Rod Dreher's Blog, page 659

Where would we be without Florida Men?:

Two years ago, Augustus Sol Invictus walked from central Florida to the Mojave Desert and spent a week fasting and praying, at times thinking he wouldn’t survive. In a pagan ritual to give thanks when he returned home, he killed a goat and drank its blood.

Now that he’s a candidate for U.S. Senate, the story is coming back to bite him.

This passage from the AP story includes the political quote of the year:

“I did sacrifice a goat. I know that’s probably a quibble in the mind of most Americans,” he said. “I sacrificed an animal to the god of the wilderness … Yes, I drank the goat’s blood.”

But wait, there’s more:

Invictus, 32, is an adherent of a religion called Thelema, established in the early 1900s by occultist Aleister Crowley. Invictus was expelled from the religion’s fraternal organization, Ordo Templi Orientis, but denies Wyllie’s specific claim about dismembering a goat.

“I have never dismembered a goat in my life. I have performed animal sacrifices as part of my religion,” Invictus said. “I was expelled from the order for political reasons. And animal sacrifice was part of it. But that is a deliberate misrepresentation by Wyllie.”

His real name is allegedly Austin Gillespie. It is reported that his Southern accent is fake, that he only turns it on when he’s giving speeches. And:

“I want you to take LSD and practice sorcery,” he says at one point. “I’m also Old World Pagan and a white Southerner. So I know what it’s like to be treated like a wolf in a hen house.”

Oh, Florida, you are truly the Giving Tree of states.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is a co-founder of Rutba House, a New Monastic community in Durham, NC. He is also author of several books, two of which, The Wisdom of Stability and a contemporary paraphrase of the Rule of St. Benedict, are on my shelf. He blogs at Red Letter Christians, a site for progressive believers. Jonathan reached out to me to see if I wanted to have a dialogue about the Benedict Option. How could I say no? I’m hoping to visit Rutba House soon and learn from what they do and how they do it. Anyway, we agreed to start talking via e-mail, and to cross-post our dialogue on RLC and on this blog. Here is the first installment:

From The Atlantic to TIME magazine, a 5th century saint is getting mainstream consideration. For some years now, The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher has been holding up Benedict of Nursia’s witness as an alternative way forward in America’s shifting culture wars. At the same time, Red Letter Christians Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove have pointed to Benedict as an inspiration for “new monastic” communities and the movement of justice-loving Christians who pray Common Prayer with them daily.

Since SCOTUS’ Obergefell decision, which legalized gay marriage earlier this year, many who are concerned about traditional family values have been drawn to what Dreher calls the “Benedict Option.” At the same time, Wilson-Hartgrove has cautioned against the manipulation of religious conviction by a divide-and-conquer political strategy. 

But as Pope Francis’ recent visit to the US made clear, the gospel way that Benedict invites us to follow does not fit neatly into the left/right categories of American politics. What does faithful public witness demand in these changing times? And how might Benedict help us find our way? Dreher and Wilson-Hartgrove agreed to a dialog on the Benedict Option in our present moment.

Wilson-Hartgrove: Well, the first thing I have to say is that Benedict saved me from the Religious Right. I mean, Jesus confronted me in the distressing disguise of a homeless man when I was working on Capitol Hill as a Senate Page for Strom Thurmond. But after Jesus interrupted me, it was Benedict who showed me a way forward. I realized that he, too, had hit a dead end in Rome, just as I had in DC. The Roman Empire was coming to an end, and the old ways of negotiating Christian public witness weren’t working any more. Benedict took the gospels and some desert monastic literature to a cave and began to pray toward a new way of living. I went to the abandoned spaces of America’s inner cities and prisons to try to do the same. So the “Benedict option” has shaped my whole adult life. Next to the Bible, Benedict’s Rule has been my most treasured spiritual guide.

Dreher: As a leader in New Monasticism, you are much farther down the Benedictine road than I am. I think I should clarify what I mean by the Benedict Option. It starts with Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous concluding paragraph in “After Virtue,” in which he prophesies and calls for a new and very different St. Benedict to offer a compelling countercultural way of living out the tradition in the chaos of modernity. I accept MacIntyre’s critique of our condition, and have been thinking, though not in a very disciplined way till now, of how Christians should respond in light of it. Maybe, then, you and I can agree on this: what Christians have been doing till now is insufficient in light of modernity’s challenges, and that we have to do something radically different. But what is that thing?

