Rod Dreher's Blog, page 663

Ross Douthat is being all non-Eeyore-ish about Pope Francis’s visit, and what that might say about Christianity in the West. Excerpt:

In a truly post-Christian society, would so many people find an imitatio Christi thrilling and fascinating and inspiring? Would so many people be moved, on a deep level, by an image like this one? (Wouldn’t a truly post-Christian society, of the sort that certain 20th century totalitarians aspired to build, be repulsed instead by images of weakness and deformity?) And then further, in a fully secularized society, would so many people who have drifted from the practice of religion – I have many of my fellow journalists particularly in mind – care so much whether an antique religious organization and its aged, celibate leader are in touch with their experiences? Would you really have the palpable excitement at his mere presence that has coursed through most of the coverage the last two days?

A cynical religious conservative might respond that the secular media only cares, only feels the pulse of excitement, because this pontificate has given them the sense that the Catholic church might be changing to fit their pre-existing prejudices, that the Whig vision of history that substitutes for its Christian antecedent might be being vindicated in the Vatican of all places. And this is surely part of it, which is one reason among many why Christian leaders should be wary of mistaking an enthusiastic reaction for a sign of evangelistic success or incipient conversion; sometimes the enthusiasm is just a sign that the world thinks that it’s about to succeed in converting you.

But mixed in with this Whiggish, raze-the-last-bastions spirit is something else: Probably not the sudden, “Francis Effect” openness to #fullChristianity that some of the pope’s admirers see him winning, but at the very least a much stronger desire to feel in harmony with the leader of the West’s historic faith than you might expect from a society allegedly leaving that faith far behind.

Oh, I dunno. I doubt it. I wish it were so, but I just can’t see it.

Believe me, I’m quite pleased to see so much excitement among my Catholic friends — and I’ve been among them this week at Villanova — over Francis’s visit. Even pals who are not theologically inclined to be Francis fans are feeling great this week. As regular readers know, I’m much more of a Benedict XVI man, but Francis sometimes says things that challenge me in a good way.

That said, I’m not convinced that public enthusiasm for Pope Francis is a sign that we are not (yet) post-Christian. Let me explain why.

What does it mean to say we are in post-Christian times? Does it mean that there are no Christians left? Of course not, that would be ridiculous. It means that we have left the historical period in which the Christian religion and its precepts were at the core of the moral imagination of the West. It doesn’t mean that Christianity has disappeared. It only means that Christianity as an ideal and a cultural force is no longer dominant.

The most recent Pew survey found that Christianity is declining sharply in America. Catholics and Mainline Protestants are taking very serious hits, but Evangelicals are holding their own. But Christians are still by far the most populous religious group in the US. What does that mean, though? Earlier this month, Pew surveyed American Catholics in advance of Francis’s visit. They found that on key Catholic teachings about the family and sexuality, Catholics reject the teaching of their own church:

Nine-in-ten U.S. Catholics say, when it comes to parenting, a married mother and father are ideal – as good as, or better than, any other arrangement for bringing up kids. But large majorities of Catholics think other family configurations generally are acceptable, too.

For example, 84% of Catholics say it is acceptable for unmarried parents who live together to bring up children, including 48% who call this as good as any other arrangement for raising children. And fully two-thirds of American Catholics think it is acceptable for same-sex couples to raise children, including 43% who say a gay or lesbian couple with children is just as good as any other kind of family.

Leaving children aside, Catholics also condone a variety of adult living arrangements that the church traditionally has frowned upon. A sizable majority (85%) think it is acceptable for a man and woman to live together as a couple outside of marriage, including more than half (55%) who say cohabitation is as good as any other living arrangement for adults. And seven-in-ten Catholics say married couples who opt not to have children have chosen a lifestyle that is as good as any other.

The numbers are more in line with Catholic orthodoxy when they filter out people who go to mass regularly, but still far from ideal. In 2013, Pew’s analysis of data from the General Social Survey found that Americans who considered themselves to be “strong Catholics” was at a four-decade low, while Evangelicals and black Protestants were doing well by that measure. Mind you, that’s self-reporting, and it doesn’t tell us about the content of the faith the respondents practice.

