Rod Dreher's Blog, page 9

Watch the first 15 seconds or so of these remarks by Sen. Mitch McConnell, explaining why Republicans approved Joe Biden’s $40 billion Ukraine war request:

.@LeaderMcConnell“: “I had a chance to call the president last week and request that the Ukraine package more by itself and quickly…He called back in about 15 minutes and agreed…I think we’re on a path to getting that done.” pic.twitter.com/0C8rc8IyJQ

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 10, 2022

McConnell says, “I think we all agree that the most important thing going on in the world right now is the war in Ukraine.”

Who is “we”? Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the Washington gang are marching us slowly into ever-greater involvement in a proxy war with Russia. Why is this in our national interest? I agree that Russia was wrong to have invaded Ukraine, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what we have to gain from risking war with Russia, or expanding this war to the rest of Europe.

Yesterday, I was stopped at a red light near a gas station. As I waited for the light to change, I saw the price of diesel fuel on the sign go up 13 cents. Living the past three months in Hungary, where the cost of living is low compared to the US, did not prepare me for the inflation shock when I got home. I bought a burger, fries, and a diet Coke at Burger King the other day: $11! And, in the city where I live, violent crime is rising. A friend of mine in Alabama is on his third round of Covid, and he’s been fully vaccinated. Do we really all agree that the most important thing going on in the world right now is the war in Ukraine?

Again: Washington does, and now we are at war with Russia. The US Government is openly bragging that its intelligence helped the Ukrainians kill Russian generals and sink a warship in the Black Sea. Is this really in our national interest, especially after twenty years of failed Middle Eastern wars? It boggles the mind. Here is Robin Wright, writing in The New Yorker:

America has crossed a threshold in Ukraine, both in its short-term involvement and its long-term intent. The U.S. was initially cautious during the fall and winter as Russia, a nuclear country with veto power at the U.N. Security Council, amassed more than a hundred and fifty thousand troops along the Ukrainian border. It didn’t want to poke the Russian bear—or provoke Vladimir Putin personally. Two days after long convoys of Russian tanks rolled across the border, on February 24th, the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, still claimed that America’s goal—backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid—was simply to stand behind the Ukrainian people. The White House sanctioned Russia—initially targeting a few banks, oligarchs, political élites, government-owned enterprises, and Putin’s own family—to pressure the Russian leader to put his troops back in their box, without resorting to military intervention. “Direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War Three, something we must strive to prevent,” President Joe Biden said, in early March.

Yet in just over nine weeks, the conflict has rapidly evolved into a full proxy war with Russia, with global ramifications. U.S. officials now frame America’s role in more ambitious terms that border on aggressive. The goal—backed by tens of billions of dollars in aid—is to “weaken” Russia and insure a sovereign Ukraine outlasts Putin. “Throughout our history, we’ve learned that when dictators do not pay the price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and engage in more aggression,” the President told reporters on Thursday. “They keep moving. And the costs, the threats to America and the world, keep rising.”

Forty billion dollars. More Robin Wright:

The Biden Administration has public support for its expanding role—for now. Despite war weariness after two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq, roughly two-thirds of Americans believe that the U.S. has a “moral responsibility” to do more to stop the killing of civilians in Ukraine, according to a Quinnipiac poll published in mid-April. In a country polarized on most other issues, a majority from both parties agreed. Three-quarters of those polled also fear that the worst is yet to come. And more than eighty per cent believe that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. Yet the public’s moral outrage “stops at the water’s edge when it comes to committing the U.S. military to the fight,” Tim Malloy, a Quinnipiac University analyst, noted. Only nineteen per cent of Americans believe the U.S. should do more even if it risks getting into a direct war with Russia.

That conviction may soon be tested. The U.S. role has evolved—from a reactive response to Russia’s unjustified war to a proactive assertion of American leadership and leverage.

How many Americans understand that we really are at risk of getting into a direct war with Russia? That our elected leaders in Washington are voting for this. We aren’t even hiding the fact now that Washington regards this as a proxy war with Moscow.Do you know that this is happening?In Europe, Hungary’s Viktor Orban is once again being portrayed as History’s Greatest Monster because his government is holding up European Union sanctions banning Russian oil and gas. Why? Because those sanctions would destroy the Hungarian economy. Hungary gets 85% of its natural gas and 60% of its oil from Russia. And it is landlocked, meaning it could not receive shipments of oil and gas via tanker.I agree that Putin is a bad man who should not have invaded Ukraine. But ask yourself: why is it in America’s interest to go deeper and deeper into the hole, committing itself to a shooting war with Russia, over Ukraine? Why is it in the EU’s interest to destroy its own member nations’ economies to cut off Russian oil and gas? Who is any of this benefiting?

UPDATE: More power to Damon Linker, who writes:

What the Biden administration has opted for is a form of proxy warfare in which Ukraine does the fighting, picks the targets, and fires the weapons, but we often supply the weapons and provide intelligence that enables Ukraine to choose targets wisely and precisely. This demonstrates American and NATO resolve while keeping us at least one step removed from directly engaging Russian forces. It’s good for Russia to know that our intelligence is strong enough to place their warships and senior military officers at serious risk — and that we are willing to share that intelligence with Ukraine. Both could well prompt de-escalation, as the Russian military command and President Vladimir Putin confront the reality that it might be impossible for them to achieve anything beyond relatively minimal war aims.

But such de-escalation becomes much less likely if the American role in inflicting pain on the Russian military is public knowledge. That’s because a big part of politics, even in authoritarian regimes, involves managing appearances. In order to sell a policy of de-escalation to the Russian people, Putin must be able to portray it as at least a partial victory. Otherwise, he would be risking looking weak and opening himself up to a collapse in support and/or a coup attempt that could leave him deposed from power and even dead. Humiliating Putin could also inflame patriotic rage among ordinary Russians, who could end up demanding retribution in the form of some face-saving action against NATO.

That’s how bragging to reporters about the American role in helping Ukraine inflict maximal harm against Russian forces could well initiate an escalatory spiral that culminates in direct military confrontation between the U.S. and Russia.

Read it all.I don’t believe we should be fighting a proxy war with Russia, but if we are, then we damn sure ought not to have our officials bragging about it!

UPDATE.2: People can’t buy baby formula in this country, but Democrats and Republicans in Washington and sending $40 billion to Ukraine.

We want to invite any Republican senator who plans on voting for the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine to come on the show and explain why. Please tell us. We’ll let you talk as much as you want.https://t.co/uPAwNtbdrO pic.twitter.com/Ep6HFTbjUP

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) May 12, 2022

The post More Warmongering From The Swamp appeared first on The American Conservative.

NPR is such an absurd organization these days. I cannot wait until some future Congress and president remove all federal funding from it, given what it has become. As far as I know, this major player in the Cathedral (the neoreactionary term for the informal system of American elites) have never paid a bit of attention to Orthodox Christianity in America. But now they’ve come out with a hit piece on how Orthodoxy is attracting far right converts.

Here’s how it appears on the website:

This is a biased article, even by NPR’s standards. Reporter Odette Yousef begins by talking about right-wing converts to ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia — the exile church, though it reconciled in recent years with the Moscow Patriarchate) in a single West Virginia congregation. More:

The case study that Riccardi-Swartz provides adds detail and color to a trend that a handful of historians and journalists have documented for nearly a decade. In publications mostly targeted toward an Orthodox Christian audience, they have raised the alarm about a growing nativist element within the church. Despite Orthodoxy’s relatively small imprint in the U.S., they warn that, unchecked, these adherents could fundamentally alter the faith tradition in the United States. They also warn that these individuals are evangelizing hate in the name of Orthodoxy in ways that could attract more who share those views.

“It’s an immigrant faith. It’s now being sort of colonized by these converts in many respects,” said Riccardi-Swartz. “They’re vocal in their parishes. They’re vocal online. They’re very digitally savvy and very connected to other far-right actors in the United States and across the globe. And that’s really changing the faith.”

Now, before I begin to deconstruct this ridiculous propaganda piece, I concede that it is based on a kernel of truth: some outsiders are finding their way to Orthodoxy, thinking that it will be the far right at prayer. A friend who attends a large parish told me last year that they are seeing some young men showing up with that in mind, only to find out otherwise. Let me be clear at the start of this essay that I concede that this phenomenon is not invented out of whole cloth.

In my own small parish, we have seen a surge of young inquirers, but they are coming not with far-right politics in mind, but because they are looking for something more stable and deeper than the churches they had been attending. And yes, it is true that some come because they correctly sense that Orthodoxy is much less likely to surrender to the wokeness that is infesting many Protestant and Catholic congregations. Note well, though, that to NPR, all of this is “far-right.”  

This Riccardi-Swartz talks about how these people are “really changing the faith.” Are they? In my experience of being within Orthodoxy for sixteen years, these leftists — like those quoted in Yousef’s story — are angry at converts like me because they want to change the faith to make it more compatible with American liberalism. Converts like me come into the Orthodox Church warning the unsuspecting cradle Orthodox what people like these activists within the Church are really doing — and how if the Orthodox congregations don’t wake up, they will find themselves turned into Baklava Episcopalians.

The NPR story focuses mostly on ROCOR, which is a tiny jurisdiction in America. There are single megachurches in Texas with more members. From the piece:

“This is in line with American mainline religion, [where] everyone is shrinking in size except nondenominational churches,” Krindatch said. But ROCOR, which Krindatch estimated in 2020 to have roughly 24,000 adherents, experienced a striking shift. While the number of ROCOR adherents declined by 14%, Krindatch found that the number of parishes grew by 15%.

“So what it means [is], we have more parishes, but which are smaller in size. And if you look at the geography, those parishes were planted not in traditional lands of Orthodoxy,” said Krindatch. The growth occurred in less populated areas of the Upper Midwest and Southern states, places with fewer direct links to Russia.

“So for me, those are a bunch of new ROCOR communities which are founded by convert clergy or by convert members,” Krindatch said.

OK, but why should we assume that these converts are far rightists? I worshiped in a ROCOR church from 2012-16, and my priest, a convert, was especially vigilant against far-right infiltration of Orthodoxy. He was a former cop, and understood that this was a potential threat. He was instrumental in educating Orthodox bishops, who were clueless. Again: this was a ROCOR priest who took the lead to fight racist infiltration of the Church by radical converts. And in our church, we founded a mission within ROCOR because it was the only Orthodox jurisdiction willing to send a priest into a mission in south Louisiana. Nobody cared about politics at our parish — well, except for this one elderly man, who seemed perpetually disappointed that nobody wanted to talk politics with him. My experience is subjective, of course, but I have had nothing but warmth, kindness, and normality in my interactions with ROCOR people.

Anyway, these tiny little ROCOR mission parishes within a small and shrinking jurisdiction so alarmed NPR that it decided to do a big story on it. And by implication, the bullying liberals of NPR — who just love “diversity,” as long as diversity goes one way — smear all of American Orthodoxy, as you’ll see if you read the whole thing.

More:

Aram Sarkisian, a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Northwestern University’s Department of History, said this new growth from converts has helped some branches of Orthodoxy offset a decline in multigenerational families in the church. Sarkisian said these converts often find their way to Orthodoxy because they seek a haven for what they consider to be the most important cultural issues of the day.

“They’re drawn to what they believe to be conservative views on things like LGBTQ rights, gender equality. Abortion is a really big issue for these folks, the culture wars issues, really,” Sarkisian said. “And so they leave other faith traditions that they don’t believe to be as stringent about those issues anymore.”

That’s true. If you want a more traditionally Christian church, you’ll want to investigate Orthodoxy. But look, Sarkisian is a left-wing smear artist, as I wrote last year when he attempted to demonize Southern converts to Orthodoxy as neo-Confederates.

He focused in part on my praise for the proposal that St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary relocate from Yonkers, NY, to Dallas — this, because Orthodoxy is dying in its historic American heartland (the Northeast), but booming in the South. And, unlike in New York state, legal protections for actually orthodox institutions are likely to be greater than in a hostile woke state like New York. I wrote:

The historic regions where Orthodoxy was first planted in the United States are turning away from God. Nobody can deny that. You might want to make an argument that a seminary should be in a place where the need for proclaiming the Gospel is greatest, but that fails to address the concern that St. Vladimir’s board has over “the legal and regulatory environment in the New York area.”

It is a very, very serious concern for any faithfully Orthodox Christian institution, particularly when it comes to LGBT-focused legislation and cultural norms. For now, the First Amendment protects the rights of seminaries to teach according to religious orthodoxy, even if it contradicts the law governing homosexuality and transgenderism (of which New York is one of the most progressive states). But that says nothing about rules for academic accreditation. It is entirely possible that if SVOTS remains in New York, or another deep blue state, that it could face uphill accreditation battles that could put the very existence of the seminary in jeopardy. Relocating to a red state would mean going to a place that is both more culturally conservative, and, being more religious, better understands the importance of religious liberty.

Naturally this upsets the people at Public Orthodoxy, who are eager to liberalize — including to queer — the Orthodox churches in our country. It appears that these theological progressives fear that they are losing influence over the direction of Orthodoxy in America, and are resorting to neo-Confederate smears to justify their anxiety. The Fordham Orthodox guys helped lead the charge to get my Schmemann lecture at SVOTS cancelled, but they failed. I talked about Live Not By Lies, and the crisis all small-o orthodox Christians — and especially Orthodox Christians — are facing in this post-Christian culture. I know exactly why they hated having me speak there: because I have their number. You rarely if ever hear progressive Orthodox voices complain about the rising soft totalitarianism against moral and theological conservatives because they themselves think oppression of the orthodox Orthodox by the state and by other institutions is a good thing. What these people can’t do within the institution — move it leftward — they are hoping that the state will do for them.

You want to talk about those trying to “change the church”? NPR quotes Inga Leonova, a lesbian activist trying to queer the Orthodox Church in America. It quotes the militantly leftist academic Aram Sarkisian. And it quotes one of the two founders of the Orthodox Study Center at Fordham, the most important center of the attempt to liberalize and queer American Orthodoxy. 

The frustrating thing about this NPR piece is that most people in America have never heard of Orthodox Christianity, or if they have, associate it with Greek food festivals. Now, though, NPR has brought all of us Orthodox under suspicion. From the piece, way down:

Those who have followed the influx of extremists into American Orthodoxy agree that those individuals are fringe within the church and are mostly concentrated in newly founded ROCOR parishes. But they also warn that it would be foolish to ignore them.

They are fringe people in one of the smallest jurisdiction of American Orthodoxy, representing only three or four percent of all Orthodox in the US! But NPR devoted ten minutes to sounding the alarm about their supposed threat. Sarkisian told NPR:

“This is how people are finding Orthodoxy now. They’re finding Orthodoxy through these YouTube shows. They’re finding it through these podcasts. They’re finding it through these blogs,” said Sarkisian. “They’re being radicalized by these folks on the internet, and that’s really dangerous.”

Is that really how people are finding Orthodoxy now, through far-right videos? I hear all the time from people who have found Orthodoxy through reading my blog or my Substack, where I talk not at all about Orthodoxy and politics. Undoubtedly, some people do find Orthodoxy through extremist videos. But the idea that the people coming into Orthodoxy through this narrow gate is significant is not demonstrated at all in this article.

