Rod Dreher's Blog, page 665

Ole Miss 23, Alabama 17.

Yesterday, out doing errands, Matthew and I played a kind of game, inquiring of ourselves, “What Is The Biggest Thing The Government Isn’t Telling Us?”

(Besides the aliens stuff, of course.)

The one that came to mind for me was that they are working on weapons vastly more deadly and sinister than anything the public has yet imagined. Matthew’s was much better, in my view:

“That they have far more mass surveillance capability than even Edward Snowden revealed — and that they use it.”

The more I thought about it, the more I thought that is probably the truth. We had fun, in a perverse, apocalyptic way, wondering if there are government secrets so dark that even the president isn’t allowed to know them. (Such as: “… and the NSA is surveilling the president too.”

So, open thread: What do you think is the Biggest Thing The Government Isn’t Telling Us?

The New Yorker publishes a spot-on satire about the hopelessly humorless Hillary Clinton. In this scenario, based on a NYT report that the Clinton campaign is going to try to bring out the candidate’s alleged funny side, HRC sits around with staffers brainstorming. Here’s how it begins:

STAFFER 1: Here’s something. Lots of jokes start with the line “A guy walks into a barn.”

CLINTON: I like that. That’s funny.

STAFFER 2: Bar. I think it’s “A guy walks into a bar.”

CLINTON: Bar? Why is that funny? Are bars funny?

STAFFER 3: I thought it was barn, too.

STAFFER 4: What if a guy walks into a barn and sees a bar?

CLINTON: That makes no sense.

STAFFER 2: Is that funny, though? Walking into a barn?

CLINTON: Barns are hilarious. It depends on the barn, of course, as well as the time of year. Barns can also be sad. I’ve walked into barns in the heartland of this great country, where jobs have vanished and the American dream is dead.

(Long silence.)

The whole thing is hilarious, and captures an essential truth about Mrs. C.

Continuing the discussion of American cultural imperialism, First Things (which has had some great stuff lately) publishes an essay by the Rev. John Azumah, a Presbyterian pastor from Ghana, who teaches at a PC(USA) seminary in the United States. He talks about how Americans — well, liberal Americans at least — are completely accepting of homosexuality, which is deeply rejected by Africans. Excerpts:

My first “welcome to America” moment occurred when I invited an imam to my Introduction to Islam class at Columbia Theological Seminary.The imam talked about the basic tenets of Islam for an hour and asserted, among other things, that Jesus is not the Son of God, denied that he was crucified, and maintained that the Bible has been falsified. My students listened respectfully throughout the lecture. When he paused and invited discussion, the students replied with rather timid and politically correct queries, at which point the imam said: “Why are you not asking me about jihad, about terrorism, women? I know you have all these questions. Why are you not asking me the hard questions?” So one student queried him about Islamic teaching on homosexuality. The imam answered by defining the practice as un-Islamic, not of God, unnatural. Suddenly, the faces of a good number of the students went red with shock and rage. I stepped in and gently steered the discussion away from the topic.

After the class ended, the few conservative students in the class approached and slyly suggested that I invite the imam again. Other students urged me to cancel a scheduled visit to the mosque the following Friday. I resisted those efforts and we all visited the mosque, after which the imam and his elders unexpectedly hosted the class for an Ethiopian feast. A lesbian student who had been most upset after the class confessed that she was glad she came, because she saw a hospitable and warm side of the imam.

As I look back upon the whole episode, I think I ended up more unsettled than my students. They were agitated by what the imam said about homosexuality, but seemed wholly at ease with his negation of fundamental Christian beliefs. If this were a seminary in Ghana, my home country, the reverse would have been the case.

Amazing, but unsurprising. Most of these students studying to be ordained Christian pastors didn’t have any particular reaction to the imam’s denial of basic Christian teaching (not that they should have been offended, but at least they should have engaged him). They didn’t even care enough to engage him critically on some disturbing aspects of contemporary Islam. But when the imam criticized homosexuality? Well, the imam defiled the high holy of American liberalism right there!