In 2013, the Barna Group, an Evangelical polling firm, looked at a number of factors having to do with belief and practice to determine how post-Christian America is. The good news is that Barna found that a majority still qualify as meaningfully Christian. But a majority of Millennials are post-Christian by Barna’s metric (which is a bit eccentric, but still useful), and the most post-Christian regions are, of course, the East and West coasts — which are much more culturally influential than the South and the heartland. As sociologist James Davison Hunter has pointed out, cultural change in a society is usually determined by its elites.

Let me quote once again this highly relevant passage from sociologist Philip Rieff’s prophetic 1960s book The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Emphases below are mine:

The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves. Many spokesmen for our established normative institutions are aware of their failure and yet remain powerless to generate in themselves the necessary unwitting part of their culture that merits the name of faith. “Is not the very fact that so wretchedly little binding address is heard in the church,” asked Karl Barth, rhetorically, in 1939, “accountable for a goodly share of her misery—is it not perhaps the misery?” The misery of this culture is acutely stated by the special misery of its normative institutions. Our more general misery is that, having broken with those institutionalized credibilities from which its moral energy derived, new credibilities are not yet operationally effective and, perhaps, cannot become so in a culture constantly probing its own unwitting part.

It may be argued against this position that Western culture was never deeply believing—at least not in the Christian manner which, in a number of its most persuasive varieties, encouraged the seeking after individual salvations at the expense of a collective one. Even so, Christian culture survived because it superintended the organization of Western personality in ways that produced the necessary corporate identities, serving a larger communal purpose institutionalized in the churches themselves. Ernst Troeltsch was correct in his institutional title for the moral demand system preceding the one now emerging out of its complete ruin: a “church civilization,” an “authoritarian and coercive culture.” What binding address now describes our successor culture? In what does the self now try to find salvation, if not in the breaking of corporate identities and in an acute suspicion of all normative institutions?

We must grant that there has never been a utopia in which everyone believed with perfect or near-perfect orthodoxy. Christians are always in need of repentance. The Church always needs to be reformed. Nobody can dispute this. Nor can the Christian faith be reduced to a moral and ethical code. That said, the Christian faith cannot be divorced from certain moral norms and the obligation for people who call themselves Christians to abide by them. For very many contemporary Americans, the historic Christian faith does not make much difference in their personal beliefs and practices. The whole point of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is to be parasitic on the concepts of Christianity, but turn them inside out to make Christianity a strategy for psychological and emotional comfort as an add-on to our modern American lives. It is exactly the kind of pseudo-Christianity that Rieff predicted would become the major religious form in America. Sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, who coined the MTD phrase, said that Christianity in America is either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself, or is being actively colonized by MTD.

To conclude, it’s clear that America (and certainly Europe) is post-Christian, but that does not mean that we don’t still have some attachment to the faith and its ideals, only that it has faded, and continues to fade. We are in a time of transition, and have been for decades, even centuries (think of Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach). There are many opportunities for deepening our faith, even in this post-Christian culture. I do believe, though, that Christians cannot afford to deceive ourselves about the present state of things, and what it portends for our future.

Has there been a “Francis effect,” in which lapsed Catholics have been energized to return to their faith because of this celebrated new pope? No. According to Pew’s findings, Catholic Americans are certainly excited by Pope Francis, and view him favorably. Alas, those most enthusiastic for the Pope are those who already go to church regularly. More:

But despite the pope’s popularity and the widespread perception that he is a change for the better, it is less clear whether there has been a so-called “Francis effect,” a discernible change in the way American Catholics approach their faith. There has been no measurable rise in the percentage of Americans who identify as Catholic. Nor has there been a statistically significant change in how often Catholics say they go to Mass. And the survey finds no evidence that large numbers of Catholics are going to confession or volunteering in their churches or communities more often.

So, look, I don’t mean to rob anybody of the joy and good feeling they get from having the Pope here. I expect that it will be an occasion of serious conversion and renewal for many individuals, and for that, Deo gratias. I don’t see it as halting the deeper long-term trends in this culture. I suspect Ross and I agree on the data, but he sees the glass half-full, and I see it half-empty. The numbers and the trends are gloomy, but I am working my way towards a Russell Moore-ish view of the situation facing the church, which is this (from the Christianity Today cover story out now):

“We are a prophetic minority who must speak into a world that is . . . exactly what Jesus promised us the world must be,” he said.