So what is its point, other than to tar a Russian church, in a time of Russophobia, as an anti-American menace? Let me give you a little more background on the kind of Orthodox people Odette Yousef quotes. The two Fordham Orthodox guys are George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou. Back in 2014, the Orthodox theologian Vigen Guroian wrote a negative review of a book about Orthodox political theology by Papanikolaou. Excerpts:

In the end, The Mystical as Political is not about theology. The book makes much of theological concepts like theosis but deploys them as tropes or gestures to smooth the way for the Orthodox faith to be put in service of a distinctly American ­religious project, one launched principally from within the academy.

In a telling admission, Papanikolaou writes that, when it comes to political theology “I do not think the transcendent referent need be to the divine, but can take the form of a common good.” In other words, whatever conduces to democracy and justice is of God. The sacramental realism and eschatological maximalism of Orthodoxy evaporates and is replaced by a consecration of the democratic “communion” of the secular liberal state.

More:

Papanikolaou asserts that “in relation to the democratic form of the common good, the church must accept its own limits and ­recognize that the goal is not the formation of a eucharistic community through persuasion.” This is an astounding pronouncement. The Church must renounce not only the use of the state’s coercive power, something Orthodoxy often ­depended on in past centuries, but also her ambition to draw the world into the eucharistic celebration.

In the place of this ecclesial vision of transformation, we are served the claptrap of diversity and political correctness. The goal of Orthodoxy, according to Papanikolaou, is “the construction of a community in which diversity and cultural difference must be affirmed and protected and in which the recognition of such diversity must be enforced if they are not voluntarily accepted.” Enforced? Does this not imply that the liberal state has a responsibility and right to coerce the Church when the Church does not affirm “diversity and ­cultural difference”? Surely, ­Papanikolaou knows that these terms are the ­property of the progressive left that insists on same-sex marriage, among other things Orthodoxy refuses to “recognize.”

And:

We’ve sadly seen this within contemporary mainline Protestantism and liberal Roman Catholicism. In those contexts, talk about justice (or social justice) has displaced the language of holiness. This has been accomplished at immense cost to the eschatological dimension in both Protestant and Roman Catholic social ethics. In the effort to insinuate the Church’s mind into public policy, we’ve seen the Church’s singularly biblical and Christian speech stripped away. Papanikolaou would do the same for Orthodoxy.

None of this is meant to minimize the “threat,” such as it is, from a handful of far-right nativists infiltrating a tiny jurisdiction of Orthodoxy. But it is to point out for non-Orthodox readers that NPR aligns itself with an academic faction within American Orthodoxy that really and truly does want to change the Church to make it more like, well, NPR.

I do give the Fordham guys credit, though, for publishing this essay from Sister Vassa Larin, a well-known Russian Orthodox nun who explains why she’s not leaving ROCOR. Excerpt:

In conclusion, let me say a few words in support of “sticking it out” within one’s own church community, at this Time of Troubles. I, for one, am not going anywhere, from my “jurisdiction,” which happens to be the ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), also known as ROCA (the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad). Why am I not leaving, even while we commemorate Patriarch Kirill, and many of our clergy sympathize with Putinism? Because I love my Church. That’s my best answer. And as I’ve said jokingly, you can’t take the “broad” out of the Russian Orthodox Church A-broad, just like you can’t take the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad out of the “broad.” I do feel quite devastated by the whole situation, and I do feel betrayed by the utter failure of some of my “fathers” to discern the truth of this horrible war in Ukraine. I have not been able to post my usual reflections on Scripture on social media, nor have I updated our coffeewithsistervassa.com website, since the war began. I have been at a loss for words, frankly, and instead I’ve been focusing on helping a Ukrainian refugee family here in Vienna, which has been a great blessing to me; this opportunity somehow to help the situation has been healing to me. And as I move forward, I see my now more-difficult vocation as witnessing to the truth within my beloved Church, however insignificant that witness is, or how uncomfortable for me, or whether it matters to anyone. I could just leave, but I don’t think, in my case, that leaving my “marriage” to this Church is warranted. I think that God calls me to love, and to truthful witness, to my church family, and that’s where I will remain. I also embrace the promise of St. Paul, quoted at the beginning of this post, that I might become one of the “approved” or in Greek the dokimoi, if I stand in truth at this time of divisions. Thank you to those of you who have read this to the end. “Let us love one another, that we may with one mind confess, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!”

I wonder if NPR has any interest in ROCOR people like Sister Vassa who deplore Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the feeble response of many Russian hierarchs to it, but who stay anyway. Do they think Sister Vassa is a closet Putinist? Actually I don’t think NPR cares. I think they’re just slinging snot at the Orthodox Church to see what sticks.

Well, look, if NPR hates an institution, that might be a recommendation for it. I hope you will go find an Orthodox Church this weekend and see what it has to offer. You will almost certainly not find politics, far-right or otherwise, despite what you’ve heard on taxpayer-funded state radio. Allow me to finish by quoting once again this line from Odette Yousef’s report:

Those who have followed the influx of extremists into American Orthodoxy agree that those individuals are fringe within the church and are mostly concentrated in newly founded ROCOR parishes.

So by NPR’s own admission, these menaces to society are a handful of people who are even on the margins within their marginal Orthodox jurisdiction (our word for “denomination” within Orthodoxy). Yet they gave ten minutes on Morning Edition to this story. How do you think NPR would have handled it twenty years ago if a fringe number of Islamic extremists were attending mosques belonging to a tiny conservative Islamic fellowship of mosques in America? I think we all know the answer to that question.

Y’all better all get used to it, you Christians from non-tame churches. This is what it’s going to be like going forward. Dig deep, pray hard, and never surrender.

 

The post The Cathedral Vs. The Orthodox Church appeared first on The American Conservative.

Look at this:

.@CBSMornings is here to warn that “an intelligence bulletin” believes “extremists could be mobilizing during this powerful debate nationwide, potentially targeting abortion clinics and government officials.”

Yes, he’s claiming U.S. intel thinks the far-right is the issue here. pic.twitter.com/K3nhp6Z814

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 10, 2022

The thing we need to all get straight in our heads is that from here on out, the intelligence services are going to be waging information war against dissenters on the Right. This “bulletin” comes from an agency in the state of Maryland, but the reporter gives no context.

Look, if there are right-wing nuts out there who want to hurt or intimidate pro-abortion people, or anybody else, then I want the government to be all over them. But come on, open your eyes: does it look to you like any of the violence, or potential violence, around the abortion issue right now is coming from the pro-life side?

It was quite a surprise to me to learn last year from an ex-CIA officer that the agency is very woke. That woke CIA recruitment ad we all laughed about last year actually reflects the reality of culture inside the agency, and throughout the US intelligence bureaucracy. With conservative Supreme Court justices now facing threats outside their houses from the militant Left, the Cathedral is working its narrative through sympathetic media. All those right-wing Christian Emmanuel Goldsteins are out to sabotage the Revolution!

You watch: conservative Christians are about to learn what it was like to be a Muslim in this country immediately after 9/11. Except back then, innocent Muslims could count on the media pumping out the message 24/7 that we should not judge all Muslims by the actions of a few. Now the media can be counted on to align itself with the message of demonization.

I tell you, to watch the US media from abroad (in my case, Hungary) reporting the Ukraine-Russia war was really instructive. It was shockingly unbalanced. I felt myself turning into some sort of Noam Chomsky of the Right as I came to regard most US media reports as little more than an attempt to manufacture consent for war with Russia. And I say that as someone who deplores Russia’s invasion, and wants the Ukrainians to kick the Russians out! But the Biden Administration and the Blob (e.g., veteran blobster Sen. Lindsey Graham) are bound and determined to get America more and more involved in a shooting war with Russia. This is a bipartisan thing. This is a Cathedral thing

(N.B., “the Cathedral” is the neoreactionary term for the informal coalition of elites who run the country and who regard themselves as guardians of secular liberal democratic holy writ; I am not a neoreactionary, but the term is accurate and useful.)

The post Emmanuel Goldstein Vs. Abortion Clinics appeared first on The American Conservative.

One of you sent me this article by a Yahoo News writer explaining why David French is a hero and I am a goat. Excerpts:

The drift toward illiberal and antidemocratic impulses has also been embraced by a significant portion of the conservative religious community.

Catholic intellectuals like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen for a few years have promoted what’s known as “Catholic integralism,” the view that Catholicism should be the foundation for public law and policy. And in another sphere of Christianity that is very different from Catholicism — a low-church, charismatic or Pentecostal stream known for its expressive singing and belief in miracles and healing — there has also been a shift over the past decade toward the belief that Christians should take control of government.

These are “people who really want to tightly entangle church and state,” said David French, a conservative writer and senior editor of the Dispatch. French has begun a formal effort to persuade American Christians, especially those on the conservative end of the political spectrum, to reject these ideas.

“The fundamental reality is that none of these movements really have a high degree of respect for individual liberty. They especially don’t have a high degree of respect for the free speech or free exercise rights of those who disagree with them,” French said in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast. “That’s a movement that is building.”

More:

Dreher, however, is one of a growing number of conservatives who believe that democracy is actually impossible, because in his mind, progressives want to eliminate those like him and his way of life.

“I would prefer the flawed liberal democracy that we had in our country until about thirty years ago, to the illiberal secularist democracy now coming into existence … that renders people like me into enemies of the people,” Dreher wrote last year to a New Yorker journalist who profiled him.

“We all seem to be barreling towards a future that is not liberal and democratic, but is going to be either left illiberalism, or right illiberalism,” Dreher wrote. “If that’s true, then I know which side I’m on: the side that isn’t going to persecute me and my people.”

But to French, that kind of talk from Dreher is an ends-justifies-the-means philosophy that departs from fidelity to Christian teaching.

“The fundamental thrust of what it means to be a Christian is the imitation of Christ, and the imitation of Christ is [to] take up your cross,” French said. “That’s just a paradigm shift; it’s not a domination paradigm.”

Read it all.

OK, here we go.

I don’t believe that “democracy is actually impossible.” The man who wrote that is not a careful writer. I believe that democracy as we have known it is probably impossible, because of cultural shifts — primarily the rise of wokeness as the successor ideology (Wes Yang’s term) to liberalism. Look at what’s happening just this week, with mobs of pro-abortion protesters outside the houses of Supreme Court justices. What are they protesting against? In part, democracy! If SCOTUS overturns Roe, all that will do is return the abortion issue to the states, and put it into the democratic process. California can be California, and Alabama can be Alabama.

But these people don’t want democracy. They want illiberal leftism. We see this over and over, day after day, in arena after arena. These illiberal leftists have completed their march through the institutions and are now consolidating power, in part by making cultural and religious conservatives into pariahs. I cannot for the life of me understand why this is not more clear to David French and his crowd.

I am neither a Catholic integralist nor an Evangelical MAGA-lord. In fact, I am trying to work out to my own satisfaction what a reasonable and moral political response to current conditions are. But I know for a fact that standard GOP right-liberalism is a dead end that is resulting in the subjugation of the unwoke. As I said, I would rather live in a liberal democracy such as we had well within living memory, for all its flaws, than in what we have today. But that is not a choice in front of any of us. I do not wish to live under a political system that gives unaccountable corporations the power to attempt to force democratically elected legislatures and officials to change course on issues having nothing to do with the business of that corporation. As Paul Kingsnorth pointed out in his most recent interview with Jonathan Pageau, back when he (Kingsnorth) was an environmentalist protester active in the anticapitalist movement, all his comrades saw the World Economic Forum as the enemy. Now that the WEF has become woke, Kingsnorth’s old pals are all on its side.

(This, by the way, is a good time for us conservatives who have been too accepting of unbridled corporate power in the past to reflect on our sins, so to speak, and to repent.)

What I am for is a form of conservatism that is more like what obtains in continental Europe, where corporations are not as free to do what they want to do, and there is a greater appreciation for society and traditions than in the US, with its hyperindividualism. I like French, so I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but he seems to believe that American conservatism as it has existed since 1980 (or more broadly, in the postwar era) is the last word in conservatism. It’s not. There are continental European versions, and even minority versions within the American tradition (see Russell Kirk and Peter Viereck). The kneejerk American mainstream conservative fear of the State is like surrendering the only weapons you have in the face of an enemy onslaught. The State is the only major institution in American life in which conservatives have any influence. The kind of conservatism French supports amounts to de facto surrender.

Here’s the thing: I agree that we Christians cannot do evil for the sake of achieving a good end. But what is the evil here? Is it evil to rein in corporate power? Is bloodying the nose of woke capitalists and telling them to stay in their own lane any kind of sin at all? Liberal democracy is not mandated in Holy Writ. Most Christians who have ever lived have not done so under liberal democracy. The idea that to be skeptical of what liberal democracy has become, or even to oppose it, is a sin — well, that’s simply wrong, and makes those who believe it just as guilty of deifying the American system as those MAGA folks they oppose.

I cannot see what conservatives like David French have conserved. Mind you, I hate the way many on the French-skeptical right have demonized him personally. It’s wrong, and in some case it has been evil. I condemn that strongly! And I have pointed out in the past that we who are moving towards skepticism of liberal democracy need to listen to French, if only because he is a seasoned First Amendment litigator, and he understands better than laptop theorists how the system works. The difficult situation conservatives, especially religious conservatives, find ourselves in is that we are going to have to depend heavily on the First Amendment in the years to come, as we become more and more of a despised minority.

That said, the First Amendment is not a force field that prevents all harm from coming to us. The First Amendment will not protect our schools from being conquered by an activist class that wants to poison the minds of children with gender ideology, for example. More deeply, as Christopher Caldwell has written so bravely in his book The Age of Entitlement, our classically liberal Constitution is on a collision course with itself over civil rights and individual liberties. The experience of contemporary American life, especially for cultural conservatives, is one of dispossession. To this, I can’t find that the French-style conservatives have much useful to say, other than trying to talk us into making peace with our dispossession and eventual subjugation, and calling it being Christian.

In Europe, the conservatives I hang with, both in Hungary and across the continent, have no use for the old Christian Democratic parties, which they say are no longer Christian in any meaningful sense, and exist mostly to bring along what’s left of the Right to accept the neoliberal consensus. They are trying to find effective alternatives within their own nations, according to their own national traditions. Good. These are our people. Don’t you believe it when our media, and when establishment conservatives, call them “fascists”. Once again, last summer in Hungary, when I shared a stage with the strongly anti-Orban liberal Peter Kreko, Kreko told the audience that as much as he opposes the Orban government, he was sick and tired of Westerners describing Hungary as “fascist”. It’s simply not true.

Now, you can find real fascists on the broad European Right, just as you can find actual Communists. Similarly in the US, you can find truly alarming extremists on both sides of the broad coalitions. But this from David French (quoted in the Yahoo article) is really misleading:

These are “people who really want to tightly entangle church and state,” said David French, a conservative writer and senior editor of the Dispatch. French has begun a formal effort to persuade American Christians, especially those on the conservative end of the political spectrum, to reject these ideas.

“The fundamental reality is that none of these movements really have a high degree of respect for individual liberty. They especially don’t have a high degree of respect for the free speech or free exercise rights of those who disagree with them,” French said in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast. “That’s a movement that is building.”

French said these ideas don’t yet have “a huge power in numbers,” but that is changing because these notions of politics as an all-or-nothing battle with one’s opponents is “mapping itself onto partisan animosity.”