Pastor Azumah comes off as an irenic figure who is trying to mediate within his church between the liberal West and the “Global South.” Here he gets to the heart of the problem:

I have come to the conclusion that the doctrinal differences between American liberals and African traditionalists originate in deeper conflicts. We may argue about what the Bible says about sexuality, but there is a broader, unstated disagreement over the Bible itself. For mainstream Western society, the Bible is an ancient text that might arouse intellectual curiosity or become the subject of historical analysis, but it is hardly a sacred book. It has no more authority in American culture than the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King’s speeches, and other notable historic statements. Dropping the language of “obedience to Scripture” and “conformity to the historic confessional standards” from the PC(USA) Ordination Standards underscores this point.

The Bible has a very different status in African societies. Where Christianity has become dominant in the last century, the Bible remains a sacred text, relevant and living. The Bible is more than a compilation of historical documents. It is, in very significant ways, an African Testament. For large segments of African Christian societies, the world of the Bible is contemporary. Old and New Testament narratives of sacrifice, polygamy, plague, agriculture, dancing, shepherds, tensions between nomadic pastoralism and peasant dwellers, epidemics, and war have immediate relevance. Andrew Walls remarks, “You do not have to interpret Old Testament Christianity to Africans; they live in an Old Testament world.”

Azumah says that a basic difference between African Christians and liberal Christians in Europe and North America is the “enduring importance of traditional conceptions of family and morality.

This largely shields Africans from the cultural upheavals that America has suffered, including redefinitions of male-female roles, chastity, holiness, and, of course, the normalization of homosexual sex. Liberal American Christians judge the African position on homosexuality as cruel to one set of human beings. But Africans have no problem in naming homosexuality a sin and praying for the redemption of all sinners. We heed the parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13. We remember that the harvest and separation of the wheat from the weeds is none of our business and belongs to the not yet, the final consummation of the Kingdom of God. There should be no place for homophobia in the African church. But there is also no place for redefining the Word of God.

As a result, Africans still believe in marriage as the union of man and woman and view homosexuality as contrary to God’s design and will, a reflection of the broken sinfulness of humanity. To hear mainstream Western media and Western liberals dismiss African disapproval of same-sex relations as the work of right-wing American Evangelical groups brings to mind a long history of patronizing attitudes and contempt. The fact that the views of the vast majority of African society on issues of sex and marriage align with those of American Evangelicals does not mean Africans are mimicking or acting as proxies of American anti-gay groups. African views, which are shared by the overwhelming majority of non-Western societies, are based on sound biblical interpretation that reinforces and is reinforced by the traditional African view of life, family, community, and sexual ethics.

Agreed! Read the whole thing. It’s important — especially the part where the author talks about the effect Western liberalism on homosexuality has on African Christians having to face down militant Islam. Pastor Azumah speaks from a church and a cultural milieu that, for all its flaws, remains Christian. Unlike our own. Note the statistics on the liberal, post-Christian PC(USA). The church is in ongoing collapse. At its current rate of decline, the last PC(USA) member will turn out the lights around the middle of this century.

It’s hard to deny that Western liberalism, especially with its obsession on sex and sexuality, means spiritual sterility and ecclesial senescence. And not just senescence in the churches. It’s not enough that we’re slowly killing our own civilizations; we have to try to force Africans to kill theirs as well.

As I write this, I’m on my way back to Baton Rouge from a couple of great days in western Tennessee. I spoke at UT-Martin on Wednesday about Dante, and spent yesterday at Union University in Jackson talking about The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Dante, and the Benedict Option — a Dreher trifecta, for sure.

In the 1998 Robert Duvall film The Apostle, there’s a great scene in which Duvall, playing a Pentecostal preacher named Sonny, watches a Catholic priest blessing the shrimp fleet. Here’s Duvall, from an interview, talking about that scene:

Another thing I want to emphasize is the cultural contrast I saw between religions. By the time we were finished cutting, that was not obvious. Like Catholics have a lot of mediators, going through saints and Mary or whatever. But I love the directness of these people. They relate directly with God, not going through anything.