…

“Moore has an important message: How do you live when you’re in exile?” says Fox News commentator Kirsten Powers. “Let’s stop the pity party and instead say, ‘We’re in exile, and this is not the first time God’s people have been in exile.’ ”

So, when Ross finds good news in what he sees this week as “at the very least a much stronger desire to feel in harmony with the leader of the West’s historic faith than you might expect from a society allegedly leaving that faith far behind,” I say that most people want to feel in harmony, but they don’t want to do anything to bring themselves in harmony, and — this is crucial — they don’t believe that they have to do anything more than feel to be in harmony with him. Because America is post-Christian.

UPDATE: Mollie Hemingway nails it:

Right after the terrorism attacks of September 11, 2001, newspapers and broadcasts were filled with stories about Americans returning to their houses of worship in droves. Evangelical leaders and others claimed that a religious awakening was happening, seen as one positive result of the day of carnage. Maybe there was a tick upward for a week or two, but not only did the terrorism attacks not presage some kind of general spiritual awakening in the United States (at least for Christianity), the trend is actually toward more religious apathy, not less.

We’re now living in something that the media like to refer to as the “Francis Effect.” Like the September 11 Effect, this is about, supposedly, a reinvigoration of church life, particularly for Roman Catholics. Francis has only been in that office for two-and-a-half years but we’re told that he is such a stark contrast to his predecessor Pope Benedict, the media-opposed theologian who led the church for several years, that Roman Catholics are rushing back or finding new enthusiasm for their religious practices. He was supposed to “rescue the church.” What’s intriguing those who study these things, though, is that for all the good feelings reported by Roman Catholics, attendance at Mass is doing anything but rising.

More:

In the same vein, think of the Francis Effect. Many Roman Catholics on left and right keep waiting for it to result in numerical or percentage increases in actual reception of the sacraments. It’s only been two-and-a-half years, certainly. But also, it’s been two-and-a-half years! A life of sanctification is not something gained by battling traffic once in your lifetime to see a pope give a few minutes of remarks.

It’s wonderful that some people say that Francis makes them feel the church is more welcoming to them. But if it’s just making people feel more comfortable in their politics, instead of making them feel the comfort of absolution, communion and strengthening of faith, that’s not much to get excited about.

dragos pop/Shutterstock

Inside her bedroom, Judye somehow escaped her father, whose hands were covered in blood, as was his shoulder. Judye ran into her parent’s bedroom. There she saw the full horror of her father’s work. Judye sprinted down the hallway and found the spiral staircase. She ran out the front door, taking deep breaths of cold night air. The smiling gargoyle in the fountain watched on as she flew down the concrete steps. She banged desperately on the door of the Lewis house. Getting no answer, she began hammering on the French windows next to the front door, smearing them with blood. Upstairs, Cheri and Shelley were frozen in fear. Judye tried another neighbor, Marshall Ross, who finally opened his door. Together, they called the police.

Back in the Perelson house, the two younger children had woken up to the sound of their sister’s screams. “Go back to bed. This is a nightmare,” Harold told 11-year-old Debbie. Then he strode away, dripping blood onto the floor. Meanwhile, Marshall Ross was climbing the steps to the Perelson house. He found Debbie and 13-year-old Joel waiting on the first floor. Then he climbed the stairs and came face-to-face with the doctor.

“Go on home,” Harold told him, according to the Coroner’s report.

“Don’t bother me.”

More:

By the time they found the doctor, he was on the floor. His head lay on a pillow covered in his daughter’s blood, the hammer in his hand. He was only just breathing, and would be dead before the ambulance arrived. The police gathered the rest of the pills and laid them on a dresser in his room. There they discovered on a nightstand next to Perelson’s bed, a copy of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.” It was opened to Canto 1: Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ha! If only he had read Dante, the lives saved would likely have been two. One more bit, from the present day, a trespasser to the Murder House:

And there in the living room, she saw the fabled Christmas presents. As promised by visitors before her, their ribbons were still tied. Just then, Jennifer felt “something ominous.”

Maybe it was the same feeling that drove away the homeless, who once tried to shelter there many years ago, but fled citing unsettling chills, mystery footsteps, unholy noises at night. Maybe it was the feeling described by neighbors in a newspaper that they were being “followed.” Adrenaline squirted in her veins now.

Read the whole thing.

The traditionalist conservative thinker Russell Kirk was an avid collector of ghost stories, and writer of them too. Tonight, on my last night at Villanova, I’m having dinner with the university’s Russell Kirk Society. I promise you there will be ghost stories. I’m going to make sure of that.

