Rod Dreher's Blog, page 10

While I was in Jerusalem, news broke that Baylor University, the Texas Baptist school, had at last approved an LGBT student group. Denny Burk, a Baptist theologian, comments:

Some people call this having their cake and eating it too. I call it a failure of basic integrity. If Baylor wishes to be a Christian university, it cannot affirm LGBTQ+ identities in any way. Sexual immorality and denial of God’s design in creation are not compatible with following Christ. You cannot serve both Christ and sexual immorality. You have to choose. But Baylor’s board apparently thinks they can have both. They are wrong. If you split the baby, you kill it. And that’s what Baylor has done to its Christian identity.

What does this mean for Baylor? The board approval of this student group is the death knell to their claim to be a Christian university. No one believes that claim anymore. The baby has been torn in two, and nothing short of a miracle can make it whole again.

I was sorting through my e-mails the other night, and found this one I sent to a friend some time ago, after I had been giving some talks at Christian colleges. I have slightly altered this to shield the name and identity of the Christian college in question (it’s not Baylor), so as not to get the professors who talked to me in trouble. Enough time has passed, and I’ve talked at enough Christian colleges and universities since then, that it should not be possible to figure out which school this is. But I can tell you that it’s a big one. One of the profs there told me it made him sick how the school’s recruiters banked on the desire of parents that their kids go to a Christian university, when in fact at best the school serves as a vaccination against ever taking Christianity seriously, and at worst … well, read on:

I was thoroughly depressed by what I heard here at [university], from both professors and some of these students. This campus is thoroughly post-Christian. The hook up culture is rampant, with many kids using a particular app to find those around them who are “DTF” (Down to F–k). Rape is a problem on campus, but one professor told me that the school hamstrings itself in dealing with it because the school is terrified of using the language of morality, only consent. The one thing they would never, ever tell their students is that sex is morally wrong outside of certain contexts. A couple of professors told me that the overwhelming majority of these kids come from Christian high school backgrounds, but are also “functional nihilists.” There are a few kids here and there who are vaguely Christian, and striving to discover truth, but they are largely alone, and struggling hard against the tide.

One professor told me that he routinely encounters kids who have never read the Bible, and know nothing about the Bible. At all. Quote: “Dr. [name], you assigned the Book of Genesis, but I couldn’t find it in the bookstore.” And: “Whoa, I didn’t see Jesus coming back from the dead. I knew he died for our sins, but that resurrection was a real plot twist.” I’m not making this up.

I was in conversation with three professors, all of whom said that it would be professional suicide to speak in class about what the Bible and the school’s religious tradition teaches on LGBT sexuality. I told them they must be exaggerating. Oh no, they said, it’s serious. One prof who is involved in Title IX compliance on campus said there are lots of cases around the country of non-tenured professors losing their jobs or otherwise suffering severe professional sanction just for presenting arguments against gay sex, even neutrally, as part of theological or philosophical discussions. It’s no joke. In this same conversation, a professor said a student came to his office hours and asked him what he thought of homosexuality. “I was sweating bullets,” he said, and talked about how he gave a noncommittal answer.

Think of it: at a Christian university, a nontenured professor is terrified to say what he really believes — that is, in the teaching of the Bible and his denomination — about homosexuality, for fear that he will lose his job and destroy his career (because no school wants to hire a bigot). And these professors are watching these kids drown in hedonism and nihilism, and can’t throw them a lifeline, because the one non-negotiable on campus is sexual freedom, and to deny that in any way, even in principle, is an assault on the personhood of the student, as far as the university is concerned.

This is our world now.

Somebody at the Christian college I visited before [this one] mentioned a program at another Christian university she was affiliated with in which the director screened out students by asking them if they habitually watched pornography. If the answer was yes, he wouldn’t accept them into the program. He eventually had to give up, because if he adhered to that standard, he would have had almost no one in the program.

At a Christian university.

The post De-Christianizing Christian Colleges appeared first on The American Conservative.

I’m still struggling with jet lag, and the let’s-just-go-to-sleep-and-screw-it-all pleasure of becoming acquainted with divorce lawyers, so I just woke up at 3 am to see the news that SCOTUS is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

Excerpt from Politico, which broke news of the leaked draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito:

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion. It’s unclear if there have been subsequent changes to the draft.

No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending. The unprecedented revelation is bound to intensify the debate over what was already the most controversial case on the docket this term.

Who leaked it? My guess is that a clerk for one of the liberal justices did so. If true, there ought to be a merciless internal investigation, and if the leaker is found — whether he or she works for a conservative or a liberal justice — that person should be fired and made to suffer professionally. We cannot have the inner workings of the Supreme Court turned into a partisan football. If I am correct to guess that this leak emerged from the Court’s left flank, then this is probably another example of how the Left believes that when its core interests are threatened, it has no obligation to play by settled rules. You might recall that a liberal journalist told me last year that the election in 2016 of Donald Trump was such a shocking event to the media class that they concluded they had no obligation to strive to live by the standard rules of professional fairness in reporting. We see this everywhere that wokeness has come to power: old-fashioned liberal rules of fair play, free speech, and the like are construed as nothing more than a cover for evil people to impose their power on the oppressed.

More:

A person familiar with the court’s deliberations said that four of the other Republican-appointed justices – Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – had voted with Alito in the conference held among the justices after hearing oral arguments in December, and that line-up remains unchanged as of this week.

It is as yet unclear how Chief Justice John Roberts will vote, according to the story.

Three of the five in the reported majority were appointed by Donald Trump. No Trump, no Roe overturned. If this draft ruling becomes law, then I hereby publicly repudiate myself for having withheld my presidential vote in 2016. I was wrong, and never have I been happier to be wrong.

Here is a link to the full text of the draft ruling. Justice Samuel Alito wrote it — and somewhere in lawyer heaven, Justice Scalia is puffing on his pipe and smiling. Alito’s prose is very clear, and his argument against the Roe decision is powerful. If you have never read anything critical of Roe‘s shaky reasoning, Alito’s crisp analysis will open your eyes. The 1973 decision was nothing more than an example of “raw judicial power,” as a 1973 SCOTUS dissenting justice put it. Notice this paragraph citing leading liberal legal lights, critical of Roe‘s reasoning. Law professors Tribe and Tushnet, in particular, are strongly on the legal left:

 

This is a hugely important distinction, one that Roe supporters consistently elide: the “right to privacy” upon which Roe is based is not the same thing when applied to other matters, e.g., consenting sexual partners. Only abortion has to do with the life or death of an unborn human person:

You may not believe that an unborn human is fully a person under the law, but no one can deny that the growing biological entity that exists inside the womb of a woman after conception is of our species — and is a unique phenomenon.

Justice Alito goes on to say, contra the 1992 Casey ruling, that it doesn’t matter what the public thinks about this or any other SCOTUS ruling. Justices have to do their jobs as well as they can, based on their analysis of the law. In fact, I bet that if the eventual ruling of the Court on abortion affirms what we see here in the leaked document, it will redound to the short-term political benefit of Democrats. Still, it will have been the right thing to have done.

It is important to say what overturning Roe would not do: ban abortion nationwide. All it would do is return the issue to state legislatures. New York, California, and other liberal states would remain havens of baby-killing. Other states, like Louisiana, where I live, and Texas, would be more humane. Everybody should know, however, that the United States has one of the world’s most liberal abortion legal regimes. Just last week, when I was in the Netherlands — that is to say, that secular progressive welfare-state utopia — a Dutch friend was telling me that the law requires a five day “think it over” waiting period between the time a pregnant woman presents herself for abortion, and the time the doctor performs it. Most European countries allow abortion, but restrict it to the first trimester, absent certain exceptions that have to be approved by more than one doctor. No European country is as liberal as the US is on abortion. If SCOTUS overturns Roe, then the US will become like Europe in this respect: abortion restriction will depend on the state.

As Politico notes, SCOTUS drafts can change before being announced, so this leak is not the law. Nevertheless, if it does prove to be the case, then the pro-life movement can rightly take pride in the tireless work of fifty years. I will be grateful to them. And I will be grateful to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg for refusing to retire during the Obama presidency. And I will be grateful to Justices Alito, Thomas, Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch, for finally rectifying an egregious injustice. Since Roe became the law of the land, an estimated 63 million unborn children have died in their mother’s wombs, at the hands of abortionists. The current president, only the second Catholic chief executive in US history, supports the continuation of this abomination. Donald Trump, a non-churchgoing Presbyterian who is almost nobody’s idea of a model Christian, was the first sitting president in the history of this country to have addressed in person the March For Life (he did in 2020), and acted decisively to bring this holocaust of the unborn to an end. God writes straight with crooked lines.

Here is Trump’s 2020 speech to the March For Life. Though he appointed Justice Alito, George W. Bush did not go there to talk to the faithful. Neither did George H.W. Bush, who appointed Justice Thomas. Donald Trump did. Again, I never have been so pleased to have been wrong about a politician. On the right to life, he delivered.

UPDATE:

This, if true, is really not normal. Our Republic teeters… https://t.co/RH5UhtEIOn

— Kale Zelden (@kalezelden) May 3, 2022

Wait, Kale, wait. Get the Narrative straight. It is only the Right that poses a threat to the stability of the Republic. Watch MSNBC — they’ll tell you.

5 to overturn Roe. 3 to overturn Mississippi law. 1 to not get dirty looks at the Chevy Chase club. https://t.co/3NDVnkf7xZ

— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) May 3, 2022

The post On Roe: Thank You, Donald Trump appeared first on The American Conservative.

A reader asked why I haven’t written anything about Holy Week in Jerusalem. Good question! What follows is what I wrote for subscribers to Rod Dreher’s Diary, my Substack newsletter:

Above, that’s a photo someone in my group took of me beholding the miracle of the Holy Fire, inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem today. The flame at the far right of the frame comes from a sheaf of 33 thin beeswax candles — one for each year of Christ’s life — I’m holding in my hands. In my other hand, I was holding the Orthodox icon of the Resurrection, with Jesus in motion, pulling Adam and Eve out of Hades. I sent that image to a friend back home, a guy I’ve known for about three years, and who said to me, “I’ve never seen you smile like that.” No, he hadn’t. It’s been a while.

As I wrote here the other day, the Holy Fire miracle goes back many centuries. The Greek Orthodox patriarch formally processes into the church, and after ritually circling the edicule covering the site of the Tomb, enters in, prays, and supposedly receives the Holy Fire from heaven. It lights his candles. He emerges to share it with the gathered worshipers. Tomorrow, I’m going to rent this 27-minute Holy Fire documentary on Vimeo for 99 cents, and learn more.

Do I believe it’s a real miracle? Well, I’m skeptical. I certainly believe that God could do something like this — I mean, after resurrection from the dead, anything is possible — but I can’t overcome my qualms. I will say that I was able to pass my hand through the flame several times in the first few minutes I had the holy fire burning on my candles, without feeling any pain. I was not able to do it after about five minutes, though. One of the members of my group, a Serbian Orthodox believer, reported the same thing, except he put the flame up to his bare face. After the first few minutes, he couldn’t bring it close to his skin anymore. Make of that what you will.

Also, here is video of worshipers in the church in the past passing the flame over their clothing. Their clothes do not burn.