The Benedict Option, broadly considered, is a conscious stance taken as a mode of countercultural resistance by Christians living in the ruins. It requires a clear diagnosis of the problem, and a change in practices, for the sake of living out the Gospel faithfully. Your father-in-law says all this in his “Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World”; Hauerwas and Willimon also spoke to this in “Resident Aliens.” I’m drawing on both books as I think through my own idea about the Ben Op. From what I know about New Monasticism, as you and your colleagues have pioneered it, it is certainly a valid response to this challenge.

But is it the only valid response? I don’t see how it can be, simply because very few of us laypersons could live out what you are living out. It is a calling. I am a middle-aged man with children and responsibilities to my extended family, including an elderly widowed mother. People like me have to be able to live out some kind of Benedictine form of life in our own circumstances. If it is too weak to be formative, then the Benedict Option will be useless. That is a risk that any of us who know we have to change, but who cannot, for justifiable reasons, do something less radical than what New Monastics undertake must deal with.

A second, and related, issue is how do we keep the Ben Op community from becoming authoritarian, culty, and weird? I have no experience in my past with Christian fundamentalism. I was raised in a thoroughly non-demanding form of Mainline Protestantism, by parents who weren’t regular churchgoers. I know how insufficient that is for authentic Christian discipleship. But I have never had hands-on experience with fundamentalism. My wife has, and has strictly warned me to listen to those Christians who have been burned by it, and to factor their experiences and insights into my thinking about the Ben Op. I know she is right, and I have committed to doing so as I research my book. Still, the fear of fundamentalism cannot itself be a reason to reject all forms of strong, intentional Christian community.

A third issue — and I think this is something that you and I will likely disagree on — has to do with which tradition we wish to live out in our Ben Op community. For people like me, an Eastern Orthodox Christian, the Ben Op community will have marks that differ from that of a Roman Catholic, or an Evangelical Protestant, and so on. I can agree with the “12 Marks of a New Monasticism,” but this one is a big point of separation: “Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church.” Where is the Church? What is the Church? Mind you, I would not say that Red Letter Christians aren’t Christians, so please don’t get the wrong idea! I am saying, though, that our ecclesiology is radically different, and that makes a difference in the way we read the Bible … which, of course, makes a big difference in how we understand what it means to submit to the Church.

Wilson-Hartgrove: Your three questions—each of which is important—stem together, I think, from understanding Benedict as an option for public witness. I should say that I’ve been influenced by MacIntyre to think about him this way, too. But when I listen to the Rule, I also have to admit that this is not his main concern. Benedict isn’t thinking primarily about how to bear witness; he’s thinking about how to grow in the gospel life. This distinction shapes how I think about each of your questions.

Is the monastic way for everyone? No, Benedict never imagined it to be. His organizational vision is limited. He thought, specifically, about how to help a community of a dozen or so people to grow in the way of Jesus. Historians say Benedict saved Western civilization, and I think they’re right. But I don’t think that’s what he was trying to do. Just as Jesus didn’t save the world by showing us how to fix the religious and governmental institutions of his day. Jesus showed us a better way to live. Benedict invites us to learn that way in a specific form of community.

We have 1600 years of experience to show us how the church can learn from monasticism without saying everyone has to live the same way. A monastic vocation is a gift, and in many practical ways it’s only possible because a broader community supports it. I know this from experience. The 16 or so folks who share life at Rutba House are supported in dozens of ways by individuals, local churches, and an international network of others who are living into a new monasticism. We couldn’t do this on our own, which means we also don’t do it for our own sake. We are called to this life for the church and for the world. Whatever we learn, we are called to share.

This essential relationship with a broader community of fellow Christians and neighbors is, I think, the most important response to your second concern. Anytime people take religious claims seriously, there’s a danger. The worst things people do to one another are done in the name of what’s right—and “God” can justify a multitude of sins. The biggest danger of fundamentalism—be it Southern Baptist or Sunni extremist—is lack of accountability. Any monastic expression needs to be accountable to people outside of the community’s family system. At Rutba House, our members are also members of local churches. We’ve also asked neighbors who know our life to conduct occasional community health check ups. The only way to see what we can’t see about ourselves is to ask others to help.

Which brings us to your third concern—one that we all share. After so many splits and divisions in church history, where does authority lie? Who, in particular, is an individual or community submitting to if they commit to submit to “the Church”? I concede that “new monastics” haven’t figured this out, but I’m not sure that you solve the problem by joining the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Church. What we have, however we shake it, is a tradition that has become fragmented into many, many parts. Sure, some streams can claim apostolic succession. I respect that. But I was born and raised Baptist by people who claim direct access to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I respect that too, however much it has been abused.

For me, the most important commitment of any religious movement—monastic or otherwise—must be to not further fracture a deeply divided Church. We can’t pretend there’s any simple way to overcome the wounds of history. But we can choose not to perpetuate the free market logic of America’s church shopping that marches on toward a religious smorgasbord of individually tailored faiths. We can commit to join the congregations that exist in the places where we are and pray with them and Jesus that “we may be One as I and the Father are One.”