As most readers know, my bailiwick at The American Conservative is writing about cultural conservatism, an area I visit far more than foreign policy. Nevertheless, I am grateful to work for a magazine that fights so hard from the Right for realism and restraint.

Earlier this month, when it emerged in Congressional testimony that the Obama administration had spent $500 million to train what amounted to four or five “moderate” Syrian rebels, I thought of Daniel Larison’s blog post from August 12, 2014, warning that Obama had just set aside half a billion dollars to drop down the Mideast rathole. Larison wrote at the time:

One would think that events in Iraq over the last few months would dispel the illusion that U.S. arms and training guarantee that things will develop in a certain way. The U.S. spent years and enormous sums of money to train and equip the Iraqi army, and it was useless in preventing ISIS from seizing large parts of Iraq.

And on June 30, 2014, Larison also wrote to criticize the president’s $500 million plan as a boondoggle in the making:

All of the calls to arm the opposition in Syria are based on the false belief that the U.S. has the ability to manipulate and direct the course of a foreign civil war, and that it is only because Washington has “failed” to insert itself aggressively enough that the war has turned out the way it has. Obama’s decision has the distinction of being guaranteed not to “work” on its own terms while also being harmful. Adding in a few more weapons into the Syrian civil war isn’t going to achieve anything except to help prolong the war and put off the day when a negotiated settlement can be reached. The more support that the U.S. and other outside governments provide to the opposition, the less inclined they will be to negotiate. Arming insurgents doesn’t give the U.S. much in the way of control or influence over them, but it does implicate the U.S. in whatever they do with the weapons and training provided to them.

More Larison:

The developments of the last six months ought to have put an end to the idea of arming the Syrian opposition once and for all, but the administration has outdone itself in finding a Syria policy option that makes no sense, satisfies no one, and slowly pulls the U.S. into a conflict where Americans still have little or nothing at stake.

And now, a year later, the verdict is in: Larison was entirely right. Half a billion taxpayer dollars, thrown to the wind in a bipartisan donnybrook.

TAC told you so! This magazine was founded in foreign policy realism — specifically, to oppose from the right the Bush administration’s foreign-policy adventurism in Iraq. TAC was right in 2002, and it is still right to oppose U.S. meddling in places where we have no business. After the 2016 elections, a new administration will take the reins in Washington, and you can be certain that whether the White House is occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, the War Party will still be in power, devising new ways to spend money spreading mayhem and undermining global stability and America’s national security in the process.

Please consider adding your financial support to The American Conservative‘s mission. There’s no one else like us. We work hard to be David to the foreign policy and defense establishment’s Goliath, motivated by the belief that keeping America strong means avoiding unnecessary foreign entanglements. If you share that view, then we need your help.

I also want to make an appeal from the social and religious conservative corner. Lately I’ve been working on a story about the religious liberty fight. Concluding an interview with one prominent source in the Christian legal community, the source thanked me for the things he’s been reading on this blog about the political and legal complexities of the religious liberty fight — and how the Kim Davis circus is actually hurting the cause. “You may not know this, but so many of us working in this field are reading you every day,” the source said. “You’re saying what we think.”

It’s not the motivational message going out from the Christian-Industrial Complex inside the Beltway, but it happens to be what’s really happening. I’ve tried to bring the same realism to covering religious liberty and social conservatism as my TAC colleagues bring to analyzing foreign policy. My writing in this space about the Benedict Option was seen some time ago as pessimistic and dystopian by many conservatives, but after the Indiana RFRA shocker and the Obergefell decision, the Benedict Option is one of the hottest topics among social and religious conservatives. And it all started here.

If it’s important for you to have TAC as an incubator of creative-minority conservatism over and against the party line, understand that we cannot do what we do without the financial help of you readers. Please make your tax-deductible gift to The American Conservative today.

I’m still at Villanova, attending classes in the Humanities department. Yesterday, in a class about Society, I listened as the students talked about a book of ethics written by Herbert McCabe, OP, a Dominican philosopher. A line from McCabe’s book jumped out at me:

Community is not founded upon law; rather, law is founded upon community.

Ponder that line for a minute with reference to contemporary America, and you’ll be well into the MacIntyrean weeds. The shared beliefs that are necessary for a real community scarcely exist. “Community” as most of us experience it today is little more than a collection of atomized individuals who live in the same geographical location. This has consequences for lawmaking, and for respect for authority.