To be fair to French, I don’t know the context from which these quotes were drawn. It could be that the journalist is distorting his message. In my case, I do not want to “tightly entangle church and state,” mainly because I think that would be bad for the church(es), but the integralists certainly want that. (This is one reason why I am not an integralist.) That said, when French complains about the lack of respect on the New Right side for free speech for those who disagree with them, I just shake my head. What world does he live in? The Left runs almost everything now, and dissenters — conservative, moderates, and old-fashioned liberals — have to watch their every word for fear that they will be outed and cancelled. And David French is worried about right-wingers not having sufficient respect for speech?

Is this about Drag Queen Story Hour? Maybe. French was smeared by many on the Right, who said that he called DQSH a “blessing of liberty.” That’s not what he said. French said that the fact that both Christian conservatives and storytelling drag queens can use the public library is a “blessing of liberty.” That’s a meaningful distinction. But that controversy really does raise a fundamental question about politics and society — and this is where French and his critics on the Right could have a useful debate: At what point does the American liberal system permit too much vice?

It’s not just a right-wing question. Many on the Left wish to restrict speech and religious liberty in the name of protecting minorities. We decided in the middle of the twentieth century that the civil rights of black Americans were more important than the rights of states to make their own laws governing race — in other words, that the Constitution did not permit the vice of segregation. The question today is whether or not the US Constitutional order can still be made to work — and, relatedly, whether we can remain together as one people.

These are not easy questions to answer, or to talk about. But I do know that dismissing all critics to the right of The Dispatch and The Bulwark as aspiring fascists is not only wrong, but it’s silly. We are not going to vote our way out of this civilizational crisis, as I keep saying, but that does not mean that politics is useless. If all the Republican Party and Conservatism, Inc., is good for is negotiating the terms of the Right’s surrender, then let’s be done with them, and find politicians who are willing to fight, and able to fight intelligently, to protect free speech, religious liberty, and the possibility of the people to rule themselves without being dictated to by left-wing authoritarian bureaucracies.

The post French Hero, Dreher Goat? appeared first on The American Conservative.

So, David French. You might have seen his vociferous defense of the renowned Presbyterian pastor Tim Keller. It highlights David’s strengths as a polemicist, and the admirable loyalty of his character … but also his weakness as a reader of the signs of the times. Caveat: David is a friend, and though I disagree with him on a lot of things, I am not joining the Hate David French crowd. I believe David is always worth listening to, even when he’s wrong. And even when he’s wrong, I prefer listening to him make his case with respect and even kindliness than I do people who are on my side ideologically trying to sneer their opponents into submission.

Nevertheless, David is quite wrong here. Let’s get into it.

What prompted French’s essay? This piece by James Wood, an editor at First Things, talking about how much he admires Tim Keller, but how he believes Keller’s time has passed. Excerpts:

Keller’s winsome approach led him to great success as an evangelist. But he also, maybe subconsciously, thinks about politics through the lens of evangelism, in the sense of making sure that political judgments do not prevent people in today’s world from coming to Christ. His approach to evangelism informs his political writings, and his views on how Christians should engage politics. For years, Keller’s approach informed my views of both evangelism and politics. When I became a Christian in college, both my campus ministry and my church were heavily influenced by Keller’s “winsome,” missional, “gospel-centered” views. I liked Keller’s approach to engaging the culture—his message that, though the gospel is unavoidably offensive, we must work hard to make sure people are offended by the gospel itself rather than our personal, cultural, and political derivations. We must, Keller convinced me, constantly explain how Christianity is not tied to any particular culture or political party, instead showing how the gospel critiques all sides. He has famously emphasized that Christianity is “neither left nor right,” instead promoting a “third way” approach that attempts to avoid tribal partisanship and the toxic culture wars in hopes that more people will give the gospel a fair hearing. If we are to “do politics,” it should be in apologetic mode.

But times changed. More:

At that point, I began to observe that our politics and culture had changed. I began to feel differently about our surrounding secular culture, and noticed that its attitude toward Christianity was not what it once had been. Aaron Renn’s account represents well my thinking and the thinking of many: There was a “neutral world” roughly between 1994–2014 in which traditional Christianity was neither broadly supported nor opposed by the surrounding culture, but rather was viewed as an eccentric lifestyle option among many. However, that time is over. Now we live in the “negative world,” in which, according to Renn, Christian morality is expressly repudiated and traditional Christian views are perceived as undermining the social good. As I observed the attitude of our surrounding culture change, I was no longer so confident that the evangelistic framework I had gleaned from Keller would provide sufficient guidance for the cultural and political moment. A lot of former fanboys like me are coming to similar conclusions. The evangelistic desire to minimize offense to gain a hearing for the gospel can obscure what our political moment requires.

Keller’s apologetic model for politics was perfectly suited for the “neutral world.” But the “negative world” is a different place. Tough choices are increasingly before us, offense is unavoidable, and sides will need to be taken on very important issues.

You do need to read Aaron Renn’s account if you haven’t already. It’s important to understand why Wood takes the view that he does.

Wood writes in sorrow, and with clear respect and affection for Keller. French responded angrily, though. Here’s how French headlined his essay:

Excerpts from his rebuttal:

There are so many things to say in response to this argument, but let’s begin with the premise that we’ve transitioned from a “neutral world” to a “negative world.” As someone who attended law school in the early 1990s and lived in deep blue America for most of this alleged “neutral” period, the premise seems flawed. The world didn’t feel “neutral” to me when I was shouted down in class, or when I was told by classmates to “die” for my pro-life views.

Nor was the world “neutral” for Tim. Last night he tweeted about his experience launching Redeemer church in New York:

And if you want empirical evidence that New York City wasn’t “neutral” before 2014, there was almost 20 years of litigation over the city’s discriminatory policy denying the use of empty public school facilities for worship services. The policy existed until it was finally reversed by Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015.

Even growing up in the rural south, I wasn’t surrounded by devout Christianity, but instead by drugs, alcohol, and a level of sexual promiscuity far beyond what we see among young people today. Where was this idealized past? There may have been less “woke capital,” but there was more crime, more divorce, and much, much more abortion.

This misses the point about Renn’s “negative world” distinction (again: read Renn’s piece!). Here is a capsule of Renn’s belief:

In recent decades, the church has passed through three eras or worlds in terms of how American society perceives and relates to the church. These are the positive, neutral, and negative worlds, with the names referring to the way society views Christianity.

Positive World (Pre-1994). Christianity was viewed positively by society and Christian morality was still normative. To be seen as a religious person and one who exemplifies traditional Christian norms was a social positive. Christianity was a status enhancer. In some cases, failure to embrace Christian norms hurt you.

Neutral World (1994-2014). Christianity is seen as a socially neutral attribute. It no longer had dominant status in society, but to be seen as a religious person was not a knock either. It was more like a personal affectation or hobby. Christian moral norms retained residual force.

Negative World (2014-). In this world, being a Christian is now a social negative, especially in high status positions. Christianity in many ways is seen as undermining the social good. Christian morality is expressly repudiated.

Renn is not claiming — it would be absurd to claim — that there was no hatred of Christianity in Positive World. Nor is he claiming that Christianity is everywhere hated. He’s generalizing about American culture — and he’s absolutely right about Negative World. I have far too many conversations with people who are senior within American institutions, both public and private, who tell me in detail what’s happening in their professional circles. I have described America as a “post-Christian nation,” meaning not that there are no Christians, but that Christianity is no longer the story that most Americans regard as explaining who we are. You might think that’s great, you might think that’s terrible, but it’s simply true.

Christians who count themselves as progressive on woke issues — LGBT, race — don’t experience Negative World as intensely, if at all. And, if you have been a vocal Never Trumper, as David French has, you gain a lot of points in Negative World with the people who run it.

Similarly, it’s a mistake to claim that because some social indicators (crime, abortion) are better today than they were when David French and I were growing up in Positive World, that this was a golden era for which Christians like Aaron Renn, James Wood, and me long. The point we make is not about the supposed Edenic qualities of the past. We have always had sin and brokenness in this country, and always will. The world is always in need of conversion, and the church is always in need of reform and repentance. The point was that in Positive World, Christianity and its ideals were held generally by society as something to be aspired to. If they weren’t, the Civil Rights Movement — led by black pastors! — would not have been possible, at least not in the form it took.

Today, in Negative World, not every workspace or social gathering site is uniformly negative, any more than in Positive World, Christians experienced welcome in, say, Ivy League law schools. The claim is a general one. I recall meeting a Portland (Oregon) megachurch pastor backstage at a Christian event two or three years ago, and him telling me that when The Benedict Option came out in 2017, he and all his friends thought Dreher was an alarmist. No more, he said. The pastor told me that the church did not change, but everything around them did. They went from being seen in Portland as sweet, essentially harmless eccentrics to being a fifth column for fascism. He told me that they are now trying to figure out how to live the Benedict Option — and he said that what is happening in Portland is going to come to most of America eventually.

I can tell you from abundant personal experience that very many conservative, or conservative-ish, pastors and lay leaders are afraid to draw the obvious conclusions from what they see around us. I just returned from spending a couple of days at a great conference of the Anglican Church of North America’s Diocese of the Living Word. Such brave and faithful and kind people there, and such inspiring pastors. But in several conversations, I heard confirmation of what I have heard from many others within church circles, and seen myself: far, far too many conservative pastors and lay leaders are desperately clinging to the false hope that we are still living in either Positive World or Neutral World, and that if they just keep calm and carry on preaching and pastoring as if all was basically well, everything’s going to calm down.

It’s not. It’s accelerating, and thinking that it’s not is pure cope. If you have the time, watch or listen to this recent podcast discussion with Jonathan Pageau and Paul Kingsnorth, which touches on these themes. They talk mostly about the totalitarian uses of today’s technology, and discuss at times how this is going to be used against all dissidents, including Christians. Paul talks about the relevance of the Benedict Option, and says we might even need to go further, to the “Anthony Option” — meaning, heading to the desert, like St. Anthony the Great, the founder of monasticism.

Anyway, back to French:

It’s important to be clear-eyed about the past because false narratives can present Christians with powerful temptations. The doom narrative is a poor fit for an Evangelical church that is among the most wealthy and powerful Christian communities (and among the most wealthy and powerful political movements) in the entire history of the world.

Yet even if the desperate times narrative were true, the desperate measures rationalization suffers from profound moral defects. The biblical call to Christians to love your enemies, to bless those who curse you, and to exhibit the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—does not represent a set of tactics to be abandoned when times are tough but rather a set of eternal moral principles to be applied even in the face of extreme adversity.

Moreover, Christ and the apostles issued their commands to Christians at a time when Christians faced the very definition of a “negative world.” We face tweetings. They faced beatings.

Wait a minute. French is certainly correct that we Christians have to love our enemies, and all the rest. And he is right that far too many besieged Christians today put that aside (a temptation of mine, I confess). But loving one’s enemies does not mean that one should close one’s eyes to the fact that they are enemies, and wish to do us serious harm. The wealth and power of American Evangelicals is something true for this time and this place. It won’t always be true. I spoke to someone at the ACNA conference who told me about a Cuban immigrant he met not long ago. She told him, “I come from your future.” He asked her what she meant by that. She told him that she can feel “in my bones” the coalescing in the United States of the totalitarianism she fled in her homeland.

Over and over and over, people who fled to America to escape Communist totalitarianism say the same thing. This is why I wrote Live Not By Lies: to relay their message, and to encourage the churches in the West both to resist while we can, and to prepare for when and if that resistance fails. The position that American Evangelicals have today will not last. Christianity is in steep decline in America, especially among the young. This, combined with the rising persecutorial sense among the woke left, who run American institutions, means that the road ahead for Christians who have not been tamed by compromise with the world will be a very, very hard one.

If you haven’t read, or have forgotten, this much-discussed 2015 discussion I had with “Prof. Kingsfield,” the name I gave to a closeted Christian law professor at a top law school, you should. Remember, this was seven years ago — and a month before the Obergefell decision. Excerpt:

What prompted his reaching out to me? “I’m very worried,” he said, of events of the last week [the beatback of the Indiana RFRA law under immense pressure from woke capitalism — RD]. “The constituency for religious liberty just isn’t there anymore.”

Like me, what unnerved Prof. Kingsfield is not so much the details of the Indiana law, but the way the overculture treated the law. “When a perfectly decent, pro-gay marriage religious liberty scholar like Doug Laycock, who is one of the best in the country — when what he says is distorted, you know how crazy it is.”

“Alasdair Macintyre is right,” he said. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, but in slow motion.” What he meant by this is that our culture has lost the ability to reason together, because too many of us want and believe radically incompatible things.

But only one side has the power. When I asked Kingsfield what most people outside elite legal and academic circles don’t understand about the way elites think, he said “there’s this radical incomprehension of religion.”

“They think religion is all about being happy-clappy and nice, or should be, so they don’t see any legitimate grounds for the clash,” he said. “They make so many errors, but they don’t want to listen.”

To elites in his circles, Kingsfield continued, “at best religion is something consenting adult should do behind closed doors. They don’t really understand that there’s a link between Sister Helen Prejean’s faith and the work she does on the death penalty. There’s a lot of looking down on flyover country, one middle America.

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.”

On the conservative side, said Kingsfield, Republican politicians are abysmal at making a public case for why religious liberty is fundamental to American life.

“The fact that Mike Pence can’t articulate it, and Asa Hutchinson doesn’t care and can’t articulate it, is shocking,” Kingsfield said. “Huckabee gets it and Santorum gets it, but they’re marginal figures. Why can’t Republicans articulate this? We don’t have anybody who gets it and who can unite us. Barring that, the craven business community will drag the Republican Party along wherever the culture is leading, and lawyers, academics, and media will cheer because they can’t imagine that they might be wrong about any of it.”

Kingsfield said that the core of the controversy, both legally and culturally, is the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992), specifically the (in)famous line, authored by Justice Kennedy, that at the core of liberty is “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” As many have pointed out — and as Macintyre well understood — this “sweet mystery of life” principle (as Justice Scalia scornfully characterized it) kicks the supporting struts out from under the rule of law, and makes it impossible to resolve rival moral visions except by imposition of power.

“Autonomous self-definition is at the root of all this,” Prof. Kingsfield said. We are now at the point, he said, at which it is legitimate to ask if sexual autonomy is more important than the First Amendment.

The implications of the past week for small-o orthodox Christians — that is, those who hold to traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality and the nature of marriage — are broad. There is the legal dimension, and there is a cultural dimension, which Kingsfield sees (rightly, I think) as far more important.

Once more, back to David French. I agree with him that far too many Christians in our country are obsessed with politics, and allow their political convictions to shape their religious views, rather than the other way around. That said, I have had to come to the realization that my own pious disdain for politics (“a pox on both your houses”) is no longer tenable. The assault on children by the pro-trans ideologues — including the one who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — red-pilled me on that. I continue to believe that absurd Christian displays like the Jericho March, which I criticized here, do far more harm than good, both to the cause of Christianity in America, and to the cause of building resistance to the Machine/Cathedral. That said, I also believe that the “winsome” approach advocated by Tim Keller and David French is a different kind of poison pill. French writes:

We live in an age of negative polarization, when the cardinal characteristic of partisanship is personal animosity. In these circumstances, a Christian community characterized by the fruit of the spirit should be a burst of cultural light, a counterculture that utterly contradicts the fury of the times. Instead, Christian voices ask that we yield to that fury, and that a “negative world” is now no place for the “winsome, missional, and gospel-centered approach.”

But this isn’t an evolution from Tim Keller, it’s a devolution, and it’s one that’s enabling an enormous amount of Christian cruelty and Christian malice. Wood says “Keller was the right man for a moment,” but he also says, “it appears that moment has passed.” That’s fundamentally wrong. When fear and hatred dominates discourse, a commitment to justice and kindness and humility is precisely what the moment requires.