But we do not do this in a vacuum. At the moment in America, we are trying to follow the way of Jesus (with the help of Benedict) in the face of economic and political powers that tell us we cannot be “Christian” without some common enemy. Some say it’s the Muslims we have to hate in order to know who we are. Some say it’s the liberals. Others that it’s the gays. My concern about the enthusiasm with which some have adopted your “Ben Op” is that it could easily be manipulated to perpetuate this other-ing. Maybe this is part of what your wife is getting at when she warns against fundamentalism. I mean, in a world where the powers thrive via a divide-and-conquer strategy, nothing could be more dangerous than circling our wagons and retreating with those who share our bias about the world (be it “liberal” or “conservative”).

So how can we learn from Benedict and Jesus a way toward unity rather than further division?

To be continued…

Run, don’t walk, to read Tish Harrison Warren’s great essay on “Our Beautiful, Broken Christian Ancestors.” Here’s how it begins:

I am a seventh-generation Texan who has ancestors from all over the South. When I think of the South, I see my grandmother’s hands, gnarled with arthritis—hands that picked and shelled native pecans and mastered a rolling pin. I imagine my great-grandfather’s dusty feet as he walked from Arkansas to the Gulf Coast looking for cheap land, a kid leading a milk cow. I think of live oaks and tall pines, Jekyll Island and the Blue Ridge Mountains, Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, bourbon and fried okra.

I also think of my ancestors from Mississippi—small-scale cotton farmers who owned slaves. I think of the graveyard where my parents will be buried, where, according to local lore, slaveholders and slaves are buried side by side. I think of Jesse Washington, a teenager who in 1916 was lynched an hour from where I live. I think of segregation, Jim Crow, and redlining. This, also, is part of my culture and story, even part of me, my blood, and my kin.

Both the North and the South practiced racial injustice, but in the South the legacy is unavoidable. Nearly as soon as they are old enough for moral reasoning, white Southern kids face this complexity: those before us who have committed atrocities also gave us life. Their legacies of goodness and evil are entwined.

At the heart of the broad, longstanding debate about the Confederate Flag on US public grounds lies a deeper question: How do we respond to evil in our history?

In the face of centuries of systemic racism, some Southerners have responded with a sort of ancestor worship, an idolatry of the past that makes us apathetic and defensive. Loyalty to those before us is exalted over love for those around us.

Clarence Jordan, a scholar and co-founder of the Koinonia Farm intentional community in Americus, Georgia, denounced this false worship. Once, after Jordan preached on the ministry of racial reconciliation, an elderly woman rebuffed him: “I want you to know that my grandfather fought in the Civil War, and I’ll never believe a word you say.” Jordan, a Southerner himself, replied, “Well, ma’am, I guess you’ve got to decide whether to follow your granddaddy or Jesus.”

It is a choice that we all face, wherever we are from, since we all inherit cultural and familial legacies marred by sin. But if the false gospel of some is ancestor worship, the false gospel of others is “progress.” We mobile urbanites can deride our heritage altogether. Confident in our own broad-minded superiority, we adopt a historical determinism that smugly labels everyone on the “right” or “wrong” side of history.

We might hope to avoid the complications of a shameful history by looking to the church as our true family. After all, Jesus scandalized the Israelites by elevating loyalty to the family of God above loyalty to biological families. He proclaimed that our true family is composed of those who obey God—the community of believers, the church.

But embracing the church does not rescue us from a painfully mixed legacy. It puts us right in the center of one.

Read the whole thing. Best thing you’ll read all day, I bet.

Where to begin with this? Let’s start with that last paragraph. Tish (who’s a friend) goes from there to talk about how every age of the Church has brought us saints and sinners alike. Reading her piece, I thought about how the same age that produced Dante and the Chartres cathedral also produced immense injustice (in fact, the Divine Comedy exists in large part as a rebuke to the corruption within the Church). The sins of another time and place are not necessarily the sins of our own, but we make a grave mistake to imagine that this means we do not sin. Our descendants will look back on things that we believe and do without thinking twice about it and marvel that we could have been so blind and wicked. And they, in turn, will suffer the same fate. To study the past with an open mind and an open heart is to be chastened about one’s own fallibility.

It’s the same all over, don’t you think? It is perhaps clearer for Southerners, because the evil of slavery and all that followed it was so stark, and still exists within living memory. I tell my children how things were here in our own town not that long ago, and they find it hard to believe. How could white people have believed those things? How could they have done those things? Well, I say, they did. And I try to convey to them in a way that they understand that they too might have believed and done those things had they grown up back then. This is the lesson of the Gospel account of Christ’s passion: every single one of us would probably have stood in that crowd yelling, “Crucify him!”