Protestants in general, but especially these people, say things to God directly, like I do in the film: ‘I always call you “Jesus”; you always call me “Sonny”.’ ‘I’m on the devil’s hit-list; I’m gonna get on Jesus’ mailing-list!’ ‘Holy Ghost explosion,’ ‘Short-circuit the devil!’ ‘I’m a genuine Holy Ghost Jesus-filled preaching machine here this morning!’ I use those phrases in the film. I heard them from the preachers and from the people. These were their terms. God is immediate to their lives.’

Sonny sees a Catholic priest blessing fishing boats as they leave the harbor. He says, ‘You do it your way, and we do it mine. But we get it done, don’t we.’ That’s the tension between religions. There are different forms and prejudices, but I wanted Sonny to show an acceptance of another religion because both were trying to achieve the same end.

That’s the feeling I had after my time at Union, talking with Evangelical professors and others about the Benedict Option. It’s astonishing to me how interested folks are in the Benedict Option. It’s really exploding. Yesterday I received an e-mail from an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, saying he had read about it, is excited about it, and would love to talk with me about what small-o orthodox Christians can learn from the Orthodox Jewish community about how to live faithfully, in community, in a culture that is alien to one’s religious values. I think this is fantastic.

Evangelicals, of course, have somewhat different concerns about the Ben Op than Catholics or Orthodox Christians would, and I learn so much from engaging with them, and thinking through these challenges. The big takeaway at this point is the strong sense I’m picking up among culturally aware orthodox Christians is that something big is happening, and we Christians cannot live as if these were normal times. I’m not talking about apocalypticism, but a sense that we really are in a profoundly post-Christian era, and the churches have to re-orient ourselves toward intense discipleship to endure in the long run — and not only to endure, but to thrive not in fear and rigidity, but in authentic Christian joy and liberty.

Hence the Benedict Option, which is going to be worked out in 10,000 conversations among Christians who can read the signs of the times, and who want to prepare themselves, their families, and their communities.

It’s so great to spend time among a community of Christians who are not my people in one way, but who in a more profound way, absolutely are. You do it your way and we do it mine, Evangelical friends, but we get it done, don’t we? We are going to get it done. St. Benedict belongs to all of us.

UPDATE: Hey Protestant readers, you might want to check out a good book I’m reading, on the recommendation of one of you. It’s called Monk Habits For Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants, by Dennis Okholm. It’s giving me good insights into how to translate Benedictine concepts into Protestant devotional and spiritual language.

This just in:

The U.S. government said that it would adopt the term “sexual rights” in discussing issues about gender identities and sexual orientation.

The statement, originally made at a United Nations meeting, came after weeks of lobbying from LGBT groups calling for the U.S. to show leadership on the issue. The new term encompasses the “right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination, and violence,” the State Department said, in a statement.

Richard Erdman, deputy U.S. ambassador to the U.N., made the announcement earlier this week, saying that “sexual rights” would refer to ones that are not legally binding.

“Sexual rights are not human rights, and they are not enshrined in international human rights law; our use of this term does not reflect a view that they are part of customary international law,” Erdman said. “It is, however, a critical expression of our support for the rights and dignity of all individuals regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”

This is incredibly disingenous. So let’s take the government at its word, that it does not include “sexual rights” among those considered legally binding in international law. This is a prelude to pushing for that very thing. Here’s why it matters: if the West can get “sexual rights” written into international law, it can strongarm religiously observant Third World countries into accepting “sexual rights” as a condition of receiving development aid. Want to eat, black and brown people? Want our help fighting poverty? Then bow towards this Western idol.

I am not surprised that a government led by Barack Obama would do this. Consider the in-your-face culture-warring the White House is waging on Pope Francis:

Guests at the White House reception for Pope Francis on September 23 will include several gay and transgender persons, a controversial nun, a radical preacher and a gay Episcopal bishop.