Consider, then, this passage from MacIntyre’s After Virtue, posted to Addenda, the Mars Hill Audio Journal blog. Excerpt:

[M]odern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means. . . .

[P]atriotism cannot be what it was because we lack in the fullest sense a patria . . . . [T]he practice of patriotism as a virtue is in advanced societies no longer possible in the way that it once was. In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear. Patriotism is or was a virtue founded on attachment primarily to a political and moral community and only secondarily to the government of that community; but it is characteristically exercised in discharging responsibility to and in such government. When however the relationship of government to the moral community is put in question both by the changed nature of government and the lack of moral consensus in the society, it becomes difficult any longer to have any clear, simple and teachable conception of patriotism. Loyalty to my country, to my community—which remains unalterably a central virtue — becomes detached from obedience to the government which happens to rule me.

As long as we’re in MacIntopia, take a look at this post also on Addenda. It’s an excerpt from a 2014 book by Francisco Javier Martínez Fernández, in which he argues that the Church (= all Christians) in secular modernity:

[A] Church that understands itself and reality through the prevailing categories of secular modernity (whether in their postmodern or Enlightenment form, or merely constituted as reactions to either of these) is doomed to disappear. Or at any rate, it will undergo such a metamorphosis that its continuity with ‘historical’ Christianity would be broken (indeed, it has in part already been broken). . . . Moreover, a Church that uses secular categories is incapable of having a productive and sincere encounter with people of other religious and cultural traditions. To the extent that it adapts itself to the categories of secular modernity, it takes on the precise role that modernity assigns to it; insofar as it embraces this role, the Church can only dissolve, or else be an instrument of violence and division. In order to meet every man and every woman in a way that allows all of us—Christians and non-Christians—to grow in our common humanity, the Church must free itself from the categories of modernity and recover its identity from within its own particular tradition.

The Church only exists in concrete cultural forms, on which the encounter with Christ—which from the beginning has always occurred in concrete cultural form—has had varying degrees of impact. This encounter can be the determining factor of the human experience, or it can remain merely a partial or marginal aspect thereof. The task of Christian education consists entirely of helping people pass from the latter condition to the former. For people in the latter situation, the categories determining Christian life continue to be those of the surrounding culture. And those categories will influence and weigh on the thought of individuals and peoples depending on how decisive the encounter with the Risen and Living Christ, Center and Lord of the cosmos and of history, has been in determining their self-awareness and awareness of reality.

The author says that if Christians accept the categories of secular modernity, then “either the Church accepts its role as a cultural leftover from the past, or it must dissolve into the surrounding society.” Read the whole thing.

What is the alternative? I would say the Benedict Option. Years ago on the Journal, host Ken Myers interviewed D.H. Williams, a patristics scholar now at Baylor. Williams said in his interview, about the early Church:

“In the process of teaching, or catechizing new Christians, it was taken with great seriousness that the commitment that they were making was a corporate one, and an exclusive one. And that it entailed a body of meaning that in many ways was inviting them to become members of a counterculture, from the one in which they had converted from. And even the catechetical process itself begins to raise important questions about the church as culture. That you are de facto encouraging the new Christian to learn a new vocabulary, a new sense of what is the highest, the good, and the beautiful; that there really are true things and false things; that there really are certain moral lines to be drawn in the sand, and that you may struggle with these, and part of the struggle is very good.”

We are going to have to do something very much like that with the Benedict Option.

By the way, if this line of critique interests you, you really should subscribe to the Journal, which is the single most helpful guide to understanding the role of faith and culture in secular modernity. Journal founder, editor, and host Ken Myers and I are going to engage together at Georgetown’s October 10 Benedict Option event. Follow @benedictoption on Twitter to keep up with news of the happening.

Have you been reading the website Heterodox Academy? Bookmark it; it’s terrific. Here’s an essay from the site by political scientist April Kelly-Woessner, in which she discusses how younger generations of Americans are less tolerant than older ones. She writes:

Political tolerance is generally defined as the willingness to extend civil liberties and basic democratic rights to members of unpopular groups. That is, in order to be tolerant, one must recognize the rights of one’s political enemies to fully participate in the democratic process. Typically, this is measured by asking people whether they will allow members of unpopular groups, or groups they dislike, to exercise political rights, such as giving a public talk, teaching college, or having their books on loan in public libraries.