Every single one.

Yet it would be so easy if we could write off all our ancestors as simply evil. It saves us from having to do hard thinking about moral complexity, and about how goodness and evil can exist within the same person. The white Southerner who looks back at antebellum times and sees only white columns of the big house glowing in the moonlight, swathed in the scent of magnolias, is the flip side of the white Northerner who sees nothing but slavery and sin. Both are true.

Three years ago, I was in Paris for the month of October. While there, I studied the French Revolution. I was staggered by the mindless savagery of the thing. You think you know about an event, and then you end up standing in the back garden of a Carmelite chapel in Paris, staring at a porch on which 150 priests were murdered, one by one, by revolutionaries, when they refused to renounce their beliefs. Here is that place; the plaque reads, in Latin, “Here they fell”:

These atrocities happened over and over again. And yet, when I read about the crimes of the ancien régime, with which the Church was complicit, it is not hard to see why the Church was so hated. In no way does this justify the atrocities, but you can grasp where they came from, in part.

I went to Versailles, which was extraordinarily beautiful … but also obscene, in its way. If you seek a monument to moral purity, you will find it nowhere. Everyone’s hands are historically stained. And so are our own.

I’m not arguing for moral relativism, not strictly. I think we can objectively say that Hitler’s Germany was more wicked than the France of Louis XIV. But we cannot say that the evil of Hitler’s Germany makes the France of Louis XIV a moral Eden. Nor can we say that the wickedness of the Jim Crow South absolves the contemporary South — or the North — of its sins.

It’s a simple, even simplistic, point, but it’s an astonishingly difficult one for many moderns to grasp. Tish talks about a time when her husband taught a class on the Church Fathers, and his students tuned him out because they regarded Augustine as a misogynist, the heretic Arius as a marginalized person, and so on. This is crackpot stuff. Think, by contrast, of the wisdom of Dante, a man who revered the Crusaders, but who put Saladin, the 12th century Muslim sultan who drove the Crusaders out of Palestine, in Limbo (the pleasant abode of righteous unbelievers), out of respect for his nobility of character. The great medieval Muslim philosophers Avicenna and Averroës are also there.

To be truly human requires a degree of cultural sophistication. We have to learn to judge rightly without ceasing to love what is lovable. Anyone who doesn’t live in some kind of tension with their people’s historical past is not being honest. I see a connection between the puritanical fanatics of ISIS, who are blowing up pagan ruins from antiquity in Syria, and those among us who wish to deny the complexity of the past by symbolically reducing it to rubble in our memories. The savage barbarian who dynamites the Temple of Bel and the civilized barbarian who dismisses Augustine because he had unenlightened attitudes towards women, differ only in degree.

Michael Brendan Dougherty gives it to you straight:

In the next three weeks, I fully expect the leadership of my own One Holy and Apostolic Catholic Church to fall into apostasy, at the conclusion of the Synod on the Family that begins today in Rome. This is the outcome Pope Francis has shaped over the entirety of his pontificate, and particularly with his recent appointments. An event like this —heresy promulgated by the Pope and his bishops — is believed by most Catholics to be impossible. But they should be prepared for it anyway. This is not an ordinary religious conference, but one to be dreaded.

My prediction is that, after much fixing and machinations by its leaders, the Synod on the Family will declare that the Holy Spirit led them to a new understanding of the truth. The Synod’s leaders will adopt the position that those living in second marriages, irrespective of the status of their first marriage, should be admitted to Holy Communion. This is commonly called the “Kasper proposal” after its author, the German Cardinal Walter Kasper. The Synod will likely leave the details of a “penitential period of reflection” for these souls up to local bishops and parish priests The leading bishops will assure critics that in fact no doctrine has been changed, only a discipline — even if these will make no sense when considered together.

But make no mistake, the Synod will make the sacrilege of the Eucharist St. Paul warns against an official policy of the Roman Catholic Church. And in the process the Synod will encourage the breakup of more marriages.

More, with reference to Cardinal Walter Kasper, the architect of modernizing changes under consideration by the Synod:

Of all Kasper’s critics, only Cardinal Müller seems to understand the stakes. “Within the frame of Modernist schemes of development,” he said during a recent lecture, “Revelation and the Dogmas of the Church are merely historically conditioned transitional stages at the end of which stands the self-divinization of man. The Revelation in Christ and its heretofore history would only be a preparatory stage for an understanding of God, world, and church in which man himself is subject and object of the Revelation at the same time.”