I will say too that given how much flame there was in the church today, it’s something of a miracle that no one was set on fire. But if it happened, the Holy Firefighters were on hand to help:

 

This morning in Jerusalem began disconcertingly, for reasons I wrote about here, on my blog. In brief, the Jerusalem Police this year decided to heavily restrict access to the Holy Sepulcher for the ceremony. Christian leaders, clerical and lay, were outraged — but what could they do? It’s Muslim worshipers at Al-Aqsa mosque who often get into violent clashes with police, not Christians. Nevertheless, Christians paid a heavy price today, on the holiest day of the Orthodox year.

For Jerusalem Christians, Easter — Pascha — de facto begins with the Holy Fire ceremony early on Holy Saturday afternoon. I had not realized till I arrived here how central this ritual is to the identity of local Christians. Pascha isn’t actually here until after midnight tonight, in the Divine Liturgy, but emotionally, it begins for these Christians with the Holy Fire. So to be told by the Jerusalem Police that they couldn’t get into the Church to see it was infuriating and humiliating for local Christians — especially as Jews were given free access to the Western Wall on today, the last day of Passover.

I was with a small group connected to the Patriarchate, so was able to get a ticket to get into the Church. Still, we had a harrowing journey to the Sepulcher, through several police checkpoints in the Old City. The narrow medieval streets were jam-packed, and people were in a surly mood over the police actions. To be fair, the police seemed at times overwhelmed. I have never been in a more frightening crowd situation. It was like being caught in a slow-moving whitewater stream, trapped by currents you couldn’t control. There were times when I wondered if people were going to be crushed. Ironically, it seemed that the police controlling the flow of pilgrims toward the basilica made things far more tense than they otherwise would have been.

Whatever the case, the explosive religious and political passions in the streets of Jerusalem today caused one of my friends to remark, “Things haven’t changed in two thousand years.” That was an astute observation. Had this mob yelled, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”, it wouldn’t have seemed abnormal. This too is Jerusalem.

In any case, we made it in sometime after eleven, and went to our assigned place in the Katholikon (here, “Greek Choir”):

 

 

And then we waited. And waited. The Greek Patriarch, Theophilos, was scheduled to process, as usual, from the apse behind the Katholikon, towards the Holy Sepulcher. He usually gets moving at 1:30pm, which meant we had a couple of hours to stand there talking and praying. As high officials of state passed by, Wojciech Kolarski, Poland’s state secretary, called out to me. We shook hands briefly, and he remarked how odd it was to run into me here. Wojciech had been a tremendous help for me when I was in Poland researching Live Not By Lies. I also saw Father Timotei of the Romanian Putna monastery, with other Putna monks.

There was an atmosphere of happy tension in the cavernous basilica. Every half hour or so, ululations would rise from a group of women worshipers who sounded like they were in the Franciscan part of the complex. As one o’clock arrived, a thick procession muscled in through the side door of the Katholikon. This was the local Arab men, who traditionally appear at this point in the day, making a joyful noise and chanting, “We are the Arab Christians! We will never surrender our traditions!”

An American friend standing near me and I talked about how these people’s ancestors were worshiping Jesus Christ when our European ancestors were still worshiping pagan gods. These stones of the basilica shelter the place on earth where Christianity began: the site of Christ’s death, and of His resurrection. And these people, the Arab Christians, the “living stones,” as they call themselves, have sheltered the redemption story in the hearts of their families and communities for two thousand years.

What a privilege to share this holy day with them!

Eventually Patriarch Theophilos began his slow march towards the edicule. Here he was passing me:

 

We lost sight of him after a couple of minutes, but watching my Arab Christian friends, I could see by their lack of excitement that we still had a while to go. Theophilos still had to circumnavigate the edicule three times before entering. Nothing happens quickly in the Orthodox world.

As we waited, I saw my friend Drew Bowling, a Catholic and a Washington political operative, wandering around with a look of sheer delight on his face. I beckoned him over and asked him what was going through his mind.As Drew started talking, he was so good that I stopped him and asked him if I could record it for my book. He agreed. Here’s what he said:

It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to come here and see this. I’m a Catholic. I don’t share the same Christian commitments as most of the people here, but I’m seeing people here from literally every corner of the planet. I am completely bedazzled. I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like when we see the Holy Fire. This is exactly what I was hoping for. I can only say that this is an experience designed to re-enchant the imagination of modern man.

Coming from a political background myself, I’ve always believed that there’s no substitute for the politics of genuine encounter. People know Jerusalem only as an idea, or a place they visit, but for many of them, it’s all about the actual stones, the physical embodiment of the city itself. What they haven’t encountered, as I have been privileged to on this trip alone, are the living stones, the people who constitute the oldest continuous Christian community in the world. To see all those people here, gathered with their brethren on this most sacred of days, is a profound wonder.

In the West, we need a healthy dose of the mysticism that is on display everywhere in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. We need to be re-enchanted ourselves. Coming here and experiencing this makes it all the more important for me to go home and share this experience with others any way that I can, and invite them to participate in it themselves.

Suddenly, the lights in the Church went out. That meant His Beatitude had entered the Tomb. Minutes later, a roar went up from the crowd, and there was an awesome clanging of bells. The Holy Fire had come! Here is the moment when the Patriarch exited the Tomb with the fire:

It quickly spread from candle to candle around the basilica, with frenzied knots of believers gathering around candle sheafs to light theirs, and to pass the flame on. In only a minute or two, the entire church was ablaze. A friend captured me a moment after I received the Holy Fire:

 

They say its miraculous property allows you to pass your hand through it without being burned, and to let it pass over your face without incident. I tried it with the flames burning as hotly as you see above — and it worked! I passed my hand with deliberate slowness through the flame, and felt nothing. Back and forth. A Serbian friend nearby let it burn under his bare face, and said he felt nothing either. About five minutes later, I tried it again, and the flames were too hot to get close to. Again, my Serb friend had the same experience.

Make of that what you will.

There was Drew Bowling, in the near distance, candles in hand, grinning from ear to ear, and scanning the basilica with a look on his face of unutterable wonder. As he turned and caught my eye, I motioned for him to stand still for a photo. He looked like he was near tears:

 

Why tears? I can only guess, but look, Drew has only very recently completed convalescence from an illness that kept him hospitalized near death for weeks. He is healed now, and is full of gratitude to God. In my case, I was there today wounded by nine years of painful marital struggle, which culminated a week ago today in learning that my wife had filed for divorce. These are the wounds that we friends and pilgrims brought into the basilica today to be cauterized by the joy of the Holy Fire. Drew and I laughed and agreed that there is nothing at all like this back home in America. This was so primitive, and so exalting, and we could not get enough.

Is the Holy Fire a true miracle, or just a symbol? Honestly, it doesn’t matter to me. I mean, look, truth matters, and if this is a fake, then the Church hierarchy should be ashamed. But when I’ve raised the question of its authenticity with ordinary Arab Christians around here, they’ve gotten their backs up. This ritual matters so much to them. If the Holy Fire isn’t real, any patriarch who broke that news to the people here would be hated forever.

But maybe it is real! I hope so, but I won’t pass judgment. I will say, though, that being in that church today, waiting to receive the light of resurrection as a communal experience stretching back at least 1,600 years, was one of the great moments of my life. It helped me understand what Christianity is, and what religion is, in a way that no book ever could. I am going to have to think about the meaning of this afternoon for a long time.

A few months ago, I posted this passage by the Orthodox ethicist Tim Patitsas about faith as a memory of theophany (a showing-forth of God):

Beginning [the search for God] with Beauty means beginning with feeling — not with passionate emotions or opinions, but with purified feeling. I mean a theological sensing, the innate ability we have to recognize theophany even in its hidden manifestation. In relying on that intuition, or in recognizing that within the Beautiful story of Christ is goodness, and therefore almost certainly truth, we fall in love with beauty and step out in faith toward it.

Is faith any different than eros? Abraham stepped out of his land and onto a journey of exile not because he worked it out intellectually but because he had received a theophany! Perhaps faith is just the memory of theophany, the continuing to launch out towards that divine supernova when it seems to have gone dark?

And when we find within Beauty the miracle of empathy, and contemplate this Goodness by imitating it, we see that the first feeling is not left behind. Rather, it is amplified and becomes contemplation, a feeling that includes discursive thought, or a faith that is expressed as reason. And finally our sense of truth is but an amplification of our sense of Beauty and our sense of Goodness or morality. The three are just one clear channel, one pure stream, flowing from feeling to contemplation to knowing Truth directly. this is why Orthodox theology looks the way it does, so pure and free, so elegant and aesthetically satisfying, rather than cold, logical, and hard.

What I experienced today, with thousands of other Christians, was the symbolic memory of the first light of resurrection, when the Risen Lord showed Himself after trampling down death. The fire — whether kindled by a miraculous act of God, or by clerical sleight of hand — emerged from the darkness of the Tomb. And this fire was, and remains, the Light of the world. The darkness has never comprehended it, and never will.

Here is a poem, “Autumn Inaugural,” by Dana Gioia, that touches on what I am feeling now, thinking about the events of today in the ancient basilica in King David’s city:

There will always be those who reject ceremony,

Who claim that resolution requires no fanfare,

Those who demand the spirit stay fixed

Like a desert saint, fed only on faith,

To worship in no temple but the weather.

There will always be the austere ones

Who mount denial’s shaky ladder

To drape the statues or whitewash the frescoed wall,

As if the still star of painted plaster

Praised creation less than the evening’s original.

And they are right. Symbols betray us.

They are always more or less than what

Is really meant. But shall there be no

Processions by torchlight because we are weak?

What native speech do we share but imperfection?

II.

Praise to the rituals that celebrate change,

Old robes worn for new beginnings,

Solemn protocol where the mutable soul,

Surrounded by ancient experience, grows

Young in the imagination’s white dress.

Because it is not the rituals we honor

But our trust in what they signify, these rites

That honor us as witnesses – whether to watch

Lovers swear loyalty in a careless world

Or a newborn washed with water and oil.

So praise to innocence – impulsive and evergreen –

And let the old be touched by youth’s

Wayward astonishment at learning something new,

And dream of a future so fitting and so just

That our desire will bring it into being.

It is not the Holy Fire we honor, but our trust in the Resurrection it signifies. But the experience of the Holy Fire in that place, on this day, with those people — well, it makes believing in Resurrection an act of love. May our desire bring the good news into being.

Now I’m going to put my jacket on and go back to the church to celebrate with thousands of my brothers and sisters in Christ the resurrection liturgy at the Tomb where the greatest miracle of all happened.

(Here is what I wrote in a subsequent post:)

Brueghel’s ‘The Fall Of Icarus’ (ca. 1555)

T.S. Eliot said famously that April is the cruelest month. I will always remember April 2022 as the month that my wife announced that she has filed for divorce. Yet after the initial shock wore off, I realized that her decision was both correct and courageous. After nine long and grueling years of trying to save this marriage, I believe she made the right decision to end our mutual torment. As I’ve said, we agreed not to talk about the things that brought us to this point, but most of our closest friends, including at least one of the two priests who have counseled us over the years, believe that it is a sad necessity. I’m not kidding when I say that I have great respect for my wife for her decision, compassion for the suffering that led her to make it, and sorrow for the role I played in the breakdown of our marriage. I spent a good part of Holy Week in Jerusalem praying for her, that she — and I — can find peace and healing.