It turns out that people in their 20s and 30s are measurably less tolerant than people in older generations. Kelly-Woessner pins the blame on Herbert Marcuse, the political theorist known as the “Father of the New Left.” Marcuse is perhaps best known for his idea of “repressive tolerance”, the title of an essay in which he called for “liberating tolerance,” by which he meant suppressing ideas and speech of the Right, because it is evil. Kelly-Woessner writes:

The idea of “liberating tolerance” then is one in which ideas that the left deems to be intolerant are suppressed. It is an Orwellian argument for an “intolerance of intolerance” and it appears to be gaining traction in recent years, reshaping our commitments to free speech, academic freedom, and basic democratic norms. If we look only at people under the age of 40, intolerance is correlated with a “social justice” orientation. That is, I find that people who believe that the government has a responsibility to help poor people and blacks get ahead are also less tolerant. Importantly, this is true even when we look at tolerance towards groups other than blacks. For people over 40, there is no relationship between social justice attitudes and tolerance. I argue that this difference reflects a shift from values of classical liberalism to the New Left. For older generations, support for social justice does not require a rejection of free speech. Thus, this tension between leftist social views and political tolerance is something new.

She goes on to say that intolerance is now being redefined as a social good, e.g., protecting victim groups from speech that makes them feel “unsafe.” Read the whole thing.

Take a look at this example of “liberating tolerance,” also up on the Heterodox Academy site. It’s a clip from a Portland, Oregon, anarchist’s meeting which was disrupted by protesters who accused organizers of creating an “unsafe” space by questioning rape claims. It’s bizarre — but if you watch it, be aware that there’s profanity in it, so it’s NSFW:

George Yancey says this appalling episode is an example of “education dogma,” which he says are “not the result of gaining more facts but instead are the dogmatic adaptation of certain social values provided to [those who hold them] by [the higher education] subculture. We see evidence of this in that it is clear that students like the ones in the video are not looking for more information to make accurate assessments, but simply look to affirm previously accepted beliefs.”

What are some of the Education Dogmas, according to Yancey? Here’s his list:

1. There is a campus rape culture that encourages the sexual assault of women.

2. A woman accusing a man of rape has vastly more credibility than a man who claims his innocence.

3. The earth is getting dramatically warmer due to human activity and altering that activity can stop or slow this trend.

4. Israelites settlers and the Israel government are as bad as or worse than Palestinian terrorists.

5. Fundamentalist Christians are morally the same as Muslim terrorists.

6. Military action in the Middle East creates more problems than it solves.

7. Criticism of Islam as a religion of terrorism is an example of Islamophobia.

8. Religious freedom is not as important as acceptance of sexual minorities.

9. Society would generally be better if traditional religion disappeared.

10. Marriage between those of the same sex should be seen as the same as marriage between those of different sexes.

11. Trans women should be allowed to use the same facilities as biological women.

12. The physical differences between men and women play no role in economic disparities between the sexes.

13. A woman has a right to an abortion for whatever reason she chooses.

14. Black men are targeted by the police.

15. Anti-Hispanic racism is an important part of what motivates those who oppose immigration reform.

16. President Obama is criticized more than previous presidents because of his race.

17. Raising taxes on the wealthy will improve our economy.

18. Political conservatives are either greedy manipulators exploiting the marginalized or sincere dupes voting against their own economic interests.

19. There is little, if any, correlation between hard work and economic success.

20. The United States is more damaging to the world than other western industrialized nations.

Yancey continues:

Let me be clear that I am not arguing that these statements are either right or wrong. For the record I agree with some statements and disagree with others. I am not arguing it is problematic that students on college campuses have these beliefs. I argue that it is problematic that they hold onto these positions with a dogmatic attitude where they are unable to entertain alternative perspectives. There are arguments opposing these statements that are not tied to evil motivations but consist of perspectives that differ from the tenets of education dogma. Yet those who hold alternative perspectives are not just wrong but they are– put in the proper term – racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, denier, sexist, cisgenderist, pro-rape, etc. They are heretics in a binary worldview where creative compromises and third ways, which require the critical thinking skills which we should be teaching our students, are ignored and only stigmatizing and silencing the heretic is allowed.

To underscore his position, Yancey, an African-American sociologist, says he has no problem with people who believe any of these things; his problem is with those who seek to silence those who disagree. Read his entire piece here.