No, I stand with James Wood and Aaron Renn here: the moment really has passed. The moment for Christians to love our enemies and pray for them will never pass, this is true. But the idea that they will embrace us, or even tolerate us, if we just be sweet is no longer viable. I don’t advocate at all hating our enemies. Neither did Martin Luther King. But King also recognized that he and the movement he led really did have enemies, and that these enemies were willing to do violence to them. We non-conforming Christians are moving into the same world, very rapidly — except this time, the technological powers that our enemies have to use against us are without parallel in world history. As Kingsnorth and Pageau were talking, Justin Trudeau showed that the Canadian state is prepared to seize the bank accounts of dissenters and cut them off from participating in the economy. Kingsnorth, who was once on the activist Left, says he cannot figure out why his old comrades used to view the state and major corporations with deep suspicion and hostility … but now that those powerful entities have aimed their fire at the kind of people progressive activists hate, the Left is fine with it.

I don’t know a lot about Tim Keller, except by reputation. He seems to be a very fine man, and devout Christian. I couldn’t imagine saying a bad thing about him, but some of you Evangelicals who follow him more closely than I do might disagree. All I can say is that Winsome World Christians are failing to prepare themselves, their families, and (if pastors) their flocks for the world that exists today, and the world that is fast coming into being. Again, I am thinking of the pastor I argued with who believed that he didn’t need to speak about gender ideology to his parish (“I don’t want politics in my congregation”) because, as he explained, if he just keeps winsomely teaching Biblical principles, all will be well. I am certain that man believed he was taking a virtuous stand against fearmongers and alarmists like Dreher. I think it was cowardice.

We all need to be spending a lot more time reflecting not on the wisdom of bourgeois American pastors, and more time on the experiences of the persecuted churches abroad. This morning I’m thinking about the Christians of Syria. Do you know that nearly all of them support the Assad dictatorship? Do you think they do this because they love Bashar Assad, or love dictatorship? No, they do this because they know perfectly well that if Assad fell, even if democracy somehow came to Syria, they would all be killed by the Islamist majority. This is not a theory. They know. We are not anywhere close to that in America, obviously, and I hope and pray we don’t get there. But the principle is still in play. American Christians have to learn how to endure persecution without capitulating to apostasy or to hatred. And when it comes to thinking about political engagement, we need moral realism. Christians who think we are going to vote our way out of this crisis are beyond deluded, as I have been saying for years. But Christians who believe that voting doesn’t really matter are also deluded.

Winsomeness is not going to prepare the churches for what is fast coming to us. That is not a rationalization for embracing hatred! But it is a warning to individual believers and leaders, both ordained and lay, to read the signs of the times, and act. The Christians who have lived through this sort of thing before, and who are warning us today, have strong counsel for us in my book Live Not By Lies. 

One of the most important things I learned in reporting this book is something that dissident Kamila Bendova, the wife of the late political prisoner Vaclav Benda, told me. She said that she and her husband, despite being very strong conservative Catholics, had no problem at all working closely with Vaclav Havel and his hippie dissident circles. Kamila told me that when you are facing the kind of dragon they had to fight, the rarest quality is courage. She said most Czech Christians kept their heads down and conformed to avoid trouble. Kamila and her husband had more in common with the brave atheist hippies who refused to live by lies, and who were willing to suffer for it.

And for us? Better to stand with a Bari Weiss, a Bret Weinstein, or a Peter Boghossian than with Christians who are trying really very, very hard to convince themselves that everything is basically okay, and that we should just keep on living like we always have, and all will be well. In a poetic sense, they suffer from a form of myxomatosis: the disease introduced by the British into rabbits to control the population. Philip Larkin wrote a poem, titled “Myxomatosis,” about them:

Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I’m glad I can’t explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.

Don’t be a follower of St. Myxomatosis, is what I am telling you Christians. This doesn’t make Tim Keller a bad man — indeed, based on everything I’ve heard and read about him, he seems like an exceptionally good man, and certainly a man who has done vastly more for the Kingdom of God than I have done. But it does make him yesterday’s man, fighting yesterday’s war.

The post Tim Keller & Myxomatosis Christians appeared first on The American Conservative.

Ross Douthat is temperamentally averse to bomb-throwing, but even if he wasn’t, knowing that his role is to explain social and conservatism to liberal readers of The New York Times puts limitations on him that, I think, compel him to write more carefully, and often more persuasively, than conservatives like me, who are not under such restraints. His column today on how Roe v. Wade distorted American politics is a great example. 

Douthat begins by pointing gently to the hypocrisy of liberals who position themselves as defenders of democracy against GOP authoritarianism protesting that returning the abortion issue to state legislatures is an anti-democratic move. (This, by the way, is not as amusing a hypocrisy as liberals who have been gassing on idiotically about how men can have babies now reverting back to the familiar rhetoric that men should have nothing to say about abortion, which they say is a women’s issue.)

This passage is especially important:

And the way Roe was decided made this polarization worse. From the perspective of geography and class, a group of robed lawyers in Washington, D.C., demanding that the country simply accept their settlement on one of the gravest moral questions imaginable is the perfect primer for a populist revolt. What has happened in similar ways with other issues — immigration, most notably — happened with abortion first: The elite settlement failed to settle the issue, and the backlash encompassed not just the issue itself but elite legitimacy writ large.

From the perspective of religion, meanwhile, by constitutionalizing the issue Roe didn’t just hand a normal political defeat to the pro-life side; it seemed to read their core convictions out of the American constitutional order entirely, seeding a religious alienation that continues to bear bitter fruit today. And the timing was particularly unfortunate: When Roe was handed down, both Catholicism and evangelicalism had just passed through periods of reform and modernization that promised a reconciliation between Christian faith and liberal modernity. Then immediately, liberal modernity changed its demands and made them all-or-nothing, making the moral price of admission more than many Christians could reasonably pay.

This is true about liberalism and its moralistic authoritarianism. The “moral price of admission” for participating in more and more aspects of public and private life is more than many Christians — and non-Christians — can pay. This weekend in Philadelphia, I was able to meet up with friends from my old life here, and make new friends with people who came to the Anglican event to hear me speak. One man told me about life at a prominent university’s science department, and how crushing it is to be placed under more and more burdens to affirm progressive cultural beliefs that not only violate one’s conscience, but that have absolutely nothing to do with teaching or practicing science. And the fear of crossing constantly-moving ideological lines imposed by liberals in power is demoralizing.

Another man who works in the tech field told me that wokeness has so consumed his workplace that his daily life is not about whether to lie or not, but rather sorting out which lies he is compelled to tell are worse than others. I could tell that he wants out.

You hear these stories often enough — and I do — and you find yourself filled with so much resentment against these people. Who the hell do they think they are? The New York Museum of Jewish Heritage has just cancelled a Tikvah Fund event scheduled for there with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, objecting to the DeSantis-backed law to regulate the teaching of LGBT ideology to schoolchildren aged nine and under. DeSantis is a big supporter of Israel. What does his support for a commonsense law that’s popular with the people of his state, and many Americans, have to do with Judaism? But this is how liberalism works today: you must agree with whatever extreme thing it professes, or you are not fit to be accommodated in public. It’s a damn purity cult — and this will never, ever work in a diverse, pluralistic country.

A friend today was telling me about a very liberal Catholic lawyer pal of ours who might be the last pro-life Democrat left in the country. The liberal Catholic lawyer sent out an email to a group of contacts, saying that he agreed with Alito’s reasoning, but thought it was imprudent to overturn Roe right now for political reasons, in this polarized country. The response from others in the group was hysterical, said my friend (who was on the list). They will not permit themselves even to grasp why a good-faith liberal like the lawyer — who is pretty much a social justice Catholic — would believe that social justice includes the right to life of the unborn. Again, this is how liberals roll in America today: as a purity cult.

I’m old enough to remember when Donald Trump was widely (and correctly) denounced for failing to speak out against mobs doing violence to senior Washington leaders, simply for doing their jobs. I guess it’s only bad when Republicans do it:

Doocy: “These activists posted a map with the home addresses of the Supreme Court justices. Is that the sort of thing this President wants?”

Psaki: “I think the President’s view is that there is a lot of passion.”

Disgusting that the White House is refusing to condemn this. pic.twitter.com/i5ErEBZ25X

— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) May 5, 2022

The White House has so far declined to say that pro-Roe protesters should not target the private homes of Supreme Court justices.

Michelle Goldberg of the NYT says — naturally — that the end of Roe is going to “tear America apart.” Because if you don’t give the Left whatever it wants, it’s your fault that they’re going to destroy things.

But long before we get there, the death of Roe will intensify our national animus, turning red states and blue into mutually hostile legal territories. You think we hate each other now? Just wait until the new round of lawsuits start.

She’s right about that — the column is correct to point out that the conflicting state laws are going to cause a lot of conflict and confusion. But notice too that from the point of view of Goldberg, the fault is not in a poorly reasoned SCOTUS decision from 1973 (even Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that Roe was shaky), but in abandoning what the Left believes is right and normal.

What is our Very Catholic President saying? This:

“This is about a lot more than abortion,” Mr. Biden told reporters on Wednesday, citing gay rights and birth control. “What are the next things that are going to be attacked? Because this MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history — in recent American history.”

“The most extreme political organization”? This is what the Democratic Party, led by the Very Catholic President Joseph Robinette Biden, supports:

I understand why liberals favor abortion rights. I don’t agree with them, but I understand it, and can discuss it with them without falling out. One gets the impression that the other side cannot allow itself to taint its pure mind by thinking how things look from the conservative point of view. I’ve told the story here before about how, back in 1994, I think it was, I was having lunch in Washington with three liberal women, one of whom was my housemate in a Capitol Hill group house. Somehow my new Catholicism came up, and one of the women asked me if I was pro-life. Yes, I said, but I don’t want to talk about abortion here at lunch. That was the last word I got in. The women tore into me. They thought I didn’t have the right to eat my lunch in peace if I held such views. One of the three women, a recent college graduate, told the other two that she didn’t feel safe with me at the table.

I threw money for the meal down on the table, and walked out. Later, my housemate told me that the conflict was regrettable, but really, I had started it by holding such abhorrent views on abortion. Our friendship never was the same after that. My point is this: the women, all of whom worked in Democratic politics, truly believed that my Catholic pro-life conviction was so offensive that I did not deserve any respect — not even the respect to be allowed to eat in peace — but that the simple fact that I held the opinion at all was responsible for their obnoxious behavior.

Now we read about a new radical group, Ruth Sent Us, that is calling on pro-abortion protesters to disrupt services this Sunday in Catholic churches, and doxxed the home addresses of SCOTUS justices. Have you ever had to have police protection in front of your home because of liberal haters attacking your house? I have, when I lived in Dallas. It’s no fun. (No kidding, I believe that one benefit to my wife and kids from my ongoing divorce is that I am no longer living there, and the anonymous person who has been sending hate mail to my house in Baton Rouge might stop.) I’m not playing Whatabout here. I have long believed that it’s deeply wrong for activists of either left or right to target the personal homes of politicians, public servants, abortion doctors, or anybody else. It crosses an important line of privacy.

Think about it: these people are planning today to invade sacred spaces and defile them to make a political point. They have no idea how much this is going to ramp up the culture war. They don’t care: they want to defile.

There are calls for a #MothersDayStrike. We support it, along with @StrikeForChoice who’s planning a day of walk-outs on Thu May 12. #DefendRoe

This is what Mother’s Day should look like. Catholic and Evangelical Churches nationwide: pic.twitter.com/BxvGhBGodn

— Ruth Sent Us (@RuthSentUs) May 3, 2022

Stuff your rosaries and your weaponized prayer.

We will remain outraged after this weekend, so keep praying.

We’ll be burning the Eucharist to show our disgust for the abuse Catholic Churches have condoned for centuries. pic.twitter.com/1UxAkyuXTg

— Ruth Sent Us (@RuthSentUs) May 7, 2022

Burning the Eucharist. There is no greater sacrilege or desecration. But this is what these monsters are planning to do, in the United States of America. Watch to see if our Very Catholic President speaks out against this.

(But not all churches. From a statement by the ghoulish woman who heads the Episcopal Church’s House of Deputies:

The cause for alarm goes far beyond abortion. The draft opinion argues that rights not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution are protected only if they are “deeply rooted” in American history. This history, as we know, was significantly shaped by all-white, all-male electorates that chose all-white, all-male executives, legislatures and judges. Justice Alito’s uncritical embrace of this history is profoundly troubling, especially because the logic of his argument can be employed by far right extremists eager to restrict access to contraception, recriminalize same-sex sexual relationships, and overturn the Supreme Court’s decision guaranteeing marriage equality.

As Episcopalians, we have a particular obligation to stand against Christians who seek to destroy our multicultural democracy and recast the United States as an idol to the cruel and distorted Christianity they advocate. In 2018, our General Convention declared that “equitable access to women’s health care, including women’s reproductive health care, is an integral part of a woman’s struggle to assert her dignity and worth as a human being.” Now—before this outrageous opinion becomes law—we must make our Christian witness to the dignity of every human being by insisting that we support the right to safe and legal reproductive health care because our faith in a compassionate God requires us to do so.)

Reading the media these past two days, it is very clear that progressive activists and those within institutions are going to ramp up hatred and even persecution of Christians and other pro-lifers — and at the same time, they are going to grant themselves permission to do this, for the same reason those three women zealots at lunch almost three decades ago absolved themselves of the responsibility to treat me, who had previously been their friend, with common decency, because my religious and political convictions made me pro-life.

This is exactly the kind of thing that pushes people like me, who was not a supporter of Donald Trump, further to the right. If these people on the left believe that they have the right to treat us, their fellow Americans, with active contempt and threats of violence, then they should not be surprised when relatively moderate people become radicalized. As I’ve written here before, the US and European left caterwauls about how illiberal Viktor Orban is, but completely — completely — miss how shockingly illiberal they are in how they run their institutions, and in the laws and policies they want to force on the rest of us. And yet, they are bewildered why ordinary people who suffer under the authoritarianism of the left vote for people like Trump and Orban.

Douthat ends his column like this:

But if Roe does fall, it makes sense that a decision that did so much to divide our parties and delegitimize our institutions would ultimately be undone by the very forces it unleashed: In its beginning was its end.

Yep. The Roe decision was naked left-wing judicial politics, using the Court’s authority to remove a controversial issue from democratic deliberation and debate. This is what the Left today has become. You are increasingly unfree within left-run institutions to dissent in any way from their ideological commands. Every space becomes politicized — this, in a tireless effort to conquer the space between your ears. A friend texted me yesterday from a shopping trip:

It was all pride and justice with rainbow backdrops at Walmart this morning. Brace yourself for June.

They politicize everything, and demand compliance. These aren’t liberals anymore. They are soft totalitarians. When they invade our churches, when they make us afraid to say true things, or even to have true thoughts without fear of being fired, when they come after our children to teach them to hate us and hate the bodies into which they have been born, and when they brutalize us and tell us look what you made us do — don’t you believe it for one hot second.