Read the whole thing. Citing some procedural moves made by Pope Francis, MBD contends that the fix is in, and that apostasy is guaranteed. This is why MBD ends his column by asking of all the hierarchs now gathered in Rome: “Do they not fear God?”

Let me ask my Roman Catholic readers: if MBD is correct, and the Synod ends with what you sincerely believe constitutes apostasy — and, to put a fine point on it, if it ends with this Pope teaching apostasy — what does that mean for you going forward? Stay put and wait? Affiliate with SSPX? Go Orthodox? Something else? I’m not trolling; I’d really like to know.

Had a great time this weekend at the annual conference of the Christian Legal Society, held this year in New Orleans. Julie and I arrived late on Friday evening and had to leave after lunch on Saturday, which meant we weren’t even in town for a full day. But it was a full day, so to speak. Met some great folks, some of whom I’ll be seeing again this weekend at the Benedict Option conference at Georgetown (Oct 10, 10am-12:30pm, Gaston Hall at Georgetown U., 3700 O St., NW). More info here.

At the CLS confab, I spoke to a group of law students and law professors about the Benedict Option. After my talk, a young law student from Georgia approached me to say that he agreed with a lot of what I propose with the Ben Op, but he wanted to draw attention to my remarks about the difficulty of keeping the Ben Op from becoming culty.

“I’ve been reading the things you’ve been posting about the situation with Doug Wilson,” he said, referring to this and this. He went on to explain that he is a product of the conservative Christian homeschooling world, and that it was a great thing for him, but that he had a number of friends from the same world who had been damaged by fundamentalism of a sort marked by fear, paranoia, and control. Some of them were left so broken, he said, that they lost their Christian faith altogether.

I told the young man that it was very important for me to know more about this, and that I would like to stay in touch with him. I asked him to consider writing something for this blog about his experiences, and those of his friends, so you readers and I can talk about it in context of developing the Ben Op. He said he would do so.

About 15 minutes later, I was sitting at a lunch table with a group of students, including a young woman from California, who told me about her experience as an undergraduate at a well-known Evangelical college. The theology department there was so liberal, and so devoted to deconstructing the faith of the students, that she had to fight hard to hold on to her basic Christianity there. If I remember correctly what she said, a number of Christian undergrads she knew there lost their faith; she credited having grown up in a strong Christian home for giving her the foundation to hang on to her belief through the crazy.

How do we find the middle path between these two extremes? The Benedict Option is, of course, in part a reaction against loosey-goosey Christianity, so I don’t have a big worry that versions of the Ben Op would be at risk of being too lax and liberal. The real concern I have is that we would go too far, and create institutions or communities that would be too controlling or otherwise unhealthy. A secondary, lesser concern is that fear of fundamentalism would be so overwhelming that the nascent Ben Op community would fail to create the practices and structures that would be effective in accomplishing what the Ben Op is supposed to do.

Thoughts? I’m only interested in constructive criticism here. If you just want to gripe, don’t bother, because I’m not going to publish it. I’m genuinely trying to learn here, and value your meaningful advice and suggestions.

And hey, if you are in the Washington, DC, area on Saturday, please come to the Ben Op conference and share your ideas.

A nightmare in northern California:

Four Northern California high school students have been arrested in connection with what law enforcement officials called a highly detailed plan to shoot and kill fellow students and teachers, just days after a mass shooting on a community college campus in rural Oregon.

The four, all students at Summerville High School in Tuolumne, Calif., “were going to come on campus and shoot and kill as many people as possible at the campus,” Sheriff James W. Mele of Tuolumne County said at a news conference on Saturday.

Sheriff Mele did not identify the students other than to say all were male juveniles. Tuolumne is about 120 miles east of San Francisco.

Investigators have found no clear motive for the planned attack, Sheriff Mele said, but he said that “the suspects’ plans were very detailed in nature and included names of would-be victims, locations and methods in which the plan was to be carried out.” The students planned to open fire during an event at school, he said, and “were in the process of trying to obtain these weapons.”

Officials said the plot was foiled on Wednesday when a group of students alerted a teacher after they overheard three of the four discussing a plan to open fire on the school.

If you read on in the story, the sheriff said the plot was far advanced; all they needed to do was to get their hands on weapons.

What if you discovered that you, or your child, was on the hit list? I don’t know that I could let my kid go back to that school again — even though the alleged would-be mass murderers were removed from the school, and perhaps were in jail. It’s so unnerving. It’s important to remember that these things are still exceedingly rare. Nearly every high school in this country carries on its business without having mass shootings, or breaking up massacre plots.