How tragic life is. When I lost my Catholic faith around 2005, the greatest shock for me was the realization that no matter how hard one tries to hold on to faith, it can be pulled out of one. I really did believe that one’s faith commitment was strictly a matter of willpower, but I learned that that isn’t true. In 2007, Bill Lobdell, the former religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times, wrote an essay about how covering church scandals cost him his faith. You should read it. Excerpts:

It took several years and numerous memos and e-mails, but editors finally agreed in 1998 to let me write “Getting Religion,” a weekly column about faith in Orange County.

I felt like all the tumblers of my life had clicked. I had a strong marriage, great kids and a new column. I attributed it all to God’s grace.

He began the process to convert to Catholicism, but broke it off:

At the time, I never imagined Catholic leaders would engage in a widespread practice that protected alleged child molesters and belittled the victims. I latched onto the explanation that was least damaging to my belief in the Catholic Church — that this was an isolated case of a morally corrupt administration.

And I was comforted by the advice of a Catholic friend: “Keep your eyes on the person nailed to the cross, not the priests behind the altar.”

More:

I couldn’t get the victims’ stories or the bishops’ lies — many of them right there on their own stationery — out of my head. I had been in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes, other violent crimes and tragedies. But this was different — the children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so sick and bishops so corrupt.

The lifeline Father Vincent had tried to give me began to slip from my hands.

I sought solace in another belief: that a church’s heart is in the pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God’s house. Instead, I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often to their faces.

All too familiar to me. Lobdell writes about covering a Protestant scandal, and about how seeing the human wreckage religious leaders and people caused, his faith finally simply left him. I was fortunate: I didn’t stop believing in God, only in the truth claims of the Catholic Church. When I became Orthodox, I resolved to become a very different kind of Christian. My intellectualism, and the intellectual certitude I brought to my relationship with God, had been not a source of strength, but of weakness. The utter humiliation of my losing my Catholic faith changed me. I hope it made me a better Christian. Only God knows, though.

Similarly with marriage. Honestly, I never imagined that I could lose my Catholicism. Nor did I imagine that I could lose my marriage. Yet here I am, after years of pain and disillusionment, among all the broken people — people who once thought that as long as they believed all the right things, and had the best of intentions, they could avoid the worst. Nope. I fought even harder for my marriage than I did for my Catholicism, and suffered excruciating pain for over twice as long in this failed marriage than in my failing commitment to Catholicism. It ended up in the same place.

And yet, this morning, back in Budapest, I ran into a Danube Institute friend and colleague on the street. She had not heard about the divorce. We talked for a while, and she noticed how calm, even happy, I was.

“How on earth are you doing this?” she said, referring to my demeanor.

“Entirely by the grace of God,” I said. “Christ healed my heart in Jerusalem. I’ll tell you the story when we have more time.”

It really is true. I told my blog readers last week about the extraordinary thing that happened to me in a dark crypt chapel of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. If you missed that essay, here’s a link. I began by talking about how I couldn’t find the church in the Old City where the Holy Thursday liturgy was happening. Frustrated, I decided not to go back to bed, but over to the church built over the place of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Excerpts:

Eventually I found my way to the Holy Sepulcher church, crossed myself at the threshold, and went in. Maybe the liturgy is at the Katholikon, in the center of the church? No, it was closed. Well, I thought, I guess I’ve missed it. But I didn’t want to miss another opportunity to pray in the holiest place on earth for us Christians. I decided to walk to a part of the sprawling old basilica that I had never seen.

I ventured into a crypt, where the Armenians have a chapel. It was still early in the morning, and very few people were in the church. No one at all was down here. I looked for a place to pray, and was drawn to a dark chapel to the right of the altar. I walked in, looking for a bench on which to sit and pray.

There were no benches, but I did see this mosaic on the floor:

I went on my knees, crossed myself, kissed it (though I didn’t know what I was reverencing, except the Holy Cross), then traced the Alpha and Omega with my fingertip. I realized that I was at the base of the Golgotha hill, which rose behind the basilica wall on my right. I stayed there in prayer for a few minutes, but then a couple of men came into the area, and were a bit noisy, so I moved back to the main chapel in the crypt, found a bench, and sat down to pray.

The entire church was eerily still, and my heart began to resonate with the unearthly silence. I realized at once that I was in the Chapel of St. Helena, who supposedly found the True Cross on the same journey that she found the Tomb of Christ. Then I realized that the rock I reverenced must be the traditional marker for the place where she discovered the Cross. (Whether she really did find it there or not is beside the point; that’s where that event is marked.) Suddenly I became aware of a presence around me, and a voice in my heart, speaking clearly. Normally I turn on my skeptical mind when something like that begins to happen, and it scares whatever it is away. This morning, though, I was so still that I just let it go.

The inner voice — that calming vocal presence — told me several things. One of the things it told me was that I was at the end of a journey. I had been praying for a long time, wondering what the sword in the stone meant.

You readers of this newsletter know all about the Sword in the Stone aspect of my story. There in the crypt chapel, I realized that the Lord had been calling me — via the mysterious intervention of an Italian artist, and the strange advent into my life of a Tarkovsky film — to make a total sacrifice of my future happiness, to preserve the marriage. I had come to understand that my obsession over the lost happiness of my marriage had paralyzed me, and had done so for years. But I couldn’t shake it. I knew that the marriage was irrecoverable, and had known it for years, but I loved so intensely what we had had for sixteen years, and loved my children so much, that I could not let go of its memory, and praying for its restoration.

Earlier this April, I had gone to a Romanian monastery on retreat, and had decided there once and for all to place all my hope in God, and to make a sacrifice of my future for the sake of doing His will, and remaining in this marriage. I left the monastery resolute — not happy, because making that vow required accepting that the rest of my life would be lonely and painful. But I did it for Christ, and for my children. I was at peace.

A week later, my wife filed for divorce. More:

Now, you might think that makes me look more noble. Wrong! In retrospect, and in light of a lot of facts I’ve been thinking about this week, I sincerely think Julie made the braver and more intelligent choice, and that the Lord has worked for us both, through her choice, a severe mercy. But I had to make the choice I did, for reasons that will soon become apparent.

The morning after I found out that my wife was divorcing me, I came to Jerusalem. I have spent a lot of time atop Golgotha, praying for her, praying for me, praying for our kids. I have been grieving. God has given me an ability to see my wife as someone who has been suffering greatly too. I have not been able to muster anger at her. We are just so unbelievably exhausted from all this. Nine years of it. 

So: as I sat in that silent crypt this morning, I thought about the sword in the stone, then I remembered that today is Holy Thursday, the day that Jesus Christ was taken in the Garden of Gethsemane to his trial. On this night, Peter drew his sword to protect the Lord from his enemies, but Jesus told him to put it away, and surrendered to his fate. Jesus knew that what was about to happen had to happen for all righteousness to be fulfilled.

I heard the inner voice say to me that now was the time to put away my sword — that is, to stop fighting for a restoration of the past. In fact, said the voice, I had done that at the monastery. I had made the long nine-year journey across the empty bath with the flame alight; now I needed to place it on the stone and be free. Then it hit me: that stone where I had just been praying was the stone that marks the spot (traditionally, if not necessarily literally) where the Romans discarded the Cross. The inner voice was telling me that the fight was over, that what was about to happen — meaning the dissolution of the marriage — had to happen.

But why? I asked. Why not just restore the marriage?

I didn’t wait for an answer, but banished the questions. I may never know, and that’s beside the point. Why did Jesus have to suffer and die? We are dealing with the deepest mysteries here.

The voice said to me that he was with me throughout the long walk across the desertified pool, and would be with me always. He — because I was pretty sure that it was Jesus — told me, “I will send my brother James to help you.” And then: “And I will send you a sign: where you see the stars, there I am.”

Then the episode ended. I rose and went back to the stone in the Finding of the Cross chapel. I knelt down, kissed it, and left my sword there, buried in it, at the foot of Golgotha. I turned and walked out, a free man. The knot that had been tied so tightly in the cords of my heart untangled itself. I was light as a feather. I felt born again. Now I was walking in the joy of the Lord.

I am returning to a world of pain and brokenness as the disassembly of my marriage and life as I knew it begins. But I know that God is in this. I don’t just believe it; I know it. I know that He won’t abandon us. I know that somehow, for reasons that we may never understand, He allowed this horrible thing to happen for some greater good that can come if we cooperate with it. The same Lord who turned his shameful, bloody, violent death on the Cross into the cosmic victory over death is at work in our grievous divorce, to redeem it from the jaws of sin and death.

I climbed the twenty-nine steps out of the crypt and into the light of new life.

Somehow, I thought, something about my willingness at the Putna monastery in Romania to make that sacrifice must have jarred something loose in the spiritual world. I don’t know; maybe so. I couldn’t understand why I felt so light, then it occurred to me that I had left my cross in the same place, symbolically, where Jesus had left His.

That was it. That was my healing miracle.

I walked out of the church in a joyful daze. But was there a liturgy anywhere? Where is this St. James Cathedral? Standing in the small plaza outside the Church, I saw a stout, grey-bearded Greek priest passing.

“Where is the liturgy?” I asked.

He pointed to a doorway nearby, then passed through it. I followed, then saw the sign saying that this is St. Jacob’s Cathedral. Of course! “James” is the Anglicization of “Jacob”. The English translation from the Greek Patriarchate had not taken that into account. When I arrived into the cramped cathedral (really the size of a small church), one liturgy had ended, but one celebrated by Patriarch Theophilos had begun. As I pushed my way into the jam-packed nave, I looked around, then up. This is what I saw:

 

The ceiling covered with stars! And then, a few minutes later, out from the altar came Patriarch Theophilos to bless us:

 

I thought: there is James! James, the stepbrother of the Lord (St. Joseph’s son by his first marriage), was the first bishop of Jerusalem. Patriarch Theophilos stands in an unbroken line of succession back to St. James. You know how Catholic sometimes call the Pope “Peter”? This man you see there is James. The Lord sent him to me, under a canopy of stars, to confirm that what had just happened to me in the crypt was real, and that I could believe in it confidently. That is my conclusion. I imagine the light pealing off my face the moment I realized that could have illuminated the entire church.

One more passage from that post:

If I had known where to go for the liturgy this morning, I never would have wandered around the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I never would have found that cave chapel. I never would have prayed silently there under the earth, amid the limestone. And I never would have heard the still, small voice tell me: you’re free.

I don’t know what comes next. I do know that I need to go back and try to share some of this unmerited grace with my wife, who needs to taste the same freedom and healing that Christ gave me. Jesus has made it possible for me to go home without resenting, or mourning, or in a spirit of destruction, but rather in a spirit of peacemaking and love and rest. How? How did this come to me? I have no idea, but I will not stay stuck in my head and refuse it because it came so suddenly, and doesn’t make sense so soon after the horrible stroke of the divorce announcement.

I went back to my hotel room and wrote down everything that had just happened, because I wanted to share the good news of hope and resurrection. Without Christ, I could do nothing. Somehow, through all the pain of brokenness, the brokenness caused by my sins, my wife’s sins, and the sins that persisted across generations of our families, Jesus was there. Jesus is there. He has not abandoned us. I testify to His love.