Todd Nickerson is a self-confessed pedophile. He says he does not act on his desires, but he wants you to understand that he’s a human being. Excerpts from his essay in, where else, Salon.com:

I’ve been stuck with the most unfortunate of sexual orientations, a preference for a group of people who are legally, morally and psychologically unable to reciprocate my feelings and desires. It’s a curse of the first order, a completely unworkable sexuality, and it’s mine. Who am I? Nice to meet you. My name is Todd Nickerson, and I’m a pedophile. Does that surprise you? Yeah, not many of us are willing to share our story, for good reason. To confess a sexual attraction to children is to lay claim to the most reviled status on the planet, one that effectively ends any chance you have of living a normal life. Yet, I’m not the monster you think me to be. I’ve never touched a child sexually in my life and never will, nor do I use child pornography.

But isn’t that the definition of a pedophile, you may ask, someone who molests kids? Not really. Although “pedophile” and “child molester” have often been used interchangeably in the media, and there is some overlap, at base, a pedophile is someone who’s sexually attracted to children. That’s it. There’s no inherent reason he must act on those desires with real children. Some pedophiles certainly do, but many of us don’t. Because the powerful taboo keeps us in hiding, it’s impossible to know how many non-offending pedophiles are out there, but signs indicate there are a lot of us, and too often we suffer in silence. That’s why I decided to speak up.

It turns out he was born with a deformity, which made him feel inadequate and set apart, and he was also molested as a small child by a visitor to his grandmother’s house.

He says he found hope in a group called Virtuous Pedophiles, who support each other and encourage each other not to act on their desires. More:

For better or worse—mostly worse—we have this sexuality, and unlike with most sexualities, there is no ethical way we can fully actualize our sexual longings. Our desires and feelings, if we are to remain upright, are doomed from the outset. Indeed, whereas the majority of crimes can be bounced back from, society doesn’t extend a mulligan to molesters. I understand why, but that doesn’t make the burden any lighter to bear, particularly for those of us who have minimal or no attraction to adults. And for the pedos who are lucky enough to be able to form working relationships with adults, there are a new set of concerns: What if we have children? Will I be a threat to them? Can I ever share this fact with my spouse? Can I ever love and want her as much as I do a child?

So, please, be understanding and supportive. It’s really all we ask of you. Treat us like people with a massive handicap we must overcome, not as a monster. If we are going to make it in the world without offending, we need your help. Listening to me was a start.

Read the whole thing.

This is fascinating stuff. Repulsive, at first, but I think about what it must be like to live with this tormenting desire, but not be able to act on it, and I pity the man. We are more than our desires. This man needs people to help him bear his cross.

That said, it is worth considering how the way we think and talk about sexuality, desire, and identity in our culture blurs the lines for this man. He says he cannot help desiring who he does, and I believe him. He recognizes that his desire is disordered, and he needs help refraining from indulging it. This VirPed (his word) group is all about helping him live a moral life despite this hated disorder.

If Todd Nickerson’s desire was for people of the same sex, this piece would never have been published, obviously. There is a Catholic group called Courage, for gay men and women who want to live celibately, in obedience to Catholic teaching — and they are often criticized, even within the Church. In our contemporary culture, most people do not believe sexual desire towards someone of one’s own sex is disordered. Almost everybody believes sexual desire towards a child is disordered. Similarly, almost everyone believes sexual desire towards an animal is disordered.

How do we determine which sexual desires are disordered, and which aren’t? Consent? Isn’t that a very thin line? Todd Nickerson describes being fondled by the older man when he was seven, and it was not traumatic for him, in his memory.

Nickerson describes pedophilia as an “orientation.” No, I’m not saying that homosexuality is the same thing as pedophilia. It is not. What concerns me, though, is that the language and concepts we have accepted to sweep away the old Christian objections to homosexuality — in particular, the sacrosanct way we see sexual desire as at the core of identity and personhood — can easily be manipulated to legitimize pedophiles. The only reason Nickerson sees his sexual desire for children as illegitimate is because society tells him he cannot act ethically on it. Nickerson writes:

With sexuality … there’s a physiological component, a drive every bit as powerful as belief. In essence, your brain knows what it likes and isn’t going to take no for an answer. For that reason, the nature or nurture question with respect to sexual preference is ultimately irrelevant—it becomes all but hardwired soon enough, until it’s all you know. And it’s self-reinforcing, no matter how much you wish to dig it out. Eventually it all tangles together with the rest of who you are.