Still, the mystery of evil in these cases — that teenage boys aspire to do things like this, not on the spur of the moment, and not for any cause other than to cause death and suffering — is so unfathomable that one hardly knows where to begin. This, I think, is why we are so eager to identify simple causes and impose simple solutions. The radical irrationality of the acts is key to their terroristic nature. These terrorists don’t want anything in particular; they just want to kill.

What is it in contemporary culture that drives some young men to think like this, and to act on those thoughts? Where I live, there are so many guns around — it’s a hunting culture — that any kids who wanted to carry out this kind of atrocity could easily do so. But nobody ever does. And again, it’s important to remember that this is still, thank God, very, very rare. Even so, the fact that it happens at all is terrifying. If they were trying to bring about a revolution, or to do it to obey Allah, or anything like that, I could at least understand it. If they were maniacs acting on ungovernable impulse, that would be understandable, in its way. But this?

What is missing?

You should see my in-box and Twitter feed. I have so many impassioned e-mails from partisans on both sides of the Doug Wilson situation, demanding that I either abandon any criticism of him, or demanding that I ramp up criticism. I even blocked one anti-Wilsonite who was haranguing me with multiple tweets calling me to account for failing to blast Wilson even harder. Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t want to get dragged into an extremely bitter fight that has way, way more layers than I am capable of understanding from this far away. Some people I know and admire know and admire Wilson; others I know and admire do not. As a general rule, I will only comment on what information is publicly available and that I judge reliable, or what Pastor Wilson himself says. Because he mentioned me in a couple of recent comments, I’ll respond to what he has written.

In this post, Wilson is puzzled that I have read his defense of having presided over the marriage of the convicted pedophile Steven Sitler and a young woman from the church community, and continue to believe that Wilson ought not to have married the couple. Sitler, in case you don’t know, Sitler was convicted of a sex crime against a minor, but according to Wilson, confessed to many more pedophilic instances, for which he was not tried. He was sentenced to life in prison, but paroled on the condition that he never be around minors without a chaperon present. He was a member of Wilson’s church, and other members of the church set him up with a young woman from within the community. A website that is harshly critical of Wilson in the Sitler case published screen grabs of a website that Sitler and his bride, Katie Travis, set up to celebrate their engagement (after two dates) and wedding. You can read there the story of their courtship, told in their own words.

The judge with jurisdiction over Sitler’s parole approved his wedding to Travis. From the audio recording of the hearing:

So here we have a young man who has committed heinous crimes and wants to engage in what I think everyone in the room would consider to be a prosocial relationship. So I’m going to let the wedding proceed. If and when Mr. Sitler and Miss Travis have children we will cross that bridge when we get to it — or, if we need to address it sooner than that, I am happy to address it sooner than that. But I . . . I think it’s a reasonable restriction that he not reside with his wife and child, in the future, if in fact they have children.

So the judge gave permission for a convicted pedophile out on probation to marry, under the condition that if he and his wife have kids, he have to live away from his wife and children. The prudence of this is certainly questionable, and in fact it strikes me as an irresponsible ruling, given that the state parole department told the judge, in a letter asking him not to approve the marriage, that Sitler said he intends to father children. So the judge signed off on a marriage that he had reason to believe would result in a situation in which the family would have to be physically disunited, to reduce the risk that the children would be molested by their father.

I said, in “Doug Wilson’s ‘Reluctant Response'”, that I still cannot understand why Pastor Wilson agreed to marry this couple under these conditions. In his latest post, Wilson writes, in part:

What precisely would Rod have wanted me to do? Would he want me to refuse to conduct the wedding, or would he want me to simply prohibit the wedding flat out? If I just refused to officiate, and Steven got married by a justice of the peace, what then? Would I have to excommunicate him for marrying? There is no biblical case for that. If his wife is fully apprised of all the facts, and she was, and she wanted to marry him, should I excommunicate them both for marrying? Don’t I need a verse or something?

Many of the questions of this sort boil down to this: why didn’t you cover your butt better than that? And the only answer I know how to give is that covering your butt is not gospel ministry.

This is extraordinary. Yes, he should have refused to perform the wedding. I don’t even see that this is a close call. About excommunication, who knows? I don’t know how his church handles such matters, and anyway, it’s a secondary issue. It is clear to me that a morally responsible pastor cannot give the church’s blessing to such a union. He knew that the Sitlers were going to try to have children, and knew that the courts would likely force them to live apart if the couple succeeded in that goal. How would this disordered marital union be one that any church can bless? No, you don’t need “a verse or something;” you just need common sense.