What happened the rest of my time in Jerusalem? Well, I went to the Holy Fire ceremony on Saturday, as I wrote about here. Was it a miracle? I am skeptical, but again, I can tell you that I was able to pass my hand through the flame unharmed for the first two or three minutes it blazed in my hands. Five minutes later, this was impossible. My Serbian friend said he allowed the flames to lick his bare face, without incident — but after five minutes, this was impossible, because the fire burned him.

After a long nap, I arose and got dressed to go to the Paschal liturgy at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I got lost in the dark warrens of the Old City, and had no idea where I was. I was in one of those shadowy alleys, and saw a man standing there in the darkness. What if that’s an angel? I thought. Of course it wasn’t — he was just a shopkeeper — but I wondered what it would be like if the Lord sent me an angel on this holiest of nights.

I turned around and retraced my steps, and who do you think I saw next? Angela, the chambermaid from the Gloria Hotel, where I was staying! She was the dear Arab Christian woman who reduced me to tears in the hotel hallway when she gave me her simple cross on Good Friday.

“Angela!” I said, and rushed over to hug her.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes, thanks to God, more than okay.”

“Thanks God!” she said.

She introduced me to her brother, standing at her side. I told him, “Your sister was an angel sent by God to comfort me.”

She told me the right way to go to get to church, and off I went.

The Patriarch of Jerusalem led the Orthodox service, conducted inside the edicule, at the very tomb of Our Lord. I stood there for five hours, with fellow believers, awaiting the Lord’s resurrection. Among the faithful was Father Timotei, a monk of Putna, where I had made my commitment:

Here I am near to the Lord’s tomb that night:

The ‘edicule’ — the ‘little house’ in the background — is built over Jesus’s tomb

Finally, at four in the morning, it was over. Just before the ceremony ended, I caught a glimpse of the Patriarch in the edicule, behind an altar. He looked like the Ancient of Days, and it was glorious. Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life. I look forward with the hope that in paradise one day, all the enmity between my wife and me will disappear, and we will meet again with pure love, in Christ.

On Easter Sunday, I went to the Western Wall of Herod’s Temple to pray for a Jewish friend, and for the Jewish people, and for all God’s suffering children of this holy land:

 

Then I did something painful but, I think, necessary. I went back to the Holy Sepulcher, and to the crypt chapel where the Lord spoke to my heart on Holy Thursday. I had one more thing to do. When I arrived there, crowds of boisterous tourists bumped around, all trying to bend down to touch the stone. I stood back waiting my turn, and I prayed. I thanked the Lord for my marriage — for the sixteen good years, and even for the nine bad ones, because surely He was in them, and used them as a spiritually refining millstone. I don’t know what He has done with me through that suffering, but I know at least He has taught me to be more compassionate. I thought marriages going bad, and divorce, was something that happened to other people — people who didn’t have enough faith or virtue. I was wrong. I had sacrificed; now I depended on His mercy. I need to find a way to be a vessel of His mercy to others.

I knelt down before the stone, removed my wedding ring for the last time, placed my the golden band at the foot of the Cross, touched my forehead to the rock, and said, “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Something like Andrei with his candle in Nostalghia, I ended the twenty-five year journey of my married life by placing the ring the rock. I rose, put the golden band in my pocket — the kids might want it one day — and turned to rise up the staircase into the light.

 

I looked back one last time to see the stone, and observed the tourists elbowing each other absurdly to reach it. They had no idea what had just happened in front of them: the symbolic end of a long marriage. And I laughed at my self-importance, thinking of Auden’s lines from Musée des Beaux Arts:

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

 

The post Jerusalem Triduum appeared first on The American Conservative.

This is a pretty good story from Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, about how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is kind of Viktor-Orbanny. Of course Beauchamp means it to tarnish DeSantis. For me, as an Orban fan, it makes me excited about a DeSantis presidential candidacy. For those American conservatives who have bought the media line critical of Viktor Orban, you should read the Beauchamp piece and understand that if you like what Ron DeSantis is doing, you ought to take a look at how Viktor Orban runs Hungary. Excerpts:

In June of last year, Hungary’s far-right government passed a law cracking down on LGBTQ rights, including a provision prohibiting instruction on LGBTQ topics in sex education classes.

About nine months later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” up through third grade. According to some knowledgeable observers on the right, these two bills were closely connected.

“About the Don’t Say Gay law, it was in fact modeled in part on what Hungary did last summer,” Rod Dreher, a senior editor at the American Conservative magazine, said during a panel interview in Budapest. “I was told this by a conservative reporter who … said he talked to the press secretary of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and she said, ‘Oh yeah, we were watching the Hungarians, so yay Hungary.’”

(When I asked DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw about a possible connection, she initially denied knowing of Hungarian inspiration for Florida’s law. After I showed her the quote from Dreher, she did not respond further. Dreher did not reply to two requests for comment.)

It’s easy to see the connections between the bills — in both provisions and justifications. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described his country’s anti-LGBTQ law as an effort to prevent gay people from preying on children; Pushaw described Florida’s law as an “anti-grooming bill” on Twitter, adding that “if you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer” — meaning a person preparing children to become targets of sexual abuse, a slur targeting LGBTQ people and their supporters that’s becoming increasingly common on the right.

This is not a one-off example. DeSantis, who has built a profile as a pugilistic culture warrior with eyes on the presidency, has steadily put together a policy agenda with strong echoes of Orbán’s governing ethos — one in which an allegedly existential cultural threat from the left justifies aggressive uses of state power against the right’s enemies.

Most recently, there was DeSantis’s crackdown on Disney’s special tax exemption; using regulatory powers to punish opposing political speech is one of Orbán’s signature moves. On issues ranging from higher education to social media to gerrymandering, DeSantis has followed a trail blazed by Orbán, turning policy into a tool for targeting outgroups while entrenching his party’s hold on power.

Let me draw a fine point on this. Vox is written by and for liberals and progressives. It is obvious to them, of course, that linking Orban and DeSantis is a blow to DeSantis. But to my eyes, it goes to show that the thing that I began saying last summer when I first went to Budapest — that American conservatives have a lot to learn from Orban’s politics — may finally be starting to happen.

More Vox:

Orbán’s political model has frequently employed a demagogic two-step: Stand up a feared or marginalized group as an enemy then use the supposed need to combat this group’s influence to justify punitive policies that also happen to expand his regime’s power. Targets have included Muslim immigrants, Jewish financier George Soros, and most recently LGBTQ Hungarians. Hungary’s version of the “Don’t Say Gay” law — which the government labeled an anti-pedophilia bill — expanded both government control over curricula and its powers to regulate programming on Hungary’s airwaves.

You see a similar logic in DeSantis’s Florida. Alleging that classroom education on LGBTQ topics somehow threatens children, the governor and his allies pushed through a vague and broadly worded bill that empowers both the state and private citizens to go after schools that teach about LGBTQ identity. A moral panic about alleged LGBTQ “grooming” serves to justify the imposition of ideological controls on public education — and the speech rights of progressive and LGBTQ teachers. (Relatedly, both Orbán and DeSantis have taken aim at curricula and textbooks used in K-12 schools on expressly political-cultural grounds.)

You see the dishonesty here. Gosh, y’all, we’re only educating children about LGBTQ topics. That’s like handing little children a copy of Playboy and saying you’re only educating them about human anatomy. To DeSantis’s credit, he sees through this liberal gaslighting — unlike so many other Republican politicians, who quiver at the thought of being called a bigot, such that they lack the stones to stand up for common-sense legislation.

And notice Beauchamp’s “feared or marginalized” groups and figures. Standard, boring liberal analysis, in which groups declared to be “marginalized” are assumed to be sacrosanct. Why did Orban not want to let Muslim migrants into Hungary in 2015? Because he judged that they would not assimilate well (especially given Hungary’s very difficult language), and would end up being hugely problematic — as unassimilable Muslim immigrants in other European countries have been. (Curiously, I overheard a conversation among conservatives in the Netherlands this week talking about how North African Muslim immigrants have brought endless troubles to the Netherlands, but Turkish and Iranian Muslims have assimilated fairly well.) For Western liberals, migrants can never be bad or problematic; therefore, opposing them coming into your country can only ever be an act of bigotry.

Similarly with “Jewish financier George Soros”. Beauchamp means to smear Orban as anti-Semitic — an ugly canard that can easily be disproven by spending time in Budapest. The Orban government lavishly funds Jewish cultural organizations. It is closely allied with Israel. What Orban hates about Soros is that Soros is a liberal globalist billionaire who uses his fortune to try to change Hungary (Soros’s homeland) in progressive ways. Libs love billionaire oligarch types if they can be counted on to push progressive policies. And Western journalists are so knee-jerk in their analyses — it’s all identity politics with them — that they can’t recognize that by attacking Soros, Viktor Orban is playing class politics, not ethnic politics.

Similarly about LGBT, to the liberal mind, there are no limits on how far queerness can be taken. To object to any of it is to show yourself to be a bigot. You may believe that the Hungarian law went too far, but only a parochial cosmopolitan can believe that the only reason people wouldn’t want their children propagandized to embrace transgressive sexual and gender roles is plain bigotry. Orban’s media law was popular with Hungarians, just as DeSantis’s far softer education law is popular with Floridians (and not just Floridians).

More Beauchamp:

Predictably, the Florida bill provoked a backlash from corporate America — which DeSantis used as a justification to engage in even more Orbán-like behavior.

After Disney put out a statement criticizing the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, DeSantis moved to strip the corporation of its special tax status in a 40-square-mile area around Disney World. In this area, called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Florida allows the mega-corporation to essentially function as a local government, giving it the power to, for example, collect taxes (from itself) and build roads. These privileges, first granted by the state in 1967, are hugely beneficial for the company — and, on Friday, DeSantis signed a bill revoking them.

In doing so, he was very explicit about his reasoning: This move was direct punishment for Disney’s stance on the “Don’t Say Gay” law. In a fundraising email, DeSantis wrote that “Disney and other woke corporations won’t get away with peddling their unchecked pressure campaigns any longer.” In an appearance on Newsmax, Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez noted that Disney had “changed what they really espouse,” lambasting the company’s “very public agenda to indoctrinate our children.”

Yep, and bless DeSantis and Nunez for doing a very un-Republican thing, and blasting Big Business. DeSantis seems to be learning the Orban lesson that the state should be used at times to rein business in. Conservatives like me (remember Crunchy Cons from 2006?) have been saying for a long time that corporate America has too much power, and doesn’t use it for the common good. I’m not a statist, but there’s nothing wrong with a balance of powers in our society. Now that we are afflicted with Woke Capitalism, Ron DeSantis understands that the only way we will ever cause these extremely rich, extremely powerful, extremely progressive corporations to back off is to use the power of the state to punish them.

Overall, regarding Orban, I find it fascinating to watch the Left’s obsession with him and the way he uses power. It reveals at times that left-wing figures simply assume that large areas of public and private institutional life belongs to them, and should not be contested. In the Netherlands this week, I heard a conservative academic talk about how every cultural institution in his country is totally owned by the Left, and generously subsidized by the taxpayer, through the state. This is common throughout the US and Europe; liberals think it’s simply the natural order of things. Viktor Orban contests that — and he wins, and he keeps winning.