Burning the Eucharist to support the right to kill unborn life. This is an apocalypse; this is an unveiling. Read the signs of the times, and act accordingly. A British pastor I talked to over the weekend, a man who told me Live Not By Lies is a prophetic and accurate warning and urge to prepare, said, “In the UK, the soft totalitarianism won’t stay soft for long.” If the Left is characterized by church-desecrators and Eucharist-burners, and the left elites (e.g., Catholic Joe Biden and Catholic Nancy Pelosi) do not denounce them and punish those who do it), you may take this as a sign that the same is going to happen here.

A lot of permanent Republican voters are being made right now. And a lot of people who are Republican voters already are being pushed to no longer tolerate Republicans who try to pretend that we are at peace, when we are not.

The post Roe And Apocalypse appeared first on The American Conservative.

I’ve been this week at the conference of the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word (ACNA), led by Bishop Julian Dobbs. The bishop gave his annual address on Friday morning, and … Lord have mercy, if only ten percent of bishops and pastors talked like this man, we would be living in a different country. I present to you here the entire text (absent a personal remembrance of three recently deceased members of the diocese). Imagine a bishop talking like this! Catholics and Orthodox can scarcely wrap our minds around it. I asked the diocesan communications director to send me the text, which was so extraordinary. Here it is:

In the name of God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.

As a young lad, I was forded the great privilege of attending an Anglican boys boarding school from the age of 9. This was an expensive commitment for my parents who both sacrificed significantly for me to have this opportunity. My parents believed that education, respect, formation, opportunity and a valuing of order and tradition were values they wanted to gift and impart into their young son.

It was here, at King’s School and later at King’s College that my commitment to follow Christ began to focus and my formation as an Anglican converged, setting the course for the future determined for me by God. It was here at King’s, worshiping Christ often twice on a Sunday, using the daily office from the Book of Common Prayer 1662, that I began to wrestle at age eleven, with what I come to know as a vocation to serve God in Holy Orders.

Singing in the chapel choir, enamored by the hymns of Watts and Wesley, I would often be transfixed during worship on a verse of Scripture that was inscribed on the northwestern wall of the Chapel of the Holy Child.

Stand fast in the faith, be strong. (1 Corinthians 16, verse 13). What an outstanding choice of scripture to inspire young boys. Virtus pollet – the school motto, virtue prevails, become men, be servants, be leaders, Stand fast in the faith, be strong. This is part of the formation that has shaped some of the DNA of my own episcopacy. As a disciple of Christ in any form of leadership or ministry in the church of this generation, 1 Corinthians 16, verse 13 has a notable sense of urgency, Stand fast in the faith, be strong.

In this pastoral address today, I want us to consider from Scripture what are the foundational exhortations that will enable us to stand fast in the faith in our context across the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word, in our nation and beyond our borders. You ask me, why is this important? I would say to you, as we listen and talk about the issues confronting North America and the world, it appears that the Bible is no longer in vogue. So let us go to the Bible and find out what it says for us today, in our context.

In the final chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul breaks into his final instructions and gives his final greetings with five short, staccato commands, or imperatives that would later be inscribed, in part, upon that northwestern wall of my school chapel.

Look at it again. It is a wonderful text. Be vigilant… Be watchful, that is, stand firm in your faith, be strong, be courageous. And let all that you do be done in love.

It is interesting that each of the five commands pre-supposes some problem, some difficulty, some responsibility, or temptation within the Corinthian Church which makes the commands necessary.

1. Be watchful

Keep awake is the exhortation from Paul. The implication here is that we have enemies ‘out there’ and we cannot afford to relax our vigilance. It seems today, that no believer can ever afford to disconnect, because frankly we do not know when the crisis is going to come and when we will find ourselves on the ropes. Things change, things change in states, in countries, things change in workplaces, things change in families frighteningly quickly and we can find our backs against the wall. Stand up at work for some inconvenient point about honesty or integrity and suddenly your boss says, you are not performing quite as well as you were and maybe the time has come to move on. Tell your parents you are having to make some changes as a result of a Christian commitment and suddenly there is an icy coolness that creeps into what you thought was a solid relationship.

Be watchful! There are real wars taking place today in the realm of ideas. Real wars attempting to control idea-shaping institutions, congregations, seminaries and denominations – and biblical truth—a prize far more precious than any army has ever contended for—is at stake.

At the center of this attack against Christ, his word and his faithful followers is a subtle, wicked, unscrupulous, very powerful archenemy called Satan. He is an adversary who prowls around seeking someone to devour.

He uses politicians, pastors, priests, prelates and anyone he can entice.

One politician recently said in a speech to our nation which advocated for and unreservedly supported and advanced transgenderism, that parents of transgender children should be encouraged to affirm their child’s identity as one of the most powerful things they can do to keep them safe and healthy. How could such advocacy be safe and healthy when 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide.

Transgender individuals are not the enemy. They are loved by Christ. But be watchful, for we are wrestling against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. People of God, there are real wars taking place today for the control of our minds and our bodies. And if politicians are vulnerable – Satan will attack there. If priests and bishops depart the faith once for all entrusted to the saints – Satan will attack there.

Jesus speaks of Satan as a wolf in the clothing or the disguise of a sheep. And he creeps up unnoticed when leaders are at their most vulnerable, when their guard is down.

Be watchful – be vigilant. That is the exhortation from Paul in these verses. For when we lose ground to Satan, it is a tough fight to reverse the trend and bring about the required course correction.

In their 2021 statement to the Church, the bishops of the Anglican Church in North America reminded the faithful that, ‘while questions pertaining to human identity are ancient, a certain vividness around personal identity has been introduced into our current cultural conversation.

Our society has collapsed into a sexual world view which attempts to redefine the image of God in humanity as predominantly one of sexual orientation and behavior.

In the liturgy of the Consecration of Bishops, a bishop commits himself, with all faithful diligence to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God’s Word and both privately and publicly to call upon others and encourage them to do the same?

Therefore, I believe that it is my responsibility as your diocesan bishop to provide direction and speak clearly as the Church navigates these crucial and important matters.

The Bible is clear on matters of sexual identity. God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.10 Therefore, any confusion of the sexes is a distortion of God’s created order. Some Christians have great difficulty with these biblical foundations. They will often point you to the experience of a much loved family member and tell you how they have been significantly influenced by someone who identifies him or her self in a way that is inconsistent with their biological sex.

While all Christians should show compassion and empathy when possible to the personal experiences of others, the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word cannot and will not recognize personal experience as revelatory. We believe that our identity must be grounded in the truth about creation which is revealed in the Scriptures and in God’s Son, our Savior Jesus Christ.

This biblical truth is under attack today within our culture and from within the evangelical church. As a result, I have appointed a task force in the diocese, chaired by The Rev. Matthew Kennedy, to help us wrestle with what it means to be created male and female in the image of God. I have asked the task force to prepare guidelines to assist us in our ministry with individuals who are already in our congregations or come to the diocese in the future and are wrestling with sexual identity.

In their report, which the clergy will receive tomorrow, the task force says this, ‘God is the author of all good things. The world that He has made includes men and women and our Lord said that from the beginning God made human beings “male and female” (Matthew 19:4). Yet this is a cultural moment when there is increasing confusion about the significance of this order and about whether Christians should think about being male or female as something that is given and fixed, or as something that is to a substantial degree malleable and self-chosen.’

Thank you Matt and the members of your task force, for your focused work.

Let me tell you why this is so important. The Holy Scriptures have been given to us by God and as a result, the word of God written is extraordinarily precious. The bible tells the world what it does not wish to hear. We should not expect to be embraced by those whose thoughts and deeds contradict the truths of our faith. Nor should we seek to make our faith more palatable, lest the salt lose its savor. As Dr. Carl Trueman has written, ‘Accommodating the world’s demands is a fool’s errand.’

I urge you to establish a framework of discipline in your life that has regular and robust biblical study and reflection. We build our beliefs and ethics, not from the loudest or the most appealing voices in the public square, academia or the corridors of power; we build our beliefs and ethics from a robust engagement with Scripture.

This is why I urge you to participate in a weekly bible study group in your congregation to study the Bible and build accountable relationships with other Christians. We need faithful friends!

Friends who will love us. Friends who will encourage us. Friends who will pray regularly for us and friends who will bark loudly like watch dogs when they perceive in us the first glimmerings of compromise. People of God, be watchful!

2. Stand firm in the faith.

Staying awake, keeping our guard, maintaining our vigilance – yes, indeed! Paul adds (vs.13) Stand firm in the faith. Stand firmly planted against all the pressures to conform. Stability is a much desired quality in almost every sphere of our lives.

About 6 weeks ago, I was visiting Holy Cross Anglican Church in the Historic Third Ward in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As I waited for the plane to depart on my return journey, the pilot informed the passengers that our flight was delayed in order to reconfigure and stabilize our aircraft. The plane I was on was a small aircraft and it required the crew to accurately compute the center of gravity so that the plane would appropriately level off in flight.

Some days later, I sought the wisdom and experience of U.S. Air Force pilot, Colonel Karen Love to explain the situation to me. Karen told me the center of gravity ensures the plane flies within its specified parameters. Without proper balance, the plane might be nose low or nose high upon leveling off at altitude. She said, the pilot must be cognizant of aerodynamic balance and stabilization to ensure maximum flight fuel and course efficiency.

It seemed to me that Karen was saying… the plane needs to be stable!

Paul exhorts us to be stable. Aerodynamic balance! Maximum flight fuel and course efficiency! Stand firm, stand fast in the faith. Do not deviate off course.

… Most of us admire people who have a stable character, a stable personality and stable convictions. I believe that ‘stability’ was one of the attributes that Jesus admired the most in John the Baptist. In Matthew chapter 11, Jesus speaks to the crowds concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? And He gave three possibilities. A reed shaken by the wind? Did you go out to see a person who is swayed by public opinion and blown about in the wind? What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Someone living in a king’s palace? What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Somebody who lives under the authority of the word of God. In those three options you have everybody in this room. Every one of us is one or other of those three descriptions. What is it that rules your life? Is it public opinion from the outside? Is it your own pleasures and passions on the inside? Or is it the word of God from above?

The two Books of Homilies [which are a gift to us all today and are beautifully being rediscovered in the Anglican Church] are valuable in a multiplicity of ways and show how Anglican doctrine shifted during the Reformation. These homilies were intended to raise the standards of preaching by offering model sermons covering particular doctrinal and pastoral themes. I strongly commend the Books of Homilies to you.

The “Homily on The Reading of Scripture” states that, ‘…as drink is pleasant to them that be dry, and meat to them that be hungry, so is the reading, hearing, searching, and studying of Holy Scripture to them that be desirous to know God or themselves, and to do his will.’

Stand firm, do not deviate. For when the Church deviates from the word of God the consequences are catastrophic!

On October 14, last year, I received a very early text message from our Director of Communications, the Rev. Marc Steele. The information Marc sent me was personally painful and the consequence for the church was, in that moment, unfathomable! My friend and confidant, bishop and former keynote speaker at this missions conference and synod had converted to the See of Peter, the Church of Rome.

After spending his entire adult life within the Anglican Communion—including thirty-seven years as an Anglican bishop, Michael Nazir-Ali was received into the Ordinariate of the Catholic Church at Our Lady of the Assumption and St. Gregory Church in London on October 31, last year.

In Michael’s own words, this was a ‘dramatic step’.

In a recent article, Michael wrote this, ‘One problem with the Anglican Communion was its lack of unity based in apostolic continuity. Each time an “agreement” was reached on important issues and accepted by the respective communions as consonant with what they believed, some part of the Anglican Communion would take unilateral action that cast doubt on the strength of the agreement.’

Michael wrote, I had often boasted that Anglicanism, although reformed, had by divine providence retained both the sacred deposit of faith and the sacred ministry.

He cites the apparent lack of authority, the ordination of women as priests and bishops, the ordination of individuals in active homosexual relationships, the breakdown of the discipline of marriage [especially amongst clergy and bishops] and a lack of clarity concerning personhood and the protections due to it at the earliest and latest stages of life as indicators which “epitomized a tendency within Anglicanism to capitulate to the culture rather than sound a prophetic voice within it.”

‘A tendency within Anglicanism to capitulate to the culture!’ That’s interesting!

One of the many reasons why I am so sensitive to wokeness and this pattern of capitulation within the Anglican Church is because I am, and many of you are, refugees from a church that lost her way when she began to succumb to appeals for compassion, tenderness and a capitulation to culture as the justification for dismantling the faith ‘once for all entrusted to the saints’.

I am a refugee from a church that deposed the late Dr. J.I Packer from the ordained ministry. I am a refugee from a church that put our own assisting Bishop William Love on trial for believing the bible. And I am a refugee from a church which just three days ago reaffirmed its commitment to the murder of unborn babies and said, ‘As Episcopalians, we have a particular obligation to stand against Christians who seek to destroy our multicultural democracy and recast the United States as an idol to the cruel and distorted Christianity they advocate.’

Brothers and sisters, when doctrine goes bad, so to do hearts, minds, churches, nations and eternal destinies. That is why this matters.

As I read the scriptures and stand on the shoulders of the Oxford Martyrs who were burnt at the stake for their belief in Christ alone, I personally could not make the journey to the See of Peter made by our brother Nazir-Ali; but his words about the Anglican Church should serve as a warning to all of us in this diocese, in this nation, at such a time as this. If you capitulate over matters of apostolic continuity, matters pertaining to the gospel, if you capitulate over such things and yield to the world, the consequences are catastrophic! C.S. Lewis wrote, “Enemy- occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”

Brothers and sisters, stay awake, keep your guard, maintain your vigilance – stand firm in the faith.

3. Act like men.

Before anyone takes offense and critiques Paul as a dry old misogynist, let us take a look at his third admonition. Act like men. Once again, the clear implication is that there is some situation that might be tempting the Christians of Corinth to be cowards. They may be threatened by some danger, challenged by some heavy responsibility, tempted to be cowardly. Paul uses the Greek word andrizomai and it is the only time it is used in the New Testament. It is a strong word. It is a powerful word. It is a word of command. Paul is writing to the Corinthian church here and they like us, are feeling the pressure of cultural identity. Paul exhorts this church to act like men, to have courage, not to be timid, or alarmed at enemies, but to be bold and brave. This is an exhortation not only for men, but also for women. Andrizomai – have courage! And there it was on the chapel wall in my early days of Christian formation. Act like men.

Courage is not something that regularly appears in the in the conversation and discipline of many North America Christians. With respect, being a Christian in North America today does not always require a whole lot of courage. But brothers and sisters, as the clouds around our nation begin to gather and the powers of darkness extend their influence, we the followers of Jesus Christ in this generation must ready ourselves to act, where necessary, with courage.

In 2017, the New York State Department of Financial Services mandated that employers cover abortions in their employee health insurance plans. Following the order, a diverse coalition of religious groups that includes our own Sisters of St. Mary, asked the New York state courts to protect them from this regulation that would force them to violate their deepest religious convictions about the sanctity of life. But the New York state courts refused. The Sisters and others with them have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and protect the right of their ministries to teach and serve without being forced to fund abortions. That’s courage! Mother Miriam, we praise God for your andrizomai.

Keep Mother Miriam and the Sisters in your prayers. I am thankful that Bishop Bill officiates at Holy Communion each Tuesday morning with the Sisters at their Greenwich, New York convent – by the way – aren’t you thankful to God that Bishop Bill and Karen Love, courageous warriors for Christ and the gospel have become such a special part of the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word!

As Christians today, we need to ask ourselves profound questions about that remarkable point of intersection between faith and courage.