The really extraordinary part is that Wilson still seems to think that it’s all about him. He’s praising himself for being a courageous Christian leader for not covering his butt — as if the personal liability of Doug Wilson if the Sitler situation blew up was more of an issue than the safety and well being of any children that came out of a pedophile’s marital union, and the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of Katie Travis and, yes, of Steven Sitler. The self-pity here is mighty weird.

There was a subsequent Doug Wilson post worth commenting on. He’s still feeling sorry for himself for all the garbage people are piling on him about the Sitler mess. He begins by affirming that just because the world criticizes a Christian for what he does, that does not make one’s actions righteous. OK, fair enough. But sometimes the world really does criticize one because it hates “salty Christians” for standing up for Jesus. I criticized Wilson the other day for writing the following sneering comment aimed at those who find fault with his handling of the Sitler situation:

This kind of controversy gives fuller meaning to the communion of opprobrium that faithful ministers of every age share. Jesus says that we are to rejoice when people revile us, in part because of the company it puts us in.

“Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you” (Matt. 5:11–12Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)).

And Jesus doesn’t say we are to be a little bit glad. He says exceeding glad. He says that we are to go around the corner, get out of their sight, and do a little jig. In this case, Nancy — a Puritan jewel — celebrated by buying me a nice bottle of Laphroaig.

I said it is unseemly that Wilson would react this way in the face of people criticizing him for his role in helping create this horrible situation with the Sitler family and that baby. Laughing at his critics? Dancing a jig? Drinking Scotch? Does he not see how outrageous that kind of reaction is in the face of the gravity of the situation? No, he doesn’t. Tonight he writes:

We have to be able to tell the difference because Jesus is teaching us to tell the difference. Unbelievers treat insipid Christians with contempt and they treat salty Christians with active hostility and hatred. When some manifestation of this arises, every Christian involved has to make a judgment call as to which it is, and has to be careful not to affirm the consequent. He has to read the situation correctly. And if he decides rightly and raises a glass of Scotch in a faithful toast, it matters not if men like Rod Dreher find it convenient to sneer at the obedience.

So, let me get this straight: according to Doug Wilson, Doug Wilson was serving Christ when he united in holy matrimony a convicted pedophile and a 23-year-old who said yes to his marriage proposal after only two dates. And anybody who says otherwise, and who contends that Wilson is wrong to treat this scandal as cause to celebrate with dram of single malt, is guilty of encouraging disobedience to God.

Think about that. And if you read the comments on Wilson’s latest, you will see that this blog’s commenter Thursday, who has criticized me for my initial blogging on Wilson’s foibles with sex offenders under his spiritual authority, indicates that Wilson ought to admit error in the Sitler case, and move on:

Thursday1

BTW, I agree that the howling internet mob out there is, to put it mildly, far from being just to Pastor Wilson, going far beyond merely accusing him of bad judgment in this particular instance. I also agree that Dreher was hasty and irresponsible in the way he wrote about this. But none of this means that Pastor Wilson didn’t blunder horribly in this situation.

Wilson writes in response:

Douglas Wilson

Thursday, as I understand your concern here, you are thinking that if I am good with Sitler marrying, and if down the road he molests one of his own children, that was something that I should have anticipated, and therefore bear some responsibility for. Is that correct?

Now the question should also go the other way. If I refuse to let him marry, and so he does not, and five years down the road is caught molesting a neighborhood child, do I — because of my refusal to let him marry — bear any responsibility?

The answer, of course, is that we cannot know the answer unless we know which path is more likely to reduce the risk of recidivism. In order to know that, we have to have a standard that tells us. The standard I am using is that of 1 Corinthians, which tells us that marriage is a help against immorality. What standard are you appealing to, and why?

Ay yi yi. In 1 Corinthians 7, St. Paul talks about the difficulty of being celibate outside of marriage:

Now for the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. … Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

You have to make a Grand Canyon-sized leap of logic to find Biblical sanction in this passage for the idea that marriage will help a pedophile resist his urges to have sex with children. I cannot believe that in the year 2015, an intelligent man believes that marriage is therapy for pedophilia. If this isn’t pastoral malpractice, what is?

Thursday responded to Pastor Wilson on that thread:

That almost gets it, but not quite.

You also created a situation where, at the very best, a father can never be trusted to be alone with his children and where, under no circumstances, should he ever reside in the same home with them. Even assuming the marriage, on balance, helps reduce the likelihood more crimes, this comes with a terrible cost, a terrible disfigurement of fatherhood.

And, quite aside from all the consequentialist arguments, someone who has done these horrific crimes has simply disqualified himself from ever standing in the symbolic role of father. See also my also my previous paragraph: what kind of father can’t be trusted not to sexually assault his kids?

So no, this was not some judgment call which one can disagree with.

Yes, exactly right.