After a conservative dinner in the Netherlands, I overheard one man present say that if he didn’t have a good job that kept him busy, “I would go to Budapest.” It’s where things are happening now on the intellectual Right. It’s where the future is being argued over, and worked out. I’m on my way home from Budapest now,  but I’m going to get back as soon as I can.

Maybe Florida is becoming our American Hungary. I was having drinks this week with a prominent US intellectual conservative, who told me that so many important conservatives have moved to Florida in the last couple of years that things are really starting to happen there. He lives in the DC area, and said he has never really had to go to Florida before. But now that’s changing. Good.

The post DeSantis, Magyar Of The Sunshine State? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Hello from Heathrow. I’m headed back to the US today. Sorry I haven’t posted much this week — I’ve been giving talks in Brussels and in Utrecht, and I’m still trying to absorb how radically my life has changed. I have missed a step or two this week, for sure.

News this week from the world of Soft Totalitarianism: the Biden Administration’s Department of Homeland Security has announced a federal panel to combat “disinformation.” That’s right: the government has taken upon itself the task of instructing the people what’s true and what isn’t. From the Washington Post:

The Department of Homeland Security’s creation of a Disinformation Governance Board has set off a backlash on the right — even as it’s not entirely clear what the perhaps unfortunately named board will do.

Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas mentioned the creation of the board in multiple congressional hearings this week. In one, he linked it to efforts to combat misinformation from human smugglers. In another, he said it would be used to counter Russian cyber and election misinformation: “We have just established a mis- and disinformation governance board in the Department of Homeland Security to more effectively combat this threat, not only to election security but to our homeland security.”

Amid growing anti-censorship fervor on the right, a bevy of Republicans have suggested that the initiative amounts to policing speech. Elon Musk declared it “messed up.” Many on the right likened it to the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s book “1984.”

They’ve also questioned the fitness of the board’s executive director, Nina Jankowicz, who has in the past supported Democrats, praised efforts to crack down on coronavirus misinformation on social media and expressed skepticism about the provenance of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

About Nina Jankowicz:

When a Minister of Truth came to America of course it was going to be a smug, condescending white woman. And of course she looks and sounds exactly like this. pic.twitter.com/5fcFeDNex4

— Chadwick Moore (@Chadwick_Moore) April 29, 2022

Something similar is going on now in the UK:

The Culture Secretary @NadineDorries just admitted that a totally opaque “disinformation unit” in government works day in day out to *extrajudicially* remove lawful speech the government doesn’t like from the internet.

The unit should be shut down. Now!pic.twitter.com/2cXF2AFgmu

— Silkie Carlo (@silkiecarlo) January 6, 2022

The ruling class really is setting itself up for a takedown. Look at this from Nellie Bowles’s TGIF newsletter, in which she comments on the progressive establishment freakout over Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter:

The White House is furious. Here’s Jen Psaki on the acquisition: “The president has long been concerned about the power of large social media platforms, the power they have over our everyday lives, has long argued that tech platforms must be held accountable for the harms they cause.” Senator Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, announced that he wants to pass laws to control social media company algorithms to promote justice: “We must pass laws to protect privacy and promote algorithmic justice for internet users.” Algorithmic justice!

It goes without saying that the mainstream media is in an uproar, but some of the claims are wild enough to still surprise. MSNBC host Joy Reid claimed the acquisition is an effort to bring apartheid to America: “Elon Musk, I guess he misses the old South Africa in the 80s. He wants that back,” she said. On The View, Sunny Hostin said Musk only wants white men to have free speech: “So when Elon Musk says, ‘wow, this is about free speech,’ seems to me that it’s about free speech of straight white men.” This was echoed by grifter/activist Shaun King, who said: “It’s about white power. The man was raised in Apartheid by a white nationalist.” The bestselling author Anand Giridharadas talked about the need for “equitable speech” rather than plain-old free speech. Times Columnist Charles Blow announced he would quit the platform in protest. Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin came out swinging: “Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has sealed his bond with the American right.”

The Times ran raging op-eds one after another like “Twitter Under Elon Musk Will Be a Scary Place.” Funny how no one is upset that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Or that Marc Benioff owns Time Magazine. Or that Laureen Powell Jobs owns The Atlantic.

But my absolute favorite was MSNBC’s Ari Melber warning about what might happen with Musk at the helm: “You could secretly ban one party’s candidate . . . secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it until AFTER the election.” Which is . . . sort of what Twitter already did.

→ Brief list of things that could get you kicked off Twitter over the past few years:

Saying Covid-19 was made in a lab.Saying cloth masks don’t work that well.Saying vaccinated people can spread Covid.Misgendering someone, even in satire.Reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.And my personal favorite: Saying the phrase “learn to code” derisively to someone.

Bowles goes on to catalog the hysterical, borderline-personality-disorder meltdown within Twitter, as the wokesters come to terms with the fact that a Bad Man is coming to take away their censorious wubbies.

Meanwhile, did you see the Madison Cawthorn gay story? Holy Elton John’s tea cozy! The Millennial right-wing tool has allegedly had a surprising person fiddling with his tool:

New video of scandal-ridden GOP Rep Madison Cawthorn having his crotch felt by a close male friend and staff member is at the center of a complaint calling for an investigation into him and filed with the Office of Congressional Ethics today, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The extraordinary footage, obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com and seen here for the first time today, shows Cawthorn, 26, in a car with his close aide and his scheduler Stephen Smith, 23.

Cawthorn sits in the driver’s seat apparently filmed by Smith as he adopts an exaggerated accent and says, ‘I feel the passion and desire and would like to see a naked body beneath my hands.’

The camera then pans back to Smith who says, ‘Me too’ as Cawthorn can be heard laughing. Smith then films himself reaching his hand over and into Cawthorn’s crotch.

You gotta read the whole thing to see the sexy comments on the sketchy Venmo payments the embattled GOP Congressman made to Smith — who lived at home with Cawthorn during Cawthorn’s brief failed marriage. Well, golly, I’m sure there’s a good explanation for how the clean-cut, all-American, family-values conservative got himself into this mess.

OK, I need to focus on some more serious stuff. But let me toss you some more Dreherbait:

In the total state breakfast cereal grooms your children pic.twitter.com/efG8teapnv

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) April 29, 2022

In Live Not By Lies speeches, I’ve used this example — the transgender children’s propaganda cereal box — to explain the nature of soft totalitarianism. From the book:

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

Infusing every aspect of life with ideology was a standard aspect of Soviet totalitarianism. Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”

Our ruling class is so obsessed with LGBT that it can’t even let the kids eat a bowl of damned breakfast cereal without being groomed. Mickey Mouse, Tony the Tiger, and Toucan Sam — groomers all. Gives new meaning to Froot Loops, I tell you what.

The post Ministry Of Disinformation, Madison Cawthorn’s Crotch appeared first on The American Conservative.

Woke up this morning in Brussels, where I will be giving a Live Not By Lies talk in a few minutes, to find that Sebastian Milbank has written a generous piece about me in The Critic, introducing me to British readers. Here’s an excerpt:

I asked him how he reconciles his scepticism of authority, and the idolatry of family and place, with Orban’s Hungary,  and nationalism in general. Dreher replied he was a “reluctant nationalist”, but “believes nations are important”. His defence  of nationhood is not triumphalist, he suggested, but essentially conservative, praising the diversity of cultures in Europe, and opposed to what he calls “the McDonaldisation of Europe”, arguing that America has been turned into a “shithole” by relentless capitalism. 

His perspective on state power is realist — it is always  going to exist, and if it isn’t used to defend basic natural goods like the family, or religious faith, it will be wielded by those  who are their relentless enemy. And if he’s sceptical of traditional authority, he’s even more wary of the panglossian narratives of modern liberalism. He’s determined to break the taboo on the right against using political levers to restrain the power of big business. 

But having made the improbable leap from America to Continental Europe, can Dreher be translated into a British milieu? In some ways he’s utterly at odds with traditional English sensibilities. He’s disarmingly open, fluently and earnestly laying out his life story over the course of our conversation. 

His religiosity, for all its fascination with Europe and tradition, is very American: apocalyptic and with a passionate, personal relationship with his saviour which he describes  as “an active life-changing relationship with Jesus Christ”. There’s more than a touch of revivalist preacher to Rod. 

But here is something we’ve lost: passionate self-expression and apocalypticism were once defining features of many religious communities in this country, and those passions  still quietly burn away in the pages of Milton and Blake. His influence is already being felt in Britain, as I learned when  I spoke to Daniel French, an Anglican priest and one of Dreher’s English supporters. 

French believes that the shock of the pandemic, in which many ordinary Anglicans were horrified by the bishops’ willingness to close churches, and their increasingly managerialist agenda for the Church, has helped generate an appetite for something very different. 

With the establishment apparently blind to, or complicit in, the dwindling of British Christianity, French believes The Benedict Option presents an alternative that meets the scale of the crisis: “It is naive to think that change in Christian fortunes is just one revival tent away. The Benedict Option points rather to our corporate journey out of exile requiring several generations of introspection.” Conservatism and Christianity alike may have to accept some time in the wilderness if they’re to recapture their soul, and to truly revive. 

According to Daniel French there is an increasingly “underground” aspect to conservative Christian life in the UK —  believers have woken up to the fact that the culture is against them, and in many cases even traditional religious leaders too.

Another of his UK allies, Dr James Orr, believes that Rod Dreher is destined to have a significant impact on our conservatism. “His insights are proving more salient with every week that passes, not only for Christians but for all those who are beginning to feel the consequences of rejecting the West’s Christian inheritance.

“As hyper-progressivism continues to colonise the UK  public square with neuralgic imports from the US culture wars, I predict that more and more people in the UK will start to take Dreher’s jeremiads seriously and pay attention to his constructive proposals.”

Whether or not James Orr is right, Dreher is interesting not just for who he is, but for what he represents. He stands at a newly emergent nexus of traditional European conservatism, English realism, and American romanticism and religiosity. With an increasingly sterile politics, caught between technocratic centrism and the hollow battles of the culture wars, there’s a desperate need for new ideas, and fresh approaches. This is a man worth listening to. 

Read it all. 

About the “shithole” comment. I made it with conscious reference to Donald Trump’s controversial remark about “shithole countries” of the Third World. I love America, but I do not love what America has become, thanks to radical individualism and a marketplace culture that valorizes desire. Our capitalism-über-alles stance has allowed us to buy and sell human life, and the mechanism for creating human life (e.g., surrogacy, IVF clinics that create hundreds of embryos), and is now allowing, even mandating, the deliberate destruction of the human in children, for the sake of allowing them to create a gender identity of their choosing. It doesn’t make you a socialist to oppose that; it just makes you a Christian who believes that God is greater than the market, and that facilitating choice is not the summum bonum of social and political life.

There’s a minor error of location — Sebastian has me living in DC at a time when I was actually living elsewhere — but overall it’s a lovely piece, and I’m grateful for his interest in my work. I am also grateful for the kind things that Father David French and Dr. James Orr said about me to Sebastian.

The post Dreher For Brits appeared first on The American Conservative.