… with the rest of who you are.

Are there any grounds — other than consent — on which we can take a firm stand against Todd Nickerson’s sexual desires, and tell him to deny what he desires in the deepest recesses of his brain, and that he considers to be an inextricable part of himself? We have made liberating the sexual self a virtue in the LGBT movement, and before that, in the Sexual Revolution. So where does that leave Todd Nickerson in terms of finding resources with which to deny his sexual desire? If we simply say by fiat “children cannot consent to sex, therefore pedophilia is wrong, does that really take care of the problem?

Mark Edmundson writes about his Catholic childhood and deep disillusionment with the Roman Catholic Church, which he left. There’s a lot in the essay about the abuse scandal, so much that I thought about not posting the essay on a day when Francis is in the country. But this ending makes the whole thing worthwhile. He’s talking about why the Catholic laity did not abandon the Church after the worst of the scandal became known:

I suspect that people stuck with the Church in part because of its commitment to forgiveness. They also stuck with it because it is one of the few powerful bodies that tries to say a resolute No to what is most distressing about worldliness.

The Church is in favor of life. It rejects capital punishment. In a time when virtually no one challenges the rich and no one fights for the poor, the Church, as Pope Francis has dramatically shown, is on their side. Sell what you have and give the money to the poor, the Savior says, and then come and follow me. No other major Western institution says this. No one else has contempt for getting and spending. No one else will befriend the condemned man, or the rapist, or the thief. As long as you are alive and in this world, the Church has hope for you. When everyone else has given up on you, the Church remains open. How many times do you forgive your brother or sister? Jesus suggests that we do this no end of times. For the Church, there is no such thing as human refuse. Everyone matters. Everyone is equal. What you do to the least of mine, you do to me, Jesus says, and sometimes the Church tries to bear him out.

Does the Church fail? Of course it does. The Vatican flows with gold; the bishop knows fine wines; the priest is still ogling your son. But the Church carries within it the answers to its own excesses. You need to examine your conscience, you need to confess your sins, you need to be sorry, you need to vow to sin no more. But if you do, the door is open. The Church may at times outrage its own highest values—blindness, denial, lies. But it will try to right itself in its own way, and it will never give those values up, no matter how large the gap between what it professes and what it achieves.

Looking back, I’m grateful for the education the Church gave me. I walked out, I dare say, with its best principles in my heart, and maybe I left its worst behind. The Church stands yet and probably always will. It tells us that our lives mean something. It tells us that an individual existence has a shape, beginning with baptism and passing to confession, communion, confirmation, and marriage all the way to extreme unction and the grave. Without that inner structure, without some moral code, without forgiveness, what is life? Something closer to the experience of animals that merely eat, couple, and sleep. That the very best wisdom in the world is wrapped up with some of the worst crime is not easy for one to reconcile. But the Church now, even under the guidance of a new and invigorating pope, is a spiritual treasure guarded by a murderous dragon—and it is no less the treasure than it is the dragon.

For a major human riddle—maybe the major human riddle—is this: the worst kind of corruption is the corruption of the highest ideals. Where there are high ideals, there will often be corruption and often of the vilest sort. But without ideals, where—and what—would we be?

Read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

The question is, though, without a living relationship to the living God through the Church, how long can an individual or a society hold on to those ideals? The Elder Zosima, in The Brothers Karamazov, says:

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it. So I think.

How do we stay connected to the mystery, and make it accessible across the generations, if not for the visible structure of the Church? Without the physical embodiment of those ideals, and without believing in the authority of the Church, how are we to know that these ideals are good?

I really appreciate what Mark Edmundson says at the end of his essay, but I’m left wondering how he would expect his children (if he had ever had them) and his children’s children to believe in these ideals if they were not given as their birthright this connection to the Church.

A reader sends in this delicious montage of right-wing TV and radio talkers losing their caca over Pope Francis.

Hey, I’m at Villanova University in suburban Philadelphia tonight, spending Wednesday at the college and giving a Dante lecture that night. The city is all wound up, waiting for Pope Francis to arrive. Open thread for readers in Washington, Philly, NYC, and all those coming into one of these cities on the Pope’s tour to see him: What are you thinking and feeling right now? What are your hopes? Your fears? Not interested in arguing about anything here; just want to know what’s on your mind right now.