To put it mildly, Doug Wilson is not doing himself and his reputation any favors by continuing to talk about the Sitler case in public. But I don’t get the idea that he’s going to let this one go. If you ever doubted the verse from Proverbs 16 advising that pride goes before destruction, just keep watching this slow-motion disaster unfold online for verification.

UPDATE: Hey, this is news. From an October 3 announcement by the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which Doug Wilson founded and leads:

The CREC began a process a couple of weeks ago aimed at addressing the legitimate questions and concerns regarding some of the past actions and practices of two cases of sexual abuse. We take these matters seriously and seek to address them fully. In keeping with the CREC Constitution and our regular church order, the session of Christ Church, Moscow, ID, has invited the presiding ministers of each presbytery to inquire into the pastoral care and counseling ministry of Christ Church, with particular regard to their handling of sexual abuse cases, not excluding the two cases that have been the subject of some recent controversy. In short, are their practices in this area operating within a biblical framework and consistent with the law? Are they operating competently and in good faith?

This invitation means that under the direction of their chair, the committee is invited to ask any questions of members of the Christ Church session and pastoral staff, and they can have complete access to their minutes, records, files, etc. Christ Church is asking this committee to issue a public report in the next few months. Moreover, they have requested that the presiding ministers satisfy themselves as to the health and soundness of their pastoral care in such circumstances, and to provide them with their counsel and advice where they see any deficiencies.

Pastor Douglas Wilson is the current Presiding Minister of the CREC Council, and he has recused himself in this matter. As the current Presiding Minister pro tempore of the CREC Council, I will assume the role of Presiding Minister of Council in these matters and will chair the committee of the seven presiding ministers of our presbyteries, which I have appointed to this review committee.

Randy Booth

Acting Presiding Minister, CREC Council

UPDATE: Want more Jan Terri? Here you go:

Belgrade, Serbia

I believe this is the first VFYT ever from Serbia. M_Young was there, and sends it in, with the photo below, and this text:

Here are a couple of views from the ‘Terraza’ cafe in the Kalemegdan — the Turkish fortress in Belgrade. One has the Sava and Njegos tower (or ‘tower of the brave) in the background — the Turks imprisoned largely Orthodox ‘freedom fighters’ there, and killed the Greek Revolutionary Rigas Feraios there. The other (off kilter, its hard to get a good VFYT) is of the ‘Ruzica’ Orthodox chapel’s spire/cross, built by the Serbs against the wall of the Turkish fortress. On the table was a bottle of Knjas Milos mineral water with ice (!) and lemon bit (!!). Really hit the spot on a hot Belgrade day.

One of these days, I really have to go see the Balkans.

Greetings from New Orleans, where I’m about to give a Benedict Option talk at the Christian Legal Society’s annual conference. Early this morning, I went across the street from the hotel to have breakfast at Lüke, and to make notes for my speech. I found myself sitting next to a young lawyer, not a member of the CLS, but a man in town for a wedding. We made small talk, and he told me that his wife works in the juvenile justice system.

“We don’t have kids yet,” he said, “but I tell you, from the things my wife sees in her work, we are never, ever going to let our kids spend the night outside our home. Their friends can come to our house to spend the night, but we aren’t about to let our kids go anywhere else.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “My wife and I have had the same policy since our kids were small, and I was writing about the Catholic sex abuse scandal as a journalist.”

I explained that in looking into the dark world of child sex abuse, I found that it was impossible to tell who was going to be the abuser. The lawyer said yes, that’s exactly it.

“My wife says you can’t tell who the bad guys are just from looking at them,” he said. He mentioned a recent case where he lives in which a mother and a father were arrested for bestiality, and making bestiality porn. They looked like perfectly normal people, but in fact they were monsters.

Boz Tchividjian, a former sex crimes prosecutor who now leads a terrific Christian ministry dedicated to fighting sex abuse within Protestant church communities, has said:

Years of investigating abuse cases — “we spend our days swimming in Christian cesspools,” he says — has left him hypervigilant. Megachurches with thousands of volunteers unnerve him, and after working on too many cases where girls were molested by someone in their best friend’s family, Tchividjian and his wife no longer let their daughters spend the night at friends’ houses, let alone church camps or “lock-in” church-basement sleepovers. “But for my wife,” he says, “I don’t trust anyone 100 percent—I’ve seen too much, too many scenarios. What I have to wrestle with is how do I deal with that? How do I balance that tension, between not trusting anyone and knowing that we have to function in life? You have to figure that out for yourself. But know this: Offenders exploit trust.”

So, what do you think? Are people like me, the lawyer at breakfast this morning, and Boz Tchividjian, overreacting? How do you handle it in your family?