Sorry for the light posting — I’ve been traveling back to Budapest from Jerusalem, and now I’m in the Budapest airport on my way to Brussels for a speech. I’ve not had much time. I did a series of wonderful interviews with people I met on my week in Jerusalem. I’m going to transcribe them and roll them out here over the next few days. I think you’ll find them all interesting.

Despite some unpleasantness, which I wrote about on this blog, the trip to the Holy Land was overwhelmingly positive, and I cannot encourage you strongly enough to visit. I did have a philosophical moment on the way to pray at the Western Wall on Sunday. As most of you know, the Western Wall is all that remains of Herod’s Temple. It is the holiest place on earth that is freely accessible to Jews. The Temple Mount is the holiest place, but Muslim places of worship are there now, and it is not easy for Jews to get there. You will have seen images of pious Jews praying at the Western Wall. Some Christians go there to pray too. I did, first to pray for the intentions of a Jewish friend, and then to pray for the Jewish people, and for the peace of all God’s children in this holy land.

The Old City is difficult to navigate, and I was having trouble with my GPS. I saw an Israeli soldier escorting two younger women dressed like religious Jews. I asked them if they could show me the way to the Kotel (the Hebrew word for the Western Wall). They said they were going there, and invited me to follow them.

The women looked to be in their mid-thirties. One was white, the other black. The black woman comes from continental Europe, and is in the process of converting to Judaism. She comes from a non-observant Catholic family, and explained how happy she was to have found Judaism. The joy on her face was palpable. She talked about how life back home had so little meaning. Not anymore.

The white woman, who I think had an English accent, was very intense. She told me that she had spent a decade in a Hindu religious cult, but came out of it a year ago. Now she was in Israel, embracing the faith of her ancestors. Yet she was very, very angry. She kept engaging the soldier in conversation about how horrible the Muslims were, and how disgusted she was with the Israeli government for going so soft on non-Jews. We reached a promontory overlooking the plaza in front of the Western Wall, and the white woman scowled.

“Look at them,” she said, referring to Muslims milling about on the Temple Mount. “That doesn’t belong to them. It’s ours. It’s ours! We should push them off of it. Why is the government so weak?”

The soldier didn’t really disagree with her, but his tone was more moderate. The angry white woman kept cutting him off to denounce Muslims and Gentiles. I kept wondering if she could see that I was wearing a visible cross. I don’t think she noticed me at all. A year ago, she was praying to Ganesh, but now, she had adopted the persona of a militant settler. The black woman with the cheerful face kept chiming in to echo the extremism of her friend. It was as if she was learning that to be a Jew was to want to drive non-Jews off the land. I mean, this was the catechism she was imbibing from the Jews she had gone to for instruction in the faith.

I liked the soldier, if not his opinions. He told me he came to Israel eight years ago from Canada. He got tired of anti-Semitism back home, but more than that, he wanted to do something meaningful with his life. He said that his family back home had no real interest in Jewish culture and heritage. I could tell that this caused him pain.

“Those Jews in Tel Aviv,” he said, “the only thing they care about is pleasure and spending. But God gives us only one life, and we have a responsibility to use it to do important things.” He went on like that for a bit. I agreed with him wholeheartedly on that point.

Down on the plaza, the soldier asked the women if they wanted him to wait for them to finish praying, and escort them back to the Jaffa Gate. No, said the white woman, half-snarling; “I know how to treat them if they give me any trouble.” Then the two women went over to the women’s side of the wall to pray, and I said goodbye to the soldier, and went to the men’s. After I left, and meandered over to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, I started thinking about the meaning of what I had witnessed.

All three of these Jews — and the Jew-in-training — had reacted against vacuous liberalism. They understandably found a life of hedonism and consumerism to be vapid and not worth living. And they’re right! But they had chosen paths that brought them into harsh conflict with those who didn’t share their ultimate commitments. This is unavoidable. Nothing like the Holy Land brings that into such sharp focus.

To be clear, not all Israeli Jews are so militant. But the demographic future of Israel favors the hardliners.

We all know, of course, how intolerant and hateful Islamic extremists of the city and the region are. That hardly needs elaboration in this space. When I was last in Jerusalem, in the year 2000, I interviewed a couple of Arab Christian men in their twenties. They told me that they hated the way Israel treated them, but that they would rather live under Israeli government than Palestinian government, which they feared at that time would mean Hamas. Christians would have no chance at all under Hamas, they said. To paraphrase the great Walter Sobchak, say what you will about Hamas’s insane, murderous Islamist ideology, but at least it’s an ethos.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? Say what you will about the various extremisms going around — religious and otherwise — but at least they call people out of themselves and orient them to something greater than individual pleasure. But it should be obvious that not all higher causes are equally honorable or virtuous. There is no way that Muslims and Jews who hold those radical beliefs about the land and its righteous use can live together. The conflict between absolutisms is especially vivid in the Holy Land, but you can see various versions of it playing out all over. Among us, the Woke are best understood as zealots of a political religion. They are purists who will not tolerate any opposition. In my case, I would prefer to live in a classical liberal society governed by a Judeo-Christian moral framework, but I have lost faith that this kind of liberalism is even possible anymore. Certainly the kind of conservatism that is really nothing but right-liberalism has proven completely ineffective in staving off progressive illiberalism.

Liberalism exists in part to make it possible for diverse peoples with irreconcilable beliefs to live together in peace. But it’s fading away, in part because it doesn’t offer enough to hold people like that Canadian man who moved to Israel to devote his life to defending the Jewish state. It doesn’t offer enough to hold that angry white woman, who didn’t find what she needed in the Hindu cult, and was now trying on settler extremism. It doesn’t offer enough to hold the ex-Catholic black woman, who wanted something more than the vacant middle-class rituals of post-Christian European life. What was especially interesting to me about the black woman is that she seemed clearly motivated by the joy of discovering Jewish religion, but had fallen in with a friend whose experience of passion for Judaism had primarily taken the form of hating non-Jews. What a tragedy.

Liberals tend to believe that all illiberal commitments are inevitably going to become intolerant and militant. And so, to forestall that, they have become in recent years the same thing that they profess to hate.

Understand me here: I share the same disaffection from secular liberalism that this Jewish trio does. You’ll read an interview here in the days to come with a Jewish man — one I’m pleased to call a friend — who moved from Canada to Israel seeking a deeper life, and who is now building it in a way that is wholly admirable. (My thought after our lunch was like that of François, the protagonist of Houellebecq’s Submission, with regard to his Jewish girlfriend who escapes France: I envy him that he has an Israel to go to.) But I have no doubt at all that the angry English Jewish convert would never tolerate Christian me if she had the power not to. All I can figure is that she shared her sharp opinions so freely because she assumed that if I was going to the Kotel, I must be Jewish. I am also sure that there are Christians who are just as intolerant. I saw a distinguished Catholic priest, a theologian who supports integralism, on Twitter defending executing heretics. While there are far more cutthroat Israeli settlers and bloody-minded Islamist militants in the world than killer Catholics (or Orthodox, or other Christians), we ought to know by now enough about human nature to realize that the skull is always just below the surface.

After the long Paschal liturgy, I stopped by a shawerma shop that was open at five a.m. to break the Lenten fast. Others from the liturgy followed me in. We were all in a celebratory mood. I started talking to the Orthodox men at the table next to me.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Republika Srpska!” he said. “You have heard of it? In Bosnia?”

Yes, I had. This is the statelet that had waged war on Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, and whose soldiers committed horrible atrocities. The next day, talking to a Serbian friend, I asked him if Republika Srpska sentiment was coming back.

“Oh yes,” he said, “and very fast.” Then he told me about how the Gulf Arab states are pouring funding into Albania and Kosovo to fund Wahhabi mosques, to turn the Muslims there militant. The Kosovar Muslims are going after Serbian Orthodox monasteries, he said, and showed me horrific videos of sacrileges and destruction. He said that the current Islamic government of Bosnia is working now to promote militancy among Bosnian Muslims, and the Bosnian Serbs are responding in kind.

He expected that we would see war in the Balkans again, before much longer. In fact, I had heard an international correspondent say the same thing two months ago over coffee in Budapest.

Liberalism is falling apart, because honestly, who can give a damn about what it has become? Silencing everyone who disagrees, mutilating children and alienating them from their bodies, sanctifying a certain kind of racism, valorizing pornography and transgressive sex, and all the rest. Good riddance to it.

But we are going to miss it when it’s gone, and people like that angry Jewish woman, and Madame Defarge of the Millennials, are in the driver’s seat. It’s coming.

The post We Might Miss Liberalism When It’s Gone appeared first on The American Conservative.

Today is the holiest day in the year for Christians — or, I should say, Orthodox Christians. It’s Pascha (Easter), for us; Western Christians celebrated Easter last year. The first service of Pascha begins at midnight tonight, which is why I say that today is the holiest day; to be honest, Pascha stretches from that service tonight, and lasts all day tomorrow.

Here in Jerusalem, though, Holy Saturday has particular meaning to local Christians because of the miracle (it is believed by most) of the Holy Fire. This is the first sign of the Resurrection. At 11 am, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher fills with believers. After noon, the Greek Patriarch goes into the edicule, the “little house” built over the tomb of Christ, prays, then, according to belief, a divine energy descends, lighting the Patriarch’s candles. He then emerges and passes the flame to everyone there. It is an ecstatic moment, as you can see here. I have a ticket to get into the Church this morning for the event. Me, I’m skeptical about whether or not it’s truly a miracle — I am certainly willing to believe — but no Orthodox believers from this region doubts at all. Whether the Holy Fire is a true miracle of mere symbolism, it is a central annual event in the lives of Christians in the city and region where Jesus lived, ministered, suffered, died, and rose again.

I’m staying at a hotel inside the Old City, where I was advised to book a room out of fear that the Jerusalem police would not let Christians into the Old City on Holy Saturday. This turns out to have been very good advice.

After an early breakfast in our hotel, a Christian friend and I decided to go over to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to pray. We got to the end of our street, which opens onto the plaza at the Jaffa Gate, and two Jerusalem police officers told us we couldn’t pass. Then she said we could leave, but there was no guarantee that we could get back in. We walked past the barrier, over to the Jaffa Gate, where I saw this big crowd of Christians behind the barrier, denied entrance into the Old City:

The police officer at the gate said we could leave the Old City, but when we returned, to tell the guards at the bottom to phone her, and she would tell them to let us in. She was polite, and tried to be accommodating, but I told my friend that I didn’t want to risk not being able to get back in. My friend, who lived in Israel for years, told me that he doesn’t blame these cops. “They’re all Israeli millennials,” he said. “Many of them don’t like this any more than we do. These are their orders.”

Meanwhile, Orthodox Jews like this man, wearing a white prayer shawl, passed easily into the Old City, going to the Western Wall on the Jewish Sabbath to pray:

My friend said, “In all my years living in Israel, I’ve never seen that. Wow.”

A few minutes later, an Arab Christian shop owner said to us, “You see what we have to live with? Every year it’s like this.”

Before we returned to the hotel, I saw a small group of Christians passing by, headed into the Old City. They must have been allowed to pass by the police at the Jaffa Gate. But this was only a small number; by far the greater part of the crowd remained outside.