We see this convergence in the Old Testament. Moses had led the children of Israel through the wilderness for 40 years and in spite of the frequent complaints of the people who murmured against him, he persevered. But in Joshua chapter 1, Moses is dead and the leadership of the children of Israel fell to his young and comparatively inexperienced lieutenant named Joshua.

He had heard the people complain against Moses, he knew how discontented they were, he himself had been one of the 12 scouts that had been sent on that reconnaissance operation of the land of Israel. And he had heard with his own ears the other scouts say, No, we can’t conquer these people. There are giants in the land. There are fortified cities in the land, we are not able to do it. Joshua had heard all that, he knew how cowardly the people were, he knew their rebellious heart. How could he lead them into the promised land? And yet God said to him, Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Andrizomai – there it is again!

Act like a man!

All over the world, Christians need great courage today. Courage to belong to what will increasingly be a minority movement. Although there are approximately 2.1 billion people nominally or actually Christian in the world, we as Christians, are religious minorities in at least 87 countries and in many of those countries, Christians are under pressure. Just last month I read that China has banned the name Christ . . . the Chinese government says the name of Jesus causes incitement. A pastor in Ireland who denounced Islam was prosecuted under the Communications Act after making his remarks when preaching in his church. Brothers and sisters, we need courage to refuse to be bullied into conformity to the crowd. We need courage to swim against the stream. Courage to resist the pressure to be politically correct. Courage to resist the pressure of wokeism. Courage to defend and proclaim the gospel of Christ crucified when it is increasingly unpopular in the church and courage to preach and declare this gospel once for all entrusted to the saints. The courage we need comes from Christ. He will sustain us.

As we will sing in a moment:

What is our hope in life and death? It is Christ alone, Christ alone! What is our only confidence? Our souls to him belong!
Who holds our days within his hand? What comes, apart from his command?
And what will keep us to the end? The love of Christ, in which we stand.

A very important book on preaching was written in 1877 by Philips Brooks. Let me quote from him, Courage is the indispensable requisite of any true Christian ministry. If you are afraid of men and are slave to their opinion, go and do something else.

1 Corinthians 16, Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men.

4. Be strong.

Is this Paul’s exhortation to brawn and biceps? What is going on in this Corinthian church requiring the great apostle to sound a clarion call for strength? The Greek adverb Paul uses here means not so much to be strong, but to be strengthened. Here is an exhortation that recognizes our weakness and an acknowledgment that the resources we need to stand firm, to act like men will never be found in ourselves, they are in Christ alone! They are only in him.

Paul writes to the Ephesians, For this reason I bow my knees before the Father… that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

It was this reality and experience of inward strength that enabled Paul to write to the Philippians, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”

It is this strength in Christ which characterizes so much of the ministry in this Anglican Diocese of the Living Word.

On Palm Sunday, Brenda and I declared Hosanna to the Son of David at Resurrection Anglican Church in Clifton Park, New York. David and Cathy Haig serve this congregation that left almost everything temporal to plant a new congregation which meets for worship in the local town hall. In order to provide for his family and the ministry, David drives for Uber, sharing the gospel with his passengers before he returns home to prepare his preaching and serve the congregation. How does he do it? In the strength of Christ alone.

Our diocese is served by 117 ordained deacons and priests who are devoted to the mission and ministry to which Christ has called them. 21 of out 43 rectors or senior ministers in this diocese are bi-vocational (meaning they have a second and sometimes a third job). We have among us prison chaplains, hospital chaplains, college chaplains and military chaplains. The mission and ministry of this diocese is supported by amazing clergy spouses, many who are working full time in order to enable the ordained ministry of their spouse to be fulfilled. How is this all accomplished? In the strength of Christ alone.

Would you please stand and honor our faithful clergy and spouses who give so much of themselves to the glory of God alone.

Together with our dedicated lay people, Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. It is not your strength. It is never about you. It is always, only, ever about Him! It is His strength, in the power of His spirit, in your inner being, in order that Christ may dwell in your heart through faith.

Let us consider the final of Paul’s exhortations – because without this, we are done, in fact, without this we are truly done. We can be watchful, we can stand firm, we can act like men, we can be strong, but without this final exhortation we are nothing… so tighten up your belts and listen up! Look back at our text.

5. Let all that you do be done in love

Ordinarily, when you talk to leaders there is an emphasis is on drive, on ambition, on initiative, on innovative thinking, even if it is at the expense of others in order to get to the top. In Christian service, everything that is done is to be done in love and this once again is so counter intuitive in our self-absorbed society in North America. We still appear concerned to speak the loudest and talk the most. We are Americans! I know… but authentic Christian ministry is impossible without love.

Love seeks the highest welfare of the people we are called to serve. Love seeks that welfare, love serves that welfare, love sacrifices for that welfare. And that seeking, serving, and sacrificing are three essential foundations of love. It was of course, to this same Corinthian Church that Paul wrote his great hymn of love in chapter 13, If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love… I am nothing. I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. That is what you are Christian if you are without love. American or not – you are nothing without love.

There was this fractiousness within the Christian Church in Corinth. And I sometimes wonder if we are not similarly fractured in the way we speak, respond, write, tweet and post. I am pleased for us to have conversations about the prayer book of 1662, 1928 or 2019. Debate about clergy underdressed in cassock and surplice or overdressed in alb and stole? To ash or not to ash on the first day of Lent. Holy Eucharist, Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper or Mass. Priest or Presbyter; Father or Reverend? Substitutionary atonement or penal substitutionary atonement? Have the conversations yes, but let all that you do be done in love.19 Let us not be naive, my friends, true love is neither easy nor automatic even to those who claim the same Lord and Savior.

You say to me, Bishop, we have got to fight hard for truth. I would say to you, fight unswervingly. The gospel is at stake! You say to me, Bishop, we have to love the least, the lost and the lonely. I would say to you, you love them with all your heart, love them as Christ loves them. But both of you take note: Paul seldom entreats love without adding a complementary responsibility to maintain the truth. And he seldom talks about defending the truth, without urging us to defend it in love and gentleness. Remember, love is patient, it is kind, it is not easily provoked.

In this text before us today Paul writes, stand firm in the faith and let all you do be done in love. Love and truth are inseparable here. Paul magnifies this for us in Ephesians 4 verse 15, where he writes that we are to speak the truth in love. Speak the truth…. in love. Some of us are great champions of the truth and we have very sensitive noses that can smell heresy 26 miles away, our ears begin to twitch and our nerves begin to tighten and our muscles ripple as we roll up our sleeves and prepare for a fight. I can see some of you already getting excited! This is a zeal for the truth. These are the watchmen on the wall and we need them.

Then there are the great champions of love. Let us just love one another and it’s all going to be ok, just so long as we love. Well, that’s very 1960’s knotted beige bandana around your head with a guitar by the camp fire singing kumbaya. Loving Jesus requires us to love his word.

Those two things are inseparable. Listen to Jesus… If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. And more from our Lords lips to our hears…You are my friends if you do what I command you. Loving him requires, from the lips of Jesus, an action, a doing of what He commands. And that’s where the rubber hits the road.

Listen my friends, truth is hard if it is not softened by love and love is soft if it is not strengthened by truth.

I know I have been conditioned by almost 20 years of ministry with persecuted Christians who are being harassed, arrested, interrogated, fined, imprisoned and even killed because of their commitment to Jesus Christ and their desire to share or spread the faith. As a survivor of the 1950’s Mau Mau crisis in Kenya, once put it, “When they come for you at night and threaten to tie a sack over your head and drop you in the river, then you know whether Jesus Christ means everything to you or whether he means nothing at all.”

Love Him yes – with all your heart and keep his commandment, no matter what the cost. Here then are five foundations of Christian ministry: Be watchful. In light of the cunning, unscrupulousness of our arch-enemy, be watchful. Stand firm in the faith against the pressures of false teaching in the church. Be courageous in the face of danger, discouragement and difficulty. Be strengthened in the grace that is in Christ Jesus and do everything you do in love.

Could you not be the Christian, could we not be the diocese that embraces not just the first of these exhortations, not just the final exhortation, but all five of them and model for the church what it truly means to be watchful, to stand firm in the faith, to act like men, to be strong and to let all that we do be done in love.

Ten years ago next month, a small group of us, representing 19 Anglican congregations, gathered at the former site of Bishop Seabury Anglican Church, then in Groton, Connecticut.

I called that event, ‘catalyst’. That event was the catalyst for what is before you today. 43 congregations, 6 church plants, 117 clergy, hundreds of dedicated lay leaders, missions in Haiti and most recently in Ghana all committed to transforming North America and beyond with the love of God through the biblical, missionary and faithful mission through the Anglican Church.

At catalyst in 2012, I said this about our mission for Christ: We are not called to hold the fort, we are called to storm the heights! The Church is on a mission, it has a cause. The purpose of the church is to fulfill the Great Commission. We do not grow in Christ for our own sake, but for the sake of the cause!

For the sake of the cause!

The most enduring image of the Centennial Olympic games in Atlanta in 1996 was that of a four-foot, nine-inch, eighty-seven-pound gymnast named Kerri Strug being carried by her coach to the medal platform to receive her gold medal along with the rest of her team. What led up to this moment was drama at its highest.

The American women’s gymnastic team held a thin lead over the Russians and the contest had come down to the last event, the vault. The first four women on the U.S. team did well, but then the fifth member of the team faulted her landing on both attempts. Because the team could only discard the lowest two scores, Kerri became the key to winning the event and because the vault was the last apparatus, the key to wining the gold medal.

On her first effort Kerri suffered a fall. The entire crowd grew silent, sensing the medal slipping away. But it was worse than a poor first try. Kerri had twisted her ankle, tearing two ligaments. She didn’t know whether to go for it, but in the end, she said she just whispered a little prayer asking God to help her out.

Repeating “I will, I will” to herself, she charged down the runway, vaulted twisted through the air, and then landed on an ankle so badly sprained that it could only hold her upright for a second. But that second was long enough for her to guarantee the first Olympic gold medal ever won by an American women’s gymnastics team. She scored one of the highest scores of the meet.

When it became known what she had done and people saw that she had to be carried to the platform, even the men became misty-eyed. When asked why she did it, she expressed her commitment not just to the competition, but to the team. They were on a mission and she wanted to fulfill her part – for the sake of the cause – for the sake of the cause.

And so, ten years on in our journey, the team is stronger, the foundations are firmer, the vision is clearer, the trajectory is forward, we are on the sunrise side of the mountain and it is all for the sake of His cause!

I am more excited about the Church’s future than I have ever been. Today’s world has yet to see what the Church of Jesus Christ can really be and do. I am so proud and so humbled to be a bishop with you in this great cause.

For Christ alone, Christ alone!

Who holds our days within his hand? What comes, apart from his command?
And what will keep us to the end? The love of Christ, in which we stand.

So let us Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong and let all that you do be done in love.

Like I said, many of us in other churches will be astonished that a bishop can speak so boldly, and so courageously — and so publicly (as opposed to what they say in private). God bless Bishop Dobbs! I am firmly, unswervingly Orthodox, and want you to become Orthodox too. But if you are a convinced Protestant, boy, I hope you will go find an ADLW parish near you. These people are true.

A priest here asked me this morning, “Why did you come talk to us?” (meaning, aside from the fact that we invited you). I told him, “That’s easy: because you are the good guys.” What I meant by that was that these Anglicans, who are part of the Anglican Church of North America, the ex-Episcopalians who left over the moral and theological collapse of The Episcopal Church, know what it means to suffer for the truth. Many of them left behind beautiful buildings, which remained under the ownership of TEC, for the sake of the Gospel. Many of them left behind old church friendships, to be faithful to the Holy Spirit, not the spirit of the age. Christians who do that, who are willing to suffer for the truth, are my people, no matter what our theological differences. There are a lot of Nigerians here at the synod meeting; these people have friends and family back home who are under severe persecution by Muslims in the north of their homeland. They get it. Bishop Julian told me private stories of ministry he has done to men and women of the persecuted church abroad, and in particular told me harrowing stories of what Christians have had to endure at the hands of Muslim persecutors. This is a bishop who understands what we are about to undergo here in the West, and who is prepared to lead his flock through the darkness.

To that point, I had a long conversation last night with a pastor, not an Anglican, who came to the dinner to hear me speak. He is a recent immigrant from the UK. We talked in part about how hard it is to get Christians in the West to understand the seriousness of this cultural moment. He told me, at length and in painful detail, about how the “hard totalitarianism” (his word) against Christians is soon to come in the United Kingdom. And yet, he said, so many people who are still going to church want to pretend that things are basically okay. They are too afraid to read the signs of the times and to prepare.

Yes, I told him, there’s a lot of that going on here in America. I recalled an incredibly frustrating conversation I had with a pastor who simply refused to accept that there was anything untoward going on in our culture, and that pastors and lay leaders in the churches had a special responsibility to prepare their flocks. It was so clear to me that this man was afraid of the implications of the signs of the times. I’ve thought about that conversation a lot, because it was my impression, based on our earlier conversation, that that pastor is a good and faithful man, one who believes the right things. But he lacks courage, including the courage to open his eyes and be done with denial. God has given us all so many spiritual resources with which

The pastors I’ve met here at the ADLW synod do have courage and vision. I met also a fellow Orthodox Christian who came to hear me talk. We agreed that we wish our bishops (we are of different jurisdictions) had even a fraction of the boldness, the backbone, and vthe ision of Bishop Julian. So many of our leaders are simply terrified of being thought ill of, are terrified of conflict, and just terrified, period. They want to be safe and respected and at peace. Who doesn’t want that? But that’s not the time in which we live. This is a time that requires bishops and priests and pastors to be watchful, to stand in faith, and to act like men.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

I am grateful that God gave me the gift of spending time with these dear Anglican faithful. And I am especially grateful that God gave me a vision of what a real bishop for our time sounds like. May God grant Bishop Julian Dobbs many years!

The post Julian Dobbs, The Based Bishop appeared first on The American Conservative.

Writing in The European Conservative, Gergely Szilvay explores the “big government cultural conservatism of Central Europe.” Excerpts:

There is a fascinating debate currently raging about Hungary and Viktor Orbán, between pro-Orbán American conservatives like Tucker Carlson and Rod Dreher on the one hand, and anti-Orbán neoconservatives like David Frum and Bill Kristol on the other. Dennis Prager has also stepped into the fray, saying that, in his view, Central European countries like Hungary and Poland are fighting for the West. However, the reality is that U.S. conservatives, particularly neoconservatives and libertarians, do not understand the underlying differences between the American and European styles of conservatism.

Two years ago, Hungary’s secretary of state for economic strategy and regulation, László György, visited the United States. He met with Republican politicians and toured university campuses, explaining the economic policy of the Orbán government.

When he arrived home, he commented that he found the university audiences reasonable and was confident that he had been convincing. He did not find, however, the same openness among the ranks of Republican politicians. Inasmuch as the discussion had focused on social and cultural matters, they were in agreement, but they were unable to comprehend Hungarian economic policy, which they regarded as leftist, statist, and an example of ‘big government.’

The difference between the Hungarian and American approach to economics is symptomatic of a deeper divide between Central European and Anglo-American conservatism. Where American conservatism seeks to curtail government power, Central European conservatism harnesses state authority to accomplish its aims.