Several of the invitations to the event, which is part of the pope’s three-city tour of America September 22-27, were offered by Vivian Taylor. Taylor, 30, considers himself transgender, which means he identifies as a sex different from his biology. Taylor has male anatomy but dresses and presents himself as female. Until March of this year he was the Executive Director of Integrity USA, a homosexual and transgender activist wing of the Episcopal Church. Taylor lives in Boston and is now freelance writing.

“A few months ago I received an invitation from the White House to attend the reception for Pope Francis,” Taylor told CNS News. “I was told I could bring several friends with me.”

Among the five people Taylor chose:

Nicole Santamaria, the Secretary of Asociacion Colectivo Alejandria, “a collective of transgender and intersex people seeking to promote awareness, provide training and education, and advocate for their community.”

I’m sure Pope Francis will handle this with typical aplomb, but it’s remarkable, just remarkable, that the White House has chosen to get so in-your-face with the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Would Obama invite Tibetan dissidents to meet the Chinese president? As a diplomatic matter, it’s unthinkable. Would he invite Ukrainian activists to a reception for Putin? In either case, the diplomatic row from the challenge would be huge. But hey, he can treat the Pope this way? Really?

These pieces of news are just another reminder of why so many religious and traditionalist people around the world resent the US government’s cultural imperialism. I don’t blame them one bit.

UPDATE: A Catholic reader sends in a typically useful John Allen article, this one about “decoding” Pope Francis for Americans. Note these items:

Ideological colonization

As history’s first pope from the developing world, Francis is keenly sensitive to perceived imbalances of power between the West and everyone else. One area he believes it shows up is efforts by Western governments and NGOs, as well as the U.N. and other global bodies, to force poor countries to abandon their traditional values as the price of receiving development assistance.

What Francis means by “ideological colonization,” for instance, would be an U.N. agency offering an African nation funding for anti-AIDS campaigns on the condition that they reduce population by a specific percentage, or allow distribution of condoms in their public clinics, or revise public school textbooks to promote family planning, or legalize same-sex marriage.

That’s what Francis had in mind when he said in the Philippines in January, for instance, that “there’s an ideological colonization we have to be careful of that tries to destroy the family.”

The phrase may come up in the States, perhaps when Francis addresses the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York on Sept. 25.

Gender theory

For most Americans, “gender theory” probably sounds like the name of a graduate seminar in a Women’s Studies program. Francis, however, uses it to mean efforts to eradicate the biological differences between men and women, or to treat those differences as culturally conditioned and therefore optional.

That’s what he had in mind during a General Audience in April, for instance, when he said, “I wonder if so-called gender theory may not also be an expression of frustration and resignation that aims to erase sexual differentiation because it no longer knows how to come to terms with it.”

“Getting rid of the difference is the problem, not the solution,” he said.

In an interview in February with two Italian journalists, Francis called gender theory a “sin” that fails to “recognize the order of creation.”

Given that background, if Francis talks about “gender theory” while he’s in the States, it probably will be a clue he’s about to say something that will appeal to the cultural right.

The Browser dug up this 2011 City Journal column by economist Luigi Zingales, in which he said America is lucky Donald Trump (that year) decided against running for president. Excerpts:

The only thing more frightening than Trump’s running for president would be Trump’s getting elected president. From a party perspective, while losing an election is bad, winning one with the wrong candidate for the party and for the country is worse. I know something about this: I come from Italy, a country that has elected as prime minister the Trumplike Silvio Berlusconi.

Trump and Berlusconi are remarkably alike. They are both billionaire businessmen who claim that the government should be run like a business. They are both gifted salesmen, able to appeal to the emotions of their fellow citizens. They are both obsessed with their looks, with their hair (or what remains of it), and with sexy women. Their gross manners make them popular, perhaps because people think that if these guys could become billionaires, anyone could. Most important is that both Trump and Berlusconi made their initial fortunes in real estate, an industry where connections and corruption often matter as much as, or more than, talent and hard work. Indeed, while both pretend to stand for free markets, what they really believe in is what most of us would label crony capitalism.