Later this morning, my friend and I will be allowed to pass into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, because we managed to get tickets to the service. Normally, though, you don’t need a ticket. The Patriarch has protested the Jerusalem police decision to limit the number of Christian worshippers allowed into the Old City for the Holy Fire ceremony. In a press statement about the letter the Patriarch sent to the head of Jerusalem police, the Patriarchate said:

 

The controversy has ended up in Israeli court. The Israelis say this is a matter of safety, but no Christian here believes that. There have been violent clashes this weekend between Israeli soldiers and Islamic worshipers outside the Christian Quarter of the Old City, but Christians do not cause problems. We are peaceful. Yet the Israelis won’t let our people come freely to worship. Why not?

There is a broader controversy here that the worldwide Christian community should know about. It involves the activities of a radical Israeli settler group that aims to “redeem” Jerusalem by cleansing it of non-Jews. The controversy for now centers around the Jaffa Gate entrance to the Old City. This 2019 story from The Guardian gives a good overview. Since that report, the radicals of Ateret Cohanim have taken possession of the Imperial Hotel. Here is a more recent report from The Telegraph:

Atop the roof of the Petra Hotel, almost every major Christian site and denomination in Old Jerusalem is visible, from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection and the centre of world Christianity, through to the lowly Swedish Christian Study Centre.

Located by the ancient city’s Jaffa Gate, where the Christian Quarter meets the Armenian Quarter, the strategically located hotel and its neighbours, Little Petra and the Imperial Hotel, are at the heart of an epic legal battle that local Christians said epitomises their struggle to cling on in this holiest of cities.

“The problem of Jaffa Gate is the problem of the coming generations for hundreds of years,” claimed Abu Walid Dajani, the proprietor of the Imperial Hotel. “Fifty years from now, there will be no Christians in Jerusalem. I can see Jerusalem, unfortunately… it’s a cemetery.”

The fight over the hotels came as Christians in Jerusalem face a demographic crisis and alleged increasing harassment from radical Jewish groups in the city.

Members of the clergy and local Christians that The Telegraph spoke to described regular incidents of verbal abuse, vandalism and spitting, as well as rare occasions of violent assault.

The property dispute dates back nearly two decades. At its heart are a series of deals done under the previous head of the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem in 2004 and 2005, in which key properties across the city were sold to Ateret Cohanim, a Jewish settler group which seeks to “reclaim” land in Jerusalem for Jews.

The Patriarchate, backed by the 12 other major Christian denominations in the Holy Land, insisted that the deals were the result of corruption and blackmail.

Irenaios I, the Patriarch at the time, signed over power of attorney to Nikolas Papadimos, an official in the finance department who made the deals with Ateret Cohanim.

When the sales came to light, Irenaios I became the first Patriarch in two centuries to be removed from office, while Mr Papadimos fled to South America.

More:

Two factors have created renewed urgency. Ten days before The Telegraph visited the Petra Hotel, members of Ateret Cohanim forced their way into Little Petra in the middle of the night and occupied it.

On the day that The Telegraph visited, scorch marks were still visible on the door into Little Petra, whilst from inside the Petra Hotel, a single Jewish man was visible next door, through a broken window, dressed in a kippah, prayer shawl and tefillin and praying.

When The Telegraph spoke to one of the settlers, he had limited English and was unwilling to talk to journalists. Whilst he provided a phone number to call, no one picked up.

The second factor is a looming Supreme Court case in which the Greek Patriarchate will attempt to have the case reopened. Since the court last considered the case, a whistleblower has come forward, allegedly disgruntled at Ateret Cohanim’s failure to pay him, detailing supposed corruption by the group in the mid-Nineties.

Lawyers for the Patriarchate admitted that it does not prove that the 2004 and 2005 deals were corrupt, but they hope to demonstrate a pattern of behaviour and, crucially, to get Mr Dan in the witness box.

And:

If the case is lost, the Christian community faces the prospect of losing control of a key area of the Christian Quarter where pilgrims enter on their route to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Christian churches start their processions.

The Patriarchate insisted that the row is not about preventing Jews from living where they want to, but stopping a co-ordinated attempt to change the character of the old city.

They point, as an example, to the former St John’s Hospice. Just 250yds east of the Jaffa Gate, it is the prime example of what the Christian church fears could happen across the quarter.

On the lintel above the entrance is the tau-phi monogram of the Greek Patriarchate, yet the vast building is bedecked with multiple Israeli flags, the windows barred and the stonework crumbling.

In 1990, this hostel for pilgrims was taken over by Ateret Cohanim, causing uproar among Christians and Muslims, and led to the closure of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in protest.

That hostel normally would have housed hundreds of Christian pilgrims. Now it is full of hostile Israeli settlers. The local Christians I’ve talked to this week believe that this is part of a settler plot to choke off access to Christian holy sites within the city, and force Christians out. One more clip:

At the far end of the Armenian Quarter, on Mount Zion, Father Nikodemus Schnabel works as a monk in the Benedictine Abbey of the Dormition. He told The Telegraph how more settlers had moved into derelict buildings around the order’s properties, bringing with them vandalism, littering, abuse and the throwing of projectiles.

“They destroy the tyres of our cars, graffiti ‘death to Christians’, break windows, they desecrate our cemetery, you know… ugly things, and it’s really invasive,” he said.

Both Father Baghdasaryan and Father Nikodemus were clear that this is not about Jews or Israelis in general, but a radical minority, with many Israelis unaware that there is even a problem.

Father Baghdasaryan described how when he was abused by extremists in front of an Israeli crowd in the new city, the crowd turned against the abusers.

“We have so much solidarity because there are many, many wonderful Jews who are ashamed of that behaviour,” said Father Schnabel. “But I see a lack of will among the authorities to really go after [the perpetrators].”

Read the whole thing. 

I want to emphasize that as far as I can tell, what the monk says is true: most Israeli Jews wouldn’t support these hate-filled radical settlers. But do they even know what is going on?

Here is a link to the Ateret Cohanim website.They sound innocent. Believe me, they are not. Guess who spoke at their 2010 dinner? John Bolton. 

What is happening here in this holy city is a disgrace. I say that as an American Christian who cares for Israel, and who wants the Israelis and the Arabs to live in peace. But we American Christians, especially those who support Israel, cannot stand by and allow these radical Jews to stomp all over our people in the city where Jesus lived, died, and rose from the dead. I believe in Israel’s right to exist, especially as a safe haven for the Jewish people. But I do not believe in the Jewish right to abuse non-Jews, especially in the holy city. I also do not believe that my Israeli Jewish friends support this. I hope that Christians and Jews of good will will rise up, repudiate these radical settlers, and defend the status quo that makes the holy city a place of worship for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

And to be clear, I condemn all violence in the Holy City; the Muslims this week who have caused such an uproar are wrong. Nevertheless, what is happening this morning here in Jerusalem, as I write this, with Christians — who have always been peaceful — being denied access to their holy sites for prayer on this most sacred of days, is another form of violence. It is intolerable.

The United States provides billions in aid annually to the State of Israel. Why do we put up with this from the Israelis? Washington should pressure the Israeli government to take a firm stand against these radical settlers in the Old City. I understand that a Congressional delegation may soon be coming here to take a look at the Jaffa Gate controversy. Good. I urge both Republicans and Democrats to come to Jerusalem, meet with Christians living in the Old City, and learn first hand about this intolerance and abuse.

And to my Evangelical Christian brothers and sisters in America, those who are so devoted to the State of Israel: I get it, but if you love Israel, please speak to the Israelis on behalf of your Christian brothers and sisters who live here, and who are mocked, harassed, and abused by radical Jews. These radicals are not representative of all Israeli society — but they are tolerated. They should not be. You American Christians, you have a lot of influence. Please use it to defend your fellow Christians in the city of Christ’s death and resurrection. If you don’t, very soon you yourselves may not be able to gain access to the Christian holy places, to pray at the site of Golgotha, and at the Tomb where Jesus rose from the dead. These radical Jews of Ateret Cohanim do not love or respect you; they despise you as much as they despise the Catholics, Orthodox, Armenians, and Protestants who live here.

This is not theoretical; this is actually happening. These Orthodox Jews are walking right this very morning, freely, to pray at their holiest site. Thanks be to God that they can do that! But what about us Christians? We never threw stones at Israeli police in the Old City. Why are we treated like potential criminals? Who benefits from this? Besides Ateret Cohanim, I mean.

(Note well: anti-Semitic comments will not be published. I condemn anti-Semitism unreservedly. But criticizing the Jewish settlers and official Israeli policy does not constitute anti-Semitism.)

 

The post An Anti-Christian Disgrace In Jerusalem appeared first on The American Conservative.

I have had a peaceful and restorative Orthodox Holy Week in Jerusalem. It has been good to not think about the collapse of Western civilization for a while, though it has come up a few times. When the transgender madness back in America comes up with religious Israeli Jews and Palestinian Christians, they are absolutely confused and angry about the whole thing. To watch their faces and hear their words when they talk about it is like going back in time to America circa 2008, or even a bit later, when the idea of filling the heads of little children with gender ideology would have sounded insane, and quite possibly criminal, to most Americans.

Not anymore. This is what America has become. We are no longer a light to the world; we are endarkening it. These people are correct to fear and loathe the poisonous ideology we are promoting in the world, via our government, our corporations, and our entertainment.

It’s not just us, either. I had coffee with a British Christian visiting the city, a man who has worked in elite circles most of his life. He told me that he, his wife, and their adult child, a college student, are starting to make plans to get out of the UK. I met him at a cafe where we shared a table, talking to locals. He told them about how you can find yourself disciplined at work, or even out of a job, for using the wrong word. When he told a story about how he was very nearly fired for an offense that sounded like a bad parody of wokeness, the local people thought he was surely making it up. I told them that I didn’t know this Brit, but what he said happens all the time.

I see that the invaluable Christopher Rufo has published leaked documents from the Evanston-Skokie public school system in Illinois. Excerpt:

The Evanston–Skokie School District has adopted a radical gender curriculum that teaches pre-kindergarten through third-grade students to celebrate the transgender flag, break the “gender binary” established by white “colonizers,” and experiment with neo-pronouns such as “ze,” “zir,” and “tree.”

I have obtained the full curriculum documents, which are part of the Chicago-area district’s “LGBTQ+ Equity Week,” which administrators adopted last year. The curriculum begins in pre-kindergarten, with a series of lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity. The lesson plan opens with an introduction to the rainbow flag and teaches students that “each color in the flag has a meaning.” The teacher also presents the transgender flag and the basic concepts of gender identity, explaining that “we call people with more than one gender or no gender, non-binary or queer.” Finally, the lesson plan has the teacher leading a class project to create a rainbow flag, with instructions to “gather students on the rug,” “ask them to show you their flags,” and “proudly hang the class flag where they can all see it.”

In kindergarten, the lessons on gender and trans identity go deeper. “When we show whether we feel like a boy or a girl or some of each, we are expressing our gender identity,” the lesson begins. “There are also children who feel like a girl and a boy; or like neither a boy or a girl. We can call these children transgender.” Students are expected to be able to “explain the importance of the rainbow flag and trans flag” and are asked to consider their own gender identity. The kindergartners read two books that affirm transgender conversions, study photographs of boys in dresses, learn details about the transgender flag, and perform a rainbow dance. At the end of the lesson, the students are encouraged to adopt and share their own gender identities with the class. “Now you have a chance to make a picture to show how you identify,” the lesson reads. “Maybe you want to have blue hair! Maybe you want to be wearing a necklace. Your identity is for you to decide!”