Szilvay goes on to talk about how in Hungary, laissez-faire capitalism is viewed with suspicion because of the way capitalists took advantage of the people in the 1990s, in the immediate aftermath of Communism’s fall. Central Europeans are capitalists, but they believe that the state has to play a strong role in preventing society from being exploited by capital. Then follows an interesting discussion of the differences between European conservatism and American conservatism. More:

American conservatism, with its Lockean roots, is—from a Continental point of view—not really conservatism, but rather, old-school liberalism. European conservatism—whether counter-revolutionary, reactionary, Christian democratic or something else—is not Lockean.

Also at play are opposing conceptions of natural law. Americans believe in its Lockean Enlightenment form (individualistic and rationalistic), whereas continental Europeans tend to accept the original, premodern, Aristotelian-Thomist version of it, which is communitarian and more pragmatic. And there are also some English conservatives who do not accept natural law at all, such as, for example, Michael Oakeshott.

To illustrate the point further: for American conservatism, ‘individual freedom,’ ‘individual responsibility,’ the ‘free market,’ and ‘small government’ are the key phrases. In the continental European conservative tradition, however, the key phrases are ‘nation,’ ‘security,’ ‘law and order,’ ‘cultural tradition,’ and ‘religious heritage.’

And:

Central European conservatism, after the fall of communism, has been—and still is today—anti-communist and patriotic, focusing on national traditions and Christianity. It stands for national independence. For us, freedom means national freedom. Anglo-American conservatives, on the other hand, fear government intervention, in part because of its association with connotations of ‘social engineering.’ But how can a nation respond to decades of leftist social engineering, especially when it was as aggressive as communism? Using state power, communism destroyed our local, organic communities and our traditional elites. Today we have to use state power to rebuild those communities and create new national elites. Society will not heal itself—nor will the free market heal it. If your house is destroyed, you must actively rebuild it; it won’t be rebuilt by an ‘invisible hand.’

Read it all.

That last quoted graf is really important for us Americans to grasp in the era of Woke Capitalism, and the general capture of every institution in American life by woke ideologues. If not for the state stepping in to protect families and institutions from the predation of entities like the Walt Disney Company, who will? The forces arrayed against the family, religion, and tradition are so powerful that only the state can offer a meaningful measure of protection. Think about it: Woke Capitalist entities are accountable to no one, but at least the people have a say in who represents them. American conservatives have got to become less squeamish about using the state in this way. As Szilvay’s opening story indicates, grassroots conservatives already are fine with it, but the leadership and intellectual class on the American Right disagree. That, of course, is changing. See Ron DeSantis. See J.D. Vance. See Josh Hawley. And see the rise of the so-called “New Right” thinkers in the US.

One more clip from Szilvay:

Rod Dreher likes to say that postliberal American conservatives need to look beyond the English Channel to broaden their minds about what conservatism means, or could mean, for them. They may learn that rather than curtailing the authority of the state, conservatives should promote and defend our cause through the government and its institutions. Maybe this is why Orbán’s Budapest is becoming an international capital for the next generation of Western conservative intellectuals.

Very true! If Americans want to see the conservatism of the future, they should go to Budapest and learn how and why to use state power for conservative ends. You and I as American conservatives might prefer to live in a world of “small government,” but that ideology is no match for powerful culturally left-wing institutions (like, incredibly, major corporations) that aim to subjugate and destroy the ideals and institutions we conservatives value.

I was talking just this week to a Christian who works in the tech field, and he said the workplace wokeness there is so aggressive, and so inescapable, that he has to lie almost every day just to do his job. He has a bad conscience about it. We talked in passing, but I passed on my contact information so we could speak at length for an interview for this blog. The point I would make here, though, is that the only counterforce in this country capable of defending that man from the politicized workplace is the state. When we have a DeSantis presidency and a GOP Congress, I expect that that beleaguered man will have champions who will protect him.

This photo recently ran in the Hungarian media. Viktor Orban is known for taking Thursdays to read. What’s on his desk? One of the books is the Hungarian version of Live Not By Lies. Another is T.S. Eliot’s classic The Idea of A Christian Society. Can you imagine a conservative national leader who reads T.S. Eliot’s social criticism?

The post Turn East, Young Conservative appeared first on The American Conservative.

Woke up this morning to the news that my buddy J.D. Vance won the Ohio GOP Senate primary. This makes him the favorite to win the general election in November. Y’all know how despairing I have become about conservative politics in recent years, but the recent moves by Gov. Ron DeSantis, and now the victory of J.D. Vance, have me feeling uncharacteristically joyful about politics. And just as yesterday, I had to thank Donald Trump for delivering a pro-life Supreme Court majority, I wish to thank him again, with total sincerity, for endorsing J.D. Vance, and pushing him over the finish line.

You might recall that J.D. burst onto the scene back in 2016 with this interview he did with this blog. His Hillbilly Elegy had been out for a month, and had done okay, but for some reason, this interview went megaviral, and suddenly J.D. was everywhere. On this day of his much-deserved triumph in his first political foray, it’s worth republishing the interview. It is breathtaking that we are now one election away from having a Republican senator who lived this way and believes these things. Remember, what follows is from July 22, 2016:

RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book.

J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time.  Donald Trump at least tries.

What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by.  Heroin addiction is rampant.  In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes.  The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad” only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on.  And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.

The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades.  From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below).  Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.  

From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth.  Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis.  More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.

Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears.  He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas.  His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground.  He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.  

The last point I’ll make about Trump is this: these people, his voters, are proud.  A big chunk of the white working class has deep roots in Appalachia, and the Scots-Irish honor culture is alive and well.  We were taught to raise our fists to anyone who insulted our mother.  I probably got in a half dozen fights when I was six years old.  Unsurprisingly, southern, rural whites enlist in the military at a disproportionate rate.  Can you imagine the humiliation these people feel at the successive failures of Bush/Obama foreign policy?  My military service is the thing I’m most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can’t help but tell myself: I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory.  No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party. 

I’m not a hillbilly, nor do I descend from hillbilly stock, strictly speaking. But I do come from poor rural white people in the South. I have spent most of my life and career living among professional class urbanite, most of them on the East Coast, and the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean — have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that? And what does it have to do with our politics today? 

I know exactly what you mean.  My grandma (Mamaw) recognized this instinctively.  She said that most people were probably prejudiced, but they had to be secretive about it.  “We”–meaning hillbillies–“are the only group of people you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.”  During my final year at Yale Law, I took a small class with a professor I really admired (and still do).  I was the only veteran in the class, and when this came up somehow in conversation, a young woman looked at me and said, “I can’t believe you were in the Marines.  You just seem so nice.  I thought that people in the military had to act a certain way.”  It was incredibly insulting, and it was my first real introduction to the idea that this institution that was so important among my neighbors was looked down upon in such a personal way. To this lady, to be in the military meant that you had to be some sort of barbarian.  I bit my tongue, but it’s one of those comments I’ll never forget.  

The “why” is really difficult, but I have a few thoughts.  The first is that humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us.  And if you’re an elite white professional, working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe.  By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe.  So your own prejudice is never revealed for what it is.

A lot of it is pure disconnect–many elites just don’t know a member of the white working class. A professor once told me that Yale Law shouldn’t accept students who attended state universities for their undergraduate studies.  (A bit of background: Yale Law takes well over half of its student body from very elite private schools.)  “We don’t do remedial education here,” he said.  Keep in mind that this guy was very progressive and cared a lot about income inequality and opportunity.  But he just didn’t realize that for a kid like me, Ohio State was my only chance–the one opportunity I had to do well in a good school.  If you removed that path from my life, there was nothing else to give me a shot at Yale.  When I explained that to him, he was actually really receptive.  He may have even changed his mind.

What does it mean for our politics?  To me, this condescension is a big part of Trump’s appeal.  He’s the one politician who actively fights elite sensibilities, whether they’re good or bad.  I remember when Hillary Clinton casually talked about putting coal miners out of work, or when Obama years ago discussed working class whites clinging to their guns and religion.  Each time someone talks like this, I’m reminded of Mamaw’s feeling that hillbillies are the one group you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.  The people back home carry that condescension like a badge of honor, but it also hurts, and they’ve been looking for someone for a while who will declare war on the condescenders.  If nothing else, Trump does that.  

This is where, to me, there’s a lot of ignorance around “Teflon Don.”  No one seems to understand why conventional blunders do nothing to Trump.  But in a lot of ways, what elites see as blunders people back home see as someone who–finally–conducts themselves in a relatable way.  He shoots from the hip; he’s not constantly afraid of offending someone; he’ll get angry about politics; he’ll call someone a liar or a fraud.  This is how a lot of people in the white working class actually talk about politics, and even many elites recognize how refreshing and entertaining it can be!  So it’s not really a blunder as much as it is a rich, privileged Wharton grad connecting to people back home through style and tone.  Viewed like this, all the talk about “political correctness” isn’t about any specific substantive point, as much as it is a way of expanding the scope of acceptable behavior.  People don’t want to believe they have to speak like Obama or Clinton to participate meaningfully in politics, because most of us don’t speak like Obama or Clinton.

On the other hand, as Hillbilly Elegy says so well, that reflexive reverse-snobbery of the hillbillies and those like them is a real thing too, and something that undermines their prospects in life. Is there any way for it to be overcome, other than getting out of the bubble, as you did?

I’m not sure we can overcome it entirely. Nearly everyone in my family who has achieved some financial success for themselves, from Mamaw to me, has been told that they’ve become “too big for their britches.”  I don’t think this value is all bad.  It forces us to stay grounded, reminds us that money and education are no substitute for common sense and humility.  But, it does create a lot of pressure not to make a better life for yourself, and let’s face it: when you grow up in a dying steel town with very few middle class job prospects, making a better life for yourself is often a binary proposition: if you don’t get a good job, you may be stuck on welfare for the rest of your life.

I’m a big believer in the power to change social norms.  To take an obvious recent example, I see the decline of smoking as not just an economic or regulatory matter, but something our culture really flipped on.  So there’s value in all of us–whether we have a relatively large platform or if our platform is just the people who live with us–trying to be a little kinder to the kids who want to make a better future for themselves.  That’s a big part of the reason I wrote the book: it’s meant not just for elites, but for people from my own clan, in the hopes that they’ll better appreciate the ways they can help (or hurt) their own kin. 

At the same time, the hostility between the working class and the elites is so great that there will always be some wariness toward those who go to the other side.  And can you blame them?  A lot of these people know nothing but judgment and condescension from those with financial and political power, and the thought of their children acquiring that same hostility is noxious.  It may just be the sort of value we have to live with.  

The odd thing is, the deeper I get into elite culture, the more I see value in this reverse snobbery.  It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism.  Like I said, it keeps you grounded, if nothing else!  But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18.  

I live in the rural South now, where I was born, and I see the same kind of social pathologies among some poor whites that you write about in Hillbilly Elegy. I also see the same thing among poor blacks, and have heard from a few black friends who made it out as you did the same kind of stories about how their own people turned on them and accused them of being traitors to their family and class — this, only for getting an education and building stable lives for themselves. The thing that so few of us either understand or want to talk about is that nobody who lives the way these poor black and white people do is ever going to amount to anything. There’s never going to be an economy rich enough or a government program strong enough to compensate for the lack of a stable family and the absence of self-discipline. Are Americans even capable of hearing that anymore? 

Judging by the current political conversation, no: Americans are not capable of hearing that anymore.  I was speaking with a friend the other night, and I made the point that the meta-narrative of the 2016 election is learned helplessness as a political value.  We’re no longer a country that believes in human agency, and as a formerly poor person, I find it incredibly insulting.  To hear Trump or Clinton talk about the poor, one would draw the conclusion that they have no power to affect their own lives.  Things have been done to them, from bad trade deals to Chinese labor competition, and they need help.  And without that help, they’re doomed to lives of misery they didn’t choose.  

Obviously, the idea that there aren’t structural barriers facing both the white and black poor is ridiculous.  Mamaw recognized that our lives were harder than rich white people, but she always tempered her recognition of the barriers with a hard-noses willfulness: “never be like those a–holes who think the deck is stacked against them.”  In hindsight, she was this incredibly perceptive woman.  She recognized the message my environment had for me, and she actively fought against it.

There’s good research on this stuff.  Believing you have no control is incredibly destructive, and that may be especially true when you face unique barriers.  The first time I encountered this idea was in my exposure to addiction subculture, which is quite supportive and admirable in its own way, but is full of literature that speaks about addiction as a disease.  If you spend a day in these circles, you’ll hear someone say something to the effect of, “You wouldn’t judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so why judge an addict for drug use.”  This view is a perfect microcosm of the problem among poor Americans.  On the one hand, the research is clear that there are biological elements to addiction–in that way, it does mimic a disease.  On the other hand, the research is also clear that people who believe their addiction is a biologically mandated disease show less ability to resist it.  It’s this awful catch-22, where recognizing the true nature of the problem actually hinders the ability to overcome.  

Interestingly, both in my conversations with poor blacks and whites, there’s a recognition of the role of better choices in addressing these problems.  The refusal to talk about individual agency is in some ways a consequence of a very detached elite, one too afraid to judge and consequently too handicapped to really understand.  At the same time, poor people don’t like to be judged, and a little bit of recognition that life has been unfair to them goes a long way.  Since Hillbilly Elegy came out, I’ve gotten so many messages along the lines of: “Thank you for being sympathetic but also honest.”

I think that’s the only way to have this conversation and to make the necessary changes: sympathy and honesty.  It’s not easy, especially in our politically polarized world, to recognize both the structural and the cultural barriers that so many poor kids face.  But I think that if you don’t recognize both, you risk being heartless or condescending, and often both.  

On the other hand, as a conservative, I grow weary of fellow middle-class conservatives acting as if it were possible simply to bootstrap your way out of poverty. My dad was able to raise my sister and me in the 1970s on a civil servant’s salary, supplemented by my mom’s small salary as a school bus driver. I doubt this would be possible today. You’re a conservative who has known poverty and powerlessness as well as wealth and privilege. What do you have to say to your fellow conservatives?

I think you hit the nail right on the head: we need to judge less and understand more.  It’s so easy for conservatives to use “culture” as an ending point in a discussion–an excuse to rationalize their worldview and then move on–rather than a starting point. I try to do precisely the opposite in Hillbilly Elegy.  This book should start conversations, and it is successful, it will.  

The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I often disagree with, has made a really astute point about culture and the way it has been deployed against the black poor.  His point, basically, is that “culture” is little more than an excuse to blame black people for various pathologies and then move on.  So it’s hardly surprising that when poor people, especially poor black folks, hear “culture,” they instinctively run for the hills.  

But let’s just think about what culture really means, to borrow an example from my life.  One of the things I mention in the book is that domestic strife and family violence are cultural traits–they’re just there, and everyone experiences them in one form or another.  I learned domestic strife from the moment I was born, from more than 15 stepdads and boyfriends I encountered, to the domestic violence case that nearly tore my family apart (I was the primary victim).  So predictably, by the time I got married, I wasn’t a great spouse.  I had to learn, with the help of my aunt and sister (both of whom had successful marriages), but especially with the help of my wife, how not to turn every small disagreement into a shouting match or a public scene.  Too many conservatives look at that situation, say “well that’s a cultural problem, nothing we can do,” and then move on.  They’re right that it’s a cultural problem: I learned domestic strife from my mother, and she learned it from her parents.  

But to speak “culture” and then move on is a total copout, and there are public policy solutions to draw from experiences like this: how could my school have better prepared me for domestic life? how could child welfare services have given me more opportunities to spend time with my Mamaw and my aunt, rather than threatening me–as they did–with the promise of foster care if I kept talking?  These are tough, tough problems, but they’re not totally immune to policy interventions.  Neither are they entirely addressable by government.  It’s just complicated.