Berlusconi’s policies have been devastating to Italy. He has been prime minister for eight of the last ten years, during which time the Italian per-capita GDP has dropped 4 percent, the debt-to-GDP ratio has increased from 109 percent to 120 percent, and taxes have increased from 41.2 percent to 43.4 percent. Italy’s score in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom has dropped from 63 to 60.3, and in the World Economic Forum Index of Competitiveness from 4.9 to 4.37. Berlusconi’s tenure has also been devastating for free-market ideas, which now are identified with corruption.

Whole thing here.

I didn’t get to see the GOP debate the other night, but I’m very encouraged by the consensus that Trump didn’t do all that well, but Carly Fiorina did. Here in Tennessee, I’ve heard several people who did watch the debate say how frustrated they were by CNN’s questioning, which, according to them, seemed geared toward gigging the candidates to turn on each other in a personal clash rather than sussing out ideas.

Anyway, Zingales’s insight into how Berlusconi’s leadership corrupted the idealof the free market in Italy in the popular mind — a position that may be contestable, I dunno (Giuseppe? Carlo? What say you?) — reminds me of what several of us have been saying about how the Kim Davis case stands to corrupt the ideal of religious liberty in the American mind. People may say, if [the market/religious liberty] means that, then I’m against it.

Did you see this? Good grief:

The Obama administration is moving toward major changes in its military train-and-equip program for the Syrian opposition after the acknowledged failure of efforts to create a new force of rebel fighters to combat the Islamic State there.

In comments that appeared to shock even many of those involved in Syria policy elsewhere in the government, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of the U.S. Central Command, told Congress on Wednesday that only “four or five” trainees from the program, a $500 million plan officially launched in December to prepare as many as 5,400 fighters this year, have ended up “in the fight” inside Syria.

I’m sorry, but what?! “Four or five” — at $100 million a pop? More:

Lawmakers responded to Austin’s description of overall progress against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq with near-universal skepticism, and they described the administration’s strategy of defeating the militants with air power, along with training and supplies for indigenous forces on the ground, as a failure.

Yeah, you know why they’re skeptical? Because the military has been lying about it.

Meanwhile, Sam M. sends in a jaw-dropping story about how Mark Zuckerberg’s gargantuan do-gooder grant to public schools in Newark, NJ, has been squandered:

Watching the $200 million iceberg (Mr. Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation was contingent on raising a matching amount) slowly melt into an ocean of recrimination over the course of 256 brisk pages can be a sometimes painful exercise. The union boss, Joe Del Grosso, demanded a ransom of $31 million to compensate for what he felt members should have received in previous years — before agreeing to discuss any labor reforms. The superintendent, Cami Anderson, demanded accountability from schools but set her own performance goals only after the academic year was largely over and relied on expensive consultants — whose total bill ultimately exceeded $20 million — without clear objectives long after she had promised to recruit a permanent leadership team.

The school reform movement’s focus on measurable results and “business-style management” is laudable. But it is downright chilling to watch the leadership team throw around buzz phrases from business best-sellers with minimal focus on the nuanced requirements of applying these principles to the education ecosystem generally or to the Newark public schools particularly.

Dang. We could have bought two more Syrian fighters for what Zuck wasted in Newark.

In First Things, Amy L. Wax reviews Robert Putnam’s most recent book, which examines the widening opportunity gap between the poor and the rest of America. She’s not buying Putnam’s explanation that it’s all about the economy. Excerpt:

In stressing the monetary and material roots of working-class collapse, Putnam relies chiefly on the observation that real earnings for male high school graduates and dropouts have stagnated or declined since the 1970s, with secure factory jobs dwindling. Yet he ignores significant fluctuations during the past fifty years, and fails to explain why social cohesion, and especially family structure, has deteriorated relentlessly despite significant economic ups and downs. Putnam himself states that the thirty-year drop in real earnings for male high school graduates has been only 11 percent without explaining how this alone can account for the accelerating pathologies that he recounts.

And although Putnam admits that life for the working class, and even the poor, used to be dramatically different, he has remarkably little to say about why parents in straitened circumstances were once far more effective in establishing orderly homes, socializing their children, and equipping them to exploit chances for self-improvement or, at least, to achieve a decent, satisfying life. And he devotes no attention to the significant number of less skilled Americans—including many recent immigrants—who effectively resist the social problems that bedevil others at the bottom of the economic ladder.