In first grade, students learn about gender pronouns. The teachers explain that “some pronouns are gender neutral” and students can adopt pronouns such as “she, tree, they, he, her, him, them, ze, zir, [and] hir.” The students practice reading a series of scripts in which they announce their gender pronouns and practice using alternate pronouns, including “they,” “tree,” “ze,” and “zir.” The teacher encourages students to experiment and reminds them: “Whatever pronouns you pick today, you can always change.” Students then sit down to complete a “pronouns workbook,” with more lessons on neo-pronouns and non-binary identities.

In third grade, Evanston–Skokie students are told that white European “colonizers” imposed their “Western and Christian ideological framework” on racial minorities and “forced two-spirit people to conform to the gender binary.” The teacher tells students that “many people feel like they aren’t really a boy or a girl” and that they should “call people by the gender they have in their heart.” Students are encouraged to “break the binary,” reject the system of “whiteness,” and study photographs of black men in dresses and a man wearing lipstick and long earrings. “It is a myth that gender is binary,” the lesson explains. “Even though we are all given a sex assigned at birth, you are not given your gender. Only you can know your gender and how you feel inside.” At the end of the lesson, students are instructed to write a letter to the future on how they can change society. “Society right now is very unfair,” reads a sample letter. “I see a lot of marches on the T.V. and I even went to a march last summer.”

If you go to this link, you can read the original source material yourself. 

This is morally insane. And, as we know, this ideology has conquered American elites and their institutions. There seems to be no brakes on this runaway train.

Why are we letting this happen in our country? Jeremy Carl tells the truth without pulling punches. Excerpts:

Sometimes a crime is so profound that it is difficult even to name it; to grasp the enormity of it. The recent explosion of transgenderism in children, an affliction currently affecting the lives of more than 1-in-50 young adults and children in Gen Z, is one such instance.

Groomers.

It’s the word of the month, which the Right is applying increasingly to our leftist political establishment.

Perhaps the best response to the groomer debate came from Helena Kirschner, a woman who detransitioned (that is, she spent years as “transgender man” before later accepting her birth sex) and has become an influential voice speaking up against transgender ideology:

“There’s a place for precise terminology,” she tweeted. “There’s also a place for memetic terms that convey a difficult to articulate concept in a way many people can intuitively understand. ‘Groomer’ applied to teachers & other adults who manipulate kids into gender confusion accomplishes this.”

And that is exactly right. It’s difficult for us to acknowledge the enormity of the crime that has been committed against our children because it’s hard for us to acknowledge how deeply we have failed. And it’s hard for us to accept that this crime is taking place with the full support of the leadership of one of America’s major political parties and most of the medical establishment. Indeed, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) banned a group of those skeptical of pediatric transgenderism from even setting up a booth at the latest AAP conference. To acknowledge the depth of the transgender transgression against our children is to stare deep into the void of a society in chaos and moral decay.

The mass grooming of our children into pediatric transgenderism and other confused gender identities is a crime of world-historical proportions, a crime which dare not speak its name.

More:

There are no “transgender kids.” There are confused kids. There are kids with gender dysphoria. There are depressed kids. There are feminine boys and masculine girls. There are kids who have been groomed and abused by the system, our corporations, our education system, and our media for years and are now deeply damaged. But there are no trans kids. There are only adults who have stolen our children’s innocence.

We lack the language to even describe the level of violation that has taken place. Joe Biden has absurdly labeled transgenderism “the civil rights issue of our time.” He has said there is “no room for compromise” on the issue. If there is no room for compromise with those who support genital mutilation of children than we are truly ruled by demons in human form.

Read it all. If we cannot turn this back, we don’t deserve to exist as a country. We will have become a curse upon the earth.

I can’t tell you how happy I am that thanks to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, conservative lawmakers are finally kicking woke capitalism in the goolies. From the Washington Post:

Florida’s Republican-led state legislature on Thursday passed a bill sought by Gov. Ron DeSantis to cancel Walt Disney World’s special tax district in Florida.

The speedy approval of the bill — it was filed three days ago, during a special session that was called for a different reason — was decried by state Democrats. Sen. Tina Polsky (D) called it “an enormous decision based on spite and revenge governance.”

The Left loves it when Woke Capitalism pushes state governments around to achieve progressive ends. But when a state government — which is accountable to voters, unlike corporations — pushes back on Big Business to hold it accountable for using its powers to interfere with politics and to behave in grotesquely antisocial ways (e.g., Disney senior executives bragging about inserting gender ideology propaganda into children’s programming and films), well, the Left freaks out.

Let them. This is a fight the GOP should want to have. From the polling I’ve seen, the trans-mania is unpopular even with most Democratic voters. But not Uncle Joe:

For Joe Biden, the vote by Florida Republicans on Thursday to strip Disney of its self-governing powers was a step too far. “Christ, they’re going after Mickey Mouse,” the president exclaimed at a fundraiser in Oregon, in apparent disbelief that state governor Ron DeSantis’s culture wars had reached the gates of the Magic Kingdom.

The move, Biden asserted, reflected his belief that the “far right has taken over the party”.

Says the Groomer-in-Chief, who doesn’t note that just over half of the people who voted for him in 2020 approve of DeSantis’s education law.

And people should be advised often that the mainstream media lie constantly about what’s really going on, either by omission or commission. Only sources like @libsoftiktok, which just retweets videos that pro-trans teachers and other activists release on social media, can be trusted to tell the truth.

The video Taylor Lorenz is describing is of a self-described “magical pleasure worker” who runs “Sexy Summer Camp” for children in rural Kentucky. pic.twitter.com/fuIHwsfMku

— John Hirschauer (@JohnHirschauer) April 19, 2022

This woman is running a “sexy summer camp” for children in Kentucky. She says she think it’s good for toddlers to masturbate. pic.twitter.com/Q2fJdR1gcB

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 8, 2022

Here’s the Washington Post‘s Taylor Lorenz in her failed hit piece on @libsoftiktok:

Tyler Wrynn, a former English teacher in Oklahoma, posted a video telling LGBTQ kids shunned by their parents that Wrynn was “proud of them” and loved them; it was featured on Libs of TikTok last week. Since being featured on the page Wrynn has been barraged with harassment and death threats.

“I’ve always seen myself as the type of teacher to stand up for marginalized voices,” Wrynn said. “I see fellow teachers on TikTok speak out for our disenfranchised students and they’re getting the same sort of harassment too.”

Here’s what the actual video was like (NSFW language):

“If your parents don’t accept you for who you are, f*** them. I’m your parents now” – Oklahoma middle school teacher

This teacher was let go last week after complaints of grooming and this tiktok + others containing questionable content were brought to the principal’s attention. pic.twitter.com/eBgAWCW3K7

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 11, 2022

How many liberal parents would be happy with their middle schooler’s teacher saying that?!

We are so lucky to have @libsoftiktok:

This is an example of an educator who lost their job after I posted their own video. A professor who wants to destigmatize pedophelia. This is who the left is defending. https://t.co/3UXezrGwvp

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 20, 2022

5th grade teacher shows her lesson plan for teaching gender and sexuality. pic.twitter.com/iFYdiigFMD

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 15, 2022

This will never stop until and unless the GOP can inflict real pain on Woke Capitalists, and the medical industry for its ghoulish todger-chopping and breast-hacking exploitation of minors. We may not win this thing, but at least we can fight like hell for our children, and for sanity.

I hope you’ll watch Jonathan Pageau’s terrific conversation with the great Paul Kingsnorth. They talk about how insane the world has gotten, and how corporations, technology, and ideology are upending everything. Here’s how it ends: with Kingsnorth saying that now is the time we have to be bold in standing up for truth, and to not care about being hated:

Today in Jerusalem, at my hotel, I met an American pastor who’s about my age, who told me that college students he works with keep telling him he’s got to read my Live Not By Lies. He told me that they are serious about their faith, and they really want to prepare to be bold and resilient in the face of what’s coming. One very good way to see if you have what it takes to resist is to ask yourself how you are facing down gender-ideology insanity — if you’re doing it.

Anyway, it’s so good to get outside of the Anglosphere + Western Europe, and talk to people. Until you do, you don’t realize how much Kultursmog we are breathing in the West, all of it belched out by our corrupt political, corporate, military, and cultural leaders. Even people like me, who recognize it for what it is, are so used to living with it that we lose our ability to be shocked. Sit down with a young Palestinian Christian mom in Bethlehem, as I did one day earlier this week, and start telling her what’s now mainstream for children in US pop culture. You’ll be hit upside the head with a healthy blast of sanity.

The post American Babylon: Endarkening The Nations appeared first on The American Conservative.

That woman you see me with is the chambermaid at my Old City Jerusalem hotel. When I left my room this morning, she was in the hallway with her cart.

“May I do your room today?” she asked. “You had the ‘do not disturb’ sign yesterday.”

“Yes, please do,” I said. Then, noticing a small knotted cross necklace around her neck, I said to her, “I like your cross.”

She looked at me with eyes of boundless compassion. It was startling to me. Who is this woman? Then she took it off, and signaled for me to bend down.

“It’s yours,” she said. “It’s my gift from the Holy Land.”

I have not wept once since my wife sent me notice that she had filed for divorce. It’s not because I’m not sad; it’s because I have spent nine years weeping, and I’m out of tears. But when that chambermaid put the cross on me this Good Friday morning, I burst into tears.

She looked a bit afraid.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry I’m crying. My wife and I are getting a divorce. I just found out last week.”

This happened three hours ago, and as I’m typing this, I’m fighting back tears. The woman looked it me with even more compassion than she had showed a moment earlier. I can’t remember exactly what she said, because I was fighting to control my tears, but I remember the tone in which she said it. It was the sound of the purest mercy, and I tell you, it was balm.

She told me that the Lord will take care of me and my family, not to be afraid.

“What is your name?” I asked her.

“Angela,” she said. “People tell me that I am their angel.”

“They are right,” I said, smiling through tears.

She said, “People tell me things. I take them into my heart, and they never come out.” Angela smiled.

“Angela, I will never forget you,” I said. “You cannot imagine how much I needed to meet you today, and hear your merciful words. Thank you, my sister. Thank you.”

She promised to pay for me, my wife, and our children, then we took the photo you see above. She went back to cleaning rooms in the hotel. I walked out and into the streets to join the Good Friday procession on the Via Dolorosa. But I wasn’t dolorous, because of Angela’s mercy.

Angela the Palestinian Christian chambermaid: Greater faith in all of Israel hath no woman! How many suffering souls passing through Jerusalem must she have showed mercy over the years? What a ministry she has. Just a simple chambermaid who somehow has the charism of seeing into the hearts of troubled travelers. She is one of the living stones of this ancient city. I will cherish her memory all the days of my life.

Me at the Good Friday procession in Jerusalem

The post A Good Friday Traveling Mercy appeared first on The American Conservative.