That’s just one small example, obviously, and there are many more in the book.  But I think this unwillingness to deal with tough issues–or worse, to pretend they’ll all go away if we can hit 4 percent growth targets–is a significant failure of modern conservative politics.  And looking at the political landscape, this failure may very well have destroyed the conservative movement as we used to know it.

And what do you have to say to liberals?

Well, it’s almost the flip side: stop pretending that every problem is a structural problem, something imposed on the poor from the outside.  I see a significant failure on the Left to understand how these problems develop.  They see rising divorce rates as the natural consequence of economic stress. Undoubtedly, that’s partially true.  Some of these family problems run far deeper.  They see school problems as the consequence of too little money (despite the fact that the per pupil spend in many districts is quite high), and ignore that, as a teacher from my hometown once told me, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids, but they ignore that many of them are raised by wolves.”  Again, they’re not all wrong: certainly some schools are unfairly funded.  But there’s this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right.  In some cases, the best that public policy can do is help people make better choices, or expose them to better influences through better family policy (like my Mamaw).  

There was a huge study that came out a couple of years ago, led by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty.  He found that two of the biggest predictors of low upward mobility were 1) living in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty and 2) growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of single mothers.  I recall that some of the news articles about the study didn’t even mention the single mother conclusion.  That’s a massive oversight!  Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are.  I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.

In Hillbilly Elegy, I noticed the parallel between two disciplined forms of life that enabled you and your biological father to transcend the chaos that dragged down so many others y’all knew. You had the US Marine Corps; he had fundamentalist Christianity. How did they work inner transformation within you both? 

Well, I think it’s important to point out that Christianity, in the quirky way I’ve experienced it, was really important to me, too.  For my dad, the way he tells it is that he was a hard partier, he drank a lot, and didn’t have a lot of direction.  His Christian faith gave him focus, forced him to think hard about his personal choices, and gave him a community of people who demanded, even if only implicitly, that he act a certain way.  I think we all understate the importance of moral pressure, but it helped my dad, and it has certainly helped me!  There’s obviously a more explicitly religious argument here, too.  If you believe as I do, you believe that the Holy Spirit works in people in a mysterious way.  I recognize that a lot of secular folks may look down on that, but I’d make one important point: that not drinking, treating people well, working hard, and so forth, requires a lot of willpower when you didn’t grow up in privilege.  That feeling–whether it’s real or entirely fake–that there’s something divine helping you and directing your mind and body, is extraordinarily powerful.  

General Chuck Krulak, a former commandant of the Marine Corps, once said that the most important thing the Corps does for the country is “win wars and make Marines.”  I didn’t understand that statement the first time I heard it, but for a kid like me, the Marine Corps was basically a four-year education in character and self-management.  The challenges start small–running two miles, then three, and more.  But they build on each other.  If you have good mentors (and I certainly did), you are constantly given tasks, yelled at for failing, advised on how not to fail next time, and then given another try.  You learn, through sheer repetition, that you can do difficult things.  And that was quite revelatory for me.  It gave me a lot of self-confidence.  If I had learned helplessness from my environment back home, four years in the Marine Corps taught me something quite different.

The other thing the Marine Corps did is hold our hands and prevent us from making stupid decisions.  It didn’t work on everyone, of course, but I remember telling my senior noncommissioned officer that I was going to buy a car, probably a BMW.  “Stop being an idiot and go get a Honda.” Then I told him that I had been approved for a new Honda, at the dealer’s low interest rate of 21.9 percent.  “Stop being an idiot and go to the credit union.”  He then ordered another Marine to take me to the credit union, open an account, and apply for a loan (the interest rate, despite my awful credit, was around 8 percent).  A lot of elites rely on parents or other networks the first time they made these decisions, but I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.  The Marine Corps ensured that I learned. 

Finally, what did watching Donald Trump’s speech last night make you think about this fall campaign, and the future of the country?

Well, I think the speech itself was a perfect microcosm of why I love and am terrified of Donald Trump.  On the one hand, he criticized the elites and actually acknowledge the hurt of so many working class voters. After so many years of Republican politicians refusing to even talk about factory closures, Trump’s message is an oasis in the desert.  But of course he spent way too much time appealing to people’s fears, and he offered zero substance for how to improve their lives.  It was Trump at his best and worst.

My biggest fear with Trump is that, because of the failures of the Republican and Democratic elites, the bar for the white working class is too low.  They’re willing to listen to Trump about rapist immigrants and banning all Muslims because other parts of his message are clearly legitimate.  A lot of people think Trump is just the first to appeal to the racism and xenophobia that were already there, but I think he’s making the problem worse.

The other big problem I have with Trump is that he has dragged down our entire political conversation.  It’s not just that he inflames the tribalism of the Right; it’s that he encourages the worst impulses of the Left.  In the past few weeks, I’ve heard from so many of my elite friends some version of, “Trump is the racist leader all of these racist white people deserve.” These comments almost always come from white progressives who know literally zero culturally working class Americans.  And I’m always left thinking: if this is the quality of thought of a Harvard Law graduate, then our society is truly doomed.  In a world of Trump, we’ve abandoned the pretense of persuasion.  The November election strikes me as little more than a referendum on whose tribe is bigger.

But I remain incredibly optimistic about the future.  Maybe that’s the hillbilly resilience in me.  Or maybe I’m just an idiot.  But if writing this book, and talking with friends and strangers about its message, has taught me anything, it’s that most people are trying incredibly hard to make it, even in this more complicated and scary world.  The short view of our country is that we’re doomed.  The long view, inherited from my grandparents’ 1930s upbringing in coal country, is that all of us can still control some part of our fate.  Even if we are doomed, there’s reason to pretend otherwise.

It’s important to point out that six years later, J.D. Vance made up with Trump, and said that he had been wrong about the 45th president, who was much better than he expected Trump to be.

I have gotten to know J.D. over the years since that interview, and I can testify that he is the real deal. Nothing phony about him. Moreover, he knows exactly who the bullshitters are in Conservatism Inc, and is not going to be their friend (it’s not for nothing that the Club For Growth spent a lot of money trying to defeat him). Moreover, remember the supposed gaffe J.D. made when he said that he was more concerned about the fentanyl coming over the border from Mexico and destroying Ohio communities than he was about Ukraine? Remember how that was supposed to doom him. It didn’t. In fact, I’d bet it helped him. Notice how back in that 2016 interview he did with me, the one that launched the J.D. Vance phenomenon, he spoke as a Marine Corps veteran about how disgusted he was with what the Bush-Obama wars had done to this country.

Finally, though: somebody who believes the things right-wingers like me believe will likely become a US Senator. Park MacDougald writes:

Trump’s endorsement put Vance over the edge, but Vance is far from a straightforward Trumpist. Despite his opportunistic flirtations with low-IQ, red-meat politics, Vance is ultimately an intellectual, with deep connections to the young, ambitious, DC Republican brain trust — so much so that this was considered a liability. The greatest knock on him throughout the campaign was that he was a sort of parachute candidate, an Ivy League egghead with wacky ideas about industrial policy and “the regime” that would sound bizarre to Ohio voters. Those critiques have been proven wrong. “I’m f***ing retarded. I can’t call a race,” one DC political reporter told me after the results came in.

If and when Vance wins his Senate seat — which seems inevitable in a state that twice went for Trump by 8% — it will represent the most tangible victory yet for the so-called “New Right”, the movement of young, edgy, and cerebral conservatives loosely orbiting Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Thiel has donated some $13.5 million to Vance’s campaign and another $10 million to that of Blake Masters, a Senate candidate in Arizona.

Whether or not Vance can do anything once in government is a different question. A GOP strategist told me Vance will have few allies in the Senate, and joked that McConnell would assign him to the Committee on Aging — in other words, that Vance would be stuck with do-nothing assignments intended to box him out of real power. That may be, but few thought expected him to get this far in the first place. Vance is young, ambitious, and full of big ideas, with lots of plugged-in sympathizers. We’ll learn soon whether that’s enough to take on “the regime.”

I can’t emphasize strongly enough: J.D. Vance really is a conviction politician. He is a conservative who has no love for Woke Capitalism, or woke anything, and lacks the timidity of conventional GOP Washington politicians in calling this stuff out. If you haven’t yet read Hillbilly Elegy — three million copies sold! — then you really should. Don’t rely on the movie, which left the political implications of J.D.’s vision out. The idea that a man with that hardscrabble background is probably headed to the US Senate, and that he is so young, and will be there fighting for normal Americans of all races for years — well, it’s a great day for American politics.

Watch the intellectual circle that develops around Sen. Vance in Washington. The smartest New Right conservative thinkers will be found there.

One more thing: J.D. Vance is a serious Christian. I was present in 2019 when he was received into the Catholic Church. He was catechized by Father Henry, a solid Dominican. From an interview I did with him about his new faith:

To what extent do you expect your Catholic faith to guide your views on public policy?

My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching. That was one of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church. I saw a real overlap between what I would like to see and what the Catholic Church would like to see. I hope my faith makes me more compassionate and to identify with people who are struggling. But my politics have been pretty consistent over the past few years. I think the Republican Party has been too long a partnership between social conservatives and market libertarians, and I don’t think social conservatives have benefited too much from that partnership. Part of social conservatism’s challenge for viability in the 21st century is that it can’t just be about issues like abortion, but it has to have a broader vision of political economy, and the common good.

What are the chief spiritual dangers you perceive for committed Christians in political life in the current moment?

At a fundamental level, being in public life is in part a popularity contest. When you’re trying to do things that make you liked by as many people as possible, you’re not likely to do things that are consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church. I’m a Christian, and a conservative, and a Republican, so I have definite views about what that means. But you have to be humble, and realize that politics are essentially a temporal game. …

I know a lot of people are very critical of how a majority of self-described Christians have approached Trump. To me, fundamentally the issue that most Christians confront is, which of these two political parties is the least offensive to my faith? When that’s the question, the answer is almost always going to be unsatisfactory. I am definitely critical of the way some Evangelicals have reacted to the president. But I also know that most of them aren’t doing it because they are sycophants. They’re doing it because they don’t think they have a better option.

 

Ron Howard wrapped up filming last week on the “Hillbilly Elegy” movie. Millions more people will be introduced through that movie to your personal pilgrimage from your hardscrabble childhood to the present day. Is there a spiritual way to interpret the “Hillbilly Elegy” narrative?

One of the things Hillbilly Elegy is about is a struggle to find stability in your own life, but also to become a good person when you didn’t have an easy upbringing. That means being a good husband and a good father, and being capable enough to provide for your family. One of the most attractive things about Catholicism is that the concept of grace is not couched in terms of epiphany. It’s not like you receive grace and suddenly you go from being a bad person to being a good person. You’re constantly being worked on. I like that.

It’s my sense that being a good person is actually pretty hard. Recognizing that grace works over the long haul is liberating, but also consistent with the way I’ve seen my own life change, and the lives of people I’ve known change. One thing I’ve had trouble relating to about some corners of Christianity is this idea that transformation is easy, and it happens whenever you say a prayer. That’s not consistent with how I’ve seen people struggle, and improve, and change.

Watch the key part of his victory speech here. This is the man for our moment. Tough titty, Club For Growth!

The post Two Beautiful Words: ‘Senator Vance’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Ross Douthat has a short, simple, and persuasive analysis of the motive and effect of the SCOTUS leak. First, he considers the rationale behind the leaker being a conservative:

So if you were simply following a crude strategic logic, the fact that what’s been leaked is a draft from months ago might suggest that a leaker on the conservative side hopes to freeze a wavering justice — Kavanaugh being the obvious candidate — into their initial vote, by making it seem like the very credibility of the court rests on their not being perceived to cave under external pressure.

But Douthat doesn’t seem persuaded by that, and neither do I. Next he considers the case for a liberal leaker. Among the rationales:

Second, as the court has moved rightward, the climate in the left-leaning part of the elite legal world (which is to say, most of it) has become much more self-consciously activist and anti-institutionalist than the climate among, say, Federalist Society types — meaning that if you were betting on a big act of institutional sabotage right now, you would bet on it coming from the left. (And indeed, the leaker was swiftly praised by prominent voices on liberal-legal Twitter.)

Third, you can imagine various possible rationales for a liberal leak. At the most basic level, there might be the hope that seeing the inevitable backlash unfold now, while the ruling can still change, could make a figure like Kavanaugh waver further, rather than locking in his vote.

Then, too, to the extent that liberals hope abortion could be a galvanizing issue — for organizing and fund-raising as well as votes — in a midterm election that’s otherwise shaping up disastrously for the Democrats, the leaker might see this as giving his or her side a head start, by encouraging the new Resistance to get to work a month early.

And finally, to the extent that a leak like this has some delegitimizing effect no matter what, that might be an end unto itself: If the court is going to be conservative, then let it have no mystique whatsoever.

Read it all. 

Douthat says that he expects the Left will arrive at that final conclusion anyway, and observes, insightfully, that this was always where the Court was headed when the Burger Court in 1973 took abortion out of the political realm through shaky judicial fiat.

On NPR yesterday, Nina Totenberg explained why this leak is such a huge deal:

TOTENBERG: Because it’s a huge breach of trust. The justices operate like nine tiny little law firms, and they respect each other’s confidences, and they trust not only their clerks, but other justices’ clerks as well. This is a total betrayal, sort of like a partner in a marriage cheating on the other partner, except that it’s never, ever happened like this before, at least going back over 100 years. Yes, there have been tiny leaks, like about a changed vote, for instance, but even those leaks you can count on one hand. This was an entire draft opinion, 98 pages, 118 footnotes with seeds planted all over the place to undo other precedents.

We all know that the Supreme Court, though supposedly apolitical, is unavoidably a political institution. Yet it is in the best interest of our constitutional order that the Court strive to remain as far above politics as it can. As Douthat avers, at least since the Robert Bork hearings, blown up by Sens. Kennedy and Biden, SCOTUS nominee hearings have been a political spectacle, with nominees compelled to shade the truth or be otherwise evasive about controversial opinions to prevent themselves from being tarred and feathered by politicians. It’s important to point out that the Left started this, and it started it in large part over abortion. Here is what Sen. Kennedy said on the Senate floor upon hearing the news of the Bork nomination:

The Republicans don’t have clean hands either. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s stalling and eventual spiking of the Merrick Garland nomination to the Court was also pure politics. But the standard was set by the Democrats, with Robert Bork. And now, I suspect that the leaker of the Alito draft was a liberal court clerk who was willing to blow up the institution in an effort to save Roe.

It’s all part of the ongoing delegitimization of American institutions by the Left. If they can’t have their way, they’re going to tear the place down. I had a conversation last year with a progressive journalist at one of the top media outlets in the US, who confirmed to me that the panic that ran through elite journalism after the 2016 Trump victory was so extreme that nearly everyone in those circles concluded that there was no point in playing by old-fashioned professional standards. This person didn’t agree with that choice, but they said that was what happened.

It’s still happening.

People wonder why I like Viktor Orban. It’s because he has the number of these people, and he understands that their claims of liberalism are just a pretense for the illiberal assertion of power. What has happened this week with this leak is another sign that conservative politics in the US had better learn from Orban, or there won’t be a conservative politics by the time the Left and the institutions it has captured gets done with us.

The post The SCOTUS Leak: Cui Bono? appeared first on The American Conservative.