In fact, Putnam’s own anecdotes belie his tilt toward the economic roots of working-class distress, highlighting the dynamic, two-way relationship between material hardship and life choices. Joe, one of his working-class protagonists, is steadily employed at a decent job managing a pizza franchise. Yet he chronically overspends his earnings and forms tempestuous, unstable liaisons that produce children he can scarcely afford. Indeed, virtually all of ­Putnam’s working-class subjects seem to specialize in a familiar litany of self-­defeating behaviors. Short-lived broken relationships, random spawning and abandonment of children, squandered educational opportunities, repetitive law­breaking, and drug abuse are staples of their existence. Male incarceration is commonplace. Parenting is often harsh while also indifferent, erratic, and neglectful.

In short, the picture Putnam paints is too often that of people who repeatedly pass up the chance to steady or improve their own lives. The sociologist Isabel Sawhill, whom Putnam cites, has observed that a few simple choices—the so-called “success sequence”—can minimize poverty even for people with modest education and skills. The prescription is to graduate from high school, work steadily at any job available, get married before having children, and avoid crime. These basic prudential steps are within the reach of virtually everyone, regardless of means and background, and most people used to accept them as indispensable way stations to responsible adulthood. Yet these steps are no longer followed by most people without a college degree. Laying this at the feet of economic causes requires adopting a peculiar brand of causal materialism that now dominates the social sciences.

Note that Wax is not saying that the economy has nothing to do with it. She’s saying that the explanation is not only materialistic, that free will, family structure, and values have a lot to do with it too. She concludes by saying that Putnam has nothing to offer to help those who are going to be in the working class, period. Read the whole thing.

(Sorry I’m not more engaged in commentary today. I’m at Union University in Tennessee, and between classes and talks.)

Russell Moore can’t believe that some Evangelicals have fallen for Donald Trump. Excerpts:

We should not demand to see the long-form certificate for Mr. Trump’s second birth. We should, though, ask about his personal character and fitness for office. His personal morality is clear, not because of tabloid exposés but because of his own boasts. His attitude toward women is that of a Bronze Age warlord. He tells us in one of his books that he revels in the fact that he gets to sleep with some of the “top women in the world.” He has divorced two wives (so far) for other women.

This should not be surprising to social conservatives in a culture shaped by pornographic understandings of the meaning of love and sex. What is surprising is that some self-identified evangelicals are telling pollsters they’re for Mr. Trump. Worse, some social conservative leaders are praising Mr. Trump for “telling it like it is.”

In the 1990s, some of these social conservatives argued that “If Bill Clinton’s wife can’t trust him, neither can we.” If character matters, character matters. Today’s evangelicals should ask, “Whatever happened to our commitment to ‘traditional family values’?”

More:

Mr. Trump tells us “nothing beats the Bible,” and once said to an audience that he knows how Billy Graham feels. He says of evangelicals: “I love them. They love me.” And yet, he regularly ridicules evangelicals, with almost as much glee as he does Hispanics. This goes beyond his trivialization of communion with his recent comments about “my little cracker” as a way to ask forgiveness. In recent years, he has suggested that evangelical missionaries not be treated in the United States for Ebola, since they chose to go overseas in the first place.

Still, the problem is not just Mr. Trump’s personal lack of a moral compass. He is, after all, a casino and real estate mogul who has built his career off gambling, a moral vice and an economic swindle that oppresses the poorest and most desperate. When Mr. Trump’s casinos fail, he can simply file bankruptcy and move on. The lives and families destroyed by the casino industry cannot move on so easily.

Preach it, brother.

In their 2010 book American Grace, Harvard’s Bob Putnam and Notre Dame’s David Campbell reported that studies show Americans of all sorts — liberals and conservatives both — tend to first pick their politics, then organize their religious convictions around them. Evangelical Trumpitarianism is no surprise, I guess, but it’s still discouraging.