound almost childish, but that was indeed the attitude.  History was unnecessary to the church.   I always knew better.

Churches of Christ imagines a 1st-Century church much along their own lines:  small autonomous congregations, each ruled by a plurality of elders, under the guidance of Scripture.  They hold that soon after 100 AD, the church started to apostatize in a big way–bishops, sacramental view of the Supper, infant baptism, etc.  Churches of Christ do not hold that the church began to go astray with the decrees of Constantine.  Rather, they believe that the rot had set long before, the Byzantine emperor’s actions only confirmed what was already in place.   This is a pleasant enough story, but no more based in reality or real history than the fantasy of the [tribes invented by Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon] created by their contemporary Restorationists.

To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant. The Churches of Christ, disdaining history entirely, fairly deserve John’s “the most Protestant” label. But while their disdain may be unexcelled, the Evangelicalism I was steeped in tried to excel it, and shared the notion that no later than the Emperor Constantine’s decree that Christianity be tolerated, things went down hill rapidly.

But history is not what drew John (or me, for that matter) to Orthodoxy initially. He loves travel, and traveled Bulgaria ten years ago:

Five hundred years of severe Ottoman domination precluded development of the castles and palaces that dot other parts of Europe.  What Bulgaria does have, however, is monasteries–destroyed and re-built time and again over the centuries.  Unless you are going to the Black Sea beaches, monastery hopping is what one does in Bulgaria.  And so, that was our plan.

In various monasteries, he saw “something completely new – real, observable reverence,” “a truly Holy place,” “[s]imple and genuine hospitality” (from someone deterred neither by work needing done nor by a language barrier) and “a real community of Christians.”

I returned home to my life and routine.  And while I did not forget these experiences, I was not yet launched off onto any new path.  The trigger for that would come in a couple of months.  And when it did, I had the context of my experience in Bulgarian Orthodoxy, characterized by reverence, holiness, hospitality and community.

Recently, I stumbled across an online survey for ex-members of the Churches of Christ.  The pollsters were analyzing the reasons why this fellowship is failing to keep their own.  (And in fairness, I have no doubt that there is a similar survey somewhere that addresses the former Orthodox.)  Just for kicks, I took the survey.  I remember one question in particular.  The pollster asked what would induce me to return to the Churches of Christ.  The question took me aback, and I realized that I was probably coming from a much different perspective than the average disgruntled ex-CoCer.  I concluded then that the poll was pointless and the pollsters did not grasp the real problem.  They were searching for ways to tweak or reform the church, to make it less objectionable to the dissatisfied.  But they did not consider that the basic premise itself was misguided.  For the Church of Christ did not do sola scriptura wrong.  If anything, they carried it to at least one of its logical conclusions.  I do not recall exactly how I answered the question, but I believe I said something about the Pearl of Great Price.

(Emphasis added) His blog has some beautiful pictures of places his visited. Don’t just take my word for his story.

Were I to stumble onto an online survey for former members of the Christian Reformed Church, in which I was an Elder before my conversion to Orthodoxy, the question “what would induce you to return” would be well-nigh unanswerable. It probably wouldn’t occur to me to say “The Pearl of Great Price,” but I might tauntingly play my conversion backward:

  1. Persuade me that Christ didn’t build one Church (or that the one He built was the CRC, or that the one Church is divided by design so that everyone can have a church that “suits them” even if it disagrees fundamentally with other churches that suit other folks).
  2. Persuading me that sola scriptura works just fine, and that those who conclude something other than Calvinism from scripture are insincere, tradition-bound or stupid.

I’m not holding my breath. I really cannot begin to imagine any reversion.

The only further Big Religious Change I can even imagine is that of  a “little light going on” some day, illumining a path to Rome that I cannot (and really care not) to see now. I’m not holding my breath for that, either, but epiphanies are unpredictable.

For now, it seems to me that Orthodoxy, Rome and relativism are the three choices.

* * * * *

“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Just politics

My tidbits for the day were getting too numerous, so I took political stuff over here. It was a very political day, it seems.

  1. Gloves off!
  2. Iron fist.
  3. The Fleshpots of Reagan.
  4. Paean to Palin
  5. Ron Paul is winning.
  6. Perry’s Crony Capitalism.

1

Whoa! Susan B. Anthony List takes the gloves off! It’s going to be a long 13-1/2 months.

This style ad is not my cup of tea, but although hyperbolic, it’s essentially true.

2

I commented yesterday on President Obama losing the Catholic vote and the Jewish vote (though he was working like crazy at the U.N. today to regain the latter).

Catholic Archbishop Dolan, speaking on behalf of the Bishops’ Conference, today asked the administration to “’push the reset button’ on their multipronged efforts to undermine marriage and treat Catholics who believe in marriage as bigots.”

“…it is particularly upsetting, Mr. President, when your Administration, through the various court documents, pronouncements and policies identified in the attached analysis, attributes to those who support DOMA a motivation rooted in prejudice and bias.  It is especially wrong and unfair to equate opposition to redefining marriage with either intentional or willfully ignorant racial discrimination, as your Administration insists on doing.”

Just so.  No hyperbole, but there’s an iron fist in that velvet glove. No wonder Obama’s in trouble with conservative religious folks. “They only call it culture wars when we fight back.”

The Archbishop’s full letter is here.

3

But opposition to the current administration’s positions on social issues does not mean I’m “Pining for the Fleshpots of Reagan,” as Jason Peters reminds us of a few derelictions of the Grand Old Partiers.

4

I should have commented on it at the time, but I didn’t quite believe my eyes: the New York Times publishing some friendly words toward Sarah Palin, because she (briefly? Time will tell) broke with GOP talking points and committed Truth. (HT Patrick Deneen)

5

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post explains how Ron Paul is winning exactly what he intended to win: control of the terms of debate. Disregard the snarky adjectives and it’s worth a read.

6

Mark Thiesen and Jennifer Rubin spar at the Washington Post about whether Texans for Public Justice cronyism charges against Rick Perry are meritorious. Thiesen says no, essentially because they’ve been making the same charge against every Texas Republican who rises to national prominence.

I’m with Rubin, who thinks Perry needs to address the issue. It seems to me that as widepread as crony capitalism is (even Sarah Palin has noticed), Texans for Public Justice might be repeating the charge because it’s repeatedly true.

I’m fond of Texas, having lived there on assignment many years ago, but it’s a whole ‘Nuther Country. Not “deep South” but barely (or is it “quintessentially”?) American.

* * * * *

Bon appetit!